Big Technology Podcast - The Rise Of Conservative Social Media — With The New Yorker's Clare Malone and Stanford's David Thiel

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

Clare Malone is a staff writer at The New Yorker who recently wrote about Gettr, a rising conservative social network. David Thiel is the big data architect and chief technology officer of the Stanford Internet Observatory, where he's researched Gettr's usage. The pair join Big Technology Podcast to discuss Gettr — and its counterparts' — potential to take on incumbent social networks. We dig into the network's growth, its funding sources, and how mainstream social network policies open the door for its success. Here's Clare's story: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/can-gettr-become-the-online-gathering-place-for-trumps-gop Here's David's research: https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/topologies-and-tribulations-gettr

Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation, of the tech world and beyond. Well, with big platforms like Facebook and Twitter banning users like Marjorie Taylor Green and other conservatives, I think it's time for us to spend an episode talking about what happens after. that. And that is the rise of conservative niche social networks, platforms like parlor, platforms like Getter, which we'll talk about in length today. And here to do it with us, we have an amazing one to combo. Claire Malone is joining us. She's a staff writer at The New Yorker who just finished and just published a story on Getter. Claire, welcome to the show. Thanks. Great to be here. Great to have you. And I always love it when we compare journalists with some of their name sources. And here in the house, we have one of, that exact pairing for you today. David Teal is our

guest. He's the chief technical officer at Stanford Internet Observatory. And he has done some pretty deep research into Getter. David, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So look, there's been so many different conservative social media platforms. I mean, I can't even list them all. And I've cover this stuff. You know, we've had Gab, we've had Parlor. I'm sure that the rumble, you know, might qualify as another one. And now there's a new one called Getter. And Getter is really taking off. I think there's about 4 million users, although David will fact check me on that.

And it's recently added, Marjor Taylor Green, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and it does seem like it has some promise to become an alternative social network for conservatives. So let's just start with the basics. Claire, I'd love to hear from your perspective, what is Gitter exactly? and why did it catch your attention? Sure. I think the easiest way to describe Gitter is basically Twitter, but for conservatives. I mean, they take umbrage with you calling it a conservative social media site.

They say it's a free speech social media site because they're still, I think, trying to get liberals to come on it. But in essence, it is basically it has all the sort of the interface that you would find on Twitter minus private messages. it's the same kind of scrolling experience you would get on Twitter. So you'd be pretty familiar with the interface if you logged on and you're familiar at all with Twitter. Yeah, it looks exactly like Twitter. Yeah. I mean, I think it doesn't, you know, we can, David might have more to say about like the news feed on the side and how that maybe is different from Twitter. I think it's probably maybe a little heavier editorializing on what goes into the,

the Gitter News Feed, but by and large, it's pretty, it's kind of cribbing from an already successful social media platform. I got interested in Gitter, in part just because of Trump's many, I don't know what to call it, his business ventures or proposed business ventures getting into social media. Obviously, he was banned from Twitter last year, and he's been talking about, you know, starting his own, not just social media network, but, you know, conservative media company who really knows what that means exactly. And there's some controversy over the SPAC merger for that company. But I kind of wanted to take a dive into the conservative media ecosystem that's developed over the last year as anger at big tech has gotten bigger

from conservatives. And they're saying, well, let's find our own space. And I kind of wanted to do, frankly, for a New Yorker reader or for a mainstream. media consumer. What does this stuff look like? Who's on there? Who's behind it? So that was kind of the premise of it is like what is what is a conservative media ecosystem look like in January 2022 a year after frankly the capital riot? Right. And let's just pressure test one of the assertions that Jason Miller, who's the CEO, made to you when you spoke with him for the story. He's a former Trump spokesperson with very colorful history. He said that this is going to be something that's going to attract liberals as well. Look at the controversy with Dave Chappelle,

for instance. Maybe they'd be attracted to a getter. What is your take on whether that is something that might actually come to fruition? I mean, that's a thing that I'm very skeptical on. And I'm not sure if it made it into the final copy, but it's very hard for me to imagine a mass liberal exodus from Instagram and Twitter. I mean, You know, we've had a lot of reporting over the past decade about big tech and what they're, you know, if it's, if it's free, the product is you. You know, Americans have gotten used to the idea of tech intrusiveness, even if they're, you know, not happy about it. And I think this, the free, you know, Jason Miller made these arguments that like liberals will have a free speech revolution when they start to get canceled or when they get. angry at big tech trying to cancel them.

And I think that that's a little bit, that stretches credulity for me. I mean, he brought up, yeah, Dave Chappelle, Nikki Minaj, Madonna. He, you know, he brought up Madonna's nipple being censored on Instagram. But that's not necessarily stuff that I think liberals would rally behind on mass. So it is, it is kind of hard to see, to see that demographic going to get her. I mean, you did see someone like Tulsi Gabbard join the other day. Tulsi Gabbard obviously has a different kind of reputation as a liberal politician. You know, she's gotten more fringe as she's, as her political career has progressed.

