There Are No Girls on the Internet - Elon breaks Twitter to save it; Threads app slithers in for the kill; Meghan Markle gets an apology;Digital surveillance in France + Virginia + Sacramento. — NEWS ROUNDUP

Episode Date: July 8, 2023

So much happened with Twitter. It broke, or maybe they broke it. Then they broke it more, possibly trying to fix it. It's still broken and the vibes are off. Meta launched its new Threads app into the social hole abdicated by Twitter, and 30 million people said "ok" even though Meta is a demonstrably terrible brand that chooses profit over people over and over and over again. We'll probably check it out.  The ever increasing availability of digital surveillance tools is threatening privacy in France (the police want to turn on your phone's camera), Virginia (adults need to register with a government website to view porn), and Sacramento (the Sheriff illegally shares license plate data with police in states that have criminalized abortion). Meanwhile in England, a newspaper was forced to publish a front-page apology for a sexist (but not racist!!!) article about Meghan Markle (it was racist).   Threads' privacy policy: https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944  French law: https://gazettengr.com/france-passes-bill-to-allow-police-remotely-activate-phone-camea-microphone-spy-on-people/  Sacramento Sheriff: https://news.yahoo.com/sacramento-sheriff-sharing-license-plate-133000119.html  Virginia is for lovers (not filthy perverts): https://www.wired.com/story/porn-age-checks-id-laws/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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business. Call 844-844-I-Hart. 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 Sports Slice comes in. Timbo, in 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 Sports Slice on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Sliced Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. There are no girls on the internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. I am here with my producer, Mike. Mikey, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Bridget.

I'm excited to talk all about the tech news. And here's what you may have missed this week on the Internet. So we're going to be kind of mixing it up a little bit today. Honestly, there was so much to talk about. A lot of it is related to Twitter. So we're going to start with some news that you might have missed and then do a bit of a deep dive on Twitter. Mike, how does that sound?

It sounds pretty good. I hope people are ready because there's a lot to say about Twitter. I know. It's like we do our little segment, what's Elon Musk up to? And this is like an extended, supersized version of what Elon Musk is up to. So I hope y'all are ready. But first, let's talk about what else is going on. So this is a little bit delicate. I don't make any kind of judgments about what kind of extra curricular internet searching activities, listeners, and folks are up to. However, here is some news, because if you've tried to watch pornography online recently,

you might have encountered some trouble. And that's because a handful of states have rolled out age verification policies to access adult sites, where folks have to essentially prove that they're over 18. So if you've ever spent any time at all on adult sites, more recently it's been, like a little checkbox that you have to check to confirm that you are over the age of 18. It feels pretty loose. Like I think you could probably just say, I am over the age of 18. And I don't think it doesn't really stop you from lying about that if that's what you want to do.

But that is no longer the case. Now, when you go to sites like Pornhub in these states, it redirects you to a government-run website to prove that you are over 18 by submitting your government ID, driver's license, or passport information. Currently, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, and Utah all have these policies in place. Virginia's went into effect just last week. And according to The Verge, traffic dropped by 80% for Pornhub after it first began enforcing age verification in Louisiana earlier this year. And after that, it sounds like Pornhub just decided to start taking its sites offline instead of enforcing this age verification policy.

So just sidestepping the issue altogether. kind of in protest. So that also goes for other porn tube sites that its parent company runs like Red Tube. So that means that thanks to Virginia's new rollout of this law, users in Virginia will not be able to access Porn Tube sites like Red Tube or Pornhub either. Perhaps not surprisingly, last week in the days immediately following this policy going into effect, according to Google Trends, Virginia ranked as the highest state when it came to searches for VPNs or virtual private networks, networks that allow you to circumvent these location-specific barriers to accessing websites. So I don't know if this is tacky to mention, but at one point, ExpressVPN was a

sponsor of the show. I don't think they are anymore. As a, what's your producer had on Mike? Is it tacky to throw out the promo code for folks who want to try out ExpressVPN? I don't think so. You know, it's a useful service. We like, like ExpressVPN. Maybe they'll want to sponsor us again. We'd love to have them back. But in the meantime, yeah, maybe listeners want a free three months off their subscription. Where can they go to get that, Bridget?

You can go to ExpressVPN.com slash no girls to get an extra three months off with a 12-month plan. Yeah, I, this is, again, this is they're not paying me to say this. I am a big fan of VPNs. I think it's just a good thing to have, especially one that's like super easy to use hit a button And then, you know, it's working behind the scenes. But I do think that legislation like this, I think that we're going to be seeing more and more location-specific internet legislation. And so having a VPN, knowing how to use one, wouldn't be the worst idea in the world for somebody, even if you were, you know, don't think of yourself as a techie who's going to need it.

Do you remember that time that I was in South Africa and you were in the United States and we wanted to watch Weekend at Bernie's 2? and it was available in its entirety on YouTube in South Africa, but not of the United States. So you used a VPN to try to access it and then you couldn't. And we ended up doing like a Zoom screen share so that we can both be watching at the same time. It was a very bad cinematic experience, but we did technically watch that movie. Yeah, thanks to VPNs. So I think that age verification online is a terrible idea for so many reasons. Not the least of which is that it just doesn't really work.

The day that the Virginia law took effect last week, people on Reddit were complaining about not being able to access porn sites despite not living in or near the states where it's the law. That's because IP addresses are notoriously kind of janky at being able to actually locate where a user is. For instance, here in D.C., it's not terribly unusual for a user's IP address to say that they're in a nearby state like Virginia or Maryland, even if they have never been to one of those states.

because it's a little bit janky. Yeah, it's true. So in some of my research, we try to geolocate people who use various digital tools that we provide. And it's hard to geolocate people. IP address is just very unreliable. And personally, I don't think that we should be getting in the habit of being comfortable with having to give over our real names and government information and IDs in order to access the internet. Our government does not keep our private data secure and private right now.

In our episode about doxing with Shauna Sigelow, the digital security expert, we talked all about how if you've ever voted or paid a parking ticket or had the power or electricity turned on in your apartment, your state or local government could be selling your personal data to whoever wants it because that's what they do. And so I think giving over more of our information under the guise of like keeping us safer, just doesn't make sense to me, especially when it's under the guise of, like, quote, protecting kids online. Because if we really cared about protecting kids online, there's a hundred other things that we would be doing to actually protect them from the corporate internet forces that we know are exploiting and harming them. And I think Wired really summarized it well.

