On with Kara Swisher - Alexis Ohanian and Deb Roy on Big Tech’s Effects on Democracy

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

Democracy is challenged, at home and abroad, and at least some of this blame falls on “Big Tech.” Kara talks to Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder and venture capitalist, and Deb Roy, the director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, about how we got here and what some potential solutions are. Stick around after the interview to hear Kara and Nayeema discuss the ethics of stapling bread to trees. This episode was recorded live at the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute for Democracy’s Democracy 360 event on October 17th. Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on social media. We’re on Instagram/Threads as @karaswisher and @nayeemaraza Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees, and it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer.

Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Hi everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Naima Raza. Today, we're going to be talking about big tech's effect on democracy. Yeah. That was the topic of this conversation with Alexis Ohanian and Deb Roy, which was recorded live last week at an event by UVA's Karsh Institute for Democracy.

How do you get roped into it, Kara? Well, I know Evan Smith, who runs it, who's helped run it with them. Evan Smith, previously of Texas Tribune fame. Yeah, he's been working on it and a bunch of other people there. And Alexis Ohanian and I have gone back a long way and talked about this issue for, I would say, decades. And obviously, Deb Roy from MIT, who's been studying this for a long time, and obviously, things have degenerated. So I thought it was a good time to do this. Well, let's chat about our guests. The first one is Alexis Ohanian.

He's most famous, of course, for being Serena Williams' husband. No, he's not. I'm kidding. He is a noted startup founder, most famously for Reddit, which he co-founded in the year 2005. And these days, he's mostly investing under 776 Capital and 776 Foundation. I would venture that he made it to a chapter in your book called People I Like. He didn't, but he is someone I like. No, I can't list all of them. But he's a really interesting person. And he's changed and morphed over the time period, which I appreciate, as he's seen things. And he left Reddit. He also is someone who I think has been very thoughtful about where everything's going.

And he's someone that you've interviewed a bunch, I think, over the years. Many years, many times, many years, when he was much younger, when he started the company, I think when they sold it, or a piece of it. And so, you know, and I've interviewed all the different CEOs, including Ellen Pau, and now Steve Huffman, who was one of the other founders. So I've been following Reddit. They've had a really interesting journey, a much smaller social media site, much more controversial originally, sort of had was the original problem on the Internet because of racists and other other tropes. And then the Donald Trump phenomenon in the 2016 election, they came under immense scrutiny and they cleaned up the house a little bit under Ellen Powell. It's hard to clean up

that house a lot, but I have to say they've taken a stand where others have not with a lot less resources and still controversial. There's still all kinds of things happening with its moderators who are unpaid. It's just a really interesting conversation community, and it's one of the original ones. And so they've struggled over the years, but also have been thoughtful. Again, not perfect, but it's definitely evolved over time. And I like to talk to them because they're very honest, as opposed to other companies like Facebook or others who try to shave things off of a very difficult situation. Our second guest is Deb Roy. He's a professor at MIT where he leads their Center for Constructive Communication. His work really

focuses on understanding machine learning, algorithms, and how all of that impacts the conversations we are having online and how we engage with each other. He's trying to put all of that in practice and the CEO of Cortico. This is this conversation platform he's co-founded with the intent of bringing, quote, unheard voices to the center of stronger civic spaces. Yeah. He went out and actually talked to real people about talking. He went to the West and he went across the country trying to have conversations in person and then was trying to mimic them online. Like, how do you do that? I think he has a lot of concepts that I think are very smart, the idea that you shouldn't talk about facts and opinions, you should talk about personal

experiences. And so he was trying to bring what was physical into digital, which is more difficult. Yeah. He recently had this Atlantic article, the internet could be so good, really. As the headline suggests, it was really a plea to kind of get away from the spectacle and entertainment of our current social media. And he wanted to build a more, I guess, benevolent model. He outlines a vision where you're actually rewarding listening. And he kind of muses that maybe it could even be publicly funded or a nonprofit model and some alternative to ad-supported social media. What do you think of that vision? I think it's interesting. I don't think it's possible. I agree the internet could have been

a great place and it's not. It's degenerated to the worst of our basest impulses. And you see that everywhere, no matter where, whatever the topic happens to be. And so I think it's quite difficult because it also has a business model that encourages what's happening, which is enragement. The non-profit or publicly funded bit he threw into that article in The Atlantic, it reminded me of Naomi Klein talking about how the BBC, why couldn't the BBC be moderating something like Twitter? Like Naomi Klein, Deb Roy is Canadian. Yeah, maybe they want a better way. But they have a point.

This was the original sin of the Internet, and a better way. But, you know, they have a point. This was the original sin of the internet. And I think most people agree, including Alexis, is that it was an advertising-based medium and then run by people who had no accountability and had shareholders in mind. And so that's one of the things. I don't think this is possible at this point. Although, you know, one of the only things is young people aren't doing this stuff except in a way. So maybe it'll just die. Part of it is that it taps into our psyches and this deep part of human nature, right? The Internet unleashes something.