So potentially you can see some people, I guess, in that category of left going on to get her. But I do think that that Miller's, that is certainly the claim that I think is, is hardest to imagine that Miller. Now, David, I'll get to you in a minute, but I'll just have one more question for table setting. You mentioned that you wanted to look at this after January 6th. What does a conservative social network look like a month after January 6th? But why it caught my attention was because we have seen more conservative figures banned over the past year. And, you know, when I speak with conservative friends, you know, they certainly know lots of people who've been banned under these broad vaccine misinformation policies and QAnon policies. And so does a story like this have some more significance because big tech is becoming more aggressive in content moderating and deleting people from their networks?

I mean, yeah, I think that the fact that, you know, big tech had sort of four years of trying to navigate, they didn't want to offend mainstream conservative politicians. They didn't want to overstep, you know, censoring the president, essentially, or, or, you know, I think that is a legitimately tricky thing to assess is how do we, how do we handle the president of the United States? And then when January 6th happened and it was kind of this, wow, this is a red line, they did, there was a certain kind of release. One, there was a Democratic president. Two, they had already banned, you know, the Godzilla of social media, right, Donald Trump. And so there was more permissiveness. And I also think it's become in the last year, the bannings have become more a part of conservative ideology. I mean, I think the interesting thing about modern American, the modern American GOP, modern American conservatism is it's not particularly ideological at this point.

And I mean that about policy ideas. it's more a contrarian ideology. So the fact that people are, that conservatives are being banned for saying contrarian things about vaccines, contrarian obviously being a light thing about a light word to apply to medical misinformation. But the idea that it's become a central tenet of the GOP that like people are out to get you is a really significant thing. And I think it's, you know, it's probably only going to get bigger in the next year as,

you know, we see Trump kind of try to reemerge and probably say more, he has a rally this weekend in Arizona. It'll be interesting to see, you know, how that gets covered and what gets snipped out. And I think we're just going to be faced with more and more that on our plates, the kind of how do you handle what to, what to censor, quote unquote, or how to contextualize misinformation. Yeah. And it is definitely a party line that we hear a lot from the right. But I do think that there's also some truth to it.

that these platforms have become stricter and banning. And that's what really interested me in the story was that I thought that there, if not a sense of inevitability that one of these networks takes off, each one of these bands does, you know, give them a better shot of succeeding. So, David, I want to turn it over to you. You know, your background is really fascinating. You've worked at Facebook, if I'm not mistaken. You're at Stanford right now. And so you know a lot about the way that these networks. function and what it takes for a network really to take off.

So, you know, I'd love to hear a little bit more from your perspective, about your background, and then how you started to apply that to see whether or not what was happening inside getter, you know, is sustainable and is healthy in terms of growth. So, yeah, I did work at Facebook for about four years and saw a lot of the kind of internal machinations around content enforcement, platform policy, as well as a lot of the security and safety mechanisms that were in place to try and moderate content, you know, explicit content, extremist content, that kind of thing. At the observatory, we study a number of different online platforms, both, you know,

the mainstream ones, Twitter and Facebook, Instagram, but also we pay attention when these smaller ones pop up and kind of study the dynamics somewhat, try and determine what populations are active on them, what the growth curves look like in terms of both user base and actual day-to-day activity and what kind of content kind of proliferates on those platforms. For Gitter, it's a little bit different than some of the other networks that we've looked at, like Parlor or Gap, both of which have been around for a number of years. Gitter was kind of a very concerted splash at the beginning. It's only been around for a fairly short time. It had that huge growth spike right at the beginning. And kind of like you mentioned, the things

that will drive adoption on these is any, you know, moderation, removal, either of content or accounts on those other platforms with, you know, the most recent exception, I guess, being the rather massive sign-up spike that they got with Joe Rogan going over, who had not actually, not in response to any of his own content removals, but still was able to kind of use that narrative to drive a big subscriber job. Right. And so from your perspective, what, you know, well, actually, it's interesting having someone who worked at Facebook here to talk about this stuff, the network effect stuff. It seems to me like there are some social networks that are niche that actually take off. Think about Ravelry, for instance, which is a knitting social network.

Pretty active user base. So what does it take to, for a, for a niche social network to take off. And do you see some of those elements present with Getter? Or is this more likely to be a flash in the pan? I mean, usually what we see, there's two things that limit growth on these networks. One, you know, when you talk about, oh, there might be this kind of growth in liberal user base on Getter. It's because the vast majority of content on the site is really just mirror. from somewhere else.

You know, somebody posts something on Twitter. It gets syndicated to get her or some other platforms. You know, there's very little on the site that does not exist elsewhere in a more streamlined omnipresent way where people are there with all of the rest of their social circle or people that they want to follow. So they've got some hurdles there, which is kind of why they're excited about all these cancellations Because the more people that are only there, the more potential they have for user growth, you know, rather than this kind of syndication model. But, you know, the second challenge that they have is just while they say that they're kind of a broad tent, you can tell from any of their marketing materials, any of the newsletters that they send out.

