Conspiracies Abhor a Vacuum

In this week's round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

• Russia and China pounce on Trump rally shooting to undermine U.S. (Washington Post) 
• The Gunshots Rang Out. Then the Conspiracy Theories Erupted Online (New York Times) 
• Chaos on social media platforms after Trump shooting is a mess of their own making (CNN)
• Elon Musk Wants His AI Bot to Deliver the News. It Is Struggling With the Job (WSJ)
• Spotify's new comment feature tries to solve a longtime problem (Fast Company)
• Comments on Podcasts Gives Creators and Listeners More Ways To Engage (Spotify)
• A grieving mom’s TikTok videos spark online speech battle (Washington Post)

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund, and by our sponsor Concentrix, the technology and services leader driving trust, safety, and content moderation globally. In our Bonus Chat at the end of the episode, Paul Danter, Global Head of Trust and Safety at Concentrix, talks about what he's excited for at next week’s TrustCon event and the huge potential for industry collaboration.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast from Techdirt and Everything in Moderation. Send us your feedback at podcast@ctrlaltspeech.com and sponsorship enquiries to sponsorship@ctrlaltspeech.com. Thanks for listening.

Transcript

Ben Whitelaw: 0:00

So I was shocked to hear that Disqus, Mike, the commenting platform that I'm sure you know a fair bit about is actually still going, after years and years and years, and I thought I'd start this week's podcast with a kind of honor to their longevity and to mark your return to the podcast, of course, and ask you to join the discussion.

Mike Masnick: 0:23

Well, it is good to be back. Uh, I was away for a couple of weeks. We were both off though. I did that emergency podcast from a hotel room. But, uh, you guys held down the fort last week while I was still, uh, trekking through the wilderness. And it is good to be back and to join the discussion back here again on Ctrl-Alt-Speech.

Ben Whitelaw: 0:44

Good to have you back. Hello, and welcome to Ctrl-Alt-Speech, your weekly roundup of the major stories about online speech, content moderation, and internet regulation. This week's episode is brought to you with the financial support of the future of online trust and safety fund, and by our sponsor, Concentrix, the technology and services leader, driving trust, safety, and content moderation globally. My name as always is Ben Whitelaw. I'm the founder and editor of Everything in Moderation, and I'm back with a well traveled, hopefully well rested, Mike Masnick. Um, you look different. You look like you've seen, you seen parts of the U S and had a good time. Is that true?

Mike Masnick: 1:31

Yeah, and got very sunburnt, uh, among other things. Um, yeah, I had a, a good road trip, hit about 3, 000 miles on a road trip. and saw lots of, amazing stuff, parts of the country I hadn't seen before. So it was very cool. I was going to mention, by the way, Disqus, you mentioned the surprising longevity of them. I spoke to the team behind Disqus before, it may have even been before they formed the company, but it was definitely before they launched where there was a venture capitalist who was talking to them and said, you know, they're trying to do blog discussions, blog comments. You know, we know this Mike guy, he's got this, blog thing that has comments. Maybe he has thoughts. And so I'd had a conversation with them very, very early on. But yeah, they really took off for a while. They were a big, big deal. And then they sort of, and then everybody hated them for a while. And then

Ben Whitelaw: 2:19

Including me, unfortunately.

Mike Masnick: 2:21

yeah.

Ben Whitelaw: 2:23

We, yeah, no, it's, that does show you. How long have you been in the game at the very least? Um, well, it's really nice to have you back. we are on the cusp of TrustCon. That is the big industry conference that's taking place in San Francisco next week, organized by the Trust and Safety Professional Association. are five sleeps away, Mike, from our live recording.

Mike Masnick: 2:43

goodness.

Ben Whitelaw: 2:44

I don't want to panic you. We're going to be on stage in front of people doing this,

Mike Masnick: 2:49

Yikes!

Ben Whitelaw: 2:49

in our rooms with a mic.

Mike Masnick: 2:52

Yeah, yeah, now we find out how much stage fright we have. Doing, doing,

Ben Whitelaw: 2:57

Um,

Mike Masnick: 2:58

this, you know, privately in our homes is one thing. Doing it in front of, in front of a live audience is going to be a whole different, situation.

Ben Whitelaw: 3:05

luckily we'll have, Alice Hunsberger, and Donna, who's from Reddit, accompanying us up on stage to talk through the week stories. So we're going to have some cover. We're going to have some experts, some actual experts to talk through the news with, which is going to be great. if you're a Ctrl-Alt-Speech listener and you're going to be at TrustCon we'd love to see you there. We are the last session on the Wednesday of the conference. So please mark your diaries.

Mike Masnick: 3:29

Do not miss it. We are in, what is, where are we again? We're in Grand Ballroom A, I believe, which is, you know, where a lot of the big parts, the morning plenary sessions will take place. So please come, we really want to see a lot of live people out there. We'd love to have, be able to hear some, some clapping and cheering and noise on the podcast. So please come to the live recording. I think it'll be really

Ben Whitelaw: 3:54

Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. We're also going to be doing a dinner on the Monday evening with, modulate who are the launch sponsors of Ctrl-Alt-Speech. And we've got some spots for Ctrl-Alt-Speech listeners. We've, we've got. Kindly been allowed to invite some of you guys on the podcast, to come along and to meet other folks in the industry. So if you are listening to this and you're coming next week and you're interested in, having a dinner with us and with some other cool folks that we've brought together, then drop us an email podcast at control or speech. com. I'll say that again, podcast at C T R L a L T speech. com and let us know you're interested and we'll, hook you up with a spot.

