Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Moderation vs Censorship & Helping Brands Safely Navigate Social Media w/ Matthew McGrory

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

SUMMARYIn this episode of "Right About Now," hosted by Ryan Alford, the focus is on the evolving landscape of social media. Guest Matthew McGrory, CEO of Arwen.AI, discusses the impact of recent political events, moderation challenges, and the future of platforms like Twitter (now X). The conversation explores Elon Musk's vision for Twitter, the importance of balancing free speech with brand safety, and the transformative role of AI in social media engagement. McGrory emphasizes the need for brands to understand customer sentiment and engage authentically, leveraging AI to navigate real-time conversations and enhance their communication strategies.TAKEAWAYSThe evolving landscape of social media and its implications for marketing.The impact of recent political events on social media platforms.The importance of social media moderation and balancing free speech.The future vision for social media platforms, including integration of e-commerce and payment systems.The role of government influence and censorship in social media.The significance of understanding customer sentiment in brand engagement.The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in enhancing social media communication strategies.Real-time engagement and responsiveness to customer conversations on social media.The accessibility of AI tools for brands of all sizes to analyze social media data.The potential for AI to transform sentiment analysis into actionable insights for brands. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. 

If someone was to ask me, why did Elon buy Twitter? One of the reasons I think is because he's got this kind of idea in his head of turning X into this kind of massive platform like they have in China with Weibo, where it's got a payment platform, it's got advertising in it, it's got the products in it, it's linked into Alibaba, all these different things all in one place. That's the futuristic vision of social media. It's linked into Alibaba, all these different things all in one place. That's the futuristic vision of social media. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes.

You ready to start snapping next and cash in checks? Well, it starts right about now. Hey, guys, what's up? Welcome to Right About Now. We're always talking about what's now. And you know, it's right, baby. You know, it's right because we're talking about it. Hey, at least we think it is in our own heads to your minds, I'm excited. We're going to talk one of my favorite topics, social media.

And being a marketing guy, if you're not into social media, then you're probably not really into marketing because it is the way to market these days. But there's a lot of talk about what it is, what it isn't, about what flows through social media. So no better person to come on than the CEO of Arwin.ai. He is Matthew McCrory. What's up, Matthew? Hey, nice to be on the show.

Thanks for having me. Yeah, man. I was excited to have you guys reached out. We had to schedule a couple of little blips here and there. But I was pumped. You know, the news has been in your space, have you guys reached out and we had to schedule a couple of little blips here and there. But I was pumped. The news has been in your space, which I know marketing well enough with PR, hey, that's free rising to the top. You want it to be top of mind, right? Yeah, absolutely. There's been lots of news in the social media space. The first inception of Arwin was as a moderation tool.

So there's been lots of talk about moderation, free speech, censorship, both in the US since you had your great election in November. And your vice president was over in Germany last week talking about free speech, telling the leaders of Europe what they should be doing. So it's a very topical discussion point at the minute. Yeah. I'm going to ask you, Matthew, since you brought that up, I'm just curious. And this is less your opinion, but you can certainly share it more. What is the sentiment overseas? I know you're just south of London. What is the sentiment overseas of what has both transpired with the election and, you know, the vice president was there? Like, is there a general sentiment or is it just like us? It's like 50-50.

I think generally it's probably more 60-40 left leaning, I would have said, is the sentiment. I think that's partly driven by one of Trump's targets is kind of the media and the kind of traditional mass media and that they tend to take traditional approaches and if you look at employees in that space they tend to be slightly left-leaning in their opinion. So yeah I would say we're definitely leaning left we've got a Labour government in here, which was probably elected more about the ineptitude of the right-leaning government that preceded it rather than Labour's good points. But a lot of Germany is seeing kind of rise of right-leaning parties getting votes and very much on the topical points of immigration.

Yeah, economy still comes out first. Everyone wants a job first and foremost. They want to make money. They want a good platform for that. That's the same, I think, in the US and all across Europe. But yeah, immigration, massive topic here. It's just kind of the levels we've had over the last 15 years across Europe have meant

that it's caused problems. And I think you've had your share of those in the US and that's created some of the divide that I think politicians, instead of closing their eyes or putting the blindfold on and running around and pretending it's not there, people need to start addressing it, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. It's unavoidable at some point. I mean, I always tell people to caution a little bit, we're a country of immigrants, but we're at a scale now where you do have to have laws in place and measures. It's been a little bit of the wild wild west for sure in that regard.

But I do want to get down, right down the pike here, I think with our audience. We got that treadmill crowd. I hope whoever's, if you're listening, wherever, whenever you are, I hope you get that heart level up, if we got to be about 85 right now, okay? Then I'm going to take you to 115 because we're going to, you know, talk about moderation. And look, one of my favorite quotes, Matthew, is everything in moderation, especially moderation. Yeah. Well, and there's,

and there's a well-known blog in the trust and safety sector called everything in moderation, which talks about everything in the space. I think for me, this is about brand safety. We typically, our clients are brands. Like Formula One's a client, ATP, tennis are a client. This is about individual choices of individuals to protect themselves in cases where they have to kind of be subjected to things that probably most of us wouldn't really like. I think the tipping point here is where people are removing content completely off social

media channels. The way Elon Musk has set up X means that if you want to say your opinion, that's fine. And if I choose not to listen to your opinion, I can shut you up. You can carry on saying what you want to say. I just decided that I don't want to listen to it anymore and I don't want my followers to listen to it anymore and I don't want my followers to listen to it. So very often where it becomes a bit of a sensitive point is we have elite sports clients and them as individuals they have tens of millions of followers that they would say my hard work has brought me these followers.

So if I don't want my followers to hear what this person over here is going to say, I don't want my followers to hear what person, this person over here is gonna say, I don't want them on my channel. Whereas, yeah, I think where Elon's going is Elon's saying, but that person still should be allowed to shout out whatever they wanna say on their channel. And I think this is where the kind of the Facebook, the meta U-turn that happened just after the election, when Zuckerberg kind of realized that to get into good books, they

were going to have to make some policy changes. There's been some interesting stuff released about what the Biden administration was asking meta to do during the pandemic, which again, I haven't seen. I've just seen kind of rumour and speculation. I haven't seen kind of cold hard facts yet. But if that was the case, then yeah, I just that shouldn't be a place where we're going. You know, things should be allowed to disseminate. We draw a line on what we call illegal stuff, which is kind of below the line, which is child sexual exploitation, where people are doing death threats, things like that. Things that are at the extreme end of the toxicity scale. And then we draw the line at what we call the lawful but awful. So lawful but awful should be absolutely fine, that stuff is allowed, but it should be up to

individuals in the community whether they want to listen to it. The analogy I generally use on demos with clients is Patrick Swayze in Roadhouse, so he's the bouncer. He's brought in by the owner of the bar to clean it up because people are smashing the bar up and the owner wants a nice hospital place. He doesn't want the band to get smashed with beer bottles every night. And we're very much trying to create a world like that, that it's based on choice. There are bars that still exist like that and that's fine. You can go in and you can throw beer bottles and the

bars protected with a cage and there are other bars that are suitable for your family and you come in and you have a nice polite conversation and we welcome everyone. So, and it's kind of free choice and yeah, I live near the home of the British army. So around me, there are loads of bars that are like what we would call Swoddy bars, where the army folk will go. And you can go down there on a Friday night and they'll be a bit fruity

and they'll get a bit exciting. Or you can go the other way and you go to your bar where you have your Sunday roast. Now, digital channels are exactly the same. It's like you want to create spaces for your audiences where they want to come and have meaningful conversations. And that's what we're really trying to do. And we're really policing that for the brands themselves.

We don't do that for the social media organizations. And so I do want to add one point. You know, you mentioned the Biden administration and not, you know, you're overseas. It's not your job to know the everything, but I am going to quote exactly what they did because Zuckerberg said it in front of Congress under testimony that he was pressured to censor and they did censor COVID information on Facebook, which is bullshit and exactly what happened. And Zuckerberg's both had a coming to Jesus, so to speak, for his own platforms and also gotten a little bit of chutzpah behind them because the guys like doing UFC now.

I don't know if it's all related. Some people would call that toxic masculinity. I would just call it seeing the world as it should be, which is you can do it. Look, 100% agree. No hate, threats of violence. That bullshit needs to be taken out. I think we can all align on that stuff, but political-based pressuring on these platforms that's been taking place in the US, and Zuckerberg's just the only one that got up there and admitted

it, has been happening. That's the stuff that just drives. And I think part of the reason Trump got elected, you know, people like or love him, hate him. It's just that there's just not room for that kind of political, like, not only censorship, but freaking, you know, they want to call everything disinformation, misinformation. You know, it's all the truth is in the eye of the beholder. Yeah, it's a very convenient catch-all, disinformation, misinformation. We've been very careful to try and avoid it. We do get rid of a lot of spam, but that's typically around the

subject of it might be financial scamming, those types of things or come to my dating site. It's the stuff that like if you're trying to read an article, you really don't want that in the way. It's poor form for content. I think we can all agree with that. I think there's another hundred miles of this road to travel if I'm honest. I wouldn't say I admire is probably too strong a word, but I would certainly respect Zuckerberg for doing what he did and almost u-turning it and actually shedding some light on the topic. That is normally the best tonic for these things. Shed some light on the topic that is normally the best tonic for these things, shed some light on the truth.

I think you're going to find that Europe were not particularly well behaved during the pandemic, and I think you're going to find that European governments are going to be held to account over the next five to ten years as we go through all our kind of our own little post-mortems of how people behaved during the pandemic and yeah there are a lot of things that should have shouldn't have happened and there are a lot of views that were pushed on us propaganda is what it would have been called sort of 60 70 years ago in my personal opinion. So we really care for them.

We as Americans go through what's called audits with our taxes. We get audited. I think there needs to be an accounting. And look, I don't really want to drudge up this shit. I'm a guy that doesn't have a rearview mirror. Let's go forward. But I do think we got to make sure we learn from the past so we don't repeat it in the future is the biggest thing that I would take away.

I will say that's what I love about what you're doing is it seems to be you guys are headed down the road of the right moderation with the stuff that we can all universally agree in as a brand and as a company that you don't want in your content and you don't want your customers get subjected to that. That's why I really like what you guys are doing with our way. And the flip side of all this is the good stuff, right?

So the whole point of social media is so that, I mean, is so that we can all have a conversation But it's monetized by the brands who want to have a conversation with their clients with their customers, right? So what we worked out is as well as detecting the bad stuff or we call it your your sort of golden tickets in your comment mountain because most brands have got a comment mountain of what people are saying to them, and most of them aren't listening to it.

They're not listening to their customers, they're not listening to buying signals from their clients. And that's where the commercial imperative is. That's where, you know, I use the example, I sort of name and shame brands when I talk to them and say, here are some comments that were on your social media channels in the last two weeks and you haven't replied to. And they will be really obvious things like, where can I buy this?

Can I get this in blue instead of red as it's shown on the Instagram channel? So really obvious things that people aren't responding to. So I think we're moving into a monetization phase on social media that isn't just as it is today, which is just kind of billboard advertising, which is kind of where we've been stuck in on this stuff for the last few years. I think it's much more interactive and I think that's if I if someone's to ask me why did Elon buy Twitter, one of the reasons I think is because he's got this kind of idea in his head of turning X into this kind of massive platform like they have in China with Weibo and the other ones where

it's got a payment platform, it's got advertising in it, it's got the products in it, it's linked into Alibaba, all these different things all in one place. That's the futuristic vision of social media, which I think is where Elon wants to take it. I think he's being held up on the road of that journey at the minute. Yeah. He's like any good entrepreneur distracted sometimes, but he's it's interesting that you brought up

the weebo thing. And it's funny, I was walking around the mall on Sunday, and I don't go to the mall very often here in the States. But I was thinking in terms of social media, and when I think of what you're talking about with building, it's almost, it's like this, there's a place that I'm now seeing more clearly than I did. I kind of panned the whole metaverse bullshit like four or five years ago because I thought we were ahead of it. And it was just so, I don't know, ethereal that it wasn't real yet.

Hey, I'm going know, ethereal that it wasn't like real yet. Hey, I'm gonna get into space and I'm, yeah, I know that I care what my skin is and that my shirts are, but it wasn't quite there. But now I can sort of see this interplay of transactional merchandise, like what you're talking about meets digital, meets social, like the digital mall. Because when you look around the

mall it's bunch it is like this combination of social because people are having conversations or walking around in these courts and things and I almost have this vision now that I see what you're saying with like X becoming that digital place of social plus shopping plus interaction right I think I think that's what you're painting, right? Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I think there's this meta-release, this metaverse world, and there's this platform concept of everything being in the same place, making it really convenient.

I don't have to set up an account to check out. I don't have to put my credit card details because they're all kind of stored somewhere. So the whole pain of selection and transaction and buying, all that pain is very much taken care of. And yeah, I think we're headed for, you know, kind of these platforms getting even stronger than they are, because they're going to eek onto the high street, you know, certainly the high street here in the UK is becoming smaller and smaller, we've got less retail outlets, and certainly more like restaurants. We joke in the UK about the proliferation of charity shops. All our market towns are filled with seven or eight charity shops, where if we went back 10, 15 years, there

might be one or two. It's great for the charities. They're getting free retail store, but I think it's a product of the fact that a lot of this stuff is moving online, a lot of the experience of how do I buy things, how do I interact, how to ask questions. It's becoming a little bit more real. And certainly the AI revolution is playing into that because I can experience things with AI that I couldn't do before. I can talk to an avatar in a way that I couldn't do before and it will respond in a slightly more human-like way. I mean, we're still at base one, but hopefully we're going to get to base two and base three fairly quickly, it would appear. Yeah. That train is moving fast.

You can see it with machine learning and everything like it. It's both exciting and scary sometimes. Talking with Matthew McCrory, he is the CEO of R1.ai. It's interesting, I'm hearing you talk. I'm sort of like looking at the R1 platform and it makes me think of this world that we live in where you have all this content being pushed out, words, pictures, type all that. And like you said, you're helping brands engage

because finding the nuggets that could be transactional opportunities or brand opportunities, which is what I'm hearing. And it goes to show that there's so much data and so many micro conversations happening on social media that there's power in the intelligence that can provide when it is rolled up for you and gives you these signals. And at its core, I feel like that's what you guys are doing with Engaze particularly, right?

Yeah, that's exactly it. We've got a retail, like a hospitality chain here that owns about 2,400 bars across the UK. And they want to do things like, we've just launched our new menu in one of our brands that might be 200 bars. How do people feel about that? What was the sentiment?

What was the most talked about thing? Did they like the burgers? Did they like the new ribs that we released? Did we change the chips? Did anyone complain about the fries? Sorry, they're not chips, fries in your world. French fries. In America. So that's really where people want that intelligence of what people are saying so they can react to it. That could inform product decisions that they're making and help them respond to people in a more informed and grown up way. You've also got, we worked with some sports teams in Formula One

and one of the teams came to us and said, well, we want to know what people are saying every 15 minutes throughout the race because we want to react to it are saying every 15 minutes throughout the race because we want to react to it as the race happens. It's a two-hour race. In hour three, the story is dead, but we want to react to it. 30 minutes in, something happens. There's a pit stop. The lead changes.

There's a safety flag, that type of stuff. So that's really people want to, the creators want to react more quickly in a more authentic way to what the audience is talking about. Some of those channels get 200, 250,000 comments over a race weekend. So there's a lot of stuff. So bringing those, boiling those things to the surface is really important so that they can authentically dive into the right conversations that kind of generate more excitement. They can use it to kind of think about

how the press conference is good. They can lead the drivers to say certain things at a press conference. That could be both to promote good stuff. It could also be to stop bad things from happening. Yeah. So it's really interesting, Le, really interesting how people are using the tech, the AI tech in lots of different ways to pick up different signals on social media. What? Matthew I mean I worked on one of the first Visualizations of social media for Verizon Wireless in

2010 we did a gigantic Twitter sentiment board it was live at like the NFL game and It would light up and do things. It was based on sentiment, things like that. It was very rudimentary. This is 14 years ago. But I want to just clearly for our audience though, talk about specifically with the advancements and how you're using AI of how this isn't just a sentiment type thing, how it is actionable and really like comes to life for people or in brands.

