Endless Thread - Snacktime: Mystery Celebs & Fed-Up Mods

Episode Date: August 28, 2021

Ben tells Amory about a subreddit trying to determine the identity of a mystery celebrity, and Amory tells Ben about an open letter penned by Reddit moderators that's calling on the platform to take stronger action against COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation on the platform.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in health care so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the I-Lab at WB-B-U-R, Boston. Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben. Emery, Emery, Emery, Emery, Emery, Amory, Emery. More of a challenge for you. You just admitted that you haven't had coffee yet, so I... I know, you're really... Baby, baby bubble babo-booy. Benny needs a bit of coffee. It's true. I really do need coffee. I'm never too sleepy for a snack.

That's right. That's right. That's going to turn everything around is a snack. We're getting close, though. We're almost departing Snackville. We're on to the full meal any minute. And look, this is going to be, this is going to be, it's not even a, it's like a nibble. It's like you found an almond, a stray almond.

That's how, that's like basically how snacky this is. I know, Emery, you're not. Really an almond gal because water use and things. For you, it'll be a walnut. I love a walnut. I know. I know you do. I'm ready. I'm ready.

Here's your walnut. I don't know anything about this. That's why it's a tiny snack. What I do know is we got a post to our subreddit, suggesting that we discuss this other subreddit. And I think you should look at it with me. Do you have the ability to look at it with me? Sure.

You go to R slash celebrity number six. Okay, got it. Okay. What are we looking at? What do you see? What's the top of this page? What's the imagery? The imagery is it looks like some sort of its drawings of some people, kind of in the style of whoever draws Archer, that animated show Archer.

But there's some people. I see a guy who kind of looks like David Spade on the bottom and like Browell. Bradley Cooper on top. And then there's a woman in the middle who kind of looks, I don't know who she looks like. Okay. Yeah, it's like it's people. Okay.

So I'm going to tell you what this is. This is a subreddit that is dedicated to figuring out who one of these celebrities are. And this image is from wallpaper. This is a wallpaper, I believe. Also fabric curtains owned by a user, Taunza, I think is maybe how you pronounce it, has been attempting to ID everyone on the fabric and has been successful naming all of them other than number six. This is a product sold as, you know, featuring celebrities, I believe, right?

So, supposedly all of the people in this fabric, wallpaper or whatever it is, are celebrities. These are all celebrities. One of them has been identified as Adriana Lima, I think, Victoria's Secret Model. Okay. One of them, Josh Holloway from GQ Magazine's Men of the Year event. Okay. Another one is Jessica Alba. Another is Travis Fimel.

Do these people have anything to do with each other? Great question. I don't really know the answer. And I don't think we know the answer. collective we, it's just a pattern that was picked. Celebrity 7, Ian Summerhalder, known for being on Lost, the TV show Lost. You've maybe heard of it. And then Orlando Bloom is also featured of Lord of the Rings Pirates of the Caribbean fame.

So this fabric apparently came from the Czech Republic. There's a lot of information that has been gathered by the users of this subreddit. And I hope I'm getting it all right so far. I'm just sort of like reading off the Google Doc. They have a shared Google Doc that they're building information on. Information about the fabric curtains. The fabric is roughly 10 years old. So 2008 is a guess for when it was sort of bought sold.

It was originally from a local store in Finland. It's still available online. It's a little bit like our episode Gidas, which if you haven't listened to, go back, take a gander. We did recently rerun it in our feed, so you don't have to go back that far. But this is a mysterious image of celebrity number six. They're in, I would say, a light blue, a turquoise, if you will. Yeah, it's the person in the, it looks like a cargo shirt. Is it that person?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it's got a pocket. I guess I would, if it were not all in this kind of washy blue color, I would guess that it would be like a tan colored safari shirt. Sure. They have sort of like, you know, would you call that shoulder-length hair? Uh-huh. Could be, could a little bit of androgynous, we could say.

I'd agree with that. Yeah. Yeah, it could be a really beautiful. Man. Man. Yeah. I love the spirit of this. This does feel like an only on Reddit sort of thing where someone's like,

look at this thing. And it's the sort of thing where you might show it to a friend in real life. And they might go like, yeah, yeah, I guess that's kind of interesting. But you take it to an environment like Reddit and people are like, oh, my God, what is this? We have to figure it out. Yes. And I love that. I love the spirit of that.

You find your fellow obsessives. Yeah. Some people think it's Olivia Wild. I'm going to shut that down right now. It's not Olivia Wilde. Wow. Jeez. Yeah.

That's a really distinct eyebrow. And Olivia Wilde, like, the structure of her forehead is very different than this one. Other celebrities suggested. Taylor Kitch. I have known, like, one name that you've been listed this whole time. Bridget, Bridget Moineshan. You know of that person? I don't, no.

So our old friendly from the Giedest days, Justin Wang. has made a YouTube video about this. So one can go and watch that. But yeah, I just wanted to surface this because someone out there, one of our listeners, might be able to solve the mystery. Celebrity number six, R slash celebrity number six.

