There Are No Girls on the Internet - Student journalist exposes creepy clown professor; Rudy Guiliani loses Ruby Freeman defamation lawsuit; Mastercard versus sex workers; Lawmakers keep trying to bubble wrap the internet; Milani makeup gets dragged on Women’s Equality Day – NEWS ROUNDUP

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

Opt out of meta using your facebook to train ai (this isn't a fake fb chain letter, it's real!): https://www.zdnet.com/article/meta-uses-your-facebook-data-to-train-its-ai-heres-how-to-opt-out-sort-of/   College professor harassed students to quench 'clown fetish,' offering extra credit, cash: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2023/08/31/clown-fetish-professor-kent-northern-illinois-nicholls-state/70603544007/   Giuliani loses defamation lawsuit from two Georgia election workers: https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/30/politics/rudy-giuliani-georgia-election-workers/index.html   ACLU sues Mastercard on behalf of sex workers: https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/how-mastercard-is-endangering-sex-workers   Australia will not force adult websites to bring in age verification due to privacy and security concerns: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/31/roadmap-for-age-verification-online-pornographic-material-adult-websites-australia-law Arkansas social media age verification law blocked at the last minute: https://www.axios.com/local/nw-arkansas/2023/08/31/social-media-age-verification-law-blocked-arkansasSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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So let's get blunt with laughs, tears, or tears of laughter. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Diana Maria Riva on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Mike, it is nice to have you back. How have you been? I've been good. It's been nice to be back.

You know, I really enjoyed Joey's episode last week, but it's nice to be back. I agree. So let's get into some of these news stories. We have some updates and some new news around attempts to legislate the internet to make it safer for kids, in scare quotes, both here and around the world. Because rather than actually keeping kids safe, lawmakers seem to be going all in on just bubble, wrapping the internet instead, in some cases with less than optimal results. So yesterday, a coalition of LGBTQ plus and sex worker-led organizations filed a complaint urging the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation into MasterCard's adult content policy, alleging that it constitutes

an unfair business practice. So basically what's going on is that back in 2021, MasterCard put a new policy in place for websites that host adult content like OnlyFans that use MAPS, that use META, Mastercard payment options. The policy requires these websites to jump through kind of a lot of hoops, like getting pre-approval for all content before publication, forbidding certain search terms, and keeping record of age and identity verification of all performers. Now, the ACLU says that this policy restricts free speech and harms the livelihood of sex workers, especially black, immigrant, and trans sex workers, while also just failing to make those content platforms any safer. When the policy was first put in place back in 2021, researcher Valerie Weber surveyed 117 sex workers about how MasterCard's

adult content policy was impacting their work. Now, according to the queer news outlet, them, 90% of the respondents in that survey said that their work suffered when that policy was implemented. They reported payment interruptions and account flaggings and closures, and mostly, it sounds like all of them felt like all of these hoops they had to jump through did not actually make the adult industry any safer. The ACLU's trans-justice campaign manager Lala B. Holston-Zanel wrote it a blog that by restricting sex workers' ability to do business online, payment processors were actually increasing the likelihood that they might have to turn to more dangerous methods of making money, such as street-based sex work. They also point out that many adult content

websites require biometric identification, technology that we know is racist and routinely used by law enforcement to surveil and target and track black and brown people. So requiring the use of that technology to verify your age or identity is like doubly problematic, which led to this coalition of LGBTQ plus and sex worker-led organizations filing this complaint with the FTC. And I really see this as yet another example of how hostile online platforms can be to people who engage in sex work. You know, we've talked on the show a bit about Sesta Fasta. And that is another good, example of how these kinds of legislation that are ostensibly kind of on their face meant to make the internet safer, what they actually do is they make it worse and less safe for everyone.

Yeah, sadly, we hear so many examples like that on this show of policies supposed to make the internet safer or, you know, save the children that don't do that, right? The best case scenario, they have no impact, but worst case scenario, like this MasterCard policy, it actually puts people at risk by taking away their livelihoods to be able to make content, make a living off their content online, and according to that whole, pushing people into street-based sex work. So when it comes to things like Bostasesta, that legislation on its face was supposed to be fighting online sex trafficking. And like, you know, the acronym is stop enabling sex traffickers act and allow states and victims to fight online

Sex Trafficking Act. However, sex workers reported routinely that, you know, by making, by having that legislation really target and further criminalize people who are engaged in sex work, what it actually did was it meant that people who are routinely online in spaces where sex is being exchanged for money could not raise the alarm when something untoward was happening, when something unconsensual was happening. And so when you criminalize the people who are showing up to those spaces, the ones who are really, you know, sounding the alarm when somebody is being trafficked or something non-consensual is happening, when those people don't feel safe speaking up, you actually are getting further away from the thing

that you say is, you know, the reasoning for passing this legislation in the first place. Okay, so speaking of legislating the Internet, Mike, you know that we've been tracking this flurry of age verification laws moving across the country that if passed would require us to verify that we're over 18 to access social media. Here's a couple of quick updates. So far, Utah, California, and Texas have all passed laws that will require verification that new users are 18 or older. And Louisiana's law actually requires minors to be 16 to create social media accounts. Now, all of those laws are meant to go into effect after Arkansas's law. And in Arkansas, the age verification law almost did go into effect tonight.

