Daybreak - Daybreak News Wrap: Musk vs Brazil; why we can't trust online news; and Meta's cool new sunglasses

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

In this episode of Daybreak, hosts Snigdha and Rahel try something new — instead of the usual monologue or interview, they cover three of the biggest social media stories from around the world. The first is Brazil's ban on the Elon Musk-owned microblogging platform, X. The feud between Musk and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes traces back to April, when the judge ordered the suspension of dozens of accounts for allegedly spreading disinformation. Musk refused to comply and the row that followed was, well, unhinged. It ultimately led to Musk shutting shop in Brazil and Moraes ordering the local telecom agency to block access to X across the nation of 200 million. A somewhat similar situation arose in India back in 2020, but it unfolded very differently. Next up, host Snigdha dives into a recent study by the International Panel on the Information Environment that flags owners of social media platforms as one of the biggest threats to a trustworthy news environment onlineAnd finally, host Rahel shares some of the biggest announcements from Meta Connect 2024. Spoiler: one was a pair of augmented-reality sunglasses that looked a lot like classic Ray Ban wayfarers, but worked essentially like a mini computer you could wear on your face. Tune in. Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at [phone]. Don't forget to take our egg freezing survey. P.S.  For next Thursday's Unwind, send us your recommendations to us as texts or voice notes. The theme is "favourite murder mystery."If you have feedback on our new news wrap format, please write to us on WhatsApp or send us an email at [e-mail], [e-mail] Check out the story about Starlink, host Rahel mentioned during the episode.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too? It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Ramon Ganesh, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production. Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording.

Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get an alert as soon as we release our first episode, please follow intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. Hello and welcome to yet another special episode of Daybreak. I'm Snigda. And I'm Rahal and every week, Snikda and I come together to talk about something in business and tech that interests the both of us.

Right. But before we start, I just want to let you know that this is not your regular daybreak Friday special episode. Rahil and I are trying something new, so please bear with us. You can think of this as a sort of a weekly news wrap, but better. Right. In this episode, we are going to be filling you in on some of the most important stories related to social media from around the world. We'll go over a recent study that flags owners of social media platforms

as one of the biggest threats to a trustworthy news environment online. Then we'll be talking about some of the biggest announcements that were made during MetaConnect 2024. But we are going to begin with X's ban in Brazil. But before that, we have something to tell you. Conventional wisdom around egg freezing often writes it off as yet another scammy product of the booming fertility industry. But as to women in our early 30s and late 20s, we know things are not that straightforward. But why shouldn't we be able to hack the system and prolong our fertility?

We have a hypothesis. We believe that women opting to freeze their eggs are career-oriented and in their 30s. We also believe that most people who don't want to go through with freezing their eggs opt out of the procedure because it is just too expensive. In an upcoming episode of Daybreak, we want to dive into the real-world complexities that drive a lot of women to opt for procedure like egg freezing. We want to hear from you. Do you agree with our hypothesis? The survey isn't just for women who have undergone the procedure. It's also for those of you

who have considered it at some point in your life. We want to glean from all your experiences and why you make the decisions you make. And of course, it goes without saying that the results of this survey are completely anonymous and confidential. We will reach out to you for more details only with your explicit consent. The link to the survey will be in the show notes of this episode. It'll only take a couple of minutes to fill in. And now, back to the episode. Rahel, do you know what X is called in Brazil? X, I'm assuming, is X, no? No, ma'am. Then, how do you say X? It's... So, in Portuguese, there's... X is very complicated. There's

no letter like that. So, X is basically she's. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So... That's very interesting. I would not... The thing is, uh, apparently, in Brazilian Portuguese, they don't end words with consonants. They end it with vowels. So, for example, TikTok is TikToky. Tiki-talky. Okay, wow. You really learn something new every single day. Sikta, I'm so excited because this is the first segment of our first ever news wrap. Let's get right into it. We are talking about cheese today. Yes. So it's very interesting because, you know, what's been happening to X in Brazil has turned into this very strange sort of a personal battle, you know, for Elon Musk, you know, despite all his unhinged rants and, you know, crazy decisions that he's been known to make, somehow he has emerged as this unlikely, you know, flag bearer of free speech during this whole saga. Right. And, you know, this whole story, right, this ban on X in Brazil. There are a few parallels to be drawn here with,

