Latest / Ctrl-Alt-Speech / Backdoors and Backsteps

Transcript

Backdoors and Backsteps · Ctrl-Alt-Speech

• 0:00
  Ben Whitelaw: So Mike, it's very important for me not to further worsen English French relations.
• 0:06
  Ben Whitelaw: it's important that the podcast doesn't do that.
• 0:08
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm a big fan of the French, but I wanted to start today's podcast using Mistral's AI's prompt.
• 0:15
  Ben Whitelaw: Ai is one of the big, open language models that you might have used.
• 0:19
  Ben Whitelaw: is a French startup.
• 0:20
  Ben Whitelaw: That's got a lot of traction over the last couple of years.
• 0:23
  Ben Whitelaw: And it has a prompt on its homepage that says talk to LeChat.
• 0:29
  Ben Whitelaw: So that's not, that's not me being pejorative.
• 0:31
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, it's not me being a kind of, uncultured Frenchman.
• 0:34
  Ben Whitelaw: That's it literally what it says.
• 0:35
  Ben Whitelaw: Talk to LeChat.
• 0:36
  Ben Whitelaw: What, what would you say to the chat?
• 0:40
  Mike Masnick: I would question my, my high school French wonders how, proper that, is.
• 0:43
  Mike Masnick: Uh, but I will say that, uh, rather than talking to Le Chat, today we are talking to the class.
• 0:50
  Mike Masnick: and we will explain what that means in a moment.
• 0:52
  Mike Masnick: But, uh, Ben, what about you?
• 0:54
  Mike Masnick: If you were to talk to Le Chat, what would you be saying?
• 0:58
  Ben Whitelaw: Well, as well as asking the chat, why I haven't received any Valentine's cards.
• 1:03
  Ben Whitelaw: Uh, I would ask it, you know, why it took one particular e commerce platform so long to respond to, Nazi content on its platform this week.
• 1:12
  Ben Whitelaw: And it's not necessarily.
• 1:14
  Ben Whitelaw: One of the ones you'd think.
• 1:23
  Ben Whitelaw: Hello and welcome to Control Alt Speech, your weekly roundup of the major stories about online speech, content moderation, and internet regulation.
• 1:32
  Ben Whitelaw: It's February the 14th, 2025.
• 1:34
  Ben Whitelaw: And this week's episode is brought to you with financial support from the future of online trust and safety fund.
• 1:39
  Ben Whitelaw: This week, we're talking about the big encryption versus safety story involving Apple, the giant AI summit in Paris, and Shopify's handling of Swastika content On its platform.
• 1:51
  Ben Whitelaw: My name is Ben Whitelaw.
• 1:52
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm the founder and editor of Everything in Moderation.
• 1:55
  Ben Whitelaw: And I'm not only joined by Mike Masnick from Tector, but we're joined by the Media, Law, and Policy class at the American University School of Communication.
• 2:04
  Ben Whitelaw: thank you very much for joining us.
• 2:05
  Ben Whitelaw: Uh, this is the first, experiment of its kind.
• 2:08
  Ben Whitelaw: And Mike, this is something you organized, isn't it?
• 2:12
  Mike Masnick: Uh, yes, this is something of an experiment that we were doing today.
• 2:15
  Mike Masnick: in the past, I have been a guest speaker at this class and we were trying to schedule that again.
• 2:21
  Mike Masnick: And the timing worked out that it was when we were recording the podcast.
• 2:25
  Mike Masnick: And we suggested, what if.
• 2:27
  Mike Masnick: We just brought the entire class to the podcast.
• 2:30
  Mike Masnick: So they are sitting here, if they want to say hello, uh, very quickly, can do a,
• 2:37
  Guest: Hello.
• 2:40
  Ben Whitelaw: Welcome.
• 2:40
  Ben Whitelaw: Welcome.
• 2:41
  Mike Masnick: and so, uh, hopefully our plan today is that they, were able to.
• 2:46
  Mike Masnick: Sit through our planning meeting as we got into this and, uh, solve the stories that we're going to talk about and raise some important questions.
• 2:52
  Mike Masnick: And we're going to, as part of the experiment here, try and bring them in to maybe discuss and ask some questions be a part of the discussion.
• 2:59
  Mike Masnick: We will see how this goes.
• 3:01
  Mike Masnick: This is a little bit messy, but it should be, fun to have their, thoughtful insights included in the discussion.
• 3:08
  Ben Whitelaw: podcast recording, before in person at TrustCon last year, but this is the first we've done in kind of virtual form.
• 3:14
  Ben Whitelaw: And it's a really, really nice format that the students have been really, really asked some really smart questions actually before the call.
• 3:20
  Ben Whitelaw: So I'm looking forward to bringing them in and if it goes well, hopefully have other guests and other groups of people like it in future.
• 3:28
  Ben Whitelaw: we have a very kind of, you know, a podcast this week has got quite a strong European flavor, Mike.
• 3:33
  Ben Whitelaw: I would say, with, a sprinkling of, our usual us, platforms background.
• 3:38
  Ben Whitelaw: So, maybe we'll dive straight in there before we do, as usual, we'd love our listeners to rate and review the podcast if they enjoy it.
• 3:46
  Ben Whitelaw: something that really helps us get discovered across all of the platforms.
• 3:49
  Ben Whitelaw: It only takes a couple of minutes and it's a massive, massive help to us.
• 3:53
  Ben Whitelaw: So, Without further ado, let's get started.
• 3:56
  Ben Whitelaw: You're going to lead us off Mike on a story that, as always happens, there's always a big story that drops right after we finished recording.
• 4:03
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and last week was absolutely no exception.
• 4:07
  Ben Whitelaw: We were talking with the students earlier about this is a story that hasn't got a huge amount of coverage, perhaps because it dropped so late last week and is somewhat technical.
• 4:16
  Ben Whitelaw: So help us unpack why you picked this story this week.
• 4:19
  Mike Masnick: And this is a big story that's, over in your part of the world.
• 4:22
  Mike Masnick: and it was reported, by the Washington post, which is that apparently the UK has ordered Apple to effectively, put a back door into its encryption product.
• 4:31
  Mike Masnick: And Apple, you know, somewhat famously has, added, encryption in terms of both messaging and then also some of its cloud storage.
• 4:41
  Mike Masnick: and so they're asking.
• 4:43
  Mike Masnick: Not asking, they're demanding, that Apple put a back door, which would allow authorities within the UK, but also potentially elsewhere to have access to what had formerly been encrypted, materials from Apple users.
• 4:57
  Mike Masnick: Now this was, A leak because the order is secret and the details about it are not fully known.
• 5:04
  Mike Masnick: and there are a bunch of problematic aspects to this.
• 5:09
  Mike Masnick: one of it being that the request is not just for users in the UK, but a global setup so that UK could then request.
• 5:18
  Mike Masnick: access to what people might have otherwise thought was private and encrypted information from users around the globe.
• 5:25
  Mike Masnick: Due to the nature of security practices right now, there's something called the Five Eyes Program, which is between the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, where they share, intelligence, Communications, meaning that if the UK can spy on these people, so can all of those other countries, which raises a whole bunch of other concerns as well.
• 5:44
  Mike Masnick: so this is a very big deal there have been battles about encryption and encrypted communications going back decades.
• 5:51
  Mike Masnick: somewhat famously, there was the Clipper chip the, in the 1990s in the U.
• 5:56
  Mike Masnick: S., which was trying to put a backdoor into encryption.
• 5:58
  Mike Masnick: There have been all sorts of other battles for many, many years.
• 6:01
  Mike Masnick: And much of the battle has always been focused on, you would have law enforcement, Folks coming out and saying, well, we need access to this content.
• 6:09
  Mike Masnick: Bad people are doing bad things.
• 6:11
  Mike Masnick: terrorists and child predators and all this stuff are able to hide behind encryption and therefore we need access to it in the same way that we might wire tap a phone or something of that nature.
• 6:23
  Mike Masnick: The flip side to that argument has always been that one.
• 6:28
  Mike Masnick: law enforcement and intelligence services have more access to more information than ever before in history.
• 6:33
  Mike Masnick: in the past, people could disappear and hide and could communicate in ways that were not easily trackable.
• 6:38
  Mike Masnick: That is less and less the case these days.
• 6:41
  Mike Masnick: The areas where encryption is used is somewhat minimal.
• 6:44
  Mike Masnick: There's so much other information, location, information, where you are, other stuff that is unencrypted.
• 6:49
  Mike Masnick: it is very hard to actually hide From law enforcement or intelligence agencies these days, they have much more visibility into things.