But late tonight, Thursday, a federal judge temporary blocked the state's social media age verification law, just hours before it was meant to go into effect. The judge said the law is a burden on the free speech of minors and adults and is not targeted to address the harms. It is identified. So actually sounds like quite a bit like what we were just talking about, where the law will lay out something that it is meant to be combating. But then the actual implementation does not actually do that. And in some cases, takes you further away from that stated intention. Yeah. And the judge basically said what we've said every time we've talked about these laws, you know, it's not targeted to address the harms it has identified.

And it really does make you wonder, like, if it's so obvious to us, to people making a podcast, and it's obvious to this judge and a whole bunch of other people that these laws are not accomplishing the things that they say they're trying to accomplish, why do so many people keep pushing for them? Why do we have a whole list of states that have passed them and are trying to put them into law?

What a good question. I think it's a couple of things. One, I think it's the need to appear to be doing something. I think that it's clear something needs to be done. And so I think this like rushed law that's just like, oh yeah, this will do something. I think that's part of it. Two, I think that the conversation has been completely hijacked by people, not completely, but in some ways has been hijacked by people who really don't have the best interests of kids in my. and that they know that when you bring up protecting kids, people will really scramble to do anything. And so I think that, like, they might have an agenda, you know, the Heritage Foundation, I think it was, like, explicitly said that these laws about kids in the internet, they intend to use that to further suppress content about, like, LGBTQ folks and identity and things like that. So I think it just becomes something where you have people who legitimately have bad intentions. and then like, if you're saying this is going to make a difference, we have to do something, so maybe that's this. And I also think that the conversation, again, the conversation around how we protect people online has become so muddled. And I think that it's like the age verification thing is such a quick fix because you can say like, oh, well, this law prevents kids from being online in the first place. It prevents kids from being on social media in the first place, as opposed to really addressing the root cause of the harm.

that social media presents, not just for young people, but for all of us. I think it's like a quick fix that really allows for lawmakers and policy folks and people in charge to not have to address some of the more systemic root causes of what's going on. If you can make a law that's just like, well, the law says they shouldn't be on in any way, then you don't have to do any of that. It's like a quick fix. And meanwhile, in Australia, the federal government in Australia was actually looking into age verification to access porn online, as we've seen.

in a flurry of states here in the United States, like Virginia and I think Arkansas as well. But this week, Australia's E-Safety Commissioner released a long-awaited roadmap to rolling out age verification, which they say after looking into it, they are not moving ahead with age verification to access pornography online. So the report actually does say that while it's not great that young people are accessing porn online at pretty young ages, like 13, 14, it's not all bad. That does not paint a full enough picture because the report also cites a gap in sex education for LGBTQ youth that online porn might actually be filling. The e-safety commissioner said, quote, in our research, participants who identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, were also significantly more likely to say that there were some positive effects of online pornography on young people learning about sex and exploring sexuality than straight participants.

Some stakeholders reflected this may be due to the lack of other representations or learning sources. for young LGBTQI plus people, including a lack of inclusive sex education in schools, which honestly really tracks with my own experiences online as well. So instead of requiring age verification to access porn online, the E-Safty Commission in Australia is actually going to develop a new code to educate parents on how to access filtering software and limit children's access to such material or sites that are not appropriate for young people. That seems like such a more thought. and like measured, targeted response than anything we've talked about happening in the States for a while.

Yeah. Australia is like we spent, like I think this report has been like years in the making. Australia has spent a long time digging into this, this policy change and instead was like, oh, there's a better way to do this. Like there's a better way to actually help parents mitigate the harm that this. poses to kids. And so, yeah, it's definitely like a more thoughtful approach. And actually, speaking of youth and social media, in Ann Arundle County in Maryland, the school district is suing Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Google, and other social media platforms saying that social media has rewired how students think and feel. Phil Frederico, an attorney for the school system, said, as a result of the addictive nature of these algorithms and platforms, children are

spending too much time on their cell phones. Certainly the content is problematic as well, but it's really these platforms and really these algorithms that are getting them to stay on their phones, repeatedly interrupting their time at school. We want to get the companies to respect children and treat them the way that they should be treated and not as a profit center. So we want them to change their algorithms, change their platforms so that we don't have this problem in the future. And I think that that comment from the attorney for the school system really speaks to what I'm talking about, right? Like, it's much hard. harder and much more complex to say, we need to change the way that social media is showing up

generally, as opposed to just slapping a law that keeps young people away from it. And so I agree with what this attorney for the school system is saying. Anna Rundle is actually the eighth Maryland school system to go after social media platforms on behalf of students. Something that the lawsuit really makes clear is that even though they're suing the social media platforms, they say that the issues really start at home. And I thought that was such a interesting point that, you know, we are all probably on our phones too much. You might even say that some of us are a little bit addicted to our phones. And if a kid's grown up, right, their parents or

their guardian is on their phones day and night, if when they come home from school, they see their parent on their phones or on their iPad or on their screen day and night, how would they be able to set any kind of a different standard, right? Like, how would they know that there's something different? And so this lawsuit, I find really interesting and that they're going after the platforms will also make me it clear that some of the dynamics that they're seeing in classrooms

that are not super healthy around phone use really do start at home. That is very interesting. I mean, you know, on the one hand, I totally agree with those quotes. On the other, it does feel a little weird that county school district is, like, leading the charge here. feels like there are so many other entities within our government, you know, like the FTC,

Congress, I don't know, probably a whole bunch of others, you know, state level entities that should be doing something. I guess a lot of them are busy passing like age verification laws, but, you know, maybe they could take a look at what some of these counties are doing and take some inspiration there. Yeah, I actually don't find it surprising at all. I'm a former educator. I stopped teaching, like, quite a while ago. But even when I was teaching, phone use was a problem in classes, I can only imagine what it is like now.

