There Are No Girls on the Internet - DISINFORMED: Understanding Section 230 with Evan Greer

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

Musician and digital rights activist Evan Greer breaks down Section 230 and why she and other digital rights activists are fighting to preserve it.Follow Evan: https://twitter.com/evan_greerListen to Evan’s rad new album Spotify is Surveillance: https://evangreer.bandcamp.com/album/spotify-is-surveillanceLearn more about Fight for the Future: https://www.fightforthefuture.org/Listen to Carrie Goldberg’s episode of TANGOTI: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/there-are-no-girls-on-the-internet/id1520715907?i=1000489091000VOTE FOR US FOR TO WIN A SHORTY AWARD: TANGOTI.COM/VOTE Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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There Are No Girls on the Internet has been nominated for a Shorty Award for Disinformed, our mini-series on Disinformation, and it would mean so much to me if you would take a moment and vote for us. It only takes a moment and you can vote every day. Go to tango-di.com slash vote. That's T-A-N-G-O-T-I-C-I-C-Vote. Or check the link in our show description. You're listening to Disinformed, a mini-series from There Are No Girls on the Internet. I'm Bridget Todd.

Okay, so a secret shame of mine is that I make a tech podcast, but I haven't really taken a public personal stance on one of the biggest tech policies of our time, Section 230. A piece of legislation passed in 1996, which basically says that internet platforms can be sued or held liable for content that people post on those platforms. One reason is that it's a complex issue that requires a bit of nuance and complexity to even discuss. You know who isn't exactly the poster child for understanding nuance and complexity? Donald Trump.

Currently, social media giants like Twitter receive an unprecedented liability. based on the theory that they're a neutral platform. My executive order calls for new regulations under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. When he repeatedly called for ending Section 230, it kind of threw a polarizing wrench into the existing debate, turning the whole thing into a partisan talking point rather than a real conversation.

There's a diversity of thought about Section 230. Last season, we spoke to Attorney Kerry Goldberg who advocated for changes to Section 230. 230. Here's a clip. But they're saying that basically the internet as we know it wouldn't exist without Section 230. And we're going to lose, you know, all the, this wonderful free exchange of ideas if we lose Section 230. And I call total BS on that. Because number one, you're assuming that the Internet as we know it is a great place and that as we know it, like, should be preserved.

You know, it's kind of like any constitutional argument or make America great again. You're assuming that it is, the things are great and that everyone has the same level of free speech. But, I mean, speech on the Internet really belongs to those who are the loudest and basically four companies, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. I mean, they control the Internet. And we've got all our issues with antitrust and also the quantity. So the most hostile people on the Internet are the ones who have the greatest protections. But digital rights groups like Fight for the Future say overbroad changes to Section 230 will further harm marginalized communities online. Evan Greer has been fighting for digital rights online for almost a decade.

My name's Evan Greer and I'm a director of Fight for the Future, which is a nonprofit that works to protect. people's basic rights in the digital age. Evan is also a musician, and a lot of her music criticizes big tech. Here's a taste. Once consent was manufactured, now it's harvested. Algorithms make decisions. I took a bit of a roundabout path to this work, actually. I dropped out of college and became a full-time touring musician for about a decade

and traveled around making a living, playing poppy, queer, political, punk, and folk music for a living. I started touring, playing about 200 to 300 shows a year, and offering workshops and trainings on a wide range of social justice, environmental justice, and economic justice issues, primarily for college students, but also for labor unions and nonprofits and high school students and youth detention centers. you know, kind of all different types of spaces. And, you know, I really, through the course of that work, it was kind of, you know, it was the early 2000s, the internet was exploding. You know, I had more fans on MySpace then than I have, like, Twitter followers now, which is kind of hilarious. But it was also, you know, this was like pre-Napster, you know, and there was a lot of musicians kind of coming out of the underground, folks who were queer.

