Meta RayBans Let Creeps Record Women; Flock’s False Accusation; China's New Influencer Law; Nudify App Ecosystem; Librarian Protests Censorship on GoodReads – NEWS ROUNDUP!
00:00:49.880If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:00:55.280Pro 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.
00:01:03.960Each 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.
00:02:14.760And this is another installment of our weekly news roundup where we dig into all the stories online that you might have missed so you don't have to.
00:02:55.740Yeah, there's just been like a steady improvement in AI generated videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti over the past several years.
00:03:05.660But I couldn't find any, you know, definitive or even speculative information about why.
00:03:13.820Oh, I can I can answer this for you. So we've you're right. We have come a really long way on the Will Smith Spaghetti Eating Index because back in 2023, somebody shared an AI generated video titled Will Smith Eating Spaghetti on the Stable Diffusion subreddit.
00:03:30.520And they had made this video using Model Scope's text-to-video tool.
00:03:35.680This was back in 2023, which I know doesn't sound that long ago.
00:18:22.240You know, they've got a whole ecosystem built around disrespecting privacy and just letting harms run wild up until the point where they start to get pushback on it.
00:29:03.580But she was like, did the police just use flock to see that I happened to drive to the same town where somebody happened to have had a package stolen and decided that because I was in that town that I did it?
00:29:16.460It does raise questions like that police officer who came to her house who said 100 percent, it's a lock.
00:29:25.200Clearly, it wasn't like what made him think that was it really just that that flock said that she was in the town?
00:29:32.640So curious, and I guess we'll probably never know.
00:29:36.400Well, the Colorado Sun asked the police about this.
00:29:39.420They were like, basically, what happened here?
00:29:42.440The Chief of Police told the Colorado Sun that Block used his cameras to identify stolen vehicles, stolen license plates, any wanted subjects that enter town, or follow up investigations.
00:29:52.320Quote, we can't see people inside the car.
00:29:56.100If we have a crime, we'll go back and look at the cameras and see who is in town at the time of the crime.
00:30:02.640So it does kind of just sound like this is a tool that police are relying on to be like, oh, who was in town when this crime happened?
00:30:11.380And it just doesn't sound like more surveillance in this instance is actually leading to crimes being solved.
00:30:18.900I think, if anything, it is leading police to say, oh, this person was here. It was probably them.
00:30:24.040This is something that we see pretty often that people really have like an outsized level of confidence in results that they get from a computer, like this belief that if a software system says something, that it has to be true.
00:30:41.060And I wonder if that's what's going on here, that they just have way too much faith and confidence in Flock to be tracking every single person who's coming and going into that town to the detriment of reasonable skepticism that maybe there's more to the story than the one person whose car was driving through their little town.
00:31:09.380Yes. And I would take that further and say that I think it is with intention. I think that when power systems, when the state uses computer systems and technology systems like Block, it absolves them of having to do any investigative work or the accountability of being wrong.
00:31:28.500because you can just say, oh, well, it was the computer.
00:31:45.000at the police department or even an apology.
00:31:47.840And it just, I know I've said this before,
00:31:49.640but it reminds me of that IBM page from like the 70s.
00:31:53.720A computer can never be held accountable.
00:31:55.480Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.0.97
00:31:57.620I think that the police are with intention outsourcing this kind of police work to technology and surveillance tools like block precisely because it means that they do not have to be held accountable as the human police when they fuck up as bad as this.0.59
00:32:14.500Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. It's a way it's like a backdoor way to reduce their own accountability. The weird thing about it is, though, that like it's not like that accountability then gets transferred to the software company and just kind of evaporates into the air. And there is no accountability.
00:32:34.260She didn't even get an apology. I mean, we'll put the piece in the show notes, obviously, but she describes sleepless nights and wondering if her finance job was going to be coming to an end because of this accusation, this completely unfounded accusation.
00:32:52.920And they did not even give her an apology.
00:33:20.340You know, she said that she basically had to exonerate herself.
00:33:23.860And my question is, what would have happened if Christiana was not the kind of person who was able to spend so much time and her own expense compiling so much proof to illustrate that she was innocent?
00:33:35.540Like, I'm happy that she beat these charges, but she only did that through out surveilling the surveillance.
00:33:41.620And I think if we're at the point where you need a tailor's receipt and your own car's dash cam footage and all of this just to prove that you didn't steal a package worth less than $25, maybe this level of surveillance is not actually keeping anybody safer or deterring crime.
00:33:58.100Maybe this is not actually the future that we want.
00:34:00.500And meanwhile, there's still somebody out there stealing packages.
00:34:04.080The real package thief is still out there, people.
00:34:06.500Okay, so speaking of accountability, we were talking before we got on the mic about this new law in China regulating influencers.
00:34:15.580So there's this new law where if influencers or contact creators want to make content online about specific regulated topics, they will need to provide some kind of education or training in those areas.
00:34:26.960So this new law requires social media influencers to hold verified qualifications before discussing medicine, law, education, or finance, and it's aimed at curbing misinformation.