Mike Masnick: 4:32

Yeah, it should be a fun

Ben Whitelaw: 4:34

Yeah, excellent. Last bit of admin for today. We've got a, really good sponsored chat with, Paul Danter the global head of trust and safety from Concentrix at the end of today's episodes. Paul has been to TrustCon, I think three times and you and him had a really good chat about the events and how it's growing and also the potential for industry collaboration, which we can see all the time in the conversations we're having, so yeah, do stick around. At the end of the episode to hear that good stuff. And that brings us to the stories for this week. And, uh, there was no way Mike, that we could do an episode of control of speech without mentioning the Trump assassination. I tried to get around it. There was literally no chance. All of the stories from this week, all of the coverage pointed to us talking about platforms, responding to. The assassination just before we get into that, where were you in your travels,

Mike Masnick: 5:29

assassination attempt, by the way. We should be clear. Yes, yes.

Ben Whitelaw: 5:33

Sorry. Um,

Mike Masnick: 5:35

So where, where was I on my travels when, when that happened? I was actually, I had just gotten back home. So, actually what had happened was we'd gotten home and we were, I was in my driveway. And my next door neighbor had come out to say hello and chat because, uh, we're friendly with our neighbors and, they knew we had been traveling and they said, Did you hear the news? And I said, no, I did not hear the news. I was like, wow. Okay. And so, yeah, that was how I found out from my neighbor welcoming us

Ben Whitelaw: 6:08

Yeah. What a return from your holiday. There's a straight into the mix of things. So we had a number of different stories that we both picked out this week. All basically kind of recapping, I think the, aftermath of the Of the assassination attempt, New York Times did a piece, Washington Post, CNN will post those all in the show notes. Take us through the kind of, differing elements of the coverage, Mike, and what kind of stood out to you in particular.

Mike Masnick: 6:36

Yeah. I mean, there were a whole bunch of different things in each of these pieces, I think had an interesting elements to it. I thought the New York times piece is a really good one to start with. And it was very interesting because they did the, um, I always have to clarify this now, but, they did the tick tock, which is what traditionally in journalism, you called the sort of beat by beat thing, but now, because there is this famous social media app called tick tock, it feels like, I don't know if we can still use that term.

Ben Whitelaw: 7:00

not a video. We're not talking about video here. We're talking

Mike Masnick: 7:02

Yeah, there was no, there was no. Dancing to music and such, but they did this, sort of minute by minute breakdown of the disinformation that flowed after the assassination attempt happened and the discussion and how quickly people jumped online and started spreading absolute Nonsense in some cases, and some of it was just sort of like misinformed speculation. An awful lot of it was, politically motivated. So depending on which side you were on, suddenly the take that, you rushed out to, to spread, whether informed by fact or not, became kind of the motivating factor. So you had obviously a lot of people blaming the other side, blaming rhetoric, blaming this, blaming that, always, Basically trying to use it to their political advantage. And then from that, it wasn't surprising the Washington post had an article that plays very nicely with this, which said that, as soon as all of that happened, both Russia and China and the various mouthpieces they had on social media and elsewhere. Pounced on the story to promote. divisiveness and division, and they were more than willing to push that rhetoric of one side versus the other. And, talking about violent rhetoric, but in a way that really did not seem designed to bring down the violent rhetoric, but to effectively ramp it up. And there was this sort of big rush. And, and so, among this, there were definitely Total conspiracy theories, the things that happen in these situations is pretty typical where in the absence of actual factual information, there is this vacuum and people rush in and sometimes they're well meaning people. Oftentimes they're not right. And so sometimes it's people just looking for clout. Sometimes it's people who are just, trying to set the narrative before the facts are out. There's a whole bunch of, of reasons why people jump in and do this stuff, but it happens with any sort of major breaking news story. The folks that on the media, which does this excellent, really excellent podcast for many years, they've always done these. Breaking news consumer handbooks, that talk about all of these interesting things around, Don't believe the first things that you hear, pay attention to who it is that you're hearing these things from, how credible are they, or how well sourced are they, all this kind of stuff. And every time there's like a breaking news story, most people just ignore that. and a lot of stuff just happens. And, you know, one of the interesting things that I saw. there's been a lot of fretting, I think, about the disinformation and, you know, the sort of, the, the more famous one was like, at one point people had identified someone who they claimed was the shooter and it turned out to be like an Italian, football broadcaster or podcaster or something, uh, that was like the center of this. So I had seen a message on Blue Sky, though I think he posted it elsewhere as well, from the comedian Josh Gondelman, who's a very funny, comedian, obviously, and commentator, and he had written, soon after all this went down, I know people are saying not to spread conspiracy theories right now, but I would like to read them. And, and that kind of stuck with me because like, that is kind of the crux of a lot of this, right? I mean, everyone sort of rushes to blame the disinformation that gets spread when there's breaking news and they blame, obviously the people who create it, they blame the platforms for distributing it. But there is this element of, the demand side of it and the fact that people want to know what's going on and sometimes are even interested in the conspiracy theory side of it, so I think there's always this element that goes with the on the media, consumer handbook for breaking news, which is that there is this vacuum of information. And obviously something momentous has happened in one way or another, however you want to look at it. And the lack of information bothers everybody. And so everybody wants to fill in those gaps. And so that's an opportunity for people, for whatever reason, some mostly probably bad, but some good to fill in those gaps. And so out of that, you get people trying to shape the narrative. You get people trying to just, make guesses in hopes that they're correct. You have people who are just trying stir up nonsense and get attention and get clout out of it. But there is this element of that works. Because so many people are looking for that, that information and they want it, whether or not they want to believe it. I think a lot of people saw the conspiracy theories and the disinformation and then they processed it in their own way. You know, I think as people sort of went into their sort of partisan camps on this discussion and assume stuff before we knew anything, nobody knew anything about who the shooter was. And I mean, even now, a week later, there's still like, Not that much information. And everybody's sort of trying to fit it into their own political narrative. Not everyone. I mean, I think plenty of people are able to, process these things, reasonably, but a lot of people filter it through this narrative and, You know, there was another joke that someone, I think Jon Stewart had made this week that was basically like, we're waiting to find out, who the shooter is so we can, twist the story to like, make it fit our narrative. Yeah.