They write, the internet isn't a child-friendly place. However, introducing age verification across the web is technical and complex. In 2019, the UK ditched a multi-year plan to introduce. age checks after encountering myriad problems. The porn we watch is also highly sensitive. Kinks are incredibly personal, and leaks of data online can be devastating. Privacy advocates, porn companies, and some regulators say the move to introduce age verification introduces significant problems. The concerns about young people accessing adult websites are real and widespread. Less widespread is the understanding of the limitations of various age verification tools and the new

dangers they might pose. This is from Arena Reu, direct. director of the Internet Ethics Program at Santa Clara University's Marcula Center. Many regulators and others seem to think of age verification as a solved problem. Technologists and privacy activists, including activists, focused on protecting children, are trying to explain that that's not the case. And I think that's absolutely true. I think that, you know, when we talk about state-specific legislation, for instance, around TikTok bans and things like that, I think that giving, giving

states and platforms more access to information about us, I find that a really wonky explanation for how that's supposed to make us more secure online. And we just know how legislation can creep when people feel motivated by a desire to protect kids online. Like in Mississippi, for example, another piece of new legislation means that nobody under the age of 18 will have access to digital materials made available through public and school libraries without explicit parent or guardian permission. So no Libby access for e-books for teens. And book riot reports that even if they do get a parent's permission, miners can't access digital materials if vendors do not ensure that every single item within their offerings meets this new, wide-reaching definition of, quote,

obscenity per the state. This legislation went into effect July 1st, and libraries had to sort of scramble to figure out how to comply with it. Yeah, it's not clear what, like, what harm they're trying to solve here. I guess the goal here is to protect kids from pornography, which, like you said, is a reasonable, laudable goal that I think most people could get behind. But it seems like the result of this law is, like, huge numbers of adults not being able to access something

that they should have every right to be able to access. And I completely agree that it is scary to have to enter your government ID to do something that some people in power have decided is not okay, right? Because you have to imagine that part of the goal here is just to, like, eliminate pornography entirely, which is a laughable goal. but, you know, these, a lot of these people who are caught up in this moral panic about protecting the kids, it's not like they are coming from a place of, you know, evidence-based concern or evidence-based solutions to actual problems, right? They're like living in a fantasy land where librarians are grooming children by reading them stories that feature gay people. and these are the same people who, you know, are pushing for these sorts of age restrictions, like you said in Louisiana and I guess Virginia now too, where you have to put in your government driver's license, which is nuts. You know, I absolutely wouldn't want to give those same people who are putting these laws in place access to.

access to data about what I'm looking at online. That is like the last thing I want to do. And it really, I completely agree. And it really comes down to something that Dr. Olivia Snow said that when we talk to her, that when you hear a lawmaker talking about legislation regulating the internet in a new way that is meant to keep kids safe, that that should be your big red flag that they are talking about cracking down on. the behavior online of consensual adults, right?

And that, like, how often protecting kids online is used as a smokescreen in order to crack down on what adults are doing online consensually? And, like, yeah, I just, who out there when they are doing their thing, when it's just them in their computer, having their private moment, who wants to get their government ID with their first, last, and middle name and whatever, like, their address on it, who wants to get that involved in that exchange? Nobody. Nobody, nobody. Like, who is this servant, right? And I think it, I think it's really interesting that we're allowing lawmakers to introduce these new laws into our lives and tell us they are for our own good. When I think that anybody who's ever looked at

online porn knows that, like, you can't close those windows out fast. enough when you're done doing what you're going to do. Do you want your license attached to it? Of course not. That's a great question. Who is it serving? You know, and relatedly, who would it most harm? You know, it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to picture a scenario where somebody is being taken to, you know, they're engaged in like a custody battle or something. and somebody gets access to somebody else's records, and now it's like part of the public record that like so-and-so looked at online pornography.

Yeah, and I think that's a great point. And it also just reminds me of how often, and we're talking about the way the internet is legislated, how often it will start in one place with online pornography and then it'll start someplace completely different. When Yahoo bought Tumblr, they were like, oh, we're not going to have there be, sexual content. You might be thinking that's like nudity, but by the end, it was a whole host of

content that wasn't necessarily sexual. It was content about people learning about their sexual or gender identities, right? And so that's not necessarily sexually explicit, but how quickly the bucket of what they were cracking down on expanded. And I think with legislation like this, you have to imagine that like, yeah, maybe they're going to say, starting with pornography, but who knows where that could end up. And that actually is a good. great segue to what's happening in France. 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 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. The worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah.

Me. Is there anything? Do 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 Yardt, but they're open.

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That's iHeartadvertising.com. Last night, a blown call changed a 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 Slicalife-12 and the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. And we're back. So lawmakers in France's National Assembly passed a bill that lets police surveil suspects by remotely activating their cameras, microphones, and GPS location systems on their phones, laptops, cars, and connected devices. Now, a judge will have to approve the use of these powers and a recently amended bill

does forbid the use against journalists, lawyers, and other people who work in sensitive professions. Now, proponents of this measure say that it is meant to be. limited in scope to serious cases, and that the maximum amount of time that police can surveil suspects is six months, and geolocation can only be limited to crimes that are punishable by at least five years in prison. Now, unsurprisingly, digital privacy experts are, to put it lightly, concerned. According to NGaget, the digital rights group La Quadrauteur Dunet, I apologize for my bad French, previously pointed out the potential for abuse because the bill is just not clear in terms of what it constitutes as a serious crime. So there are

fears that the French government could use this to target environmental activists and others who are not grave threats. You'll notice that even though they say that this won't be used against folks with sensitive professions, does that include activists, right? Does that include dissidents? They also point out that just like in the United States, security policies do have a habit of expanding, just like we were talking about with that porn legislation, right? That they have a habit of expanding to less serious crimes. They give the example of genetic registration, which used to only be used for sex offenders in France, but La Quadra Chur says has now been expanded to being used for almost every crime in France. Yeah, I don't know about France, but here in the U.S.,

I feel like every time there's been some law that expands police surveillance powers, one, two, three years later, there's a bunch of stories about how that law was. was abused, used in ways it wasn't intended, targeted people that weren't supposed to be targeted. You know, those newspaper headlines, too, it's like the most obvious thing in the world. This is all happening against the backdrop of protests in France sparked by the police shooting and killing teenager Nahelam Rizak. Gizmodo reported that French President Macron actually threatened to shut down social media platforms as he claimed that protesters were filming, posting, and organizing on platforms like TikTok, Telegram, and Snapchat.

And I think that it really goes back to what we were talking about in the last story, about how it may seem like something that we, it's easy to think that these are measures that we should be taking to keep us and our communities safe. But it's so often that they sort of start out as being about one thing and then can sort of slowly become about another. That is a tale as old as time when it comes to surveillance policies like. like this one. And so I think that these digital rights groups in France are really right to be pushing back on this and saying, hey, giving the police the power to turn on, remotely turn on

the camera or the microphone to your phone, to your car, to your laptop, that should be something that we're really concerned about and don't just, you know, become okay with lightly. Absolutely. I think privacy is something that we all need to take very seriously and protect. It is under assault. People have been saying that privacy is dead for years, and I don't think that's the case. I think we still have a lot of privacy in our lives, thankfully. And I think it's super important that we all protect what privacy. privacy we have and resist efforts to make us all register with government ID if we want to watch porn, resist giving the state authority to like turn on our phones and record from our cameras without our permission. It's, yeah, it's a scary world. These technologies really enable a lot of surveillance activity.

that would have been unthinkable years ago that like despots of the past wish they could have had access to. And we've talked a lot on this show about some of the paradoxes of the internet, how at the outset it promised this like bright, democratic future where everyone would have a voice and everyone would be connected.

