00:00:53.240and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:00:58.760I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.
00:01:02.380Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:01:09.920These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:01:13.740Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:21.360If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:01:27.100Pro 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.
00:01:35.740Each 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.
00:02:39.200Because AI is ruining college graduations, right, Mike?
00:02:43.260Yeah, it seems to be a common thing across graduations.
00:02:47.480I've read a bunch of stories about it now.
00:02:49.280I saw this video from Glendale Community College, their commencement, where the person running the commencement ceremony realized that a bunch of graduating students, their names had not been called.
00:03:01.180And she said, oh, well, it was a screw up because we're using a new AI system that glitched.
00:03:06.020So those graduates that did not get their names called just did not get to walk across the stage to get their diploma in front of their friends and family that were attending the ceremony.
00:03:15.400And there wasn't enough time to redo it.
00:03:18.180So the person running the graduation just said, sorry, that's AI.
00:03:40.540I mean, this is not to even get off topic from the first banter bit, but it reminds me of, I need to speak carefully because I don't want to put anybody on blast.
00:03:49.640Nobody that I work with in putting this show together.
00:03:52.700This is not a story about anybody who has anything to do with there are no girls on the internet.
00:03:56.540But in another part of my life, people are very excited about AI. And somebody said, oh, I'm having Claude do this task that usually I have to do every day to start the day. And I said, oh, how is it working? And they were like, well, I have to spend a lot of time correcting it and actually more time than it probably would have taken.
00:04:18.120But Claude did it. And everybody was so impressed. And I was kind of quietly the grumbly person
00:04:24.500thinking, if it actually took you more time to fix what Claude messed up, did it really save you
00:04:30.780any time? And why are we applauding it? Just because they figured out a way to have AI do it?
00:04:34.640Like, are we all listening to ourselves? In any event, Mike, your point is taken of why is it
00:04:40.440better to have AI read the names than just having somebody at the college read the names?
00:04:45.720Yeah, you got me. I feel like we have reading names off of a list technology down. Like,
00:04:52.580we don't need continued innovation in this area.
00:04:56.160Yes. And even beyond reading names from lists, a handful of people were also booed at college
00:05:03.060graduations for bringing up AI in their speech. At University of Central Florida, a real estate
00:05:09.440executive, got booed after calling AI the next industrial revolution. During a speech to arts
00:05:15.640and humanities graduates, which, yeah, unsurprising, that was not an audience that wanted to hear about
00:05:21.360AI, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was really booed at University of Arizona at their commencement
00:05:28.160on May 15th when he said, quote, the question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will.
00:05:33.880The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence. Steve Borchetta,
00:05:37.740who is not a name that I knew before reporting this story, but he started Big Machine Records,
00:05:44.840which I think at one point was Taylor Swift's record label. He might have actually been the
00:05:48.780person who, quote, discovered Taylor Swift, but don't quote me on that. He was giving a speech
00:05:53.580at Middle Tennessee State University where he said, we are the agents of change and the agents
00:05:58.620of next, and this industry will change on you in a heartbeat. It has already changed more in the
00:06:03.100last 10 years than in the 50 years prior. AI is rewriting production as we sit here. So when the
00:06:09.140graduates all booed, he spoke over the boos and said, hey, like I said, you can hear me now or
00:06:17.500pay me later. As they continued to boo, he said, then do something about it. It's a tool. Make it
00:06:23.880work for you. Oh, man. I love the like getting hostile with the crowd. Like fighting back.
00:06:33.100Yeah. So first of all, I kind of will give it to him that he was like, I'm going down with a ship on this one. He's giving it to him like Rick Sanchez from Rick and Morty style. Your boos mean nothing to me.
00:06:50.120Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he probably thinks he's hot shit and he's getting booed by a bunch of college kids, a bunch of brokies.0.88
00:06:57.480Yes. The reviews are in. College students do not want to hear about AI at their commencement. I do think there is a connotation that all college kids are just using chat GPT to do all their work. But young people are not that into AI, even as they use AI.1.00
00:07:17.920I was looking at this poll from Gallup, the Walton Family Foundation, and GSV Ventures, which is a venture capital firm that works in education technology.
00:07:27.000The poll found that the percentage of respondents aged 14 to 29 who said that they felt hopeful about AI declined sharply since last year, down to 18 percent from 27.
00:07:37.840Young adult excitement about AI also dropped.
00:07:40.800Nearly a third of the respondents said that AI technology made them feel angry.
00:07:45.660So that poll really aligns with the boos that are being lobbed out at these commencement speakers who use their platform and their time to speak to champion AI.
00:07:59.820It does. And it's notable that neither of those questions suggested that people aren't necessarily using AI, right?
00:08:07.380I would guess that a lot of those graduating students who were doing the booing probably do use AI, some of them probably like all the time. But that doesn't mean that they want to hear about it in their graduation speech, right? Like they're graduating from college about to go into the world as adults and make their way.
00:08:28.280And if the main thing that commencement speakers are offering to them is the opportunity to not get left behind by some technology that threatens to grind them into dust, it's hard to imagine a less inspiring message.
00:08:42.620Yes. And read the room. They're graduating into a pretty dismal economic situation, a pretty dismal job market. Do you think they want to, after their accomplishment of graduating college, do you think they want to sit here and listen to you talk about how great the technology is that is potentially making it harder for them to find a job that is making the landscape in which they are graduating into more difficult for them economically?
00:09:07.800like they're like all of that is happening and you expect me to applaud it at that graduation
00:09:13.580speech on top of it i can understand why these young people are angry also here's my thing at
00:09:19.680this point we have already seen these speakers be booed for mentioning ai like the eric schmidt
00:09:27.680speech happened this week a full week after that real estate person was booed in florida at this
00:09:35.960point why mention ai at all the reviews are in people don't like it yeah people don't like it
00:09:42.520they don't want to hear about it not in something like that it takes me back to an earlier perhaps
00:09:48.560simpler time when people were booing at a graduation back in 2015 do you remember the
00:09:54.180incident where i shouldn't laugh but it really tickled me oh no i know exactly what you're
00:09:59.680Who's leaving? All the black people.1.00
00:10:03.960I've never seen, if y'all have not, if y'all remember that, I can't even do it justice.0.82
00:10:25.620Basically, the graduation ceremony gets messed up.0.97
00:10:28.780The woman who is white, who is doing the ceremony, comes back on to try to restore order because they're like, oh, the ceremony's been messed up.
00:10:35.700This was human error, by the way, because this is back in 2015.0.59
00:10:38.440As like a kid is trying to give a speech after the graduation ceremony should have ended, people, I guess, are getting up.
00:10:45.120They're like, we're not listening to this speech.
00:12:21.880If anybody is from Stone Mountain, Georgia, and you know about the 2015 graduation ceremony at TNT Academy, you know, Principal Nancy Gordick, let me know because I need a follow up.
00:13:42.840If you don't fuck my brains out tonight, I'm going to sabotage your promotion, things like that.1.00
00:13:47.480He also claimed that she drugged him, made racist comments, called him a slur, and essentially, according to the lawsuit, made him her sex slave.1.00
00:13:57.060That's a direct phrase from the suit.0.96
00:14:00.160The way that the suit describes the allegations, it's almost sort of written like pornography.
00:14:10.000At one point, the lawsuit claims that she told him, does your Asian wife have these cannons while exposing her breasts?0.88
00:14:19.260The way that it's written is full of very salacious details.
00:14:25.460So when I first saw this story, it was because all of these manosphere adjacent big accounts were on it, like really, really sharing it deeply.
00:14:34.960And it makes sense why they would because it sounded very much like an example of a man being sexually abused by a woman and then perhaps not being taken seriously.
00:14:47.360I want to be super clear here. Obviously, men can be sexually victimized by anyone. You know, anyone can sexually victimize anyone. When we talk about it, I'm often talking about people who are not men, but men can absolutely be victims and survivors of sexual violence.