It's not just the business model that's broken. I think they changed the construction of it so that it encouraged this. And so when you're at a school board meeting now, it degenerates. When you're in public, when you're at any San Francisco meeting, it degenerates. That's been going on for decades. But I think when you're in conversation with real people in real time, I think it is much better. They're typically much better conversations. So it's a question of whether you can move that to online or not.

All right. Speaking of conversations, let's take a quick break and we'll be back in conversation with Alexis Ohanian and Deb Roy, taped live at the Paramount Theater in Charlottesville. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore.

That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore. That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists. And they're making bank. Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion. It's mind-blowing to see the kind of infrastructure that's been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scam centers all around the world.

These are very savvy business people. These are organized criminal rings. And so once we understand the magnitude of this problem, we can protect people better. One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam victims sometimes feel too ashamed to discuss what happened to them. But Ian says one of our best defenses is simple. We need to talk to each other. We need to have those awkward conversations around what do you do if you have text messages you don't recognize? What do you do if you start getting asked to send information that's more sensitive?

Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness, a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim. And we have these conversations all the time. So we are all at risk and we all need to work together to protect each other. Learn more about how to protect yourself at vox.com slash zelle. And when using digital payment platforms, remember to only send money to people you know and trust. It is over. Thank you. Let's start talking about what's happening now, because I think it's a perfect

example of misinformation and disinformation. And I want to start with that because this is a big moment again where social media has failed us, where it's worrisome. It has real world impacts. Let's start with you, Alexis, having started Reddit. ALEXIS MOUSSINE- It's my fault. It's your fault.

Well, I don't blame you for everything, but just some of it. Talk a little bit about where you see us now, because it doesn't feel like a lot has progressed and it's still problematic. Yeah, yeah. It really, hopefully you all know, three years ago, I resigned pretty publicly in protest from the board of Reddit.

I had some differences of opinion on moderation and wanted to crack down on communities about violence and hate. The good news is the company did a a month later, ban those communities, replacement of the director of color, did those things. And I think it has gotten demonstrably better, as well as better for the business, which shouldn't surprise anyone since. But yes, the genie that social media opened up, especially in the context of this war going on right now, it is bringing out,

it has gamified the worst parts of our nature in many ways. And I think we're now in this state where even the most storied journalists, I grew up, the New York Times is an important newspaper in our household, are rushing to compete with user-generated content. Indeed. And there's business reasons for it. There's human nature reasons. I remember in 2005, starting Reddit, sitting in the offices of the New York Times, the friend of mine who was a journalist, and one of her peers came over very excited because her article had just hit, I think it was top five most emailed articles, right? We have something about us, and this is not to say, it's not an integrity thing, it's just, it's humans. We like winning, we like these leaderboards.

And if I could see it in 2005 when it was just, hey, I made the top five emailed stories of the day list, now there's so much pressure to be first, and UGC, user generated content will always win. It won't always be right though, but it becomes the epicenter of where the conversation is. And then I'll think what percentage of our population

really wants to earnestly take the breath and say, let me stop doom scrolling and let me just wait until people can do the work synthesize it and then help me react yes because we've all been so trained and conditioned now to just get the likes get the retweets get the upvotes and i do think last part of my monologue the way people talked about media and storytelling during the vietnam war and how you know that war was on the news every night and it brought it into Americans' living rooms. I think this is going to,

this feels like that turning point in our consciousness when we realize, my God, like we are so plugged in to all of these storylines, whether it's from traditional media, whether it's from user-generated, someone on their phone, you know, posting to a Telegram group, we are overwhelmed and overloaded.

And it's unfortunately appealing to the worst parts of a lot of our instincts. It's not just that, it's monetization. Deb, talk a little bit about this in your article. Tell them the title of your article. It changed a couple of times. Oh, okay. What was the one that ended up that? The internet could actually be good, really. The internet could actually be good, really.

I completely agree with you. Many years ago, when I was interviewing Steve Jobs, he was like, I'd like it to be Star Trek. And I said, and it's turned out to be Star Wars, which is a very different viewpoint. Star Trek, everybody comes together. It's diverse. They take villains and make them better. Star Wars, the bad guy tends to win quite a bit. And I thought about that, like the way it turned. So talk a little bit about this, because what's happening now in this conflict is people are actually making money by doing inaccurate and putting up the most repulsive videos,

the most inaccurate videos. They're getting monetized for it on X, I'm going to call it Twitter, I don't care. I don't care what he wants to call it. It's called Twitter. Later he's going to tell us what the original name of Reddit was going to be. I'm also calling Meta Facebook. I don't care either. I don't care what they do. But it's monetizable. You talked a little bit about this. Is the original sin most people feel was advertising? Yeah. And if you go back, so let's call it Facebook and Twitter, we all originally

learned that these were social networks. And at some point, if you think about it, we learned that it's actually social media, not social networks. That changed just in our language. If you think about why we changed gears, it was because these two companies in particular figured out a business model by just adopting the media model. And so, yes, that came with advertising, and you could now with X also try to do subscription. But the basic idea of the media model is a broadcast model. And so back to competition, one way to talk about winning is being first. but the basic idea of the media model is a broadcast model.