folks who were playing, you know, music that was way outside the mainstream or who, you know, you know, were kind of marginalized identities, marginalized musicians. And we were seeing the internet as this, like, incredible engine and platform for giving us a voice and kind of, you know, taking on some of these gatekeepers that had always sort of controlled what was cool or what music got to be heard. And so, you know, there were so many of us that were, like, putting our music up for free on archive.org and then having people send us donations, like, again, before Napster, before Spotify, before any of this stuff. And so for me, that was like the wake up where I was like, wow, this technology is really powerful. And it, you know, has this, you know, I distinctly remember, like, one specific moment of my first tour of Europe showing up at, like, a record store in Prague in the Czech Republic.

and there was like a hundred 19 year old punk kids that knew all the words to all of my songs. And like I'd never toured there. I didn't have a record label. I didn't have a publicist. And it just, it struck me as like, this is all because of the internet. Like these kids have all downloaded this music.

They've shared it. They've created a community of like wanting to hear this type of stuff. And that was like, you know, just a really powerful moment for me. And so when, you know, I wish I had some like really. cool end to that story, like, or whatever. But really, the end of it is, then I had a kid,

and I maxed out a couple credit cards trying to make a living, you know, supporting a family as a transgender anti-capitalist folk singer. And then I realized I might need a quote-unquote real job. This would turn out to be an opportune time for Evan to be further pulled into the world of digital rights activism. Today, Google's main page shows a black rectangle in the words tell Congress please don't censor the web. Wikipedia has shut down the English-language version of its online encyclopedia for the day. A chorus of opposition was growing against legislation called the Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA. Legislation ostensibly meant to crack down on the piracy of copyrighted content online,

but was widely criticized for the chilling impact it would have on free expression online. Huge internet companies like Reddit, Wikipedia, and Mozilla protested the legislation by taking their websites offline for 24 hours. About a year after the organization had formed, a year after the SOPA strike, or the internet blackout, as it was often called at the time, which was the largest online protest in human history where, you know, I wasn't even at the organization then, but fight for the future. And many other groups basically mobilized hundreds of thousands of organizations and websites to black out their online presences.

And we drove more than 8 million phone calls to Congress. single day to defeat copyright legislation that could have led to widespread internet censorship. So I kind of came into the organization in the aftermath of that. For Evan, it was always music that illustrated the power of the internet and its ability to connect people. And that's what drives her fight to protect it. Just quickly started, you know, kind of seeing the parallels between the work that I had done as an artist where I was trying to use a song or, you know, a little introduction to a song. to connect with people and move them on an emotional level to try to move them toward action

of some type or another. Maybe that was just throwing some money in the hat for the benefit, or maybe it was signing a petition or writing a letter to a political prisoner or whatever it was. But now with Fight for the Future, seeing, well, I'm doing kind of the same thing. I'm not necessarily throwing out a song, although I still do write and record music, and I've got a new album coming out and the next single comes out next week. but we're also sort of painting and coloring with websites and with action tools and with videos and with infographics. But instead of reaching dozens or hundreds or for me on a very, very good night, maybe a couple thousand people,

were able to reach hundreds of thousands, millions, sometimes even tens of millions of people and move them to take action. And again, it's that same feeling that I had at that show in Prague of just recognizing. that the Internet has changed the rules for what is and isn't possible within our political system, you know, in some ways that are really terrible. And I think we're starting to grapple with the reality of that, but also in ways that are really profoundly transformative and democratizing. And the way that, you know, fight for the future's goal is to ensure that technology in the Internet specifically are largely a force for empowerment and liberation, rather than a force for

exploitation and oppression. So that's kind of my roundabout story of like how I came to this work and also why it matters to me. I have to tell you that feeling that you described of the internet being the source of uniting people and connecting people across continents, across the globe. That was exactly the same thing that got me so excited about the internet when I first got my clunky dial-up computer. I was definitely putting hello viruses on it by trying to download music off of Napster. Word. Yeah, that was such a transform.