It's obviously very conservative, and it's the user base has stayed that way, basically conservatives and a tiny group of trolls, and the day-to-day interactions tend to taper off when you really only have similar people to agree with, and that's your only form of interaction. It doesn't have the same kind of conflict that another social network would have that might actually keep people involved. Yeah, there's a little bit, I mean, to, to, to David's point, the idea that there's so much content mirroring, particularly from Twitter, basically kind of at this point, if you're a conservative figure or conservative politician, having a getter account is almost like virtue signaling.

It's basically saying, like, I believe in free speech, I therefore have this getter site, but also like, if you take a look, you know, they've, they are just, they're just tweets. They're just tweets. They're just tweets. That's all it is right now. And it is this weird, yeah, the frisson of excitement of, like, disagreeing with someone on social media, having a really big argument. I think the only time I really saw, you know, in my not very long, Gitter usage, the biggest, you know, fights or controversies I saw kind of amid conservatives on Gitter was when Donald Trump said that he'd gotten boosted. And there was like the video of Trump saying that. And people, you know, are outraged. that he was boosted. So that was kind of interesting to see because it was actual like disagreement with the party line, for lack of a better phrase. Yeah, Claire, I wanted to speak to you about this because I thought about it when I was reading your story. So where do you think we're better off? Do you think we're better off with like mainstream networks where you have

people that are voicing some of the stuff that, you know, they won't tolerate some of the vaccine skepticism, for instance, that Roger Taylor Green has been, you know, had been voicing on Twitter that I think eventually got her boosted. Booted, sorry. Probably didn't get her boosted. Yeah, probably not boosted. Maybe. Or, you know, these niche social networks, they're fascinating because you're right.

Like, there isn't the same conflict, which is what tends to build social networks. But on the other hand, you can end up having echo chambers that if it doesn't radicalize, you know, folks, it could, you know, it almost certainly further divides people and ends up, you know, creating a more accelerated. problem like the one we have in the country today, where we have, you know, people of different political persuasions that just don't seem to be speaking the same language. So what do you think is better? I, I will, I will give the coward's answer and say, I have no idea. I do think it's not a coward's answer, by the way. I think it's like totally fair to be like, hey, I don't know about this stuff. I don't personally, you know. Two, I mean, two things that spring to mind. One, kind of the, again, like some of the idea behind the story was there's this. There's

this whole really flourishing, vibrant, influential conservative media ecosystem that, you know, you might not know about dear reader or dear Twitter follower, but is really influential in people's daily lives. I mean, this is a whole separate story. And I would encourage people to go seek out some of the ProPublica reporting on Steve Bannon's podcast, The War Room. But that podcast is really influential. It has lots of downloads. I think it's a sort of more, you know, conservative talk radio. There's more, there's a long tradition of that. That's basically what Steve Bannon is doing, right? He's, he can talk for three hours, which liberal or conservative is a talent, right? Most of us can't, you know, just talk on end for many hours of the day. But lots

of people listen to that. And, you know, ProPublic has done some reporting that shows like, it's had some influence on these local electoral administration positions because Bannon's basically saying we need to go out and change things from the grassroots. So on the one hand, I think it's bad that a lot of Americans don't know what's going on in, yes, the misinformation-filled conservative media echo chamber. And we should know more about it, especially as, you know, we're coming into an election year, and I'm sure that will be a big part of everything. On the other hand, I mean, it's funny, on Twitter, I think in the last month, they've put up these little, I don't even know what to call it, signposts when they've deemed that a convert,

what do they say, it's hard, there are real humans behind this or something like that. I don't know what it is, but it's basically like. They're trying to improve conversational health so you don't end up yelling at people. Right. Which conversations may be intense. Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Yes. And it's like, you know, no shit, Sherlock.

Sorry, Alex, you might, should I, should I re take that without the stories? We're going to talk about how what, what, how Rogan reacted to get her. So we're taking this conversation is getting intense. Yeah, this conversation is getting intense. Thus I use a bad word. But I mean, you know, are we having better conversations on Twitter? You know, increasingly, I'm sort of, a lot of it is the bigotry of small differences. It's liberals getting in fights with each other over sometimes actual issues, but a lot of times ego, you know, I won't name them, but like I saw a couple prominent like politics types yesterday, getting in a, in a really long time-consuming Twitter fight that had absolutely no, like it was just about their egos, masking it as like a light policy fight. So I really have a answer. I have like this policy where I like, I won't go. I'll reply once, but not more than once. Like it never ends up being a good situation. Once you reply, someone else replies, you reply back the whole conversation.