I bet that it is disruptive to schools to the point where they feel like just having there be policies at the school level that's like no phones, you get in trouble if you're, of your phone is not enough, that these educators probably feel like addiction to social media is disruptive enough that, like, they need to take it to the next level. And not even just, like, just the distraction of having phones in schools. Like, I, again, I have not taught in a long time, so I can't speak for sure. But I can only imagine that the social disruption that social media platforms introduces into an education system is also a problem and that they probably are just completely fed up with it. Yeah, that's a great point. You know, there's both things are huge problems, right? Like, people are addicted to their phones, have no attention span anymore for

anything. And it's not just kids, right? Like, we can't just blame children. You know, I unfortunately spend half my days on Zoom calls talking with, you know, accomplished smart adults. And even still, you can tell that half the people are not paying attention to the conversation are like, you know, checking Slack or responding to an email or looking at Facebook or who even knows what they're doing. Social media has really, I think, like, done something to all of our brains, all of our attention spans. And then also, like you mentioned, the other harmful dynamics that social media has probably introduced into schools of kids getting into fights and posting inappropriate photos of each other or others. Yeah, I bet schools are mad. And I do think that we should really be setting a different standard for our young people. You know, it's one thing for me to be an adult and to have my brain chemistry be so altered by the dazzle of social media platforms that I can no longer sit through an hour-long Zoom meeting that I didn't really care about in the first place.

It's another to be passing that on to somebody whose brain is not even fully formed, which just sounds like what we are doing to our young people. And we are allowing platforms to profit from it. And so we'll keep an eye on this lawsuit and see where it goes. 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

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Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Speaking of platforms profiting off of all of us, it is no secret that Facebook really cannot be trusted to put anything ahead of profit. Not your, not the well-being of our kids, not our democracy, not our privacy, none of it. and certainly not the well-being of their users. They're actually pretty open about it. And maybe that's why we see so many of those super fake chain letters that you see on Facebook.

Maybe you've seen like your weird aunt or your uncle post it where it's like, I do not give Facebook permission to take any of my pictures, post this in your status and tell Facebook that you don't give them permission. If your Facebook is anything like mine, you maybe have seen someone make a post like that. And those things are not true. They're just like fake chain letters. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to talk a bit about this ZDNet article that came out today with instructions on how to opt out from Facebook using some of your data to train AI. Because it sounds exactly like one of those Facebook chain statuses that goes around.

Only it's real. So we'll link to it in the show notes. But basically, there's a set of tools that you can use with your Facebook account to control what they call, quote, off Facebook activity. The article provides instructions on how to break the link between your Facebook activity and all other data they collect about you from their advertising networks around the rest of the internet. So do we think that Facebook is going to actually honor those requests? Honestly, I don't know. Probably not, maybe.

But I think it's maybe worth a shot, even if it only keeps some of your data from being used to train their latest AI model. I did it. Mike, I know that you did it. And I think folks should consider it too will put the article in the show notes. but if you see that floating around Facebook, it is not just your weird aunt, not understanding how social media works. It is a real thing.

Yeah, it's interesting that they made those tools available since obviously they don't want people to do that. I hope people do it. I don't know. It's such a weird time with AI and like these models being trained. And I just keep thinking about that group of authors that we've talked about, like Sarah Silverman, who's suing Open AI because chat. GBT was just repeating large sections of her book unaltered, right?

Because the AI had been trained on her book. And it was just repeating it verbatim, like long passages. And so if it can do that with a book, it can do that with our conversations that we're being, you know, we're having on social media. And I just, it's just very uncomfortable. And, you know, you give up all rights to it. and what do you get from it? You get nothing from it, right? Like, it's just harvesting your data.

So opt the hell out. Opt to the hell out. I know I've talked about this. People are like, we've heard your soapbox spiel about this, but I fundamentally believe that we have got to push back on the dynamic that just because we use these platforms, anything and everything that we do on these platforms is for the taking, for the mining, for no benefit to us. So, yeah, I think folks should opt out.

I would love to opt out. Like, I would like very much to be excluded from this narrative. I think that folks should be opting out. Yeah. And to be clear, it's not like there's a setting, like a single setting on Facebook that you can just globally opt out from all of it. Like, they're still going after our data. But it's something that can be done in the ongoing process of trying to protect our privacy. Yeah.

And to be clear, I'm not even sure. Like, you really can't trust Facebook. And so I'm not even sure that if people take the steps that I've taken and that are described in this piece, that Facebook would honor that. But mostly, I just want people to know that it is a real thing from Facebook. The fact that it kind of mimics or mirrors fake chain letters that we see on Facebook a lot is unfortunate. But I just want people to know that if you see this on Facebook, it is legit. It is real. Look into it.

Yeah. If nothing else, maybe doing this is going to be articulation. it into the next big class action lawsuit against Facebook when they failed to honor these requests? Oh, I did my, I know I told people the data's come and gone. So if you did not fill out your form to be part of that class action, when I get my $12, best believe I'm going to spend it. I'll happily take $12 from Zuck. I don't care if he threatened to beat up Elon Musk. I'm taking my, I'm getting my money. Get your money. Okay, so this next story is really wild. It is such a weird story. I try to usually give a heads up if a story involves something that's going to be like heavy.