00:15:05.600And I also want to be clear that, you know, I'm not a lawyer. I don't have any kind of inside information here. If I sound like I'm speaking about it very carefully, it's because I am. I don't want to make it seem like I know for certain what's happening because I don't. And so I'm just trying to be very careful.
00:15:29.520Well, part of it is just the way this story has been written about is so salacious.
00:15:37.540For instance, before any of this information was verified or, you know, anybody had their day in court, I saw AI generated videos and images that showed these two JPMorgan employees together.
00:15:52.720I saw a video on X that purported to show them like sipping wine, like being cuddled up in a cafe and saying, oh, my God, it really happened.
00:16:02.960These videos got millions of views, even though they're AI generated, they're not real.
00:16:08.600So why I'm being really careful is that, in my opinion, it does seem like this case is very suspicious.
00:16:20.640Not suspicious in the way that, you know, a woman would never sexually abuse a man,
00:16:26.760so that's why this case is suspicious.
00:16:29.100For instance, the lawsuit was pulled from the court records for corrections.
00:16:34.600J.P. Morgan said that the claims had no merit after doing an internal investigation.
00:16:39.320To be clear, I don't put a lot of merit into internal investigations,
00:16:43.960like J.P. Morgan saying, oh, we looked into it and turns out nothing happened that was untoward.
00:16:50.760Just earlier this week, we were talking about eBay's internal investigation into the stalking incident with the Steiners, right?0.96
00:16:57.620An internal investigation is designed to protect the company.
00:17:01.100Yes, and that eBay story is a great example of the fact that, like, you really can't trust companies and corporations.
00:17:08.660They will do a lot. They will go to extremes to protect themselves.
00:17:12.940And so I'm not one to take J.P. Morgan at their word because they've done an investigation and they say it's case closed.
00:17:20.520Her lawyers denied everything, saying that she never dated this individual, never had a sexual or romantic encounter with him of any kind, never gave him drugs.
00:17:30.940In the investigation, one of the things that came out was that in the suit, it said that she told him that, oh, if you don't have sex with me, you won't get your promotion.
00:17:40.440but that in the structure of J.P. Morgan, he did not report to her.
00:17:44.460Like, she had no control over his compensation.
00:17:46.960They didn't report to the same people.
00:18:01.740Again, that's why I'm trying to be cautious in talking about this.1.00
00:18:05.600But I will say the way that this woman is being digitally dragged through the mud, I have seen so much AI generated garbage that is like very sexualizing about her.0.99
00:18:19.740I've seen AI generated images that purport to show her JP Morgan headshot, but they're, you know, they've been digitally edited so that they show like a lot of cleavage.
00:18:32.680So the point that they're trying to make, obviously, is that, oh, this woman in her professional headshot was like showing her cleavage, which is not that the images are fake. And so I say this to say they're going to have their day in court. And so, you know, we'll know more.
00:18:46.400Even still, the way that big manosphere adjacent accounts have jumped on this case and used it as an excuse to sexually harass this woman is despicable.
00:18:59.600But I think that's kind of where we are now. Like, I was listening to the podcast Good Noticings when this case first came out, and they put it very well that these kind of anti-feminist manosphere accounts get to essentially use AI to sexually harass a woman and feel like they have the moral high ground to do so because this woman has been accused of sexually abusing a man.
00:19:26.660And so they get to feel like, oh, we're doing, like, men's rape survivor activism by digitally harassing this woman when we don't even know the truth yet.
00:20:22.080Specifically, he claimed that he was sexually assaulted,0.90
00:20:25.000drugged, and raped by that supervisor, too.
00:20:27.840In addition to that, this is a little bit of a strange thing.0.94
00:20:31.000Her team also claims that he once falsely claimed
00:20:34.860that his father had died in order to obtain bereavement leave
00:20:38.600when his father was and still is alive.
00:20:42.260So it sounds like her legal team is just saying,
00:20:44.180like, oh, this is a person who fabricates stories in the workplace.
00:20:49.340Also interesting is that the New York Times reported that after he filed an internal complaint at J.P. Morgan last May, he was put on paid leave and then later offered $1 million in a settlement, which was roughly two years of his salary.
00:21:05.280J.P. Morgan says that that offer was made to avoid litigation and to protect an employee facing reputational harm.
00:21:12.260But his attorney pushes back on that framing, saying, quote, in my 30 year plus career as an employment litigator, I have never had an employer defendant make such a substantial offer if he truly believed the allegations have no merit.
00:21:26.600So what her attorneys are alleging is that essentially this guy is an extortionist and that he was trying to extort both J.P. Morgan and other previous employers out of money by saying, hey, I will say this happened if you don't pay me off.
00:21:43.540Which, to connect it back to the manosphere, is an accusation that is often thrown against women who complain of harassment or sexual assault in the workplace.
00:21:57.060Yeah, they really nailed it very well on the Good Noticings podcast that I think that the reason why the manosphere seized on this like they did was because either outcome is kind of a win for manosphere types, right?1.00
00:22:10.960Either A, this is an example of a woman sexually abusing a man and the man not being believed and that's why feminists are bad.0.98
00:22:20.900if this guy is not telling the truth,1.00
00:22:24.200well, then it's an example of false accusations
00:22:38.020to sexually harass this woman off of the internet.0.82
00:22:41.560I should also say that his side is not backing down.
00:22:44.700His spokesperson responded to her countersuit saying,
00:22:48.420defamation requires the statement to be false,
00:22:50.900Truth is an absolute defense. His statements are true. This will be proven in a court of law.
00:22:56.320A preliminary hearing is scheduled for May 26, so this is far from over.
00:23:01.240And again, I'm trying to be sort of careful about how I speak about this because I don't know what I mean.
00:23:08.040I have I have my opinion about what I think happened, but I don't know for sure.
00:23:11.800And so I don't want to be saying definitively this is what happened because I genuinely don't know.
00:23:18.380But whatever the court decides, whatever the truth turns out to be, the AI harassment machine and the internet and the manosphere did not wait to find out. And it's concerning to me how they're turning around the language that people who care about survivors and sexual violence will say, like, oh, we should believe victims and say, oh, well, why aren't people believing this guy?
00:23:43.680And I just hate how disingenuous the conversation is online. And I just hate how easily we have made it to smear and digitally harass people like this. In her court filings, she describes her daily life as, quote, a daily living nightmare, citing severe harm to reputation, career, relationships, and emotional well-being in what she calls an increasingly permanent digital environment.
00:24:11.300And I'm not saying anybody's name on purpose here because like she's right. Like she's right that when you Google her, you know, and like part of it is like, OK, well, now you felt a countersuit. So like it is part of the public record. But when you Google her from now on, this is what will come up. Like whether or not it turns out to be the truth or not, I don't think that she's wrong that we do live in an increasingly permanent digital environment.
00:24:38.600And when I searched her name on X, all I saw was essentially AI-generated pornography about her.
00:25:28.640pay credit visit bell.ca for details and to check availability bell connection is everything run a
00:25:34.760business and not thinking about podcasting think again more americans listen to podcasts than ad
00:25:40.260supported streaming music from spotify and pandora and as the number one podcaster iheart's twice as
00:25:45.640large as the next two combined so whatever your customers listen to they'll hear your message
00:25:50.080plus only iheart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio think podcasting
00:25:55.400can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at
00:26:00.720iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com. If your bookshelf and your for you page are
00:26:06.920equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast
00:26:13.800that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives,
00:26:18.280and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:26:23.180I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:26:30.300I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.
00:26:33.820From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:26:39.820It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
00:26:47.300Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.
00:26:56.900Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:28:11.020so let's talk about the take it down act because i have been a little bit hesitant to do
00:28:18.420too deep of a dive into specific pieces of tech policy unless it's tech policy that i feel is
00:28:24.960objectively and obviously horrible and there is a lot of legislation like that out there
00:28:29.880such as legislation to age gate the internet in specific ways that's not the kind of thing that
00:28:34.660I support, and I'll talk about it all day. But mostly why I kind of am a bit hesitant to get
00:28:42.560into policy is that I'm not a policy professional. And the times when I did work with platforms to
00:28:48.620design and recommend and advocate for policy changes, not laws, like their internal policies,
00:28:55.420I really saw firsthand how complex policy can be when you're talking about the internet.
00:29:01.080We would run into situations where you would advocate for one policy thinking, oh, this is going to alleviate harm, but that policy would actually end up creating harm for a group that you had not fully considered.
00:29:12.780And so my work was a lot of that kind of thing and like working in coalition and talking to people and talking to different marginalized communities about policies that they wanted to see enacted.
00:29:24.240It was very complicated work. But from doing some of that work, it made me see like actual legal tech policy as sort of above my pay grade. I have opinions about them, but for the most part, I think we should listen to people who are smarter about actual law and policy than I am.
00:29:45.260However, I do want folks who listen to the podcast to feel informed. And so part of that is having conversations about policy. As a side question, I actually would want to know if listeners want more discussion on policy.
00:30:01.360Again, it comes up sometimes, but I try to not get too deep into it.
00:30:05.880I have my opinions, but there are sometimes situations where more opinions from people who are not policy professionals are not what's going to help people understand the situation more clearly, if that makes sense.
00:30:19.840So, like, I'm just very aware of that.
00:30:22.040But if folks want more of my take on policy, I'd be happy to give it.
00:30:26.560I just don't want to be the person that's like, here's my uninformed opinion.
00:31:52.580It had multiple co-sponsors from both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
00:31:55.740It has two main components. One, a criminal prohibition on sharing non-consensual intimate images, or NCII, real or AI-generated, which many states had already addressed through their own state laws.
00:32:10.740Which, by the way, separately, remember when the Trump administration was trying to curb states' abilities to put forth any of their own state-level laws on AI?
00:32:20.380Oh, yeah. They really love power and having a monopoly over it.
00:32:26.940The second part of the Take It Down Act is a broader takedown requirement, and that's the piece that kicked in this week on May 19th, 2026, a year after the law was signed by Trump.
00:32:39.000So that means, as of this week, under that provision, online platforms must remove flagged content within 48 hours, or they could face penalties.
00:32:49.560The Verge reported that Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson sent letters to over a dozen tech companies ahead of the deadline.
00:32:55.780A list that included Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Automatic, Fumble, Discord, Match Group, Meta, Microsoft, Pinterest, SmugMug, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, and X.
00:33:06.700It told platforms that they needed to offer users an easy takedown request process and remove offending content within 48 hours, as well as any known identical copies.
00:33:17.020The FTC, which is the agency tasked with enforcing the law, reminded companies that violating it could result in civil penalties of more than $53,000 per violation.
00:33:29.300All of the big social media platforms all supported this bill.
00:33:34.120Major platforms including Meta, Microsoft, Google, TikTok, and Snap all supported it and all expressed confidence that they could and would comply.
00:33:43.300I know what you're thinking. How about Elon Musk?
00:33:47.020Well, even X supported the Take It Down Act.
00:33:50.700So this is my issue with a lot of tech legislation in general.
00:33:55.460I have no trouble believing that this law will probably do some good,
00:34:00.360that people will get their non-consensual intimate imagery taken down,
00:34:06.960And I guess I don't want to sound like a Debbie Downer here,
00:34:11.340But I am just incredibly suspicious of this kind of legislation. So I'm not fully ready to say this is a definite win for Internet safety. I have some concerns about the legislation. I would welcome the thoughts of listeners and how this is landing for people.
00:34:34.620But there are a few issues that I take with this legislation. One is that the way this legislation works still puts quite a bit of the onus on the victims to find the offending content or image, to report it to the platforms, to really do the work of getting this taken down.
00:34:55.960Mind you, as we saw earlier this year when Grok was being used to flood X with non-consensual intimate imagery, a lot of that imagery was of children, youth, teenagers.
00:35:06.960And so I don't think it is a reasonable dynamic to expect teens to be doing the work of trying to get platforms to take this kind of garbage down.0.66
00:35:20.200It should be on the platforms to make sure that garbage like this is not on the platforms.
00:35:24.760And I don't really love the dynamic that says, okay, like a high school girl is now tasked for doing the job of people like Elon Musk for him. These platforms have people who are paid to keep the platforms free of illegal offending content.
00:35:42.700And the fact that a high school girl would be taking it upon herself to have to do the work of the platforms for them doesn't sit right with me.
00:35:50.280So that's, again, I'm happy that that creates some kind of a mechanism for that to be done, whether or not that, you know, the jury is out on whether or not this will be a reasonable mechanism to actually do that.
00:36:01.920The fact that we had no requirement to have a mechanism to easily report this kind of content is absurd.
00:36:09.620And as you mentioned, a lot of states already have laws on the books prohibiting and making criminally illegal non-consensual intimate imagery. Both minors and adults already had some form of legal recourse.
00:36:26.260And I think that's one of the big criticisms of the take it down law is people arguing that it's not necessary because it is just further criminalizing something that in many cases is already criminalized.
00:36:41.320I've also seen supporters of it argue that it opens up some additional opportunities for victims to seek recourse, and the fact that it is a single federal law creates opportunities for victims to pursue violations that cross state or country lines.
00:37:01.800But particularly in the case that you just described of minors, that is content that is already criminal in, like, multiple different ways, is my understanding.
00:37:12.440Yeah, it is criminal in multiple different ways.
00:37:15.100And the European Commission said that the stuff that was being generated by Grok on X, they deemed that unlawful.
00:37:23.500And yet, when Elon Musk was summoned by French investigators about this, quote, unlawful content, that's not me saying that, that's the European Commission saying that, the American Department of Justice said that he didn't have to go and that he was being unfairly politically persecuted and that they were going to have his back if he decided to not show up for this investigation.
00:37:50.740It's hard to talk about because we're talking about stuff that already is illegal.
00:37:55.300And yet, if that illegality is not really being meaningfully enforced, what does that really mean?
00:38:01.620I'm concerned about the fact that the FTC is the body that would be enforcing all of this.
00:38:09.460Back when we were first having a conversation about Grok being used to generate these non-consensual images,
00:38:14.920friend of the show, Kat Tenbarge, had a great piece at her outlet, Spitfire News, where she
00:38:20.320spoke to Dr. Marianne Franks, who drafted the template for several laws against non-consensual
00:38:26.100distribution of intimate imagery, who said, the FTC has made it clear that they're fighting for
00:38:31.440Trump. It's actually never going to be used against the very players who are the worst in
00:38:36.160this system. X is going to continue to be one of the worst offenders and probably one of the
00:38:41.680pioneers of horrible ways to hurt women. Marianne Franks was saying this before this provision was1.00
00:38:47.420enacted with the Take It Down Act. She spoke to The Verge about this more recently and basically
00:38:53.520said that she wondered if the reason why the platforms were supporting this legislation
00:38:58.940is because they knew that it was never actually going to be applied to them in the first place.
00:39:03.840So why wouldn't they, you know, get some good PR points by being seen publicly supporting it?
00:39:11.000She also made another good point, which I think to me seems pretty obvious, that this law could be set up to selectively be applied to platforms that don't play ball with the administration.
00:39:26.140I think what is the worst thing that can happen is it turns out to be a paper tiger against the companies that are actually doing the worst and turns out to be a way to penalize and to actually truly go after unpopular platforms and to censor speech.
00:39:39.380She goes on to say that that speech could include things like LGBTQ expression, especially as gender-affirming care for trans youth is already currently being targeted by this FTC.
00:39:51.100Quote, I'm very worried about that being used as a pretext to crack down even further on either consensually sexually explicit material or specifically on educational materials for kids who are exploring their gender identity or exploring their sexual orientation.
00:40:04.620And The Verge reports that even if a court decides that that is not within the scope of this law, it would send a very clear message to the platforms about how this administration, including the FTC, expects them to moderate.
00:40:17.200And we don't even really have to sort of glean this because Trump more or less said this explicitly that he intended to use the Take It Down Act himself, potentially as a way to crack down on his perceived political enemies.
00:40:33.520At the State of the Union in 2025, when talking about the Take It Down Act, he said, quote,
00:40:38.460I'm going to use that bill for myself because nobody gets treated worse than I do online.
00:40:43.460At the signing ceremony for the Take It Down Act, then ex-CEO Linda Yaccarino, remember her?
00:40:50.560She was there at the signing, and the Trump administration praised her for doing a great job.
00:40:56.020And so it's hard for me not to sort of see the signals of which this could easily be just being used to give Trump allies like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg a past and perceived enemies, this being used to crack down on them.
00:41:13.280I am of the belief that when Trump says things, I know he lies a lot, but I don't like when people say, oh, he just says that, he's not going to really do that.
00:41:19.900When people show you who they are, believe them.
00:41:21.740Like, that's an axiom that I find useful when dealing with Trump.
00:41:25.060While there is every reason to believe that the Trump administration absolutely will exploit this law to enrich its buddies and pursue its perceived enemies and abuse it in that way, the National Association of Attorneys General also points out that there is a huge opportunity for abuse of this law by just random people on the Internet.
00:41:48.920Others have pointed this out as well, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that the law requires platforms to take down reported violations within 48 hours, but offers platforms very little protection for situations where something is reported as a violation fraudulently, where no real violation has occurred.
00:42:10.360So the way the law is set up, it really incentivizes platforms to just take everything down immediately when it is reported without any sort of investigation into whether it truly is a violation or not.
00:42:24.980And I think there is huge concern about that being abused.
00:42:29.560And it's not even a question of if, right?
00:42:31.760It's a question of when both of those organizations, the National Association of Attorneys General and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and I assume many others, have compared the Take It Down Act to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which many of our listeners will be familiar with, is a 1998 law that protects against copyright violations.
00:42:53.300And it's often criticized, often fairly, in my opinion. We've criticized it many times on this podcast. But in this regard, the DMCA actually has stronger protections against that kind of fraudulent reporting abuse than the Take It Down Act has, which is a huge concern and speculatively is probably one that is going to have to be fixed in the future.
00:49:23.840When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months.
00:49:29.080I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:49:36.080I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files.
00:49:39.780I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything.
00:49:47.980Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable.
00:49:52.260I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.
00:49:56.860I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:50:04.480They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:50:08.380But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:50:11.820They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:50:15.460Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:50:23.240If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:50:30.120This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:50:42.300I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:50:49.420I'm going to have to look up this story.
00:50:52.560From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:50:58.960It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
00:51:06.880Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.
00:51:16.040Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:53:47.740Well, the analogous to black people is veterans and farmers0.97
00:53:51.940because none of those people are black, but they are.1.00
00:53:54.900What I'm saying is they've tried to create a very stupid racial binary1.00
00:53:58.840where no real binary exists, where you gave black people something.1.00
00:54:04.140Now you've got to give white people something.1.00
00:54:05.780And to translate that into policy, it's going to be veterans and farmers because the Trump administration is really stupid.0.99
00:54:12.480So they don't know that all veterans and all veterans and all farmers and all manufacturers are not uniformly all white people.0.99
00:54:21.960They think that they are, but that's actually not correct.
00:54:25.240The thing that gets me about this is that it's so simplistic.
00:54:28.700It assumes the world works in this tit-for-tat way when it just doesn't.
00:54:34.440And I know that on paper, some people might say this is a win for PayPal, and financially it sort of is. They don't have to pay any kind of cash penalty. The Department of Justice made no actual finding that PayPal broke the law. So to be clear, the DOJ does not say PayPal broke the law or did anything wrong. PayPal explicitly denies any liability.
00:54:54.940But we should also be clear what happened here, which is that the company voluntarily created a program to help close the racial wealth gap, which is a real thing that exists in this country.
00:55:05.860And the federal government came after them for it.
00:55:11.680They just got pressured and investigated until finally they were like, OK, we'll kill the program and replace it with something that helps veterans and farmers.
00:55:20.040So to me, even though it's kind of a legal victory for PayPal, it's also very clearly a shakedown.
00:55:28.540And the Trump administration is basically saying that acting attorney general Todd Blanche, who is worth mentioning, is Trump's former personal attorney, celebrated this settlement with a statement saying, quote,
00:55:39.920quote, American corporations are on notice. You will face our aggressive enforcement if you use
00:55:45.240race or national origin to discriminate against qualified Americans, which, come on now, what he
00:55:51.960means is white Americans, because in their understanding of the United States, the only
00:55:56.280people who are ever qualified are white people. The fact that black people or non-white people0.79
00:56:01.500or women would get anything is giving something, taking something away from qualified Americans,0.99
00:56:48.320Well, according to the mother of his child, Ashley St. Clair,
00:56:52.060possibly rigging the 2024 presidential election, question mark?
00:56:56.200We have covered Ashley St. Clair before.1.00
00:56:58.420She's that right-wing influencer who had a baby with Elon Musk,1.00
00:57:02.260turned down a $15 million NDA offer,1.00
00:57:04.760and has been in a nasty custody battle with him ever since.
00:57:07.740We did an episode about her after she apologized for her past comments about trans people, and the episode was really about whether or not folks should buy that apology.
00:57:17.380Well, she's back, and she's saying that Elon Musk maybe sort of rigged the election.
00:57:23.560On a TikTok video that she posted this week, she says that one night she and Elon were alone together, and he told her that he had lasers in space ready to create what he called, quote,
00:57:35.460an anomaly in the Matrix during the 2024 election.
00:57:40.100She says that immediately she told him,
01:05:13.240So these police officers said that they felt shocked and embarrassed when they found a video of them using the bathroom had been posted on YouTube for the world to see.0.99
01:05:22.220No shit they felt embarrassed about that.0.99
01:05:25.080I don't know. What are they trying to hide? Are they trying to do some grooming in there?0.99
01:05:28.840so this guy was trying to defend himself
01:08:40.240Larry is welcome on the show anytime, but Larry should start a podcast.
01:08:44.100If you are someone who is, like, lighten up the Facebook comments over politics, do it in front of a microphone and make it your job, you know?
01:08:53.080So it sounds like, yes, Larry knew exactly what he was doing, like, spreading progressive cantankerism on Facebook.
01:10:07.380So Larry told that officer that he was not going to take that post down.
01:10:11.440And that was that, or so Larry thought, because the cops came back later that night and arrested him.
01:10:17.820He was charged under a Tennessee law, making it a felony to threaten violence against a school and hit with a $2 million bail he could not afford.
01:10:26.640So he sat in a Perry County jail for 37 days before the charge was eventually dropped.
01:10:34.120Importantly, the whole thing was an obvious setup.
01:10:36.820Sheriff Weems later admitted on a TV interview that he and his investigators knew that that meme was referencing the Iowa school shooting because it was obvious and that it had nothing to do with anything local to Perry County.
01:10:49.140But he claimed that he pushed for the arrest anyway to calm fears in the community because the post had created a panic and created hysteria.
01:10:58.540But Larry's lawsuit said that there was no evidence of any community hysteria to speak of.
01:11:04.460Not nary one concerned citizen had flagged the post to police.
01:11:08.780The local school district had, quote, no records at all relating to Larry or his Facebook post.
01:11:15.180And none of the commenters on the actual Facebook thread had said anything about having interpreted his message as a threat.
01:11:22.580So Sheriff Weems just made up an excuse and lied about it.
01:11:26.740It sounds like he had a boner for Charlie Kirk and used his authority as an agent of the state to squash free speech.
01:15:25.620Larry, his attorneys did send us a statement back when he was first arrested, which is why we ended up covering this case and why it was on my radar in the first place.
01:15:34.440So, yeah, Larry, you don't know me, but you're an official friend of the show.