Because like, what if you have to go to the bathroom and then you don't reply for a while and they're like, oh, look at that coward. They didn't reply to me. It's like, well, maybe I just had to go live my life. That's right. Yeah, there's no, there's definitely no willingness for folks to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. But most importantly, it just escalates. And, you know, I'm happy to give one answer, but anything beyond that, it's usually,

it almost always ends up in bad faith territory. But I, you know, I just want to, you know, hammer home on this point a little bit. Now that I think about it a little more. I mean, the platforms are banning. And look, I don't like the spread, obviously, of all this health misinformation, which you've alluded to. But the platforms seem to be very quick to ban people for health misinformation. And, you know, it's happening at a time where the CDC can't get its act together. It seems like it changes its guidance every five days or maybe even less than that.

And so you end up having, you know, so many folks who like, you know, are maybe expressing displeasure about this or looking at alternatives because they don't trust the CDC. They get booted from a mainstream platform. Next thing you know, they're on getter. It does not leave us, you know, with a bigger problem. And, you know, either Claire or David, I mean, David, you know, you were, let's toss to David, actually, because you were actually at Facebook. So I'm curious what you think about this, this balancing act that the big platforms need to have between how much, you know, conversation can you tolerate it? And what are the side effects when you start banning people at mass?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it is a balance, and I think that there is actually some benefit in how the platforms have been behaving in the last couple of years. I think that there probably are some times when they've been a little bit heavy-handed, but when it comes down to it, when we're trying to control the spread of not just medical misinformation, but other forms of radicalization that clearly took place on Facebook and. to some degree on Twitter and other platforms, I think containing that into its own community, where it does have a harder time leaping out of it, does have some benefit. And there have been some very prominent cases where de-platforming has worked rather well.

Like we haven't heard anything from Naomi Wolf for, you know, months just basically cut off the, you know, almost all communication and relegated her to telegram and these kinds of platforms. So, I mean. Yeah, she's not get her also, I think. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, she's also been complaining about the, the lack of audience that she was getting on other platforms. So, and she was notorious spread of medical misinformation. So while it's, it's not great that those people are not exposed to newer ideas, there comes a point where the fact that they're pushing and spreading that content so actively themselves, that, you know, it can potentially serve

a better purpose there. And just in terms of, you know, you mentioned Naomi, well, wasn't happy with the audience. Getter keeps throwing out all these big numbers. David, what have you learned in your research in terms of like how healthy this network is? in terms of growth and retention engagement? In terms of user growth, we basically had that splash around, you know, July 5th, 4th, 5th, and it was basically just trailing along in very small numbers until this Joe Rogan spike, which was actually, it looks like it's potentially bigger than what they got on launch.

So overall, the growth has been quite low and flat. When it comes to engagement, similarly, you'll have those spikes and it'll just kind of hum along at a low level. And we also get a lot of users that, it seems there's a decent amount of people signing up when they're encouraged to do so just so that they can have an account, just in case they need it just in case the people that they're following get de-platformed or they do. But they don't seem to really come back and have a lot of daily interaction, exactly. Yeah, and Joe Rogan himself, he talked about like how he has a follower count of 9 million people,

but that exceeds the number of people on Getter. Dave, you were telling me how he reacted. He said it was like some fuckery going on over there. error. And then he talked about like, can I actually even like delete my account, which was like fairly surprising given they've, given that getters gone on this PR blitz talking about how great it is that Rogan's come on. Yeah, it was interesting because presumably they had a deal with him, which did not appear to include non-disparagement. But after that, and I'm not sure the exact timing of this, but I noticed that they have now split out the getter followers and Twitter followers into separate things in the UI. which, you know, initially they were kind of trying to make things look active and highly followed and, you know, hoping to bootstrap it. But now that they've kind of been pushed to pull those two things apart, it's actually interesting. You look at somebody like Tucker Carlson yet has like 368,000 followers on Gitter,

which is surprisingly low. Like if you're not a Tucker Carlson fan, what are you? you doing on getter um and you know i think the most actively followed person now is joe rogan with um at 1.2 million here's here's one wild stat kately jenner is on getter she has 466 getter followers and 3.5 million total followers so jo rogan you're right that is some fuckery they they they told me that they do they um to get you know they have the verified v for it's their version of the blue checkmark. And they say you can get verified just by,

if you're verified on Twitter, you're automatically verified on Gitter. So there's also a certain amount of like, they're kind of taking the big tech, you know, check and saying like, okay, all right, that works, that currency works here too. So that's interesting. Well, initially they were taking all of a user's previous posts

via Twitter's API. so you'd have a timeline going back to like 2010 if you tried to archive the posts and people would get all confused because it wasn't clear when Twitter imports stopped and when Gitter posts started. Claire Malone is here. She's a staff writer at The New Yorker. We're joined also by David Teal, the chief technical officer at Stanford Internet Observatory. We're talking about Getter and other conservative social networks.

Are they going to make it a go? Are they going to actually challenge mainstream social networks? Can they be consistent? After the break, I want to talk a little bit about one of the real mysteries here, which is who is funding getter. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news,

and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the, biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So search for The Hustled Daily Show and your favorite podcast app like the one you're using right now. And actually, whose idea was it? So why don't we dive into that right after this?

