Pirate Wires - The "Disinformation Experts", Zuckerberg's AI Problem, DeSantis Bans Social Media For Kids & More

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

EPISODE #46: Back at it again! This week we have a discussion around "disinformation experts". What makes these people experts, (aside from Mike Solana of course) and why do they only blame misinformation on the right wing? We think you know why. Meta was in the news this past week. From Boomers getting fooled by AI images, to the decision to limit political news ahead of the election season. Ron DeSantis signs a bill to ban social media for kids in Florida. Do you agree? Finally, Sanjana breaks down her piece on Jo Boaler, the woman who dismantled Algebra education in San Francisco.  Featuring Mike Solana, Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Sanjana Friedman Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/jo-boaler-misrepresented-citations Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Welcome Back To The Pod 1:00 - 60 Minutes Story On Misinformation - How Do These People Decide? 17:45 - Meta News: Boomers Fooled By AI & Limiting Political News 29:50 - Ron DeSantis Signs Social Media Ban For Kids Bill - Do You Agree? 43:50 - Quiet On The Set Documentary 48:20 - War On Algebra - CA’s Architect of “Equity-Based Algebra” Accused of Academic Fraud

The statistics I've seen are just for the Twitter platform. They've responded to about 30% of the things that we sent them. If it's not just direct misinformation in this segment, it's a really good piece of propaganda. The right wing is behind all of the misinformation on social media today, but not one example of misinformation that makes the left look bad. How is she an expert at disinformation? I study it every single day, so do you guys. I just want to know who decides that these people are legitimate. You know what I mean? These people are just mods. I don't know. It's like, I want to have fun with this topic, but these people are

fucking evil and I just am over it. What's up guys. Welcome back to the pod we have uh another banger for you this week i want to start right out of the gate with this wild 60 minutes segment on disinformation now the disinformation researcher is an archetypical type annoying person on the internet we've talked about for years reported about for years covered in the context mostly of our kind of social media giants. These people gained a lot of power throughout COVID and really during the last election. A lot of that was shattered when Elon took over Twitter. Famously, we sort of saw them run out of the office with pitchforks, it felt like. And certainly, all of the crowd on Twitter was cheering for their departure.

it felt like. And certainly all of the crowd on Twitter was cheering for their departure. They still kind of do exist in the context of other social media companies, in a maybe more hidden context. And also just the media, relentlessly reaching out to them for comment in an effort, I think, to get the government to do something about wrong think. But a lot of this interview or a lot of this sort of segment, I think it's interesting for a handful of reasons. Just first right out of the gate, I love Brandon who sat down and really studied the content to kind of break it down for us here today before we start our conversation. Yeah. So 60 Minutes, the television program just ran a, basically it was like a 13-minute segment on, it was pretty much a post-mortem on the 2020 election and misinformation and how social

media platforms responded to misinformation. Kate Starbird was clearly one of the stars of this segment. She's actually a former Stanford basketball player and now she's a professor at University of Washington. And she actually appeared to be involved in the Twitter files. She was like one of the people sending Twitter information, like our posts, and telling them that this was misinformation. She was one of the people sending Twitter information, like our posts, and telling them that this was misinformation. She was one of the bad guys. She was one of the bad guys, according to us. Yes. So the segment also included Jim Jordan, who's the conservative chair of the Senate Judiciary,

and two other experts that were kind of similar to Kate Starbird. The message of the piece really is that conservatives and the right wing are behind misinformation. And because of layoffs and indirectly Elon, there is now way more misinformation than there used to be. than there used to be. But when you watch the piece, or when I watched the piece, I should say, it kind of felt to me that the 60-minute segment was itself a kind of a piece of misinformation. For example, they have an example of a piece of misinformation,

and it's a tweet with two images, two AI-generated images of Joe Biden and Donald Trump being friendly. And they're like, this is misinformation, and it's a tweet with two likes. And I'm pretty sure the caption of the tweet is sort of indirectly saying he knows that these images are AI.

Right. And there's many such examples throughout the piece. So if it's not just direct misinformation, this segment, it's kind of a really good piece of propaganda. And yeah, that's kind of the segment. Within the segment, this lady named Kate Starbird, who you pulled out on Twitter, she says that Twitter only responded to 30% of her companies

or nonprofits' reports about misinformation, which kind of seems like a lot, quite frankly. The statistics I've seen are just for the Twitter platform, but my understanding is that they responded to about 30% of the things that we sent them. And I think on the majority of those, they put labels. But just a third. Just a third. understanding is is that they responded to about 30 of the things that we sent them and i think the on the majority of those they put labels but just a third but just a third but again i think important context area she's talking about the uh 2020 election which is pre-elon and they kind of take that all the way up to now and say that now the problem's way worse because of Elon and all these social media companies have laid off their staff of fact checkers and stuff.

And I will say one more thing is that they actually do use legit examples of misinformation from the right wing, but not one example of misinformation that makes the left look bad. I noticed that they don't mention j badacharya at all like not once which like if you were doing an honest piece of reporting on misinformation during the 2020 uh campaign cycle and covid you would definitely have to mention jay um he's nowhere to be found so you mean to apologize for accusing him of well you would say this is how uh you know so so the piece again is like it's worrying about He's nowhere to be found. You mean to apologize for accusing him of... Well, you would say this is how...

So the piece, again, it's worrying about the state of misinformation research and misinformation in general. And they're showing how the right wing is behind all of the misinformation on social media today. But the fact of the matter is, is you have on the left during COVID, Jay Bhattacharya being shadow banned and censored. And like this has to be told as part of that story.

And it's just not. This is, I think, so they refuse to grapple with what we really saw throughout COVID, which was this insane power grab that they totally then abused. Once they had the power to kind of censor the internet, which they achieved by, it was really kind of, you have a very small class of people in Silicon Valley who control all of these apps, and they are ideologically very the same. So it's not really that hard to, or it wasn't really that hard for these people to capture the machines of

speech, basically, throughout the entire country. They used those to then censor things that they've considered to be dangerous. Now, if I want to steel man, I don't know if I'm capable of steel manning this. They genuinely do seem to believe that Trump is dangerous and therefore censoring things that he believes and says and argues for is considered a mitigation of danger. But this is, of course, and I feel, you know, we always are hammering this. We go back to it again and again, or at least I feel like I always do. But I just, we kind of, we have to keep doing it because they keep fighting for these powers. The problem with the disinformation conversation is multifaceted.

In the first place, this woman calls herself an expert. Why? How is she an expert at disinformation? I study it every single day. So do you guys. We live online. We're professional writers and researchers. We're putting out pieces. Are we experts in disinformation? I put it in my Twitter bio because I think that I am. I think after the question of expertise, there is the question of, one, as Brendan, as you mentioned, there are examples of misinformation in both directions. And if you only cover one, you're necessarily biasing, or you're sort of naturally biasing the entire conversation. And then it's like, what do you kind of not consider to be misinformation just because of your bias? What are you missing in that conversation? There's a lot there. I do think that misinformation

exists. And I do think the deepfake stuff in particular is something we need to think about. But the solutions are all so much worse than the problem, right? The medicine there is lethal. Their solutions are always power and control, and only they get to talk. And it's like, I almost, at that point, how could you possibly care about the problem, the dangerous problem of political misinformation when their solution is to destroy the political system that we have all grown up under? And that's what that would do. When you take an entire spectrum of thought off the table, that is not America anymore. That is something much more scary. And I don't know, it's like,

I want to have fun with this topic, but these people are fucking evil and i just am over it sajna what are you thinking so i didn't watch the the 60 minute segment i have to confess um i just saw the clip circulating on twitter of kate um and honestly i mean they are evil and they are you know no well i think well they're they're not there's just like this, like Mike, you've said in the past that this is like this hall monitor class of like totalitarian minded people who sort of get off on controlling everyone else's speech. My takeaway from the clip though, is just like Kate Starbird has the physiognomy of a disinformation expert

like she's like her haircut her glasses not to you know come for someone's appearance but i think you know she she just uh i think one of the the reasons why that um clip blew up so much on on twitter is because it kind of just epitomizes what everyone imagines when they think about like the person who's sending angry messages to Twitter is like trust and safety team and telling them to remove, you know, the post, the deep fake of Biden and Trump.

I don't know, like shaking hands or something. They have this, I do, I would love them to address these because the Elon Musk Twitter is their new Trump, at least until Trump picks up steam. I don't know if that will ever happen this election cycle. I actually have a giant question mark there. It might just be a really boring election. I think we've talked about that on this podcast before, but Elon is there because he's the big bad. And because he's so scary,

he took away their censorship apparatus. He said, nope, you have to listen to people who you don't agree with. They lost their minds because of this. They have never forgiven him because of it. They're on TV talking about it. They're absolutely obsessed. Because of that, they let slide entire really bubbling conspiracy theories about him and about really more importantly to me, the platform. I saw one in Wired just this week. It wasn't even about Twitter, right? It was about the bridge collapse. They were making fun of all the conspiracies that were going around, blaming Twitter for it naturally as if people weren't saying bad things or wrong things before Elon Musk took over Twitter a year ago, as if we

hadn't all been complaining about Twitter for the past ever. They, in that article, say something like, this problem has gotten worse because now you can buy a blue check mark and artificially amplify anything that you tweet. And they linked. So I'm like, I live on Twitter. That's not accurate. Let me just see what they're linking to here. They just linked to another article of theirs, also not about Twitter. It was about some other random topic. But in that article, they just make this claim about Twitter's blue check verification amplifying content, which is not linked. It was like they just linked to a story where they also made this up of their own, of Wired's. And it's just like a complete...

That is misinformation. That's not true. That does not exist. That is not how the verification system works. That's not why it's in place. We have no evidence at all that this is happening. Certainly, I see people believing this. Kara Swisher and Don Lemon have...

Well, I guess they were talking more about de-amplification. But I've seen some of the other journalists. And I want to mention her name. I feel like I talk about this one too much. I've seen prominent journalists talk about the amplification that is happening now under Elon Musk. This one is a very specific thing, right? That you could buy.

It's not just like, oh, I think he's amplifying it. You can literally go and you can buy this and it will your bad information will be amplified not true and there's no one sort of policing that and they don't care and these are the people who are supposed to be policing misinformation and it's like of course again it's in it's almost there is uh a humiliation involved in having to take their their their own identity seriously like they have assumed the identity of the moral arbiter, the good person who has their heart in the right place, who is really just trying to get to the truth of the matter. We're obviously just in a state of political war, always have been.

And I'm frustrated by this continual sort of insistence on their part that we have to kind of enter their frame and talk to them in this way. It's like, we already know. We've pulled the curtain back. We saw the Twitter files. We know who you are. You're just trying to censor people for political purposes. You're not doing it anymore, or at least not until they axe Elon, which who knows. And that's that. River, what are you thinking? Yeah. I mean, these people are just mods who went to college and it's they think it's some sort of qualification it it's really bizarre to me um i just want to know who decides like that these people are legitimate you know what i mean there's no this is just a

random lady who's a professor who has some sort of research group with they didn't even name in the 60 minutes piece it's true i noticed that um this isn't a government agency which i mean i didn't like the fbi emailing twitter trying to get stuff taken down either but i mean at the very least it's it's the fbi it's not just random people who have declared themselves experts. It's really strange. And presumably the FBI also is accountable to us. I mean, I know, yes, not actually in practice. Like, they're supposed to be. Like, you could maybe petition your representatives to do something about that.

Whereas this is some random woman with, as Sajan said, like, the safest or the sort of disinformation expert haircut. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I don't understand it. I thought about this a lot for Facebook. So a couple of years, a few years back when I first started writing about this, you had the Twitter on one side, but the Facebook censorship apparatus was really interesting because during the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco, the way they got out of that, they were like, oh yeah, we've sent this on to our third party of

specialists and experts to review it. Whereas Jack was really in the thick of the fight on all of that, getting pounded, attacked. Twitter HQ was trying to defend little things. They actually were not even as aggressive in some part as certain other places. We never heard back from Facebook on what their third party group of fact checkers decided. Or my question was like, who are these people? How are you deciding who's getting this job? Like you said, River, like what are what are their is a credential you could even study for something like this? I mean, we all can sort of weigh the information and decide what is true and what is not. There will be a major. It'll be like disinformation BA or like modding BA or something. They'll make something up.

Information integrity. Yeah, like for real. I'm honestly surprised that it isn't like degree yet because this is an actual... Being a mod for Twitter or Instagram or whatever is kind of a job. I mean, I think they outsource a lot of it to India, but I suppose... Well, for the safety, right? Well, we learned in the Google story... I don't know if it's true. Every single company holds a lot of this stuff close to the chest. But at Google, trust and safety in the context of the AI piece, at least, was very different than the... What was the RAI team? Which I forget what the R stands for, but that's their AI safety-ism

team. And trust and safety was more like, let's make sure there's not any self-harm content on here. Let's make sure there's not any kids or any weird sex stuff." That's what they were focused on. And then REI was like, how do we work our ideological framework about the world into this massively important search engine so everybody agrees with us? And there is, I think, a tug there, a tug and pull there. I don't know what the phrase is. I think some of this stuff is legitimate, right? Like we don't want any of that trash on these platforms. A lot of it's illegal. Um, most of it, I think is illegal. Uh, the stuff that the trust and safety team is, is looking out for. And Twitter still has a team of people doing that. And, um, I don't know, that's kind of like, is it illegal or not? It's just like,

yes, no. And you get rid of it and you don't need to be like a an an expert at that uh where you need to be an expert is on the nuances of what leftist opinion needs to be protected today and that's what was happening under the last the last sort of order at twitter i do want to talk a little bit about facebook because they've had a wild week this week um a wild week in the news let let's say. A ton of cool AI stuff, which we've written about a little bit in Pyrewires, or at least in the takes. Boomers getting fooled by AI-generated images. And I would love for... I know you guys...

Brandon, you were really early to this story. I want you to kind of walk us through that in a second. And then the reduction of news on Instagram, which is very closely related to this conversation. So let's just skip straight to the weird AI shit you're seeing on Facebook. And then I want to get into the news thing. Brandon. People on Twitter last week were scandalized by, I think it was just like one viral post that appeared. It was a post that had two images, maybe one of which was portrayed old people looking at cake, right? I think something like that. Clearly AI generated too. Maybe there was another one. I had noticed this trend a few weeks back, looking at Facebook. And it's true. The newsfeed is full of AI generated pictures of like, I noticed cabins.

pictures of like, I noticed cabins now, like now you just see a lot of like really clearly fake cabins. Some of them look like castles now, people just commenting, chimping out on them in the comment section of just loving the cab, loving these AI generated cabins. This like caught on on X last week and people were like, oh man, you know, like Facebook's really bad now. But I think my, I don't know if I had this take in the daily, I probably did, but my take on it was just like, look, I mean, how is this any different from stupid memes about phishing or memes about guns or God

that had previously invaded the feed on Facebook? So it was kind of like it always has been thing, at least in my perspective. But now the meme page creators are just using AI and it's just cheaper probably to produce than just finding and reusing old memes. So it's just meme page 2.0 on Facebook. That's what they say, I think. But do they think that the cakes are real? Yeah. Oh, okay.

Well, I guess that's a little bit different. Nobody's like, this cake isn't real. Everyone's like, I want that cake! Holy shit, how did they make that cake? You know, where do I get the cake? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I guess maybe we should discuss how, like, why is this uniquely bad?

I mean, it's all trash content. It's all just evil. Yeah, people talk about this specific question and have been for years when it comes to political deepfakes. And the only defense that I've heard that is even a little bit compelling is there is going to be so much fake information that looks real on the internet. It will be all of it, right? Just a complete super abundance of that kind of information, just fake pictures of everyone that you know, doing every manner of crime, every celebrity with every... I'm already seeing all sorts of celebrities hooking up on Instagram

that are just like AI-generated celebrities. It just keeps popping up. I'm like, what is going on with this? And they can't be okay with that. There'll be so much of it that we will learn to believe nothing. And maybe that's just a hard headspace for us to get into. But I think that's the only way that we get out of it. It does feel like a problem. We don't usually talk about the good part of this. I look at those AI-generated homes and let's table the food for a minute. But when I think about just a practical use case for this, the AI-generated cabins and homes and let's table the food for a minute. But when I think about just like in a practical use case for this, the AI generated cabins and homes and things, I really would love to be like, generate the city block for me in the way that it should work and tell me then how to build it and how much it costs given like the constraints that we have right now today. Tell me why it costs

so much. Tell me how to reduce the cost. Once we're able to visualize, yeah, it's crazy. There's this crazy part of what's going on. But just focusing on what we're building right now that's really cool is this ability to visualize almost anything that is also closer than ever to a form of search that is able to immediately tell us how to create these things in the real world, which feels cool. And I wonder, it can go in two ways. I was looking at Zuckerberg

getting criticized for not doing enough maximalism today. And I was looking at all of these maximalist architectural landscapes that were AI generated. And I thought, okay, so either one, I get what I want, which is these tools for visualization better enable us to create this thing in the real world. Or two, slightly dystopian version, we become so flooded with the coolest things ever that we can't quite build that it just burns us out generally and we do nothing. But I don't know i'm gonna stick to the former until i see evidence for the latter i mean i boomers have kind of always been fooled by this sort of thing too like i remember my grandma showing me like clearly photoshopped images of obama smoking a blunt or like i don't know dressed up like uh

like osama bin laden or like standing in front of the isis flag or whatever like i don't know they've always kind of been this way and at least now it's kind of cute like they're looking at cakes and um babies and ducks or whatever instead of like i don't know red bait like uh political content i think the question now for now yeah i'm sure that'll change what you said so that i think it relates to this interesting, unfortunate point, which is that the Kate Starbirds of the world are right about something kind of, which is that people are believing a lot of crazy, stupid shit, but they always have. And that is because most people are not very bright, and they believe really stupid things. And we've kind of always seen this. because most people are not very bright and they believe really stupid things. And we've kind of always seen this. It's not actually,

I don't see evidence that people are voting for Donald Trump, for example, for like, tell me the misinformation. What misinformation is the reason they want to vote for him? I think the reason that they voted for him in 2016, the reason he was the president is because of immigration. And that wasn't misinformation. That was like, we had an immigration problem. Only one person was talking about it. That's all anybody was talking about on the pro-Trump side back then. And he won because of it. He didn't win because of misinformation.

And he didn't lose in 2020 because of misinformation. So I don't... Yeah, there's a flood of stupid things and it's getting worse in terms of there's more of it, So I don't, like, yeah, like there's a flood of stupid things and it's getting worse in terms of there's more of it, but I don't know. I just don't, I really don't see the evidence just yet. I think there are these negative tail risks that I've written about. I wrote a piece called Jump that kind of addresses this. There is a way that this becomes really bad, really fast. I think COVID misinformation pretty much shut the world down. So like leftist information, I've seen some pretty terrible impact of, but in general, I'm not really scared of the giant cakes. Sorry, Brandon, I cut you off there. I was just going to say, I think there's first off a

distinction between the cakes and for example, celebrities hooking up that never hooked up. One has a real world impact and I don't see the cakes having any impact at all. And the other thing I was going to say was, what's a Zuck to do about AI cakes? I mean, I think Zuck should label, if it's possible, deepfakes and things involving people. If they're AI-generated, there should be a label that this is AI-generated.

But I don't know how fruitful or how much virtuous ROI there would be on spending a lot of money trying to identify pictures of cake as, as are they AI? Are they not AI? I don't see the concern with this specific issue really, but I'm happy to happy for somebody to argue against that. I just don't, I can't see it. Well, I don't think anyone cares about the cakes though, right? It's like, it's the political stuff they're worried about, which is maybe why, maybe it's

not just, oh, political news makes everybody miserable and the political people are the most annoying and obsessed with the misinformation question. So, you know, we're going to get rid of news, which Facebook is now doing. They're de-amplifying news content. Maybe it's just this question. They're like, actually, there is no solution to this problem other than to not play the game. There's no winning move other than not to play. There's going to be so much bad misinformation. We're going to get attacked so relentlessly. We're going to be blamed for the election no matter what happens. Fuck it, we're out. You can no longer,

unless you super duper go to your content preferences and toggle off three things and triple opt into getting blasted with bad takes from the Washington Post, you're not getting any news content. Maybe that is the dynamic that's happening there. And actually, it's not only the dynamic. Yeah, I think that's what's happening. Zuckerberg doesn't want another 2016. Everybody blamed him for Trump. And he's just like, no, I'm not doing that. I've already seen conspiracy theories about that that it's somehow related to israel palestine by the way oh my god i know every i mean everything is related to israel palestine for a certain kind of person before i move on i want to give because brandon you sort of outlined that i think i'd love to hear from river i am handing you the keys to the castle

at facebook um what do you do about the deepfake problem? I wouldn't do anything, honestly, because the boomers will find a way. As I said, they're going to be tricked. They'll be tricked by Photoshop. They'll be tricked. I mean, the Clinton body count stuff that everybody was talking about

in relation to misinformation in 2016, that originated in the 90s. The original list was created by a woman in 1995 or something. So, this sort of stuff has been happening forever. The most pernicious stuff that can be done with AI, like AI deepfake porn and all that, all that is that sort of content is banned by meta anyway. So, you know, I feel like I mean, if it's, you know, Jennifer Aniston and The Rock, like holding hands or whatever that I mean, maybe they don't like that, but I don't think it's like the end of the world. But it's not going to be, you you know a porno with like a 13 year

old like girl's face on it or whatever and like that's the actual thing that i think is like intolerable about ai that like something is gonna have to be done about um but all the other stuff i mean i think it's here to stay and there really isn't that much that you can do about it. I feel like this is just part of, this is like the DNA of the information environment and it always has been. I think that this is truly just humans struggling with the fact that memes travel like viruses. Yes.

And now we're dealing with it on a global scale and a super sped up scale compared to our ancestors. And it's just a difficult thing to deal with on both sides of the political spectrum. I think that the problem that we're dealing with, and it poses good things and bad things, but it's the internet. It's not AI, it's the internet. I think that's exactly right. This is what I, in jump, this is like really my premise is that just being able to spread any kind of information rapidly, good or bad, is new at the very least. And that means that we've never been able to do this before. And so it's going to have some kind of a consequence. I think, think about COVID. Had COVID happened

without the internet, had COVID happened in 1995, what are really the odds that the entire world would have shut down the way that it did within a matter of, what, like a month? All of the countries did it at exactly the same time? Zero percent chance. The reason that happened was because we were all consuming the exact same information at the exact same time. And so we made the exact same wrong, in my opinion, set of decisions. And with the exception of, I think, was it Sweden that I think kind of went its own way? God bless Sweden, the weirdest country. The country that we were supposed to be obsessed, all good liberals were supposed to be obsessed

with Sweden up until like COVID. And then the script flipped and they are the enemy now. But anyway, yeah, that is the nature of the internet, I think. Ron DeSantis, social media ban. Florida is doing something about the whole machine, it seems. River, you have looked into this. Why don't you break down the story for us and give us your take? Yeah.

into this, why don't you break down the story for us and give us your take? Yeah. So Tuesday, Ron DeSantis signed HB3, which is a ban that bans everyone under 14 from using social media. And then 14 and 15 year olds have to get parental consent to use it. It also is effectively a porn ban. Any site that more than one third of the content is quote unquote harmful to minors which is basically porn. I guess gore sites. I don't even know if those are still around or if that's just like a figment of my youth.

What is a gore site? 4chan. That's totally 4chan probably. Gore sites like something awful or I don't know like Lively which i don't think lively goes around anymore but like where you could find like isis beheading videos when i was in high school um you recall yeah um those will be banned if more than one-third of the material um is of this harmful to minors uh variety there is like a clause in it where it says that it has to be intentionally

distributed and i think that may be a carve out for twitter i'm not completely sure we actually reached out to try to get clarification on this not responded yeah um because twitter i don't know if it's a third i haven't counted but there is a lot of porn on twitter um it's kind of they're pretty good about walling it off like Like if you don't follow those accounts, you won't really see it, but it's definitely there. And so you can't access those sites if you're under 18. And they actually have to verify, unlike social media, I think you can kind of just lie

if you're like 13 and want to Facebook or whatever. But with these porn sites and maybe X, you actually have to verify your age using some sort of third-party verification. And other states have passed laws targeting porn sites like

Texas, Utah, Mississippi, and others. And what's happened is sites like Pornhub have pulled out. And also searches for VPNs and stuff have exploded. So I think Pornhub and sites like that will probably just pull out. I am interested to see what happens with X, though. It's still unclear, but that would be kind of crazy if I had to submit my driver's license

tweet well you know probably the end of well it'll be the end of spam i mean yeah that's an interesting solution if they were forced to do something that actually got rid of spam i think the uk did this with porn um i don't believe i am i correct i might be wrong about this but i'm pretty sure you can't look up porn in the uk you can but they have my understanding is you can but they have weird laws on like what you're allowed to post like a lot of bdsm stuff yeah yeah yeah it's very it has to be very vanilla porn. I find that hard to believe. That's what I've read. I don't know. UK porn laws. Let's look it up really quick.

You lived in the UK, right, Sandhya? I don't know how much porn you were watching over there. I didn't. I honestly had not come across any porn laws there. I mean, I hadn't heard of any restrictions. I'm seeing pieces of them trying but failing to age gate pornography is this the same as like um the european union there once many many years ago before i was in a relationship and i remember i'm not saying i looked at porn i'm saying someone who i know may know may have tried to look at porn in the UK,

and they were not able to do so. So that is where I'm drawing this from. But I do see a bunch of articles here. 2019, the UK porn block explained and wired. 2023, The Verge is reporting UK tries once again to age-gay porn. Maybe it's fallen out with laws or whatnot sorry yeah i i see so i think the way it works in the uk is if you go onto a porn site the landing page can't show you explicit content and then you have to like verify i it seems from what i'm seeing this is like something back in 2019 you have to to say you're over 18. I don't know if that requires like showing an ID or something. But lots of questions about it on Reddit, ask UK.

I wonder how much the increased Muslim population in the UK has contributed to the political viability of something like this in the uk so this is a way more conservative group of people who are coming in who are actually very interested in shaping society um just a random thought i it might be that or it might be the uk also has like a fairly radical feminist movement that the united states doesn't have that's why you see a lot of like the turf stuff and a lot of those people are also very very The UK also has like a fairly radical feminist movement that the United States doesn't have. That's why you see a lot of like the TERF stuff. And a lot of those people are also very, very anti-porn. It's a very old school sort of feminism.

It's kind of dead here. Anti-porn, anti-trans. They are generally lesbians though. There are a lot of, or not all of them, but a lot of famous lesbian TERFs in the UK. Still, those lesbian TERFs do have a lot in common with radical islamic fundamentalists um which is just interesting it's like that bell curve man it's just like it is it never fails uh what do you yeah i mean what where is the where is the push to ban social media for kids coming from i think it's you have one hand, the idea that this stuff is addictive. On the other hand of the ideas that are being disseminated or bad, I've looked at the evidence

on the addiction thing and I've gotten into fights about this online before. The evidence seems inconclusive to me. It feels true, right? Like you use it, you kind of feel that it's true, but I've not seen it i just i've seen it mixed i've seen evidence in both directions from the studies that i looked at i did look at them a couple of years ago there might have been some major studies since that i haven't seen um and then the idea is i mean ideas have always been bad but the internet in that way maybe it's just i don't know something that we're not ready to grab to grapple with what do you guys think yeah i mean i i'm like a grown man in Twitter.

Like, the internet makes me feel like shit sometimes. So, I totally get it. But a lot of the things that people have a problem with were problems before social media, like the body image stuff i mean like the peak of anorexia was like in the 90s um i i it's probably not great for kids to be on their phones all the time i don't really think it's great for anybody but one i think all these kids are just either going to get vpns or they're going to find a way around i mean these kids were raised on ipads like there's there's no way that they're gonna just like take this lying down if they really want to get on instagram or whatever and i also think that there's something to be said for parents taking control like why does the state of florida think they control they can control like the behavior of kids when their own parents can't like the parents don't want you to have social media like they're

in the best position to do that because they they're the ones who can make sure that you can't get a vpn and once you can make sure that you don't have the instagram app on your phone or whatever well can you make an argument about cigarettes too though unless you're maybe making you might be you might be making the argument in favor of 12 year old smoking but i think you should we be consistent here yeah i mean i still got cigarettes when i was underage but yeah i mean my parents found them they like threw them away um yeah i mean i guess you can make that argument but i don't it's just so ingrained now like Like, you know, I mean, we're talking about, we were talking about like 14 and 15 year olds. It's gotta be the vast majority of them are on

social media. And I don't know if it was ever the case that the vast majority of 14 year olds are smoking cigarettes, you know? Yeah. Um, well there was that craze over vaping for a while. Um, but, and, and the nicotine addiction did go up at the beginning of the, I don't know, vaping culture. I want to defend tech stuff in general. Social media is harder and harder to defend. And I think it's very telling that there is really not a, no one, no libertarian even is making the argument of, oh, we can't ban social media for teenagers because if we do that, they won't be able to X. Like there's no positive use case that we're really worried about people losing access

to. There's only this potential huge asymmetric downside. And that feels like a pretty bad thing. When I was in high school, it was the early 2000s. So there were versions of social media right before Facebook was created right before facebook was created i went to college and facebook was created then but it was like message boards and things and there was one that like everyone in my school was on and even that it got really toxic really fast and it wasn't ever really clear what the upside to talking to these people in that way was um i did find a lot of upside talking to strangers on the internet especially about comic comic books and just learning about different cultures and making friends online and stuff. I mean, there were things that I loved about it, but I don't know. It's just like over the years,

all of the really optimistic, excited, idealistic arguments in favor of this stuff, connecting the world and what does that mean and whatnot they've just been replaced by the horror of what it means to live in a connected world and uh it's just it's difficult to grapple with as someone who wants to again i really do want to see it from the bright side i don't know sajna is a case for optimism perhaps i'm actually basically in favor of the ban. I mean, I don't see why. I do agree with you, River. Like, I think kids are going to find a way to get around it. You know, they'll find a way.

If they can find a way to get, like, fake IDs pretty easily to buy alcohol and things like that, like, they'll probably find a way to verify their age and get a VPN and all that stuff. But I just don't really see the kind of like broader positives that most 13 and 14 year olds are getting out of being on Instagram, honestly, or even on YouTube in a lot of cases, except for maybe educational content. I know so many cases of kids who have been, like, not necessarily groomed online, but definitely sort of had strange conversations with, you know, weird adults on social media. There's all these cases of like... I was that kid. I was that kid having strange conversations with weird adults. with yeah i mean and it makes sense like if you've got like these these 13 year olds who are posting like asmr videos or become instagram influencers obviously you know you'd hope that most of the people watching them are their peers but at the end of the day there's going to be a

lot of of weirdos um and i think if we if the band can actually like i'm i guess i'm pessimistic that it'll actually get enough of them off of social media because i do think so many are going to find workarounds but if there can be a paradigm shift where like social media becomes this adult thing um and which i think it should be uh and kids kind of have to wait till they're like 18 uh when you can like buy a pack of cigarettes and you know 21 you can start drinking and you can make an instagram account or something i think that would be good um because i just think it leads to like brain rot especially when you're you're still developing you know your

attention span the internet would be less annoying too because you wouldn't have like 14 year old k-pop stans oh my god in I'm sitting here in a dress or whatever. I always wonder how much of my misery on Twitter is really just by, it exists by virtue of me arguing with children and not realizing it. It's like, they're not stupid. They're just, their brains aren't developed yet. And I don't realize that I'm talking to a child because they're anonymous.

Sasha, what you were just saying about, really, you're talking about the overexposure, just the exposure in general of your kids to the world. It reminded me of a topic that you raised, River, about the documentary, the kid actor documentary. All Quiet on Set. Yes. I mean, it seems we all grew up,

I grew up knowing that to be a child actor was dangerous and kind of bad. I remember my mom would talk about this because I wanted to be an actor. And she was like, fuck, no, I'm not taking auditions. That's a night, those kids go there to be destroyed, never, not a million years. And she's right. I mean, just like how many child actors have survived? It's very, very, very few. I mean, literally survived quite a bit. But how many of them survived intact emotionally, intellectually, just like as a human being? Not many.

And in a sense, social media has sort of turned any kid on social media is potentially a celebrity now. And that's crazy. I don't know why we just allowed that to happen. River, did you want to maybe break down a little bit of your thoughts on that documentary and just maybe this topic in general? Yeah. So the documentary is about Nickelodeon and all the various abuses that went on there. I mean, they had legit pedophiles on set who were kids. pedophiles on set who were kids the most famous of them was

Drake Bell from Drake and Josh who was a dialogue coach who was on the set of those shows it's kind of all centered around Dan Schneider who's the guy who created the Amanda show with Amanda Bynes

who didn't participate in the documentary but you know had very troubled lives she was under conservatorship mental breakdowns all that um he also created i carly trick and josh basically like every big nickelodeon show of my childhood and um yeah he's kind of a freak he that he was never accused by anyone in the documentary of direct molestation but he did have a weird relationship with his female employees where he was we'd like break them and make them give them massages kind of like standard b2 stuff but then the weirdest stuff was he clearly has a foot fetish and he was like there's all these clips and like i carly and stuff where the girls are like smearing peanut butter on their feet and like holding them it looks like

fetish content um and there's famously a video of ariana grande who was on one of the shows cat and sam i think where she's like holding a potato and like, she's like, I'm trying to get juice out of the potato. And she's like, yeah. And then like pouring water over herself and like squealing. It like, it looks like soft core porn. And she was like 14 or 15. And it's really disturbing, like in retrospect, that all of that was like on nickelodeon like supposedly for kids um but i remember i mean we were kids and we did like it i wonder how much this is us as adults

looking i mean i take point take it on weirdos and whatnot but i do wonder sometimes like if our jaded adult lens looking at this stuff is part of the problem here i'll show you some of the videos like i feel like it's pretty undeniable. Because it's not kids. It's a guy directing this who behind the scenes was always making a bunch of, in the writer's room with other adults, always making a bunch of sex jokes.

He's kind of known as kind of a pervy guy. So I think that combined with the videos kind of... know that the emblem for nickelodeon used to be a foot was a foot at one point that's all right that's not that's weird what what channel is this on what's the streaming nickelodeon oh no documentary uh it's on max. Um, I think a discovery produced it. Yeah,

that's good. Um, what do you guys make of my thought that perhaps we've turned all of our kids into celebrities via social media? Well, yeah, that's true. And I think like the kids are probably,

there's a lot of stuff like on that you see on Tik TOK where I'm like, it's a little bit different because the kids are making it but it's also like oh i know there's like perverts in this these comments you know what i mean um and it's kind of sad like because i you know sorry even uh because i have a public instagram account i get a bunch of a bunch of crazy people on twitter who follow me she doesn't even let me post pictures of our niece or my niece and nephew anymore. And I just kind of completely immediately totally understood that it's, there's not really a good reason to have any public facing account with pictures of your kids on it. And that's just, I don't know the world that we live in. And maybe that's, that's kind of like always been the world that we live in. And I don't know how we like lost that lesson.

How did we, as I'm a child of the eighties, okay. I grew up, my mom was worried about there being glass in baby food and like kitty snatchers and Halloween candy with razor blades in it. A lot of this stuff was just complete misinformation. Speaking of misinformation, like I think all of those stories other than the kitty snatcher one. But those are things that we were afraid of. I grew up kind of afraid of the rest of the world was terrifying and people were trying to kill me. And I don't know how we lost that lesson at the very moment that it became extra easy for the rest of the world to hurt you by way of you, you know, super exposing yourself to things. I do want to switch gears slightly and talk about this amazing piece of yours, Sanjana, on the topic of the kids and people who are really trying to hurt

our kids. Let's talk about Joe Bowler. Joe Bowler. I mean, so the context for this, I think a lot of viewers will have heard of this war on algebra happening in California, which began in San Francisco, as many things do, back in 2014, when the school district decided to make it mandatory to take Algebra 1 in ninth grade, which previously had been a class that a lot of people had taken an eighth grade and it's really foundational for algebra two and calculus and basically all of the math that powers AI, among other things. So algebra is kind of the cornerstone. And that decision can be traced back to a woman named Jo Bowler, who is a professor of mathematics education, not mathematics, at Stanford. And she not only was behind the ban on algebra in San Francisco, she's also behind this new California math framework, which was just approved back in July. It's a thousand pages, so very few people have the time to go through all of it but the sort of takeaways from it is it also recommends not teaching algebra in middle school and teaching it in ninth grade and it

recommends like an alternative pathway for data science like this kind of fuzzy data science course that's very low on math as an alternative to calculus, which is another product of Jo Bowler's research. So she has for decades been pushing this idea that, you know, we need to detrack classes. We don't need to have honors classes and standard classes. We should have everyone together in the same class and you should teach math content more slowly building on big ideas all of this she claims is uh borne out by data in you know math education research and cognitive science uh and you know people have been sort of scrutinizing her studies for years as i talk about in the piece she back in 2006 um she published this paper where she basically claimed that she had studied