• 6:57
  Mike Masnick: So the idea that encryption is in any way sort of hiding, bad behavior in a way that is that law enforcement cannot deal with does not seem to be true on top of that.
• 7:06
  Mike Masnick: There's the flip side, which is that encryption is incredibly important for people's safety and protection.
• 7:12
  Mike Masnick: And, the argument is often presented that it's this fight between privacy versus security.
• 7:18
  Mike Masnick: But the reality is that that is not true.
• 7:20
  Mike Masnick: For most people, encryption and privacy protects their own safety and security.
• 7:25
  Mike Masnick: And there are all sorts of reasons why.
• 7:27
  Mike Masnick: I don't have to go into, great detail on that.
• 7:29
  Mike Masnick: But being able to.
• 7:30
  Mike Masnick: protect your own information is often a way to keep yourself safe.
• 7:33
  Mike Masnick: And so the cases where law enforcement is upset tend to be more edge cases, whereas breaking encryption would put tons and tons of people at risk.
• 7:42
  Mike Masnick: Now, there are lots of concerns about the way that this came down, the fact that it is being done in secret.
• 7:46
  Mike Masnick: there was a big fight.
• 7:48
  Mike Masnick: last year, mainly around the UK and the online safety act, which we have talked about on the podcast, which is sort of focused on social media safety and things like that.
• 7:58
  Mike Masnick: There was a concern that there was an element in the online safety act that would be used to attack encryption.
• 8:03
  Mike Masnick: And you had, Apple spoke out about that, but you also had even more forcefully, Meredith Whitaker from Signal.
• 8:10
  Mike Masnick: making the rounds and being very clear that if the online safety act passed in that manner, that signal would probably not be able to do business in the UK because it would lead to this breaking of encryption.
• 8:22
  Mike Masnick: so there was a slight sort of backstep on that.
• 8:25
  Mike Masnick: And the way the online safety act came about, it didn't have all of the language In as troubling a way there were concerns that it could still be used to crack encryption and sort of do this force back doors into encryption according to the reporting and again, like a lot of this is because of leaks and reporting investigative reporting this was done under the investigatory powers act, which is a different law that passed a few years ago It's also been referred to as the snoopers charter and this is an example of why And it was, basically an order given under that law telling Apple that they have to build in a backdoor, that they can't talk about it.
• 9:02
  Mike Masnick: And so Apple has not been public about it.
• 9:04
  Mike Masnick: and.
• 9:06
  Mike Masnick: Effectively, they can't really appeal the order either.
• 9:08
  Mike Masnick: From what I understand, believe they can only appeal that it costs too much, but that is not a societal level cost they can make the argument on only that it would cost too much monetarily for Apple to implement this.
• 9:22
  Mike Masnick: And so there is now a lot of concern and people are raising concerns.
• 9:25
  Mike Masnick: Certainly there have been, uh, a bunch of, human rights and civil society groups have spoken out.
• 9:30
  Mike Masnick: we have people in Congress in the U S we just, uh, appointed our new director of national intelligence, and, uh, A bipartisan, surprisingly bipartisan group from, from, Congress sent a letter to her asking her to push back on the UK's attempt to backdoor encryption.
• 9:49
  Ben Whitelaw: this is, uh, somewhat ironic that.
• 9:51
  Ben Whitelaw: us Brits are bringing the American politic system together, you
• 9:55
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 9:56
  Mike Masnick: Thank you, Ben.
• 9:58
  Ben Whitelaw: through this issue.
• 9:58
  Ben Whitelaw: But yeah, the comments, from senators are really striking.
• 10:02
  Ben Whitelaw: I just want to read one of them out.
• 10:03
  Ben Whitelaw: If Apple is forced to build a backdoor to its products, that backdoor will end up in American's phones, tablets, computers, undermining the security of American's data, as well as the countless federal state and local government agencies that entrust data to Apple products.
• 10:16
  Ben Whitelaw: It's very, very stark.
• 10:17
  Ben Whitelaw: And, the statements from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are equally.
• 10:22
  Ben Whitelaw: So this is a massive, massive, story, Mike, listeners might be thinking, you know, encryption feels a bit far away from kind of where I'm at as a, somebody who's interested in safety, explain again, the trade offs, that we're constantly making and podcast, if that's okay.
• 10:38
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 10:39
  Mike Masnick: I mean, as I sort of was alluding to earlier, the safety and security question are intricately linked and protecting your users is important.
• 10:46
  Mike Masnick: And one way to do that, it depends on the product and the tool and what it is that you're trying to do, but for many, services having encryption and protecting the user's safety go hand in hand.
• 10:58
  Mike Masnick: And this is why there have been debates for a long time and questions about, should, direct messaging end to end encrypted.
• 11:04
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, you had meta that spent many years.
• 11:07
  Mike Masnick: it's a difficult thing to do it right.
• 11:08
  Mike Masnick: Because part of the issue is if you do it wrong, you expose an lot of private information and you put people at risk.
• 11:15
  Mike Masnick: And I think that is really important to understand.
• 11:17
  Mike Masnick: Meta took a lot of time and then eventually did implement end to end encryption for their various messaging products.
• 11:22
  Mike Masnick: Twitter for many years tried to and found it very difficult to get it right.
• 11:26
  Mike Masnick: And so they never fully implemented it.
• 11:28
  Mike Masnick: When Elon Musk took over, he insisted that that was one of his priorities.
• 11:31
  Mike Masnick: It was like the one priority that I agreed with him on.
• 11:34
  Mike Masnick: and then they, Did this sort of half assed implementation that wasn't really encrypted.
• 11:38
  Mike Masnick: And they sort of, in typical Elon fashion.
• 11:40
  Mike Masnick: They sort of pretended it was encrypted and promised that they would do a more complete encryption job later.
• 11:44
  Mike Masnick: We've never about it since that was like two years ago.
• 11:47
  Mike Masnick: they never mentioned it again.
• 11:49
  Mike Masnick: but you know, being able to protect your users and protect their privacy is a huge, important thing.
• 11:55
  Mike Masnick: And this is.
• 11:57
  Mike Masnick: A huge attack on the ability of companies to keep their users safe.
• 12:01
  Mike Masnick: And, if services think that it's going to stop with just the UK going after Apple, think that's wrong.
• 12:07
  Mike Masnick: I think.
• 12:08
  Mike Masnick: That if this works and if Apple does do this, and if the UK doesn't back down, it's going to open up a lot of stuff around the globe of governments demanding access to all sorts of information that will put users at risk.
• 12:22
  Mike Masnick: And so I think this is, a hugely important issue for safety and trust and safety and online user speech and, and having them feel comfortable, on any particular service.
• 12:33
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, and also speaks to, I guess, a shift in UK politics and its approach to safety as well.
• 12:39
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, the Labour government was elected last year.
• 12:42
  Ben Whitelaw: Keir Starmer as Prime Minister has, included safety as one of his kind of five pillars of its government.
• 12:49
  Ben Whitelaw: one of the areas that it's seeking to make.
• 12:51
  Ben Whitelaw: ground on and it's he made many things about safety from a kind of physical, you know, real world on the streets perspective, but has also talked about it in relation to.
• 12:59
  Ben Whitelaw: The online space as well.
• 13:00
  Ben Whitelaw: There are a number of very, influential civil society and charities in the UK who, do a lot of policy work, including the NSPCC, which you might have heard of, and they have been advocating for, Changes to the way the encryption works to allow for, child safety, improvements.
• 13:17
  Ben Whitelaw: So to allow, platforms to be giving, government data to be able to address what they see as harms specifically for children.
• 13:23
  Ben Whitelaw: The child safety groups in the UK, as far as I understand, are very, very vocal and very, very powerful.
• 13:29
  Ben Whitelaw: So again, we're kind of seeing.
• 13:31
  Ben Whitelaw: I guess probably a year or 18 months worth of work from the point that you mentioned, where Meredith Whittaker was talking about encryption in the online safety act through to the labor government being elected.
• 13:43
  Ben Whitelaw: And almost, you know, this being a kind of a milestone in that process.
• 13:46
  Ben Whitelaw: Tom, one of the students from the American university was, was also trying to kind of was thinking about why this might've happened to Tom, you have some thoughts about again, why now, and what this might mean from a labor government perspective.
• 13:57
  Guest: Yeah.
• 13:58
  Guest: Um, so I was just kind of wondering if this perhaps had to do with kind of in reaction to the far right riots and this kind of made them more of a sense of urgency to perhaps kind of at least do something about it.
• 14:09
  Guest: Um, particularly with the pressure on the new government coming in.
• 14:12
  Guest: I was just kind of curious your thoughts on that.
• 14:14
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, I think that's fair.