And we're back here on the big technology podcast with David Teal. He's the chief technical officer at the Stanford Internet Observatory and Claire Malone staff writer at The New Yorker. Thanks both for joining once again. All right. Let's start off this second. segment with one of the most bizarre things about getter um which is who is go wengui he also goes by miles quack he may be the funder of this situation claire what did you find when you spoke with them about this um i found a lot of evasion uh but i mean miles uh whoa however you want to style him and if you do a google of him and if you read enough about him and it's truly an internet rabbit hole I mean, this guy has lots of aliases, lots of lawsuits, a long relationship with Steve Bannon.

Steve Bann was actually arrested on Miles Kwok's yacht a couple years ago. So he's an interesting character. He's a, he's a Chinese billionaire, supposedly, who there has been previous reporting that his family foundation, provided seed money for Gitter. And I think David can probably speak more accurately to this. But there was a previous Chinese language site called Gidomi. That was basically Gitter. Then they wiped it clean and relaunched it as Gitter, the English language site on July 4th or whatever. So there's a lot of, I would say, flashing red arrows. that say Guo Wen Gui is a person who has had a lot of influence in the roots of Gitter.

I think, you know, there's a lot of Steve Bannon and Guo kind of have this mutual dislike of the Chinese Communist Party. So there's a lot of anti-Chinese Communist Party bots on the site. There's a lot of, there's just a lot of indication that this, that this is something that is, there's a connection going on here. But I think, you know, Jason Miller is reticent to answer questions head on about, you know, was this site originally funded and the brainchild of Guo and gooey? And he's evasive and says, you know, told me there's no, he has no personal financial stake. He also said, you know, that's a very interesting evasion. It is a very interesting evasion. You know, he said, Steve Bannon doesn't have a financial stake.

But Bannon is obviously getting a lot of, I think, clout from the site, for lack of a better word, or it's a, you know, it's a platform for him. But I think David can probably speak more in a more technically astute way about the connections between these two sites, the Chinese language and now the English language. Yeah, David, David, let's hear it. Because to me, it's just really unbelievable that you would have a Chinese language site that gets flipped overnight to this, you know, kind of patriotic magasite filled with. you know, Trump supporters in railing against cancel culture? Yeah. So in its first incarnation, it was very clear of Go's involvement. He talked about it and said it was going to be this amazing next big thing.

And then kind of at some point, they shifted it over to being getter with two ease and pushed that. And the same accounts were still active when they made that first migration, eventually changed. changing, dropping an E and essentially purging all of the accounts that had been there before and relaunching it in the app store, albeit, if I recall, signed by the same keys with like the same organizations listed as the distributors of the applications. Yeah, I mean, it's quite clear that Guo had responsibility for kind of the genesis of it, how much of that has been handed off is not particularly clear. But what we can see is that the development team that works on other Miles Guo related

apps like GNews, GTV, they also, I'm sorry. What are those? They're kind of this quo-centric news outlets. One is more videos streaming base. One is more written news-based, but with the overall narrative of being anti-Chinese Communist Party. But the same development team works on those apps as also works on the getter mobile apps. So it would appear that those apps have come from that team originally. They still seem to have some involvement, how much they're really under the direction of every day,

of Miles Guo is not necessarily clear, but I think it's, it is clear that some of those links are persisting. It is, you know, just so bizarre to me that, you know, a Chinese billionaire who has a beef with the Chinese Communist Party, maybe that's where he found companionship with Bannon. That would make sense. But that he's playing such a big role in right-wing American politics. Is that, I mean, I suppose, you know, teach their own, but is that weird, like, or is it just me saying, you know, this doesn't make sense? Well, if we've learned nothing from the past, you know, five or six years of American politics or decade or 20 years, if you want to go back further, there is a certain argument to made that, like, populist politics

on both the right and left has demonized globalization and China as the great kind of where all your goods that used to be made in America are now made. So I think there is, in some ways, there's a sympatheticness of populist right-winger Steve Bannon, you know, kind of taking the anti-globalist, right? Like we do not like what has happened with the death of American supremacy see in manufacturing. China is an authoritarian state that is, you know, killing the working class jobs in, you know, Michigan and Wisconsin and Ohio. So there is a little, I mean, I do see, there is to me a logic in there of like the populist working class right wing line that is

anti-communist Chinese Chinese party. But, you know, I should also say, just as a fun aside, Will also uses Gitter to post like workout videos. He's a, he's a wearing his sunglasses indoors and a monologue well on an exercise machine. It's very funny. He does like rollouts, you know, like ab rollouts. So on his pet house balcony. So it's a very funny.

It's not just anti-CP propaganda. It's also workout vids. Yeah. And I saw him. He's pretty, he's getting his money worth if he is funding this because he is featured pretty prominently in like the streaming section of of the app you basically can't scroll down that section without missing a gore video and i will say when i first joined the site i think i joined it in the afternoon and i woke up the next morning and checked it and i had

hundreds of new followers almost all of them were what i assumed to be bots that were chinese language bots that had like anti-cp the only thing in english was an anti-ccp uh chinese Communist Party bio or whatever. So. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I got followed immediately by a Rudy Giuliani fan club. So there you go.