I support you out there. If you find out who it is, you'll probably tell me the name and I'll be like, yeah. But. And then you'll tell me the show they were in and I'll be like, oh, yeah, I love that episode where blah. You know what I mean?

Yeah, I'll be like... The art, I understand, the makers of the art, this is going to guarantee that nobody will ever recognize me because I'm saying this out loud, but that's fine. I'm okay with that. Well, thank you, Ben. This is great. This is definitely up my alley.

Also, I should give a shout out to the user who put this on our subreddit. Thank you, you slash, Darth Molecule. Darth Molecule, it's fair to say, you get us. And we see you and appreciate you. We see you, Darth Molecule. All right, well, let's take a quick break and come back. You got a big story for me that we'll talk about. Reddit involved.

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My story starts with an email that we got to the endless threat account a couple of days ago, at least from when we're recording this. And this email was from someone that we spoke to back in March of 2020. My name is Emerson. I am a virologist and a moderator of the coronavirus subreddit. You remember Emerson, Ben? I do. Coronavirus subreddit, this community that's really tried to be a bastion of facts and resources

and a place to have your questions answered by virologists and experts like Emerson. Because for as long as SARS-CoV-2 has been around, of course, misinformation. and disinformation has been around and spreading on platforms like Reddit. So Emerson says Reddit has lately kind of been sleeping on its own policy handling misinformation and hasn't been taking what she would call serious action against communities where misinformation has been allowed to thrive. A pretty cogent example is that in the very, very beginning, there was a subreddit called Wuhan flu.

after Wuhan flu came a subreddit called No New Normal, which basically contends that they don't want to accept mask wearing as a quote unquote new normal that they should just adjust to. So they are pretty upfront, anti-vaccine, anti-mask, and more so than that, they've been really active in distributing fake vaccination cards and helping people get ivermectin. So, Ben, two things. First, fake vaccination cards. It's terrifying. Second thing, Emerson mentioned,

Ivermectin there. What do you know about ivermectin? You know, look, it's a thing for barn animals that people are ingesting because they're... All right. Let me help you out. Let me help you out. That was not entirely wrong.

It's an anti-parasite drug. So it's not an antiviral. It should not be used for things like coronavirus, as far as we know. And according to the Mississippi State Health Department, at least 70% of calls coming into their poison control center right now are from people who've ingested the Ivermectin meant for livestock. All possibly because of something that they may have heard in a subreddit. So here's Emerson again. There was one called getting Ivermectin that Reddit actually did ban after a constant badgering from the coronavirus moderators.

So eventually people from primarily no new normal, but also these associated subredits, we've had to deal with them the whole time on the coronavirus subreddit, but they started causing problems across the entire website. And Ben Emerson is not exaggerating here when she says that COVID misinformation is spreading across Reddit as a whole. And it started popping up in some surprising places. So one of the subreddits that I moderate is called Aw. It's AWW and it's just for cute pets. It's just for people posting their pets and their animals, stuff like that.

This guy goes by Nate the Great on Reddit. Just call me Nate. Nate's what we call a power mod. So he moderates some of the biggest communities on Reddit, like shower thoughts, picks, gifts, communities that have tens of millions of members in some cases. Yeah, I'm looking at the list right now. It's like all the hits, straight hits, Nate the Great.

So Nate shared an example with me of how. anti-COVID vaccine and anti-mask-wearing sentiments have started leaking their way into subreddits that seem totally unrelated, like this cute animal subreddit. What kicked this off was that someone posted a picture of a, I want to say, like an infant, and they were wearing a mask. This got cross-posted to the anti-mask subreddit, and 150 people brigaded the subreddit. It came into all to start fights. they basically just, you know, stomped on the guy who posted the video. So as this sort of thing keeps happening across different Reddit communities, and we've seen more waves of COVID cases, more variants,

with arguably little to no intervention from the Reddit admins regarding these new hotbeds of information on the site, a lot of moderators have gotten pissed. And Nate says he personally has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to people who post coronavirus misinformation. If I catch an inkling of any kind of misinformation or advocating anything against vaccines, masks, et cetera, they're gone. Gone as in banned from the subreddits that he moderates,

which are, like we said, the big ones. But Nate recently took it a step much further. He's a software developer by trade, and he put his expertise to work and built a bot. Ben, you're a bot man. Remind us what a bot is. Bot man. I want to be a bot man.

A lot of moderators build bots and moderator groups build bots and software developers. Generally build bots in order to perform tasks that are a waste of time for a human and also done more efficiently by a machine. And by a machine, I mean a piece of software. I believe bots can technically ban if you power them the right way. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Because that's exactly what Nate did.