Like, you know, I grew up in a small town, so that was such a transformative thing for me and is why I'm so interested in the internet now. And I love how you've described this overlap. And I noticed in your music, there is quite an overlap between your stances, as it pertains to tech and big tech, and the music that you make,

I was listening to your song before we got on the call. Emma Goldman would have beat your ass. And on the van campsite, you describe the story behind that name. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, so it's funny. It's interesting for this album. I've ended up doing a few kind of historical deep dives.

The song I have coming out next week is sort of a trans liberation anthem, and I made a music video for it that features archival footage of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson and the work that they did in the aftermath of Stonewall, but also going back even further to like the Compton's Cafeteria Riot, And like I think of myself as someone who like, you know, kind of knows my radical history or whatever. And every time I like really sink my teeth into this stuff, I'm just so struck by like how much of our history is kind of stolen or hidden from us. And so this was an example that I wrote this whole song based on like an anecdote about Emma Goldman

that I, you know, I don't know, like had heard or maybe read somewhere. And then like I wrote up the whole song and I like, you know, was writing the introduction for it was like, I got to go find a source for that. And then I found out that it like wasn't entirely true basically. But the, the story that I had heard was that like she had like literally bullwipped her like ex-boyfriend because he was like trash talking Alexander Berkman after he had attempted to assassinate Henry Frick, who was like, you know, one of these robber baron hyper-capitalist, you know, types. And, you know, it was sort of this like moment. of division within the left in the United States during that era.

It turns out that it wasn't quite her ex-boyfriend. It was like a mentor type guy. And yeah, he had condemned Alexander Frick. And she like basically like hit him with like a toy whip of some sort, which like to which I was like, how is there a toy whip? That seems weird. I don't know if that's really a toy. This is all very problematic. But yeah.

And then apparently she like expressed regret about it. later in her life or whatever. But I don't know. I just felt like there was something powerful for me about that kind of like expression of a woman's rage and specifically toward kind of a, you know, someone who was seen as like a mentor, like a respected man in the community

and just kind of like not taking any bullshit and like literally getting up there and like whacking him in front of a crowd. And so, you know, I just feel like I aspire. to be that direct in my, you know, activism, et cetera. You know, Emma Goldman, you know, like every figure throughout history, you know, had many nuances and, you know, but I, she's definitely someone who has been an inspiration to me and many others. It's pretty punk rock, I have to say.

Right? I mean, come on. It's punk, punk a.F. The different kinds of campaigns that fight for the takes up. One of them really surprised me this campaign to ban facial recognition at festivals, like music festivals. And I had no idea that was going on. I used to work for a music festival called Afropunk. And I thought, God, there are, first of all, hey, there's so much overlap between digital rights and music and arts communities. And then also, there are so many ways that like surveillance is playing out in these ways that we might not even know. We might not even be aware that we are being surveilled in these ways. Yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, the good news that I can say is that that campaign that you just mentioned,

that we ran with Tom Morello, the guitarist of Rage Against the Machine, and a bunch of other prominent musicians was hugely successful. And we actually got more than 40 of the world's largest music festivals to say that they won't use facial recognition surveillance at their events. And, you know, for folks who maybe, you know, I'm sure folks are increasingly aware of facial recognition and the problems with it. But, you know, for me, that's hugely significant because, you know, a lot of the conversation about facial recognition has centered on government and law enforcement

use of this technology, which makes a lot of sense because it's being used right now by police and law enforcement agencies, predominantly targeting communities of color, predominantly targeting black folks, and the technology itself is racist. It has racial bias baked into the current algorithms and it's automating and exacerbating these existing systems that are also already racist. So when you take a system of policing that we know measurably has disproportionately harmed black and brown communities for centuries, and then you layer on top of that a technology that essentially just speeds up and automates those same discriminatory processes that

were already happening, you just get supercharged discrimination and supercharged state violence toward a community that's already disproportionately affected by it. And so it makes, again, makes perfect sense that the conversation has kind of started there with government use, but all of those same things are true with corporate and private use as well. They're enormously discriminatory things that private companies can do with a technology like facial recognition. And so music festivals, I think, were a really good example because it's so public and visible. And all kinds of people like to go to music festivals, right? And so I think it does, it was one really good way, not just to kind of get these policies in place to protect individual music listeners that want to go to a festival without having their biometric information collected by a private corporation.

But it's also sort of a way of educating people, right? Like getting prominent musicians talking about this helped put. facial recognition on the map as a dangerous, toxic technology that no one likes. And that's building momentum for what we really need in the end, which from our perspective at Fight for the Future, is something closer to abolition than reform. We think that this is a technology that is fundamentally unjust and that poses such a profound threat to the future of human civilization and liberty, that it can't be effectively regulated. It really does. need to be banned outright for both government and the vast majority of private uses as well.

Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odin-Kir to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an Acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst?

Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard.

But they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Human me!

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I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves. Their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context, and ask the questions everybody wants answered.

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and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you. but don't ever feel like you don't belong. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it.

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Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. And we're back. Fight for the Future advocates for big stances, like the outright banning of facial recognition technology, because that's what their members want. They don't want incremental bit-by-bit changes to harmful tech policies. Rather, they get behind big swing for the fences, bold actions.

I'm always struck by that. there's that notion in Washington, D.C., that, like, oh, what people really want is, like, compromise and, like, you know, watered down things. And that's just so bogus. And, like, we see it again and again in politics that, you know, no, what people want is, like, real fundamental change. And, you know, what we've seen is that, you know, people are actually much more, resonate much more with the idea of this technology is harmful, let's ban it than they do with, you know, what we, what we've seen. we really need is an opt-in consent-based regulatory framework that allows corporations to continue

selling the stuff and profiting, but put some rules of the road in place. No, like, that is not, you know, A, that's an incorrect policy that won't actually protect the most vulnerable people from the harms of this technology. But B, it's just not a good rallying cry either, right? And so for us, it's always, you know, it's both about leading with what we think is right and always fighting for the biggest possible, you know, or we kind of frame it as like just this side of impossible, right? Like we always try to aim our sights as high as we can go. And we're a very small organization. So we have to like ruthlessly prioritize. Like, is this really one of the things to go all in on and fight for? Or is this one of the ones we have to just let go and hope somebody else, you know,

picks it up and fights for it? But when we decide to go in on something, that's at the top of our minds is basically, A, is this a huge, you know, is this a win that if we will fundamentally change things and concretely benefit large numbers of people. I first met Evan when she was leading a coalition call of dozens of progressive activists and digital rights groups about Section 230 in response to the Safe Tech Act, legislation sponsored by Senators Mark Warner, Maisie Hirono, and Amy Klobuchar, to make changes to Section 230. The last time Section 230 was changed was back in 2018. The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or Sesta, got bipartisan.

and support in the House and the Senate, and was signed by Trump. Cesta becoming law meant that platforms would be held responsible for knowingly facilitating or supporting sex trafficking. Now, this might sound like a good thing, but it actually ended up causing a lot of harm to people involved in sex work consensually who were not being trafficked. Well-meaning celebrities endorsed the legislation in a PSA. Call your congressperson or senator and say, what the f***? Ask them to amend Section 230. and then call them again until they do something. Please call yours. Will you call yours?

But this is why people like Evan say it's so important to have a thoughtful debate and conversation about Internet regulation. Most people agree that something needs to be done. But if you do something just to say you're taking action, you could end up inadvertently causing more harm. And we know the people most likely to be harmed are those who are already marginalized. Full disclosure, as someone who makes a podcast about the Internet, people often ask me about my position. section 230. And I am kind of ashamed to admit that I said like, oh, I don't really know, you know, I'm glad I'm glad that smart people are having the conversation. You know, we, last season we spoke to attorney Kerry Goldberg, who was very much in favor of changing

Section 230. And you and I were on a call, a coalition call about Section 230, which was fascinating and I feel like I learned so much. But the thing that really struck me was, even though we were on this coalition call with like civil rights groups and justice groups and social change groups, it was clear to me that there was not consensus on the call of where folks stand. So I guess I want to, I want to ground our conversation in that. But then my question is sort of where do you and fight for the future stand on Section 230 and, you know, what, like, what is your position on this legislation? I think the way that you framed it there is really important because I think one thing that's happened is Trump, just to put it bluntly, right?