I think one other thing that, you know, bears noting is that both Guo and Bannon are the founders of a couple of organizations, I believe at least one of which is a nonprofit that funded some previous things like the research paper that was published claiming that, you know, COVID was engineered. So they've worked together and funded projects in the past, and they do have organizations that they work through, which I can't really speculate as to kind of the evasion about the funding prior, but it's pretty easy for those two to have a stake while not having a direct personal stake, given that they have these organizations that they work together on.

Yeah, and I don't even want to verbally wade into this because this is one of those things where I'd want to like go and fact check it. But I think one of their ventures might be involved in a lawsuit. So there's a lot of kind of financial complications. Well, I guess like one of the things I want to ask as we come to close of this second segment is given the number of people on there, it seems like it's well funded. does this thing have a chance of working? I think we have to wait and see how what Donald Trump decides to do. I mean, honestly, I think that like that is Trump ex machina is really actually a thing on all these sites. You know, whether or not he ends up starting his own social media company, which I think people are a little bit dubious about it actually getting off the floor and, you know, becoming something besides a meme stock.

if Trump decides to join one of these social networks, maybe it's Parlor, who knows, Melania's NFT is powered by Parlor. So, you know, who knows? But I think Trump actually joining would be a real game changer because if we're talking about, you know, if we're talking about one of the problems is, you know, mirrored content, you know, if Trump were posting on Gitter, obviously people would cross-post what he posted onto Twitter, right? But you would still be potentially getting, you know, maybe Trump would stream from Gitter. Maybe there are features or whatever site he would choose, but there would be exclusive content, which we obviously know is like a trend in media anyway, right?

Like, you know, you get the exclusive content on one platform and you try to protect that. I think that that is really the thing that could, the sort of single moment that could make a platform. a conservative platform take off. But in general, I mean, how the midterms play out will be really interesting. I mean, you see someone, like, let's take the Ohio Senate race with J.D. Vance and Josh Mandel kind of basically making their campaigns, like Twitter campaigns. You know, what if you had something like that just like fully go to Twitter, you know, or, you know, fully, you're fully streaming something from Twitter.

Maybe that would change the game. But as it stands right now, I mean, I think David's work showing the people just don't engage and the psychology that I think we all sort of intuitively know interacting on social media, which is like you want to see, it's kind of plays to the baser human instincts of conflict and wanting to see and participate in fighting. So it doesn't, Gitter doesn't have that right now. Yeah. So basically the best social networks are, you know, have an element of reality television in them. Everybody's their own reality TV actor. We all love reality TV. It's so good.

I got COVID over the break and just dosed myself with reality television. And I can't stop now. It's a really big problem. The real opiate of the masses. But it is, it's so good. David, is Mark Zuckerberg losing sleep over getter? Or is there any way that this thing could build itself into like a formidable network with a solid base of daily active users?

I would say no and probably not. If anything, for Facebook, it's good if Trump, for example, were to go and play somewhere else because it would kind of take the spotlight off them a little bit in terms of people questioning what they should be allowed to do to politicians and the claim of, oh, I've been completely silenced and can't get a message out there kind of goes away when you have people moving to those platforms. And for the most part, those platforms are happy to get rid of a lot of the toxicity of the people that were de-platformed in the first place.

In terms of get her becoming like a major player, I think you're right. it's going to be something that does depend a little bit on what Trump does. It's possible that if he were to join a network like that, that he might bring some of that conflict with him. In a strange way, it might actually get a more diverse base of people because they know that's where the fight is. But, you know, he may also end up moving forward with the truth social platform. they've already got some of the framework out there.

And I think in that case, we look at these other platforms trying to pivot to different things like cryptocurrency, Gryft, and so forth. And, David, you just said something interesting about how they're willing to not put up with some of the trolls. You know, they get around in particular, bills itself as a free speech platform, but it also has like a fairly aggressive moderation policy. Isn't that right? Yeah. I mean, that's happened with. with parlor as well where these companies market themselves as very broad free speech platforms and they quickly discover that that's not what they actually want, not just in terms of

ideology, but in terms of content that pops up all kinds of trolling and porn and stuff like that. So they typically start free speech, start walking it back over time. If they see a bunch of trolls or I mean I believe they were actively talking about either parlor or getter was discussing getting rid of left of center accounts that were joining and saying that openly yeah they it definitely changes over time and when you look at what they actually action on it's not quite what people perceive it as being Claire what do you think Did you speak with this, with them about this? A little bit, yeah.

I mean, they obviously got a lot of flack in the beginning for having, like, porn bots on the site and just, like, not having a very, I don't think they had many human content moderators at all. I asked Jason Miller about that, you know, and he said, we've gotten more human content moderators. And I tried to, I tried to ask him a little bit about what would, what would you. remove from like what would count as like too much right and I think um I think the example David I would want you to check me on this but he gave one example of showing video of the aftermath of like a large bombing where you're basically showing like dead bodies after a violent attack it might have been after one of the um maybe one of the Kabul airport attacks and maybe showing showing video of that. And he said, we would allow that. I believe he said we would allow that.

