There Are No Girls on the Internet - Zoom drops (maybe?) AI training policies; Black pregnant women arrested by facial recognition; Twitter CEO (kind of?) Linda Yaccarino gives first big interview; Did Elon ever pay those creators? — NEWS ROUNDUP

Episode Date: August 12, 2023

The role of misogynoir and disinformation in the Tory Lanez trial: www.Patreon.com/tangoti     Here’s the story on Jane Friedman, the author AI impersonated- Amazon author AI counterfeit books: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/author-discovers-ai-generated-counterfeit-books-written-in-her-name-on-amazon/ New Zoom AI policies were loudly hated across the internet: https://www.zdnet.com/article/zoom-is-entangled-in-an-ai-privacy-mess/?ftag and https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxjgvy/zoom-changes-tos-to-say-it-wont-train-ai-on-your-calls-without-your-consent-after-backlash Eight Months Pregnant and Arrested After False Facial Recognition Match: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/06/business/facial-recognition-false-arrest.html Here’s Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino’s full CNBC interview but you don’t really need to watch the whole thing to get the gist: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2023/08/10/watch-cnbcs-full-interview-with-x-corp-ceo-linda-yaccarino-on-twitter-rebrand-and-more.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to soccer moms on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There Are No Girls on the Internet is 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, and here's what you may have missed this week on the internet. So, as you all know, in the pandemic, Zoom became such a ubiquitous part of all of our lives. You would have your work meeting on Zoom, your therapy on Zoom, your happy hour on Zoom, your book club on Zoom. But Zoom is still a tech company. And tech companies can be very tricky in that they love to quietly slip some updates into their terms of service.

You know, that thing we all click without really reading too much. Last week, people started posting screenshots of Zoom's new policies that state that people who use Zoom, just by using the platform, consent to the company's use, collection, and storage of, quote, service-generated data for any purpose. This includes, quote, training and tuning of algorithms and models. And so just by showing up to a Zoom meeting, you are consenting to use whatever comes up in that meeting, whatever you talk about, images, whatever, for Zoom's, quote, machine learning, artificial intelligence, training and testing, among other uses.

According to ZDNet, just by showing up on Zoom, users would then give Zoom, quote, a perpetual worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sub-licensable and transferable license, and all other rights required or necessary to redistribute, publish, import, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display,

copy, distribute, translate, translate, subscribe, create derivative works of, and process all of our content. That's pretty bad. That is a lot of, like just by showing up to this meeting, you know, that's a lot of data to be giving over to Zoom just to show up. So Zoom told Vice that they actually made this change to their terms of service back in March. Notably, it sounds like Zoom didn't really go out of their way to make this super public until this week. until this week, users started posting screenshots of this new terms of service. After all the backlash and outcry, Zoom then put out a blog post this week where they kind of walked back this terms of service and basically said, yeah, you know, all that stuff that I just read from their terms of service, they promise, promise, pinky promise that they will not do it without users consent, like opting into it.

promising that Zoom will not use audio, video, or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent. That was a big part of the issue before that Zoom users basically had to consent to this. There was no opt-out. One interesting thing is that folks were asking, like, what about people who use Zoom for like therapy sessions? Like, my therapy happened over Zoom or, you know, medical reasons. It does sound like those use cases are completely different Zoom contracts. And so Zoom is required to keep those conversations like HIPAA compliant. Is that right, Mike? Yeah, I believe that's right. I think that it's like a separate category of contract that enterprise clients who have HIPAA protection needs signed than general users like most of us.

So yeah, it sounds like that for most of us, general Zoom users, there was no way to opt out of this. If you were going to use Zoom, you had to consent to let Zoom use your data in this way. But now they are saying, promising that they will allow users to opt out. However, ZDNet pointed out that Sean Hogle, business and intellectual property attorney, is not so sure. On Y Combinator, Hogle wrote, quote, Zoom's lawyers are trying to pull a fast one with these revised terms. The new sentence on user consent being required to train AI applies only to customer content, not service-generated data. Zoom can use this data, which is derived from your conference and materials without your consent. Also, surprise, in their blog posts clarifying their terms of service as it pertains to AI,

Zoom assures all of us. No, no, no, don't worry. It sounds scary. Trust us. This is going to be good for you. It's for your own good. Pointing to the ability to opt into Zoom settings for things like meeting transcriptions and summaries and how it will, quote, improve the performance and accuracy of these AI services.

So if you want to use these services with Zoom, then you will have to opt in to sharing your data with the platform. Something that I find kind of interesting about this, like I was talking to somebody about this, and they were like, well, what do I care if, like, Zoom wants to use my data in this way? Like, explain it to me like I'm five, why this is a problem. Well, first of all, there are pretty big intellectual property concerns. Anybody who uses a platform like Zoom to discuss things where their ownership, of those things is key. So like for me, I'm a podcaster. If I were having podcast interviews on Zoom, Zoom could essentially say, oh, hey, actually, because you use Zoom, we could have the rights to what you talk about in this episode. You no longer have the rights. We've talked about how folks like Sarah Silverman

are suing companies like Open AI for intellectual property threats because they have taken her intellectual property, which she owns, to train their algorithms and machine learning. So if you are somebody who best to discuss scripts that you own or discuss creative content that you own. Using Zoom under those original terms of service would not be a really secure place to do that because just by using Zoom, you're kind of giving them consent and ownership to use that intellectual property, however they see fit to make money for their company. And not just intellectual property, but any sort of trade secrets or internal information that you wanted to keep private among you and your team, your business associates, your partner, anything, right?