Like, Trump started tweeting things like repeal Section 230. And then, you know, and frankly, you know, Joe Biden has also called to revoke Section 230. And so part of what has happened is something that's actually a very complex policy debate and conversation has now been sort of thrust into the like CNN, MS. NBC, Fox News, like, level of debate. It is a tiny law that's had a huge impact on the internet as we know it. Section 230 of the community. And anytime that happens, just like the thoughtfulness of the conversation. You know, there's like a, you could draw a graph, right?

Of like, how much attention is this getting on cable TV to like, how intelligent of a conversation are we having about it? And it's like a, you know, I'm not good at math, but they're like the opposite. Yeah. And so I think, but that said, I, you know, I think within social justice and civil rights and human rights spaces, there is a more thoughtful conversation happening in the sense that I think there is, you know, there's maybe broad disagreement around exactly what should be done, but there's increasing agreement about the harms, right?

Like all of us on the call that you reference agree, like big tech is a problem, their business model is fundamentally incompatible with basic human rights and democracy. They are exacerbating existing disparities in our society. They are amplifying harmful ideologies like white supremacy that have long held a stronghold in the United States and around the world and within our political institutions and economic institutions. So like everyone sort of agrees on the problems. And I think we're now trying to figure out, well, what are the solutions? And I think it's healthy that there's disagreement or ongoing discussion about trying to figure out what the solutions are. Right. And so like there's tons of groups that I work with every day on issues

like surveillance or issues like privacy. And maybe we don't totally agree on Section 230. But like we all know we're like trying to get to the same place. Right. And like I think it's healthy that we can have these these conversations. And that said, I think it's also really important that we push for a more thoughtful conversation. And for myself, you know, one of the things I've been really specifically trying to do is urge nonprofits and progressive groups to listen to sex workers. This has been kind of my mantra in this section. 230 conversation because really when we talk about what would it look like to change section 230, we only have one concrete example, which is Sesta-Fasta, the last major piece of legislation

that created a carve-out in section 230 that lawmakers claimed was intended to address sex trafficking. And what we know is that in fact, it didn't actually do anything to address actual sex trafficking, but it was devastating for sex workers and for their safety. And it ended up leading internet platforms to shut down entire subsections of websites, shut down places where sex workers were able to kind of set their own rules, set their own terms, and have more autonomy. And that there's actual studies that show that that led to actual loss of life. Right. And so sex worker safety and advocacy organizations have been sounding the alarm about this since before Sesta Fasta.

And from where I'm sitting, it does frustrate me that I feel like, you know, there are progressive groups who are just kind of, you know, looking to beat up on the tech companies, which I'm all for like, let's beat up on the tech companies. I am with you. I am in the front row with a pitchfork. But in doing so, trampling or ignoring the voices of, you know, a community. that has already been disproportionately harmed by uncareful policy change, right?

So that's kind of a broader framing. But I didn't actually answer your question, which is what is our position? So, you know, fight for the future, sees Section 230 not primarily as a protection for companies, but actually as an essential law that essentially enables all user-generated content on the Internet. So the speech of ordinary people, right?

The people who wouldn't be on cable TV or the radio, but who are now able to create memes and jokes and write blog posts and share videos on TikTok or wherever, or share photos or be an adult creator or be a storybook creator or whatever it is. Section 230 is the law that essentially allows for all of that to take place by making it so that corporations who care only about making money, right? And we should always remember that are not disincentivized from hosting our speech and our creativity and our ideas and our opinions. And I think it's particularly important for myself as a trans person and I think for anyone who's a creator of a marginalized identity of any kind to recognize that our creations, our thoughts, our ideas are often unpopular among the general public. Right.

And so what Section 230 does is it basically allows platforms to host things that might be unpopular and thus might get them sued. And what happens if you radically change or remove or gut section 230 is you put these content moderation decisions, which we know the platforms are already doing a terrible job at, and it hands them to not away from the trust and safety team or whoever is already doing kind of a bad job at it and gives it to the most risk-averse corporate lawyers in the world who are going to do an even worse job at it. These are lawyers that do not have a power analysis. not care about the speech of marginalized people. They just care about protecting their platform from getting sued. And so if that means that they remove wholesale, entire categories of speech, or engage in widespread censorship of marginalized people's viewpoints and posts and opinions, they will happily do that in order to protect themselves from lawsuits. And that's what we saw with Sesta Fasta.

It didn't actually end up coming down on the companies. they just kind of figured out, all right, fine, we'll just shut down. This is not about defending the companies. I don't particularly care very much about, you know, the company's profits or, you know, how much money they have to spend on lawsuits. What I care about is the impact that that then has on marginalized people's speech and particularly social movement. And for me, Section 230 is such a crucial law for protecting speech, like

for example, a video of police violence, which in a world without Section 230 would almost certainly invite lawsuits from law enforcement who would claim that it's defamatory or that it's incitement, right? Like the Me Too movement, where, you know, people are able to speak out about abusive behavior and platforms are willing to host that speech because they know that they're not going to get sued for giving people a platform to speak. their truth. And so I always think about the impact on those movements. Fight for the Future sees Section 230 as one of the most important laws protecting free speech and human rights in the digital age. And that doesn't mean that we don't think it can ever be changed, right? No law is sacrosanct.

Laws are just laws. But we are very concerned that, you know, rushed or uncareful changes to Section 230 will do far more harm than good. And we also have... think it's largely a distraction from the policies that we really need to be fighting for, like strong federal data privacy legislation that cuts off the huge stream of data that these companies are collecting and using to manipulate people, like banning practices like non-transparent algorithmic amplification, where Facebook isn't just letting white supremacists spout off. They are actively saying, hey, you seem like you might be a white supremacist. Do you want to meet these other white supremacists in this white supremacy group for the purpose of gaining more money

through advertising, right? And so our feeling is that there are real policies that are sitting right there in front of us, like passing strong federal data privacy legislation, like enforcing existing antitrust and civil rights laws, like pushing for FTC investigations into specifically harmful business practices, again, like algorithmic manipulation, like micro-targeting, et cetera. And we could be getting to work, getting those done if we weren't constantly going around in circles in this kind of partisan gridlock debate around Section 230, and we could do it in a way that would actually address the problem at its root. And then finally, I'll just say, I think one thing that people often miss when thinking about Section 230 or one thing that's

happening a lot is I think lawmakers have almost got it into their minds that Section 230 or taking away Section 230 is like the only lever that they have to hold big tech companies accountable. And I hear this a lot from lawmakers, from groups that I work with where they're like, yeah, I don't think this is really a good solution, but I just don't know what else to do. Like someone has to do something about these companies, right? And I resonate with that. Like these harms are real and they're happening right now and they're traumatic. And we do have that sense of like we have to do something.

But again, I think if there's one thing that we've learned over the last number of years around internet policy and if there's one thing that we should take away from sesta foster, it's that we have to do the right thing, not just something. Because if we just do something, it'll almost always end up coming back to hurt the people who are already being hurt. And it won't actually hold the companies that we want to hold accountable, accountable, because they have exponentially more resources. They have deep pockets. They can afford the lawyers, right?

And so what we end up with if we make changes to Section 230 that are not thoughtful is we could actually end up solidifying the monopoly power of the largest, most abusive players, like Facebook and Google. They're the ones that can afford the armies of lawyers to deal with lawsuits. And we might end up inadvertently crushing any alternative that could come along and provide a better service or a better model or a better community online and leave the big tech companies as the only ones left standing because they're the only ones that can afford to survive in a world without Section 230. And so for me, this isn't sort of like, well, are you for the companies or are you for holding them accountable? For me, this is, I'm for the people. I'm for human rights.