you know, what happened in India back in 2020. with what was then Twitter. Correct. So, you know, this was the time when the standoff between the government of India and Twitter had sort of reached its peak during the farmer's protests, right? And actually, before we get into that, let's just dive into what is happening in Brazil. For our listeners, some context, on the 30th of August, the Supreme Court of Brazil banned X in the country. And, you know, within us, more than 20 million people lost access to the platform.

Wow. Yeah, that's crazy. Now, even if you forget about this, it's still, it's still very extraordinary because, see, social media platforms being banned in countries is not really something new, right? Right. X is banned in China as well. Exactly. So here, but when it comes to Brazil, we're talking about a country that is known to be one of the biggest users of the internet in the world. Okay. And plus, as Indians, we will sort of relate to this. We are talking about another one of the world's largest. democracies. So, you know, for a whole platform to be banned across the country like this is quite something. Yeah. Yeah. It isn't just about social media or about Twitter. It's much bigger than that. Exactly. But, you know, I spoke to a sociologist who spent the last five years in Brazil. His name is Sebastian Antoine. And he's doing his postdoctoral from the University of Pennsylvania. And here is what he told me. I would not say that X is the most popular social network in Brazil. And this is a country which has a really long history of using those tools since Orkut in the early 2000s

that got a lot of success in Brazil, but not a doll in the rest of the world. And then Facebook, of course. So the mostly used apps today are WhatsApp and then Instagram and TikTok. So even if Twitter X had some kind of expression in the country and not only, for political issues, but also to comment on the last episode of Big Border Brazil, the reality show that everybody is watching there. The most used platform in the country are in the hands of the American meta or Chinese Biden. Okay, but it isn't about that, right?

It isn't about how many people were using Twitter in Brazil. It's so much bigger than that. Because right now, this is a conversation about free speech. It's about censorship, right? conversations that are being had all over the world right now. Those conversations are largely centred around social media. Should you be allowed to say whatever you want on social media? The thing is, Musk is a very controversial figure in this debate.

But he may just have a point here. Snigda, was this really a sudden decision? Not really. You know, it was the culmination of this ongoing standoff which actually started last year between X and Brazil's needs. new left government that came into power in 2003 with the victory of Lula de Silva who's like this very well-known

veteran left-wing politician. Right, it was a huge deal, right? Bolsenaro, of course, the former president, he's often called the Trump of South America. He ended up losing. Yes. I remember all the drama that kind of unfolded during that period.

It was actually quite similar to the storming of the US capital after Trump had lost the 2020 election. There's a lot of parallels to be drawn there. Exactly. I mean, many people say, say that they were actually inspired by the storming of the US capital. But, you know, funnily enough, even that happened in the month of January in 2020.

And this happened in January last year. Bizarz. Bizarre coincidence. Yeah. So basically Bolsonaro lost and him and his supporters, they began spreading this narrative of, you know, the election being rigged, right? And a lot of this conversation was happening on X, you know, and that is when this whole mob of supporters, Bolsonaro supporters,

they kind of attacked government buildings in Brazil's capital. And this was just one week after the new left party with President Lula was inaugurated. Actually, Sebastian told me a little bit about it. So Twitter at the time had a quite interesting position in the Brazilian electoral process almost two years ago because people are basically using those wall of garden kind of social network like Instagram or sharing messages on WhatsApp or through Telegram groups and stuff like that. And so Twitter became some kind of a public arena where people from those different political

position were hitting at each other and creating contents, memes and those kind of stuff that were afterwards we use and shared in a lot of other kind of networks that people are actually using more. So it basically had some kind of coordination position to spread those contents all over Brazil and was quite important in the process of the contestation of the result that brought to the invasion of Brasilia in January 2020. Okay, but what is this ongoing battle, you know, between X and the current government of Brazil? Right. So, you know, after this, whole incident took place.