And so back to competition, one way to talk about winning is being first. Another is to build the biggest audience. There's nothing wrong with building an audience, but if that is your only way to communicate, you're going to transform from a social network to social media where now the point of the platform shifts fundamentally from connection between people at a social level to some people emerging and having a platform, having an audience, and then you take away all of the gatekeepers and incentivize certain kinds of behavior,

even if it's not purposeful, where the fact that disinformation wins in terms of capturing attention, in some ways is just a byproduct. It wasn't the intention necessarily of the people designing the platforms. Right. Although in some ways you think, what did they think was going to happen? Honestly, I'm not sure that... I don't think they thought at all. I'll be honest, I was there.

They didn't think at all. And I've had conversations with Tim Berners-Lee, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, thinking about what would be the consequences at scale of the World Wide Web. This is the creator of the World Wide Web. And there was, in general, an assumption that with more connection, we come together. It seems actually pretty intuitive. Sure. The possibility- The Star Trek version.

The possibility that with more connection, we could actually come apart is pretty counterintuitive. Sure. The possibility- The Star Trek version. The possibility that with more connection we can actually come apart is pretty counterintuitive. But if you take the media model, sandwich it in a social network, you get this completely new, it's not the media industry anymore, it's something transformed, far more powerful in many ways, but where provocative, extreme points of view, strong opinions just tend to get the most traction. We're going to talk a little bit about that in a second, but when you were starting Reddit, what was that? You were the free-speechiest free-speecher I met of all of them. Really? Yeah. Are you sure it was me? Completely sure. You were the free speechiest free speecher I met of all of them.

Really? Yeah. Are you sure it was me? Completely sure. Okay. I think, I certainly can't speak for Zuck or Jack or any of those other folks. 2005, I'm an undergrad at UVA and the only reason I started a startup was because I walked out of the LSAT and knew I didn't want to be a lawyer.

Okay. I stumbled into Reddit in part because I ran a PHP BB forum in college. And it was like 600 people. And it was a fun, vibrant community. And I always felt online community was as real as offline. Because that's how i learned to program when i was a dorky kid in my parents basement because strangers on the internet would help right i was in a quake 2 clan and playing video game collaborative video games with strangers

on the internet i i believed in that and really did not even conceive of reddit potentially being a multi-billion dollar business or having hundreds of millions of users because it was so ludicrous, hard to believe. But in 2005, no one wanted to start a startup. It was the least interesting thing you could possibly do. And so the idea that this thing that everyone is telling you is a terrible idea could be so successful it would affect elections and democracies, was, it was ludicrous. So I genuinely had no expectation

that it could be that successful, for better and for worse. So, but did you think about implications of democracy? I mean, this is what this topic is. No. I mean, imagine that, right? Like most people I met when I told them the story of Reddit, smart, well-informed media people, told me one, no one will ever care what random people on the internet think. And two, that sounds like a terrible idea, but good luck.

So the idea that I could go from that feedback from experts to then think, my God, I'm going to be so successful. It could have a tremendous impact on democracy, would take a level of delusion that even I as a first-time CEO, just couldn't have. Right? It just, it was literally not even on the radar. And was that a blind spot? Absolutely. And it's one that I think we will see play out, and I hope in the best ways.

I've certainly, since resigning, tried to make a very good faith effort to, you know, put my energy and my platform to having a good story for my kids when they grow up. Um, but the one thing that has been illuminated for me, like even this university is a product of the enlightenment, which is only a few hundred years old as a species. We have understood truth way, way longer as being what the people sitting next to me around the campfire say is true, because we've broken bread or we've shed blood together or we've had kids together. Like the ability to scale ideas and the idea of trusting an abstract institution is actually

a really foreign concept for us as human beings. And so the part that I am coming more to terms with is, as we now have all these collisions, it's not, okay, it's unreasonable to me and probably for all of us here to think that there's a community of thriving people who believe the earth is flat. There's a few on Reddit. That's pretty big. There's millions. But go ahead. Sure. In 2023, millions of people who believe the world is flat.

And we sit here thinking that is crazy, but these people earnestly, seriously believe it. And when you ask them why, they go back to the same fundamental principles our species believe, which is this person I trust, these YouTube channels, these people who I believe in, they think it's true and I trust them. And I actually think from first principles, it's a wonderful miracle we were able to get to a place where we could just trust an institution to say that this is what experts think. I think that's helped a lot of amazing things. Believe me, I love those things. I just now worry about this next phase because all of those institutions have been shaken. And the part that actually appeals to us as a homo sapien is now readily available on the internet

to revalidate whatever things. Yeah, and they are real. I did think it was a great idea because I saw it happening at AOL on a big basis where people would meet online and then form good communities in some cases.