So what I did then is I built a botnet to start automatically banning users from that particular subreddit, even if they hadn't participated in the subreddit I moderate, I banned them just for participating. It's a pre-ban. Exactly. So this is big because he's automatically,

banning people from his subreddits just for belonging to these anti-mask or anti-COVID vaccine communities. Another move made by frustrated moderators just this week, a group of them came together to write an open letter calling on Reddit admins to take action against the misinformation and the disinformation that's infiltrating the site. So basically what we want is for them to simply shut down, not allow the subreddits that are dedicated to spreading and contributing to medical and general overall pandemic misinformation. That's it. The moderators of more than a thousand communities so far have signed this letter, and many of them stickied or pinned it to the top of their subreddit,

so it's more likely to be seen by their users and subsequently the rest of Reddit. I was scrolling last night. I was doing my usual late night scroll, and it was, uh, it was very, it was hard to miss. But Ben, a community that surprisingly has not signed on to this open letter to the Reddit admins, Emerson tells me, is her own community, R slash coronavirus. We chose not to participate in part because having a good source of information is kind of instrumental to directing people against bad information.

we actually kind of in response took a different approach and made a sticky post compiling good resources, how to vet resources, and how to continue to try to get good information in the light of policies like Reddit that don't direct you to it. So what do you think of that approach? I guess what I would say is, yeah, it's tricky.

I would think that you could put something on the coronavirus subreddit that would appropriately thread the needle, but I get the thinking. Well, the moderators got a response to that open letter from the big cheese at Reddit, CEO Steve Huffman, who's known on the platform as SPES. And it's long, but the company's approach to handling all things COVID-19 can be boiled down basically to this excerpt.

He says, we believe it is best to enable communities to engage in debate and dissent, and for us to link to the CDC wherever appropriate. While we believe the CDC is the best and most up-to-date source of information regarding COVID-19, disagreeing with them is not against our policies. So here's what Nate said to that. I read it several times. I'm not happy. What they said was basically people are allowed to have their other opinions. And that's great. I agree with them on that. You know, if you want to put pineapple on your pizza, if you want to wear Velcro shoes, if you want dye your hair, polka dots. That's great. But whether or not medicine is effective, whether or not

vaccines, masks, all that stuff is effective, that's not an opinion. So what options does this leave moderators like Nate the Great with? And one thing they could do is engage Operation Amy Knight, which is my term, not theirs, referring to a controversial UK politician turned Reddit employee who was fired after moderators discovered that the site was censoring negative information posted about her on Reddit. And when they uncovered this back in March, a bunch of really popular subreddits went dark, meaning the moderators set their communities to private so they couldn't be accessed. It makes it look like the subreddit doesn't exist anymore, like a store just locking their door and saying we're closed, go home. Which drove down traffic on Reddit in a big way, and that protest got resolved.

from the admins. So the question in my mind is, will this group of FedUp moderators try the same thing here? Basically, turn off their subredits, rendering Reddit as a whole, effectively no fun or useless for the tens of millions of people who congregate in the subreddits that power mods like Nate the Great oversee. I ask Nate what the plan is from here. He said he was not at liberty to share that information just yet. but at the end of the day, Reddit admins hold the keys to the castle. And if Reddit users and moderators try to beat Reddit at its own game via user banning and blackouts, the Reddit admins can just change the rules. Are you personally concerned about getting banned from Reddit? If my account gets deleted, it gets deleted.

I think it'll turn me into a martyr, though, if it happens. With Spez's response yesterday, I think he fanned the flames. A lot of people are even angry or not. now than they were before. So you can hear the passion in Nate's voice through all of this, and he told me that some of that comes from the fact that he has family members who are immunocompromised. But for Emerson, the mod of the coronavirus subreddit, this perceived snub from the admins feels personal to her for a totally different reason. Yeah, I don't know how to even put the frustration into words. In addition to being a virologist, I research SARS-CoV-2. So I go into

work and I put a respirator on and I have my hands in that big hood. I look like one of those people from the movies. And I come home and I get on Reddit and I'm just another redditor. And as far as I can tell, if I can identify something as misinformation, that doesn't seem to matter. Okay, Ben, thoughts, hopes, feelings on how this will all play out? You know, I mean, there's never a dull moment on Reddit. That's why we spend so much of our time there. I think at the end of the day, there's always going to be a tug of war between moderators who can control their subreddit communities and the users that just interact in those communities. And also between administrators of Reddit who can control the whole platform, I think it's important to point out that even on Reddit, some of this brigading

stuff that's happening, it's literally state actors directing people to mess with America. That's a thing that's also happening. So I think, like, as a user, you have to remember, and even as a moderator, you have to remember that, like, some of this chaos is organized, and it's purposeful. The moderators have to keep that in mind, and the administrators do, too. As Nate and Emerson have said, like, if this stuff is allowed to continue, it really does actually remove the reason for being of Reddit. At what point do you say, like, You know, screw this. I'm going to go somewhere else. I'm going to try to build this somewhere else with different rules. Or at one point, do you just say, all right, we give up again, and we're just going to keep trying to do what we do because we don't want to lose the community that we've built here. Like, if there is an ultimatum to be whipped out here, who's going to do it first and what's it going to be? No idea. And I'm glad that I don't have to figure it out.

Same. Same. All we have to figure out is almonds versus walnuts. What's it going to be? Walnuts every time if you're Amory. But every once in a while, you dabble out in almond land if you're Ben. All right. Well, that is it for this week.

And as we mentioned earlier, we're going to be back soon. Stay safe out there on Reddit and in the world in the meantime. Don't put any barn animal stuff in. to your body unless you're a barn animal or you've been hanging out with them. Great idea.