The Lula government, they came down with a very heavy hand against people, especially people from the right wing who were Bolsonaro supporters, who was spreading misinformation online. And, you know, the man who was tasked with leading this campaign was a Supreme Court judge called Alexander de Morais. And Musk hates him so much. Okay, so this is a name our listeners need to remember for the rest of this segment. Justice Morais.

So it's very funny, you know. he's done so much name calling. You won't believe. Like, he's called him Evil dictator on Twitter, I mean, on X. He's compared him to Lord Waldemort from Harry Potter. Wow.

He's gotten creative here. Yeah. He's been pretty, to be honest, very unhinged. Anyway, so, you know, the Supreme Court, they gave sweeping powers to Justice Moray's

to investigate all the misinformation online and a large part of it meant going after X, right? Because a huge segment of, like I said, Bolshnaro supporters were on the platform. Right.

So then earlier this year, Morais sent an order to X asking it to block certain accounts that were implicated in these investigations of what Morais and Lula and everybody from the left party,

the ruling party, they've been calling them digital militia, you know, and they are accused of spreading lies and half-truths and hate

at the time of Bolsonaro. Okay, let me guess mask didn't take this well. Exactly. You know, so the thing is other platforms were also asked. Other social media platforms were also asked to do the same, like take down accounts and all of that. Most of them complied.

And first actually even X said that it is going to comply, but Elon Musk being Elon Musk, he was like, hey, wait a second. This is an attack on the freedom of expression for the people of Brazil and I am going to fight on their behalf. Okay. So last month, Justice Morais threatened to arrest X's local representative.

So, Elon Musk refused to take down these accounts. And then Morase threatened to arrest this local representative. And then Musk responded saying that X is going to shut down its physical presence in Brazil. That's drastic. Yeah. That is a drastic step. Actually, he kind of, the shutting down thing actually started from him. And then Justice Morase was like, before that, I'm going to do get cute.

You know, and that is when he ordered X to be banned altogether from Brazil. Right, I remember that post Musk put out in April, right? It was all over the news. Actually, I think I have it here. Let me just read it out. Yeah. Okay. We are lifting all restrictions.

This judge has applied massive fines, threatened to arrest our employees and cut off access to X in Brazil. As a result, we will probably lose all our revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office here. but principles matter more than profit. Exactly. Remember, Elon Musk has said this. Principles matter more than profit. But actually, this is also a great time to bring in what happened in India with Twitter, right? This was 2021.

Farmer protests were in full swing. The government was shaken up with the scale of the protest and the kind of support it was receiving, especially online, you remember? Yeah, absolutely, yeah, correct. From around the world, right? I distinctly remember Rihanna tweeted in favor of the... farmers and of course there was a huge who-ha about that. Exactly.

And the, you know, the centre basically asked Twitter to kind of suspend or block, I think, more than 1,000 accounts, if I'm not wrong. Yeah. And basically, the logic was that they are spreading misinformation, they're provoking discontent, you know, all related to the farmers' protests. So quite similar, right, to what happened in Brazil, like take down accounts, the government is telling you, right? But the way Twitter handled it back then in India was so different from what they're doing right now under Musk in Brazil.

So at the time, it reached out, Twitter reached out to the Indian government, the IT minister actually, Ravishankar Prasad, asked for a formal dialogue. Right. Things were a lot more cordial back then, right? It was this proper negotiation, this proper dialogue. And I don't know if you remember this, Stigda, but Twitter was speaking about its concerns over freedom of speech. Yes. Right? It asked to restore some of the... accounts linked to the farmers' protest.