And like we kind of got that, but we also kind of got something very different where no one is anonymous and everything you say is traced back to people. And that comment from Macron that you just read that he was going to shut off social media because people were organizing, how many despots throughout history have wanted that power, but just like didn't have it. But now that we are all communicating on apps that are centralized across maybe half a dozen different apps, suddenly that does become possible.

And what a scary proposition that is. Yeah. And I don't know. Have you seen that episode of that first episode of Black Mirror, Joan is awful? Oh, yeah. So something, I won't give it away, folks haven't seen it, but something that that episode really makes clear about the current future that we're, or the future, the present that we're all in is how surveillance is sold to us as for our own good, or even.

for our own entertainment. We should like being surveilled. We should find it funny. We should enjoy the information that we, that, you know, our apps and our platforms have collected about us and sold back to us. And so it's kind of scary how, I mean, I'm not immune to it either. I like looking at my Spotify end of the year list just like anybody. I'm not a monster. Of course I find that fascinating about information about myself. But the way that we've been able to be desensitized to it. And sort of more and more and more and more of our privacy is sort of for sale. And we are consistently told that it is for our own protection, that we should be happy that it's happening. Another great example is what's happening in Sacramento. So listeners

of this show know that since the Supreme Court overturned Roe last year, we have been following the very deep connections between technology, digital surveillance, and abortion rights. And here's another update on that front. The Digital Rights Group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sent a letter to Sacramento Sheriff Jim Cooper, urging the Sheriff's Department to stop their practice of sharing automated license plate reader data with out-of-state authorities in anti-abortion states, including Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas. Adam Schwartz, he is the EFF's senior staff attorney, said that this practice is a threat to security and privacy and that a sheriff in Texas, Idaho, or any other state with an abortion ban on the books

could use that data to track people's movement around California, knowing where they live, where they work and where they seek reproductive medical care, including abortions. So back in May, the Electronic Frontier Foundation released a report showing that 71 law enforcement agencies in 22 California counties, including Sacramento County, were sharing this kind of data and that this practice was actually in violation of a 2015 law that states that a California law enforcement agency shall not sell, share, or transfer automatic license plate reader information except to another California law enforcement agency. And so they're just, it sounds like, and I'm no lawyer, but it sounds like they're just not doing that.

They're just not following that law. The Sacramento Sheriff's Office had a pretty weird response to those allegations, accusing Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of being involved in some sort of like vast conspiracy to spread lawlessness. I don't know. You tell me. Here's what they said back in May. Law enforcement agencies commonly use information from like, license plate readers to investigate serious crimes such as homicide, child kidnapping, human trafficking, and drug trafficking across state borders. So very much like what we were just talking about, right? That like, oh, us collecting this data is actually good for you because it makes you safer. Fine.

However, they go on. Some organizations such as the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have lied that law enforcement sharing this information is an attempt to violate people's legal rights. These false claims are intentional and part of a broader agenda to promote lawlessness and prevent criminals from being held accountable. So, like, I don't know if the Electronic Frontier Foundation is in on this, like, vast conspiracy to enable criminals to just be lawless out on the streets. I don't know. That seems like a pretty big allegation from the sheriff's office in Sacramento County. just chaos agents their only interest is spreading chaos disorder uh yeah that's what they're doing that's where they get the big bucks uh because they're out there just trying to foment chaos anywhere they can and honestly it sounds like electronic frontier foundation was accusing the sheriff's office

of not following the law so then for the sheriff's office to turn around i'd be like actually y'all are the ones who are lawless liars. It is interesting, right? It's like their allegations are so specific. And the response is like, well, y'all are lawless liars who are just trying to help criminals, you know, murder children. One of these allegations seems a lot more believable than the other to me. I don't know. That's just me. It's such a good follow up to those two stories we just talked about about the creep of surveillance authority because exactly like you said it sounds like from this letter that eFF was saying hey you guys are currently violating the law by sharing this information that you have collected through like police surveillance apparatus i don't know what the

term is but like through these license plate readers they're reading licenses and you're sharing that with people who the law forbids you to share it with and people are going to get hurt. And the response was, shut up. We're going after criminals and you're a criminal too, even though the police are the ones breaking the law. And the people pointing that out and pointing out this overreach of a law that was intended to have limits and the fact that the police are disrespecting those limits that were placed around this law to get it passed. But you have to assume were put there by legislators who couldn't get the law passed without them. So they were like, okay, okay, well, like put these limits around it. They can't share it outside of California to get the law

passed. And this sheriff is just like uninterested in that, right? He's going, he's going after criminals and lawlessness. And why should any God-fearing good citizens be concerned that their data is just illegally being shared across state lines? Okay. So if you like to that response, After the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent the Sacramento Sheriff their letter asking him to stop this practice this week, he replied on Twitter. That first response I read to you was like Sacramento Sheriff's Department, like official Twitter. This he took to his personal Twitter to give this response. He said, quote, the bill and this law has absolutely nothing to do with reproductive rights. My record on women's and reproductive rights has been strong throughout my time in the State Assembly.

and nothing has changed since becoming sheriff. Electronic Frontier Foundation has a track record of protecting child molesters, fentanyl traffickers, rapists, and murderers. Perhaps they should focus more on helping victims rather than continuing to shield criminals from prosecution. So if you thought the first response back when EFF first made these allegations was a little much, being like, oh, no, no, you all are too busy holding hands with child molesters and fentanyl traffickers

and rapists and murderers. Like, it's just, it's just a very intense response from what is, like, a very measured letter about how they are following the letter of the law. Now, I should say that Adam Schwartz, the attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, does say that he was not aware of any cases where license plate data was used to prosecute someone for getting an abortion, but added, quote, we think we shouldn't have to wait until the inevitable happens. And honestly, I could not agree more.

And I think that the fact that the sheriff is going back and pointing to his record when he was in the assembly on abortion and reproductive care, I just, I mean, I honestly think this is kind of a normal or expected take from somebody who has not really thought very seriously about the landscape of abortion rights here in 2023. And I think a lot of people, one, did not expect Roe to ever be threatened the way that it was. And when it did fall, really had a kind of myopic. view on the actual threats that folks who are looking for abortions or need abortions are allies to people who need abortions would face. You know, it's not, it's one of the reasons why when I was in the reproductive justice space, we're not, we were like, oh, don't use like coat hanger imagery or talk about like back alley abortions because in 2023, that's not the

threat. The threat is surveillance and criminalization. Sheriff Cooper is saying that this kind of data tracking and sharing with other states has nothing to do with abortion and reproductive rights just goes to show how limited his understanding of the reality of our abortion landscape in 2023 really is. Because if he's never thought about how tracking somebody's license plate data in California and then sending it to a state where abortion is criminalized like Texas or Idaho could play a role in someone's ability to access abortion care, if he's never thought about that, that really tells me all I need to know about how he's thinking about this issue. Because even if that license plate data is not being used today on Thursday, July 6,

2023, as we've just talked about in this episode, that does not mean that there will not be an expansion of how that data is used. And in my opinion, it is not a question of if, it's a question of when that data will be used to criminalize people who are looking for abortions. And just because Sheriff Cooper doesn't see it and it does not have that clear of a view of the landscape of abortion rights in 2023 does not mean that it's not a risk. And it's really, I can't believe that he would say, like, this has nothing to do with abortion.