And I believe that defending Section 230 and fighting instead for real meaningful policy changes that will actually address the root causes of the harms that we see from these surveillance capitalist monopolies, that's what I'm fighting for. And that's what fight for the future wants to see. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group?

The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. To the group. The yard birds, right? That's the name.

The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again.

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Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. Last night, a blown call changed the game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the plays, the controversies,

and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context and ask the questions everybody wants answered. Sports Slice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to Sports Slice on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

And for more, follow Timbo Slic Life 12 and the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't.

Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't feel like you don't feel like. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. An Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ledecki. The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face like. up and smile. That means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals.

At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can, like, I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Let's get right back into it. I'm so happy that you started this conversation being grounded in talk about sex work. It's kind of well to me how often people who are involved in sex work are the ones who are really innovating online because they have to.

Yet they're so marginalized and sideline in those same conversations about online policy. They're just not really given a voice in conversations that impact them so directly. Your average sex worker is more of an expert on Section 230 than like anyone, any PhD or academic who like studies this. content moderation or thinks that they do because they have to be right and like people's i think this is also about reframing how we think about expertise right i you know i've just been banging my head against the wall over the last few months because i just constantly hear you know a panel on npr and they have like you know random law professor a random law professor b and like a representative from youtube or whatever to or like you know some former cia guy who like studies

information when they're not busy spreading it about Latin American governments or whatever. And like that's the panel. And, you know, and they're framed as experts. And the reality is, you know, the people who are experts in online harms and online and tech policy are people who have lived experience with what these policies actually do when they go into effect. And I think, you know, if there is one thing, you know, like if I could just snap my fingers and make anything happen, it would be to force like every progressive nonprofit based in D.C. and every lawmaker to like sit in a captive audience and just listen for a couple hours to groups like the Sex Workers Outreach project or swap behind bars or reframe health and justice or the Woodhull Freedom Foundation

who are leading the lawsuit against Sesta Foster and actually listen and listen. And listen. to how these policies play out. Because it feels like often a lot of the conversations around Section 230 are sort of framed as like, here's a bunch of terrible things that have happened. And everyone's like, yeah, those things are all terrible. And then it's like, and that's why we need to change Section 230. And that's where the disconnect is.

Because, again, no one disagrees that there are real harms that are springing from these platforms behavior, from their business models from the status quo. I am so far from someone who thinks the internet is fine, just leave it alone. We need real policy and we need to act quickly and we need to fight for meaningful change. But again, I think that mentality of like,

well, let's just do something so we can say we did, I think is actually profoundly immoral because at that point, again, you're not recognizing that just doing something, quote unquote, can actually end up doing really profound harm. And if you're not listening to folks who are truly marginalized, who are actually have lived experience with being on the wrong side of content moderation,

with being on the wrong side of platform power, then you're not actually fighting for policies that protect the most vulnerable. And we're kind of just recreating a lot of the same mistakes that we've made in the past. Again, I think for myself, I think often about the mainstream gay rights movement that, you know, systematically for decades, de-prioritized its most vulnerable members, including sex workers and trans folks, and basically anyone who is not a cis white man looking to get married or

join the military. And I think now our mainstream organizations are recognizing those mistakes and starting to reckon with them and really genuinely are, at least on a policy level, starting to fight more for policies that benefit, you know, trans folks or at least fight against this surge in discriminatory legislation, et cetera. But then I see other movements where we're making the same mistake. And so for me, I always try to base my activism, not in what some academic says,

not in what's popular in Washington, D.C. or what's hot button on TV, but in the lived experience of people who have real experience with how these policies actually play out on the ground. As someone who lives in D.C. and has worked for many an organization where I wonder, you know, who are we actually centering here? I think in my personal activism, I always try to think about the folks who are actually the most marginalized or the most oppressed because if we're able to center them and lift them up, we will all benefit. We will all benefit when the people who are directly impacted and most marginalized are amplified, supported, and lifted up, we will all impact. It fundamentally changes how you think about these things. And I guess for me, again, I just wish that more folks were thinking about this through the lens of like,

what actually fixes this problem versus like, you know, how can we score some points against the companies, right? Like, I want to score points against the companies as much as anybody else. These companies are doing harm. They're evil. They are profiting off of a business model that, again, is really incompatible with so many of the things that we hold dear. But like, I don't want to just dunk on them. I want to like actually do something about their power and take it away from them and put it back in the hands of everyone.