Ben Whitelaw: 12:33

I agree. I think the, my feeling about the assassination attempt was, and the reaction of platforms and the conspiracy theories that happened is really just how difficult it is to moderate during breaking news situations, like, because they are almost unique in the fact that they have none of the conditions that make moderation when done well. You know, that it doesn't have the context for you to rely on, it doesn't often have the resource, you know, you don't have people ready. sitting ready to, react to reports in the same way you would do on a regular day, all of the things that kind of policy teams are setting up to ensure that day to day works well, it gets completely, you know, Broken in the case of a breaking news story, especially one about the potential us presidential nominee. You know, this is the kind of ultimate storm in many senses. And these pieces from the New York times and CNN and the Washington post, they talk about conspiracy theories, as you say, and it's the same with other news events in the past. They never have a view on what could have been done better.

Mike Masnick: 13:44

Right.

Ben Whitelaw: 13:45

They never, they never have a view because it's really, really hard. they don't have what could have been better because there isn't really a way to make it better. We have to be honest about this. I, for one, um, relatively critical of platforms when they don't do the job that they, themselves out to do. It's really hard to place any blame on, the platforms here because no one knew anything. Right. And, That's very apparent in the stories that you're talking about,

Mike Masnick: 14:12

Yeah. And you know, I mean, one of the interesting things, right. And we've discussed this a little bit in the past, it's like, meta has really talked about how they're sort of trying to play down news stories. And so there was some talk in some of these articles about how on the various meta platforms, some of this stuff did not trend as quickly or as widely, but also you had a whole bunch of people who were kind of frustrated because again, going back to the other point, people are looking for information. People are trying to find out what is going on. And this is a major. Major important story, no matter what happens. And so people are desperate for information. And so where do they turn often it's social media and, in meta's case where that's one way of trying to deal with it, but that is not necessarily helpful to people who are desperately searching for information. That's not to say that the approach of say, you X was any better because there was also a ton of, total nonsense. And in fact, there was a separate story, which is slightly more humorous, I guess. I mean, there's not much humorous about a story like this, but like where, Grok, the AI that is, uh, Sort of associated with X, Elon had sort of promised that it would be a better source of news in all sorts of situations. You can't trust the media, but Grok will summarize and synthesize the news for you. And yet it had no idea what was going on with the assassination attempt and published utter nonsense. And in one case it published a story about like, uh, actor from Home Alone shot at Trump rally, which is. Which is technically correct because Trump was in Home Alone 2 as a cameo appearance in Home Alone 2, but the, the summary of the article just, treated as if they were two separate people and correctly said it was at a Trump rally and that an actor, which the article that Grok wrote did not name

Ben Whitelaw: 16:04

Oh, really? Okay.

Mike Masnick: 16:05

was a Home Alone 2 actor who was shot at a Trump rally. And so, All of these things are just demonstrations of like when news is breaking, and information and facts are not well known and things are not well established. the whole zone is flooded with nonsense and, every approach has

Ben Whitelaw: 16:22

Yeah, I, I agree. I mean, I reflected quite a lot on this as somebody who used to work in a newsroom and was privy to breaking news and whose job it was to decide whether readers could leave comments on articles. Right. So, so I had a team of people whose job it was to do that. And who would triage reports and generally keep an eye on conversation, which was as ever tricky. And I was thinking about how the only way, so our policy in this case would have been to not allow comments on the article, probably. Right. Because no one knows enough, no one's going to be able to leave interesting or insightful comments on a piece where they know when no one else knows what's going on. So the chances are that if you're sitting in a kind of suburban. Part of the UK, you're not going to know even less. And that's, you're setting yourself up for a situation where are going to leave comments that are unhelpful. We're going to resort to conspiracy theories. We've seen that time and time again. There's no way to do that on platforms.

Mike Masnick: 17:23

Yeah.

Ben Whitelaw: 17:23

can't hit pause. Right. So, if we're trying to be constructive and we're trying to think about solutions for this, what would you say, you know, would Platforms could do in this situation. Like, cause none of the pieces obviously that we talked about got to being constructive in, in that way. Is there anything to be done?

Mike Masnick: 17:42

Yeah. I mean, again, and this is a really unsatisfying answer, but I think, the nature of this is that there is no satisfying answer, right? I mean, this is sort of the story of trust and safety writ large, right? There is no satisfying answer, but like,

Ben Whitelaw: 17:55

another t

Mike Masnick: 17:56

you know, yeah, yeah, exactly. So there are a few things. One is just like being able to flag. The fact that this is breaking news, people don't know stuff, love the, you know, I brought it up already. The on the media breaking news consumer handbook is like a really useful, just framing tool for like teaching people to take a step back and not jump into the fray. And if there are ways that platforms could not have that necessarily, but just. a flag or a notice saying like, this is breaking news. Nobody knows anything. Of course that'll be abused. And that will lead to people complaining about things as

Ben Whitelaw: 18:32

Yeah.