When I'm sorry, get real in 2023, when you share license plate data from California to states like Texas and Alabama, it has everything to do with abortion rights. And the important thing is that I think this isn't about this one sheriff getting it wrong and like isn't he a bad guy or isn't he clueless or something.

I have no idea about him. The concerning thing is that he is the one who has the authority to decide how this private data that has been surveilled gets shared. And like you just said, he either is clueless about the landscape of reproductive rights and legal threats to people seeking abortions in 2023, or he's faking it. But either way, the data that he is sitting on of who has been driving around in Sacramento has real consequences for people. And he, by his own admission, is making decisions about who could access that data and who can't without having apparently any clue about the legal risks to the people that. he has been entrusted to keep safe. I would take, I agree. I would take it one step further.

And I would say because it is, he, like, it is not men. I don't think that he, I don't, this might be a controversial take. I think that for a lot of men, it's difficult to see the realities and the concerns of people who are not also cis men. Seriously. I think that he's like, I'm pro-choice. That's all I need to do is like be pro-choice. And it's like, no, you need to also not buttress a vast network of interstate surveillance. If you truly want to advocate for reproductive rights in this country, that's what it looks

like in 2023. It's not 1980, right? just being supportive of abortion rights and voting along those lines is not enough in 23. If you are propping up a vast surveillance network, that is going to get people who need abortions criminalized one way or another. And if you're, it's really something to see people who are tasked with supporting and advocating for these constituents not get that. And so loudly proclaim that they don't get that. Like I would, he should be. be embarrassed. So I looked up his record, and it does seem to be a little bit all over the place

in terms of his record on abortion care. But he obviously, from his statement, wants to think of himself as somebody who is a champion of reproductive care. And if that is the case in 2023, you have got to be thinking about this issue a little bit more thoughtfully and a little bit more with a little bit more foresight about how it's playing out. Because in 2023, you cannot be propping up a vast digital surveillance. network and tell me that you're on my side when it comes to abortion rights. And I'll leave it there. 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 a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that 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 herds, 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. 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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That's 844-8-4-I-Hart. Jacob Kingston grew up in an isolated polygamous sect. We were God's chosen kingdom on earth. He felt destined for greatness. So when a swaggering Armenian businessman catapults Jacob into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back. Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, meeting the president of Turkey.

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Let's get right back into it. So it's not all vast surveillance networks. Let's talk about the sun. So we have talked a bit about Megan Merkel and how the coordinated hate campaign that she gets online targets her. But one of the weirdest aspects of this story is that it's not just random hate mongers on YouTube publishing. videos like 10 of Megan Markle's micro expressions that show that she is actually a huge, mean person. I almost said a swear word. I'm trying to swear less. I got some feedback about my swearing. I was going to put a swear word there, but I didn't. So you're welcome.

Listeners with children. So it's not, it's not just weird YouTube hate mongers. It's also the press, like big newspapers who are targeting her. Last week, the newspaper The Sun, had to print a front page apology for an opinion piece about Megan Markle written by Grand Tour star Jeremy Clarkson. The piece, I can only really describe it as a lot. Here's a bit from that piece. He writes, I hate her. Not like I hate Scotland's First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, or serial killer Rose West. I hate her on a cellular level. Oh no. Megan is definitely worse than a serial killer, right? obviously, like, what do you think of Megan Markle? You think serial killer is here.

Megan Markle much further on the hate spectrum. He goes on, quote, at night, I'm unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets on every town in Britain, while the crowds chant shame and throw lumps of excrement at her. Everyone who is my age thinks the same way. I don't know, dude. I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's correct. that like everybody who is your age is like, yes, I stay awake at night, gritting my teeth, thinking about her. Now, in his defense, he did say that he was going for like a Game of Thrones reference with that. I don't watch Game of Thrones.

So like, you watch the show. Does that check out? Yeah, that does check out. That is a reference to a scene from the show. But it doesn't diminish it in any way. Like it's it's not like she liked being paraded through the streets naked and having excrement thrown at her. You know, the character who was having to, who legitimately was like, she didn't enjoy it. It was like very bad.

And it was just as sexist in the show as it is in real life, you know. So even if he was going for like a specific reference, I just think it's a little much to be printed in the newspaper. Like, I can't believe that an editor read that and was like, okay, doesn't sound unhinged at all. Definitely dis-publish it. Just click publish and away we go. Yeah, literary illusions aren't like, like get out of jail free card for writing messed up stuff, right? Like, they add some context and maybe some meaning or something, but they don't just like make it all okay because it was a reference. Well, the UK newspaper regulator, the independent.

at Press Standards Organization agrees with you. After this was published, they got 25,000 complaints about the piece, and they ended up launching an investigation into whether the piece breached its editor's code of practice. Although, interestingly, the IPSO chairman, Lord Fox, said that the article was, quote, humiliating and degrading toward the Duchess, but, according to deadline, also rejected complaints that the article was racist in tone, inaccurate, or sought to harass the Duchess. The peace was ultimately removed and the son was forced to print an apology to Megan on the front page. It is so interesting to me that they specifically go out of their way to say the peace was sexist. It was humiliating, but it was not racist and it was not meant to harass her,

nor was it inaccurate. I find that so interesting because, I mean, it really goes back to so much of our conversations that we've had on, there are no girls on the internet and also internet hate machine about how the responses to Megan Markle kind of work and how it's always right on the line of racist. So it's like they're not going to overtly call her a slur. But I just have a hard time believing that if not for Megan's race, that this would have been, somebody would have found this acceptable to print in the newspaper. Right. And I also think that because of the way that identity works, gender and race and class. and everything else.

It's so linked that it is the idea that if someone printed this about me in the paper as a black woman, I would not be able to say, oh, they printed it because I'm a woman, not because I'm black. The idea that you could parse it and say like definitively not racist, sexist, but not racist, it just not how it works because of the way that layered identity and the intersections of identity work. And so it's fascinating to me to see this. you know,

ethics board be able to say like, nope, not racist, just put a big red stamp on that. Like, I would be curious to know how they determined that. Yeah, me too. It's

it's like, how do you prove that it's racist, right? When, like you said, identity is this big web of intersecting identity. and the systems of oppression that traffic and benefit from public sexist and racist attacks are so good at writing that line.