I honestly don't even know how to give a heads up because it's so clowns are involved. Face painting is involved. Creepy behavior from an authority figure is involved. So if those are things that you have a problem with, just know that that's what we're going to get into right now. So USA Today is in a deep dive investigation into this geography professor named Joseph Takash, who has a self-described clown fetish and has been using his position as a tenure track professor at Nichols State University in Louisiana to get female students to let him paint their faces in clown makeup and take photos and video of them. It's a dozy. Let's just keep going. So his time at the university is raising questions about background checks for educators at the university and whether the university,

and whether the university put students at risk by not taking this behavior seriously. USA Today reports that Takash's interactions with students and open discussion of his fetish happened in both mainstream and tailored digital spaces. He popped into Facebook groups geared toward new students and niche forums on websites like Reddit. He posted videos on YouTube. In one Reddit post on a forum meant to highlight hard-to-believe stories, he posted pictures of several women in white face paint. So it sounds like a couple of different students initially agreed to let him paint their faces for money.

One student says that he insisted on picking her up at her place of residence and taking her back to the geography building. And it sounds like when they were discussing this via text, she found the whole thing weird and eventually stopped replying to his text before the meetup ever happened. When she stopped replying, he sent her a message with no text, only a picture of himself in full clown makeup. that he sent after midnight. USA Today had a picture of this image. It is like going to haunt my nightmares. It is terrifying. The student said, quote,

there was some negative intention with sending me that photo. It's definitely burned in my mind. Me too. It's burned in my mind too. I haven't even seen it and it's burned into my mind. Yeah, it's a pretty disturbing image. There's no text message. There's no text in the message.

It's just a picture. But he is wearing a shirt that says, I'm not a failure. So weird, just weird. I don't even know what to make of it. It's so strange. So another student basically said the same thing happened to her, that he went online and said, like, oh, I'll give you money if you let me paint your face. He insisted on coming to pick her up at her place of residence and take her back to the geography building.

It sounds like that was the line that was like, no, that's so weird, which would make these women stop replying. So over the years, two students complained to the university and some even complained online. But the university, it sounds like, just never followed up. So before coming to teach at Nichols State, Takash was teaching at Kent State. And students want to know what exactly happened when he was at Kent State to make him leave and start teaching at Nichols. Because when he was teaching there, he was also a student. He was finishing his doctorate, which is like fairly common in academia. And so the university said that they cannot share any information about anything that went down at his time at Kent State,

but because he was technically a student citing FERPA the federal privacy laws for students. Now, it does seem like that maybe the university is kind of just using that as an excuse. Like the USA Today article spoke to some experts who said that they are really taking a specific kind of interpretation of FERPA in a way that kind of sounds like they might be trying to just avoid accountability and like avoid having to say what they knew and why they didn't tell other universities about what happened at this. guy's tenure at the university, but in any event, Kent State never gave any information to Nickel State that prevented him from taking up a job there. So according to the USA Today piece, it honestly does kind of sound like Kent State just didn't do a ton after students complained. The piece reads, Kent State would not say whether any actions were taken after the student's reports, but Eric Mansfield, a spokesperson for the university, said the police department confirmed that the

students who filed police reports were provided with university resources, which would include other non-criminal avenues to pursue as a general police practice. However, the student who made the complaint at Kent State says that she does not recall police offering her any services. She said that she did not want counseling. What she wanted was this professor investigated, which, yeah, I can imagine why. The Kent State University spokesperson said that the university monitors social media, but that colleges, quote, can't always see or track every. mentioned on social media, which again, it just to me does, I'm sorry, kind of sound like a cop out. So students are now asking why the university did not do a background check of this guy's social

media, because his behavior, the self-described clown fetish, and bragging about painting students' faces and sharing images and videos of the students whose faces that he painted were all pretty widely available on this guy's social media. His LinkedIn used a pretty obvious reference to his name and profession, Joeography, which was also his Reddit name. So if you looked at the name that he used on his LinkedIn and just Googled it, his Reddit account would come up, where he wrote, quote,

I convinced pretty girls to let me paint their faces, along with a photo of multiple women in white face paint that he had wrote on Reddit. On YouTube, a YouTube account under the name Joe Takash included at least two videos in 2020 of a man throwing pies at women. One of the videos features a young woman, also seen in the screenshots from Takash's Reddit account. There's also a comment, quote, you can have a video of her tied up getting pied via cash app.

So it sounds to me like not only was he taking these pictures and videos, sharing them on the internet, pretty openly saying, like, yeah, I convinced them to let me do this. And it sounds like maybe engaging in some sort of scheme where he would share additional photos for money, question mark, maybe. these were his students that is the problem here there is like a special trust of university professors with students and it's a very one-directional power relationship and exploiting that is not only ethically inappropriate but it is it like directly harms the students who have been entrusted in the care of the instructor uh So I just want to be super clear that, like, that is what is so inappropriate here.

Throne pies, fine. But living out your sexual fantasies with your students, never okay. Yeah. And, like, describing it to students, people who you have a, should be having a trust relationship with, and a relationship where you just implicitly have power over them, describing your fetishes to them is inappropriate. Bringing these conversations into the classroom is inappropriate. Having these conversations online is like it's all inappropriate because he's their professor.