three high schools, three public high schools in California, two of which were these affluent majority white high schools, and one of which was this sort of lower income majority Hispanic high school. And in the lower income high school, she had done this intervention where they detract the classes. So you had, you know, like high achieving students with less high achieving students, among other things. And that like kids had outperformed their peers at the affluent high school. And then these mathematicians like took a look at her at the data set that she had selectively cited. And they found that actually that was not true. that she had selectively cited, and they found that actually that was not true. They had like performed slightly better than they used to have, than they had performed before on this one test,

but on every other metric, they had not performed well. So these kinds of accusations have sort of dogged her for her whole career. But last week, this 100 page, like pretty shocking, this 100 page um like pretty shocking uh anonymous complaint was released that details 52 instances of her like flagrantly taking citations out of context in her research a lot of which is foundational to the claims made in the california math framework that's now guidance for all you know the thousands of public schools in the state um like for example you know she uh she has this whole thing against timed math tests as like traumatizing kids and causing math anxiety and it turns out the study she cites uh to support this like makes one mention of timed math tests and doesn't actually say that they traumatize kids in the way that she claims uh they do so anyway she

she basically has been accused of academic fraud and there's going to be an investigation um but on top of this it's important to note that she sends her kids to a 48 000 a year private school uh where they have a very rigorous math education i mean i don't want to say the name of the school uh because you know respect your kids privacy but we've looked at their math curriculum and it's very rigorous. And so she's a hypocrite. She seems to have engaged in a lot of academic fraud. And she has the kind of person who is not usually held to account. And even now is not really being held to account, right? It's not like, what are the consequences going to be, if any? And when are her studies going to be, I don't know, rejected by the state that has absorbed them into, as you said, the academic standards of California or the academic, I guess, direction of California. I think this idea that really,

when you break it down, this is a woman who is fighting on behalf of poor minority kids and essentially using them as an experiment for her own ideological obsessions. I don't understand why these people think that they're not racist and despicable. It's always like this. It's like your idea, you have these public schools in California, in San Francisco. We had a huge controversy around Lowell and still do. This is one of the advanced, the only gifted high school in the city. This is a way for kids who are going to public school in San Francisco who cannot afford to go to private school, which in SF, everyone sends.

Anyone who can possibly scrape the change together sends their kids to private school because the public schools are terrible. So you're essentially a poor person. You have a kid who's achieving well. They have this incredible opportunity to get out of the shitty school and flourish. And you have an ideologue like this who wants to shut it down. And they do it because it just makes them feel bad. It's messed up. And I really hope that she gets some kind of, there has to be some kind of repercussions to this. I mean, she's still working. She's at Stanford, right? Education school, though, not the math school, which is

another thing she lies about in her Twitter bio. Yeah, she calls herself a maths prof. She's British, by the way, which I don't know if that's important context, posh British woman who's come over to spread her ideology. Yeah, I'm sort of pessimistic about whether or not she's going to be appropriately disciplined by Stanford for some of this stuff, because Jelani Nelson, a professor at UC Berkeley, who's been calling out her academic misrepresentations for years, pointed out that like Stanford is kind of financially tied up with some of her other projects like her nonprofit. And so they don't really necessarily have an incentive to appropriately investigate her because if they find that her research is fraudulent, then like they could potentially face legal consequences for some of the marketing they've been involved with. Is that, who is the black professor who she called the cops on? Jelani Nelson. Yeah. Yeah. She, well, basically-

That is crazy. It's crazy how these people get away with it. They're everything they say they hate. I mean, she, she is actually like really such a caricature. I mean, she basically the context for that is she charged this underfunded majority Hispanic, uh, school district in Southern California, like $5,000 an hour consulting fees to come and give like professional training courses to their teachers. And this leaked and Jelani Nelson tweeted about it and was like, you know, this woman who says that she wants to, you know, help black and brown students and, uh, increase equities charging these exorbitant fees to underfunded school districts. She got really

pissed and she sent him back this email and was like this is being taken up with lawyers and police just for context that's 10 million dollars a year 10 for what for five thousand dollars an hour river brandon any any thoughts on maths professor bowler i mean asji said, it is like the perfect caricature. I don't even, I've never understood this argument that black people can't do math or something. And it just seems like the most racist and patronizing idea of poor people or whatever. It's usually racial.

Like, let's be honest like that's the way they say because they conflate like poor and non-white um it just seems really um i actually understand it less than i understand the sort of um the arguments about like sat words or whatever like people from poorer backgrounds not understanding those, like that actually makes more sense to me. It's like, maybe you didn't hear this word growing up at all. You're not familiar with it. But with math, I mean, it's either you know the concepts or you don't, you know, nobody's talking about math at the dinner table or whatever. It just, it's never made any sense to me. I just, I do want to say with the SAT thing, nobody knows what those words

are. It's memorization. It's an intelligence test. And I don't know. I don't see how any of this stuff... If you want a world where black kids feel empowered, the absolute worst thing you could ever do is implicitly argue to the entire world that any high achieving high achieving black kid was put there artificially it's like you just you destroy every reason to actually excel and you undermine an entire generation of smart kids it's messed up can't stand it brandon thoughts i concur i don't have any other thoughts well that's that on joe fucking bowler um i hope we don't hear from our lawyers we didn't make any claims in there did we we just we just we just reported i don't think you even put your did you even put your opinion in there i feel like we kind of know the opinion but i don't

think you even even opinion's in there. I feel like we were really careful, and we just reported on what anybody else could go fact-check for themselves. Yep. Check it out, guys. Be sure to rate and subscribe. Thanks for chatting with us in the live chat today. It's been real. We'll see you next Friday. Later.