• 14:15
  Ben Whitelaw: I think there's an ongoing storyline that Mike and I often refer to in the podcast, which is kind of Elon Musk's views on politics in the UK and, people connected to Downing street and political scene in, London are very aware of, Musk and what he's saying.
• 14:32
  Ben Whitelaw: it's a kind of constant backdrop to policy work being done across a number of different, parts of the government as far as I understand.
• 14:38
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and so, yeah, I think being able to address some of the underlying issues, related to the riots is, part of this, you know, it doesn't necessarily excuse it as Mike says, it does feel like a big step.
• 14:50
  Ben Whitelaw: Couldn't.
• 14:51
  Ben Whitelaw: the comments from the senators and from the civil society organizations, I think back that up, one of the human rights watch, researchers said this is an alarming overreach by the UK authorities seeking to access private data of UK, but worldwide, you know, if you're, if you're concerned about rights in your country, Maybe address the underlying issues related to that rather than trying to, create these kinds of backdoors.
• 15:13
  Ben Whitelaw: So don't want to excuse, the labor government too much or make it too kind of party political, but it's definitely probably a factor.
• 15:21
  Mike Masnick: the one thing I would add to that is that it does feel the timing of this beyond obviously the new labor government is them, I think, trying to take advantage of kind of the chaos in the US and the sort of distracted nature of everybody in the US to sort of see if they could sneak this through while everyone is focused on, other issues.
• 15:40
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, I think, it's perhaps a cynical take, but I think it's, it is worth pointing out that, the timing of this is certainly interesting.
• 15:48
  Ben Whitelaw: So you mentioned Mike about the compliance with this order.
• 15:52
  Ben Whitelaw: Is there any risk that Apple of wouldn't, exist, in its current form in the UK would stop, particular services or products?
• 15:58
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 15:59
  Mike Masnick: I mean, Apple has made it clear, they made it clear during the, the online safety act debate that if they were forced to remove or backdoor encryption in the UK, they would try to, no longer offer those services in the UK.
• 16:13
  Mike Masnick: There is a question of whether or not that matters under the order, because it is a, global order and access to global communications.
• 16:20
  Mike Masnick: And then I think it just becomes some sort of legal fight.
• 16:23
  Mike Masnick: but yeah, I mean, Apple has made, made it pretty clear that they might seek to at least, stop certain services being available in the UK, and then it just becomes an escalation and who knows where it ends up after that.
• 16:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 16:37
  Ben Whitelaw: Well, again, you know, a story that's somewhat passed me by until we started talking about it earlier and something I know that as, the likes of human rights watch and amnesty start talking about it kind of blowing the whistle more on this, I'm sure we'll return to, we'll turn now to, Paris, not a billion miles away from where I am in London.
• 16:56
  Ben Whitelaw: And the AI Action Summit that took place this week, where over a thousand thinkers and doers related to AI, people working on policy and regulation, got together to talk through, how, AI will evolve on a global scale.
• 17:10
  Ben Whitelaw: This is not just folks from Europe, but folks from the States and elsewhere as well.
• 17:16
  Ben Whitelaw: This follows on the, Back of two other summits like it one in London two years ago, which was famously organized by Rishi Sunak, very much trumpeted by the conservative government at the time.
• 17:25
  Ben Whitelaw: I was hosted at Bletchley Park just outside of London and then one in Seoul last year.
• 17:30
  Ben Whitelaw: And in both occasions, there was, huge, agreement around what AI, the future of AI should look like a number of agreements were signed.
• 17:37
  Ben Whitelaw: A lot of kind of patting on the back of, not only companies, but also elected officials as well around how they were going to take the future of AI forward.
• 17:45
  Ben Whitelaw: And everyone was praised for their kind of general agility on the, on, bringing these summits to bear this week was very different, Mike.
• 17:53
  Ben Whitelaw: I don't know if you, came across some of the, Stories, but you know, Things have changed and probably, you know, we could put it down to.
• 18:01
  Ben Whitelaw: Donald Trump and the new, presidential, state of things, I'm going to leave you to talk about, JD Vance and what he's talked through maybe trying to read the tea leaves on, what he said, but the broad swathe of what came out of the summit was that.
• 18:15
  Ben Whitelaw: Essentially, France and other companies, have been closely involved are advocating for a move away from, very strict regulation on AI.
• 18:24
  Ben Whitelaw: A lot of the wording around the summit was about, innovation and competition and economic growth.
• 18:32
  Ben Whitelaw: And the general thrust was that if we regulate AI too heavily, you know, we reduce the ability of companies to grow and to kind of generate, wealth and for people to benefit these ways, as we know, and as we talked about a couple of weeks ago on, on the episode that on deep seek, when we think about innovation, purely safety and security often, is offset as a result of that is the thing that gets lost.
• 18:54
  Ben Whitelaw: And we somewhat see that in one of the big announcements made this week, which was a public private partnership by.
• 19:01
  Ben Whitelaw: France, which put a lot of money in and a number of other companies called current AI.
• 19:06
  Ben Whitelaw: essentially this is going to be focusing on kind of large projects in the public interest.
• 19:10
  Ben Whitelaw: They've got 400 million euros to spend.
• 19:13
  Ben Whitelaw: They're going to try and get 2.
• 19:14
  Ben Whitelaw: 5 billion euros over the next five years.
• 19:18
  Ben Whitelaw: And this is all about creating big projects.
• 19:19
  Ben Whitelaw: Data sets and focusing on a, open source technology, and then involving communities in, in the growth of AI.
• 19:26
  Ben Whitelaw: But within the wording of the current AI, website, there's some very, very clear indications that actually this is a shift.
• 19:34
  Ben Whitelaw: so I just read a quote from one of those, involved.
• 19:39
  Ben Whitelaw: We need to do things in the affirmative sense, not just think about regulation and things you want to forbid, you know, Emmanuel Macron, the French president also got up and said something similar.
• 19:48
  Ben Whitelaw: This is not just about regulating what, what is bad.
• 19:51
  Ben Whitelaw: It's about trying to, get the benefits and the economic benefits.
• 19:55
  Ben Whitelaw: Benefits of what is good as well from AI.
• 19:56
  Ben Whitelaw: So that's a very, very interesting shift.
• 19:59
  Ben Whitelaw: We're going to see a lot of companies take the lead from you know, the key messages from this summit, Mike, what did you make of, the summit more broadly, what, what do you make of these kind of big, big, big.
• 20:09
  Ben Whitelaw: Highfalutin network dues that everyone goes to that, but we never get invited to.
• 20:14
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I mean, I definitely thought it was interesting and I think the point that you raised of, sort of government's talking about less about regulation and more about innovation is perhaps not surprising.
• 20:27
  Mike Masnick: Interesting in a way.
• 20:28
  Mike Masnick: And obviously anyone who listens to this podcast regularly knows that I am often skeptical of regulatory proposals and do believe strongly in, enabling more innovation and things like that.
• 20:41
  Mike Masnick: You know, so I should be, I should be thrilled about, about this in some sense.
• 20:45
  Mike Masnick: Um, but I feel that a lot of this was very cynical and that it wasn't a thoughtful approach, right?
• 20:51
  Mike Masnick: there are ways, you know, part of my argument is always that, there are ways to deal with safety and security that are important, but they're important in some ways to the bottom line itself, and that, that companies should be thinking about these things, but it feels like the approach that many people are taking are like, bottom line overall, like just, you know, forget everything else, forget safety, go as fast as you possibly can.
• 21:16
  Mike Masnick: and I think that leads to really bad results and that will lead to backlash.
• 21:19
  Mike Masnick: and I think that that is bad in the long run.
• 21:22
  Mike Masnick: I mean, the fact that France is now presenting this, I think that ties back to our opening prompt today, which is Mistral, right, which is a French company and has been a successful player in the AI space.
• 21:34
  Mike Masnick: so it's, not surprising to me, but again, it's perhaps a slightly cynical take where it's like the rest of Europe is all in on AI act and we've got to regulate heavily.
• 21:45
  Mike Masnick: And then France is like, wait, we have this successful company here.
• 21:47
  Mike Masnick: Like let's pump the brakes a little bit on the, on the regulatory side and let's, let's actually support, this company.
• 21:54
  Mike Masnick: And so, there's always these sort of.
• 21:56
  Mike Masnick: Push and pull and trade offs of, you know, regulation versus kind of like pure, unregulated markets and how that plays into, innovation.
• 22:04
  Mike Masnick: But I, you know, watching all of these speeches and, announcements like I came out of it very cynical.
• 22:12
  Mike Masnick: I don't think that these, companies are doing these things or the countries and their approaches to regulations are being done thoughtfully, right?