You know, if he was throwing pies at a of age woman consensually, you know, who was not his student, okay, fine. But it's bringing it into a relationship where you have power over somebody and you are abusing their trust. Like even in the way that he talks about it himself on. Reddit where I convince pretty girls, it's pretty clear to me what he, what's going on. Like, it's not like he's trying to hide it. This is some, like, letters taunting the police kind of style stuff, where he basically is admitting what he's doing. Now, the reason that we know any of this is actually because of a student journalist. Nichols State student journalist,

Sally Ann Torres, started hearing these weird rumors about a professor who was giving out extra credit to students who would allow him to paint their faces, which at first she just dismissed as, like, a weird rumor. But that's a weird rumor. But that's a weird rumor. Then, Takash emailed students to tell them that the university was not renewing his contract. He said the reason why they were not renewing his contract was because he gave out too many A's to students, which like, likely story. That is such a, that sounds to me like a cover story where you're like, oh, I want to go out as a hero. I want people to be like, well, Mr. Takash really was like sticking up for us. It's so unfair, the university is like getting rid of them.

So, you know, who else found this a little bit suspicious? Sally Ann Torres. So she started looking into this. At one point, he said that there was a committee at the university to look into grade inflation. And she was like, I don't think we actually have that committee. She looked into it. No such committee exists. So she ends up breaking the story for her campus paper and getting him on video, defending himself, saying that he basically just had an assignment because he's a geography professor where students were required to paint their faces to learn about other cultures.

Even that to me is like, I'm no geography professor, but I don't understand how painting your face like a clown, whatever. Either way, that was his explanation for it. But the day that that piece went live, he resigned. And so that just goes to show you that student journalists are always going to get that dirt. They're going to sniff it out. They're going to find the truth. So shout out to Sally Ann Torres for really, you know, getting the truth and not letting the university sweep that's under the rug because it does sound like if left to their own devices,

the university would have taken no action because they didn't want it to be clear just how much they had put students at risk by not taking this kind of behavior seriously. It should not be tolerated. And I can see how it would be really easy for the university to ignore these complaints almost because they're so unusual, you know, and just kind of like shrug them off as like something weird that's. not harmful or not like some kind of sexually motivated breach of trust. So good for that student journalist, Sally Ann Torres. Yeah, I wonder what's next for her.

Yeah, I want her to go on to be like the next Ronan Farrow just like, taken down creeps left and right. Yeah, maybe she'll come on the pod. So speaking of creeps, we've got a little bit of good news in the taking down creeps universe. We've told you about Ruby Freeman and Seymouth, the mother and daughter duo of election workers in Georgia, who Trump and Rudy Giuliani waged a racist, sexist campaign of lies against baselessly claiming that they tampered with votes in the 2020 election. Well, this week, a federal judge ruled that Rudy Giuliani is liable for defaming them. He will have to pay their legal fees.

He's already paid about $90,000 in their legal fees. There's going to be another trial to determine how much he has to pay in additional damages, and it could be in the million. So Giuliani's mouth has been writing checks and his butt cannot cash, and it is finally catching up with him. New York MAG reports that Giuliani told the court in Georgia that he could no longer afford to contest that he made defamatory statements against Ruby and Che, because he could no longer pay to access his own electronic records, which were seized by the FBI when they took his phones in 2021. Since then, he's been paying $20,000 per month in hosting fees to access his records. His lawyers say that this is not an admission of guilt on his part because, you know, that would require taking accountability for your own actions, which this is somebody who is just not going to do, but that it just means that he can no longer afford to contest the claims anymore. And this is really funny.

The judge overseeing the case ordered Giuliani to forfeit because he had only handed over a sliver of relevant documents in discovery, though Giuliani did provide, quote, blobs of indecipherable data. So the judge was basically just like, enough already, dude. Like, it's enough already. Like, let's end this. The judge declared him liable for defamation and the intentional affliction of emotional distress. Could not happen to a more deserving guy. I hope that Ruby and Shay take this joker for every penny that he's worth. You know, it sounds like he's been begging Trump to pay for his legal fees, which like,

Trump don't even pay his own bills. Talk about Shire, she don't pay. Like he doesn't even pay his own bills. He's not paying for Rudy Giuliani. And even if he did pay for him, he probably wouldn't end up paying anyway. I did read that Trump is holding a fundraiser specifically for Giuliani, but like that's it.

He's not paying for his legal bills. And yeah, this is why you shouldn't have your mouth write checks that your butt can't cash. Yeah, it's great to see, you know. And also, we haven't brought it up in a little while, but the theme of this season is present future, right, where we're trying to look ahead to see which parts of the present are going to become more dominant in the future.

And once again here, we have a defamation case where the targets of a coordinated disinformation campaign successfully fought back with a defamation lawsuit. We've seen that several times over this season. And good for them. Like you said, it couldn't happen to a more deserving dude. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, 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 the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me.

Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, uh, 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 Smygel 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.

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Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast, Point Game is about defying the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game.