00:34:41.320Well, it'll be up to platforms like the Chinese version of TikTok, which is Douyin or Weibo, and beliebly, to verify content creators' credentials before allowing that content to be posted.
00:34:54.580Content creators, if they want to talk about these specific regulated topics, they will
00:34:59.120need credentials like degrees, certifications, or professional license in those topics.
00:35:05.020It's actually a pretty wide-ranging set of new laws.
00:35:08.520The Cyberspace Administration of China, which is the Chinese government agency responsible
00:35:12.600for regulating and overseeing the country's internet, online content, and data security,
00:35:16.680has also implemented some new regulations on social media advertising and promotions.
00:35:20.500Under these new laws, any campaign for medical products, supplements, and health foods will now be prohibited unless it is clearly defined as such to prevent misleading content disguised as educational material.
00:35:34.320So basically you can't just say, oh, this is just educational information and actually it is a campaign for a medical supplement that I want you to buy.
00:35:43.700Influencers will also have to disclose sources for studies or note when content is AI generated under this new legislation.
00:36:05.140You know, it's obviously scary to be like regulating speech, but also what we're doing in this country is like not working at all right now.
00:36:19.540Like the Internet is just filled with medical misinformation, which I, you know, know a little bit of something about enough to be like, yeah, this is a really bad day of affairs.
00:36:33.420I can only imagine, like, what were the other areas, legal, education, and finance information.
00:36:40.720I can only imagine that there's, it's equally bad in those domains as well.
00:36:46.260So there's, and it's not just that there's some bad information out there, but, like, our social media platforms are designed to amplify and spread and replicate that misinformation.
00:37:01.500So, like, it's very bad. And I'm open to ideas about, like, trying to rein that in in some way. And so there's something appealing about some laws to rein it in. And I kind of think that, like, in this country, we do need some laws to rein that in.
00:37:22.740But it's also pretty scary because if you think about the administration in charge right now, what would it look like for them to have the final say in what kind of medical information is allowed to be shared and not, right?
00:37:36.420Like they're spewing misinformation from the White House, from the head of HHS.
00:37:48.180You really said it. I mean, on the one hand, I want to be clear that I'm skeptical about this because it feels like censorship to me. And also part of it's a real love hate thing that I have with social media is that the democratization of media where having a platform or having a voice is not gatekept like it is in traditional media.
00:38:10.040that is something that i love it is it is what has driven me to being a podcaster but it also
00:38:16.140i kind of hate it because that means anybody can just get a microphone and a ring light and just
00:38:21.840say whatever they want and yeah so i i want to be clear that i'm skeptical of this but like you
00:38:27.660obviously what we the system that we have the united states is not working um what's funny to
00:38:34.540me is so rfk jr the head of hhs he has a law degree he doesn't have any kind of medical degree
00:38:42.480would he not it would he not be able to make content or you know commentary about health
00:38:50.680advice or medical advice if this law were in the united states because he only has a law degree
00:38:54.960and not any kind of medical expertise i mean we know how much these guys care about laws
00:38:59.780you wouldn't stop him if it were a sane society he would not be making comments about health stuff
00:39:10.380and even if he was if we were a sane society people wouldn't be listening to him we wouldn't
00:39:16.280be amplifying him as dc residents the day that he swam in rock creek nobody would if you if you0.77
00:39:25.700live in the mid-atlantic you know this homie just took a swim in poop yeah he just took a swim in
00:39:33.000poop like and he had his kids out there doing it i love rock creek i i go hiking along it like
00:39:39.040multiple times every single week uh i would not swim in it like when it rains it smells like poop
00:39:46.160because a lot of the sewers just like wash right in there that's just like how it is with combined
00:39:50.840sewers in an old urban city like this like uh it's it's not a good place for for people to swim
00:39:58.840and i'm not even sure it's safe for dogs to swim in no it's not because they drink it and you know
00:40:04.640the annoying thing is that he when he did that after he like took his little splash around in
00:40:10.920rock creek and uh ostensibly he said he was fine we don't know what was going on in the bathrooms
00:43:17.260Like, again, I'm not saying that I am skeptical of this law.
00:43:23.060But it is hard not to see this and be like, wow, we really have a problem in the United States and anybody can just build a massive platform saying anything and it's fine.
00:43:31.720Yeah. And in this country, it seems like our political leaders and certainly the leaders of social media platforms have, like, embraced the chaos. They're like, this is what makes America strong is the ability to just, like, scream harmful lies and drown out anyone who's trying to say something reasonable.
00:43:53.960Our president was out here doing crypto scams and nobody said boo. Like, this is a scam economy. That's all there is to it.
00:44:01.720It's so true. So many scams. Like every day he does a dozen things that for any other administration would be an enormous scandal and they just like vanish into the media ether.
00:47:23.260So I wanted to briefly talk about this new research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, or ISD,
00:47:30.160who, full disclosure, I used to do a bunch of partnership work with.
00:47:34.200They just put out a fascinating new study that really sheds some light into how the ecosystem of non-consensual deepfake material works online.
00:47:44.020Basically, tools to make and distribute this kind of material are all over social media.