• 22:19
  Mike Masnick: I think this is being pushed by strain of, technologist and entrepreneur and investor that is.
• 22:26
  Mike Masnick: you know, as they refer to it as accelerationist, which is basically let's ignore any of the safety concerns.
• 22:32
  Mike Masnick: It ties back to the thing that we have talked about in the past of the, Mark Andreessen techno optimist manifesto, where he declared trust and safety to be the enemy of the people or whatever, the enemy of innovation, which I think is, is wrong.
• 22:48
  Mike Masnick: I think, if you want innovation to not lead to backlash, and if you want these technologies for people to feel safe using them and to embrace them and figure out the best ways to integrate them into your lives, people have to feel safe using them as well.
• 23:01
  Mike Masnick: so I think there's this overcorrection that was very clear in the way that announcements in the discussion around the, the summit.
• 23:10
  Mike Masnick: Worked out.
• 23:11
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 23:11
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, yeah.
• 23:12
  Ben Whitelaw: The kind of thing to know is that the, hugging face, which is a AI platform, you'll know, has a, also got a French CEO.
• 23:19
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, so.
• 23:20
  Mike Masnick: right.
• 23:20
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 23:21
  Ben Whitelaw: So there's, there's a number of.
• 23:23
  Ben Whitelaw: big AI players who have kind of French personalities who are reportedly very close to Macron have kind of really shaped his thinking over the last few years.
• 23:30
  Ben Whitelaw: I also agree with the kind of mood music around the summit and was reading very carefully the reactions of a number of trust and safety kind of experts who were there.
• 23:40
  Ben Whitelaw: Theo Skiadis, who's the public policy, lead on DoorDash.
• 23:45
  Ben Whitelaw: She's there.
• 23:45
  Ben Whitelaw: She's somebody who I have a lot of respect for.
• 23:48
  Ben Whitelaw: She's very, very thoughtful about some of the safety concerns whilst also, not doing it for the sake of it, but, but, but, you know, very, very, careful with some of how the regulatory regime should work.
• 23:58
  Ben Whitelaw: She said that there was a gloomy.
• 24:00
  Ben Whitelaw: Feeling to the summit at the end of it.
• 24:02
  Ben Whitelaw: And people felt very afraid about how, some of the participants were, thinking about safety as a, low down on the list of priorities, and that was demonstrated by the fact that there was unlike the other summits I mentioned, there was no kind of signed communique, at the end of it, at least not one signed by the U S and the UK.
• 24:21
  Ben Whitelaw: So some of the big names that were traditionally, In agreement, at the end of these summits, not.
• 24:27
  Ben Whitelaw: singing off the same hymn sheet this time.
• 24:28
  Ben Whitelaw: So yeah, it's very, very different to Seoul and very, very different to London.
• 24:33
  Ben Whitelaw: And it does open up a question about who will end up governing AI and what happens next.
• 24:39
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 24:40
  Mike Masnick: I mean, you know, one of the things that I saw too was, rather than safety, a lot of the language was around security and I think maybe that is a sort of a statement also on the state of the world and kind of where we are, where sort of the traditional orders of the world that we've.
• 24:54
  Mike Masnick: Grown used to over the last few decades are potentially breaking down.
• 24:57
  Mike Masnick: And, we've definitely seen a lot of the positioning, certainly in the U S whenever there's talk of, regulatory regimes around AI in particular, there's always talk of like, well, you don't want to let China beat you.
• 25:07
  Mike Masnick: And so it becomes this sort of like nationalistic thing in which security and sort of like this idea of like security at the state level, becomes more important than safety at the individual level in terms of what people are thinking about.
• 25:19
  Mike Masnick: And I think that was really reflected in a lot of the language.
• 25:22
  Mike Masnick: And discussions that came out of, this particular, you know, the particular summit.
• 25:26
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 25:27
  Ben Whitelaw: Did you have any, take on, JD Vance's comments?
• 25:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Cause he was there, you
• 25:31
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 25:32
  Ben Whitelaw: he said some stuff.
• 25:34
  Ben Whitelaw: It was reported.
• 25:36
  Mike Masnick: He said some stuff.
• 25:36
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 25:37
  Mike Masnick: I mean, you know, like if I can go through my week without having to deal with JD Vance is a better week, but, but, um, yeah, I mean, it was a lot of sort of, you know, nationalistic jingoistic stuff.
• 25:47
  Mike Masnick: I mean, he used the opportunity, he attacked the DSA, he attacked European regulations.
• 25:52
  Mike Masnick: You know, there was a lot of culture war related stuff.
• 25:56
  Mike Masnick: it's, it's very JD Vance, you know, there's not substance there.
• 25:59
  Mike Masnick: but it's, very much driven by the people that he has surrounded himself with, which are the sort of, you know, Silicon Valley, accelerationist, techno optimist, uh, people.
• 26:07
  Mike Masnick: Investor class that just wants, wipe out anything.
• 26:11
  Mike Masnick: Like we don't even want to think about safety.
• 26:14
  Mike Masnick: You know, we just want to be able to do whatever we can.
• 26:16
  Mike Masnick: And yeah, sure.
• 26:17
  Mike Masnick: Like if we destroy a few lives or a few thousand lives or a few million lives, like, well, you know, that's the price of innovation.
• 26:24
  Mike Masnick: and so, It was, it was frustrating, but, and, and obviously extraordinarily different than, you know, the way the, the Biden administration approached these things.
• 26:33
  Mike Masnick: And I was critical of the Biden administration approach to things.
• 26:36
  Mike Masnick: I thought their approach to dealing with AI was, fairly short sighted as well.
• 26:40
  Mike Masnick: But this is, this is swinging the pendulum very much in the other direction and without any thought towards how this plays out.
• 26:46
  Mike Masnick: And this is my concern with so much of, well, what is going on around the world, but certainly with the Trump administration is this inability or unwillingness really to think through.
• 26:56
  Mike Masnick: the implications of what it is that they're positioning and assuming that like, well, if we just, wipe away any concern about safety and just allow everything to move forward, everything will work out.
• 27:05
  Mike Masnick: And, the car's going to crash in some way, then people are going to get hurt and not preparing for that and not realizing that there's going to be a backlash.
• 27:12
  Mike Masnick: And it could be a really damaging backlash that has, wide ranging implications and not being willing to even think through those things is.
• 27:20
  Mike Masnick: Incredibly short sighted and I think will lead to really bad situations in the long run.
• 27:25
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, I agree.
• 27:26
  Ben Whitelaw: And I actually before we started recording, went back and looked at one of the big announcements from the London summit.
• 27:32
  Ben Whitelaw: Which I don't know if you remember was the AI safety Institute.
• 27:35
  Ben Whitelaw: This is a kind of body that was, created so that, researchers, government officials, people working roles in companies could come together figure some of these nutty questions out together.
• 27:46
  Ben Whitelaw: literally this morning, Mike, they've changed the name to the AI security Institute.
• 27:54
  Mike Masnick: Well, there, there you go.
• 27:55
  Ben Whitelaw: So, uh,
• 27:56
  Mike Masnick: moving from safety to security
• 27:58
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah, exactly.
• 27:59
  Ben Whitelaw: We might have to change the opening of the podcast, uh, to, to reference security in some way, uh, so as to be in line with everyone else.
• 28:06
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, one good thing that did come out was the announcement of Roost.
• 28:11
  Ben Whitelaw: the robust online.
• 28:14
  Ben Whitelaw: Open safety tools.
• 28:16
  Ben Whitelaw: I think I've got that right.
• 28:17
  Ben Whitelaw: this is a big initiative that we've kind of been tracking a little bit.
• 28:20
  Ben Whitelaw: We know a number of the people involved and have been seeing this develop, but essentially is a, large scale tooling initiative supported by a bunch of companies that is making, tools more accessible for smaller, medium sized platforms that can't build them.
• 28:37
  Ben Whitelaw: Themselves that can't do it internally.
• 28:39
  Ben Whitelaw: you can talk a bit about the background, Mike, but this is, this is actually kind of a, I think a positive thing to have come out of the summit.
• 28:45
  Ben Whitelaw: again, you know, it's worth noting that we know, some of the people involved, so we, you know, we, are biased in that way, But, this is focusing on three very specific cases, initially building tools to address CSAM, child sexual abuse material, producing classifieds to reduce harm and also creating tools for moderators to be able to, do that with a greater degree of wellbeing.
• 29:06
  Ben Whitelaw: So what did you make of the kind of announcement in the context of the wider summit, Mike?
• 29:11
  Ben Whitelaw: Like, how do you see the broader geopolitical shifts happening towards AI regulation and this initiative?