Quilters particularly, they had met online, they had created a quilt, a big AOL logo. then they went to AOL headquarters when I was there and presented it to Steve Case and they were friends and never met. And it was such a transformative moment for me and they relied, and this was quilting,

so it was, it would later turn into a white supremacy group, but no, I'm kidding. But they sure made nice quilts. But it was really, I'm kidding. But they sure made nice quilts. But it was really, I remember, I was like, oh yeah, of course, this is the way it's going. And at the same time, and Deb, I'd love you to talk about this, part of it is good. That's the part you're talking about in this article

that you could form. I do wanna talk about the problems, but you feel like it could have gone a different way, that it would be more community-based, that it could be this face-to-face interaction, even though some community things lately, especially town meetings, have devolved into the internet now. Yeah, I think scale is really important, and there's different ways to achieve scale. I mean, most of what we know, just going back to what you're saying, that we know and trust, we don't have the expertise or the direct ability to verify ourselves. So if trust decays, everything falls apart.

So having small scale networks, that's one of the things that I talked about in the article. Explain what that would mean. I went to towns. We got out of Cambridge and went to parts of rural America, and it was very difficult, actually, to get the meetings with community leaders in some of these small towns to just sit down and have a conversation about what's the view of, you know, in this town as it relates to the media environment in your state. We were in places in upstate in Iowa, in Wisconsin.

And I had come off of doing a project with colleagues at MIT and studying the view from Twitter of the 2016 presidential election. And what we found was, although we had literally access to the fire hose, we were analyzing billions of tweets. We were seeing a very fragmented graph, a social graph of people who are hardly talking to each other. And when we were pressed for insights into why people were tweeting the way they were, voting the way they were,

voting the way they were, pretty limited insights for large swaths of voters that were different. So they were missing. So Twitter isn't real life. Incredible. They were missing or they were, it was this polarized extreme view where much of the nuance of what were actually going on in people's lives lives we sure as heck couldn't tell from looking at tweets and so that led us to try to get out of Cambridge which has its political biases and get into other parts other communities around the country and it was extraordinarily difficult to convince people to actually spend time with us right and finding intermediaries that trusted us,

that could get folks from some of these towns together. But what you found was that in-person discussions worked well. And it doesn't take much to just explain a little bit of why you're having the conversation, some prompts to open up a conversation. One of the things we've learned now over the years, when it's a hot topic, don't ask people for their opinions. And facts actually don't help either if you're trying to establish some common ground. Instead, ask, what is your experience as it relates to this issue? And if you draw from your own personal experience, it turns out, this is known in a lot of science recently, that

empathy, trust, respect, they all go up when you hear someone, even where it's obvious you don't agree with their point of view, because you can tell from the story they're sharing. The fact that they're sharing authentically what they've experienced, all of those kind of- Translating it, I get that completely,

because I have the weirdest relationship with Ken Buck that I've never imagined. I couldn't agree with him less on everything. And we have a very good relation because we started talking about personal experiences around internet stuff. So I get how that works, but translating it online...

So, you know... Because people behave differently, whether they're anonymous, which I think has always been a bane of these things, although sometimes it's a good thing. And they just seem to lose their... I mean, Elon Musk is example one of losing your mind because of online discourse. So this is again where this idea of scale and having, when you have a small group and it's a private space and there is some common experience or pre-existing trust, that's the perfect conditions.

So like an airlock, you step into it and you can have a very different kind of conversation. It's not performative, it can be authentic. The question is, how do you then build scalable networks where some of what is said in that safe, trusted space can actually be brought out and heard by others? Because if you can't do that, we end up totally fractured. You end up with either trolling or feeling too embarrassed to say things, right? Right. And you have the real conversations in private.

But where's the public conversation? Where's in private, but where's the public conversation? Where's the public discourse? Where's the public sphere? If you don't have one, or if it's left to whoever wins the game of broadcast, basically, where there's very few rules of what you can broadcast, social media, in other words, that becomes our public sphere. So I think finding ways to create networks of different sizes that are connected, where it's under the consent of people who create them to decide which parts of what I share am I. Well, that was the premise, Alexis, of Reddit for a point, but it did get out of it. Like, what do you think happens when people are near each other and looking at each other, they tend to be nicer.

That makes sense in lots of ways. How did it develop there? And how did you watch it happen? So on the plus side, the power of pseudonymity. So I agree with you on anonymity, where there's no accountability. Pseudonymity, where you have a username, fluffybunny12, not my username, but- I'll bet. That is powerful. He's fluffybunny13, but go ahead. You know me too well.

The problem that it solves is now you have some notion of identity and accountability. And so if you say dumb things, you are punished because even though it's not your government name, it's a pseudonym. That I believe in. It is strong. It is real. And it allows people to open up and be more authentic and honest. And the best parts of that behavior, let people from all over the world come online and finally be their authentic self because they're not trying to show how perfect their life is on Instagram. They're trying to talk about how they're struggling with their marriage

or substance abuse or things that you're not going to go when you're trying to talk about when you're trying to score internet points, but are really important reasons to connect. Or maybe it's silly. Maybe like stapling bread to trees, which is a Reddit community. Like, fine. It doesn't hurt anyone. You staple bread on trees.