Like, chat GPT can just using that as one example. But, you know, a lot of these large language models are different and who knows how any of them work, but chat GPT seems pretty good at repeating back information from specific copyrighted works, you know, specific pieces of its training corpus. And so who's to say that what might happen to something that you say, during a Zoom meeting that you think is private, that then gets used to train a large language model. It's a pretty like brazen attack on privacy and confidentiality. Well, exactly that. And I think that's another big issue is that yes to all of the intellectual

property concerns and trade secret concerns, kind of like what you were saying, it's also just kind of the principle that people's private meetings should not be fodder for training Zoom's AI, that like that dynamic where, just by using this software that has become so ubiquitous to all of our lives, how work gets done, how people communicate and connect with each other, that just by showing up on that platform, you are consenting that basically you're like an employee of Zoom, that whatever you, whatever comes up in that space belongs to them. And that's like a fundamental dynamic that I think that it's the principle of that. that's kind of what why people felt so outraged by this move by Zoom.

It's just like the fundamental shift that we as users of these programs are just fodder for whatever Zoom wants to do and however Zoom wants to make money. And I think that people are, the fact that people really raised hell about this to the point where Zoom had to like walk it back, I think shows that there's a little bit of a shift happening in terms of how folks are thinking about the relationship between themselves, tech companies, and how their data is used or misused. And this is not the first time that Zoom has really stepped in it with regards to things like user privacy.

Mike, you got a little bit of a check from Zoom because of this, right? That's right. I got a check for $53 from a class action settlement against them. Wow, what did you spend that whopping $53 on? I think I got some Uber Eats. Well, the reason why you were able to get that Uber Eats is because Zoom had to pay out a historic $85 million lawsuit for Zoom bombing, basically not having secure enough system that allowed for bad actors to disrupt the privacy

of folks as private meetings. This has happened to me before. I have been on pretty high-stakes, important calls on Zoom where, like, presentations about things that are, like, important but need to be secure for specific security reasons. And bad actors and folks looking to disrupt have been able to, gain access to those spaces to disrupt them. So it's pretty serious. Like, it's, it's, it's, pretty high stakes is what we're talking about. And like I said, I think that people are just starting to ask questions about whether or not these tech companies are actually, obviously,

they're not acting with our best interest as users in mind. But like, how much are they not acting with our best interest as users in mind? I think really recently there have been a lot of big examples of people being like, wait a minute, you're using my data or my work or my intellectual property for what exactly? And really pushing back against that dynamic that everything of theirs should just be for the taking of whoever wants it for them to make money. For instance, this week, this guy, Benjie Smith was rightly like kind of bullied by authors of the internet into taking his platform prose craft down. Prozcraft was meant to use AI to analyze the structure of a whole library of thousands and thousands of books. Books, he notably, did not

have any right to be using or reproducing. Authors like Roxanne Gay were pissed, and eventually he took the platform down, because it turns out that authors really don't love it when their material is being taken without their consent. So they spoke up about it until he put out a statement apologizing and eventually was like, oh, wow, like y'all really hated this and announced he was closing up shop. On the show, we're actually going to be talking to another author, Jane Friedman, who recently found out that somebody or some buddies is an impersonating her name as an author and using AI to create like poorly written AI-generated knockoffs of her books under her name, and that Amazon then added those books that were not written by her to her Goodreads author profile.

And Google, for instance, just recently went on record as saying that their AI systems should have the right to mine publishers work unless those publishers specifically opt out of doing so. When asked how a system like this might work, Google didn't say they didn't really have an answer. And I think that we've really hit a wall with how regular people are thinking about the future and the way that tech companies are using all of us. I think folks are starting to push back against this idea that everything we do, everything we do online, everything we say, whatever we bring to these platforms can just go to enriching these tech companies. that already have so much, have so much money,

and have so much impact on how all of us live our lives. I hope you're right. 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 headwriter, 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 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.

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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 up 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. And we're back. So speaking of that, we have to talk about this black woman in Detroit who was falsely arrested. This story is infuriating.