• 29:18
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 29:18
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I do think this is an important initiative and, regular listeners of the podcast will remember that last year in July as one of the bonus chats, we had Camille Francois and Juliet Shen on the podcast talking about the open source work that they were doing at Columbia.
• 29:32
  Mike Masnick: That is basically what has been turned into Roost, with a lot of support from, various philanthropies and companies as well.
• 29:40
  Mike Masnick: And so, um, actually do think it's exciting because they're sort of stepping into a space that is important, where there are tools that are sort of necessary table stakes to do trust and safety that.
• 29:53
  Mike Masnick: are really fragmented all over the map.
• 29:55
  Mike Masnick: Lots of companies are to have to rebuild them from scratch, even though they're effectively the same tool.
• 30:00
  Mike Masnick: yeah, well, Roth, former guest cohost on the podcast, you know, has talked about how.
• 30:05
  Mike Masnick: When he was at Twitter many years ago, he bought this company called Smite.
• 30:08
  Mike Masnick: that was a, classifier engine that almost everybody used for trust and safety.
• 30:13
  Mike Masnick: And the day that Twitter bought it, they also shut it down for everybody and sort of left everybody high and dry and scrambling to rebuild a classifier engine, which is just sort of really important for analyzing different content on different networks.
• 30:26
  Mike Masnick: And so being able to have those tools and have them be available to everybody and be open source, I think is important, especially as hopefully we're moving to a world where there are not just.
• 30:38
  Mike Masnick: four or five giant companies, but we're seeing smaller companies being set up that need to do trust and safety or not even companies like Mastodon instances, being able to handle sort of trust and safety stuff if there are open source tools that they can plug in and make use of, I think that's actually a really powerful thing.
• 30:55
  Mike Masnick: And I think it's a really important thing for.
• 30:58
  Mike Masnick: building a more robust, world for online communications and online speech.
• 31:03
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, I agree.
• 31:04
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, the only thing I would say, and I haven't spoken to any of the team involved about this, but the absence of Meta and Reddit and a couple of other big platforms who have invested a lot in tooling over the last 15, 20 years.
• 31:20
  Ben Whitelaw: And you have some, some of the most advanced tooling, as far as I understand it is a bit of a blow.
• 31:24
  Ben Whitelaw: And do you think that, Roost is worse off as a result of that?
• 31:28
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I don't know.
• 31:29
  Mike Masnick: I mean, we'll have to see, my guess who know, I don't know the reason why I haven't, I haven't spoken to anyone involved either on, on this in particular.
• 31:37
  Mike Masnick: So I have no idea.
• 31:39
  Mike Masnick: I mean, you always have this sense that when you have companies that sort of are, Above and beyond what other people are doing.
• 31:46
  Mike Masnick: They might be a little bit more proprietary about what they've built.
• 31:48
  Mike Masnick: And so not as willing to sort of share.
• 31:51
  Mike Masnick: but does that last over time?
• 31:52
  Mike Masnick: I don't know.
• 31:53
  Mike Masnick: I think that.
• 31:55
  Mike Masnick: the team that is working on Roost and the folks who are involved how they think about these things, I think they can build very, very strong tools.
• 32:01
  Mike Masnick: They have built super strong tools in the past.
• 32:04
  Mike Masnick: They know what goes into this and then building tools that are open source and for a wider audience to use and embrace and then build on and contribute back.
• 32:13
  Mike Masnick: You know, the nature of sort of open source tools in general.
• 32:16
  Mike Masnick: I'm not as worried that like maybe a This company or that company is not a part of this.
• 32:21
  Mike Masnick: Obviously it'd be nice.
• 32:22
  Mike Masnick: And maybe as Roost proves itself, they'll end up deciding that they do want to join in and I think that would be good, but, overall, I actually do think it is a really positive development and hopefully leads to just better tools for more platforms.
• 32:36
  Mike Masnick: Which also means, less need to rely on certain giant companies whose interests might not be the best.
• 32:43
  Mike Masnick: I mean, we're talking all about, companies moving away from safety and security.
• 32:46
  Mike Masnick: We've talked about Meta cutting back on its content moderation stuff, having tools that allow others to come in and not being totally reliant on Meta making the decisions for what is okay to see on the internet.
• 32:57
  Mike Masnick: To me is, that seems to be moving in a better direction.
• 33:00
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, definitely a positive take from the summit.
• 33:03
  Ben Whitelaw: Aram, who leads the media law and policy class at American university, also had a thought about how this tooling initiative might play into some of the regulatory stuff we talked about.
• 33:12
  Ben Whitelaw: Aram.
• 33:13
  Guest: Yeah, well, I had really two concerns.
• 33:14
  Guest: One is, you know, as an open source platform.
• 33:17
  Guest: the notion that individual adopters of Roost might be able to use it as a tool of oppression rather than a tool of safety for its user base.
• 33:27
  Guest: But to speak to your question, I think there's a long history of new tech being kind of integrated into the regulatory apparatus.
• 33:35
  Guest: And so I could easily imagine, for instance, in the U.
• 33:37
  Guest: S., Section 230 protections being contingent on platforms adopting Roost.
• 33:43
  Guest: which would leave, other alternatives and the platforms that wanted to adopt them out in the cold and potentially put them on the wrong side of the law.
• 33:50
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 33:50
  Mike Masnick: I mean, it is a legitimate concern.
• 33:53
  Mike Masnick: you know, we've certainly seen that, especially in the copyright space where, people created tools, you know, content ID, or similar tools, or now we're seeing it in the age verification space where, companies have built these age verification tools, and then that is being used as justification for various laws around copyright or age verification, often.
• 34:12
  Mike Masnick: Lobbied heavily for, by these very companies that then would sort of profit from it.
• 34:17
  Mike Masnick: and so I think there is always a risk of that and it is worth watching.
• 34:21
  Mike Masnick: I am less concerned about it in this situation for a few reasons.
• 34:24
  Mike Masnick: One, this is a nonprofit, this is an open source thing.
• 34:27
  Mike Masnick: I don't think they're going to be, in the same sense, lobbying for their own profit.
• 34:31
  Mike Masnick: because of that, but more importantly, it's just sort of the nature of what these tools do and why they're useful, whereas the, Other examples around copyright and age verification tend to be things that go against what users are trying to do.
• 34:45
  Mike Masnick: often what these tools are for is to make a platform overall safer and better for the majority of users.
• 34:51
  Mike Masnick: So there's actually a, good sort of positive reason to make use of them no matter what, and therefore, less reason to sort of require them by law.
• 35:01
  Mike Masnick: and Less having to deal with sort of special interest reasons for why, there might be a regulatory approach around these things.
• 35:07
  Mike Masnick: I do think it is a concern.
• 35:09
  Mike Masnick: It is something worth watching.
• 35:10
  Mike Masnick: We are already seeing, lots of countries outside the U.
• 35:14
  Mike Masnick: S.
• 35:15
  Mike Masnick: Mainly, sort of requiring these kinds of things anyways.
• 35:19
  Mike Masnick: And in that world, I think it is still actually better than to have kind of an open source nonprofit approach that is available rather than pushing everyone into a for profit, uh,, corporate approach that, you know, I think is, a worse end result.
• 35:34
  Mike Masnick: So it is worth watching.
• 35:36
  Mike Masnick: I share your concern.
• 35:37
  Mike Masnick: I think it's a really good question to think about, like, will the existence of this lead to a different regulatory approach like undermining 230 or something like that.
• 35:47
  Mike Masnick: It is worth watching, but I don't think this alone is going to do it.
• 35:51
  Mike Masnick: I'd be more concerned if it was completely corporate driven.
• 35:55
  Ben Whitelaw: I think there's also a practical element to this as well.
• 35:57
  Ben Whitelaw: If you, you're working in a platform and you're looking to bring on a vendor or a piece of technology to address one of these issues, it's really difficult to find out.
• 36:04
  Ben Whitelaw: what's best in class and, to go through the rigmarole of demos and, calls with vendors and to figure out, okay, do I need this?
• 36:13
  Ben Whitelaw: Will it integrate with my other, you know, tech stack in terms of, safety classifies, like it's, it's really, really slow as far as I understand.
• 36:20
  Ben Whitelaw: So actually having something that sits above and kind of demonstrates best in class is something that.
• 36:27
  Ben Whitelaw: People can go to first, I think is a good thing.
• 36:29
  Ben Whitelaw: that should help the, hundreds of thousands of smaller, medium.
• 36:33
  Ben Whitelaw: So it's platforms, forums, instances that are going to be obliged through regulation to, figure this stuff out.
• 36:40
  Ben Whitelaw: So, yeah, thanks for the question, Aaron.