Good luck. Shout out to our ASL interpreter doing an amazing job to describe stapling bread to trees. But so that's the best part of it. And, but the problem happens at scale, to your point, once you start talking about tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of people, I think part of the reason we are so nostalgic

about that OG sort of early internet is in part because there were fewer people on it. Right. And there was a higher threshold of whatnot to just get on and participate. And so on the one hand, as a product builder, I'm happy that more people now have access, right? I don't like the idea that the internet that I'm so nostalgic for was actually an ivory

tower. But now that we have more people have access, I have to live where we all have to deal with the sort of consequences of now being exposed in real time to people that we couldn't have even fathomed sitting around the campfire with. Again, as a species, this is a collision. We've been hardwired for what, hundreds of thousands of years to not expect to meet many people that we wouldn't see every day, right? Because we couldn't get on a plane. And chances are, if we saw someone who's

pretty different from us, we'd probably be going to fight them for something. So I want to be an optimist about it. And I think there is still a path forward, but we're fighting against very, very strong human instincts. If we can solve it, it will do so much good. It really, really will, because we will find out we have more in common than not. Bourdain, I know you can't scale the Anthony Bourdain experience, but one of the most compelling things about that show was the fact that he understood and communicated so well that if you broke bread with someone anywhere in the world, there was a common humanity and an ability to relate that I thought he communicated so well with no reservations. But it's that energy that I wish we could put on people's smartphones. I was just going to add to that, that when you think about designing networks that do have scale, but actually address some of the lessons we've basically learned over the last

20 years. There's a wonderful book called The Pattern Language. It was a group of architects, and they spent about a decade studying our built environments to look for design patterns that seemed to correlate with human flourishing. It's like a design guide with a set of a couple hundred patterns. So one of them is called the intimacy gradient, and the reason I mention this is it's a way that we think about taking lessons from the physical environment where we're structuring how we live and interact and how we can bring that into the world of networks.

So the idea of the intimacy gradient is any well-designed space, it could be a home, it could be an office, actually has a gradient of spaces that go from more public and accessible to the most private inner sanctum. And it's not just binary. So if you think about your home, you would have the living room and then the kitchen and then the bedroom, right? And maybe even the porch and then the front yard. In general, across cultures, if you look at architectural design, there's some notion of this kind of gradients and thresholds, well-marked thresholds. And when you get rid of them, people feel uneasy. There's some, you know, the same thing happens in a work environment, an office.

You've got a lobby, you've got conference rooms, you've got private offices. If you don't have the mark thresholds and the ability to move between things to fall apart, you just say let's just open it all up. Which is what's happened. And so if you think about that metaphor and let's go back to Facebook or Twitter, Facebook's actually the perfect example. Whatever the intimacy gradient was, it kept changing, right? Because there was actually something else that the company was optimizing for. They're optimizing for how long you'd stay on platform. Okay, we've got to break up these social networks. We've got to bring content that you didn't

even know you were interested in because it'll keep you on the platform. So as a network architecture, there were just, there was no intimacy gradient. In some ways, the easiest thing to find were kind of the equivalent of people's bedrooms, the kind of individual users, right? We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from Constant Contact. You know what's not easy? Marketing. And when you're starting your small business,

while you're so focused on the day-to-day, the personnel, and the finances, marketing is the last thing on your mind. But if customers don't know about you, the rest of it doesn't really matter. Luckily, there's Constant Contact. Constant Contact's award-winning marketing platform can help your businesses stand out, stay top of mind, and see big results. Sell more, raise more, and build more genuine relationships

with your audience through a suite of digital marketing tools made to fast-track your growth. With Constant Contact, you can get email marketing that helps you create and send the perfect email to every customer and create, promote, and manage your events with ease, all in one place. Get all the automation, integration, and reporting tools that get your marketing running seamlessly, all backed by Constant Contact's expert live customer support.

Ready, set, grow. Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca One of the issues is that they call it a public square, and it's not a public square. It's a private square owned by the richest people on Earth who have their own little quirks about what they find interesting and have thoughts on things and make decisions they're entirely incapable of making, but don't think they are, and do it anyway or else they don't care.

And I'll give you two examples. One was when I was talking to Larry Page about the Google News, which they just laid off people today, which was interesting. And he was arguing with me that the New York Times, whatever you think of it, it's a good news institution, and some guy who's blogging are the same and we should present them the same. And I was like, you're crazy, it's not.

You can't verify that, you can't do this. And he was like, well, let people decide. That's what he, he literally said it just like that. He had some thoughts on IP that weren't quite good either. But that was one. And then the second was when I was arguing with, I'm always arguing with someone, about it being a public square and not a private square,

I think it was Mark Zuckerberg, actually, we were having an interview, and we were talking about Alex Jones. And I was like, why haven't you kicked this guy off? First of all, he's loathsome. Second of all, he's broken every one of your rules. And so why do you have rules at all if you're not going to enforce them?