Is that something that Facebook or Twitter would put a, you know, I don't know, a content screen over or not allow at all, basically dead bodies? They would put a click through on it for sensitive content, you know, almost certainly. In terms of whether they leave it up, It depends somewhat on context. Definitely, if people are reposting it with any kind of encouragement, that falls afoul of their policies immediately. If it seems to be something where it's just being shared for gore value, that would also potentially be taken down.

But there are exceptions to a number of those policies for newsworthiness and things like that. So likely that would fall through. just at a click-through. Yeah, not particularly controversial. I guess the other two things that spring to mind are like, you know, I saw on Twitter the other day a user who had in his bio the N-word, but using it as like the colloquial, I believe he was black and he was using it colloquially. And he was like, Gitter banned me for that. They're not a free speech website. And you got the Gitter spokesperson replying to him being like, you violated our terms of service.

So I think that's a pretty kind of like, it was an interesting thing to watch happen on Twitter. I guess the other thing that kind of has to do with content moderation is like, you know, little things. And I cited this in the piece, like Jason Miller posted basically like a kind of crass Epstein. It was a news with Hillary Clinton in it, right? Yeah, it was a, it was a Hillary Clinton is standing in front of like, a cartoon Christmas elf that's that looks like he's hung himself in a cell and you know Miller says like seasons greetings or happy holidays or whatever he said um so it's the season is the season thank you uh you're my fact checker so it's it's like uh it's like violent

but it almost it almost feels like like it's like the charlie abdo uh this is a political cartoon and you know again david i would turn to your to your expertise on this would would a facebook or a twitter put a content screen on that or a or a warning a flag on that um or is that kind of up to like this is a this is a political cartoon i mean there's a i would say that there's a lot of that variety of joking potentially on gitter like it's a little more off color like you know your midwestern an aunt on Facebook would probably get a little squeamish if she ran across that on your Facebook page and maybe she'd report it. But on Gitter, I'm not sure it's like raising flags. Yeah, I mean, the number of things on Gitter that are really just, you know, dunks or memes,

you can actually look at the, you know, the most frequent replies to posts and it's, or the most frequent contents of posts and it's like just the crying, laughing emoji over and over again. yeah in terms of how those kinds of cartoons or depictions would be acted on from what you I haven't seen what you described but my guess is that you know it might it would probably stay up I can't think off the top of my head of the policy that yeah I think a lot of these things are like it's probably in some ways the same baseline content moderation as a Twitter or a Facebook but there's more just like kind of the off color joking that probably gets streamed out more on on your Facebook news feed or your Twitter news feed because

like even if it's a Fox News journalist they're probably not making the like weird joke right they're they're probably doing a little bit more like either polemic or reporting or linking to a story and I think that exists less on getter I think what this discussion underscores is that just content moderation uh is just a impot a very very difficult thing to, you know, get your head around, whether your Facebook or Twitter or a so-called free speech network like Getter or Gab or Parlor, and everyone's doing content moderation and no one has, you know, any good answers. And however, you know, easy, it might seem in a 280 character declaration of what a platform should keep up or take down, it's always more difficult in reality.

And it's something that all network struggle with. And it always seems a lot easier to do it from the outside until start your own network and then you're dealing with some of these problems. So we have just a few minutes left. I want to get to a very interesting potential for this network that it might actually end up becoming more popular outside of the United States than inside. So why don't we do that when we come back after the break? So we'll be back right after this here on the big technology podcast. And we're back for one final segment on Big Technology podcast. Claire Malone is with us.

She's a staff writer at the New York. And we were also joined by David Teal, the chief technical officer at Stanford Internet Observatory. So one of the things I found really interesting was while the Trump and the Trump family is not participating on Getter, the Bolsonaro family is in Brazil. And it's actually quite popular in Brazil. So is there a chance that Getter ends up becoming a social network that actually goes beyond the ambitions for the U.S.? and actually ends up becoming, you know, as popular or more popular outside the country? When, Claire, didn't you lead off your article with Miller coming back from some international trips, try to entice, you know, folks outside of the United States to sign up?

Yeah, he'd just been in France and he was promoting the app there. He'd been on a, I think during December, he'd been to D.C. to promote it to Capitol Hill influencers, as he put it. And then he went to France to basically promote it and get right-wing finger. figures to join the site. I mean, he would be, I think he's very upfront in saying, like, we see Gitter's growth as being global. So pointing to obviously to the Bolsonaro's in Brazil, who, you know, Bolsonaro and his sons have been active users. I mean, basically the places where Jason Miller was kind of pointing out, oh, there's potential for growth here are countries

where there is a strong right wing. So India is another place that he said. that has potential for growth. France, obviously, you've got French elections coming up this year. You've got, you know, these European right-wing candidates who are getting, whatever, they're not getting the majority of the votes, but they're not getting nothing, right? Like, this is potentially a place for them to strike out. So I think it's, you know, it's interesting. It's also, I mean, it's of a piece with, you know, remember when Steve Bannon founded the Rome office of Breitbart?

It's kind of the same thing. It's like sort of picking your spots and saying, where can we make inroads? And I guess from a business perspective, you know, if you're not, if you're not hitting your strides everywhere in the U.S., you might as well expand outward. So there definitely, I mean, that definitely seems to be an emphasis. And I would say, you know, David mentioned this earlier, that like, Gitter might, you know, let's say if Trump and the truth social network plus streaming platforms actually come to fruition and Gitter has to pivot to crypto or maybe Gitter pivots to a more international

flavor, right? Like maybe Trump's truth media is a very U.S. focused operation, which why wouldn't it be, right? Then all these other sites can say, like, great, well, we're going to be the voice of the French right wing or Modi in India or Bolsonaro. So, yeah, they're going global. Yeah, David, what did you see in the data? I mean, no more than 5% of the audience that we can see on Gitter appears to be Portuguese language or from Brazil. There definitely is a presence there, and it happened pretty early on with the rest of the kind of flood of users during the launch. I think, though, that the obvious difference here is that the Bolsonaros are all still on Twitter and Facebook. So the appeal of a lot of those users is going to be if they were kicked off of those platforms for, you know, whatever they were doing there.

So I don't see, it's not a massive user base right now. I don't see a huge amount of growth unless there is a D-platform. of some kind. Right now, the Bolsonaro's are usually pretty careful about what they say in posts on Facebook or Twitter to not violate terms of service. And they save that for live streams where they'll repeat various kinds of misinformation and be a lot more insulting and explicit. But given that Gitter is starting live streams as well, there is potentially a scenario where you know, Javier Bolsonaro gets too many strikes. and then, say, gets his live streaming privileges revoked or something on Facebook Live.

If he were to then do his weekly live streams on a platform like Getter, that I could see driving a whole ton of engagement. And same for other political figures in other countries. Can we end on just this one thing that we've touched on a few times, but it's worth putting a pin in it, which is the true social, which is the network that Donald Trump is planning to start. I'm surprised to have not seen him on Getter or any other networks. I'm curious what the state of this social network that he wants to build is.

And Claire, you mentioned that the Getter folks wanted to offer him a check of millions of dollars to join. So I guess like, so that's a lot of questions. But let me throw one more in, which is what happens when, you know, if and when he inevitably does join one of these networks. I mean, yeah, truth social is a very, Devin Nunes is apparently its CEO, the former, former congressman from California is supposedly at CEO, but we haven't seen, we haven't heard much from it publicly in the past, I don't know, month or so. So we'll see what happens there. I mean, if Trump gets in the game or joins one of these networks, I do think it is a big bump, but I would. I will say it, I don't think it, like, completely, I don't think it eliminates Twitter or, you know, it's, I mean, I think it's preposterous to think that Twitter won't be the number one kind of like, this is how we interact and talk about politics in America. But I do think it could potentially be, you know, let's say if Trump does join one of those networks, I will say I think the potency of those networks will change probably for the worst. in the sense of like the amplification of misinformation

would be more potent if Trump joined something like that and had fewer, you know, content moderation restrictions, but also, you know, Jason Miller and Trump are good, you know, they're close, right? It's not like Trump is going to be particularly afraid of saying something inciting or inflammatory. So I do think that that is the big worry. And it goes back to these echo changes.

that we have, right? Like, you might not be exposed to the misinformation on this site and the big tech platforms might be happy that all the kind of crazy vaccine misinformation people are gathering on Gitter. But then you do have this problem of like everyone infecting each other over and over again with the same misinformation or the same, you know, potentially violent or untrue things. So I think that's the sort of of the sort of worst case X factor of Trump joining one of these is that he gets in 2022 and then as 2024 presidential campaign ramps up, that it becomes like a bit more virulent, for lack of a better word.

Okay, well, I think that's a, I don't want to say good note to end it on, but it's a note to ended on. So Claire and David, thank you so much for joining. I really enjoyed the story and David you have a white paper I'll link both in the show notes do you guys want to share where people can find you online

if they want to follow your work not if they want to throw in you or anything like that you can do both I guess I'm on well I'm on the New Yorker.com and also on Twitter at Claire Malone that's Claire without an eye

okay great David you can find all of our research at i.o.stanford.edu. I am also on Twitter as elegant underscore wallaby. It's a long story. Oh, great. Great username. Well, I'll have to have you back to tell the story. All right, that's going to do it for us here on Big Technology Podcast. Thanks again to Claire and David.

Thanks to Nate Gwattany for editing and mastering the sound. Thank you to Red Circle for hosting and selling the ads. Thanks to all of you, the listeners, for coming back with you. us and hanging here every week. Appreciate it. We'll see you again next Wednesday with another conversation with a tech insider, outside agitator. Until then, take care.