It's a tough thing. It's almost impossible to look at one isolated incident like that, or one isolated piece of writing, even as terrible as this. And like you said, he didn't include a slur, didn't reference the color of her. skin so like prove that it's racist but then when you step back and look at the pattern of how this piece fits into a whole ecosystem and industry around smearing and harassing her uh obviously it's racist it's it's a challenge i guess uh it's also hard for me to think about the like what is this guy's title the IPSO chairman.

Yeah. It's like, it's also a little challenging for me to think about this IPSO chairman who is like, I guess in England, he's like the top person in charge of the newspapers. Like, what would that even look like in the United States? I can't even wrap my head around it. Well, if he asked me, he should come on as a producer and co-host of the podcast, Yo, is this racist? Because this white.

man apparently is the arbiter of what is and is not definitively racist. And we got to get him on that podcast as a co-host ASAP because his talents are being wasted. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel 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 might as Nike Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella 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 to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smygel 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.

More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started.

That's 844-8-4-8-4-I-Hart. Last night, a blown call changed a 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 Slicelife 12 and the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Let's get right back into it. All right, Bridget, we got all the hard news out of the way. What's Elon done now? Well, something was definitely up with Twitter over the weekend. I have so much to say about it. Let's break down what was going on. First, Twitter started limiting who could and could not read post.

hosts on the platform. They limited it to only people with Twitter login. So if you didn't have a Twitter login, you could not see Twitter. If you went to Twitter.com, it would redirect you to a login page. Then yesterday, they quietly walked that policy back without ever acknowledging it. So they rolled it out without acknowledging it, walked it back without acknowledging it. Weird. Then Elon Musk tweeted that they were going to start limiting the amounts of tweets that users could see. If you were a Twitter blue subscriber, you could see 6,000 tweets a day. day. If you were an unverified account, you could see 600 tweets a day. And if you were a new unverified account, you could see 300 tweets per day. Yvonne Musk tweeted that this was a temporary

measure to prevent data scraping. There was some concern about like AI potentially scraping Twitter data to train its models. Seems a little suspicious. I'm not, we'll get into that, but I'm not totally sure. But that's what he tweeted. So I don't know how it was for you all, but by this happened on Saturday, by Sunday, I was totally unable to see any tweets at all, right? So like when I woke up on Sunday, but obviously like the clock should have restarted in that 24-hour period. But the moment I logged in, I was already getting the error that I had seen all the tweets that I could see, even though I had not been on the platform at all. So by Sunday, the platform was just a no-go for me. I don't know how it was for y'all, but let me know I'm curious.

And in case you're wondering, this also applied to official Twitter account. for emergency services, like the National Hurricane Center or Amber Alerts. They also could only, you know, see the 6,000 tweets per day if they were Twitter Blue subscribers or 600 if they were unverified, which is pretty concerning. Like, had there been a hurricane or had there been an Amber Alert, maybe there was, it's probably good to have these organizations be able to see more than a couple of tweets, you know, particularly if they're paying for Twitter Blue, that's a point. that I fully kind of don't understand is how, if I'm paying for like a subscriber experience,

how am I getting my tweets capped? It's like, what was the point of paying if it's like, oh, you get all these features and also can only see 6,000 tweets a month? Like, what's the point of paying? One other consequence about not being able to see tweets if you're not logged in is that it has caused Google to remove all tweets from Google results. So it used to be that if you were searching for something online and Google thought that a tweet was relevant to what you were searching for, it would include that tweet in your search results. But that's no longer the case because of this change that only logged in users can see it.

And that's a pretty big deal because Google's responsible for over 90% of all searches in the U.S. And I don't know how much Twitter traffic was coming from Google, but I have to assume, some. And Twitter being removed from Google seems like one more big step towards Twitter becoming less relevant in the overall information ecosystem that we all live in and get our information from. So what the heck is going on here? Well, the short answer is we don't totally know. So there was some speculation that it was related to Twitter not paying their bills. This is from BBC. Data scientist and ex-Twitter employee, Dr. Ruman Shadri, told the BBC that it was unclear if AI organizations had actually been scraping data from Twitter, but suggested that financial issues could be behind the changes. Frankly, I think I'm in the majority of people who believe that it's due to Elon's lack of payment of its bills and that he's attempting to reduce his cost, she said.

I have since seen other people who kind of claim to be in the know saying that it was not related to unpaid bills. So I really couldn't say, former Twitter head of trust and safety, Yowell Roth, said that Elon Musk's official explanation about trying to prevent data scraping doesn't sound totally right, saying it just doesn't pass the sniff test that scraping all of a sudden created such a dramatic performance problem that Twitter had no choice but to put everything behind a login. So a lot of theories being floated around, I should be clear that we don't know which one is the truth. Don't let leave me a weird comment on Instagram, Elon Musk, a certain magazine because I'm just speculating

and summarizing other people's theories. We don't know what's going on. But Mike, you actually have a theory we were talking about the other day, no? Yeah, I mean, it's not like my theory, but like you said, nobody really knows

what was behind all of these, like, large, surprise. changes, some of which were announced, some of which just like quietly happened. But clearly something was up. One thing I saw over the weekend was a post from someone speculating that this was due to Twitter unintentionally releasing some very bad code in their attempts to restrict the site to only authenticated users who were logged in.

So the idea here is that for whatever reason, Twitter wanted to make that change so that people who weren't logged in couldn't see it. And to do that, they had to change some of their code about how Twitter works. And the code that they released to do that was just bad and caused a lot of problems. And the evidence that this person had for it was that they shared a screenshot of their console from their web browser, showing that, you know, as they were logged into Twitter, their computer was just like hammering away at Twitter. servers with a bunch of network requests. And so they were speculating that perhaps that was what caused Twitter to have to put

up, put in place these limits because, you know, first they tried to restrict it to only logged in users, but they executed that so poorly that it created this enormous drain on their, on their resources. And so they had to put the limits in place just to be able to keep things. moving at all. And so for a while, the hashtag self-DDOS was going around for self-distributed denial of service attack, making fun of Twitter for crashing its own servers through its bad code. So that seemed consistent with the screenshot that he had shared, and it seems consistent with the chaotic scattershot approach to decision-making that Twitter seems to do under Elon Musk.

but like you said, it's just speculation, who knows. I also love the Dave's on vacation theory. The sort of joke that Elon has fired or laid off so many engineers that Twitter is now operating with a skeleton crew. So people are speculating that this engineer named Dave, who I guess is like a fictional engineer, took his family on vacation, and there was nobody there to answer the phone while he was out, and Twitter imploded. I love the Dave's on vacation theory of like, oh, yeah, Dave's up with the wife and kids up in the Adirondacks for the weekend.

None of this stuff's going to work. Yeah, I like that one, too. And it's, of all these, it's probably the closest to correct. But yeah, none of us know. And it really seems like the true answer, which we'll probably never know, maybe we will, is some version of they try to do something stupid. they screwed it up and had to do more stupid things to try to like dig themselves out of that hole. And I think we're still there. Maybe they're up and running.