The government then responded that the platform is a quote-unquote intermediary and has to follow the orders of the government. Yeah. Yeah. And the government actually said Twitter cannot become the court, you know, in India. And I think that was the peak of the standoff between Twitter and the government here. Right. There was one more kind of interesting thing happening in the background, right?

This was around the time that coup came up to remember. Yes. It was pretty much a copy paste of Twitter. And I remember so many government officials and politicians kind of endorsing it as the alternate to Twitter. Exactly. And, you know, interestingly enough, who actually shut down just two months ago. Yeah. But again, that's a different story. But in India, Twitter, you know, it did take a stand. It did bring up free speech, concerns about free speech. And also, it did not immediately comply, but comply. It did. You know, the IT rules, the new IT rules. that came into force, they required social media platforms to appoint Indian nationals as representatives, as compliance officer, grievance redressal officer, right? And Twitter did it here in India.

But then look at Brazil. You know, the final nail in the coffin before the ban was literally, like the ban happened because X failed to comply with a court order that asked it to appoint a local legal representative. Right, exactly. Which is why this Brazil's situation is seeming sort of like a personal attack for Marx? That's what. And you know, the thing is he knew this was coming, you know, since April. Like that tweet that you mentioned earlier, right, principles over profit. Brazil is a huge base for X in terms of the number of users, right? More than 20 million. And Musk is willing to put all of that at risk for this.

Right, but I'm curious to know, like, what happens to the 20 million people that were using Twitter in Brazil, right? Is there a new alternative? I read somewhere about how now a lot of Brazilians are going back to using Tumblr. Yeah. Oh my God. Tumblr kind of reminds me of my college days, you know. I used to use it like an online scrapbook. Wow.

But anyway, yes. So a lot of people are switching to different platforms, Tumblr, you know, metals, threads. But the one platform that is actually gaining from this whole situation, quite a lot is Blue Sky. Oh, surprising. Yeah. And the funny part, listeners, is that, you know,

actually Blue Sky was started by Jack Dorsey, who's the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter. So, you know, all the left... And very interesting, right, what is happening. So all the left-leaning politicians are happily moving away to Blue Sky. Actually, I read somewhere that 85% of Blue Sky's new users since August 30th,

since the Ban of X, have come from Brazil. think that this is why you always vouch for the underdog. Right. And, you know, it's also a little bit scary because the right-wing politicians are kind of continuing on X. You know, Bolsonaro supporters at this point, they kind of look at Musk as this hero, you know, and they're all using VPNs to use X.

And it's scary because, you know, imagine social media platforms or, you know, being known based on the user's political leanings. You know, we look at these platforms as democratic spaces, right? And if that changes, that is pretty concerning. Right, right. I actually read how Justice Morayas actually found out about all of this. And he said anyone that's found to be using a VPN is going to be heavily fine.

Yeah, yeah. But also there's a whole another conversation is, you know, actually finding out VPN. and all of that is a very complicated process. So anyway. Also, apparently X has kind of changed its network provider. Recently it did this just last Wednesday. And suddenly, it's very funny. Suddenly, everybody in Brazil was able to access the platform for a short while.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And the judge actually went and imposed like a $900,000 fine on X or something. Yes. It was for this. Yeah. Got it. Yeah.

But, you know, now he's also going after Starlink, you know, Musk's satellite company that kind of brings internet to the most remote places in the world. Exactly. Do you remember that one New York Times story a while ago about how Starlink changed the lives of so many indigenous tribes in Brazil's Amazon? Yeah. It was this life-changing thing for these people. But then, I mean, of course, there's also the other side of the story as well about, you know, the kind of vices that came with it. I will link it to the show notes so our listeners can check it out, read it. Awesome. But you know, I also asked Sebastian if there is a chance that the ban could be revoked, right? And here's what he told me. I don't see a reason why this ban could not be revoked by the Supreme Court. Basically, because Musk already shown sign of stepping back after the way the Brazilian authorities start hitting Starlink with heavy fines linking all those Elon Musk business altogether.