So back in February, a 32-year-old, eight-month pregnant black woman in Detroit, named Portia Woodruff was arrested for a carjacking that she did not commit. Why? Well, facial recognition technology misidentified her, as it often does with black people. The New York Times reports that when the police came to her house, she actually gestured to her stomach to indicate how pregnant she was and that like how unlikely it would be to have an eight-month pregnant woman commit armed carjacking and robbery. However, that did not stop them from putting her in handcuffs in front of her neighbors and her four babies, leaving her four babies at home with her

fiancé as they cried, and taking her to the Detroit detention center for booking. She says that she was held for 11 hours, questioned about a crime that she had no knowledge of, and had her phone ceased to be searched for evidence. She told the New York Times, I was having contractions in the holding cell. My back was sending me sharp pains. I was having spasms. I think I was probably having a panic attack. And the reason that she knows all of this is because she's a nursing school student. I was hurting sitting on those concrete benches. So she was charged with robbery and carjacking, released on $100,000 bond. And when she was released on bond, went straight to the hospital,

where she was diagnosed with dehydration and had to be given two bags of IV fluids. A month later in March, the Wayne County prosecutor dismissed the case against her. And this week, she filed a lawsuit for wrongful arrest against the city of Detroit in the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Michigan. Portia is the sixth person to report being falsely accused of a crime because of facial recognition technology. All six of these people have been black because we already know that facial recognition technology disproportionately misidentifies black faces. Portia Woodruff is the first woman reporting it.

So basically what happened in this situation is that a man called the police to report that he had picked up a woman who he had been drinking with outside of a liquor store and that this woman pulled out of a gun. robbed him and stole his car. The police department uses a facial recognition vendor called DataWorks Plus to run unknown faces against a database of criminal mugshots. The system returns matches ranked by their likelihoodness of being the same person. A human analyst is ultimately responsible for deciding if any of the matches are a potential suspect. The police report said that the crime analyst gave the investigator Portia Woodruff's name

based on a match to a 2015 mugshot that she had because she had been arrested for being pulled over while driving with an expired license. They then showed the victim six photos of black women, and the police say that he, the victim, picked out Portia Woodruff's picture. If Portia gets her settlement, which she should, this would be the third case where the city would have to settle for folks who have been falsely arrested of a crime

because of faulty facial recognition technology. The New York Times reports that on average, Detroit runs over 125 facial recognition searches a year, almost entirely on black men. an attorney for the ACLU who represented a man who was falsely arrested for shoplifting because of facial recognition technology is trying to get Detroit to agree to collect more evidence in cases involving automated face searches to end what he called the facial recognition to line up pipeline. So I need to be clear, it is not like we do not already know the dangers

of the use of this kind of technology. Dr. Joy Bolamweeney, researcher at MIT back in 2018, did a whole bunch of research showing that facial recognition technology routinely fails to accurately read the faces of marginalized people. There's an entire fascinating Netflix documentary about it called Hidden Bias. However, apparently police officers in Detroit have not seen this film and have not heard of this research.

This is a good example of how technology can really harm marginalized people and how we know when that technology is allowed to become commonplace anyway, it is a real problem. Like there are real world consequences. And unfortunately, this technology, despite being knowingly faulty, is also becoming really commonplace.

You have probably gone into venues that use facial recognition technology and might not have even known it. Event venues like Madison Square Garden, City Field, Cleveland's First Energy Stadium, Miami's Hard Rock Stadium, the Pichanga Arena in San Diego, and others use this technology on fans entering venues for concerts and sporting events. I've heard horror stories. There was a story of a young girl who was being, who her parents had dropped her off at a skating rink. And I think it was in Chicago.

And the skating rink happened to be using facial recognition technology. It misidentified her as someone else. And the skating rink owners basically threw this girl into the night without her parents because they said that she was someone that she was not based on this technology. There was another case with Madison Square Garden where an attorney, who was representing, like the parent group of Madison Square Garden, she was representing them in a legal suit, but not directly involved with Madison Square Garden,

just like their parent group. And that apparently that parent group has a rule where if you are not just one of the lawyers involved in a litigation against Madison Square Garden or their parent company, even if you are a lawyer who just works at that firm, you are not allowed to come into Madison Square Garden. And so she was taking her kid to see the Rockettes for Christmas. They stop her at the door and they say, we know you're an attorney and you can't come in.

And so this technology is becoming more and more used and commonplace, even though we already know it is disproportionately misidentifying black folks, women, and folks of color. In fact, the organization Fight for Our Future organized a boycott led by musicians like Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, venues that utilize this technology. And they actually got smaller venues like House of Yes in Brooklyn, one of my favorite spots. The Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles and the Black Cat here in D.C., these smaller venues actually pledged

not to use facial recognition at their shows. But as this technology grows, I think these problems are going to become more and more pronounced and happen more and more often with bigger and bigger consequences. It's one thing to not be let in for a concert. it's quite another to spend 11 days in jail when you're eight months pregnant. The fact that she was so pregnant and had to spend like her eighth months of pregnancy in jail feels pretty, it feels inhumane. It does feel inhumane.

And something that she said that kind of like broke my heart was that she said that she was as horrible as it was to be very pregnant in this holding cell for 11 hours, that she was kind of happy that she was so pregnant because at least it provided some kind of a seed of doubt to the police officers and investigators that this could not have been her because the victim in the carjacking did not say that this person,

the person who did this to him was pregnant. And so it's pretty obvious when someone is eight months pregnant. So she said that as much as it was horrifying to her, which I'm sure it was, being pregnant, she believes it was almost kind of a saving grace because at least the police officers it put some doubt in their mind that they had the correct person.

Maybe we just need to figure out a way to move that doubt a little bit further up the causal chain of events and like not arrest the pregnant, innocent women from the beginning. Yeah, I mean, that's what the lawsuit is calling for that when facial recognition

gives a match, doing actual police work and actual investigating to see if you have the right person before you arrest them and hold them for 11 hours, especially if they're pregnant, but even if they're not. I think it might be a case where it's very easy to just rely on the technology because you have it. And you can have that cover of saying, like, this is why we arrested her, right?

Like the city of Detroit is saying, like, oh, well, in this case, her arrest was actually warranted because of the situation. because the facial recognition technology said it was her. The victim picked her up and up, picked her out on a lineup of six. But, you know, anybody who's ever done one of those police lineups knows how faulty those are, too. So relying on two different faulty mechanisms, facial recognition technology, which we know is faulty, and just a human being's ability to recognize faces in a moment that was probably like scary or traumatic, just relying on those two things that are so faulty to lock somebody up for,

11 hours is not enough. And so I agree. I think that we need to have, clearly we need to have protocols in place where this kind of thing doesn't happen and that human investigators are doing work, which I know nobody likes to do extra work, but that you can't just cut corners when it's people's lives like this. And it sounds like that's happened too many times in Detroit. But I think the fact that the powers that be are like, let's start using it first. make it commonplace first, and then the kinks will reveal it. It seems like they're just saying that like, it's okay. The human cost, the human impact is just part of working at the kinks. And if an eight month pregnant woman had to, you know, be dehydrated in a cell phone 11 hours, that's just the cost of getting on the road of perfecting this technology so that we can have a pitch perfect digital surveillance state. It's like the whole thing is like a big casserole of awful. When I think about it that way. So speaking of a big catherall of awful, let's talk about Linda Yakorino, a new CEO question mark of Twitter.

She had her first big, splashy boss of Twitter televised interview this week. By the way, you may have realized that we're not calling it X. We're calling it Twitter. I am going to continue calling it Twitter. I think it will be funny if X doesn't take. and I'm doing my part to make sure that it does not. So we will continue to call it Twitter. I call Facebook, Facebook for the most part.

Every now and then, like if I'm reading a statement from the company, I'll slip into meta every now and then. But X is just not going to take. I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it. Are you doing it? I guess I'm trying, but it just feels so awkward that it feels weird every time I say X.

So basically, as you reported a couple months ago, Linda Yacanaro was made Twitter's new CEO. It was a weird situation because during that time, Twitter had like very big moves. Like they changed the name. They announced the payouts, which we'll get to later. All of these big changes. And these changes seem to be from the outside.

Just Elon Musk's whims. And then Yacanaro would have to sort of play catch up and have a very enthusiastic thread of tweets about whatever random change they just made. It just did not seem like the behavior of someone who is the CEO of the company, which she supposedly is. She often, publicly, anyway, seemed to be like an afterthought. Like, she, I remember the day that they announced the Twitter payouts, she posted, like, oh, in order to be eligible for payouts, you have to have 44 million impressions a month or whatever.

And then Elon Musk, that same day said, like, oh, well, we're using internal metrics to determine who gets payouts. There's no way to know who gets what publicly. And it's like, well, then why did she just tweet literally something else? Like, why didn't you at least tell her that? So she didn't tweet that. And then have you say something totally different. And then it's like, okay, well, my tweet says a completely different thing. Like, get on the same page.

Basically what I'm saying is that it did not seem like CEO behavior to me publicly. And so I was sort of like happy to see that she was doing some kind of a public-facing CEO-ish interview. Let's talk about how it went. So you really don't need to watch the whole thing. There's really nothing too surprising that you need to see if you didn't watch it. Basically, Yekonero did a lot of spin around Twitter being a healthy place. It is very clear that she really wants brands to feel. safe on the platform and come back. Many brands have left Twitter, rightly so, since Elon Musk

took over because they probably don't want to see their advertising next to like, you know, slurs or hate speech or child sexual abuse material. So a lot of brands left the platform and took their advertising revenue with them. Yackanaro was really excited to talk about the fact that two big brands, State Farm and Coke have come back to the platform. Although, funny enough, Media Matters after this interview showed Coke and State Farm ads where it's like, here their ads are on the platform next to hate speech and harassment. Like, good job. And she really kept championing this idea of Twitter being a place for free expression.

Like that was like, she probably said that three different times in this interview. As someone who has done a little bit of work around platforms and sort of how people think about platforms, researchers think about platforms. Something that she did that I really want to call out is that she repeated a lot of made-up metrics that truly mean nothing, like truly are meaningless. She said, I can confidently sit in front of you and say that 99.9% of all posted impressions are healthy. I don't know what that means.

It's just, it's not, it's like not a metric that any researcher would be like, oh, sure, of course. 99.9% of all posted impressions are healthy. She just made that up, and it probably sounds good. It's probably something they're going to be using in their marketing to try to get brands back to the platform. Because it's a very brand safe platform, if you didn't know. Like lots of healthy discussion and free expression is taking place there,

Coke and State Farm and other advertisers. Please come back. We love you. There was this exchange that I feel like is a pretty good example of the kind of say-nothing PR. tech spin that I'm talking about. I can confidently sit in front of you and say that 99.9% of all posted impressions are healthy. How do you define healthy though? Is porn healthy? Are conspiracy theories healthy? You know, it goes back to my point about our success with freedom of speech, not reach. And if it's if it is lawful,

But it's awful. It's extraordinarily difficult for you to see it. But how many millions of people follow Kanye West? Lawful but awful. And he's allowed back on. You know, Kanye, who hasn't rejoined the platform yet, but is planning to do so, will operate within the very specific policies that we have established, that we're clear on, that everyone who's watching this or,

listening on spaces can access themselves. And we have an extraordinary team of people who are overseeing hands-on keyboards monitoring all day every day to make sure that that 99.99% of impressions remain at that number. But we also have to remember what's at the core of free expression. You might not agree with what everyone is saying. We want to to make it a healthy debate and discourse. But free expression at its core will really, really only survive when someone you don't agree with says something you don't agree with. I mean, so what are your takeaways on that bet? Oh, it was pretty empty. She used a lot of rhyming phrases. The business world's Johnny Cochran. Yeah. She was asked, how do you define

that and she responded, I think, with another rhyme. At first, she said 99.9% of posts are healthy, which like, what does that mean? And she said it was 99.99%, which further makes it seem like she's just making this number up. And it just sounded like very PR speech in a way that was like transparently so. Like she wasn't even trying to make it seem like she was actually talking about these problems. She sees no problems. From her point of view, she has, they've solved all the problems. And it's just all about free speech, which to her means anybody can say anything.

So her obsession with free expression and open dialogue, healthy dialogue, I don't think that's really what we're talking about when we're talking about problems on platforms like Twitter. I don't think that anybody could say that they go on to platforms like Twitter and they only see takes they agree with. It's such a like false reality that like, oh, what people are upset about is that they're seeing takes that they don't agree with. But have you ever considered dear user that that it's freedom of speech? It's like, no, that's not really what people are upset about. Like, me being called a slur is not an opinion that I don't agree with, right? And here's an actual metric.

According to Twitter's own API, usage of the N-word on Twitter jumped from about 390 instances on October 26, 2022 before Elon took over to 27,706 on November 5th, 2022 after Elon took over. So that is an actual, tangible, specific metric. And that's what I'm talking about. If there are about 30,000 people calling me a slur on the platform, that is not 30,000 takes that I happen to not agree with. That is not discourse. That is not free expression. And so she's doing this very tricky rhetorical thing where she's making it seem like people's complaints and concerns about the way Twitter is being moderated now is grounded from a place of not wanting to see opinions they don't agree with.

who wants any social media platform ever is only engaging with or seeing opinions they agree with. That's not what people are saying. And it's like this insistence on digging into this false self-serving reality really, it's just so obvious. I also think like the person interviewing her in this clip really did a good job of kind of trying to hold her accountable a little bit for some of the things that she was saying. like saying like, oh, we are going to be having, focusing on healthy speech on the platform. Kanye West tweeted a literal swastika and got his platform back. And so she's saying, oh, well, he's going to be operating under specific rules. First of all, Connie, Kanye West is probably not doing anything that you expect him to be doing at this point.

It's all clear. What she's actually saying is that his, he will not be eligible for the, revenue sharing model and that advertising won't be next to his tweets. But he still has millions and millions and millions of followers. He has more followers than there are Jewish people worldwide. And so you're going to tell me that when he tweets a swastika, it's no big deal because, oh, don't worry, he's not going to, there's not going to be ads next to that. Like, she speaks like somebody for whom the only thing she can think about, the only measure of success of this huge, important platform is whether or not brands are there. And that Kanye West using his millions of followers

to tweet anti-Semitic garbage is only a problem in so much as it affects advertising. There's no other reason why one would have a problem with that. The only other reasons that she articulates to, you know, care about content moderation policies is to ensure that free speech is protected. Like, by her telling, you know, we should welcome the opportunity to see swastikas and hate speech and slurs, right? Because it's like a difference of opinion and that's valuable in itself, which is just wrong, right? Like, we don't want that. There need to be rules for discourse in polite society and hate speech has no place there. But then stepping back about her saying, like, oh, we want to foster healthy engagement and healthy dialogue on the platform.

Ever since Twitter announced these payouts, which we have a big update about that for you at the end of the show. But the platform has just gotten, it's gone from, you know, I don't know if you're familiar with the expression. It's gone from worse to worse or if anything. Like, it's gone from from worse to worser, if anything. It is, I have definitely seen an uptick in more accounts, rage baiting and clickbaiting and outrage baiting because there is now a financial incentive to do so. You might not even ever get that check, hint, hint, but now that that has been financially incentivized, I have seen more and more people give more and more acidine tweets that are just, clearly meant to anger you into engaging because they think that it is financially incentivized. There was this account earlier this week that posted a picture of a woman who runs a coffee

truck in Vancouver. And she made a cute TikTok where she's like, oh, I make my coffee. And I'm really polite to everybody. And this guy, I guess just because he didn't happen to find this woman, like, attractive personally, took her TikTok from TikTok, posted it on Twitter with like a mean comment. And the only thing this woman had done wrong was just like exist and like happened to put her existence on Twitter. And so it's like these kinds of things that are that are kind of relying on people like me replying and being like that's awful, how dare you like blah, blah, blah,

because they think it will put money in their pocket. I saw this like pretty well known right wing grifter doing that thing where he posted an image of a really sexy looking woman dressed in a UPS uniform and he tweeted it with the caption, you get a package and she's your delivery driver. What are you saying to her? And it's like just the lowest of the lowest quality engagement bait that you see on like your Mee-Maw's Facebook page. that, I mean, that is not healthier discourse. That's not better discourse.

People being incentivized to have the worst or most obnoxious takes that they can to get people to engage with them so they can have put money in their pocket is not making anybody's discourse healthier. It's just making us all more annoyed, myself specifically. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends.

and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's 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. To the group.

The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt 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. Huber 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. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-4-4-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-4-I-Hart. What's up, Sam? Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast Point Game is about

define 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, 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. Linda Yaccarino's big first public interview as Twitter CEO was happening against kind of a weird backdrop. I have to give a little bit of a heads up for child abuse on this one because the day before her big interview, Nick Pickles, who is the head of global government affairs at Twitter, was grilled by the Australian Parliament about why Twitter restored the account of someone who shared a still from childhood sexual abuse material.

Remember that Elon Musk touted how he was going to crack down on childhood sexual abuse material on the platform and was like bolstering this zero tolerance policy and that he actually criticized Twitter's former leadership as being too busy censoring conservatives and speech to care about protecting children online. Well, now it sounds like the new policy is kind of like, depends on the vibe. So a right-wing social media influencer, Dominic McGee, who goes by Dom Luka, who has over a half a million followers on the platform and is big into Cuban on, posted an image from a well-known child sexual abuse material video. He said that he posted these images to spread awareness about child trafficking. The still is from a video that is known to investigators. It's actually the specific video that led to the arrest of Josh Dugger from the show 19 Kids and Counting. The Washington Post reports that when this image has posted to Twitter, it got more than 3 million views and 8,000 retweets.

And when he posted it to Twitter, he watermarked the image, which I feel like is a special kind of, like you've got to be a real creep to do something like that. Yeah. So Nick Pickles, the head of global government affairs at Twitter, basically said that he felt the person that shared that image did so, because he was outraged by the image, which again, that is not a zero tolerance policy, right? That's not what a zero tolerance policy is. Pickles testified, quote, one of the challenges we see is, for example, people sharing this content out of outrage because they want to raise awareness of an issue and see something in the media.

So I guess if you put like a sad face emoji next to it or like you're like, this, like, hate this, then like it's okay. you know, there is nothing in Twitter's terms of service that says it's okay to share child sexual abuse material if the user is doing it because they're outraged or looking to, quote, raise awareness. The policy says viewing, sharing, or linking to child sexual exploitation material contributes to the re-victimization of the depicted child and is one of the platform's most serious violations. And it's just beyond obvious that regardless of anybody's intent, nobody should be sharing that kind of material. ever point blank full stop end of sentence. And it really kind of goes back to something that came up in our interview with Miles Clee two weeks ago, the author of that Rolling Stone article about the trafficking movie Sound of Freedom, where so much is done to quote, raise awareness. They're like, oh, well, even if it's, even if it upsets you, it raises awareness and that's okay. And it's like,

no, actually it revictonizes the person depicted in this harmful image. And it has no, it has no place. It's not discourse. It has no place in polite society. Yeah, and raises awareness towards what end? Like, the field of public health is littered with failed awareness campaigns that did successfully raise awareness of something, but achieved zero impact in, like, reducing the harm of it or reducing the scope of how many people it affected. So, like, how does it help anyone to raise awareness of the specifics of an image of childhood sexual abuse material? It just reinforces the idea that the people who are, like, deep down this rabbit hole of, like, fixation on trafficking, like, it just feels like a lot of

them just kind of like it, right? Like it's like a smokescreen to share stuff. Yeah, that came up in that Miles Clee interview as well that like that film is like very gratuitous. And so all these people who were like, we are trying to raise awareness about trafficking are also like watching a movie that kind of like has a gratuitous depiction of it. And so it's like, well, you're kind of consuming the thing with which you are saying repulses you in a way that is like very weird. And, you know, this idea of raising awareness, I don't think that people need to see an image from childhood sexual abuse material to know that that is wrong and that is bad. I truly don't think people need to see that to have their aware. I think that most people already know it's wrong and horrible.

I don't think that that image really helps change anybody's mind. And in that interview with Linda Yaccarino, I do think that, you know, the way that the tenor of that interview seems. to me that folks are interested in asking pointed questions to get at what the truth is, because they understand that this platform is so important to our discourse. And I think kind of in the same way that the tide is sort of turning around how we respond to big tech companies who want to be using us and everything we do online to train their AI, I think that we're kind of seeing folks turn on Musk and the people in his orbit as well. Casey Newton published a piece over platformer called, it's time to change how we cover Elon Musk. In it, he breaks down

Musk's many, many, many, many lies and calls for a shift and how journalists cover him. Kind of not totally dissimilar to Trump. Like, how do you cover someone who lies so much? I mostly agree with the substance of the piece. I have a couple of big quibbles. One is that Newton says that in business reporting. It is generally commonplace to take CEOs at their word and not assume that they're just lying, bold face lying to you. I would really push back on that. I would say like, yeah, if you're lazy, yeah, if you like can't imagine a CEO ever lying or distorting the truth, yeah, if you are caught up in the fact that this person has power and a company and money and access and privilege and therefore are bought into this idea that they are smart and worthy and valid and upstanding,

Sure, maybe, but I think that for the most part, I don't, if I'm talking to a CEO, I'm not going to assume that CEO is automatically telling me the truth. And it's also worth noting who, like which specific journalists take hucksters and liars like Elon Musk at their word, because I sure didn't, right, to cover Musk without mentioning his deep history of lies, his embrace, his open embrace of things like white supremacist talking points and eugenesis talking points, failing to pay his bills, fostering workplaces that foster sexism and racial mistreatment, cracking down on journalists and freedom of speech, etc., etc., like union busting, like blatant transphobia. All of that, choosing that those things are not part of the story and choosing to not include them in stories, is a choice.

It is not being objective. It is not being unbiased. It is a choice. And I do think that the tech press has spent a long time really not including these things, that I believe are so at the core of who Elon Musk is, not just as a person, but as a leader as well. And they basically helped him rise to power. They helped give him this reputation as a brilliant genius who, you know, is playing three-dimensional chest, who is so brilliant. We could never fully understand the moves that he's making because he's just too smart.

when in reality he's actually just like a wealthy manchild born on third base who thinks he hit a home run right like I think that a lot of tech folks got really invested in this idea of who musk was telling them by the time they opened their eyes to who musk actually is and who he has been for a really long time and who he has made clear time and time again who he is I think they were like, oh, wait, I have spent a long time not asking these questions. And so, you know, I'm glad folks are getting there. I do think the tide is turning a little bit. I think that like the fact that this, in this big first interview of the new CEO wasn't just a cushy, you know, Q&A about her rise to power or whatever, but it was like real questions of substance about this platform that are so important to all of our lives and our democracy.

I think it illustrates that like the tide is turning a little bit. And I guess I would just say this, that if we are reaching a point where folks are more apt to be calling out Musk for who he is, I hope that when the next tech leader comes along selling us a lie and a dream or snake oil or giving us harm in a package that they've wrapped up and said it's good for us, that we are not so quick to launder that, that people with power and platforms really, do the work of asking the question of like, who is this person really? Not who are, not who are they saying they are, or who would it be nice if they were? Who are they really? It's a good plan. I hope we do that. I don't know. I'm a little skeptical. I think we have got a long history of just really wanting to embrace hucksters and not just willingly,

but enthusiastically get behind the con that they're selling because It's almost like a rising tide, lifts all boats, like a self-serving con serves everybody who gets behind it. Yeah, until it doesn't, until it's revealed as a con and like, if your folks in Trump world, you start going to jail, right? Yeah. Right, until it doesn't. Okay, so one last thing, speaking of Elon's lies, one big update that we promised y'all is on those Twitter payouts. You might recall that Twitter promised they were going to. start paying out on their ad revenue sharing program to people who drove ad dollars on the

platform. People were posting screenshots of like thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars they were meant to be getting from Twitter. And I was skeptical, we'll say, that's the word I'll use. I was skeptical because Elon, much like Shiree Whitfield from Real Housewives of Atlanta, who's sometimes known as Shiree, she don't pay, Elon Musk does not pay his bills, just like like Sherey Whitfield. Wow. And comparing Elon to Sharray. I have a lot of questions for both of them.

Most of them are like, are you going to pay? Don't get me on a housewise tangent, but. No, this is why people trune into you, because you can take the, you know, the complicated digital things going on in the news and put them in terms that people understand. Elon Musk is the Shiree Whitfield of technology. I will stand by that. You know, just like before you, you were going through all of the things that he has done openly, repeatedly, that journalists ignore when they cover him. And a lot of them, it's like, okay, you know, fostering a sexist and racist workplace, I can see how his people would be cool with that.

But it really truly surprises me the extent to which people, on the way. the right seemed totally fine with their, like, cult leaders, personality leaders, just not paying their bills. I really would have thought that that would be more of a problem for people on the right who were, like, the party of, like, personal responsibility, according to them. It's not true. Or, like, fiscal responsibility also not true. I guess it's all just, like, not true. But, like, these heroes who just openly don't pay their bills, it's something. surprising. It's so interesting. I mean, I have a new philosophy on this where it is not fruitful

to point out hypocrisy with some of these folks of like, well, if I was like a young person who was drowning in student loan debt, you would be like, pay your bills, you should pay your bills, personal responsibility, yada, yada, yada. If I'm a billionaire and I have lots of money, but I don't pay my bills, it's like, oh, what an innovative strategy. to cut down on costs, squatting. Yeah. Somebody said it a while ago that their goal is

they want the freedom to do what they want to do and also the freedom to tell you what to do. Yeah, exactly. Completely hypocritical. And it does nothing to point it out. And maybe Elon and Yagorino have already figured.

figured that out. Maybe they are ahead of us in their vision of open discourse where, you know, there is no point in actually talking about inconsistencies and ideas or anything. It's just like free speech. It's just people yelling slurs at each other. Well, why do you need to talk about things like inconsistencies or accountability when you've got a little thing that rhymes? When you've got any of you've been practicing a little rhyme in the mirror? That'll, that'll get them. She had two things that rhymed. I'm like trying to talk to you and also rack my

brain to come up with like a little rhyme. If you could have come up with a little rhyme, it would double our listeners. Okay, give me a second. When Linda talks about the tweets, there are very few deets. Oh, that's good. That's the best I can do on short notice. If anybody has a good rhyme out there,

tell it to me. I'm going to like memorize it and then drop it on the show. as if I just like came up with it and then I will not give you credit. So that's how it will work. If that sounds appealing to you, let me know. Okay, so back to Shiree.

I mean, Elon. So on August 4th, Twitter put out a statement saying, quote, the volume of people signing up for revenue sharing has exceeded our expectations. We previously said that payments would occur the week of July 31st.

We need a bit more time to review everything for the next payout and hope to get all eligible accounts paid as soon as possible. So basically, like, the last time they were, like, within 72 hours. It was, like, a very specific time frame. And now they're like, look, I ain't got it. So I don't know what you want me to say. We're just going to need some more time.

We're going to pay you as soon as possible. Listen, I am very familiar with the language of somebody who, like, owes money, but they don't have it. So, like, I definitely recognize this, like, oh, what he needs to say is, like, come up with some sort of convoluted story, convoluted but detailed story of like, well, so I was going out to put the checks in the mail, and I remember because it was raining, and so I had to get my coat, and when I went out

to get my coat, I realized, you had to come up with some sort of like convoluted, detailed story. Don't just be like, it's taking. And I love how it's like, because so many people were interested in this, like, program, so many of you loved it

and could see that it was lucrative and worth your time. Now, because of All of that interest. You know what? Holy shit. That's exactly what Cheray said about why her she by Sherway website didn't work. She was like, too many people were interested in it, and it crashed the website. So when you went to her website, when she launched her line, her website didn't work.

And everybody on the show was like, you know, took you all this time to launch this brand and your website doesn't work. And she was like, oh, well, there was so much interest, it crashed. It's actually a good thing. There's, this, I'm going to, this is, this comparison. is apt. This comparison is apt. X by Elon. Yes. It's like she by Shiree. I would, I see a Shiree

Elon Musk collab in the future. So if you are owed money from Elon Musk, the check's not in the mail, basically. You're not getting it. Just like I said, I knew it. I knew he wasn't going to pay all. It sounds like he did pay out like a select handful of right-wing influencers, but did

not pay the vast majority of them. I think that he's thinking that people will see these big numbers and be like, I'm going to join. But the pot of money is like empty. Just today this week, they were selling off. Not just old Twitter memorabilia with birds on it, but also like couches and stuff. So like not just now off brand stuff, all their furniture. That is not the behavior of somebody who has this big pot of money to pay people out.

Yeah. So if he owes you money, I don't know. Don't bank on it. This is not the behavior of somebody who has. has the money to pay. Yeah, their whole thing is that they like don't have any money. They're leveraged up to their eyeballs. They, they're losing all their advertisers and revenue. Yeah, paying out a bunch of people doesn't really help that. Yeah. Well, I will say at least Shiree Whitfield when like push comes to shove, you can like back her into a corner and she will pay.

It takes some work, but she'll pay eventually. Elon Musk comes on a thing or two about life. from Sharia Whitfield. Yeah, I'm still waiting for those ex-joggers. Joggers. We're doing joggers. People who don't watch Housewives are like, what the hell are they talking about? I also have a little bit more to say,

specifically about the Tori Lane's trial for shooting Meg Nostalian and how disinformation played a role in that. If you want to hear that, you can find it on Patreon at patreon.com slash tangoady, where you can get ad-free content and support the show. Mike, thank you so much for writing down these stories with me.

As always, thank you for listening. If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our merch store at tangoody.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 tangoity.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. Tari 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, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHartRadio,

check out the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest,

SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHart 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 had a bogo. Well, then you got them. Listen to soccer moms on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Deanna Maria Riva, and on my new podcast, How Hard Can It Be? I call on my Gen X squad from Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate midlife's most fantastic BS. Unfiltered conversations from night sweats to food. to scheduling sex. Wait, what sex? Is it just me? Or does every woman my age want to look at

Pinterest instead of having sex sometimes? They say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure going to try. 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. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.