• 36:43
  Ben Whitelaw: and if you're listening to control speech and you're, you work for one of the vendors or technology companies that have classified and you want to take part into this initiative, you know, you're interested in, contributing to the open source, project that's, that's being spun up, you know, get in touch with the guys.
• 36:58
  Ben Whitelaw: they're really, really thoughtful.
• 36:59
  Ben Whitelaw: We'll be really interested to hear from you.
• 37:01
  Ben Whitelaw: I think that that'd be much, much recommended.
• 37:04
  Ben Whitelaw: Great.
• 37:05
  Ben Whitelaw: awesome, Mike.
• 37:05
  Ben Whitelaw: So we are two stories down.
• 37:07
  Ben Whitelaw: We've, we've addressed UK and, France, and now we're onto much more familiar ground, uh, in the US, uh,
• 37:16
  Mike Masnick: We're not going to, we're not going to get through a, uh, an episode without talking about a U S based story.
• 37:21
  Ben Whitelaw: no, no, and it leads neatly on from the conversations and the question that Aram had around section 230, and picks up a thread that we touched on a few weeks back on the podcast.
• 37:29
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 37:30
  Mike Masnick: So, obviously there've been a whole bunch of cases in the U S sort of attacking two 30 and sort of seeing where they're going.
• 37:36
  Mike Masnick: There was a case last year that we spoke about, which is the Anderson versus tick tock appeals court ruling in the sixth which, think we talked about at the time made no sense to me.
• 37:46
  Mike Masnick: It was a ridiculous ruling, was very problematic basically saying that, if you have an algorithm on your platform, it effectively wipes out your 230 defense that recommending stuff is no longer protected by 230.
• 37:57
  Mike Masnick: I believe that's wrong on multiple levels, which I don't.
• 38:01
  Mike Masnick: Need to get into all the details, exactly why.
• 38:03
  Mike Masnick: there were two things that happened this past week that were interesting on that level.
• 38:08
  Mike Masnick: One is that.
• 38:10
  Mike Masnick: Everyone assumed that TikTok was going to appeal that case to the Supreme Court.
• 38:14
  Mike Masnick: and they put in a notice saying they are not going to do that.
• 38:18
  Mike Masnick: Um, and they did that a couple of weeks before they had to, I think they actually had till next Friday to decide to put in the, the cert petition for the Supreme Court, and they chose not to do that at all, meaning that their Accepting ruling in the sixth circuit, which went against them and was very problematic.
• 38:35
  Mike Masnick: I'm sorry, not six or I keep saying six or it was the third circuit.
• 38:38
  Mike Masnick: got to keep those circuits straight.
• 38:40
  Mike Masnick: Uh, so I apologize.
• 38:42
  Mike Masnick: and I think this is bad for anyone who is in the third circuit, because now you have two 30 does not really apply to anything with algorithms in the third circuit, and I think that is bad and we're going to see a whole bunch of really dumb lawsuits.
• 38:55
  Mike Masnick: Filed in there and it's, it's going to be bad for a lot of companies.
• 38:59
  Mike Masnick: but also interesting, perhaps more interesting is in the fourth circuit.
• 39:04
  Mike Masnick: Again, I got to keep my circuits straight now in the fourth circuit.
• 39:07
  Mike Masnick: there was another case, which is the MP versus medic case, which goes back to Dylan roof, who was one of these horrible people who went in and shot up a church, you know, sort of famous, awful story.
• 39:19
  Mike Masnick: and again, there was an attempt to hold meta.
• 39:22
  Mike Masnick: liable for certain things based on the algorithm and, you know, people having an account and all of those kinds of things.
• 39:29
  Mike Masnick: And here, the fourth circuit said, of course, 230 applies.
• 39:33
  Mike Masnick: And of course, meta is immune from that.
• 39:35
  Mike Masnick: and there were a few interesting things about it.
• 39:38
  Mike Masnick: The fourth circuit is where the very first case that challenged section 230 where section 230 was an issue Was ruled it's called the ziran case.
• 39:48
  Mike Masnick: I'm not going to get into the history of it though.
• 39:49
  Mike Masnick: It is very very interesting And so that has been sort of the standard across the country and there have been people who have been critics of ziran and a few years ago again in that same circuit in the fourth circuit in a case called henderson They seem to maybe reject Zeron, not explicitly, but came out with a ruling that sort of was different in terms of sort of setting up a different standard for where you could get around 230 and there were worries that that would lead to a whole bunch of cases that, found their way to get around 230, but here.
• 40:18
  Mike Masnick: In the MP versus meta case.
• 40:20
  Mike Masnick: the appeals court was, the majority of the appeals court'cause there is a dissent, but the majority of the appeals court said no.
• 40:25
  Mike Masnick: Like the way Zoran works, and this is, IM important to understand conceptually without getting too deep into the weeds.
• 40:31
  Mike Masnick: The way Zoran works is it says two 30 is designed to protect companies for doing traditional publishing activities from being held liable as if they were the publisher.
• 40:42
  Mike Masnick: and this gets really confusing to a lot of people.
• 40:45
  Mike Masnick: Often people who should know better.
• 40:47
  Mike Masnick: It is the traditional publishing activities that protect you from being held liable as a publisher.
• 40:52
  Mike Masnick: There's this belief, like the whole thing where it's like, if you're acting as a publisher, you sh you shouldn't get liability protections, but no, two 30 is actually standing for the exact opposite argument.
• 41:00
  Mike Masnick: It is saying because it's user generated content and you as a platform don't have the ability to review and understand the legal implications of.
• 41:08
  Mike Masnick: each and every piece of content for the activities you do that are just like any regular publisher, you don't get held liable like you are a regular publisher.
• 41:18
  Mike Masnick: Because you have no way of knowing all the specifics of that content.
• 41:21
  Mike Masnick: And that was, that's the point of the Zeron case and other cases that are followed.
• 41:25
  Mike Masnick: And so what the MP versus Meta case is saying, which is important is algorithmic recommendation is a traditional publisher activity and therefore 230 applies and you get those protections.
• 41:37
  Ben Whitelaw: Mm.
• 41:38
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 41:39
  Mike Masnick: And so it is sort of setting up a circuit conflict now between the third circuit and maybe a couple of other, other circuits as well, but mainly between the Anderson ruling around tick tock in the third circuit.
• 41:49
  Mike Masnick: And now this, the MP meta ruling in the fourth circuit, what will be interesting is now, if The plaintiffs in this case, try to appeal this one to the Supreme Court.
• 41:59
  Mike Masnick: And I think, just from a purely emotional standpoint, this is probably a better case to go to the Supreme Court than the, TikTok versus Anderson.
• 42:06
  Mike Masnick: And maybe that's why TikTok chose not to, uh, request cert from the Supreme Court that they felt that people, whoever the people are felt that this is a, better case to get in front of it's somewhat more reminiscent of, uh, of the Twitter versus Tamna and Gonzalez versus Google case from a few years back, which were about sort of terrorist acts and whether or not Twitter and YouTube in that case could be held liable.
• 42:32
  Mike Masnick: and the Supreme court sort of was just like they didn't address 230 specifically, but they were kind of like, wait, you know, you can't really trace terrorist actions to the fact that they're Those groups also had social media accounts.
• 42:43
  Mike Masnick: And so there is this element of that that might play through.
• 42:45
  Mike Masnick: So I think this is a better case if it does go to the supreme court and could Be a way to get the third circuit back into line with how 230 actually works So it's an important case and we'll sort of see how it plays out
• 42:56
  Ben Whitelaw: What are the timelines for that, Mike?
• 42:58
  Ben Whitelaw: how quickly might this go to the Supreme Court?
• 43:00
  Mike Masnick: I mean assuming the plaintiff decides to to ask for a cert petition They have I forget the exact time but they basically would have to file cert petition fairly soon within the next few months I believe You And then there's a question of whether or not the Supreme Court takes it up.
• 43:13
  Mike Masnick: And then when it takes it up, I think a standard would be that they, if they decide to take it up in the next term, then they would probably hear the case, I would guess late fall or probably early 2026.
• 43:24
  Mike Masnick: And then you would get a ruling in probably summer of 2026 would be the most likely, it could get pushed further than that for a variety of reasons, but, generally speaking, I think it would be a summer 2026 ruling.
• 43:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Interesting.
• 43:37
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and when you say the kind of emotional aspect, you mean because it's not related to TikTok and there isn't this kind of Chinese national security fury around it.
• 43:45
  Ben Whitelaw: It's more likely to be judged more on its merits.
• 43:48
  Ben Whitelaw: Is
• 43:48
  Mike Masnick: It's, it's partly that, so there's two things to it.
• 43:50
  Mike Masnick: One is, is that, and there's all these other questions around TikTok and who's going to own it.
• 43:54
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, and obviously the Supreme court made it clear that they're not, they're distrustful of TikTok in general, which I think, frames it in a poor light for the Supreme court, but also the nature of the case itself, the TikTok one was about, a child who did one of these challenges that they found on TikTok and ended up dying.
• 44:09
  Mike Masnick: And it's, it's a very.
• 44:11
  Mike Masnick: emotionally wrought, sympathetic one.
• 44:13
  Mike Masnick: obviously, the Dylan Roof situation is also emotionally wrought, but in a slightly different way in that it's, more, a terrorist style action as opposed to a kid succumbing to a viral challenge.
• 44:26
  Mike Masnick: And so I think it's, it's a little easier to separate out the actual legal issues and the implications of it than in the Anderson case.
• 44:33
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 44:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Interesting.
• 44:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 44:35
  Ben Whitelaw: That's helpful.
• 44:36
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, I'm still very much learning about what the different circuits are.
• 44:42
  Ben Whitelaw: So this, this is good for me.
• 44:44
  Ben Whitelaw: This is good.
• 44:44
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, third, fourth circuit.
• 44:45
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm getting there.
• 44:46
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, and, um, and Eric Goldman's blog on this issue, which we'll share in the show notes is, is very good.
• 44:51
  Ben Whitelaw: We're also trying to include some of the other cases you mentioned there, Mike, if people really want to go into the weeds on, uh, on some of the cases you mentioned there.
• 44:59
  Mike Masnick: I'll give you another little thing, which is, I don't know if this has been talked about, I'm not sure if I'm even supposed to talk about it, but I'm going to do it because what the hell, um, very soon I am releasing, in partnership with some other folks, so I won't name them yet.
• 45:11
  Mike Masnick: That'll be what I'll say, a podcast all about the history of section two 30, which will go deep into the weeds on a whole bunch of this stuff.
• 45:18
  Mike Masnick: I've been interviewing people who were there, the authors of two 30 lawyers, all sorts of people all around two 30.
• 45:25
  Mike Masnick: Uh, it's going to be a, I think a six or seven part series.
• 45:28
  Mike Masnick: It should be out in, I think it's supposed to come out next month.
• 45:31
  Mike Masnick: Um, and so I might as well start promoting it now.
• 45:33
  Mike Masnick: but it'll go in pretty deep in the weeds on a whole bunch of this stuff.
• 45:36
  Mike Masnick: I'm really excited about it.
• 45:37
  Ben Whitelaw: nice.
• 45:38
  Ben Whitelaw: And there'll be a, a Netflix version, I presume as well.
• 45:42
  Mike Masnick: We'll see.
• 45:42
  Mike Masnick: We'll see.
• 45:43
  Mike Masnick: Come, come talk to me, Netflix.
• 45:44
  Mike Masnick: We'll see.
• 45:46
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay, great.
• 45:47
  Ben Whitelaw: well, we've got time for one more story.
• 45:48
  Ben Whitelaw: And this, this is a story that the students they've been joining us today have been very interested in.
• 45:52
  Ben Whitelaw: So I want to get their thoughts on it.
• 45:53
  Ben Whitelaw: And this is big platform story this week, or certainly the biggest kind of drama related to a platform this week.
• 45:59
  Ben Whitelaw: And it's, got everything, it's got the Superbowl, it's got Kanye West, it's got, you know, Failing to deal with Nazi content.
• 46:07
  Ben Whitelaw: it's like back in the days of Twitter, not too long ago, Mike.
• 46:11
  Ben Whitelaw: if people haven't seen it, it's the fact that, I'll briefly unpack what happened, Kanye West, also known as, Ye, Ye, never really known how to say that.
• 46:20
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, bought a Superbowl ad, local, not national.
• 46:23
  Ben Whitelaw: I think that's important to note, pushing people towards his, uh, website where he was selling a bunch of products at the time of the, ad going out, the, products were regular t shirts.
• 46:34
  Ben Whitelaw: I think, it was basically, you know, nothing untoward very quickly though, those products turned into a single t shirt with a Nazi source to go on them.
• 46:44
  Ben Whitelaw: And, you know, was very much like in the middle of the Superbowl, a lot of traffic, a lot of people, a lot of interest.
• 46:51
  Ben Whitelaw: And all of a sudden, you know, you've got a platform policy issue at play.
• 46:55
  Ben Whitelaw: Shopify is the underlying e commerce platform for Kanye West's website.
• 47:01
  Ben Whitelaw: And.
• 47:02
  Ben Whitelaw: It took them best part of a day and a half.
• 47:05
  Ben Whitelaw: It was only on Tuesday where the, they kind of de platformed Kanye.
• 47:08
  Ben Whitelaw: They took down, the site from his personal site.
• 47:12
  Ben Whitelaw: And the justification for doing so is what's really fascinating here, Mike.
• 47:16
  Ben Whitelaw: So you would have thought that actually this falls under a hateful conduct policy or some sort of hate speech policy, actually, as was reported by a number of different, media outlets this week, it's not.
• 47:27
  Ben Whitelaw: Actually, Shopify got rid of that policy last year in July.
• 47:32
  Ben Whitelaw: And so actually.
• 47:33
  Ben Whitelaw: Kanye West's content got taken down on the basis of fraud.
• 47:38
  Ben Whitelaw: the logic reports that the justification was that the merchant, Kanye West in this case, did not engage in authentic commerce practices.
• 47:48
  Ben Whitelaw: Can you believe that?
• 47:49
  Ben Whitelaw: That's, that's what, you know, that's what posting a t shirt with Nazi emblem on it constitutes now.
• 47:55
  Ben Whitelaw: And, basically that's the reasoning for his, de platforming.
• 47:59
  Ben Whitelaw: So we have a situation where major, major e commerce platform, at the center of a massive, massive story like this.
• 48:06
  Ben Whitelaw: I wanted to bring in some of the students, here, I think, Will, are you really interested in this story and how it was kind of shaping out?
• 48:15
  Ben Whitelaw: The engagement around this story and around Kanye West generally is obviously massive.
• 48:20
  Ben Whitelaw: What did you make of it?
• 48:21
  Guest: Yes, so I had kind of a comment about whether divorcing profit for the social media companies and just these companies that sell offensive material like this, whether divorcing profit from endorsing hate speech or hateful content, hateful merchandise.
• 48:42
  Guest: Would help push regulation more towards safety and promoting a safer, more equitable environment in media and communication for everyone.
• 48:52
  Guest: Or if the pattern of deregulation is now just kind of so ingrained in world politics and in national politics in the U.
• 49:00
  Guest: S.
• 49:00
  Guest: that it, you know, we're on the train ride and it's not going to slow down.
• 49:06
  Ben Whitelaw: the train ride that doesn't slow down might be the title of this podcast, Willa.
• 49:08
  Ben Whitelaw: I will say that.
• 49:10
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, just to note before you come in, Mike, it is worth noting that, Shopify had a very, very good.
• 49:15
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, and I'm, I'm not saying this is connected to them getting rid of their hateful conduct policy last year, but their profits were up 31 percent year on year in the latest, filing.
• 49:25
  Ben Whitelaw: So, well, it's got a point, Mike.
• 49:27
  Mike Masnick: Correlation is not causation, Ben.
• 49:31
  Mike Masnick: It's,
• 49:31
  Ben Whitelaw: I certainly hope so.
• 49:32
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I, you know, I mean, right.
• 49:35
  Mike Masnick: There is this, push and certainly among sort of the Silicon Valley investor class that, seems to believe that more hateful speech leads to more profits, which I think is nonsense.
• 49:44
  Mike Masnick: And I think that they will find that is nonsense long term.
• 49:47
  Mike Masnick: I do think it is a good question to understand.
• 49:49
  Mike Masnick: Like one of the points that we've made for years.
• 49:52
  Mike Masnick: well, we've only been doing the podcast for a year, but we've, done it on the podcast for a year and I've done it for years as well as is, actual safety actually is good for the bottom line and, dismissing this as not like, it's the Nazi bar issue.
• 50:02
  Mike Masnick: If you represent yourself in this case, literally being willing to host Nazi content, people begin to assume that you are willing to support Nazis and therefore they might not be willing to support you.
• 50:12
  Mike Masnick: And that hopefully leads to less business in the long run.
• 50:15
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 50:16
  Ben Whitelaw: Talking of Nazis.
• 50:18
  Ben Whitelaw: I might bring Aisha into this because she noted very cleverly that actually this wasn't the only Kanye West drama, Kanye West related drama this week and he had some, ongoing beef in the background on X.
• 50:29
  Ben Whitelaw: I should explain kind of how you feel like this, plugs in.
• 50:33
  Guest: Yeah.
• 50:33
  Guest: so I saw that on X, he made some again, hateful comments, which were called out.
• 50:40
  Guest: Um, and he credited Elon Musk, who's the owner of X for allowing him to spew this hate speech and using this platform basically as a soundboard to, um, Get this communication out about this, and in our class, we've been talking a lot about the 1st amendment and free speech and what constitutes as essentially like good free speech and not so good free speech and what are the barriers in between that?
• 51:04
  Guest: And I think Kanye was really speaks to this right now.
• 51:08
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, I would agree with that.
• 51:10
  Ben Whitelaw: And you know, I think the, the irony is that he took himself off X, after this all happened and, presumably, doing a job for all of us that we, you know, that he's had enough.
• 51:21
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, but I I do think there's a larger point there that was it was really good and thoughtful question Which is you know one of the things that we've seen over the last two plus years since Elon took over Twitter and turned it into X was that he has been very pretty explicit that he is fine with hate speech on the platform and encouraging that kind of speech to be platformed and to be promoted and to be shared and Claiming that this is about free speech when the reality is as we've seen with X and it's dwindling user numbers.
• 51:48
  Mike Masnick: It's still a lot of people, but it has gone down is that that drives some people away, it drives a lot of people away because a lot of people don't want to be in that space.
• 51:55
  Mike Masnick: And I think that wraps around to the topic that we've been talking about whole day.
• 51:59
  Mike Masnick: and, I think it, opens up, this is the discussion that we're having now, which is, is free speech really about allowing hateful speech, or is it about figuring out the way to allow the most people to feel comfortable on your platform to speak?
• 52:13
  Mike Masnick: and this is a perfect example of that.
• 52:15
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 52:19
  Ben Whitelaw: was, was talking about kind of objectivity and subjectivity, what, cause one of the things that was in the statement that was leaked as part of this story was, the fact that, you know, The platform didn't want to be seen as being overly subjective.
• 52:33
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, it wanted to remove as much subjectivity as possible as what they said.
• 52:37
  Ben Whitelaw: And, I know the communication students, uh, American university have been thinking a lot about this.
• 52:41
  Ben Whitelaw: So where do you think this sits in, in a broader thread of, trying to be more objective and less subjective, Gabriel.
• 52:48
  Guest: Yeah, so if you'll let me get into the theoretical weeds here, because what are we as graduate students good for, if not getting into the theoretical weeds, and I promise I'll bring it back around in the end.
• 52:57
  Guest: this sort of reminded me of a conversation we were having in my methodology class about what we can conceive of, knowledge on sort of a spectrum between two, uh, epistemological frameworks.
• 53:10
  Guest: One of those being positivism, Which is, uh, to say that there is an actually existing truth and, a shared common knowledge outside of each of ourselves.
• 53:21
  Guest: And on the other end of that spectrum we have constructivism, which is more relative in thinking about how we each, create knowledge in and of ourselves, and we don't necessarily have this shared sort of experience.
• 53:33
  Guest: Now, negotiating these two is a framework called post positivism, Which tries to amend positivism to, acknowledge the subjectivity of each and every one of us.
• 53:45
  Guest: And so it's, it's not relativist per se, but it is really focused on acknowledging Each of our subjectivities and trying to, uh, negotiate reality in a way similar to how cultural studies theorists like Stuart Hall, were talking about in the latter 20th century.
• 54:02
  Guest: So, in that way, we can think about how, the, Shopify issue is hewing towards positivism and trying to establish some kind of real Actually existing objectivity and they're basing their arguments in that sort of sense and maybe that gives them a stronger legal framework when their general counsel Jess Hertz is saying that it's not a good faith attempt to make money and that factor into their decision.
• 54:31
  Guest: They're trying to remove as much subjectivity as possible They are really reifying this concept of objectivity which post positivists Understand is Sort of a fallacy or at least more complicated than it would seem from a positive, positivist perspective.
• 54:47
  Guest: I think I got that right, uh, if retroactively deduct points from my grade.
• 54:54
  Ben Whitelaw: That was great.
• 54:54
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, I, I, again, it really, really helpful.
• 54:57
  Ben Whitelaw: I think, could get you on to talk about that in a whole episode, I think.
• 55:00
  Ben Whitelaw: But, you know, the, the kind of post positivism of platforms is something that we're seeing all the time in a way.
• 55:06
  Ben Whitelaw: And, the push and pull between positivism and post positivism, as Gabe has explained it, Mike, is, is a really fascinating one that, we're seeing each week when we talk about these issues.
• 55:17
  Mike Masnick: And I think, that was really important and, and was glad that you called out the quote from Shopify's, general counsel and trying to explain this and basically arguing that, this whole decision of, taking down the thing, you know, wasn't about the speech, but their failure to be authentic and that it might lead to fraud and him saying that, opinion doesn't factor in here, it's like, opinion always factors in, right?
• 55:38
  Mike Masnick: And, and, this is an important point that, I think everyone in trust and safety sort of recognizes you do want to set rules and you do want to set rules that can be repeatable and understandable and explainable because otherwise it's just chaos.
• 55:50
  Mike Masnick: You can't do trust and safety by vibes, but at the end of the day, when you have to make the final decision, there are a lot of cases that have a really subjective component to it.
• 55:59
  Mike Masnick: And so, you have to understand that.
• 56:02
  Mike Masnick: And Shopify is, general counsel said they're trying to remove as much subjectivity as possible.
• 56:07
  Mike Masnick: And to me, that's a sign of somebody who either doesn't understand what they're talking about, who are, who is misrepresenting the situation.
• 56:14
  Mike Masnick: There has to be an element of subjectivity in all of this.
• 56:17
  Mike Masnick: And, people who work in trust and safety know that.
• 56:19
  Mike Masnick: And as much as they want to try to remove.
• 56:22
  Mike Masnick: As much subjectivity, make it as objective as possible, have clear rules, have clear ways to apply it.
• 56:27
  Mike Masnick: The actual application of those rules always involves some element of subjectivity.
• 56:31
  Mike Masnick: And I think it's good when people can actually admit that rather than trying to deny it.
• 56:35
  Mike Masnick: And then, because then you come up with these really complex, silly, uh, Arguments for why you pulled down a t shirt that was just a swastika
• 56:43
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, and you're, you're met with the full force of Gabriel's explanation of post positivism, which I love, might be one of the smartest things that anybody's ever said on this podcast.
• 56:53
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, that's that's the high point we are never getting back there again
• 56:58
  Ben Whitelaw: Awesome.
• 56:59
  Ben Whitelaw: that is probably an appropriate point to wrap up today.
• 57:01
  Ben Whitelaw: We've touched on a range of different stories as ever.
• 57:04
  Ben Whitelaw: Big thanks to the students at the American University in the class of media, law and policy.
• 57:12
  Ben Whitelaw: massive, massive thanks to them for their inputs and for their thoughtful questions.
• 57:16
  Ben Whitelaw: to Aaron for setting that up and Mike for, being the bridge there.
• 57:19
  Ben Whitelaw: will do this all again next week.
• 57:21
  Ben Whitelaw: We won't have any students with us.
• 57:22
  Ben Whitelaw: but
• 57:22
  Mike Masnick: We will not be doing this next week.
• 57:24
  Mike Masnick: We are off next week, but we will be back in two weeks
• 57:27
  Ben Whitelaw: correct.
• 57:28
  Ben Whitelaw: He's right.
• 57:29
  Ben Whitelaw: on holiday.
• 57:30
  Ben Whitelaw: So, but we, uh, we'll see you in two weeks and we'll do this all again.
• 57:35
  Ben Whitelaw: thanks very much for listening.
• 57:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Take care, everyone.
• 57:37
  Ben Whitelaw: appreciate you listening.
• 57:38
  Ben Whitelaw: Bye bye.
• 57:42
  Announcer: Thanks for listening to Ctrl-Alt-Speech.
• 57:44
  Announcer: Subscribe now to get our weekly episodes as soon as they're released.
• 57:48
  Announcer: If your company or organization is interested in sponsoring the podcast, contact us by visiting ctrlaltspeech.Com.
• 57:55
  Announcer: That's C T R L Alt Speech.
• 57:57
  Announcer: com.
• 57:59
  Announcer: This podcast is produced with financial support from the Future of Online Trust and Safety Fund, a fiscally sponsored multi donor fund at Global Impact that supports charitable activities to build a more robust, capable, and inclusive trust and safety ecosystem.