Right. And reclaim the Internet as the technology that we talked about at the beginning, that like you and I both. have felt the power of, and that is giving us this opportunity to have this conversation right now and to let people listen to it. And I just want to make sure that we, you know, as we're looking to address harms, we also recognize the ways in which this technology has profoundly liberatory potential. And I think it's also, part of that is also about looking at the status quo, right? If we think about the world before the internet, right, there was still. disinformation. It was just on cable TV. Look at crime reporting in the 90s, right, which was so

blatantly, overtly, anti-black and racist, right? It was all about constantly hyping up crime in cities to play on people's fears, specifically white people's fears, to push racist policies, right? Now we see that democratized in a way on with kind of, you know, things like next door and Facebook, et cetera. And it's still. a problem, but it's not a new problem, right? It's a problem that has shifted mediums and shifted forms. But I think there's something about the instinct to blame technology that is rooted in a collective unwillingness to acknowledge that these hateful, harmful, bigoted ideologies and movements have been part of this country since its inception. And I think there is sort of a,

it's almost like a collective amnesia around that, that kind of pushes us to be like, oh, this is a new problem created by the internet. And it's like, no, this is an old problem that's being reflected back to us by the internet. And instead of blaming the internet, we need to actually hold ourselves accountable and work for the structural change that we need. Structural change to our social safety net could actually be one potential solution to the spread of disinformation. We already know that people turn to live. and conspiracy theories and distortions when they're scared or anxious. If more people's basic human needs were taken care of, fear could drive less of our discourse and policy. I would argue that,

like, you know, policies like universal health care and, you know, ensuring that everyone has adequate housing and food and access to education and basic survival would do a lot more to address things like viral disinformation than anything you could do to Section 230 or even anything else with tech policy because these are problems that are springing out of broad structural issues and then kind of being exacerbated or amplified by technology. They're not being created by it. And I think that's actually really important and something that is uncomfortable to grapple with because it also sort of means like there isn't some quick fix silver bullet. It kind of just means we got to keep doing the work and recognize that change takes time.

And, you know, I'm so inspired by those who come before us, who were, you know, many of whom died before they actually saw the results of their organizing. And, you know, for me, it's it's about recognizing that every day that there's something integral about protecting the transformative power of this technology in the hopes that in future generations, we will look back and say, I'm glad that folks fought. to make sure that we have this tool and that it's available to marginalized communities to organize and fight for our liberation and that we fought back against the worst uses of technology like facial recognition or like automated license plate readers or other forms of harmful surveillance. Because I do think this debate or this fight over whether technology will largely be a force for good or continue down this path of being a force for exploitation and greed and corruption is going to determine not just the future of technology,

but the future of humanity. And so for me, that kind of gets me out of bed every day and keeps me up every night. But that's why I think it's worth fighting for. Today's episode featured music from Evan Greer's new album, Spotify as Surveillance. Check it out at the band camp link in the show description. If you enjoyed this podcast, please help us grow by subscribing. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi. we'd love to hear from you at hello at tangoty.com.

Disinformed is brought to you by there are no girls on the internet. It's a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our supervising producer and engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. For more great podcasts, check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy.

Not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter.

Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world, like, I can do anything.

I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet. lost its mind, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where SportsSlice comes in. I'm Timbo, and every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headline. And we're going straight to the source,

the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear. Listen to SportsSlic on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slices Life 12 and the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.