And he said, in a mistake of his, one of his many mistakes of his life, said, let's talk about the Holocaust. And I was like, oh, all right, if you insist. And he started talking about it and said, Holocaust deniers, in the end, don't mean to lie. That's what he said. And I kept thinking he really should have finished that history course at Harvard. But OK.

And having been a propaganda studies major, I was like, oh, OK, all right. And just let him put it out because he didn't know what he was talking about. And then two years later, he came to the same conclusion i was handing him and blocked them and then got into trouble for that because then he had gotten people so used to not pulling things down that pulling things down was a problem same thing around trump so talk a little bit alexis about the power of these people who are wholly inadequate to the task well i guess as a former one of those people, or maybe I still am wholly inadequate,

but I don't have the power. You did better than most, but it's a low bar. But go ahead. I appreciate that. I agree. I use the metaphor of like the Javits Center, where an infinite Javits Center, which is a horrible, but if you've been to any conference or convention in New York,

you've been in a horrible space. But infinite conference rooms, right? And if i run and own and operate the javits center i'm implicitly saying like yeah pokemon convention cool your community can meet up here kkk you can wait no actually because all of a sudden nathan's hot dogs is like yo we don't want to do business here and you make a decision as a business owner your times the the public square one also falls flat because if that then implies that it's a public square, which means like what a town or a city,

if you're the person in charge of it, you're the mayor, but there's no democratic election, you're a CEO. So then you're like the king. So like, if you want to lean into the town square thing, fine, just own it and say, yeah, it's a town square and I am the infinite dictator and tyrant of it. And so anyway, the metaphors get messy. I do agree on the principle. And I

think at the end of the day, it was, it took too long to make those hard decisions because I think a lot of us, I'll just speak for myself, we really believe that in the long run, sunlight is the best disinfectant. And I'll tell you, actually, UVA story, I've never shared this publicly. So I'm Armenian. I grew up hearing the stories from my family in graphic detail of the rapes

on the death marches of my family, of parents being beheaded. This is during the Armenian genocide. It was 100 years ago. The country that did it, Turkey, still to this day, denies it ever happened. But I took for granted that the Armenian Genocide was a historical fact, because it was, it is.

And UVA was where I first met a very sweet Turkish student who was in my German class, and we got to talking, and she was like, oh, you know, that didn't actually happen. And I looked at her, and I was like, wait, no, you're at UVA. Like, no, no, no, I've heard stories of Turkish people who deny this existence, but you're educated, you're here. And she calmly explained to me why it had never happened. And it was such an eye-opening experience. And even in that moment, I thought, wow, like, okay, I'm learning. And as And in that moment, I thought, wow, like, OK, I'm learning. And as these stories started to pop up with Reddit scale, again, there was an r slash turkey community.

So you'd start to see this same energy bubble up now on a platform that I had created. And I think at first, I really also believed that same idea, that over time, more speech would be the thing to combat it. But just like, I mean, we were in German class together for another two years, three years. I did my best, but I could not convince her. A living descendant survivor of genocide survivors could not convince her that that experience was real, not to mention

all the historical evidence. And again, I think I was still naive to think that, okay, we're in this enlightened age, information is everywhere, and they'll find it with enough truth. And now we encounter a world where most of the content we're going to end up seeing is either somewhat or fully AI generated in the years to come. And I worry that it will become even harder for truth to win in the long run if we don't do anything about it. So when you have these unaccountable, unelected kings, which is precisely correct, who are being licked up and down by people all day long. And you know all about that. Well, just saying. You know what I'm talking about, how difficult it is to resist. They live in increasingly small bubbles with increasing

power. What can be done about that? Because you talk about creating these new network communities, these other it just doesn't happen because of the convenience factor because everybody is either and the new ai stuff is all owned by the same people or the same groups of people there's some new players and they're more thoughtful i would say sam altman is much more thoughtful and at least talks about some of the problems, which they never did. We'll see if he means it. I think he does, but we'll see if he has control of it.

Deb, first, what can be done when you have this big tech that is unaccountable, is the most powerful, has lobbied out any kind of regulation? Every, you know, Amy Klobuchar had a series of bills that were just decimated. Every month she'd call me. I'm like, she goes, I'm going to get it through this month. I'm like, no, you're not. And she didn't because they spent $110 million to stop her. Same thing's going on right now with Lena Kahn at the FTC. There's a Justice Department thing.

They don't have as many people. To say that U.S. government is not strong enough to this group I don't say that lightly but they're not Europe has tried a little harder but it's not as effective at this these are mostly US companies in many ways what should be done then we can't rely on the kindness of Mark Zuckerberg no we can't very nice person by the way he's not the worst. Yeah, and... Low bar. This has to come from us.