But the question is probably more about the way global source countries, but also the European Union, can make those American companies to implement basic content moderation, especially looking at the way those tools are used in conflicts, like in Sudan or currently in the Middle East. And that's probably why this Brazilian show of strength got the global coverage we know. Okay, but in the larger context, think the governments around the world

have been going after big tech, right? For a bunch of different reasons. Right. But think about it, Rahil. Isn't it fair to a certain extent? Like, you know, the government is like, okay, this is our constitution. You have to follow it.

You know, social media companies need to understand the local situation wherever they operate. And they should adapt accordingly. Right? They can't just like parachute. company into any country and expect everybody to follow the same template, you know?

Right, but the funny thing in all of this, right, willingly or unwillingly, social media platforms are kind of emerging, like they kind of care so much about free speech, right? But the question is, does mask really care about it or is it some sort of, you know, is there an ulterior

motive here? The thing is, we don't know, like, because take the case of India, his standards for India was so different. Yeah. Right? He very clearly, even last year, in fact, Musk himself has said that India's, India has very strict social media regulations and his company is going

to adhere to it. But then look at Brazil. Very different standards. Right? So, that's where things are right now. Interesting. Thanks for that update. You're welcome. And I guess that brings us to the end of this segment.

Also, great time to segue into our next story. It's about a recent study that flagged owners of social media platforms as one of the biggest threats to a trustworthy news environment online. Stay tuned. The International Panel on the Information Environment or IPIE recently came up with a very interesting study. So basically, this is an expert group that is modelled after the UN's intergovernmental panel on climate change. It is a non-governmental organisation and it was launched last year after warning that biased algorithms,

manipulation and misinformation, were a global and existential threat. So IPIE got together more than 400 leading academicians from 66 countries like India, Brazil, Nigeria, China, US and Western Europe for this. And these experts are from all kinds of sectors, computer, data science, engineering, social sciences and humanities. The purpose was to study the degradation of online information available to people from around the world. when IPIE's founder, co-founder Philip Howard, who's a professor of internet studies at the University of Oxford, was talking about this report, he said that the global information environment is at a critical juncture.

And then he went on to highlight the most important finding. And here is what he said in his own words. And I'm quoting, one of the most pressing concerns highlighted by our survey is the influence of social media platform owners. Their control over content distribution and moderation policies significantly impacts the quality and integrity of information. The unchecked power of these entities poses a grave risk to the health of our global information environment. End quote. Now, the report does not directly mention any tech platform owner. But Howard did speak about Elon Musk.

He pointed out how Musk has been known to promote his own tweet. on the platform. And about meta, there was the whole whistleblower case from 2021, if you remember. Her name was Frances Hoggin, and she had revealed a series of confidential documents that became a part of the World Street Journal series called the Facebook Files. These documents brought meta face-to-face with a series of very serious allegations, which included that Facebook knew its products were damaging the mental health of teenagers, and that they were fermenting ethnic violence in common.

countries like Ethiopia, and also they fail to stop misinformation before the January 6th Washington rights. Francis has claimed that Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Meta, Facebook and Instagram, gives lower priority to moderating non-English language content. Also, there is TikTok, right? We all know about the platform and how it has faced multiple allegations of operating under the pressure of the Chinese government. The CEO of TikTok Shao Shi Chu actually came out and said that the owner was not an agent of China or any other country. Meta has also said that it reviews its content on Facebook and Instagram in more than 70 languages. So, in light of all these developments, plus the constant tussle between big tech and national governments,

this is a pretty important report. But again, it's important to remember that it's not just platform owners that this report is raising concerns about. It is also talking about the role of domestic and foreign governments and also political parties in the degradation of the overall global news environment online. And now on to the next segment where Rahal is going to tell you all about the big announcements from the Meta Connect event of 2024. Okay, we can't have a social media themed episode and not talk about MetaConnect. Okay, for the uninitiated, this is Meta's annual developers conference and it's a lot like the Apple WWDC event?