His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before. And he knows. Without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs. I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything

he gives us on the night to night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nash would get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He running the court licking his fingers why he got the ball. Like, after you go through a

training camp with that, Isaiah, you figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball. So listen to point game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. So speaking of playing stupid games and winning stupid prizes when it comes to defamation, so if you followed the Johnny Depp Amber Heard defamation trial, you probably recall that Amber Hurd's lawyer described how she carried makeup in her purse to cover bruises that Johnny Depp had

given her throughout their entire relationship. Her lawyer held up a specific color correcting makeup palette from the makeup brand Malani. Malani then took to TikTok using footage from the trial where one of their staffers looks up the date that that color correction palette was released, which was 2017. That would have been after Heard and Depp's relationship ended. So how could Amber have carried at their entire relationship? The video pretty clearly implies that Melani has caught Amber Heard in a lie, you know, a cosmetics-based lie at that a la Legally Blonde. But her attorney never actually said that Amber used that specific brand of makeup or that specific palette.

She was using it as a prop to demonstrate like, oh, a color correction kit like this one that I'm holding. So this was back when brands were really jumping into talking about that trial in a way that I found so distasteful. After facing backlash for that TikTok, Malani released a statement saying that they, quote, weren't taking a formal stance on the trial, evidence, or future outcome of the case. But I truly do not know how they can say that when they made a TikTok where they commented on the evidence, tried to comment on the trial. And so you can't really say like, oh, well, we aren't weighing the evidence and commenting on the trial after you have commented on the trial, specifically commenting on what you thought was evidence.

So it was pretty clear to me at that time why brands would want to get in on this. According to BuzzFeed, that particular piece of content that Malani put out was their most watched TikTok of all times. It got 5 million views. And prior to this, none of their TikToks had broken half a million views. So this week, Malani posted on social media in honor of Women's Equality Day. They wrote, shout out to all the inspirational, powerful women in our lives, happy women's Equality Day. Today and every day. And they got rightfully cooked because if there's one thing I know about the internet, it never forgets.

Twitter user, female tragedy, quote, tweeted their equality day tweet saying, do you remember when Amber Heard used a color correcting Malani palette as a court prop? And y'all took her out of context to frame her as a liar and created a space for others to laugh at her. Now it's Happy Women's Day, L.O.L. And honestly, I think that that Twitter user is exactly right. And I wanted to talk about this because I really hope that this is, what's happening to this brand on social media, shows other brands that There are certain things that you really should not weigh in on in a jokey, cutesy TikTok. If Malani, the brand, felt it was important to release a statement about their makeup palette being used in the trial, they could have released a statement. Making a cutesy TikTok with like a cutesy song is not an appropriate way to weigh in publicly on a trial that at its heart has domestic violence, right?

Like, that's not cute. That should not be funny fodder for like social media engagement. And if you engage in that way, you can't then be surprised when people don't forget it. You can't then be surprised when when you try to come back and say, oh, happy women's equality day. We support women that people remember because nobody forced you to do that. That was your choice. And so if you make the choice to wade into that conversation in a way that is that distasteful, it's really nobody's fault but your own

when people remember that that's what you chose to do. Boy, I hope you're right that we're coming to the end of those times, but like it's not like we're talking about 2002 at like the, you know, the dawn of the modern internet or something. It's, this was, what was it, like, 2022? It was like a year ago, right? Yeah, this was like last year. Yeah, it's like,

No kidding of a makeup brand whose target audience is primarily women, maybe you shouldn't weigh in on a domestic violence case and have a cutie video making fun of the woman. Like, it would seem like that would be pretty obvious, but I guess it wasn't. And so I guess I hope you, I don't know. Yeah, what do you think? It seems like it should have been obvious to me. Well, I would actually argue that the Amber Hurd situation was probably one of the more high-profile cases of this happening. But I have seen a flurry of this kind of thing happening, not on the same level.

Like, not where it's brands talking about a high-profile incident involving domestic violence. But, like, brands have really been wading into misogyny lately in a way that I think is really stark and really upsetting. A couple of months ago, there was this, I don't even know the right word for it, because I want to, I want to, I want to, use the word feud, but even that, I think, fuels that kind of misconception that I'm talking about. There was some sort of situation between two famous women, Selena Gomez and Haley Bieber. And these are two women who are both in the public eye. The story around them was framed as if these two public famous women were having some kind of a public spat or feud. I don't really follow either of them that closely to really be able to say, like, you know,

what was going on specifically. But the internet, seemed to be suggesting that Selena Gomez was the victim of bullying by Haley Bieber. And so it would seem to me that like Selena Gomez was painted as the more sympathetic of these two. And so then it's one thing to be like, oh, I'm somebody who cares about celebrity gossip or what's happening with celebrities. And I am picking aside on these two famous women who seem to be having some sort of a something between each other. But then here come the brands waiting in. And then you had, you had, like, big brands tweeting about it, like, oh, we're team Selena. And to me, that just, that just seems like misogyny.

It just seems like another way that brands have realized that they, it is profitable and popular to publicly crap on women who are perceived in a negative light in some way, that you can jump on the bandwagon. So, like, I don't love it when individuals do it. I don't think that's great. But, like, that's one thing. It's quite another for a brand who has. has like a social media team and a social media editor. Professionals decide, you know what we should really wait into is piling on this young woman in the public eye.

There's another celebrity, Rachel Zegler, who is the star of the new remake of the Snow White movie, who I feel like we are watching that happen in real time. The women's brand Girl Boss actually had to apologize for an Instagram post that they put up, kind of like making fun of a Rachel Zegler because she's been taking a lot of heat. for coming off as like, quote, smug in interviews around this new Snow White movie. And so I saw this Instagram post where they were like, we're sorry that we piled on, we didn't realize how misogynistic that looked, blah, blah, blah. I actually applaud them for actually taking down this post and apologizing.