Mike Masnick: 18:33

when we have these little interventions that just give people a second of pause, you know, like let's think this through a little bit. Doesn't work in all cases, in some cases it backfires, but in some cases we've seen that that is helpful for people who don't, mean to be, who aren't doing this purposefully and who are just kind of like, I need information or I need to share information and are, sort of quick to, find and share information that, confirms their priors. Sometimes it's helpful to have that, just that little pause, that little insertion that says like, This is breaking. We don't know the details. Are you

Ben Whitelaw: 19:09

Can, can I suggest that that guide is shared with a lot of Congress? Because the,

Mike Masnick: 19:15

Oh gosh.

Ben Whitelaw: 19:16

because the, the standout fact for me, right? In that New York Times piece that you talk about was that six

Mike Masnick: 19:21

Yeah.

Ben Whitelaw: 19:22

Republican congressmen And within an hour shared some different kind of conspiracy theory. so rather than doing exactly what you suggested, which is the kind of, you know, saying notable thing to do, you had a whole bunch of people who have, I would say in a larger than average responsibility to react in a certain way in these situations, kind of doing something very responsible. And I'm wondering, like, to what extent can we target Congress people, you know, people who in political power, and there's a lot of research on this about how misinformation comes from the top. It comes from elites who, who often have, as you say, a kind of political leaning, who have a reason to drive a certain narrative, and that's when, that contributes to the snowball effect of these conspiracy theories taking hold. Is that not a kind of missed opportunity to, to target people specifically there?

Mike Masnick: 20:15

but that is based on the assumption that those people can be educated, right? That they're doing it on purpose, right? There's a reason why they're spreading that kind of stuff, and that is because it's politically the thing for them to do, right? That is what their base wants, spreading the, the nonsense. So. My thoughts were more on the people who are more conscientious, not the people who have another motivation in which to spread a narrative and to spread a frame. And so the only way to get politicians who will. Do that is if people start voting for conscientious, thoughtful politicians, as opposed to grandstanding, you know, showman types of politicians. And I don't know how to solve that problem. That's a bigger, different kind of problem that, it would be nice if we had, there are a few, there are a few people who are thoughtful in Congress, certainly. but the folks that you're talking about, they built their voter base, in part because they spread this kind of nonsense and so they're going to keep doing

Ben Whitelaw: 21:13

Yeah. And we've obviously in the UK, we've had two MPs murdered in the last six or seven years, I think it is. And. At a time where a number of different political stories were very hot topic, and there was for the UK, at least a lot of polarization in terms of views. We obviously just changed government. I'm hopeful, hopeful that will change, but it does feel like something that is, going to endanger, politicians and people in power. if we can't get a hold on it in many respects, can't find tangible ways to address this. Yeah.

Mike Masnick: 21:45

And of course, I mean, we've had things like that in the U S as well, beyond the attempted assassination of Trump, there was Gabby Giffords, who was a Congresswoman who was shot. and so These are issues and there's a lot that goes into this and there have been assassinations and assassination attempts of politicians going back forever since we've had politicians. So this is not necessarily just about, uh, social media and conspiracy theories. There's a whole bunch of stuff is happening and it is, an unfortunate part of society, another point that I go back to all the time is that so many of the things that we tend to these days often want to blame social media for are often huge societal problems that have been around for centuries that we have never been able to solve. And, we're probably not going to solve them by having Mark Zuckerberg be slightly better about something.

Ben Whitelaw: 22:36

Perhaps. okay. We could, spend the whole episode talking about this story. I think like, let's move on now to a story that I really, was interested in this week, came out of the back end of last week about slightly kind of less politically, uh, Intense story. Um, thankfully after, that one, it's about Spotify and their announcement about some new features on the platform that allow podcasters, including us in theory, to, publish comments. And to moderate them on their podcast itself. So for a long time, people have seen, if you listen to a lot of podcasts, there are some engagement features on Spotify. You can kind of do polls. You can leave reviews. This is the first time really that, listeners have been encouraged to leave comments on podcasts and that those comments will be published. The only thing is that, and this is somewhat controversial and why I'm kind of interested in this story is that the creators, the podcasters themselves will be the only people who are able to publish those comments. So it's a very, guess, lightweight first implementation of this new product, this new idea. And, will essentially involve creators, podcasters, moderating. comments themselves and then publishing the ones that they'd like, or that they deemed acceptable. Now, I think this is like, it's really interesting. A number of levels, the fact that spotify, I think that one of the oldest forms of internet activity, leaving a comment on an article is the future is kind of fascinating in itself. But the kind of worry is I guess, and it's reflected in the fast company story that we'll put in the show notes is that there'll be a kind of sanitized version. Of comments underneath because creators will obviously not publish things that will, or are less inclined to publish comments that are critical of them or of the content that they produce. And Spotify's view is that, yes, that's true. We're kind of, incentivizing the creators to publish what they like at this stage. but I wonder to what extent this is setting a kind of precedent for basically podcasters and creators being. Essentially moderators of a particular type of content that has always been the case to a degree, but this is feels like a really new shift and we've got obviously hundreds and thousands of podcasters on Spotify who will all of a sudden be responsible, including us, Mike, for deciding what people say. What did you think?

Mike Masnick: 24:59

Yeah. I mean, there's a few different things. There's a few different sort of interesting elements to this. So one is, Spotify is just one podcast platform of many. And so there is this issue and also it's a. Podcast platform that, feels like they regret getting into podcast to some extent, right? I mean, they had invested really heavily and bought all these podcast productions and had, signed all these exclusive deals, which I will continue to argue are not podcasts once they become exclusive, podcast has to be something that you can listen to on any preferred platform that is an open format. But then you sort of get right back into this where it's just a question of, where and how do these comments work? I had spoken to, just a few months ago, actually, somebody had gotten me in touch with a startup that was trying to build a new podcast platform. And part of their whole thing, it's kind of interesting in light of this, was To build community around podcasts and in particular, allowing people to comment and to share and discuss a podcast and yeah. And, and, it was a really interesting and thoughtful approach to it, but some of the concerns I had was like. Because the podcasting ecosystem is this open system, which I think is good, that also means it's somewhat fractured. And so you have this content that, people are commenting on it on one platform, but not elsewhere. and then if you have multiple platforms where this is all happening, that is going to become a mess if, if all podcasters have to moderate content coming in from all over the place, it becomes a little disjointed and problematic. There are potential solutions for this. I would love for everyone doing this. Spotify is not going to do this, but like if Spotify were thoughtful about it, they could embrace decentralized social media systems, different protocols, whether it's activity pub or at protocol or something like that, so that these comments could be shared elsewhere and other people could adopt and then have all of the comments living. connected to podcast, but not having them tied to any particular platform. All that aside, it is interesting just in the fact of, the more situations where people who have strong opinions about speech online and content moderation are put in a position where they have to actually do content moderation. I always think that's an eye opening experience for people.

Ben Whitelaw: 27:17

for sure, sure.

Mike Masnick: 27:19

so in some ways. And I have questions about how many people are actually going to use this. How many people actually want to comment on podcasts? I have no idea. I actually don't think it is that many. It just doesn't seem like the medium leads itself to people really strongly wanting to comment at enough of a level that this will matter. some people do. And at times they do, but I'm not sure. it's just different kind of medium than reading an article or something

Ben Whitelaw: 27:48

I does feel a bit odd in some ways that the, obviously the podcast is a audio medium that's a voice medium. And all of a sudden you're kind of commenting in, in text form. That seems like a bit of a relegation in terms of what the audience is allowed to do. That might change in the future. They might have, ideas for how that could evolve from Spotify side. The press release, interestingly said that there's a kind of real reason for creators to get people to comment because they found that people were four times more likely to return within 30 days in terms of if they engage. So there's gonna be a push here, I think, to get people commenting. We should work out what our, policy, what our strategy will be. And we're, we're always listening, always trying to listen to our listeners

Mike Masnick: 28:32

I was, I was going to say, I, we, I had mentioned this before we haven't, launched this yet, but the platform that we use to host podcasts recently launched a thing that they call fan mail, which allows. listeners to respond, and to comment on the podcast that then goes into our podcast feed. We haven't turned it on. We were looking at it. I think it's a really interesting feature. and Hey, we love hearing from our listeners. I'll just, you know, make that very broadly clear. We love hearing whether it's reviewing us, or anything or emailing us or, or whatever it might be. Or if we see you at TrustCon next week, come and say, hello. it's interesting that, this is an interesting potential challenge for different, uh, you know, podcast hosts where they're suddenly going to have to manage these things, if they want these comments. And so, what does that mean and how much, extra responsibility and effort does this put? And, the way this is set up, where basically all of the comments need to be approved by the podcast host means that initially we're only going to see the positive comments. And depending on how, willing to accept, you know, I was going to say criticism, but not let's say constructive commentary, how willing to accept constructive commentary people are, certain comments might, not appear and then there's all the, the questions about abuse and the vectors for abuse, you know, Spotify is setting this up as, effectively saying like, because we're letting the podcasters make the decisions themselves, it's not a trust and safety issue for us, but you're just offloading that. You know, now this becomes a vector for abusive stuff. So if somebody wants to, send annoying things or threatening things or harassing things or abusive things to a podcaster, this is an avenue for them to do that. And I don't know, it's not clear from this, at least what I've seen, how Spotify deals with that. You know, even if that, these comments are never published, if you want to abuse, I mean, I can imagine, especially for female podcasters, This is an avenue where they could receive an awful lot of abuse and harassment. And even if those comments are never published, the fact that the person who is controlling the podcast, has access to all of this stuff could be a really big deal. And I don't, it's unclear to me how much Spotify is thinking about

Ben Whitelaw: 30:50

Yeah, I agree. I think we almost have a duty to try it out, Mike, just to see how it works and report back. Um, two things on what you just said. I think the. The point you make about the tools being pretty kind of rudimentary is a really important one. So although the ability to leave comments on videos and on podcasts in some cases have been around a long time, obviously on YouTube primarily, actually the tools that the creators have to be able to kind of manipulate those comments have actually been pretty basic for a long time. And I remember last year, YouTube. Announced only in December, I think, the fact that they, YouTubers can now pause comments coming in on an article on, on a video without losing those comments. So the only options before that were to completely get rid of comments or to manually go through them all. Which seems super binary, for 2023. So they kind of, I think, recognize that the tools that creators need to be able to create that experience and apply policy are important. They're going to improve. and the flip side is that we know that more and more. Of the audience of, of people consume their news through these creators and through individuals, right? There's got huge audiences. They're getting huge engagement. If the tools are really simplistic and not set up for people to, do that themselves or do that with a team of volunteers, that is a problem. So I find this kind of story really interesting across a number of different levels. Yeah,

Mike Masnick: 32:18

back to our opening, this is what Disqus was originally designed to try and deal with. They were trying to build, just more complete tools for blog comments, including, how do you manage moderation aspect of it? And, you know, this is one of the things like, I've done TechTurt for 27 years now, and we have our own home grown comment system, which has since been ported over And And, you know, we have a lot of custom stuff, but part of that is because we are constantly trying to figure out how do we deal with this. And in fact just in the last few weeks, we've been discussing, we've had a, commenting issue, which I'm not going to go into the details on, that we've been trying to figure out, like, how do we deal with it? And do we need to build in additional tools to make all of this work? And what you learn is like bad, Malicious people will figure out ways to abuse whatever tools you have as a tool provider, if you're not thinking through all of those, you're going to be in a bad place, or you're going to put users in a bad place. And so it'll be interesting to see how Spotify is handling that, because there are a whole bunch of questions about how abusive or, or bad comments are handled in this system, that it's unclear if there's a, any sophistication here at all beyond just like an empty text box.

Ben Whitelaw: 33:32

yeah, definitely. we will investigate and, uh, come back to the listeners and explain more maybe about how it works. Good stuff. So that covers off that really interesting, quite multifaceted story. I think Mike, um, onto the best of the rest, you found a story from Washington post about a. really tragic case actually of, a mum on TikTok that has implications for the U S court and legal system. Talk us through that.

Mike Masnick: 33:58

Yeah, this is, this is such a complicated case. I'm not even sure we're going to be able to do it justice the amount of time that we have. Very sad story. A young girl, I think 13 years old ended up taking her life, by suicide. There was a lot of dispute over what led to that and where that went. The mother is positive that, For other girls, who her daughter knew had bullied her to this point and was very angry about that, calling that out, as I understand it from reading the news, police investigated, did not find evidence to support the claim of bullying or that the bullying itself was responsible. If it did exist, bullying in many cases is in the eye of the beholder. It is very difficult to determine that. Either way, one of the mothers of one of the, other students who was accused of bullying the daughter asked for a restraining order, on the mother of, of the, girl who, died, got it. And then, earlier this year, that mother posted some somewhat incendiary videos on TikTok saying that her daughter was bullied to the point of, taking her own life and saying it was because of, other students, though she did not name them. She did suggest that if you asked her other daughter, you could find out who they were. And this led to a series of lawsuits, but also people started naming the other girls in the comments, and then people started bullying those girls and their families. It is a mess, no matter how you look at it. Everything here is an unfortunate situation. It is problematic. Lawsuits have been flying back and forth. The parents of the other girls sued the mother for defamation and for violating the restraining order and a few other things. The judge jumped in and I don't think they can do this under First Amendment law, but judges sometimes don't care about that, ordered the mother to remove all of her social media accounts, and take them down. Also, then tried to seal all of the details of the case so that nobody could have access to it. So that only came out because somebody leaked the ruling. Uh, because the whole thing was under seal. just this week, that, that all happened about a week and a half ago. Just this week, the judge lifted the seal. I mean, it was already out because it had been leaked and everybody knew about it. Also lifted the order on social media, but did put in some, other orders around having the, Parents and all of the children involved in this story, be checked out by child protective services, which who knows where that goes? this is just one of those. It's an interesting story because you, as you begin to think through the issues and these come up a lot, everybody talks about online bullying. And certainly we've talked a lot about teenagers and suicide and social media. And sextortion and bullying and all this kind of stuff. The thing that struck me about this story is just how complicated all this is. And again, how there's no easy answer here. Everything about this story is tragic. There, there's nothing good to come out of this, I think, but the fact that, the grieving mother understandably upset, understandably, angry about what happened. Casting blame at the people that she believes were responsible for this. But the fact that that then leads to bullying of those people and attacks on those people feels also not like a good situation. The fact that a court then has to come in and try and sort this out and their response to it is stop speaking. silence yourself, take yourself off social media also feels bad. So the thing that really just struck me at this story and why I wanted to share it is not that there's like any good lesson out of this, but that these situations are always way more complex than people want to talk about. And it's easy to pick a side and say, we have to blame this person, or we have to stop this person, or we have to, have social media block this stuff. And it's never that simple. And. I understand grieving mother trying to process, unthinkable pain, terms of trying to deal with this and doing that by lashing out in some way I might not think it's productive, but I'm in no position To

Ben Whitelaw: 38:18

Yeah,

Mike Masnick: 38:19

all of these things are so complicated and this is why it frustrates me to no end when people jump in and assume that there's some easy answer to all of this. And if only social media were better and, you know, we're able to stop this or that, like we would solve teenage bullying or we would solve issues with suicide. These are really complex human problems. That have existed for a long time. And there are concerns and there are ways that we should be thinking about, like, how can we lessen the impact of these things? But these stories are just always. tragic and complicated. And there's so much going on that there's, no good answers to these stories, which cuts back to some of the stuff we talked about earlier in a different

Ben Whitelaw: 39:02

yeah, totally. And, and we might never have answers, you know, that was my, that was my reaction to this story when you. brought it and we talked about it. It's just that we might not ever have answers because this has been looked at by the police. It's gone to court. there's probably only the information that is going to be found out about what happened would have been found by now, probably if it was going to. And, and actually what, in some ways, what benefits is there to. Even being able to attribute blame, it's so tough. I think it's, it's so tough. And, but yeah, I've never been in that situation either. And if you're a parent, it must be so hard.

Mike Masnick: 39:38

It is a very tricky situation and it's one of the things that, you know, when it comes to, suicide in particular, it is very easy to try to place blame. And I don't know that anyone can ever fully do that. And so I always worry about, obviously bullying is bad and bullying can drive people crazy. people to take their own lives. And that is a huge problem and a major, major concern. But I fear where we end up when we get to a point where we are quick to blame others for the decision for someone to take their own life because we, we can never know fully what goes into that decision. And when we do, we lead to this situation where we perpetuate that cycle. And the, immediate response from lots of people is to then go and bully and harass those who are accused of having led to this and, that doesn't strike me as a good way of dealing with this either. And we've seen this before. I mean, I was telling you before, many years ago for people who've been following tech policy for years, there was a famous case involving a woman named Lori Drew, who was a mother who helped bully one of her daughter's friends by setting up a fake MySpace account and befriending a girl that her daughter was having a fight with and then basically attacking her, like becoming sort of close through this fake friend. And then, basically pulling out the rug from under her and saying, you know, you're a horrible person. I don't want to talk to you. I forget the details. This is already like 15 years ago, I think. and that girl ended up taking her own life as well. And it was a very sad story. But the rush was to then blame the mother. And it's easy to look at it and say, like, yes, that was a horrible thing that she did. But, how far does that blame go and where does it end and what does it lead to when you go down that path and so it's just, these stories are horrific and horrible and it's natural and understandable that people look for someone to blame, but, um, I don't see it, it taking us to good places when we do

Ben Whitelaw: 41:33

Yeah. I think you're right. Um, really, really tragic case. And in some ways a bit of a, Difficult note to end this week's podcast on, I would say, I think we've kind of run out of time as far as some of the other stories I'd, but, you know, evidence again of the importance of, what trust and safety professionals do, the importance of more people understanding the difficulties of, Creating policies and, and having platforms invest in these difficult challenges, I think comes through really, really strongly in that story. I would say, there's a couple of other stories we could have mentioned, but I want to kind of remind listeners about the really great conversation you had, Mike with Concentrix, Paul Danta, about how TrustCon has evolved over the last three years. And how attendees of Trust Con can get involved in the future of trust and safety at their stand next week. So whether you've been before or you are heading to Trust Con for the first time, definitely take a listen to that. Mike and Paul have a really good conversation. Enjoy.

Mike Masnick: 42:39

So I know TrustCon is coming up next week. I think most of the people listening to this know this. I hope that a whole bunch of our listeners will be there. But, since both of us have been to every single TrustCon, how do you think the event has evolved and, uh, what are you most excited for next week?

Paul Danter: 42:57

Mike, I'm a huge fan of TrustCon. I have to say, um, yeah, I was there at the inception as you were, in Palo Alto back in the day. And, it's really changed quite a lot. You know, it started out and it felt like, it was the first real big post COVID event. It felt like it was something that the industry really needed so that everybody could finally just get together and see each other again. and even colleagues you saw it was really moving at the first event. You saw colleagues who hadn't seen each other for some time, just finally getting together. Right? It was, it was a really interesting event and quite an intimate event because of that, I think. And then last year, of course, it just seemed to just grow exponentially, and became so big, but also just so impressive in terms of the content and the wealth of content that's available. And that's, the thing for me is, is how do you cover it all? We actually have a, have a reasonably big team going this year and we've all been instructed. We have to take notes so we can share them afterwards because, The number of parallel sessions that are going on and every topic is super interesting. Uh, just being able to get through it all is going to be a really big challenge for a lot of people. Just being able to make choices is going to be a really big challenge.

Mike Masnick: 44:05

I mean, just before we started recording, we were talking about how neither of us have had a chance to go through the, the agenda fully yet and plan our schedules because it is a task, I mean, and there are going to be very hard choices, I think that, that everybody has to make, because it's not just that there's so much going on, but, almost every session, and there's lots of parallel sessions, just look, together. Really fascinating and really interesting and really valuable. And so figuring out what to go to and what things to see and pay attention to is going to be, it's really shaping up to, it looks like a great event.

Paul Danter: 44:37

Well, I might, I might help share my notes with you, Mike. You know, you can, you can, uh,

Mike Masnick: 44:42

Yes, please. Absolutely. and so, there's a bunch of stuff happening as well. And I know that Concentrix, you guys are going to have, a booth, table five, I believe at the session, there's always, interesting companies, displaying stuff and people doing interesting things at the, at the booth. their booths. And I understand that you guys have some sort of a game going on. And I say this as, someone who last year released two different trust and safety games. I love the idea of using some element of gaming in trust and safety to help people think about it, to think about the future, to think about how things work. So what, uh, what is going on at table five with you guys?

Paul Danter: 45:20

yeah, no, that's thank you for asking. Yeah. We really, this is, sort of about us as, as a participant in the industry, just really trying to reach out and engage. The whole community, right? Just to sort of address the elephant in the room, you know, we're a vendor there and I think that we're still trying to find our place in that community sometimes. And we we want to be proactive about that. We also want to be engaging in terms of how we reach out to people and how we collaborate in general. So, so what we've decided to do this year and this actually goes back to my feed Early career where I was a product manager at a software company where we used to engage people in thinking about things that were important to focus on for the future, in terms of features in that regard. But this is much more about what do we as a community really want to be focused on for the future? Where can we as vendors help, focus our efforts and even our investments, in terms of progressing some really, really important topics. we want to get people's feedback on that. So, yeah, we've. Sort of gamified it a little bit, but we it's just a way to really engage people and ask them to vote on specific things they think are really really important in the next 12 months in this really fast paced environment. We're all in Where really should we be focusing our efforts? Where should we really be putting our money where our mouth is? And um, and and then also creating those connections through collaboration as people engage with us when we do that And we want to Build that up. We've done it really well with our clients. I think one of the interesting things that nobody ever talks about is how vendors have this really unique perspective because you get to look across all of these trust and safety programs, right? You have this very, very interesting bird's eye view and, and you can see, you know, best practices and things that could be applied better in some areas and others. And how do you really kind of roll that up into something that can be really impactful for the industry? And this is our next step. First attempt at really engaging the community in that way to build that up and to, develop it further.