And I know that's a little cliche that, you know, we the people. But I do see, you know, it's how old is the World Wide Web and everything that's built on top of it, Reddit and all these. Roughly a human generation. So that's how long it takes to actually learn lessons of what we have actually created. And of course, there's a lot of, you know, we're talking about the positive side of social media, of the internet, that's there. We don't want to lose that. But we have learned a set of lessons. And I think the growing awareness,

I spent a lot of time, we're designing a social network that's a mobile app. We've been designing with high school age youth. And one of the subtexts as we spend time with, you know, these are 15 year olds, 16 year olds, they know something's wrong. Right? They sense it. My sons do, certainly.

And so the kind of latent demand for something different, I think, is there. It's taken us a while to figure out something's wrong. And I think having the imagination to build alternatives, and I'm not looking for regulation to solve this. I'm not looking for the handful of people... Even basic privacy legislation, even basic algorithmic transparency legislation. Some of that, again, I... You know how many bills there are regulating the internet. Zero. Yeah. Zero. And there's one that helps them, broad immunity. I mean, also, you have to be specific of where. We have a pretty broken political system in the U.S., right? Yes, I know. I've noticed that recently in Congress. But I think the-

They couldn't order lunch at this point, honestly. I think what is becoming, so what I've noticed is, since 2016, my own work has pivoted from analyzing what's going on in social media to designing alternative. And we spent a lot of time, when you get into a room, convincing people there's a problem or something we should be working on. That's no longer, I don't spend any time on that. alternative and we spent a lot of time when you get into a room convincing people there's a problem or something we should be working on that's no longer I don't spend any time on that so in terms of people know it and I there's an

appetite there's a latent demand so that's what makes me I think somewhere between hopeful and optimistic it's that it is not reigning in the current. Yeah, I would agree. I had my two older sons, I was like, why aren't you on those things? And they usually say, it's a bunch of assholes yelling at each other, I don't really feel like participating.

And the last thing I'll say is, you know, on this, there's also a question of time horizons, right? And some of what we have to do, it'll take, you know, if it took a human generation to learn these lessons, it may not take another 25 years to adopt new habits, form new habits. But it's going to take a while. And meanwhile, the world is burning. Alexis, how do you look? You know, I spend my time now investing.

776 is the firm. And this generation of CEOs, to your point, especially the ones in their, like, let's say early 20s, even late 20s, feel so much wiser than I did at that age, for sure. And I do think the platforms, the things that they're going to build, this feels, I don't know what it was like in Germany, I don't know, 1400s, whenever Gutenberg got started, right? But I presume there were a bunch of Germans running around being like, yeah, we can all make books now. And some of them were like, we'll make Bibles, right? Because you needed this truth societally for people to believe in that time.

But not long thereafter was a newspaper, because they probably reached a tipping point where they're like, I'm sick and tired of Hans telling me what's going on in the world. Like, we need someone whose job it is to actually keep tabs on whoever's running Stuttgart. Yeah. And I'm liking history by Alexis. I was a history major here, so I got a, got a but like, I hope to your point, that's the moment we're in. And, and I, I am a techno optimist guilty as charged that, that I do think that pendulum will swing back,

I think, even swifter than we realize. And I do think we're seeing a turning point here with everything going on in the Middle East where if it has not become abundantly clear that we need something better to figure out the world, it's right there. And the urgency is here. And then my only hope is that there's a significant number of people who actually want this version because the dope, we didn't even talk about the gamification of it, right? Every one of us builds our platforms,

whether it's social media or whether it's the app to get you to remember to drink water. Like we're all building to capture attention and get you to come back. And whatever you're building, whatever the next generation has to be as addictive, frankly, to win, but in a way that you know doesn't further disrupt democracy yeah i feel like it's interesting because i i don't think

they're going to pass legislation incredibly i don't believe they will but i do believe for example some of the bills that may pass include the ability to sue people that they will not be protected by section like the new generative ai stuff looks like it's not protected and one or two good lawsuits do tend to clean up some things and that to me is until our legislators really get serious the only hope honestly in terms of getting things done is that if they feel pressure legal pressure it will it's what happened with cigarettes what happened with cars and it might be the same thing. All right. Anyway, thank you guys so much. Thank you.

Stapling bread on trees. That was funny. Have you seen that? Do you know what that is? No, I know it's a thing. I know. I went down the internet rabbit hole. It seems a little wasteful. There's bread that is literally stapled on trees. There's 300,000 people on that Reddit.

And then 3,000 followers on another Reddit that's a little bit more violent called bread nailed to trees. Very Walter and office space. But the most interesting part of that conversation, I think, was Alexis's reflections on being young and founding this thing in 2005 that everyone, you know, Christian, Megan, and I were talking about this. He didn't have any idea what he was creating and nobody seemed to imagine the power that it could have. And you were, of course, there during this time. I was.