Then I saw people in the comments that are like, I guess Rachel Zegler, even though she's in Snow White, does not care for Snow White, the fairy tale. And it's made that clear. and people are in the comments of that Gruboss apology were like, well, when is Rachel Zegler going to apologize for what she said about Snow White? And it's like, well, Snow White is fictional.

She does not really exist. So that would be difficult for her to do. But yeah, so I would actually argue that it is a trend when brands feel like they need to hop on the bandwagon of hating young starlets

in the public eye who are taking a lot of heat. And I hope that the way that people responded to Malani's women's equality day posts sends a message to other brands who are interested in getting on the misogynistic women hate bandwagon that it's not worth it. Your cheap engagement is not worth it. People don't want to see brands trafficking in this kind of misogyny. And if you do, we will remember.

So when you make your little Quality Day post or when you make your little women's history month post, people are going to remember because, the internet, if there's one thing we're going to do, it's have a long memory. Yeah, it's absolutely true. You know, social media can feel pretty crummy a lot of the time. And, you know, brands want to be there because they want to be reaching people. And I guess I can see how that would be challenging for them to navigate, like wanting to get an engagement without stepping on, or stepping into things that they don't want to be into. But like maybe they should just be a little bit more conscientious and less misogynistic.

But I don't know. It's a weird time in social media, right? Well, that's a great segue to this article that I wanted to talk about. I wouldn't really call this news, but I did want to mention it. This interesting piece in Business Insider called Social Media is Dead. Basically, the piece uses Instagram as a lens to chart where we've been and where we're going with social media. So if the start of Instagram was the start of something that felt new and exciting on social

media. Now, the fact that most people, regular people, do not even really post on the Instagram public feeds anymore kind of signals this shift. And maybe that shift is suggesting that social media is kind of over. So the piece points out that regular people, by that I mean people who are like not influencers or, you know, not brands or don't have any kind of professional or monetary reason to be on Instagram, those people, we're not really spending a lot of time posting to our public feeds anymore. Those folks, they are posting in the close friends Instagram story and in DMs. This is especially true for younger people. Like younger people are just not posting on their public grid. And one of the reasons why they say this is, is that the Instagram feed just no longer

feels like a good place to post content from regular folks who like don't have a professional camera are not trying to snag brand deals or something like that. And so, you know, if Instagram, when you scroll the feed, it just feels like a place for more and more curated, polished pictures from people who are trying to make money and using it as a revenue-generating stream. Where does that leave people who just want to post pictures for their friends? Certainly not their feed. And so the article talks about how people are spending time in these, like, more intimate, closed places, your close friends feed on Instagram, DMs, discord, places like that.

But brands can't really show up there, right? And so if brands are not invited to like your Discord server or whatever, like the fact that social media has really built up this entire infrastructure around this like capitalistic thing of like brands reaching out to you and like serving you ads, what does that mean for this, this like infest – the scaffolding of this infrastructure that has been built up around that. And so, you know, the article is really interesting. I definitely think folks should read it. Something that they don't talk about in the piece that I think is maybe part of why social media feels so weird right now is that I think people are just really tired. Like, I think that social media used to feel fun.

Like when Instagram first came out, it felt exciting. It felt like a new thing. And that when Instagram made this shift toward being more creator-focused, like influencer-focused and brand-focused. and brand focused, they started rolling out all of these hoops that people had to jump through just to get any kind of traction on the platform, just to sue your friends would see your pictures. And who's got time for that? Who's got the energy for that? If that's not part of your job, why would you do that? And so the piece is really interesting. I think it really speaks to a vibe that I have felt more and more that, I don't know, something has shifted with social media.

And I feel it. I'm curious if folks listening feel it. You barely do social media, so I don't know what your gauge would even be. Yeah, it's an interesting thing to think about. You know, I can't help but suspect that it's related to the enormous shift that the internet has undergone over the past 25 years from a radically distributed thing to a highly centralized handful of apps owned by an even. smaller handful of companies, all of whom make their living on sales of ads, right? Like, we've allowed the internet to become a place where brands pay to market themselves to people. And I, you know, I guess we've always been supported by advertising. Everything always has.

and there's nothing inherently wrong in it, but allowing the internet to become completely dependent on it, and not just that, but like, oriented around making spaces safe for brands and also connecting people in a way that really facilitates selling brands, ads to reach all of those people. It just leaves out the connection that makes people want to participate. So yeah, I think you're right. I personally haven't had any meaningful social media presence in a long time.

Most of what I do on the internet is group chats or like Discord servers with people that I know. I am really curious about our listeners and what they, where they, spend their time online? Is it, is it Discord? Is it Facebook groups? Is it, maybe it is Instagram? I don't know. But we'd love to hear from folks at hello at nangodi.com. So a couple of things about that. One is that, one is that according to Adam Oseri, one of my personal nemesis, tech nemesis, he admits that people are still consuming content on Instagram. That's not down, but sharing content is way down. People are just, he's flat out admitted it, that people that are not sharing content on Instagram.

So that definitely mirrors what you're saying. But about the ads, I think that we have really, this is not a fully fleshed out thought to like, bear with me. I don't, I think that we have reached peak ad. I think that the fact that when you used to open Uber, you would just type in where you were going to go and you would see the thing that's like, oh, five minutes away. Now when you open up Uber, you see a bunch of ads,

that are random, that make no sense. It's like, why are you offering me a trip to Disney World? I'm trying to get a ride across town, right? Like, things that they're not even like transportation focused. They are sneaking more and more ads into more and more parts of technology and the internet. Places where ads did not used to be. And so to me, what that says is that the bubble is about to burst, that they are like, we, like, we have hit the apex of the attention economy.

and it's like, we need to squeeze whatever else juice is in this. We need to like get our money's worth because I think something's not panning out. I think that people are just like, I don't know. That's my, that is just my opinion. That is my take. But I do think that what you said about connection is so interesting because like that was the point of the internet in the first place. It wasn't to show you a million ads and, you know, have the internet experience

just be boiled down to four apps that keep changing to. mirror each other. It used to be about connection and excitement. And in the Business Insider article, they talked to Andrea Casanova, an influencer strategist, who basically says the same thing. She says, culture in general has kept a lot of people from showing up because they don't think their life is aesthetic, or they don't think they're selling anything. So why would they post a social media? I just don't have the lifestyle that all these creators have, so I don't know what I would be sharing. And therefore, I fall into this loop of never sharing anything. And that just makes me so sad I can't help but going back to the early days of social media where you would have one night out at the bar and you would come home and post 50 pictures of the same group of friends from the same night out.

And you didn't care if it wasn't aesthetic. You didn't care if like the picture of your food looks like vomit. You were sharing it anyway because that's what we were all doing. And obviously those days weren't perfect. I'm not going to say they were. But I miss those days when you didn't feel like you could be sidelined from your own digital experience. because it didn't measure up in some way. And it's exhausting and crazy making to try to bend yourself into a pretzel to meet this impossible aesthetic that you feel like you have to have to embody it just to show up online.

Like make social media fun again. Don't make it this like anxious slog through a resilient ads for stuff you don't need. It is sad that she would say that and like, you know, feel like she didn't have anything, you know, worthy of posting. But I get it. I totally get it. I feel it. And just to be super clear, there's nothing wrong with advertising. We love our advertisers, you know.

Oh, yeah. You know, they support us. They allow us to make this show. They support all of the amazing outspoken talent. Our advertisers are the best. We love them. Mike, I'm not talking about the good folks at Nissan and Hulu. We obviously value their partnership.

Yeah, exactly. They support us. We're happy to support them because they're putting great. stuff out there into the world. But like, this is a show that we're making. And that's just a qualitatively different thing than social media, right? These are different worlds. Like, exactly like you were just talking about it.

You know, back in the day, you'd go out to a bar and you'd post like 40 terrible photographs of all of you out there and just like one big batch, just like a dump, like blah, here it is. And that was fine because nobody outside your immediate circle was going to see it. there's no expectation that they would. But back then, the infrastructure was set up to support that connection of you with your friends. And it's just become completely co-opted where the distinction between, you know, a piece of software that's meant to connect people and a piece of software that's meant to serve up entertainment has been eliminated because it's just all been, I don't know, combined into this,

entertainment attention economy to all of our detriment, you know, like ads on podcasts, the best. Ads in me sharing my photo of like hanging out with my

niece and nephew with some of my friends. No good. Yeah, there should be a place for people that just want to post their bad pictures where they have pit stains or whatever because certainly all those, like, go back, go back and look at those pictures that we used to post on Facebook back on the day. And, like, we didn't have filters.

So you were just, like, sweaty and pit-stained all the time. And the flash, it just always looks terrible. Or it would be, like, cringy statuses that were, like, little reference, like, a song lyric or, like, a cryptic, like, a cryptic sentence where you're like, like, reading. When I read those now, I'm like, I don't even know what this was about. Like, this is like an inside joke that's so inside. I don't even know what I'm saying. Anyway, what I'm saying is like, I think that we're all feeling a shift. I don't necessarily think it's bad because I do think that when there's a shift,

sometimes something interesting or exciting or different is on the other end of it. And so, yeah, I'm curious what people think. Let us know. Yeah, I'll leave it there. And if folks want to chime in, they can get in touch with me on email at hello at tangoati.com. If you want to support the show and listen to ad-free bonus content, check out our Patreon. at patreon.com slash tangoity. We have some exciting changes coming to the Patreon soon.

TBD. Stay tuned. Mike, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Bridget. It's a pleasure talking with you, as always. And we will talk to you soon. If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our merch store at tangoity.com slash store. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech

or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoadie.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoity.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeartRadio and unbossed creative.

Edited by Joey Pat. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tarie Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, write and review us on Apple Podcasts.

For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, check out the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy. On Humor 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. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Tolodano. favorite time of the year on our podcast point game, the playoffs. We're digging into the biggest surprises of the season.

And I'm looking back on some of my greatest playoff moments. If we didn't talk ever again, I was crying. You just understood. That's how personal it got. Wow. Then after that game seven, Marquis come until he's like, you know I love you, dog. You know, it's all love. This was just playoffs.

This was just basketball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHeart Podcasts presents. Soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend, Janet.

Hey. And we have been joined at the hips since high school. Absolutely. A redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. This is a podcast.

We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? Oh, they hit a bogo. Well, then you got them. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.