Yeah, so the way we approach this is like you've got to really understand your client, your customer, what they're looking for. So it typically, it might be very often it's kind of a PR related message. Yeah, a good example is I interviewed someone from a very well known drinks, global drinks grand and they're very sensitive about people talking about them polluting the oceans with plastic. So you may or may not be able to guess who I'm talking about them polluting the oceans with plastic. So you may or may not be able to guess who I'm talking about. So they spend an awful lot of money cleaning the oceans of hundreds of tons of plastic. They have a whale preservation program and they want to tell people about that. So what we're able to do is we're able to take the messages that they're looking for

and with the advancements in AI, specifically large language models, we're able to create synthetic data sets. So the client gives us 10 source comments. They kind of say, we're looking for stuff that sounds like this. So the client gives us 10 source comments. They kind of say, we're looking for stuff that sounds like this. And whenever that gets posted, we want to lean into that conversation. And we want to tell them, look, we're not polluting the oceans. We're actually saving the whales. We're saving the dolphins.

And we remove this. So PR and kind of crisis people are using these things to get to very specific content in very specific ways. More generalistic, people are using those large language models techniques. It's a bit techy, and I'm not going to profess to be an expert on this, but there's a technique called RAG, which was developed by Facebook, which takes a customer's own data, so their own voice, their brand guidelines, their brand voice, the responses

that they give to their call center to talk to their clients, pulls that all together. They couple that with the large language model to generate authentic on-brand voice responses for clients. So they use it inbound, how can we detect specific messages, and they're using it outbound for we want the suggested replies. Normally it's suggested to a human agent, and they kind of have the last call and edit it of how we respond to that. That's really come about in the last, I would say, 18 months to two years with where open AI and the whole large language model movement has gone and being able to take that, we can do lots more than we used to.

Yeah. I mean, it can just process so much more data quickly and then not only process it, it can interpret, right? It's the interpretation probably that's the stuff that'll blow your mind, it feels like. Yeah, I mean, it's picking up on these, like for brands, it's picking up on specific messages normally that they're looking for, but they're also after the intelligence that they kind of don't know that's there. But yeah, I wouldn't say finding it is easy yet,

but it's democratizing access to the data because we've got a development we're doing at the minute. I mean, it's a bit cheesily named in its prototype. It's called Ask Arwen. And Ask Arwen is aimed at the kind of the non-technical person within a marketing team or a social media team who wants to ask a question of their data. So it might be, what was the most positive 10 comments made on my social media? What was the most talked about, top three talked about topics on my social media? What was the most talked about,

top three talked about topics on my social media? So the idea is you can use like have a conversation with your social media channel and ask it questions. On TikTok what was my most talked about event? Which channel did the most? So you're pulling all this data out in the way humans like to do it, which is I want to ask a question and I want to get an answer that isn't deeply technical. So bad news for some of the data analysts who spend their days kind of translating what a marketing director might give them and then turning it into like a SQL query to interrogate data.

So this will be really game changer because it allow businesses to make quick, rapid decisions like in the moment. I think that when we get to that point, yeah, we're going to see, it's going to make creativity within ad campaigns really, really exciting. Is this a product and you know what the development that goes into this that's for large brands only? Like is this, you know, how scalable is this? I mean, obviously I get that, you know, a mom and pop coffee shop doesn't need to scan million pieces of data.

But there's, I don't know, e-commerce brands that might be smaller, but they serve a large wide audience or they'd like to. And intent data would be very valuable to them. But is this attainable or reachable or scalable? Where does that start and stop with R1? Yeah, well, I mean, our model is really to address that part of the market, to do it through partners. So there are a lot of organizations

that already have partners that are helping them, they're doing these types of things. So we partner with both kind of traditional outsourcers that are providing kind of people services, customer experience type services, and also with marketing agencies. So kind of there are two kind of go to markets from partners. Most of those organizations are providing insights, client intelligence, all these types of things. So what we're trying to do is our go-to-market, we are going direct as well,

but we're kind of layering that into the services that they're providing. So it becomes intrinsic when people are doing campaigns. Further down than that, like you say, kind of e-commerce, yeah, we're working with partners that go into the SME marketplace. So we're able to give it to them, and they're able to give it to their kind of sector. A lot of these insights are very often sector-specific.

So once you understand the sector or work with a sector specialist partner, you can drive real good economies of scales and therefore make the products available to lots of people. So we're early stages, but I definitely think we're not far from this being very affordable very quickly. We're not talking five years. We're talking 12 months. Yeah, lots of startups are building this into their strategy about how they target that mass market of businesses that aren't enterprises. You could build essentially, you might have a target market in mind, but tools like this could help you pivot and or adapt target markets that are maybe larger or different than what

you anticipated. If suddenly your product has a use case or is gaining steam with soccer moms for some reason, you know, like you could build, you know, niche target markets from this data that might not have been your first inclination. Yeah, definitely. And the other thing, the other thing that's coming in, again, in Europe, we're beholden to GDPR regulations in probably a slightly stricter way than in the US. But some of those demographic overlays are quite important. And there's lots of businesses now kind of stepping into that fray. So you can get alongside the insights data,

you can get a demographic overlay. So we were able to tell a sports governing body that we said 20% of your audience, of your followers is women, but they provide 60% of the positive sentiment on your channels. So go and recruit more women because they're good. They send a great message out.

So those types of nuggets, they're quite, you have to think through how to write the reports. But yeah, I think we're, the large language model kind of product is really changing that and allowing you to discover exactly as you're talking about different demographics, different target markets within what you're doing. The key is you have to have a conversation to start with. At the heart is the creativity around the story you're telling, you've got to excite people with your ads or your message or your content. So you've kind of got to have a conversation to start with, otherwise no one's commenting on your socials and you've kind

of got nothing to analyze in the first place. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, in theory, how does it work, Matthew? I mean, as far as like a just industry aggregation of data, like, okay, it's one thing for Coca Cola that wants to know their billion customers, how they're talking about it. It's another for Coca Cola startup that wants to, you know, wants sentiment data for the industry. So I mean, I would, I assume you might work with both, correct? I know that going straight to brands or an agency or the brand might be, but you can also roll up, I guess, categorically, right? Yeah, you can do a bit of that, but a lot of that data is tied up, certainly on Metta.

So the way, because of the, I don't know if it was big news in the US, but the Cambridge Analytica scandal over here, which was really the UK company that was targeting individuals as part of the election campaigns, we're going back 10 years now, meant that Metta had to reapply all its data privacy policies and laws. So now getting any permissions to access data, for us to do that, we have to go through a

complete app review process. It takes at least two weeks every time we tweak a change. It's a real lengthy process. So a lot of the data is tied up in those data pools, so is actually only accessible to actually only accessible to the kind of base companies. Some sell it, like X, you can sign up to their data, or you can sign up to one of the kind of big social listening platforms that are kind of, they're listening to the kind of 10% social media sentiment that's going around, the sprinkler, brand watch,

these are the kind of big players in those sectors. But they're spending a lot of money to get hold of that data and put it in these vast data pools. The only way you can do it affordably is to know exactly where you're looking. So you have to have a kind of use case in order to do that. Doing it generally is quite expensive at the moment.

Yeah. Interesting distinction. And I can understand if you're wanting personalized data, I guess it's actually the rollup of that data and what it tells you, not necessarily so that I can target Jane Smith because I know she wants to buy it, but more that the aggregation of that knowledge, because you would think, I mean, and I'm not suggesting anything nefarious here, Matthew, but scraping what is public information for posts that are public and not necessarily made to only specific people or whatever

That that information could be aggregated in a way That could tell you things. I'm not saying that's what our one does, but I don't know where the line it gets drawn with publicly available data versus you know your personal profile and and then targeting you with you know leather shoes because You know, we know you like that. Yeah. Well, I mean, you can certainly do that within the ad platforms, within social media. So we do do kind of retargeting lists for clients. So they run a meta ad.

We analyze who looked at it, who responded it within the meta ecosystem. And then we tell them, the next time you run the ad, don't run it against this audience, because they don't like you. But run it against this audience, because they do like you. So we find that happens in lots of different micro communities. So you can definitely do it within your own data set. Yeah. But kind of aggregating up is more challenging. Yeah, there are there are definitely businesses out there that will do scraping. They will.

And there's nothing illegal to doing that, as you say, it's totally publicly available information. Arwen doesn't do it because we signed a T's and C's agreement with Meta that says we won't do that. So we only do it on kind of information that's in the box. But there are businesses that do that and they aggregate data up. And yeah, I think that's usual. We can access it and anyone can access it via X, but you have to pay to access the X API.

But then you obviously only get an X view of the world, then you don't get an X Facebook, kind of Instagram view of the world, which, and TikTok, which a lot of marketing professionals will want that kind of full view of what's going on. Do you guys enrich, you know, does Arwen enrich those, you know, again, the data that you have access to within the box of the brand? Are you enriching that data, you know, for targeting on digital channels? Well, we are only so far as like I said before, we'll partner with demographic type organizations.

We'll take an audience that reacted positively to maybe an ad or to an organic campaign. We'll take all those people and then we'll say, can you find me more people like this? We'll do a demographic analysis exactly as you were saying. They're soccer bums, they're on the East Coast. They kind of look like this. So that the client could then run another lookalike campaign to target more people that look like those people. So yeah, so you can enrich it in that sense of the word,

So, yeah, so you can enrich it in that sense of the word, but it's very difficult without doing it manually in this kind of data private world to kind of do that in an automated fashion anymore. Going back 10 years, you'd have great pools filled of people doing that data enrichment. Matthew, as we close out the episode here, where is it all headed for Arwen? And what's your future vision where this world of moderation on social media is headed and how you see Arwen being a part of it?

Well, with everything that's happened in the last sort of six months, we're definitely headed to a much, from our perspective, probably on the main channels, a much more kind of generally toxic environment. I think the pendulum swung one way, it went too far. It's gonna swing back the other way. It'll swing past the middle and go to the other side.

Yeah, we know it will. That's what always happens in these cases, which is unfortunately good for us because we'll be standing there waiting to help people, to protect people's brand. So that's the sort of the kind of me too bit of the job, the moderation side. Where we hope things are heading is they're heading the, what we call our kind of insights, intelligence. We think that's a little bit more exciting. It's about creating more engagement.

Yeah, that's where we think the future is on social media is giving people exactly what they want, not hammering them with loads of ads that they don't really wanna see, getting in the way of their kind of user journey that they want, that they're accessing news and leisure and all sorts of their kind of user journey that they want. They're accessing news and leisure and all sorts of their hobbies, etc. on these social media channels. So don't get in their way, give them exactly what people want. And I think that giving people that intelligence as to how

people behave online and what they respond to and what their interests are. I think that that should help brands give people the content they want. So I see that becoming more affordable to more businesses and being able to do it much quicker and you don't need as big a skill set as you used to technically in order to deliver it. I love it. I love it. Where can everyone keep up with everything

that you're doing Matthew with Arwen? We are, you can look at our website arwen.ai. We post all our news on there and that's kind of the main channel. I'm a linked for the CEO of a social media company. I haven't got the biggest social media preference. LinkedIn is my network of choice. That's how I kind't got the biggest social media preference. LinkedIn is my network of choice. That's where I kind of live and breathe and post stuff.

I'm on all the other social medias because I have teenage children and I have to check up on them occasionally. Yes, I live in that world myself. And hey, if Arwen can help protect them from some of the bad guys, I'm all for it. I just want it to be done in a world where we're not moderating opinion. Yeah, I totally agree with you. Totally agree with you. Matthew, it's a pleasure having you on. I really appreciate it. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Ryan, for having me. Hey, guys, you're going to find us, Ryanisright.com. You'll find highlight clips from today's episode, the full YouTube video and audio, and of course, all the links to social media for Arwen and myself and the show. We appreciate you. We know you have a choice in podcasting. Thank you for making us number one.

We'll see you next time, or right about now. This has been Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. Visit Ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening!