Diabolical Lies - A Tale of Two Algorithms

00:00:00.000 All right. Today's episode was brought to you by Facemash, Musically, the anger emoji, young college women everywhere who refuse to sleep with the creepiest guy at the party, the freaks who heard about Meta's decision to let users call gay people mentally ill and thought, yay, my freedom of speech has been protected.

00:00:20.520 Tom from MySpace, because that's the last social media founder we had who wasn't a lizard wearing a human costume.

00:00:26.060 And Elon Musk's Nazi salute.

00:00:28.920 Congratulations, Katie.

00:00:30.240 We started at the bottom, and now we are living in the trapdoor cellar of a serial killer who screams at us occasionally to put the lotion in the basket.

00:00:37.140 Welcome to America the Beautiful. 0.99

00:00:39.340 If by beautiful, you mean an oligarchy state run by a small handful of tech founders who are richer than God and yet somehow inexplicably dumber than the dumbest person you've ever met. 0.99

00:00:47.740 But hey, at least now we will be able to go to Mars and frack the fuck out of Alaska and get rich by investing in Donald Trump's meme coin in the next 18 hours or whatever the fuck your most annoying friend is saying to you right now. 1.00

00:01:00.260 Thank you. I'm so happy to be here, question mark. 0.99

00:01:04.860 So happy to have you. Okay, Katie, today we are not talking about the inauguration. We are talking about the algorithmic war being waged over the soul of America.

00:01:14.640 We are talking about TikTok and Facebook and Red Note and the very important lesson we can

00:01:18.880 learn from what has happened over the last few weeks. So I have basically read in the last week

00:01:24.600 everything I could get my hands on regarding the TikTok ban. And I'm going to put my cards

00:01:28.560 on the table here. I went into this with a very clear objective and very clear beliefs.

00:01:34.300 And I came out in another place entirely. And so I'm excited to talk this through with you today

00:01:39.180 because I've had a pretty intense series of revelations from this research.

00:01:44.340 I'm very excited to hear where you landed because I know where you started.

00:01:48.760 Yep, yep, yep, yep.

00:01:50.440 I started with a very fervent belief that TikTok was basically, like, where the revolution would happen.

00:01:57.240 TikTok was super essential to have a social media app that is not owned by the U.S.,

00:02:01.460 and I ended in a very different place than where I started, and that's what I'm going to say.

00:02:05.260 So as we talk today about TikTok and Meta and Marky Mark and Donnie Dawn,

00:02:09.180 I want everyone to keep a question in the back of their minds.

00:02:12.560 What are we afraid of?

00:02:14.640 Who are we afraid of and why?

00:02:17.020 So we are going to zip back in time now to 2003,

00:02:19.880 when 50 Cent dominated the charts and the war on terror was still cool.

00:02:24.500 So this is 2003.

00:02:27.040 A young man with a head full of curls and a heart full of promise.

00:02:30.720 Hold on, sorry.

00:02:31.880 We have the wrong guy.

00:02:32.800 I need to start again.

00:02:34.320 2003.

00:02:35.440 It was Napoleon Dynamite, wasn't it?

00:02:37.600 It was Napoleon Dynamite.

00:02:39.180 In 2003, we have a young man with a head full of curls and a deep sense of willful disregard for the well-being of others, and he launched a website called Facemash.

00:02:47.580 Katie, what do you know about Facemash?

00:02:49.220 My understanding of Facemash is that it was the V1 of what became Facebook, but the intention was just to compare women and their appearance.

00:03:01.360 It's like a hot or not website. Is that correct? 0.89

00:03:04.700 That is correct. So, you kind of got a little bit ahead of me. So, the young man was Mark Zuckerberg.

00:03:09.180 He was a sophomore at Harvard at this time, and he was preternaturally good at coding.

00:03:13.580 By this point, he had already been approached by major companies as early as high school to work for them.

00:03:18.540 Wow.

00:03:18.840 And he didn't take the jobs because he believed at a very young age and has said in recent interviews that if he had taken one of those jobs, it would have essentially meant a good job at Microsoft.

00:03:27.440 And he knew at a very young age that he wanted something better than that.

00:03:30.320 He wanted better than what most Americans would barely even dream of, which is like an exec-level job at Microsoft.

00:03:35.160 You know, when I worked at Meta, this was coincidentally completely omitted from the onboarding material.

00:03:42.380 Wait, Katie, did you work at Meta?

00:03:44.200 Yeah. Have we never discussed this?

00:03:46.600 Shut the fuck up. What are you talking about? 1.00

00:03:49.780 I worked there very briefly from October 2021 until January 2022, because I started working

00:04:00.160 there before the offer to buy money with Katie came in. So I had like just started that job

00:04:07.660 when the acquisition offer came in. And so I left three months after I started because I was going

00:04:14.980 to do money with Katie full time. But yeah, I worked there for three months.

00:04:18.820 What was the position?

00:04:20.440 I was a content designer.

00:04:21.920 So design and like UX copy for a product called Accounts Center, which is basically the nucleus that they were trying to build between WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, all the different meta-owned properties.

00:04:39.560 I was actually there when they renamed the company.

00:04:42.120 That was like the third week I worked there was when the rebrand happened.

00:04:44.980 Okay. So that was a wild time for sure. But yes, for briefly, I worked there.

00:04:49.840 Wow. Oh my God. Learning new things about you every day.

00:04:53.140 You're like, wow, I didn't realize you were that much of a sellout.

00:04:57.440 I have a terrible taste in my mouth. I will be contacting my lawyer to see if I can back out of

00:05:02.140 the media company that you and I founded. Anyways, back. We're at 2003. The night Zuckerberg made the

00:05:07.980 first prototype of a website that would eventually become Facebook. So Katie, I'm going to ask you to

00:05:12.220 read these journal entries from Mark Zuckerberg, who wrote these words the night he made face

00:05:18.460 masked, and which really illustrates his thought process. Okay, this is Katie clocking in as Mark.

00:05:25.940 Which honestly is more embarrassing than me clocking in as Osama bin Laden. Anyways, go on.

00:05:31.100 Jessica A is a bitch. I need to think of something to take my mind off her. I need to think of 1.00

00:05:36.460 something to occupy my mind. Easy enough. Now I just need an idea. The Kirkland dormitory

00:05:43.320 Facebook is open on my computer desktop, and some of these people have pretty horrendous Facebook

00:05:47.960 pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people

00:05:53.220 vote on which is more attractive. Let the hacking begin. So do you understand what happened there?

00:05:59.220 Uh, sounds like he was rejected by a woman and then tipped over the first domino that is currently

00:06:06.060 knocking over the big domino that says U.S. democracy fails. What do you think of that

00:06:12.940 characterization? That's honestly, no, no. The last gasping breath of American democracy.

00:06:19.640 Correct. So before we all marvel at the ingenuity, I want to note, Mark Zuckerberg is very smart.

00:06:25.940 FaceMash was not like a unique idea. There was a very famous website called Hot or Not,

00:06:30.460 which had launched three years prior, and it allowed people to be ranked. But the really key

00:06:35.840 point here is that with Hot or Not, people voluntarily submitted their photos. With FaceMash,

00:06:41.060 Zuckerberg hacked into the Harvard directory and stole pictures of women and men.

00:06:47.780 Oh, so we're like not doing consent. Okay.

00:06:50.880 We are not doing consent.

00:06:52.000 Night one, consent revoked.

00:06:54.280 Obviously, the Harvard Crimson went on to report this, and I found a really interesting 2003

00:06:59.280 Harvard Crimson article that kind of went through this whole ordeal. First things first, will you

00:07:04.720 read the motto that he created, Mark Zuckerberg created for face mash? I just highlighted it

00:07:11.360 blue. Were we let in for our looks? No. Will we be judged on them? Yes. So, of course, Harvard

00:07:21.040 required him to take down face mash, and I want you to read the two quotes that Zuckerberg gave

00:07:25.600 the Harvard Crimson regarding how he felt about what had happened. Now, keep in mind, this was

00:07:29.940 years, years before anyone would see his journal entries about Jessica A. being a huge fucking 1.00

00:07:34.360 bitch. So this is what he said publicly. This is publicly. Okay. Yep. I don't see how it can go 1.00

00:07:40.180 back online. Issues about violating people's privacy don't seem to be surmountable. This is

00:07:47.100 after he hacked into the mainframe. So read the next section. I hope you understand this is not

00:07:52.200 how I meant for things to go. And I apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect

00:07:57.360 to consider how quickly the site would spread and its consequences thereafter. I definitely

00:08:03.500 see how my intentions could be seen in the wrong light.

00:08:07.260 I'm like obsessed with this story as the founding documents, as it were, for Facebook and also

00:08:14.580 for Mark Zuckerberg. Like it feels really perfect to me from start to finish. It's a good time to

00:08:19.940 tell everyone that Mark Zuckerberg actively chose not to be like a computer sciences major and to

00:08:24.220 be a psychology major. A lot has been made of that, that he's a psychology major. He cares about

00:08:29.340 how people function. But I just think it's like really perfect because in the last few weeks,

00:08:33.800 we've seen a lot of hand-wringing about how much Mark Zuckerberg has changed.

00:08:37.400 And I just don't see that. Yes, but Caroline, would you say he has riz?

00:08:41.420 okay onward a year later zuckerberg launches facebook we could go into all this shit about 0.90

00:08:50.400 how it was stolen no it wasn't he claims that he was inspired by what happened with face mash

00:08:56.040 that he was inspired about like i've got to create a better community others obviously say that he

00:09:01.160 stole the idea from them we're not spending any time today on the winklevide twins number one

00:09:05.240 because it's boring number two because i detest any story in which a pair of finance bros are the

00:09:10.140 victims. And number three, because I was a rower and therefore have heard way too much about those

00:09:15.040 Harvard Olympian fucks by the time they turned 20. TLDR, Mark seems to take inspiration from 0.67

00:09:20.800 other places, and I think we see that throughout Facebook's long and depressing life. So Katie,

00:09:26.820 can you read this quote from Rolling Stone about the creation of Facebook?

00:09:32.940 On April 13th, the team filed letters of incorporation. Zuckerberg posted his job

00:09:38.360 description on Facebook as founder, master, and commander, and enemy of the state. The empire of

00:09:47.300 the nerds had begun. Any thoughts? Well, master, commander, enemy of the state is doing a lot of

00:09:57.220 heavy lifting there. It is doing a lot of heavy lifting. So he talks all the time now about how

00:10:01.220 the purpose of Facebook was to bring people together. The purpose of Facebook was never to

00:10:05.340 fucking bring people together. It was for him to get rich. So I bring this up, not because Mark 0.97

00:10:09.960 Zuckerberg really matters, but because this is essential to understanding how the Facebook

00:10:13.740 algorithm works and why Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg became so terrified when TikTok

00:10:19.120 entered the forum. Are we going to talk about why Facebook is so bewilderingly unusable?

00:10:25.200 We sure are. So Katie, do you remember Facebook? Did you have one in the early days? When did you

00:10:31.220 sign up? Oh, yeah. I think I got Facebook in 2008. Okay, so yeah, you were there for kind of the

00:10:36.060 early days. Do you remember what it was like? Early adopter. Yeah, early adopter. I remember

00:10:40.380 you had a wall. They had the poking feature. I remember desperately wanting to friend request

00:10:47.160 people. I remember it being a pretty addictive experience, kind of from the jump, but I also

00:10:53.140 remember it feeling a lot more grown up than MySpace did. And I'm curious, did you have a

00:10:58.240 cell phone at the time? Yes. What type of cell phone did you have? I think at the time I had a

00:11:05.360 like a Nokia flip phone. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'm about the same. I remember that I was desperate

00:11:12.760 to get invited to Facebook because in the very early days, Facebook functioned as a members only

00:11:17.360 club. So of course, at first you need to belong to Harvard and then you need to belong to some

00:11:21.780 small group of elite colleges. And then later you needed someone who was already a member to invite

00:11:26.280 you or you needed some type of college or high school address, right? I was desperate to have

00:11:30.600 Facebook. It was very fucking cool. So by the time you had joined, Katie, Facebook had already 0.98

00:11:35.960 launched the news feed. That was one of their earliest inventions. And that was like the

00:11:40.720 beginning of algorithms as we knew it, right? And at the time, because Facebook was kind of private,

00:11:46.280 it was like you were only friends with people you knew and you had kind of small friend groups.

00:11:50.740 Your news feed was the chronological list of things that were happening with your friends,

00:11:55.180 like Jessica's in a relationship, Katie pokes you, these kind of very intimate things. But

00:12:00.660 keep in mind, this was before the era of the smartphone. This was before any other apps.

00:12:05.460 You would basically just go home and communicate on Facebook. That's where party group invites

00:12:09.280 were happening, all that kind of stuff. I think the other element of that is that the power

00:12:13.700 dynamic between users was such that you sent a friend request and they accepted your kind of

00:12:19.180 equals. And how that's different now from the structure of a platform like Instagram, where

00:12:25.520 you're not friends, you become someone's follower.

00:12:29.860 Right. Yeah, it was like a very flat hierarchy. Even in MySpace, there was this push to be in

00:12:34.320 someone's top eight. There really wasn't that with Facebook at first. Like it genuinely did

00:12:38.280 kind of feel like these vaguely representative of your social groups in real life. So here's

00:12:43.360 what I think is interesting about my research is that Facebook has been omnipresent for two

00:12:48.920 decades now, right? It is such a behemoth. The period of time in which people enjoyed Facebook

00:12:54.520 is like four years. Like that's crazy to me. And I also want to note that something that I feel

00:13:01.500 like people don't talk about that much that at least I made a connection about is that we talk

00:13:05.300 about the springing up of other apps, the competition, the need to like increase profit,

00:13:09.340 all that's true. People don't talk about the advent of the iPhone and what it meant for the

00:13:14.240 iPhone to have group chats and to make it so much more accessible, basically take all those

00:13:18.740 social interactions and just have them in iMessage. Do you mean with respect to in a time like 2007

00:13:25.540 in order to communicate en masse with a bunch of people you were going on a platform like

00:13:30.960 Facebook post iPhone post iMessage you can have a group chat and like you don't actually have to

00:13:36.480 have that conversation elsewhere is that what you're saying? Yeah that is what I'm saying and

00:13:40.000 the only thing that's arguably more powerful than a social media engine like Facebook is of course

00:13:45.560 Apple. Apple hosts all of this. And so the advent of the iPhone, I believe in 2008,

00:13:51.880 and then like the wide adoptability of it in the following year has just meant that Apple could

00:13:56.160 basically tweak stuff such that like what became cool and the fastest way to engage with your

00:14:00.680 friends or the fastest way to invite people to parties. All the ways in which teenagers communicate

00:14:05.540 and in which youthful, cool culture operates, I think changed irrevocably with iPhones. And then

00:14:11.040 with each new version of the iPhone,

00:14:13.140 you had a cooler version of messaging. 1.00

00:14:15.200 Around 2009, Facebook starts doing really stupid shit. 0.99

00:14:18.560 One of the things that had happened 0.99

00:14:19.880 was that the newsfeed was no longer chronological

00:14:22.000 and it was no longer private.

00:14:23.620 So you had this algorithm that was like,

00:14:25.320 it used to be just to connect your friends and family.

00:14:27.520 Now, all of a sudden,

00:14:28.920 you have an algorithm that is expanded to the public

00:14:31.100 and is expanded to basically try to shove up the content

00:14:34.580 that you are most likely to interact with.

00:14:36.740 And so all of a sudden,

00:14:37.680 instead of seeing like what your friends are doing,

00:14:39.480 you're just seeing all this crap you're seeing like videos from upworthy you're seeing all these

00:14:43.600 things and yes you might engage with them while you're on the news feed but your instinct when 0.91

00:14:48.000 you get off facebook is that you don't really want to get back on it and then this is taking place

00:14:52.000 in concert with like the ease of communication that you get from your iphone so it's like these

00:14:56.900 two things taking place at once that just devalue facebook interaction and 2012 and 2013 are when

00:15:03.200 you start to feel like you log on to your news feed and you're like oh look there's this little

00:15:07.100 picture of a baby chick hatching out of an egg. Oh, look, there is a Nazi telling me why black 0.94

00:15:12.640 people are bad. You know what I mean? 2016, Facebook shifts to prioritize video. But then 1.00

00:15:19.360 it notices an issue that is only going to get bigger over time, which is that people are not

00:15:24.120 sharing anymore. So again, think of how short of a time it was where any of us liked being on

00:15:30.220 Facebook. There are a lot of takeaways that we're going to have today. Something that we talk non

00:15:34.440 stop about in America is how fucking wonderful capitalism because of the products we get, 0.97

00:15:40.000 the innovation, the competition. Facebook has been a bad product since like 2013 and it still 0.91

00:15:46.960 retains the lion's share of value. And like, that's something worth thinking about.

00:15:53.000 Yeah. Monopoly is a hell of a drug.

00:15:55.340 It's a hell of a drug.

00:15:56.620 But yeah, well, something else that's occurring to me now is in the early days when it was good,

00:16:01.700 It was good because it was reflecting back the things that you wanted it to do. It was a reflection of your actual reality, your actual friends, what they were actually saying when they were saying it.

00:16:14.560 And it sounds like the shift occurred both in the way that the algorithm started to try to guide you to specific things and also the obsession with video, which, as we know, fundamentally changed the business model of media companies writ large.

00:16:32.880 But when Facebook started to try to not just reflect reality, but shape it.

00:16:39.680 Right. Yeah, it's actually really funny.

00:16:40.860 I remember like before TikTok happened, I think it was like 2015, I was working in media when there was the huge shift to video and like CNN created all their video and it all collapsed.

00:16:50.540 And we're going to get into that.

00:16:51.620 We're going to get into why TikTok succeeded when Facebook didn't and all these other media companies didn't.

00:16:55.340 But I'm basically just trying to paint a picture of this brief period of time in which people were able to actually have like some sort of social world on Facebook.

00:17:03.720 and then the period of time after where Facebook was flailing.

00:17:07.580 They were trying to like find and create social media.

00:17:11.180 What does social media look like?

00:17:12.500 How do you make it profitable?

00:17:13.740 How do you keep people on a feed?

00:17:15.660 So in 2017, Facebook does something for their algorithm

00:17:19.300 that probably underscores what most of us understand it as Facebook today.

00:17:23.280 Now, before I say what that is, I'm curious.

00:17:25.660 When did you stop spending time on Facebook, Katie?

00:17:27.980 Or do you still today?

00:17:30.120 That's a trick question.

00:17:31.120 Funny.

00:17:31.640 I mean, I think I stopped really using it probably around the time I graduated from

00:17:39.420 college, 2017-ish was probably when I, yeah, 2017, I think, give or take.

00:17:48.280 Okay.

00:17:48.660 So, of course, by 2017, a number of things have happened.

00:17:51.600 You have Snapchat, you have Instagram.

00:17:53.580 What Facebook does to try to game the algorithm and to make it as addictive as possible is

00:17:59.140 create a new set of goal metrics that it calls meaningful social interaction. Do you know anything

00:18:03.920 about meaningful social interaction, Katie? No. Okay. So what it starts doing is prioritizing

00:18:10.220 posts from friends and family. So you'll see posts from people that you know, but prioritizing posts

00:18:15.360 that cause reaction. Now, again, remember what Facebook is. This is a network designed for like

00:18:21.140 a very artificial form of social capital. And something that I've been thinking about is when I

00:18:25.780 go to Thanksgiving dinner or when I see all my college friends, they're not people who necessarily

00:18:30.440 have the same interests as me. And so we talk about the things we have in common. That's why

00:18:34.640 Facebook worked originally for college students. You would share photo albums. You would kind of

00:18:38.200 share your experiences. When you go to the dinner table over Thanksgiving, you and your aunt and

00:18:43.920 uncle aren't all equally interested in the banjo. And so you find shared topics to talk about. You

00:18:51.000 talk about Taylor Swift. You talk about Donald Trump. You talk about Beyonce. You talk about

00:18:55.260 the things that everyone in America can have an opinion on. And so Facebook figures, we're going

00:19:00.060 to encourage people to talk about the things that everyone has an opinion on. Good, good, good.

00:19:04.200 What they do is they prioritize the anger emoji over the like button by 5x.

00:19:10.400 When you say they prioritize it, you mean in the back end, a post that generates more anger

00:19:16.540 than thumbs up. A post that says, I think my vaccines are why I'm so dumb. A bunch of people 0.99

00:19:23.220 click, angry, angry, angry. Then your best friend says, hey, I just wrote a PhD about how we're

00:19:30.060 going to deliver clean water to Africa. Like, like, like, you're going to see the post about

00:19:35.960 vaccines are making me dumb. Cool. Love that. You're not going to see a post that everyone 0.98

00:19:40.060 celebrates. So that is the huge fucking turning point where Facebook's algorithm becomes something 0.94

00:19:45.660 that is defined and fueled and accelerated by anger. So anyone who has used Facebook through 0.98

00:19:52.740 this time period of like 2017 to about 2022, or frankly, to the present, would know this to be

00:19:57.860 true anecdotally. But just factually speaking, also, this is what leads Facebook to become a

00:20:02.540 cesspool of white supremacy, misinformation, all these things, is that Facebook is trying

00:20:06.720 desperately to stay profitable. Young people are not using it because Facebook does not have the

00:20:11.680 tools that they want to use. And so the only way to keep people posting and therefore to keep

00:20:17.160 sucking their data and to keep advertisers happy is to make them angry. So we only know all of this

00:20:23.220 because of a whistleblower. Her name is Frances Haugen. Yep. Have you heard of Frances? Oh yeah.

00:20:29.380 The Facebook papers? What do you know about them? I remember reading things about her on

00:20:35.760 Workplace, which is like Facebook's internal like Slack. Oh right, because you were a scab. 1.00

00:20:42.800 you were inside the machine. They were like, we'll pay you $100,000 a year. And I was like,

00:20:49.020 I'll do whatever the fuck you want me to. Thanks. Hey, I know that game. I know that game. Okay. 0.99

00:20:54.220 I'm going to have you read these two sections that come from a Washington Post summary of what we now

00:20:59.180 call the Facebook papers. Basically, she shared a bunch of internal documents that revealed

00:21:04.740 what was taking place in Facebook during this time period. Zuckerberg testified before Congress in

00:21:11.360 2020 that the company removes 94% of the hate speech it finds before a human reports it.

00:21:18.360 But in internal documents, researchers estimated that the company was removing less than 5%

00:21:24.580 of all hate speech on Facebook. One 2019 report tracking a dummy account set up to represent a

00:21:31.900 conservative mother in North Carolina— Iconic.

00:21:34.940 They could have just hired my mom for this—found that Facebook's recommendation algorithms led her

00:21:40.600 to QAnon, an extremist ideology that the FBI has deemed a domestic terrorism threat. Interesting.

00:21:47.620 In just five days, still, Facebook allowed QAnon to operate on its site largely unchecked for

00:21:55.420 another 13 months. So another piece of information we found is that Facebook knew their anger emoji

00:22:02.040 prioritization was associated with, quote, toxic content and misinformation, but they allowed it

00:22:07.200 to be like a foundational aspect of their algorithm until 2020. And then Katie got hired 0.97

00:22:12.520 and was like, hey guys, cut it out. That's not cool. Okay, and then read this section 0.66

00:22:17.240 that is also thanks to Frances Haugen. Internal documents show Facebook researchers found that

00:22:23.600 for the most politically oriented 1 million American users, nearly 90% of the content that

00:22:30.380 Facebook shows them is about politics and social issues. Those groups also received the most

00:22:36.620 misinformation, especially a set of users associated with mostly right-leaning content

00:22:42.500 who were shown one misinformation post out of every 40, according to a document from June 2020.

00:22:50.320 Hmm. So this is where our kind of act one ends, right? And we're going to leave Facebook.

00:22:55.500 Facebook from 2017 to 2020, arguably from 2012 onward, has been in crisis. It does not know

00:23:02.860 how to keep people on its site. There are three things kind of taking place. Number one, of course,

00:23:08.500 Facebook was huge, almost beyond comprehension. It had to keep growing. If you can't take from

00:23:14.700 people, if you reach the maximum amount of users, you have to take their data. And you cannot take

00:23:19.220 their data if they aren't posting, right? And then advertisers are going to fall away. So what do you

00:23:23.700 do? Well, and to your point about capitalism and innovation, I think it's pretty well-worn

00:23:29.240 territory by now, but I'll state it anyway. Pretty much since the inception of Facebook,

00:23:35.720 Zuckerberg's entire business plan has been allowing other people to make better apps and then buying

00:23:42.400 them. Yes. Instagram is still very relevant and successful, but he didn't invent that. He just

00:23:48.400 bought it from somebody else and then copied the best features from a different social media app,

00:23:54.180 multiple social media apps, in order to keep making Instagram better. I don't know that you

00:23:58.640 could really say that he's ever done anything original everything he's done has been copying

00:24:03.520 or benefiting from like weak antitrust laws a hundred percent you know this is another issue

00:24:09.080 for another time i went down like a two-day rabbit hole trying to understand how meta is

00:24:13.780 still so profitable and i genuinely like couldn't find answers that satisfied me like it's almost

00:24:19.800 like how tesla stock has become so divorced from the product it's like a maddening inquiry to try

00:24:26.320 to figure out how meta is still so powerful when both Instagram and Facebook have like

00:24:30.440 plummeting numbers, which we're getting into. Problem number one, Facebook is huge. And because

00:24:35.660 capitalism, obviously, it has to keep growing. Problem number two, in my opinion, Facebook's

00:24:41.480 algorithmic goals were fundamentally incompatible with a foundational idea of this platform,

00:24:47.560 which is that you're supposed to be connected with the people you know. You can't maintain

00:24:51.400 close connections with friends and family and also be stimulated to the point of engaging

00:24:55.780 nonstop on a platform. That fundamentally, to me, misunderstands how intimate connections with

00:25:00.860 friends and family happen. They don't operate that way. And they don't grow exponentially

00:25:05.460 either. Exactly. They happen like you have small talk with your friend, you reference inside jokes.

00:25:10.640 It's not something that is fueled in the way that an algorithm has to be fueled. And problem number

00:25:16.420 three, as I've alluded to, young adults were leaving the service en masse. Katie, I'm going

00:25:22.140 ask you to read this section from The Verge. Teenage users of the Facebook app in the U.S.

00:25:27.820 had declined by 13% since 2019 and were projected to drop 45% over the next two years, driving an

00:25:36.340 overall decline in daily users in the company's most lucrative ad market. Yeah, that's a problem.

00:25:42.740 Young adults between the ages of 20 and 30 were expected to decline by 4% during the same time

00:25:48.940 frame. Making matters worse, the younger a user was, the less on average they regularly engaged

00:25:55.500 with the app. So this is obviously a huge fucking problem. Young people view Facebook as lame. It's 0.99

00:26:03.900 cringe. And so it's like you're staring down the barrel of extinction, right? And again, arguably,

00:26:09.360 this has been happening for over a decade. This brings us to the rise of TikTok, which is like

00:26:14.060 Mark Zuckerberg's worst fucking nightmare. So, Katie, if you were a Shanghai-based engineer 0.96

00:26:21.100 who wanted to create an app in 2013 that would resonate with the American marketplace without

00:26:26.680 raising a single alarm, how would you do it? Oh, my God. Ah, fuck. I don't know. Do you want

00:26:33.360 to know how they did it? Yeah. How did they do it? You go for the demographic whose opinion

00:26:38.760 everyone collectively chooses to ignore, disbelieve, and or disvalue. 1.00

00:26:43.400 Oh, white women. 1.00

00:26:44.620 You target white American teenage girls. 1.00

00:26:47.380 Yeah, I love it. Great. Good. 0.90

00:26:48.700 So TikTok's story begins in like 2013, 2014.

00:26:52.600 Two men named Alex Zhu and Lu Yu Louis Yang

00:26:55.660 had created this like short form education app, got no traction.

00:27:00.320 And so they pivot and create an app where you can lip sync music videos

00:27:03.840 for 15 seconds or less.

00:27:05.500 This is called Musical.ly.

00:27:07.420 Katie, do you know anything about Musical.ly?

00:27:08.760 The only thing I know about it is indirectly through fundy snark YouTube channels, which is that it's how the LeBrant family, Savannah LeBrant, who's like married to Cole LeBrant, that ex-vine star, they're big in the anti-choice movement.

00:27:26.280 Interesting.

00:27:27.120 She and her daughter Everly came up on that app. They would like dance and sing together. She danced and sang with her like, you know, I don't know, four-year-old child.

00:27:36.080 okay so musically becomes fucking ginormous and no one gives a shit and it's just so perfect to 0.98

00:27:44.760 me that a chinese app basically like trojan horse itself into american consciousness by becoming 0.96

00:27:49.640 popular with young women so musically becomes huge and something worth noting is that you and

00:27:54.920 i both use tiktok and one of the reasons that people love tiktok for those who aren't familiar

00:27:59.200 is it's not just about the algorithm it's about the video editing tools right it's really really

00:28:04.400 easy to curate and edit videos. So these engineers and their little company, they spent a lot of time

00:28:10.540 engaging with these young women about content creation. They got a ton of feedback. These

00:28:14.520 women were telling them exactly what they wanted. So they made the app. 0.99

00:28:17.460 You mean they actually listened to their users? They asked women what they wanted?

00:28:25.380 Two men believed women and look what they got. So they make the app better and better. One example

00:28:32.340 I would give is that at the time you couldn't download like a video that you were editing and

00:28:36.960 use it on another app. They made that easy. You could download the video without it being

00:28:40.500 watermarked and then you could upload it somewhere else. So it was just like really fun for young

00:28:44.720 women to use. So Mark Zuckerberg did try to acquire Musical.ly. That fell through. And this

00:28:50.660 app was eventually purchased by a Chinese company called ByteDance, which had an app at the time

00:28:56.420 called Doyin. Katie, do you know anything about this? No, I've never heard of that. I hope I'm

00:29:01.440 pronouncing that correctly, but if not, apologies. So, ByteDance saw that these men had created an

00:29:07.180 in with an American audience. They were then able to take that in, to take that popular product,

00:29:12.900 and then turbocharge something that they had that no one else did, which was their algorithm.

00:29:18.120 We're going to talk about that algorithm in a second. In order to then take Musical.ly,

00:29:23.460 which was rebranded to TikTok, and then move it past the demographic of American teenage girls,

00:29:28.240 they poured money into advertising for tiktok i'm talking like nine figures a month on advertising

00:29:34.120 and at first they were essentially lighting money on fire this is bite dance yes but i think they

00:29:39.600 realized like you have this opportunity it's so hard to get a foothold in the american marketplace

00:29:43.800 musically did and so all of a sudden they're shoving and the algorithm is more powerful than

00:29:49.280 anything else in the marketplace they had nine figures a month i mean that's a hundred million

00:29:53.700 dollars a month or more. Where did this money come from? Their other apps are hugely popular

00:30:00.460 in China. So my understanding is that this was a major, major investment, but it was an investment

00:30:06.120 that at the time, a lot of people were like, what a waste of money. TikTok is never going to be

00:30:09.840 anything, right? So we now understand TikTok as this insane global power player. I want you to

00:30:15.840 read an article from Taylor Lorenz in The Atlantic in 2018 about how people perceived TikTok when it

00:30:21.960 was starting to reach mainstream media because of this advertising push. The category most people

00:30:28.240 on the broader internet use to describe TikTok is cringe. It's so painful and embarrassing that

00:30:34.720 a viewer can't help but laugh. There are endless TikTok cringe compilations on YouTube, many with

00:30:41.260 millions of views. Earlier this month, a thread of cringey TikTok videos went viral on Twitter.

00:30:48.080 In one video, a woman standing in front of a bathroom mirror

00:30:51.220 does thumb movements to a Yo Gotti and Nicki Minaj song

00:30:55.060 before panning up to reveal that she's filming

00:30:57.820 by holding the phone in her mouth.

00:31:00.720 Iconic.

00:31:01.260 In another, a man wearing a Walmart vest

00:31:03.660 dances emphatically to Rihanna's S&M

00:31:06.260 in front of a Confederate flag in his bedroom.

00:31:10.100 Interesting.

00:31:10.720 So people thought that it was basically like Facebook.

00:31:14.180 Yeah, basically, because think of the evolution, right?

00:31:16.340 Sentimentally.

00:31:16.700 Yeah, think of the evolution. So you have this app that was only used by teenage girls for music videos, and then it's starting to expand to, like, high schoolers, and you no longer have to necessarily do a music video, but the videos are still limited to 15 seconds at the beginning. It lends itself to silliness, right?

00:31:32.280 But what people were not prepared for is that ByteDance, as I had mentioned, had plugged TikTok into its turbocharged big dick fuck you up for life algorithm. Katie, can you read from an excerpt from Eugene Wei, who has written some really incredible stuff about TikTok? 0.97

00:31:48.960 Before ByteDance bought Musical.ly and rebranded it TikTok, its Musical.ly clone called Douyin

00:31:55.560 was already a sensation in the Chinese market, thanks in large part to its effective algorithm.

00:32:01.320 A few years ago, on a visit to Beijing, I caught up with a bunch of former colleagues

00:32:05.740 from Hulu Beijing, and all of them showed me their Douyin feeds. They described the app as

00:32:11.620 frighteningly addictive and the algorithm as eerily perceptive. More than one of them said

00:32:17.180 they had to delete the app off their phone, relatable, for months at a time because they

00:32:21.380 were losing an hour or two every night just lying in bed watching videos. That same trip,

00:32:27.100 I had coffee with an ex-Hulu developer who now is a senior exec in the ByteDance engineering

00:32:32.500 organization. Of course, he was tight-lipped about how their algorithm worked, but the scale

00:32:37.440 of their infrastructure dedicated to their algorithms was clear. On my way in and out of

00:32:42.680 this office, just one of several ByteDance spaces all across the city, I gawked at hundreds of

00:32:48.700 workers sitting side by side in row after row in the open floor plan. It resembled what I'd seen

00:32:55.580 at tech giants like Facebook in the US, but even denser. Okay, so before I talk about this TikTok

00:33:02.700 algorithm, I want to ask, what do you think, what is it about TikTok? How is TikTok different than

00:33:07.680 an algorithm like Instagram or Facebook? Think about the experience of logging onto Facebook

00:33:11.920 and scrolling through and then think about the experience of TikTok, even just like shouting

00:33:15.780 it out. Like, tell me, what does it make you think of? How is it different? Well, the first thing

00:33:19.260 that I'm thinking about is like the practice in the TikTok comments where you'll be like

00:33:23.220 commenting to stay on Bama Rush talk, commenting to stay on social engineering talk. There are very

00:33:29.920 niche interest groups that if you express interest at all in a video, it is really,

00:33:36.480 really good at quickly adapting what it is showing you next rather than on Instagram where I feel

00:33:43.700 like I intentionally seek out the following feed where I only really want to see things from people

00:33:49.340 I'm following because the like for you explore page feed is not worthless but it feels more 0.86

00:33:56.020 rudimentary if I watch a video of Taylor Swift I just go to the explore page and it's just fucking

00:34:01.120 all Taylor Swift and I'm like okay well that's not what I wanted whereas on TikTok I pretty much 0.66

00:34:05.820 only engage with the For You feed and not the following feed because I know that that For You

00:34:11.080 page is going to be so fucking algorithmically calibrated to the things that I care about,

00:34:19.300 my interests, the things that I want to see more of. Yeah, it doesn't just pick up on topic. It

00:34:24.500 picks up on tone. It picks up on style of communication. So anyone who uses TikTok will

00:34:30.440 tell you that uncanny is a great word, like the way that TikTok locks in on your palette.

00:34:34.780 But it's not just the power of the algorithm, it's how the platform functions to begin with.

00:34:39.780 So Instagram and Facebook both have very powerful algorithms, but these two apps, along with

00:34:45.320 Snapchat and arguably along with X as well, are platforms that are defined by aspiration

00:34:50.120 and by social capital.

00:34:51.920 This is in direct contrast to TikTok.

00:34:54.020 When you download TikTok, you don't have to have a single friend.

00:34:57.960 I think it offers the option, but you don't even have to tell it what things you like.

00:35:02.600 Think when you log on to any sort of thing and it goes, tell me three topics that you're interested in.

00:35:07.100 It doesn't matter.

00:35:08.180 When I downloaded TikTok almost one year ago to the day, today, I had no friends on it.

00:35:13.920 I had no topics.

00:35:15.300 I had no plans. 1.00

00:35:16.060 I wasn't planning on talking about Tradwives.

00:35:17.900 I didn't even know I was going to, that wasn't even a topic yet.

00:35:19.920 So think about it that way.

00:35:20.800 Like I became known in part for talking about a topic that I couldn't possibly have predicted until I logged onto the app.

00:35:27.860 Oh, that you didn't even have an interest in before you got the app.

00:35:31.420 Right.

00:35:31.820 So TikTok could more easily be compared to something like YouTube and Reddit, which is all about connecting you not to other people you know personally, but to people who have shared interests.

00:35:43.660 So TikTok's algorithm is not about social capital.

00:35:47.120 It's about your interests.

00:35:48.580 And so what happened is that TikTok created this platform that was defined by interests, which was powered by an algorithm that had no American parallel.

00:35:56.460 So at first, you're seeing 15-second videos, and then they're extending them to 60-second videos.

00:36:01.100 And as they're extending the video length, they're extending the amount of subcultures that can exist on TikTok, right? So it's like, yes, you have people who are obsessed with Taylor Swift, and that could be compared to Instagram. But you also have people who are interested in Marxism. You have people who are interested in engineering. You have people who are explaining, like, exactly how different screws work.

00:36:22.480 the most niche possible interests can find a foothold on TikTok in a way that could

00:36:27.680 never happen on Facebook and Instagram because they're kind of antithetical. It's not about

00:36:32.740 retaining a community with your close friends and family. It's about curiosity. It's about

00:36:37.540 learning. It's about finding subcultures. And then you add on top of that the ease of video editing

00:36:43.540 and uploadability and like you're off to the fucking races. Anyone can edit a video and 0.97

00:36:48.140 upload it in like a minute flat. Think about how much harder it would be to be a YouTube creator.

00:36:52.700 It takes a lot of work, right? A lot of YouTube creators will use TikTok's video editing

00:36:56.440 in order to upload their own videos. So there's one other thing about TikTok that I think would

00:37:02.220 feel to an American in 2017, fucking revolutionary. Can you guess what that is? 0.98

00:37:10.740 I'm trying to put myself in the 2017 mindset.

00:37:14.460 before Instagram co-opted all of these features.

00:37:19.400 Would it be music or would it be?

00:37:22.620 It could be.

00:37:23.440 I mean, there's no real wrong answer,

00:37:25.200 but I have one answer in mind personally.

00:37:27.060 Yeah, I don't know.

00:37:28.000 What was it?

00:37:28.920 So my thought is that this was the first app

00:37:32.900 that young people could access en masse

00:37:34.920 that was not optimized for either anger or aspiration.

00:37:39.260 It was optimized for surprise and delight.

00:37:41.620 And then later when videos got longer,

00:37:43.260 it was optimized for curious people. So what does that mean? You finally have an app that isn't

00:37:50.020 making you miserable when you X out, right? Like there are certainly videos that will stress you

00:37:54.920 out. Like, of course there are, but it's not optimized. The algorithm is not set up to make

00:38:00.180 you mad. It has other ways to engage you and retain you. And those ways make you feel good

00:38:05.180 often. They entertain you. They make you happy. They make you laugh. They make you ask questions.

00:38:09.560 They make you engage with the community.

00:38:11.220 And that is in direct opposition to what Facebook and Instagram were both doing.

00:38:16.440 Wow, that is really interesting.

00:38:18.220 Especially now in the context of, like, if I go on the cesspool that is Elon Musk's ex, I am furious within, like, seven minutes of scrolling.

00:38:29.780 Like, probably less than that.

00:38:31.740 I feel like he kind of took the cues from the Zuckerberg approach to social media and said,

00:38:38.000 hold my beer. I'm going to make this so fucking intolerable that only Nazis are going to want to 0.97

00:38:43.800 be here. But it is interesting, yeah, because TikTok is a place where it's the only app where 0.96

00:38:49.120 I had to literally set a time limit for myself and be like, at this time, I am going to get off.

00:38:55.000 You had to physically remove yourself. But it's interesting, too, because when you think about

00:39:00.000 why the meta-properties started optimizing for anger,

00:39:05.320 I think we've talked about this before,

00:39:06.760 that there's no more intoxicating feeling

00:39:09.040 than feeling angry and right.

00:39:12.500 That, like, righteous indignation is the feeling

00:39:15.000 that those properties were optimizing for

00:39:16.720 because it worked, because it kept you there.

00:39:19.760 Mm-hmm.

00:39:20.560 So it's interesting to see this more generative approach

00:39:24.240 that's a little more varied work so well,

00:39:27.800 and I can see why Zuckerberg would have been like, wait, hold on. No, no, no, no, no, no. You guys

00:39:32.700 can't do that. Yeah, it's terrifying. And I mean, even as we're talking now, another thing I'm

00:39:36.840 thinking about is that like when you're on Facebook or X, you inevitably stumble into

00:39:42.320 ideologies and beliefs and sorts of people that you really can't stand. The absolute opposite

00:39:48.640 happens on TikTok. Like I get asked all the time if I have to deal with bullies on TikTok. And the

00:39:54.560 answer is no i deal with like people being dicks once in a while nowhere yeah they're just not the 0.91

00:39:59.820 people that diametrically oppose you just aren't seeing your stuff right because the goal of the 0.86

00:40:04.940 algorithm is not to create engagement out of conflict the goal is for you to feel like your

00:40:11.640 brain is like floating in this really satisfying personalized soup it's like just for you and it's

00:40:19.080 a little bit funny a little bit interesting and you never come across it so it's not that there

00:40:23.900 aren't far right people on TikTok. There are. It's that the goal is not to merge echo chambers to

00:40:29.820 create conflict. The goal is to create these echo chambers and keep them separate almost forever.

00:40:35.540 Fascinating. So TikTok blew up so quickly that someone like Mark Zuckerberg couldn't even acquire

00:40:42.220 it. I don't say that lightly. I mean that like... Let me guess. He definitely, he tried though.

00:40:46.680 Oh, for sure. For sure. And something I was doing in order, because like there are so many

00:40:50.960 news articles about TikTok. Here's a little tip for anyone who's ever curious about something

00:40:54.600 that happened in an earlier time period. You can set Google parameters to like only look during a

00:40:59.400 year. And so I went six month period by six month period from 2017 onward to see how we were reacting

00:41:06.380 to TikTok in real time. Oh, wow. TikTok had 100 million American users within the first eight

00:41:12.940 months. It blew up. It was fucking huge. And all of them followed Addison Rae. 68 million of them

00:41:22.080 were like, yes. The Substack Tell the Bees wrote about this. Charlie D'Amelio and Addison Rae,

00:41:28.480 two people who combine the excitement of smiling with the thrill of just standing there.

00:41:34.580 60 million people golf clapped like, yes, do it again. Do it again.

00:41:37.600 I really think that I'm amazed that no one made this connection about me.

00:41:41.740 No, I genuinely was amazed to realize how much of TikTok's success was hidden in the fact that we don't take young women seriously.

00:41:51.580 Charli D'Amelio was one of the first faces.

00:41:53.720 Addison Rae was one of the first faces.

00:41:55.240 And people didn't take it seriously. 0.99

00:41:57.020 People did not give a shit. 0.98

00:41:59.640 So February 2019, TikTok is hit with its first major scandal. 0.98

00:42:04.480 It is slammed with a record fine for collecting data on children.

00:42:09.020 Not good.

00:42:10.900 Not great.

00:42:11.820 Not great.

00:42:12.460 So what happened here is like probably pretty obvious.

00:42:14.920 When TikTok was Musical.ly, pretty much its whole audience was young women.

00:42:19.400 It was an app that was designed for children and preteens, and it required basic sign-up info.

00:42:24.620 Parents would often complain.

00:42:26.340 Whenever parents complained, Musical.ly would comply and would remove the info, but it didn't always remove the info from its servers.

00:42:32.460 So this is a genuine concern.

00:42:34.220 Like, this is a problem.

00:42:35.420 TikTok was hit with this.

00:42:36.780 I would also note that this was right around the time period that Meta announced its intention to create an app exclusively for children under 13.

00:42:44.820 Of course it was for the children's own good.

00:42:46.780 You know, that's why tech companies do things, for the children's own good.

00:42:50.380 And around this time period, there was also a big Guardian report that showed what appeared to be pretty clear evidence that TikTok was censoring content.

00:42:58.520 It was not censoring American content.

00:43:00.700 it was censoring content about its own country, China. And it was censoring stuff that would be

00:43:05.900 sensitive to the Chinese Communist Party. So Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong, Taiwan, that kind

00:43:10.800 of stuff. And it had banned one US citizen who shared a video criticizing China's treatment of

00:43:16.220 Muslims. It has since reinstated her. So I was reading about this February 2019. I was like,

00:43:21.320 okay, I'm assuming that the data onslaught is coming. Everyone's about to freak out about

00:43:25.620 TikTok and our data. You would think, right, that the obsession with China having our data

00:43:30.120 would have started around here, like proof. They had our kids' data, right? They're censoring

00:43:33.820 some sort of evidence. It fucking didn't. No one gave a shit. No one gave a shit. No one cared. I 0.99

00:43:42.920 can't emphasize this enough. I found one niche Think Tank article being like, hello, like we are

00:43:50.360 concerned about data. No one cared. TikTok has partnerships with countless U.S. corporations.

00:43:55.980 The NFL is a great example.

00:43:57.940 Over 100 million users are using it.

00:44:00.480 Video limits are now up to 10 minutes long,

00:44:02.860 so you can imagine how content is changing and evolving under those parameters.

00:44:07.380 Enter stage left a creator like me.

00:44:10.320 Katie, do you remember which of my videos excited you most when you reached out to me?

00:44:15.940 Yes, it was a video that you had made about systems thinking

00:44:20.880 and how systems thinking can actually expand your autonomy.

00:44:25.380 within a capitalist system rather than shrinking it, which I think is often a critique of systems

00:44:32.340 thinking. It's like, oh, well, you should focus on the individual because all you really have

00:44:36.580 agency over is yourself. And so to think about systems is to abdicate responsibility for your

00:44:42.940 life. You were responding to that pushback, and I thought your response was very compelling,

00:44:47.020 and I wanted to talk to you about systems. So let me just be clear. Katie and I don't

00:44:53.260 know each other. We met each other online. We have met in person once. You found me because

00:45:01.520 users were commenting in your comments to listen to my critiques about trad wife culture. You went 0.99

00:45:07.460 to my TikTok page. You watched a nine minute video that I did about systems thinking. And that is why

00:45:14.340 we have this podcast today. I feel like that's super fucking important. Worst case scenario for 0.89

00:45:19.540 politics exactly what they don't want right i'm reading about this and i'm like okay so to be

00:45:26.620 clear we have musically then we have tiktok we have nfl partnerships we have a hundred million

00:45:31.180 users on tiktok for multiple years pre-pandemic right this is pre-pandemic yes this is 2019 0.99

00:45:37.740 wow our politicians do not give a fuck so here is when they start to give a fuck so it begins 0.99

00:45:45.080 like halfway through 2019 and like all truly great moral panics it grew from the shrunken 0.99

00:45:50.940 neanderthal brain of a florida politician love marco rubio said and i quote these chinese-owned

00:45:57.900 apps are increasingly being used to censor content and silence open discussion on topics deemed

00:46:03.000 sensitive by the chinese government and community party so again they're not censoring american

00:46:08.060 conversations they're censoring their own conversations he goes on the chinese government's

00:46:12.880 nefarious efforts to censor information inside free societies around the world cannot be accepted

00:46:18.140 and pose serious long-term challenges to the U.S. and our allies.

00:46:23.260 Which is like, I think the most generous good faith interpretation is like, yes, is it fair

00:46:30.820 to be worried about state-sponsored criticism of negative feedback? Absolutely. But to focus all

00:46:39.880 the energy on the Chinese-owned app when, like, Mark Zuckerberg is in the corner selling our data

00:46:44.800 to China. It's kind of, like, weird that, like, you're not worried about that guy, though. I mean,

00:46:50.060 we're 20 years deep in, like, a failed experiment run by this guy. Yeah, I just think, like, at the

00:46:56.060 end of the day, I think that you can see from this how our politicians are so inept to deal with any

00:47:01.260 of this. Like, frankly, the fact that we had an app that was hosted in China that was directed

00:47:06.780 exclusively at teenage girls and no one gave a fuck. They're just singing. They're just singing 0.98

00:47:11.880 and dancing, Caroline. They're like singing like the Chinese government. Nothing to see here. 0.99

00:47:15.880 You start to see these trickles and bursts, right? Senator Josh Hawley, who is notably not someone

00:47:23.000 that I'm personally viewing as very credible, but he kind of jumped on board with Marco Rubio.

00:47:28.840 In 2020, the U.S. military blocked the TikTok app from all personal phones.

00:47:32.840 Yes. I do think it's worth noting that they block a lot of apps from phones. They

00:47:36.740 block any apps like fitness apps or anything that tracks your location. So it's not exclusive to

00:47:41.640 TikTok, but that is relevant. And then in 2020, you have Trump trying to ban TikTok. Signs an

00:47:47.820 executive board of banning it. Oh, I don't think I realized that. That completely went over my head.

00:47:52.320 Yeah. So Trump in 2020 was very big on banning TikTok. It had all the rhetorical legitimacy of

00:47:58.700 any of his arguments. It was very much based just kind of in xenophobia. It was like China cannot

00:48:02.680 win, which is a big part of this conversation that we're about to get into. But on that same

00:48:06.760 day, on the day he signs an executive order, Facebook launches Reels, which is, as you have

00:48:12.300 stated earlier, a terrible impersonation of TikTok, but that is Mark Zuckerberg's bread and butter,

00:48:17.900 terrible impersonations of better products. So by this point, we are in the pandemic. We are

00:48:23.540 starting to see these rumblings about TikTok. TikTok is huge. It's like a lion, you know,

00:48:28.120 130 million American users, there are also a number of arguments that are starting to be

00:48:32.920 reliably used against TikTok. China is accessing our data. Americans are going to get radicalized.

00:48:38.840 There is no content moderation. There's a fear of foreign influence. It's too addictive. Katie,

00:48:45.100 can you read these three headlines for me that were about Facebook before 2020?

00:48:51.380 Facebook gave data access to Chinese firm flagged by U.S. intelligence.

00:48:56.860 Meta shares update on detected foreign influence operations.

00:49:01.800 Facebook's content moderation rules are a mess.

00:49:05.720 I just want to note two other things.

00:49:07.540 There is this constant obsession with people being influenced.

00:49:10.740 There is a lot, a lot of research about how American women are radicalized into Sharia law on Facebook and YouTube.

00:49:20.120 Oh my god.

00:49:20.740 I also want to note that when the Christchurch shooter in New Zealand live-streamed his shooting on Facebook,

00:49:26.100 The cops found him faster than Facebook content moderators were able to turn off the video.

00:49:32.380 That should give you some context into what was happening with our apps at the time, what was happening with our social media companies.

00:49:41.620 So that's cool.

00:49:42.620 It is worth noting, I found this interesting, that there are Pew Research surveys and a majority of Americans do want to ban TikTok.

00:49:50.540 I think it was 52% support banning it.

00:49:52.860 something like 28% are against banning it and something like 22% are just like don't have

00:49:58.020 enough information. People agree. The majority of Americans think TikTok is scary and they think

00:50:02.760 China is scary. And that's a really important thing that we're going to come back to. 0.94

00:50:05.960 So Biden wins the presidency. Executive order falls apart. And then we reach October 7th,

00:50:12.160 2023 and everything changes. Katie, what happened with TikTok and Israel and Gaza 0.95

00:50:18.720 as you understand it over the last year?

00:50:21.800 My understanding of it is that TikTok kind of became the only place that you could reliably

00:50:27.160 share pro-Palestinian content without it being suppressed.

00:50:31.900 Thank you. That's perfect. So what happened with TikTok in 2024, four years after Trump

00:50:38.360 tried to ban it, some what? Do quick math, Caroline. Some seven years after it was launched

00:50:45.140 in America is that our understanding of what it was and what it could do changed radically.

00:50:52.720 So up until that point, American citizens did not have easy access to the thoughts and opinions of

00:50:57.440 people in other countries. Why? Because every other social media app we had was set up to

00:51:02.020 connect us to people that we knew or people that we aspired to become. So friends, family,

00:51:08.040 celebrities. All of a sudden, you have an app that is optimized for surprise, for delight,

00:51:13.260 for curiosity that will connect you to subcultures with visuals. Katie, did you know that the whole

00:51:20.820 claim of Israel-Palestine is too complicated for me to have an opinion on it is a distinctly

00:51:26.260 American worldview? I sort of knew that because of Ta-Nehisi Coates' work. So this is something

00:51:33.180 for everyone to understand. This is a very common thing for Americans to say, and I think that we

00:51:37.660 tend to assume by what we have been taught that everyone views it the same way. That is not true.

00:51:43.260 And I would say that there's a lot of these types of slogans that probably fall under this category.

00:51:48.380 It's really complicated, only democracy in the Middle East, surrounded by enemies who want to kill them.

00:51:54.640 Like, all of these phrases you kind of hear consistently, and they've been so widely repeated that I think they've become conventional wisdom.

00:52:02.720 But what you're telling me is that those pieces of conventional wisdom are uniquely American.

00:52:08.520 What I am telling you is that the United States is one of the only countries in the world that has refused to recognize Palestine as a country. It is one of the only countries that increasingly and repeatedly stands alone in support of Israel at votes for ceasefire at the U.N. It has used its veto power against Israel-related sanctions 49 times in the United Nations Security Council. 0.70

00:52:32.720 Yeah, buddy. These colors don't run. 0.83

00:52:37.200 So...

00:52:37.440 Oh, my God.

00:52:44.880 All right, go ahead.

00:52:46.160 Oh, my God.

00:52:47.280 So here's the thing. 0.83

00:52:48.220 People start noticing that there's a shit ton of pro-Palestine content on TikTok, right?

00:52:51.940 In a way that they were not seeing on any other app. 0.62

00:52:54.360 And so I think that someone might rationally conclude in America, based off of your thing, like,

00:52:59.880 oh, well, maybe TikTok is trying to make us believe pro-Palestinian thoughts.

00:53:04.400 Oh, it's like, oh, the Chinese government is doing this.

00:53:07.100 China is radicalizing American citizens.

00:53:09.740 As opposed to the American government just influences the opposite to be happening in the rest of the media. 0.79

00:53:14.700 Exactly. So the data just doesn't bear it out.

00:53:16.980 And in fact, the vast majority of pro-Palestine content was not shared by Americans.

00:53:21.680 It was shared by people in other countries.

00:53:23.540 It was shared by people in Jordan and Lebanon and Egypt and people in South America and all these other countries.

00:53:28.340 But for the first time, Americans were served those videos because it was covering topics that they were interested in.

00:53:36.800 So to be super clear about this, the breakdown of American posts about Palestine and Israel was like pretty close to 50-50.

00:53:44.340 It was like pretty representative of American sentiment.

00:53:47.500 Now, this obviously led to a really crazy cognitive dissonance, right?

00:53:51.560 You have all these algorithms.

00:53:52.940 You have Facebook.

00:53:53.540 You have Instagram telling you one thing.

00:53:55.780 You have corporate media telling you something. 0.98

00:53:57.600 And then you're also on TikTok and you're like, what the fuck is happening to me? 0.94

00:54:01.460 Am I a character on severance? 0.77

00:54:03.380 How is this happening?

00:54:04.980 And then on Twitter, it's just people being like, the college kids won't go inside.

00:54:09.900 These rich Columbia brats are trying to get sandwiches ordered to the park.

00:54:16.280 Okay, Katie, can you read this headline from The Intercept?

00:54:21.620 Coverage of Gaza war in The New York Times and other major newspapers heavily favored Israel, analysis shows.

00:54:27.600 Now can you read this report from Human Rights Watch?

00:54:31.400 Yes.

00:54:32.620 Mehta's content moderation policies and systems have increasingly silenced voices in support of Palestine on Instagram and Facebook in the wake of the hostilities between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups.

00:54:44.720 Human Rights Watch said in a report released today, the 51-page report, Meta's Broken Promises, Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content on Instagram and Facebook, documents a pattern of undue removal and suppression of protected speech, including peaceful expression in support of Palestine and public debate about Palestinian human rights.

00:55:06.180 Human Rights Watch found that the problem stems from flawed metapolicies and their inconsistent and erroneous implementation over reliance on automated tools to moderate content and undue government influence over content removals. 0.97

00:55:22.180 You are fucking kidding me. 0.60

00:55:23.760 Okay, a couple things on that just right off the bat. 0.98

00:55:26.580 It is interesting to read that then in the context of what Zuckerberg was saying on Rogan about, oh, well, they wanted me to remove this.

00:55:35.200 Like, we need to get away from censorship.

00:55:37.320 It's very interesting in that context.

00:55:39.580 I'm thinking now back on some of the ways that people would get around these policies

00:55:44.620 and the way in which, like, putting the watermelon on something was kind of a bat signal

00:55:50.200 because it was red, green, and black, like the Palestinian flag,

00:55:54.840 and how people would change letters or use exclamation points

00:55:59.720 or try to, like, adapt the punctuation in a word

00:56:02.760 to bypass these content moderation systems.

00:56:06.320 And the extent to which that just kind of becomes normalized,

00:56:09.880 like, oh, yeah, obviously we have to use emojis

00:56:12.800 and special characters so that people will see our videos

00:56:15.880 because otherwise the algorithm is going to suppress

00:56:18.160 the fact that we're talking about Gaza.

00:56:20.220 Right.

00:56:20.420 And how quickly that's just kind of accepted 0.98

00:56:22.220 and not like a, this is a really fucked up recognition 0.97

00:56:25.940 and acknowledgement of the fact 0.97

00:56:28.400 that there is some power that is moderating the things that you are saying right and not to be

00:56:36.400 like we should live under a state dictatorship it's very easy to ignore all that stuff when all

00:56:41.340 of your apps are working in concert that is the i don't want to say the benefit but that is what

00:56:46.140 happens when something like meta owns facebook and instagram and then snapchat is just for like 0.90

00:56:51.180 the weirdo 14 year olds who want to sex each other like you don't you don't even notice it

00:56:56.100 And so it's not uncomfortable, right? 1.00

00:56:57.900 It's just like, oh, well, they don't let me say pussy. 1.00

00:57:00.140 So my weirdest friend who tries to sell Yoni crystals is going to, like, type all this shit out. 1.00

00:57:04.460 It's normal. 0.96

00:57:05.520 But TikTok, it's almost like those sci-fi movies where you're, like, learning about this creature.

00:57:10.720 It's like Stranger Things with Eleven, where they're like, oh, my God, what is Elle capable of?

00:57:15.220 Elle is TikTok.

00:57:16.240 You know what I mean?

00:57:16.940 It's like, I think even TikTok didn't even necessarily know what it was capable of.

00:57:21.820 Because the whole point is that the algorithm is dictated by you, by what you're interested in. 0.99

00:57:27.280 So when, like, the collective eye of Sauron moves away from Charli D'Amelio and moves towards fucking Israel, you're going to find some scary shit. 0.98

00:57:36.320 So this is where the TikTok ban is like, oh. 0.99

00:57:40.400 This is when American leaders look at each other and are like, we have a problem.

00:57:44.280 We have a problem.

00:57:45.260 Everyone get into the office.

00:57:46.420 We got to talk.

00:57:47.500 Right?

00:57:47.980 Wow.

00:57:48.300 This is the moment where they realized they had a propaganda problem. Not that Americans might

00:57:53.700 receive propaganda from other countries, but that they might start to see through the propaganda

00:57:59.020 that their own country had been selling them. Scary. Scary stuff. So this is when a whole

00:58:05.660 bunch of actors jump into motion. You've got AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League lobbying

00:58:10.780 Congress. You've got Facebook lobbying Congress. And to clarify, the meta-involvement at this point

00:58:16.920 lobbying Congress. My understanding, again, is that it's driven by the recognition that TikTok

00:58:24.020 is a very, very formidable competitor for their products rather than like Zuckerberg giving a 0.96

00:58:31.320 fuck about geopolitical tides. I don't think that Mark Zuckerberg is capable of giving a fuck when 0.99

00:58:39.460 you think about what that phrase means. So it's like all these actors are acting for the same 0.99

00:58:44.540 goal but for very different reasons yes and we are we're walking into that cave so it's like

00:58:50.400 we're worried about pro-israel sentiment we're worried oh my god all the americans are supporting

00:58:54.540 hamas because apparently hamas is like that four-year-old kid that you saw getting blown up

00:58:58.080 we're worried about that but that's not actually what we're worried about so all of a sudden the

00:59:02.520 tiktok ban goes from something that was like the weird pet project of our most xenophobic president

00:59:07.680 to something that is fully and wholly endorsed across both sides of the political aisle and 1.00

00:59:13.280 then supported by president biden and we're like you motherfuckers can't agree on shit but you 0.98

00:59:17.660 but you could come together to do this so spring of 2024 while biden is signing a bill that will 0.99

00:59:25.040 set the tiktok ban into motion trump is taking a total pivot because he is like tiktok he knows

00:59:31.180 all about surprise and delight he likes to keep us entertained joined the app they love me on that

00:59:38.000 app. I mean, honestly, this is not me complimenting him. This is me pointing out how bad everyone else

00:59:44.760 is at their jobs. He's so good at this. He's also just like so predictable. Like, what is that in

00:59:50.200 that one profile Olivia Nuzzi wrote where she's like, he's kind of like a caveman, but like a

00:59:55.380 very sophisticated caveman. Oh, he's got his finger on the pulse. So Trump is obviously very

01:00:01.780 pro-Israel, but he is also pro getting what he wants. So he had joined the app in 2024. He

01:00:07.500 immediately became very successful, had like 15 million followers on it. And so on the campaign

01:00:11.820 trail, he says, what do you guys say? I'm not banning TikTok. What? I never said that. I'm

01:00:15.580 not banning TikTok. In a CNBC interview in spring 2024, he says, without TikTok, you can make

01:00:21.620 Facebook bigger. And I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people. Oh, whoa. During his

01:00:29.960 presidency, he had been very, very oppositional to Mark Zuckerberg. Wait, that means Zuck got his

01:00:35.460 goal he became enemy of the state literally the president of the united states called him the

01:00:41.480 enemy of the look he's very very clear it's like that uh bo burnham song bezos 1.00

01:00:46.860 you did it fuck their wives drink their blood you did it babe 1.00

01:00:53.460 he still hasn't fucked their wives and drank their blood as far as i know 1.00

01:00:57.800 but um anyways so this is a huge problem for mark zuckerberg who is genuinely probably worried 0.99

01:01:03.700 that President Trump is going to send him to jail.

01:01:05.760 Trump said during his presidency

01:01:06.900 that he would like to send Mark Zuckerberg to jail.

01:01:09.280 So Trump gives this interview

01:01:11.100 and thousands of miles away, 0.77

01:01:14.160 a pink-eyed, curly-headed weevil

01:01:16.340 was doing taekwondo in his underground bunker

01:01:18.500 when he paused and perked his ears.

01:01:20.000 And he felt it.

01:01:20.740 He felt a change coming.

01:01:22.660 So Mark Zuckerberg by this point

01:01:25.460 is obviously one of the most influential

01:01:28.460 and wealthy men on the planet.

01:01:30.000 Also, Facebook and Instagram both have a problem.

01:01:32.660 Instagram, not as much as Facebook, but they are also losing young people.

01:01:36.460 They are losing frequency of posts.

01:01:38.060 People don't post as much as they used to.

01:01:40.160 And it's probably worth mentioning that, like, the other products that they own that are successful, like WhatsApp, isn't monetized.

01:01:49.460 Like, WhatsApp doesn't make any money.

01:01:51.920 So, like, that's kind of off to the side.

01:01:54.360 And then you have their venture into the metaverse.

01:01:58.080 All of this is happening after they've just sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into this effort that really isn't panning out. It was kind of like Zuckerberg's first attempt at being on more of the cutting edge of something rather than reacting after the fact. And to be fair, they did buy Oculus from someone else. So it's not like their Oculus products were developed in-house. But that was not widely perceived as like a success.

01:02:24.160 So I think that that's also really helpful to, like, ground ourselves in all of this is happening in the aftermath of kind of a failed gambit.

01:02:35.120 Absolutely it was. And again, I'm trying to keep the focus relatively narrow here.

01:02:39.500 It's worth noting that Meta has suffered a series of blows of people investigating them, of trying to understand what they're doing.

01:02:46.040 They put almost no effort towards content moderation in any other country besides the U.S.

01:02:50.800 In the US, they barely do it. There are accusations of data theft. And in particular, from like 2015 to 2020, Mark Zuckerberg was under fire. And so this isn't just a social media problem for Mark. It's not just that TikTok is his competitor, because even if TikTok goes away, we know that young adults are not going to flood Facebook.

01:03:09.860 It's also this very weird American values thing.

01:03:14.440 He is, I think I mentioned, very capitalism-pilled to the point that he thinks less like a person and more like the disembodied free hand of Adam Smith.

01:03:22.780 In his Joe Rogan appearance a few weeks ago, which you mentioned, he said point blank that the purpose of the U.S. government is to defend U.S. companies, not to investigate them, and that companies in the U.S. should be, quote, the tip of the spear for our country, which is as jingoistic as it gets.

01:03:38.380 He genuinely believes this, and he has said this again and again. He thinks that the tech sector of America is our economy. It is what defends us against competition. So the function of TikTok has also been for him serving as China as this boogeyman. He has given speeches about how China is winning the war of the internet, that they are trying to take over the internet, that we are protecting free speech. They are not.

01:04:01.840 So all of this brings us to today where a kind of confusing number of events are taking place.

01:04:07.360 So it's like TikTok has been saved for the time being.

01:04:10.300 It still needs an American buyer.

01:04:11.740 And something that a lot of people aren't talking about is that the TikTok algorithm will not be outsourced.

01:04:16.880 It will not be exported.

01:04:18.120 So if TikTok were to be bought by an American company, we would lose the algorithm.

01:04:22.760 You're like buying a user base.

01:04:24.540 The Chinese national government has said outright, our algorithm is a matter of our national security.

01:04:29.240 We're not giving it to you.

01:04:30.320 So that's something that people aren't talking about. Meanwhile, you have Mark bowing the fucking knee to Trump by making all these plans for no more content moderation. People can say that gay people are mentally ill, which I think serves as this weird one-two punch. Number one, it's going to help keep their older generation more addicted and engaged. It's going to make Trump happy. 0.97

01:04:53.020 Slurs are cool again. 1.00

01:04:54.280 I know. Everyone's like, yay, the real 1950s. We're back to the 1950s. 1.00

01:05:00.920 The thing that has kind of been in my head, though, is like, that's not solving the problem of young adults.

01:05:05.420 When you say solve the problem of young adults, what do you mean by that?

01:05:09.940 So Facebook's core problem is that young adults don't use it. That is their issue.

01:05:14.720 Oh, so you're saying that, like, the content moderation shit doesn't do anything to help them with that. 0.96

01:05:20.660 The Facebook is already perceived as kind of like a wild west of extremism. 0.91

01:05:26.760 And so to fully take the reins off of that, I think will solve a problem of engagement.

01:05:31.760 I think that the people who are on Facebook now are going to become even more engaged.

01:05:35.040 But it doesn't solve the major problem that Facebook is constantly hiding.

01:05:38.820 Attrition of the demographic that's most attractive to advertisers.

01:05:41.500 The only reason that we know that they are losing young adults is because of this whistleblower.

01:05:44.880 Like, this is something that they have completely tried to hide.

01:05:47.500 Interesting.

01:05:47.940 As I was doing research for this episode, I was like, what is happening here? We know the data argument is bullshit. Facebook sells our data to China. Apple has servers based in China. Like, it's just, it's not real. We also know that there's no evidence, none, that people are actually being radicalized on TikTok. 0.98

01:06:05.580 We have evidence that TikTok is the only app that is slightly more left-leaning than right-leaning.

01:06:10.540 But when you look at the data, it's not happening to the extent that I would expect to see this kind of mobilization from leaders and government leaders.

01:06:18.400 Hmm. I think to your point about the evidence of censorship on that app does seem to pertain specifically to sentiments critical of the Chinese government or critical of things that the Chinese government is doing.

01:06:32.460 I would just be curious if a politician, when pressed on this, if they would cite that as their main concern or if they would be forthright about the fact that it does sound like it's more that this is just a place where the content moderation that can be influenced by the American government, which is what that Human Rights Watch report found about Facebook's relationship or Meta's relationship with the American government, that TikTok is just a place where that doesn't play.

01:07:02.460 You are now exposed to a vulnerability that it's kind of a hole you can patch on the sites, the platforms, the outlets that are owned by or have at least influential ties to American politics.

01:07:18.700 This is my, like, core, I think, conflict about this is that I do see the concern, yes, it's not good that they're censoring information about China.

01:07:30.600 If someday the U.S. went to war with China, I can see why they'd be like, yeah, it would be bad for

01:07:36.200 the Chinese government to own the app that all the Americans are using. I can see that argument.

01:07:41.700 I guess I still have doubts that that's really the underlying fundamental concern of the American

01:07:47.960 government right now. Well, and the thing that I was thinking about is if that's a concern,

01:07:51.640 then all of your apps have equal concern, right? Like we have women getting radicalized to Sharia

01:07:56.040 a fucking law on Facebook. That's a concern. Anyways, I kind of started to realize what was 1.00

01:08:02.180 happening because of what happened with Red Note, which is what we're about to talk about.

01:08:05.440 And so here's my theory. When government leaders and tech leaders alike saw its citizens gaining

01:08:10.560 access to information about Israel and Palestine, it wasn't that they cared so much about Israel

01:08:15.380 and Palestine. It's that they realized that this could be replicated for other situations.

01:08:20.460 They realized that this app had the power to deconstruct billions of dollars of state-sponsored

01:08:25.920 propaganda, not just for Israel, but for boogeyman number one, which is China. Every single argument

01:08:32.360 against TikTok relies on this kind of fundamental underpinning of a fear of China, right? Like the 0.61

01:08:38.300 argument literally only makes sense if you're afraid of China. No one cares if France has our 0.75

01:08:42.460 data. It's that China has our data. We have this fear of communism. We have this love of capitalism.

01:08:47.900 We have this belief that America is like trying to defend democracy all over the globe. China is

01:08:52.200 trying to expand this violent ideology. But what if that understanding changed? What if China is

01:08:59.520 not as bad as America thinks? And more importantly, what if it's that we're worse? And I'm not talking 0.65

01:09:05.980 about military conquests. I'm saying, what if our trade and tech and communication wars with China

01:09:12.000 actually don't benefit us? What if the average citizen living in Shanghai has a better quality

01:09:17.880 of life than the average person living in New York. I'm not saying this is true. What I'm saying

01:09:22.980 is this is a radical question, regardless of the answer. And in the days leading up to the TikTok

01:09:28.980 ban, people started asking that question for the first time in American history, and they got

01:09:34.760 answers. And this brings us to Red Note. Katie, what do you know about Red Note?

01:09:40.060 My understanding of it is that it's like the Chinese, not the equivalent, because it sounds

01:09:44.740 like that other app is the equivalent of Chinese TikTok, but it's another like video sharing app

01:09:49.140 that works and looks similarly that Chinese people use. Once TikTok was in the process of

01:09:57.000 being banned, people were moving over to Red Note. So the way that I would describe Red Note,

01:10:02.300 because I downloaded it, is like, you know, when you go on vacation, you're like, 0.75

01:10:05.420 we're in Italy or whatever the fuck. And it's like, you think you're having a truly

01:10:09.400 international experience and then you take a walk and you end up in like an actual village and

01:10:15.780 you're like oh this is italy and like what i was experiencing was like disney world for americans

01:10:19.760 that was my experience with red note like red note was totally set up for chinese people when

01:10:25.380 you downloaded it it was like almost impossible to navigate because it was all in mandarin 0.79

01:10:29.560 here is like something fucking incredible while all of our politicians and all of our tech leaders

01:10:35.100 were like freaking out about the TikTok ban 0.97

01:10:37.020 while Congress mommy and Silicon Valley daddy 1.00

01:10:39.940 are like having hate sex in the other room. 0.99

01:10:42.180 The kids are up to something naughty 0.99

01:10:44.380 and the kids downloaded Red Note.

01:10:47.120 People actually think that Red Note

01:10:48.580 is like a euphemism for Mao's little red book of communism.

01:10:51.300 It's not.

01:10:51.900 I read from some Chinese journalists

01:10:53.240 that that's just like a poor interpretation. 1.00

01:10:55.640 The color red is lucky in China

01:10:57.180 and so a lot of things are red.

01:10:58.900 Oh, interesting. 0.72

01:11:00.200 But anyways, what happened is that Americans 0.99

01:11:02.460 started downloading Red Note kind of as a fuck you, 0.95

01:11:04.500 Kind of as like, well, if you think we're not going to give our data, but then something really fucking crazy happened, which is that for the first time in modern history, think about this, for the first time ever, a huge group of American civilians were talking to a huge group of Chinese civilians unmonitored, and they were having the conversation in public. 0.97

01:11:23.740 So Americans began to know and see things that they had not known or seen before. 0.53

01:11:28.580 They saw how advanced Chinese cars are.

01:11:32.120 They saw the public infrastructure in Shanghai and Beijing.

01:11:35.220 They saw how much cheaper food is in China than it is in America.

01:11:38.740 There is this viral video of finding out that a banana in China costs something like our equivalent of like 10 cents. 0.82

01:11:45.060 And in turn, Chinese citizens... 0.89

01:11:47.480 They were like, wait, your toilets have fountains on them? 1.00

01:11:51.040 Hold on.

01:11:51.920 And again, I need to remind you, this is happening through translation. We are literally using translation apps and Chinese citizens are writing in their language. You know, like this is literally so raw. So Chinese citizens see this influx of Americans, right? And they start asking us questions.

01:12:09.200 They asked if it's true that Americans have to work two jobs to stay afloat.

01:12:13.000 They asked if it was true that an ambulance could cost thousands of dollars,

01:12:17.640 or if that was their own government's propaganda.

01:12:20.200 They were like, it can't possibly be true.

01:12:21.780 China must just be telling us this.

01:12:23.640 We started comparing medical bills. 0.68

01:12:26.720 Americans found out that the social credit score system isn't actually enforced.

01:12:31.800 They found out that Chinese people love Luigi Mangioni.

01:12:34.700 I saw one video that was like, we call him Lulu.

01:12:37.260 Yeah, he's like a mythical figure for them.

01:12:41.300 This one Chinese user asked an American user, and I quote,

01:12:44.820 May I ask why MAGA targets immigrants?

01:12:47.420 Isn't your biggest enemy the capitalists who possess the majority of resources? 1.00

01:12:52.020 Holy shit. 0.99

01:12:53.400 Another user said again, and I quote, 1.00

01:12:56.260 You all are living such difficult lives and you have guns, so why don't you unite and fight against the capitalists?

01:13:01.980 These things happen in China, and the Chinese people would have rebelled long ago.

01:13:05.440 This is another relevant example that has taken place on Weibo, which is not Red Note, but it's taken place during the same time period, in response to this effort that Trump is pushing that 50% of TikTok must be owned by America.

01:13:17.600 Chinese sentiment on this American effort to acquire TikTok, which we think is essential, a matter of national security.

01:13:24.340 Do you know what Chinese citizens are calling it?

01:13:26.120 They're calling it robbery. 0.87

01:13:27.660 They're calling it theft.

01:13:29.060 One commenter on Weibo says, Apple and Tesla should give up 50% of their shares to Chinese companies.

01:13:35.320 Another user suggested China should get 50% control of NVIDIA.

01:13:38.880 As I was reading all these comments and these communications between Chinese and American

01:13:42.600 citizens, I was thinking of the letter that we read from Osama bin Laden, where he described

01:13:46.620 American oil acquisition as the greatest theft in human history. 0.51

01:13:50.560 So back to Red Note.

01:13:52.080 This is where it gets really interesting.

01:13:53.920 There was all this cultural exchange taking place.

01:13:56.240 Red Note was scrambling to create two servers to separate American users and Chinese users.

01:14:02.080 So you are literally racing against time to communicate with these people for the first and maybe last time in history. 0.90

01:14:10.020 Wait, can I ask a question?

01:14:11.200 I don't know anyone who lives in China.

01:14:12.960 I can't be like, oh, let me email.

01:14:15.660 But are you telling me that without an app like this, there's just no easy way to contact somebody who lives in China?

01:14:23.320 Or like, I guess my understanding was that the government in China kind of had them on like a different internet.

01:14:29.480 Because it is an authoritarian government.

01:14:32.080 there are rules about what they are allowed to see and who they are allowed to contact.

01:14:37.820 And so it sounds like what you're saying is like the Red Note platform created this middle ground

01:14:42.860 space where like American users were joining and talking to these people directly. And because they

01:14:48.800 weren't being put on different servers or like because there wasn't like a separate American

01:14:52.620 platform for it, that without that, there was really no way for them to communicate.

01:14:57.440 Am I getting that correct?

01:14:58.580 Yeah, I mean, it's about servers. It's also about language. TikTok, you know, if you speak the English language, you're going to have a vastly different experience on TikTok. You're going to talk to other people who speak English. If you speak a different language, you're going to have a different algorithm, right? We were living in largely different worlds.

01:15:14.960 So what happened with Red Note is that this app was set up for Chinese people to use. 0.88

01:15:19.960 And so it was like you were looking at Mandarin.

01:15:21.900 You were looking at this setup.

01:15:22.980 But American users were basically pushed into a corner to the point that it was worth it for them to brave this app that was not set up and optimized for Americans. 0.52

01:15:33.480 So while Red Note is fucking scrambling to separate these citizens, an American user asks a Chinese user a simple question.

01:15:42.460 They say, what is your honest opinion of Americans? 0.91

01:15:45.380 And the Chinese user said, you have freedom of opinion, but you don't have freedom of choice.

01:15:51.660 This is a conversation that goes hugely viral.

01:15:56.180 Katie, do you remember what your Fox News relative said to you about complaining about America?

01:16:00.460 Oh, yeah.

01:16:00.740 That like, well, if you were to do that in China, like you would be hauled off and thrown in jail.

01:16:05.120 Right. 0.99

01:16:05.440 Most Americans, we don't have a fucking clue how their jobs work, how their housing works. 0.99

01:16:09.180 You don't understand how their market economy works. 0.99

01:16:11.660 You don't understand how communism works.

01:16:13.240 What you say is that we have freedom of speech and they do not.

01:16:16.660 We get to know everything and they do not.

01:16:19.980 Are you telling me that they got freedom of speech too?

01:16:22.560 Are you telling me that in China they can talk about their opinions and nothing bad happens to them?

01:16:27.040 What I am telling you is that what Red Note exposed is that we have freedom of expression,

01:16:31.600 but that our freedom of expression is totally separated from political change.

01:16:36.920 Think about God rights.

01:16:37.560 Oh, it's like largely an illusion.

01:16:39.400 It's an illusion.

01:16:39.880 when you give the kid the game controller that's not plugged into anything and you're like yeah

01:16:44.480 sweetie you're totally making a difference that is a perfect 100% counts that is a perfect metaphor

01:16:52.220 that's literally exactly what it is and so this happens and all of a sudden all these americans 0.66

01:16:56.120 are like holy shit and this is happening simultaneously that like people are seeing 0.96

01:17:01.380 the humanity white people are sharing pictures of their babies chinese people are sharing 1.00

01:17:05.260 pictures of their babies and it sounds very fucking stupid and narrow-minded but i think 1.00

01:17:09.400 a lot of Americans are realizing that Chinese people are funny, that they are sarcastic, 1.00

01:17:13.340 that they know things about America, that they have opinions, that they have ideas of

01:17:17.280 the world that are not so inaccurate.

01:17:19.560 It's that, but it's also that, like, they're able to say and share all these things on

01:17:24.360 one of their platforms, which I think is, like, part of the thing that my dad was referencing.

01:17:29.140 It's like, oh, so wait, granted, it didn't sound like they were saying negative things

01:17:34.680 about the Chinese government, so I don't want to over-extrapolate or, like, over-insinuate here, 0.99

01:17:40.040 but it's, like, they are also just, like, on a social media platform shooting the shit. 0.99

01:17:45.960 A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And so, I came across this message that a Chinese citizen 1.00

01:17:52.240 wrote to Americans, and this was after they found out that Red Note was separating the servers,

01:17:55.680 and I don't know if I was, like, about to get my period, but it made me cry.

01:17:59.640 And what they said was, this is a translation, because, of course, it was written in Mandarin.

01:18:03.560 if uncontrollable circumstances ever cause our connection to break again let us always remember

01:18:10.000 the love and trust we share at this moment if there are negative rumors about each other in

01:18:15.000 the future we can firmly say to ourselves this is not what i see this is the takeaway that kind

01:18:23.340 of sent my head spinning which is we talk all the time about misinformation we talk about vaccines

01:18:28.360 We talk about racism. We talk about Israel and Gaza. We talk about American issues because we live in an information landscape that is controlled by American forces. Our internet, our media, our algorithms. Just this fall, the House of Representatives passed a $1.6 billion fund to, quote, subsidize media and civil society sources around the world to, quote, counter Chinese malign influence globally. That's a Chinese propaganda fund.

01:18:53.340 Just a few days before Biden left office, his administration carved out a loophole for the TikTok ban that it will not apply to U.S. State Department employees who are, quote, responsible for public diplomacy efforts to, quote, promote U.S. interests abroad.

01:19:09.520 Even TikTok, an international app, did not offer the moment that happened on Red Note, right?

01:19:14.860 We are siloed from each other all of the time, and the more that I thought about this, and the more that I thought about the special privileges that we afford Meta that we don't afford TikTok, the more I began to see these two algorithms as, like, a direct projection of these two countries, right? 0.97

01:19:29.640 Like, they are doing the same shit. 0.97

01:19:32.280 They are siloing their citizens. 1.00

01:19:33.920 They are censoring the shit that they don't want to see, and Meta needs TikTok, right? 0.99

01:19:38.180 Because Meta uses TikTok as a scapegoat. 0.99

01:19:41.040 They say, TikTok is China.

01:19:42.340 Look over there.

01:19:43.500 You want this.

01:19:44.600 So, Katie, I want you to read something from Joe Mayall, who we both love.

01:19:48.360 One of our favorite sub-stack newsletters, Joe, wrote.

01:19:50.900 I want you to read this and tell me what you think.

01:19:53.320 The difference between younger and left-leaning Americans who don't fear the Chinese boogeyman

01:19:58.080 and the center-right and older Americans who do is that we recognize the American government

01:20:03.680 is already doing what it accuses China of.

01:20:06.980 The TikTok ban was passed under the banner of national security, the catch-all code word

01:20:12.080 the U.S. government has used to suppress, discredit, and sometimes imprison citizens

01:20:17.020 it doesn't like. The same excuse was used to justify the Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq,

01:20:22.440 the illegal torture camp at Guantanamo Bay, mass incarceration, the police beatings of anti-war 0.91

01:20:28.140 protesters, COINTELPRO, and the prison spying program that took a shit on every civil liberty 0.89

01:20:34.060 in the Constitution. All of this was covered up by lie upon lie from presidents, CIA directors, 0.92

01:20:39.980 politicians, and the journalists who serve the interests of the American state.

01:20:44.120 Meanwhile, American troops were sent to so many countries,

01:20:47.820 Congress people were surprised to hear one was killed in Niger.

01:20:51.820 American has over 750 military bases on foreign soil.

01:20:56.840 China has three. 0.68

01:20:58.040 It certainly looks like one country wants to dominate the world, 0.99

01:21:01.200 and it isn't the one speaking Mandarin. 0.94

01:21:03.680 This is why the claim that America has its faults, but China is worse, 0.82

01:21:07.780 so we need to ban TikTok, just doesn't hold up to our reality. How is it worse for average

01:21:12.740 Americans? Did China just kill at least 60,000 Palestinians? Did they send fascist cops to beat

01:21:18.320 student protesters? Did they refuse to raise the minimum wage above $7.25, condemning millions of

01:21:24.700 Americans to grapple with poverty? Did they fail to prepare for a climate change-induced wildfire

01:21:29.440 that burned down America's second largest city? No, that was all the U.S. government. I'm sure

01:21:34.220 Chinese people have plenty of complaints about their government, but Americans aren't mad at 0.51

01:21:37.980 Congress because China manipulated our social media algorithms to make it so. We're mad because 0.87

01:21:42.840 our government has spent 50 years sacrificing us to capital, taxing us to bomb innocent children,

01:21:47.560 and then telling us how fortunate we are to have them lie to our faces. That's why we're mad,

01:21:52.220 and no amount of fear-mongering or censorship is going to change that.

01:21:56.240 What do you think? 0.99

01:21:57.100 Damn, he kind of snapped. That's kind of how I felt last night, 0.99

01:22:00.800 reading Trump's first executive order that was, like, all about how they plan to force everyone

01:22:09.720 to acknowledge there's only two genders. And I was like, man, it's a good thing that we're not 0.89

01:22:15.340 the only fucking high-income country in the OECD without paid parental leave, universal child care, 0.80

01:22:21.700 universal health care, that we have 25% of our population living in poverty. It's a good thing 0.95

01:22:25.740 that none of those fucking things are true and that instead we're focusing on whether or not 0.98

01:22:30.200 there's more than one gender and like which bathroom people are using. I'm so happy that 0.98

01:22:35.000 we are spending our resources on these amazing and worthwhile things. It's like, what the fuck 0.99

01:22:42.160 is going on? What the fuck is going on? The purpose of this conversation is not to tell people, 1.00

01:22:47.500 move to China. China's great. China has all of its own shit. I'm aware of that. But this was a huge

01:22:53.640 week for me. Reading all those red note comments, seeing what is taking place and starting to ask

01:23:00.000 a question that I have genuinely never asked before, which is what if it's actually just not

01:23:04.060 true? What if we're the problem? We know that America is annoying. We know annoying. We know

01:23:09.020 that America is the problem militarily. Like any progressive person understands that we are not

01:23:13.240 spreading democracy across the world. But there is an assumption that we are basically flexing

01:23:18.720 our military might all the time in order for us to have a high quality of life. And like to protect,

01:23:24.360 right? It's like, well, we have to do this because if we don't, the authoritarian governments are

01:23:28.540 going to take over the world and ruin everything. That's really the argument.

01:23:32.740 Exactly. But I think this was the week where I was like, oh, and that's actually not giving us

01:23:38.260 a higher quality of life. That's giving a few dozen people immense wealth. What if people in

01:23:43.440 China have a higher quality of life than people in America? That is something that I had never even

01:23:49.360 considered. And again, it's a much more complicated question that deserves a much

01:23:53.940 more complicated answer, but it is a question worth asking. It is very, very interesting

01:23:58.960 to see Chinese perceptions of America. And my guess would be that China is similar to America

01:24:04.420 in that there is wealth stratification that you couldn't believe. For sure. Right? Of course.

01:24:08.840 And my understanding of it, too, is that I'm having a hard time parsing, like, what is true

01:24:12.900 and what is just me being America-pilled. Right. But my understanding of it is that the Chinese

01:24:18.960 government has actually had a lot of success with eradicating poverty in their country in a way that

01:24:25.040 the American government has not. And so even now, as I talk about quality of life differences,

01:24:31.840 I'm having a hard time ascertaining what is true and what isn't. But what I do know to be true

01:24:38.000 is that the quality of life in the United States has improved vastly for about 5 to 10 percent of

01:24:44.840 the population. And for everybody else, it's gotten worse. So regardless of what's happening

01:24:49.320 in China, I do feel comfortable saying that we know that the way that the U.S. has been approaching

01:24:54.240 its domestic and international affairs has not been improving life for Americans for at least

01:25:00.280 around 40 years. Right. So I went into this conversation planning to argue that TikTok

01:25:06.060 was where the revolution would happen, right? And I came out of it being like, oh, that was never

01:25:13.260 true it is very important to have an app that is not owned by the united states but have you heard

01:25:19.680 of this song have you heard of the revolution will not be televised um no but i thought the

01:25:27.100 revolution was going to happen in the comment section of that kick-ass podcast diabolical lies

01:25:31.500 so i guess so this is something riley and i say to each other a lot which is basically like a

01:25:37.340 commentary on media which is the revolution will not be televised right okay the tv is always going

01:25:42.240 to pan away from the protests. We're not going to cover that shit. It's a song by a black artist 1.00

01:25:46.560 named Gil Scott Heron. It was released in 1971. It's a fucking banger. I highly encourage people

01:25:51.000 to read the lyrics. And I think that you can understand what it is saying inherently. The

01:25:55.200 revolution is not going to happen on any state-sponsored app. We are not going to see the

01:26:01.240 world through social media. We're not going to change the world on social media. Our social

01:26:05.120 media apps, if I were to guess, are going to become worse. I think they're going to become

01:26:08.640 more and more similar to something like porn. I think they're going to become very degraded.

01:26:12.960 I think TikTok is going to become a degraded version of itself. I think meta is going to get

01:26:16.820 worse. And I'm okay with that. I think that I started this out being like, we need this. And

01:26:22.980 I ended this being like, no, we need real life. We need to organize in real life. I'm not dismissing

01:26:29.500 the organization and collection that people do on social media. What I am saying is the revolution

01:26:34.580 when it happens is not going to happen on TikTok. It's going to happen through these series of fits

01:26:40.580 and bursts where we have a moment like Red Note, where you have a moment where no one's watching,

01:26:45.200 and then you have to go outside and have conversations that are not monitored by anyone.

01:26:50.980 That was my big takeaway from all of this. If you can, go to fucking China. If you can, 1.00

01:26:56.660 if you're a college student, go abroad. Spend time with other students. Hear what they think.

01:27:00.740 work with them. It's not accidental that the U.S. canceled its Fulbright thing to China.

01:27:06.180 There has never been less communication and travel between these countries, and we are seeing

01:27:11.000 the outcome of that today. This reminds me a little bit of a recent

01:27:15.980 Substack post that I saw from Eliza McLam. It's called, How Much Do I Really Need to Know?

01:27:23.680 And it was basically about the decision to try getting off of all social media for January and

01:27:29.620 just keeping up with the news current events in a more old school way, aka she's still using the

01:27:37.160 internet. She's still going to news sites. She's still talking to other people, but she's not so

01:27:43.180 plugged into the discourse machine at all times. And something that she wrote at the end, I want

01:27:49.920 to just read to you. She said, as a taxpaying member of the American public, I find it important

01:27:55.420 to educate myself on my country's past and current atrocities here and abroad. Against my will,

01:28:00.840 my money builds Israeli bombs. Against my will, my money employs millions of cops. Against my will, 0.57

01:28:05.700 my money funds private prisons. It would be plainly stupid and completely against my values 0.99

01:28:09.940 to consciously avoid these facts, so I won't. I must, however, remain clear-eyed and energetic 0.83

01:28:14.480 enough to fight what is currently happening and what is to come. I cannot do that when I'm

01:28:19.400 overwhelmed, when I am broken. I cannot do that when I am, in Sontag's words, anesthetized,

01:28:24.520 because she compares that constant flow of information to your brain kind of just shutting

01:28:29.560 down. You can't process that much that quickly. And the juxtaposition of video of a child being

01:28:36.560 blown up in Gaza with makeup tutorial, you just kind of flatline. And so she wrote,

01:28:42.000 how much do I really need to know? Enough to know what I think and how I feel. Knowing any more

01:28:47.020 makes both impossible. And it kind of coincides really nicely with this idea of, oh yeah, we're

01:28:55.280 not going to achieve this on social media, and asking a platform to be the place where that type

01:29:00.560 of real-world organizing happens. Like, we were always kind of asking too much of it, and so maybe

01:29:04.920 this isn't the loss that we thought it was. That is very interesting. When I think about the most

01:29:11.060 successful protests. And I think about the most successful mass movements of organization. All

01:29:17.560 of them happened before social media. So this idea that like we would need these platforms

01:29:22.820 to organize or build or facilitate these things to happen. It's kind of like, what if the opposite

01:29:29.960 has been true all along? What if they've been kind of sucking the wind out of and fracturing

01:29:34.180 these movements? Yeah. And I think I have felt very implicated in this realization because I

01:29:39.040 think I tend to feel really proud of the things I talk about on TikTok, but I'm not going to a

01:29:44.060 meeting in my town. I'm not coalition building in the real world. And so I think you're totally

01:29:48.320 right. Social media has neutered it. And I think it reinforces the idea that we have freedom of

01:29:52.780 opinion, but we don't have freedom of choice. We do not have control. And so the solution to this,

01:29:59.600 luckily, is very obvious. You have to go out into the real world. And I think that a lot of people

01:30:04.440 would be amazed that, like, 500 people in your town have more political leverage than a video

01:30:11.860 that gets 100 million views on TikTok. And that is what they have lulled us into thinking, is that

01:30:17.500 we should care about social media. I'm just kind of like, cool, maybe we just let these apps burn.

01:30:23.760 Let it make Facebook worse. Cool. Log off. Great.

01:30:27.880 Go fucking join your local DSA chapter. Start doing something. 1.00

01:30:31.620 I listened to a really inspiring as a clan episode recently if anyone wants to do about attention and the whole thing is like dude social media is new and like I think we're entering a new phase where a lot of people are just going to be like fuck it I don't like this it doesn't feel good anymore it's not doing its original thing turn it off it is not mandatory you don't have to spend all your time on it and so I went into this desiring to compare these two algorithms I was going to spend all this time on Mark Zuckerberg and then I was like holy shit that's not the point they want us to be thinking about

01:31:01.560 that the point is red note the point is that conversation that is where we want to get and

01:31:07.120 that is where i want to sit and i have saved so many videos and tweets that i will share in our

01:31:12.180 show notes that show these red note interactions so many funny videos of chinese people like 0.94

01:31:18.140 skewering us and making jokes and it's like that is the point that is the fucking point hold on to 0.91

01:31:24.100 that like the one where that person was like why do y'all eat like you have universal health care 0.98

01:31:28.720 seriously I was like damn you've just fucking clocked us dude wow Caroline this was excellent 0.72

01:31:36.580 thank you thank you so much for this journey I yeah I really was not expecting to leave this 0.98

01:31:42.660 conversation feeling hopeful today but somehow you managed to get us there and I will also say

01:31:48.160 that something that I've been thinking about that's maybe one step removed from the social

01:31:53.240 media discourse is that to some degree, podcasting, like direct podcasting onto an RSS feed

01:32:00.260 does kind of sidestep algorithms because you aren't really being shown things based on

01:32:05.940 what you're clicking or like what someone else wants you to see. There really isn't an algorithm

01:32:10.560 in the podcast app. It is owned by Apple, which is certainly contending with, but it's more

01:32:16.200 decentralized than going on a platform like Instagram. So I exempt us and our opinions

01:32:22.560 from all of my comments. Well, no, you're actually dead on. And that's something that

01:32:25.920 Ezra Klein and his guests talked about. It's more like radio. No, the future of podcasting,

01:32:29.580 I think, is really bright. And I actually got a really nice message from someone being like,

01:32:33.620 are you ever considering connecting people, diabolicalized people in their states or doing

01:32:38.380 something like that? We have listeners in every single state and numerous countries. And so

01:32:42.700 I think that you and I can start to think about what can we do to help people be more physical

01:32:47.420 I think at the beginning of this project I would have been like I'm not interested in that and now

01:32:50.940 after this research I'm like dude that's everything that's it these algorithms are

01:32:54.880 not going to save us I don't know stay safe out there it's we're in Trump's America now

Diabolical Lies - January 26, 2025

A Tale of Two Algorithms

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