It started this Wednesday. And generally what happens every year is that the company announces all these cool new plans and products that they'll be launching. Now, meta, as we all know, is the big daddy of social media. Right? Like Sikda mentioned in the last segment, it owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. Not to mention, Mark Zuckerberg has been harping on and on about his very futuristic vision of what social media networks can be.

I mean, we've all heard about Metaverse. You know, if you're going to spend time looking at a screen, right, if you were going to do a video call anyway, then, you know, over time I think it'll feel better to just teleport to a place and be there as a photorealistic version of yourself. I think that that'll be pretty powerful. At Metac connect, there were a bunch of different announcements, all centered around Meta's two big ambitions at the moment. The Metaverse, of course, and AI, artificial intelligence. Now, let's unpack some of the biggest announcements, shall we? Starting with one that a lot of people have been waiting for for quite a while now,

Meta finally introduced us to its long-rumored Orion-A-R glasses. It is a completely new kind of display architecture with these tiny projectors and the arms of the glasses that shoot light into waveguides that have nanoscale 3D structures etched into the lenses so they can diffract light and put holograms at different. depths and sizes into the world in front of you. Okay, just to clarify, these are still just a prototype.

They will eventually become the company's first consumer full holographic augmented reality glasses. They look a lot like the classic re-ban, Wayfarer glasses, but they're just a little bit thicker. So it'll be able to track your wrist movements and your eye movements, and it's basically like wearing a mini-computer on your face. Now, you're probably wondering what, What does this do?

Right? Well, it can do a lot of things you can do with a phone. So you can use it to take and make phone calls, video calls, send text message, take photos, videos. You can basically do all these things while interacting with people around you. The tech is really, really fascinating. But can you buy a pair today? Well, no. Again, this is a prototype.

It's going to take meta a couple years to get to a point where it can make them in a more economically sustainable way, right? At the moment, multiple reports say that it costs Meta close to $10,000 to make one pair. And it has to be ready for mass production. They'll have to be able to bring it down to at least $1,000 around that much. Okay, next obvious question. Why is Meta announcing it now? Well, there are multiple theories.

If you ask a meta employee, they'll say it's to create hype around the product. But a lot of people say it's actually because Zuck is trying to make his big comeback after, you know, plowing billions of dollars into building the metaverse, which is still years away from reality. Right? Now let's move on to some other big announcements. Well, Meta launched a new, updated, low-cost version of its Quest 3S virtual reality headset. Meta's also using the Quest 3S to introduce new versions of Instagram, Facebook and YouTube that are better designed for the company's own operating system. It's called Horizon. But the glue holding all of these new features and updates together is Meta AI. Meta actually went ahead and announced a bunch of enhancements,

improvements to its artificial intelligence, which of course is called MetaI. These include bringing a bunch of celebrity voices to the AI assistant. So now it can sound like Aquafina, John Sina or Dame Judy Dench, whatever you choose. I wouldn't mind an AI assistant that sounded like Amita Bacchan, but I guess phone pay beat meta to it. Now, the assistant is of course incorporated across most of Meta's largest apps. So Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook, all of it. All of this goes back to Zuckerberg's vision of what social networks can be

and what is possible right now. The idea is for all these products to enhance your experience when you're using all of Meta's social networking apps. He wants people to make these products useful enough so that they come back to them regularly. In the process, Meta is also taking some risky bets. And now it will eventually start inserting AI-generated posts onto users, Facebook and Instagram feeds.

For a lot of us, we may not want to consume that sort of content. Then there's the fact that, in the past, a lot of meta-AI projects haven't really panned out the way that they had hoped. Right now, as things stand, the company says meta-AI has 400 million users already. What's next? Well, you'll just have to wait and see. Okay, and that's a wrap. Thank you for listening. Please do let us know what you think about this new format.

You can write to us on WhatsApp. We'll add the number to the show notes. Or you can write to us at our email ID, which is podcast at the rate the hyphenken.com. Thank you.