They're up and running now. And whatever the rationale was, we may never know the truth. What we do know is that the vibes on Twitter are not good, right? The engagement is down. Advertising revenue is way down. It's kind of funny to me that we're having this conversation after the new Twitter CEO, Linda Yaccarino was just going on and on about how she was going to make Twitter brand safe again and bring back advertisements. This is not doing that, right?

Like, I don't know why somebody would want to pay to be advertising on a platform that would limit how much tweets people could see. Advertisement included, doesn't make any sense to me. What's also funny is that we didn't really hear a ton from her when this was going on. She was kind of doing some sneak likes of Elon's tweets, but, like, I would expect the CEO to be making. a statement about this, but she didn't really. I guess she's just like, oh, whatever Elon says, I also, I'm going to like that on Twitter. And not to mention the fact that it's just a janky, confusing experience for folks who are trying to navigate it still, right? Like, I was trying to use Twitter to navigate stuff happening globally, as I often do, and it just was impossible

to do that. You know, verified tweets were coming up at the top that weren't saying anything that was accurate or useful. It just wasn't a good experience. And so, I think the vibes were not good over there, and it just seems like it is not well thought out in terms of how they are rolling out these changes and then quietly rolling them back. Not well thought out really captures it. And it's not just their users. There's an article in Mashable this week about how developers of third-party apps are fleeing Twitter, too, because they are similarly being jerked around and having functionality that they were promised,

taken away or just break on them without notification. I don't, did you ever use the app who unfollowed me? No, I'm way too anxious for that kind of thing. I don't want to know. Okay. Yeah. No one would ever unfollow me in my mind.

I guess I'm, yeah. So it was like a useful and kind of fun thing, but it relied on their API. And now it's just gone. because the API points first the developer had to pay for them, and so they paid however much it was a month. But then, like, Twitter changed what endpoints they were able to actually access after they had paid for it.

And so even, like, big developers who've shelled out up to $42,000 a month for enterprise access have been complaining that the APIs just break all the time. Twitter will make changes without telling them, which forces them to do like emergency maintenance to try to keep their apps working. And according to this article, a lot of them have just given up and are done with Twitter. You know, and so that's just, I think, one more sign

that things are going poorly in Twitter land for everyone involved. So speaking of giving up and being done with Twitter, I can relate. And it seems like a lot of other regular users of Twitter can relate as well, because with this big roadblock for the platform, a lot of people are looking at alternatives for Twitter in a way that I have not seen since Elon Musk first took over like seven months ago. So let's talk about a couple of the different alternatives to Twitter floating around out there. There's Blue Sky, a platform that I've played with a little bit. It was a platform conceptualized by Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, that is still in beta and is invite only. It's very similar to Twitter. We're going to be doing an episode about it more in-depth, but it's kind of like a Twitter alternative where a lot of folks who you might see on Twitter

are there doing their thing. Another is Spill, which launched on July 12th that was conceptualized by two former Twitter staffers. Hopefully we will hear from the creators of Spill on this very podcast very soon. Spill kind of strikes me as a spot that is meant to be specifically building community around marginalized users,

black folks, queer folks, when you log into spill, which is still invite only, you have to, like, it's very clear, like, we're not about hate speech. We're here for marginalized people to be able to show up. I find that kind of interesting. I don't think it's, like, explicitly a space just for marginalized people, but I think it's clear that they want it to be a space where marginalized folks can show up. And there's a lot, there's a heavy, like, black Twitter contingent to spill. But again, we'll hear more from the creators in their own words, hopefully very soon. The one that I really want to talk about today is IG Threads.

So I have to admit I have not tried IG Threads. It has been out for like 30 hours. And in that time, I have not been able to download it. I'm actually not sure if I will question mark. Maybe I'll decide during the course of this episode. But it's being called the Twitter Killer. So I've seen some people that I trust talk about threads being good. It just launched yesterday.

Overnight, 30 million people joined it. It shot to the, I think that currently it's the most downloaded app on the app store. It's only for iOS right now. I think one of the reasons I've seen people that I trust kind of be like cautiously optimistic about it is that it pulls from your current Instagram following so you don't have to start from zero. And I think like even if you're somebody who is really good at building community online and really good at like, you know, engagement and getting followers and all with that, nobody wants to start from zero. And so I think that that is a reason that I've seen people say that it might be good. Let's talk about some of the reasons why it might not be good. One big thing to know is that if you download threads, it is a separate app separate from your Instagram.

So if you download it and then you decide you don't like it, you have to delete your entire Instagram count to entirely get rid of that app. So according to the thread supplemental privacy policy, you may deactivate your threads, profile at any time, but your threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account. Ars Technica also quoted my personal nemesis, the head of Instagram, Adam Oseri, who said, you can deactivate your threads account, which hides your threads profile and content. You can set your profile to private. You can delete individual threads posts, all without deleting your Instagram account. Threads is powered by Instagram, so right now it's just one account, but we're looking at a way to delete your threads account separately. So I don't know. I just don't like that.

I think that if you were one of the, you know, 30 million people who just wanted to try it out and join, you shouldn't have to completely delete your Instagram account if you decide it's not for you. Now, again, as he said, you can, like, private your threads or hide your threads, but if you want out entirely, I think it's a little bit much that you have to completely delete a completely separate app to do that. I don't like that. Another thing to know is that you cannot only follow people that you want to follow people that you want follow. The feed is a mix of people that you follow and people that you don't. As Ars Tecneco reported, some users have actually complained that their feed is flooded with content

from accounts that they never followed, seemingly outnumbering posts from their friends. But in classic TechBro style, this thing that users are complaining about and saying is annoying is actually a really great feature. They just don't get it yet. Because in a blog post, meta touted this default feed as a feature, not an annoyance, saying, quote, your feed on threads includes threads posted by people that you follow and recommended content from new creators you haven't discovered yet.

So, you know, an influencer that you've never heard of and don't care about spamming your threads feed is just a friend you haven't met yet. So those are some of the logistical reasons that maybe it's red isn't so great. But let's talk about some of the bigger, kind of thornier issues. Number one is that it is Facebook, people.

Do I really need to say anything else? It's Facebook. So the people that brought you everything that comes with Facebook, they are also bringing you threads. That should really be enough. Jason Kent summed it up really well in this tweet that I love. He writes, misleads about metrics, inflates video opportunity, covers up data breach, empowers foreign interference, AIDS and genocide, blocks free and plural press, hides damning harms research, abuses users' privacy, copies competition, launches new app, where can I download it?

Sounds a little funky when you put it that way, right? I get it, man, I get it. So because it's Facebook, that means that they are very big privacy concerns with threads. Threads collects a lot of data about you, which can include things like your sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, biometric data, trade union membership, pregnancy, status, politics, and religious beliefs. Threads can also collect data on users' employment as well as health and fitness activity. Beyond that, the app also can collect data monitoring your location and other web activity. Now, if you're listening to this in the EU, you do not have access to threads. And that's because of the European Data Protection Board's finding decision that Meta did not have an appropriate basis for processing personal data to serve up behavioral ads.

It's kind of a whole legal mess, but here's how TechCrunch put it. Currently, meta does not even offer users a general upfront choice to deny its tracking and profiling, let alone, explicitly ask if it can share data on your health conditions so advertisers can sell you diet pills or whatever. And with even harder limits on surveillance ads coming down the pipe in the EU, an app that proposes to track everything to maximize its appeal to advertisers will be a tough sell to regional regulators. And so, yeah, if you are someone who wants to get on threads, you should just be aware of the amount of data that meta is collecting from you from threads, because it's a lot.

And I should say, obviously, Facebook is not the only platform collecting your data. Twitter also collects your data, albeit I think, a little bit less than Facebook does. But it's just generally good to be aware of Facebook's practices and histories around our sensitive data. Yeah, all of it. It's Facebook. They're collecting all of it. And even though Zuckerberg has talked a big game about wanting threads to be this place for discourse and accurate information, it has been up for less than a day. And already this has being called into question. Because known harassers and misinformers and disinformers like libs of TikTok are already showing up on threads. When Donald Trump Jr. joined, threads added a warning to his

account, letting folks know that he is known for spreading misinformation, which he is. When Donald Trump Jr. screenshot at that warning and complained, Meta's Andy Stone walked it back saying the warning was just a mistake. They didn't mean to apply it. So it does kind of seem like the same moderation issues and concerns that already show up on Facebook might also be present on threads. I would also just add that, like, I don't really even know how to put this, but there is definitely a cultural vibe of Instagram that makes me wonder if a product connected to Instagram will ever take off and be an actual replacement for Twitter. You know, it's hard to explain, but if you use Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, you probably

know exactly what I mean. Think about the kind of person who becomes big on Instagram. Now, think about the kind of person who becomes big on Twitter. Those two groups of people find success for completely different behavior and things with completely different audiences. The culture of Twitter is text-based. So snarks, jokes, meme, general on we, right? Those are the things that perform well on Twitter. Text-based snark, text-based insights, things like that. The culture of Instagram is visual, right? So it's looking a certain way, presenting a certain way. I don't necessarily want to read written takes from the kind of people who really perform well on Instagram. I don't mean that as a dig on them. It's just that there are two different

mediums. They're very different. And they have very different audiences. And so I feel like the kind of person who would find success on a visual medium and the kind of person who would find success on a text-based medium are very different. And having threads be connected to your Instagram account so that, like, the people who already have big followings on Instagram, people who are already big influencers on Instagram, automatically will have big platforms on threads as well, just makes me think that as a text-based, I mean, you're shaking your head, but like, if I have a million Instagram followers and you have five Instagram followers and Threads automatically pulls your followers from Instagram, I will start out on day one with a million

followers on threads. You will start out on day one with five followers on threads. That's just how it works. It's true. But just because you've got a million followers, if you're not creating the kind of content that they think is going to give them the kind of engagement they want, they will bury you in a day. And you might have a million of followers, but there's no doubt in. my mind that they they're you know they wouldn't dial you back to like a thousand impressions a day even if you're posting a lot of content uh because as you describe it's it's not like a chronological timeline right it's that this algorithm that they are using and that that vibe difference that you described between Twitter and Instagram I'm sure that a lot of people have studied it and I would be

like really interested to hear from them but i have to believe that the particular vibe that exists on instagram was very intentionally and deliberately curated by meta um and so yeah i think you know bringing all your followers is going to you know it is an advantage to starting on a new network uh you know when i started on mastodon a while ago that was like a major barrier i was starting at zero. Not that I had that many followers, but for me, it was more like the people that I was following. I had to go and, like, find them and find all new ones. But there, it's a chronological timeline. And, you know, with both Instagram and threads, that's not the case. It's the algorithm. They're showing you what they want you to see. So Ed Zetrone has a piece

that I think really speaks to what you're talking about. And he actually argues that this might be kind of marking the end of a certain era of the internet as we know it. It's kind of a long quote, but I think it's so worth it. Hear me out. He writes, when Twitter and Instagram launched, people were not primed for what a social network was. Users did not join with the intent of building followings or content creation.

Influencer was a term, but it was not a term that people instantly gravitated toward from day one. Twitter was exciting because it felt raw, almost accidentally honest. And the way that famous or notable people acted didn't feel like they were following a content marketing calendar. Threads is built to attract people who are concerned about influence

versus any kind of authentic conversation and it suffers greatly as a result. Perhaps we're simply approaching the end of the honest internet where the magic of happenstance is being squeezed out as financial interests find ways to dominate real human conversation. Threads isn't built for you to talk to other people. It's built to inject incipid content into your life and interfere with as much of the human experience as possible.

Perhaps it's because Zuckerberg already saw how unprofitable Twitter is and decided the only way to do this would be to make a significantly worse experience. More fundamentally, spreads isn't a social network. It's a marketing channel for the least interesting people on Earth. It's exactly what you'd expect of a text-based Instagram, a mediocre algorithmic nightmare of content slop

that barely resembles entertainment, and I can't wait for it to fail. So a little bit grim. That speaks a little bit, I think, to what you were talking about, about influencers and whether having a big platform, on threads will correlate to engagement and being successful there. I kind of agree with, even though I'm not on threads, I kind of agree that we're thinking

about it completely wrong. We're thinking about it in terms of an authentic engagement platform. And I don't think that's what threads is. There is zero reason for optimism, right? Like it's meta. They are bad actors. Every single piece of it is going to be bills or wrong. around selling ads.

I think they would readily admit that, right? Like they're interested in harvesting data and selling ads. This new platform is a new vector for them to do that. Maybe it'll be interesting. I don't know. You know, television is a vector for selling us ads, and there's good shows on there. Yeah, and it's funny because you're not able to control your feed

and what you're seeing. It's a lot of brands and influencers and things like that. Giovanni Colantiano at Digital Trends put it really well. He said he posted this screenshot of all of these different brands, you know, cracking their little brand-specific jokes on threads. There's Netflix saying, threads it's kind of like love is blind because everybody is all about that engagement. Engagement ring emoji.

And I get it. It's like cringy and eye-rolly and all of that. But he writes, It's truly pathetic that this is the endgame of social media, a powerful tool for education and organization co-opted into a dead-eyed utopia for brands to post the most saccharin shit imaginable and have it forced into your feed. Happy Meal Ass app. And I get the energy that he is responding to, right? Like, that it's, we, there was a time where social media and this, this era of the internet represented endless possibilities of connection and, you know,

and power building and organizing and engagement. And we're using it to get, you know, Netflix's little brand jokes about love is blind. And we're not even choosing to see that. It's just being surfaced to us because that's what Adam Mosey and Mark Zuckerberg think that we want from the internet. And it is, I mean, I don't want to sound like a downer, but it is a little sad to me that these are the people who are architecting what our digital future looks like. This is what they think that we want. Or, and that we should just be happy to get it. If we're like, oh, we don't like, oh, no, no, no, you're actually wrong.

You actually don't. You're actually too stupid to know what you like and don't like. Actually, I know what you like and don't like. I know more what you like than you know. And I just hate that. And I also think that Ed's post that I read earlier, you know, when Twitter first started, it was a platform with a little bit of irreverence and a little bit of zaniness and humor and darkness. And it did feel new and exciting back in the day. And it hasn't felt like that

for a really long time. Mostly it just feels exhausting. And I think that's one of the reasons why I don't necessarily see a future for a Twitter clone that is connected to like my Instagram, Facebook universe. This might be specific to me, but folks can let me know what they think. I just think that my Instagram, Facebook universe is too broad of a universe for me to then go put my takes out onto, right? Like, my mom follows me on Facebook. My high school English teacher follows me on Facebook, right? Like, my high school friends follow me on Facebook. Twitter is a much more niche platform.

Less people use it. And even less people than that actually make content and post there. So it kind of feels a little bit safer to put, like, whatever. bizarre niche take I want out into the universe on Twitter. The idea of like, Emily, from my senior year math class, reading my deep dive tweets into the Edipole complex in the movie Bo is Afraid, it's a little much. Like, I think there should be some division in the way that I, there is some division for me in how I show up on Twitter versus how I show up on Instagram.

I don't necessarily want those universes mesh together. You know, I think I said this last week is I kind of blest. like having different apps for like different audiences and different groups of people that I communicate with and different types of content that I want to look at. Something you said just before about what a sad end game for social media and you know thinking about threads being essentially just a clone of Twitter which I think everyone agrees like that's exactly what it is. Twitter like you said really came to prominence. years ago in a different era.

Twitter was different. The internet was different. We were different. And so cloning Twitter now, it's just like a radically different thing than what Twitter was. And Twitter arguably hasn't been that for a while. So it's, you know, if you clone the technology of a platform that was something

that people really liked and valued, a few years ago and maybe has fallen off in more recent times, you're probably going to end up with something that is similarly not what people are looking for in 2023. Then again, 30 million people downloaded it. What do I know? But I remain optimistic that we're going to do something new, right? Like, we're not just going to all shift to some new platform that is a clone of the old

platform, that like something genuinely new and different. and possibly decentralized is going to come along. Maybe it's spill, you know? Maybe it's, there are a couple people who are, like, I think all of the interesting new alternatives to social media platforms are all coming from marginalized creators. There's somewhere good, which is an audio-based, intimate audio-based social networking platform. There's spill.

Yeah, I don't want to make it seem like I'm like doom and gloom. I will forever be an optimist. I think that when you get people who care about connection online together, really important stuff can happen. Really groundbreaking stuff can happen. But we actually need to be centering and empowering those voices and having some of these fucking dipshits get out of the way who are just trying to make everything worse.

Like, isn't life hard enough? Do we have to make everything worse? So on Wednesday, Twitter threatened to sue meta, because as you just said, Mike, it's basically, threads is like basically a Twitter clone. I don't even want to, like, get too much into this because I really hate this kind of Cola Wars, Pepsi versus Coke framing.

I don't like talking about this as a business story because the reality is that we're talking about, as we just demonstrated, we're talking about our ability to, like, connect with people, access information, and, like, functionally use our largest communications platforms that are so connected to our ways of life, social engagement, democracy, politics. So that's really what's at risk. So I just mentioned the lawsuit because it's part of a story.

I think talking about this from a perspective of like, ooh, what are these two CEOs going to do? Are they going to cage fight, duke it out? I think it really lends credibility into the way that both of these bad actors have been behaving, the way that they've been putting all of us at risk. and it kind of adds credence to that, so I don't like that. But I will say that in response to the threads rollout and this lawsuit, Twitter's new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, tweeted something that I thought was pretty rich. She tweeted, on Twitter, everyone's voice matters, whether you're here to watch history unfold, which you can't do,

discover real-time information all over the world, which is all inaccurate, share your opinions or learn about others at Twitter. You can be real unless your account is being impersonated. You built the Twitter community, prayer hands emoji, clap emoji, and that's irreplaceable. That is your public square. We're often imitated, but the Twitter community can never be duplicated. Now, I agree with her in some parts, right?

We, the people. We did build Twitter. We did build the community. But here's why I think that sentiment is so rich coming from her. It's like when COVID started and all the airlines were like, we're a family here at American Airlines. And you're like, oh, were we a family when y'all charged me $40 from my suitcase? Were we a family when you bump me from my flight?

No, we're not a family. So it's pretty rich for her to be talking about community. Now that they see that there are other games in town, other alternatives for people to get their online engagement, now it's about community. Since Elon Musk took over, Twitter has not given a single crap about community. Anyone whose job it was to foster community at Twitter from Blackbirds to other identity-specific groups were all let go. And Elon did so while making it crystal clear that as far as he was concerned, the only job or role at Twitter that mattered was engineering.

Which side note, he also sucks at managing because Twitter was broken all weekend. So was Twitter a community when Elon blew up verifications and put up. users who actually built the community at risk? Were you looking out for Twitter's community when you let hate mongers, extremists, and transos back on? Maybe, but that is not a community that I would ever want to be part of. And Linda is right. It is the people, especially marginalized people who make Twitter worth showing up to.

That is a community that Elon has attacked and undermined and targeted the people who do that work of building the community on the platform. Those are the people that he has targeted again and again and again and put it. at risk. So we did build this community on Twitter and that every turn, Elon Musk treats us the people who built that community like freeloaders who are behind on rent that we owe him simply for showing up. And so I say like very rich to be talking about how much you value community now. Where is that value when people didn't want to give you $8, Elon? Damn. That sounds a little personal. Well, it is. I mean, I just don't like being told that

my contribution, if I'm not willing to personally shell over $8 to Elon Musk, my contribution as a community member of Twitter, but on the platform since the beginning, does it make a difference? But now when they're seeing there other apps out there that might be able to recreate what they're doing, whether they do it well or not, is, you know, remains to be seen. Now they want to talk about community. This is the first time that Elon Musk has ever talked about community to me. Where is this coming from, right? And so, like, I just don't appreciate the flim flam, and I don't appreciate having him talk. I don't appreciate Twitter high ups talking out of both sides of their mouth and playing at all of our faces. Because if we're a community, being a community is not just cashing my checks and treating me like garbage. Being a community means actually representing me and actually advocating and supporting my interest and my well-being, which I have not seen from Twitter in the last six months. So, yeah, I guess it is personal to answer your question.

Yeah, I'm angry about it. And I guess we'll stop it there. Fair enough. Mike, thank you so much for being here. As always, thanks for keeping me grounded. Yeah, thanks for having me on. This was a long Twitter app, but maybe next week everything will just be cool on Twitter. We can talk about other stuff.

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