Mike Masnick: 47:09

And I think that, you know, one of the really interesting things, and this is. Partly I think has come out of TrustCon and everything that TSPA has done is that there is this really sort of collaborative spirit that goes on and I've seen it, even across what might seem like competitors. It feels like a lot of people, are really trying to share ideas and best practices. This is a, a new industry in a lot of ways, and it is one where everybody is learning and trying to understand and, people are not being particularly proprietary because they realize like working together and figuring out the best ways to accomplish things is really important and sort of, moving the entire internet forward into a sort of safer world is important. Where do you think there are, are really interesting areas of promise for industry collaboration going forward? what are the things that you're interested in right now?

Paul Danter: 47:59

Yeah. It's actually an emerging trend, even with clients who we have a lot of clients that talk about it. I'm sure, um, it's a common theme that's shared with other, vendors in the industry as well. Of collaboration, how can vendors just put aside, some of the aspects that they focus on around, you know, are we growing fast enough and all those kinds of things just to actually solve the damn problem for the client. Right. So, you know, if you've got a, if you've got, um, a lack of resources in a certain geography or something, just pick up the phone, right. Call your competitor and say, Hey, we need a little help here. We need to get this done. but I think it goes beyond that. I think there's some really interesting coming from a technology background areas and solutions where we should be working. I'll be speaking on the second day, just briefly in the morning session in front of everyone. I'll be talking with NECMEC about some of the work we've done there. But I think there's lots of things we could do to expand that work. I think, there's a massive opportunity for collaboration across platforms. and maybe we could be part of that where, early detection signs of, of new and emerging threats and trends could be shared. And, and so if something is spotted on one platform, we can make moderators or train, uh, systems to be able to detect those things sooner. And I. I think that could have a huge benefit to all platforms, but also to all of us, right? Um, in the industry and, and of course society at large.

Mike Masnick: 49:13

Yeah, I think that makes sense. And, we've seen certainly, some of the platforms themselves, it took a while, but in the last few years have gotten to the point where they're often willing to collaborate. And if there's like, you know, foreign threats or some new kind of thing, like we've talked sextortion suddenly becoming a big issue and, and sharing notes about that and things like that. And I could see where if that expands and. Wraps in some of the vendors as well. And the ability to collaborate on those issues, that could be a really, really effective way of going about this stuff.

Paul Danter: 49:43

Yeah, and I think, I mean, the other area there is something we're really passionate about right now, which is we kind of broadly call it voice of the moderator, right? And I think there's a big, appreciation in the industry right now of moderators, not really just performing tasks that help enforce policy, but also being on the front line and seeing some of these things early on. Some of our really experienced moderators, and this is the same across all companies, they can see threats emerge, right? They see new trends, and, and that voice of the moderator and giving them an opportunity to filter that back up. Is really, really important and kind of ruggedizing that would be really, really cool for the industry, I think.

Mike Masnick: 50:22

Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's, that's a really great point. So one other thing, you know, I think everybody in sort of the trust and safety field recognizes that, there is a real importance and value in making the internet just a better place. Safer digital world all around. it's one that, you know, lots of people are talking about, lots of people thinking about, but I'm kind of curious from your perspective, what do you think will move the needle the most? what do you think is, the biggest and most important points towards making the digital world safer?

Paul Danter: 50:54

Well, I mean, this might be controversial, but I do actually think regulation has got a big important part to play and it's going to be really interesting to see how that plays out over the next 12 months with DSA and others, UK Online Safety Act, and to really see whether or not that does change the way things are run, behaviors online. so I think that's a really important thing, but the second thing, which I'm quite passionate about, and I've been sort of speaking to a lot of different, people across the industry around it is actually education, which, quite far removed from, from, I guess, where we are as a, uh, as a business, but. just from a societal impact perspective, I'm really, really passionate about how we, how we educate children, especially middle school children to be good online citizens, how they can understand how to navigate that space effectively. And there's very little of that goes on. I've done some personal kind of passion projects around that in my local community here in California. But, there's a lot more that we could be doing as an industry. And I think it's to the benefit of everybody actually, if we can really get these, um, Young people understanding, the right way to behave online and the consequences of things that you do online. Whether that's every from bullying to much worse, things. But, you know, I think you, you sow that seed early and I think that's gonna have a massive change in the long run.

Mike Masnick: 52:11

Yeah, yeah, no, I think that is hugely important. I think that there are some people working on it, but, making it flow through and, and be just sort of central to everything, I think would be absolutely huge.

Paul Danter: 52:22

Yeah.

Mike Masnick: 52:23

well, Paul, thanks so much for taking the time and, uh, for explaining all of this. And, I look forward to seeing you next week at TrustCon.

Paul Danter: 52:30

Sounds good. Yeah, you too. Thanks Mike. Appreciate the time.

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