I did imagine the power it could have. I think they were, you know, that's what I was surrounded by, people who didn't realize what they were doing. And anyone who was even slightly an adult could understand what was going to happen. But they were like that. Everything was up and to the right. And they had both no accountability. And they also had no idea what was about to happen.

Deb talked about this point of the intimacy gradient, the house and every room. And all of a sudden, instead of being on the porch or in the living room, you're all of a sudden in someone's bedroom, right? You're all of a sudden having this interaction. That was kind of a sudden, instead of being on the porch or in the living room, you're all of a sudden in someone's bedroom, right? You're all of a sudden having this interaction. That was kind of a useful architectural metaphor. Yeah. And I think that the fact that there are no real rooms on the internet, that everything is one place has been a real problem. Again, it encourages misbehavior. And so I think what he was talking about is installing, as he said with conversations, how would you behave in the real world and how might you bring it to the online world?

I don't know if that's possible because people feel uninhibited. It's like being drunk or something. And normal lines are crossed really easily. And now, of course, you're seeing those lines now crossing in real life, right? Now they're doing it in real life. There's a very dramatic picture of this House thing that's happening right now. And a reporter asks a normal question about the new latest nominee's election denial. And the group of Republicans jeer at, it looked like an

online thing. Like, this is what you would do online. Hey, come on. And it was embarrassing. Well, there's almost no distinction anymore between online and offline and people are performing for their viral moment or social media or whatever is happening. That's exactly right. It leaped one way and then the other way. Now it's leaped again in this really unfortunate way. And, you know, what was so unfortunate is most of the people standing there knew how to behave in real life, but now they don't care anymore. Yeah. And I don't know, Alexis had the caveat that pseudonymous is better than anonymous. Yeah.

I feel that is somewhat true. But I was talking to someone who does, Kyle Drop, who has this company called Morning Consult. They are a survey company. And I was asking, you know, how do you find people respond on the phone versus online? And I was asking, you know, how do you find people respond on the phone versus online? And he directed me to something from the Pew Research Center, which said, look, people are more likely to express that they're unhappy, say, in their marriage or in their private life. So maybe they're potentially being more honest with you on things like that. But they're also more likely to express online that they have more extreme views of someone like Hillary Clinton. So it's hard to dissect, like, what's truth and what's posturing on the internet. Yeah. You know, are people just being polite in real life and what they say on the internet is really what they think or are they? Well, I think there is a good thing about being polite in real life, isn't there? There is

keeping it to yourself in some ways and having your own internal dialogue going on. We don't want everybody to tell us everything they're thinking at any one moment. And I think the internet has freed that, and then it's shifted back to real life where we have to listen to everybody's opinion at all times. I think the biggest thing is that it reduces it. It's putting it into this tiny point, which is if you were to listen, not just to someone's thesis statement, but their whole argument, you could probably find something to grab onto and talk about. But if we only react to one another's headlines, that is not a good conversation. No, that's where you end up in online.

It becomes completely reductive, and it has to be because of the medium. But again, then it moves into real life where it's just jeering at each other, or one side jeering in this case. Yeah, and this conversation was about Big Tech's role in democracy. You didn't get deeply into disinformation or AI or foreign interference, but all of those, of course, are important. Yeah. But, you know, I think what's happening that's genuine is just as bad, right? Donald

Trump really is not even hiding it. It's not tricky. I was just spending some time with some disinformation people and they're just as worried about what's genuinely going out over the wires as what is being faked. 100%. Do you think that Deb's platform, Cortico, that he has will have any real world effect? No. I'm sorry to say, I've seen a lot of these attempts to make good conversation online. People are attracted to the accident. They're attracted to the yelling. I think one thing that's good is there's no central place now, and people don't like a really bad experience, which is why you're seeing the declines in Twitters or whatever Xs. All the recent studies are showing huge declines. It's a gross experience, even if they like parts of it, and they do. I do too. It's becoming grosser. It's like being in a city that's decaying. And while you may like that city, the decaying is really hard to take. And so you stop going as much.

The scale is really hard to reach nowadays. But I do think there's generational scale, like millennials a lot are on Instagram, millennials are on TikTok. And so YouTube, I think, has always been an interesting community as well. Yeah, we'll see what happens. It's definitely a moment of change for all these things. And we'll see what happens. It would be nice if there was a nice place to talk online. And there are in some cases when it's very directed. But it's degenerated quite a lot because of what it's done to our brains. Well, we will continue talking about this in other episodes.

Democracy, disinformation, just in time for a big election cycle. There's always another one coming. Anyway, hopefully, hopefully there's always another one coming. All right, let's read us out. Today's show was produced by Naeem Araza, Christian Castro-Rossell, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Mary Mathis and also to Aaliyah Jackson, who engineered this episode. And thanks to UVA's Karsh Institute. Our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, congratulations. You know the earth isn't flat. If not, go back to stapling bread on trees. Go wherever you listen to podcasts,

search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more. Do you feel like your leads

never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees and it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing and makes writing blogs, creating videos and posting on social a breeze. So now it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers.