00:02:46.660Social media has become a community organizing tool that has relied upon easy infrastructure for sharing news.
00:02:53.880We don't know the long-lasting effect yet, but we already know that not being able to share news has communities disoriented and puts lives at risk.
00:03:02.420Government emergency websites and text notification warnings just don't have the same reach and up-to-date information as social media does.
00:04:06.140when we had a really early fire season,
00:04:07.920And then it's kind of been like, you know, usually we might have a lot of fires in British Columbia one year or we might have a lot of fires in Alberta another year. But this year, it was kind of like we had a ton of fires in British Columbia, a ton in Alberta, a ton in Quebec, a ton in Ontario, a ton in Nova Scotia. It was just like all over the place. And it's still going.
00:04:27.120Right now, Northwest Territories, which is one of the northern territories in Canada, two-thirds of the population of that territory has been evacuated because of wildfires.
00:04:38.060And in British Columbia, Kelowna, which is kind of a popular kind of tourist vacation spot. And, you know, just kind of like a place that's in, you know, a nice natural area. Part of it has been evacuated and part of it is under evacuation order.
00:04:56.760So what we're experiencing with the wildfires this year is just shockingly bad. And it is kind of a preview of where things are going and how the effects of climate change. I remember when I was younger, younger as in 10 or 15 years ago, there would be climate deniers and conservative politicians who would say, climate change might be bad, it might be happening, but it's going to be okay for Canada because we're a northern country.
00:05:26.760And, you know, we're going to have more arable land as a result, so we're going to be able to feed the world and blah, blah, blah, you know, people who are in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry and stuff.
00:05:36.640But they never talked about how the wildfires are going to get worse and how the hurricanes are going to get worse and how we're going to get more flooding.
00:05:42.100And so we see all of that. And then, as you say, as all of that is happening this summer, we have META, which is kind of going to war against a new government regulation that is similar to the regulations that passed in Australia a couple of years ago.
00:05:56.460that would expect Facebook, Instagram, and Google to be paying money to news publishers because
00:06:03.160they have the news on their platforms. They're running ads against that news. People don't
00:06:08.020always click through to read the articles, but are still commenting on them and things like that
00:06:12.040on these platforms. And so there's a view that we can debate whether that is right or wrong,
00:06:18.880but that these platforms should be paying a certain degree to support these news publications
00:06:23.580that are going through a really difficult time right now
00:06:53.000about the evacuations that are happening in the Northwest Territories.
00:06:57.060And when Meta is presented with this information and is presented with the fact that people
00:07:01.780are just taking screenshots of news articles and sharing them on social media because they
00:07:05.900can't share the article itself to make sure that their friends and family are informed
00:07:09.300about what's going on, Meta says, well, the government can still post updates and people
00:07:14.180on the platform actually report that they're happier now that we have taken news off.
00:07:18.480And I think the final thing I would say, because I know I've been talking for a little while,
00:07:21.680is just that, you know, Meta is saying all of this.
00:07:26.740Meta is blocking news on its platforms.
00:07:28.560But the reality is that the law is not even in force yet.
00:07:32.420The law is not going to be in force for another few months.
00:07:35.160But Meta is still doing this and still won't allow news to go back on the platform,
00:07:39.320even in this moment where there's a ton of natural disasters happening in the country.
00:07:43.880So I think that last point is really key.
00:07:46.600The law that Facebook objects to is not even in effect or being enforced right now.
00:07:50.960So Facebook could continue allowing news on their platforms, especially given that we're in this emergency situation in Canada, but they aren't.
00:08:01.020So it just feels to me like Facebook is putting profit and power and like dick swinging, for lack of a better word, over people's actual safety and lives, the lives of their users.
00:08:13.720Absolutely. You know, it's undeniable. And they've done that many times. Let's be clear. This is not a new thing.
00:08:19.140You know, if you think back to the genocides in Myanmar, if you think about all the revelations about, you know, what they've been doing around the world and how sure they might be interested in content moderation in places like the United States or Canada or the UK or whatever, where they have a lot of users and where the media is really paying attention if something goes wrong.0.51
00:08:35.620But in many other parts of the world, they really don't care nearly as much. And there's a lot of kind of human tragedy that results from the fact that Facebook does not really care about what happens on its platform.
00:08:47.280And so what we're seeing right now, as you say, is that this law is not actually enforced. So if Meta did allow news on its platform right now, it wouldn't have to pay news publishers because the government is not actually requiring this to happen.
00:09:00.380And I think that one of the really notable things is that in the Australian case, Meta did pull news off of Facebook because it was going to be required to pay. And that didn't take very long for Meta to reverse course and to start working through this government process to make these deals with the news publishers and to abide by the law.
00:09:18.780But in this case, a couple of years later, Meta is really not willing to do that in the way that it was before. And I think that part of that is because Meta's kind of view on news and view of how its platform should work has shifted over that time, right?
00:09:33.880I think that, you know, two years ago or whatever, there was a much greater argument that maybe news was something that meta needed to have on its platforms to keep people engaged and to keep people interested. But I think now we've arrived at a point where meta sees news as more of a liability that can kind of get people engaged in conversations and things like that, that are more extreme or for whatever reason, kind of result in these discussions that it doesn't like on the platform.
00:10:02.360And it also feels that it doesn't make enough money to justify having that on the platform.
00:10:07.320So as I said, one of the things it's saying now that it's taken news off in Canada is that it says that users are actually happier not having news on the platform.
00:10:15.500And this is not just about Canada, but about saying to all the other jurisdictions that are looking at Canada and trying to think about following suit with their own version of this, places like California, New Zealand and other places around the world, that don't you dare try this because we'll do the same thing in your jurisdiction too.
00:10:34.380There was a time that when you logged into Facebook, the thing that you scrolled was called the news feed and it was full of news.
00:10:41.060But in 2016, social media platforms were increasingly scrutinized for a failure to keep misleading and inaccurate news off of their platforms.
00:10:49.720Two years later, Facebook changed its algorithm and announced that we'd see 20% less news, prioritizing instead content from your friends and family.
00:10:59.040This move hurt news publishers who, up until then, had been getting about 10% of their traffic from Facebook alone
00:11:05.800and had been jumping through hoops that Facebook set,
00:17:39.420But I do think the people who run big tech platforms, who have made so much money from news, should be invested in supporting a healthy journalistic landscape.
00:17:50.180I do think that what we're seeing now is Facebook trying to really send a signal to other countries.
00:17:56.180Like the similar legislation in California, I think this is meant to really be a signal globally.
00:18:02.900Like, do not tell us that we have to pay you.
00:18:06.740And you don't want that. Like, I think they're just trying to to grandstand a little bit and sort of flex a little bit.
00:18:13.780Absolutely. And they can flex. Right. Because let's be real that a lot of our governments have become very reliant on Facebook and these other social media platforms in order to communicate with their citizens, their residents, what have you.
00:18:28.780The people who they want to communicate with. And that means that they don't always have the channels to reach people directly because there has been a view or an acceptance that the way that we are going to communicate with people is through these social media platforms. And that has just been kind of accepted for the past decade or so. Right. And the media is in that camp as well, where the media, you know, certainly there's been like a shift to newsletters in the past few years and stuff like that.
00:18:56.400But in general, the media still reaches people through social media or at least reaches a lot of people that way. You know, it's overstated how much traffic Twitter sends to media websites, but it is the case that Facebook still sends or, you know, has traditionally still sent a lot of traffic to news and they have depended on that traffic.
00:19:12.840And so I don't think the reality is that they can't switch away from that, but that it will be an adjustment and there will be kind of a difficult period if everything just gets turned off and government and media were not kind of preparing for that having to happen and haven't set up alternatives ahead of time.
00:19:29.900One of the things that we did see in Australia, and again, we didn't have a ton of time to actually judge the long-term impacts, but that when news was removed from Facebook, these publishers were able to adjust.
00:19:47.220And I believe it was, I can't remember if it was Australia or Spain, actually, sorry, because Spain had a similar thing that they did as well. And Google News had blocked like news in Spain for a while and publishers did kind of, you know, were able to make up the difference there.
00:20:03.040So I think that that's just to say, I think that there are examples where, you know, these publishers and the governments can end their reliance on these social media platforms and don't need to be so reliant on them. But that takes real work and, you know, a real commitment to do that. And I haven't really seen that commitment kind of in practice in the past few years.
00:20:24.120And it seems rather that they would prefer to continue to be reliant on these platforms, but also have them kind of abide by these regulations. And theoretically, these companies should be abiding by regulations. If a sovereign government decides that Facebook or Google or whatever should be abiding by certain regulations in their country, I think it's fair to say that, yeah, they should probably be doing that.
00:20:48.080Because, you know, especially in a democratic country like the ones that we live in, I think we would expect that the government, which is ultimately the representative of the public, should be having the final say, not some major corporation that's led basically dictatorially by Mark Zuckerberg.
00:21:05.380Like news media, governments have had a complicated relationship with social media platforms.
00:21:10.600Because governments need social media to be able to communicate with people.
00:21:14.440But governments are also ostensibly meant to be regulating these platforms and keeping them from harming us.
00:21:21.340And when emergencies, like Canada's wildfires, happen, like it or not, a lot of people are getting critical information from social media.
00:21:29.500And it reveals this problem of what happens when social media platforms, in the whims of the tech billionaires who run them, become such a big part of the infrastructure of modern society.
00:21:41.000In a recent piece for The New Yorker, Ronan Farrow makes clear
00:21:44.480just how much of the infrastructure of public and civic life
00:21:48.420is being left up to the whims of individual tech leaders like Elon Musk,
00:24:51.400Like, just thinking about – and I think in the Ronan Farrow piece, so often Ronan Farrow's reporting is like, this guy is a bad guy.
00:25:01.620Let me show you all the things that he's done.
00:25:03.360But in that piece on Elon Musk, what I really took away from it was exactly what you said was that it's not just that Elon Musk is a bad guy.
00:25:10.520It's that we have given – we have such little infrastructure that having one bad guy who is not great at decision-making be in charge of it, that's not really just on him.
00:25:23.780It's on our governments to allow that to be the standard.
00:25:29.740Like it's a complete failure of government, right, to allow this to happen.
00:25:33.620And it's not like they stood back and this just happened and they didn't notice it.
00:25:38.120They actively encouraged Elon Musk to amass this much power. The media was involved in that as
00:25:45.380well. There were many other players who helped to build Elon Musk into the figure that he is.
00:25:53.520But the United States made an explicit decision to move forward with the privatization of the
00:25:59.820space program and to de-emphasize NASA's role within that because it was building a new rocket
00:26:06.100and the George W. Bush administration stopped it. And the Obama administration continued the move
00:26:12.280toward, or excuse me, the George W. Bush administration ended the space shuttle program
00:26:16.700or set a date for it to end. The Obama administration ended the work that NASA was
00:26:20.980doing on a new kind of rocket launch capability and instead said, we're going to rely on the
00:26:26.380private sector to do this. And that is part of what allowed this transition to SpaceX and to
00:26:32.260reliance on Elon Musk to happen. Then, of course, regulators allowed him to put all those satellites
00:26:37.220in the sky. You know, American regulators deciding that an American company can put all of these
00:26:43.540satellites up that are effectively going to block a lot of other countries from doing something
00:26:47.400similar instead of like an international body having to approve something like this. And then
00:26:52.500on top of all that, of course, you know, all of the investment and kind of subsidies that he
00:26:56.900received with Tesla and to build that out. So we have this really serious problem where the
00:27:02.400government for many decades has been slowly kind of reducing state capacity, reducing what it does
00:27:07.820and leaving that to the private sector. And that has allowed someone like Elon Musk to be in this
00:27:13.020position of power that he's in. And of course, we talk about Elon Musk, but like we're talking
00:27:17.120about with Meta and like we're talking about with all these other companies, they have assumed real
00:27:20.920positions of power, real kind of bottlenecks around society and throughout the economy.
00:27:25.460And that has a lot of serious impacts on, you know, on the wider public.
00:27:31.280I mean, that's such a good point that it's really not like I was interested to talk to you about Meta and the Canadian news media ecosystem.
00:27:38.280But it's really not about the one company Meta or the one company Twitter or Elon Musk.
00:27:44.260I wonder, like, do you think that these U.S. based companies should have such an impact globally?
00:27:52.160Like, what does it say? Is it fair that, like, the U.S.-based company Meta can have such a big impact on Canada's news media ecosystem?
00:28:05.320Yeah. And I feel like I can sometimes get criticized for this as well. Right. Because one of the things that I try to point out sometimes is that like if you're an American and you're in the United States, maybe it doesn't seem so egregious that there are all these large American companies that have such a significant role in so many countries around the world.
00:28:28.400Amazon, Google, Facebook, et cetera, et cetera. But when you're not in the United States,
00:28:35.100it feels like you have very little control over your own society and your own economy and what
00:28:41.060is going on in it when you're always at the whims of these major companies that are foreign-owned
00:28:47.300and controlled. And when your governments try to regulate them, like in the case of what the
00:28:52.940Canadian government is doing now with Meta and Google, they basically fight these regulations
00:28:59.100tooth and nail and try to ensure that they don't have to, you know, follow through on it. And I
00:29:05.580would argue that this was, you know, if we go back to like the 90s, when the internet is being
00:29:10.360privatized, the message that we have is that as the internet is going global, and as these companies
00:29:14.940are going global, it's bringing like democracy and freedom and economic opportunity to everybody.
00:29:19.460And I push back on that. And I would say, like, we never really got those things, you know, to a large degree. But what we did get was the expansion of like American control and American power through these companies and through the expansion of internet infrastructure.
00:29:34.580And this is like the political economy piece that is often not brought into the critiques of like the tech industry and its kind of connections to government, right? Because it was presenting itself as separate from government and like, you know, oppositional to government. And there are ways that that is true.
00:29:50.720But at the same time, it is helping to kind of expand the influence of the American government around the world. And that ensures that once you have kind of free flows of capital, once you're not allowed to put kind of protectionist measures on your own economy, it's pretty much impossible for you to create effective competitors to these large American companies that were able to corner these markets well before.
00:30:20.720you know, any kind of domestic company was able to do anything similar, and they can never really
00:30:25.800reach the scale that an American company can because it starts in such like a large market
00:30:30.660to do these sorts of things, right? And so part of the reason that we're finally starting to see
00:30:35.740a shift away from, you know, the US focus on, you know, deregulation and allowing these tech
00:30:42.420companies to do whatever they want is that Chinese tech companies are finally kind of competing with
00:30:46.960them and potentially trying to, you know, benefit from this infrastructure that they set up. And now
00:30:52.060we see America moving forward with protectionist measures after, you know, so many years of saying,
00:30:57.820no, like everything should be free and open and whatever, right? But now they want to stop the
00:31:02.840Chinese companies from moving into the space that American tech companies occupy. And so that's part
00:31:08.680of the reason why we see these shifts. More after a quick break.
00:31:16.960Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus
00:36:17.760And even though the companies are bad,
00:36:18.940the companies are not as bad as like government, right?
00:36:21.380Because government is like the ultimate evil.
00:36:23.180And so I think what we see in Canada right now is that there are different ways to look at these laws that the government is trying to enforce against Meta and against Google. And I'm critical of them because I don't like the idea that the news media is going to be tied to Google and Facebook and have revenue that is coming from them.
00:36:45.500Because I think that creates an incentive not to want to hold these companies to account for what they're doing, right? And it also makes them dependent on foreign companies that anything could happen to them in the coming years. And I think we would want them to kind of be dismantled to a certain degree. But this creates an incentive not to have that happen because you're setting up this revenue stream.
00:37:03.600Whereas the other form of critique and the one that I would say is more dominant is for people to say, actually, it's bad that the government is moving into this space at all, is trying to regulate these foreign tech companies and is doing so with, and I would say that these are very disingenuous arguments with a link tax, right, which is against the fundamental nature of the very internet.
00:37:27.980You can't tax a link because that's essential to how the internet works. And I think ultimately, you can certainly read the bill in a way where it looks like a link tax, but I think that the actual goal of what the government is trying to achieve is not that at all, and they've been very clear about it.
00:37:43.800But I think that you get these disingenuous arguments that are very beneficial to the tech companies, but that are laundered through particular experts who are at arm's length from the tech companies and who would even say that they are critical of the tech companies, but are ultimately kind of forwarding arguments that are in the tech companies favor, even though they act like they are opponents of the tech companies.
00:38:05.400And that's why we see that whenever stories about this Canadian news bill come up, you have a lot of people replying to it saying, actually, this is the government's fault, not Meta's fault, that there's no news on these platforms.
00:38:19.020And it's like, I'm sorry, but you have taken the complete wrong message from the criticism of these companies.
00:38:27.520So that's something that truthfully has created struggle for me on how to thoughtfully cover this issue, because it does seem like an issue that it's the government's fault, but also the tech companies are at fault.
00:38:38.140It's difficult to cover it in a way that is thoughtful and tells the whole story.
00:38:42.400Have you found that, too, because of all of these different talking points, the blame being put on the government in a way that's laundering the message for tech companies, that it makes it kind of difficult to have a thoughtful conversation about what's actually happening?
00:38:55.720I think the difficulty is that we always seem to want to try to narrow these things down into like very simple narratives that everyone can understand and that like, you know, there's not much complexity to it. But the reality is that all of these things are very complex, right? If you actually dig into the details.
00:39:14.540And so it's easy just to say, oh, the government is bad. You know, we shouldn't be doing this or to say the tech companies are bad and we should be setting up this framework where they need to support the news media companies.
00:39:28.900And let's be clear, like Canadian news media companies in many cases suck. They're really terrible because of like the legacy of just, you know, decades of funding difficulties and mergers. And, you know, what our biggest newspaper chain is owned by a U.S. hedge fund right now.
00:39:46.820So you know that they're not actually incentivized to provide good journalism. It just creates a bunch of right wing newspapers that like, you know, are not really interested in in providing good journalism to Canadians, not to say that the journalists working there are not doing their best in a really difficult situation. Right.
00:40:02.940And so I think that it's easy to take those kind of perspectives. It's much more difficult to say, listen, there is a serious problem with news media in Canada. We do need to address it. It's probably not the best way to do it to make these news media companies linked to these tech companies and create a direct stream of revenue from them.
00:40:25.840But that doesn't mean that the government is illegitimate in trying to set up some kind of way to regulate these companies or some way to address what's happening in the news media environment. It should just be done in a different way. So you're not creating these kind of really bad potential incentives as a result of it.
00:40:45.520And so that's more difficult to argue because it takes a longer amount of time than just saying government bad or meta bad. I would be more inclined to say meta bad and then try to expand on why there's more complex. But yeah, I think you can see how that happens.
00:41:01.700Thank God we are podcasters and, like, newsletter writers so that we have a little more space than, like, a tweet to boil this down.
00:41:10.040Listen, so I know that you're not, like, I think of Tech Won't Save Us and Disconnect Blog as, like, very future forward, often, like, you know, prophetic about what's next.
00:41:20.440I know you're not a fortune teller, but what do you think is on the horizon for Canada?
00:41:26.840And, like, what would you like to see as the future of news and media in the country?
00:41:31.660Yeah, so those are two different things, right?
00:41:33.660I think ultimately what's going to happen is that this framework is going to be put into place where the tech companies are going to have to pay the news publishers.
00:41:42.040I think it's entirely possible that Meta keeps news off of its platforms and just doesn't engage with this scheme.
00:41:50.080I think it's much more likely that Google finds some form of accommodation with the government so that they do still make agreements with the news publishers and pay them some degree of money to still have news on its platform because I think news is still more important to the Google search engine and the Google news product than news is to, you know, Facebook and Instagram, right?
00:42:13.720So I think that is ultimately what we're going to see happen. And, you know, there'll be some people angry about that. And I don't particularly like it. And it's not going to solve the problems in Canadian media. But, you know, that's that, right?
00:42:26.800I think if we were thinking kind of bigger picture about what I would want to see, I think that we can recognize that the business model of media makes absolutely no sense right now and is fundamentally broken.
00:42:40.160I would like to see things like maybe a tax on the revenue of Google and Facebook, like a tax on digital ad revenue that then goes into a fund that can fund journalism. And then maybe the government sets up some kind of funding mechanism that could maybe even have some degree of public input in order to publicly fund good investigative and local journalism, which is something that we're lacking in Canada right now because of the degree of cuts that have happened.
00:43:07.900And I think one thing that is important to remember, as I'm sure many of your listeners are in the United States, is that Canada does have a large public broadcaster called the CBC. And I think that the CBC is decently funded, but when you compare it to other public broadcasters in Europe and other parts of the world other than the United States, it's not funded nearly as well as some of those other ones.
00:43:32.400And I think that one kind of immediate way that we can start to heal the problems of journalism in Canada and kind of the news deserts that have arisen around the country is really to increase the budget of the CBC so that they can do more local reporting and more investigative journalism as the private media market has been really unable to provide those things.
00:43:56.660um you know there are other bright spots with like independent media and like um left-wing
00:44:03.140media that have been kind of getting started uh in canada but of course they always face funding
00:44:08.680challenges uh that are even worse in canada than the united states because the market is so much
00:44:14.140smaller right um so i think that ultimately because of the nature of the canadian media market and
00:44:20.080and just the way that canada works um that we do need some sort of like a public funding mechanism
00:44:26.440and a government solution if we're ever going to address the problems in Canadian media.
00:44:32.120The government is trying to solve that just by, you know, connecting news publishers to
00:44:37.500And I, you know, I'm worried that that's not going to produce what we actually want.
00:44:42.040But it looks like that's the direction we're headed for now.
00:44:46.400Ultimately, Facebook just does not care about any of us.
00:44:51.120The wildfires have already killed at least 11 people and displaced thousands.
00:44:55.560If Facebook were to bring back news to the platform, even temporarily, just to help mitigate the harm of this nightmare, they wouldn't even have to pay anything to do it because the law requiring Facebook to pay news publishers is not yet in effect.
00:45:09.700What Meta has decided to do in Canada really shows us that this is a platform that does not care about its users.
00:45:17.280It does not really give a damn about the people using the platform.
00:45:20.160You know, users of Facebook right now are being evacuated from their homes in places in Canada, are under threat from wildfires. They are finding workarounds to share information through the platforms that they are dependent on. Because let's be clear, you know, a lot of regular people do rely on Facebook and do still use Facebook.
00:45:41.220And I think it's very smug when I see kind of people who are more kind of techie and in the tech conversation saying like, why would people look at news on Facebook and stuff like that? Like these are not your Mastodon users. These are not the people going to seek out the decentralized alternatives to the web and stuff. These are people who signed up to Facebook like over a decade ago and are still using it even as a decline because that's where all their friends are. And even as it's gotten worse, like they haven't really gone anywhere else.
00:46:10.440And I don't think that they should be punished because that is how they use the web and that is how they've been taught to use the web. And so I think that, you know, we need to be more critical of Meta and of Facebook. We were doing that for a while and then everyone seemed to start to praise Mark Zuckerberg recently because he launched a Twitter competitor.
00:46:27.340um uh so you know i think that we need to keep up to kind of the um the critical uh views on this
00:46:36.640on this company because yes it's happening in canada right now and people in canada are being
00:46:41.220affected and meta doesn't care because it has what two or three billion more users that will
00:46:45.620look at the ads on its platform even if some of the canadian users die in wildfires um and so it
00:46:52.240doesn't care about that, but it's going to do this in other jurisdictions as well as places like
00:46:57.620California and New Zealand and, you know, other parts of the world try to move forward with
00:47:02.280something similar. Facebook does not care about you, does not care about anyone who uses the
00:47:06.340service. It only cares about its bottom line. And I think that we should recognize that much more
00:47:10.980because it's not just the case with Facebook, it's the case with many of these tech companies.
00:47:16.680And, you know, they've been kind of let off the hook with this stuff for a bit too long, I think.
00:47:46.240And that's why we've seen people sharing screenshots of news articles on Facebook so that their friends and family can see what is happening, can get the updates about evacuations and wildfires and things like that because they can't actually share news articles and Facebook is stopping them from doing that.
00:48:02.560So you see that people are finding ways around, you know, the kind of the barriers that Facebook has put up for them. And I'm sure that people will find other ways of getting information ultimately. But let's be clear that Facebook made this change very recently. And all of a sudden, you know, in the middle of a summer where a lot of people are facing difficulties across Canada, and certainly, you know, in other parts of the world, but Canada is where they shut off news.
00:48:28.980And so it's made it more difficult for those people to get kind of potentially life-saving information.
00:48:35.340And Facebook doesn't care about that, even though the law is not actually in effect and it would not be charged if it let people share news right now.
00:48:45.440Well, one thing I can say is that I will always put my faith in the resilience of people, everyday people, to find those workarounds, even as tech billionaires are trying to make it so much harder for them.
00:48:55.960They shouldn't have to do this, to be clear, but people are resilient and people are always going to find a way.
00:49:02.160It's the one thing I'll always believe in.
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00:49:56.460If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:50:02.100Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:50:10.780Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.