00:47:50.480ISD analyzed web traffic to 31 websites that provide deepfake tools and found that those sites got a combined 21 million visits a month, with the most popular sites getting over 3 million visits in one month.
00:48:04.380As of May, ISD's analysis found 31 active deepfake tools that were easily discoverable on X, 4chan, and common search engines.
00:48:14.160These tools can create realistic, explicit deepfics from a single photo, and we already know what that means. People who are targeted with this kind of thing, there's a potential for social exclusion, job discrimination, and debilitating emotional stress for the victims targeted, especially people in public positions.
00:48:33.080I've often said this, this is not just about, you know, naughty pictures. It's horrifying. But in my book, it is definitely a democracy issue, right? If the people who are targeted for this kind of thing are overwhelmingly women, those women, especially women in public positions or elected officials and things like that, it is going to keep women who are targeted from running for those positions and taking a more public role in civic participation.
00:49:00.800And it's going to keep us all from the representative democracy that we deserve. So it's not just an issue of gross, creepy pictures, which it is. It is a democracy issue that we should all be concerned about.
00:49:13.480Yes. And I think that's a really good point to make, you know, after the the segment that we just talked about, about regulating speech about health online as a democracy issue, because it's democracy is complicated and it doesn't just mean anybody can say anything they want as like the be all end all virtue of what it means to be a democracy.
00:49:42.920Like you just said, the ability of women to run for office and just, like, show up online and exist and to be able to do that in a way where they aren't being harassed and subject to, like, nudify apps and things, that's also a democracy issue, right?
00:50:04.580I think there's a lot to balance there, and it's, I think online, like so many things, the conversation gets immediately taken to the extreme of, like, really fetishizing one aspect of democracy and leaving out that aspect that you mentioned of, like, in some cases, there does, you know, every single person can't act with complete freedom all the time.
00:50:34.580if that means that it's going to restrict the ability
00:50:38.480of a whole class of people to participate in society.
00:51:47.720You could just put a picture of anybody and ask Grok, like, undress this person, and they'll put him in a bikini.
00:51:53.540So out of almost half a million mentions between June 2020 and July 2025, more than 70%, nearly 290,000 of the results of these things were on X.
00:52:05.140Much of this activity appeared to come from bots, identified by repetitive usernames, identical post files, and similar profile pictures.
00:52:12.640So even though a lot of this seemed to be automated,
00:52:15.900the volume of it is still pretty concerning
00:52:17.860because it is likely drawing new users to tools
00:52:20.700that can be used illegally in certain situations.
00:52:39.480As many victims of malicious deepfakes have repeatedly pointed out, speaking about this kind of personal harassment or even calling out the harassment of others just comes with the risk of attracting further attention and thus attracting additional abuse.
00:52:54.520And I guess that's what really infuriates me and simultaneously breaks my heart about this is that whenever I research an incident, like an incident in a school involving minor boys using these tools to make and distribute images of the minor girls in their class,
00:53:12.700something i see again and again as the boys saying some iteration or something along the lines of
00:53:19.840well this can't be illegal or this can't be wrong because it's so easy to find online if this was
00:53:24.980illegal i wouldn't be able to just google or use a mainstream social media platform to find this
00:53:31.500thing so easily kind of assuming just because it's so easily available it's probably legal and
00:53:36.620fine to be using and i can see why they would think that because in some ways they are absolutely
00:53:42.280correct right that fact that platforms like x allow this stuff is essentially a kind of implicit
00:53:48.240endorsement but i think it just shows how much we have failed our youth because when this kind of
00:53:56.060harm is so easy to find online after a while they're right it does kind of look like permission
00:54:02.440yeah that's a really good point when it's that available it it looks like permission you know
00:54:10.660But it is like an implicit, either an implicit wink and a nod or even just an explicit thumbs up to go ahead and use it.
00:54:21.520You know, the availability of something harmful like this.
00:54:27.680I guess I'm like really stuck on this, like balancing different competing aspects of democracy thing.
00:54:34.400But like there are things that these platforms could rein this in, right?
00:54:38.940They could deprioritize these results, make these tools harder for people to find, and so it wouldn't be bad, like passing a law to ban them, but these platforms, if they really cared, could take steps to limit the availability, which would have huge harm reduction benefits, and yet they don't.
00:55:04.780You know, just because something is legal doesn't mean that it should be just pushed to every kid who types a search term for it into whatever platform they're using, probably X.
00:55:19.620Well, it goes back to my question, and I mean this in a meaningful way.
00:55:25.280I am not smart enough to be the definitive voice on this.
00:55:27.700But at what point is this platform materially benefiting from an illegal enterprise?
00:55:33.240If it is illegal to use some of these nudify apps and these apps are easily findable on platforms and in some cases advertised on these platforms, at what point is it, oh, you are making money from an illegal enterprise that is disproportionately harming girls, children?
00:55:49.140that's right and another thing that they mentioned in that study was that uh there were a lot of ads
00:55:56.140being taken out on these platforms uh using the using the names of these particular tools what
00:56:04.640was interesting was that the it sounded like in a lot of cases the nudify tools themselves were
00:56:10.680not buying ads but when the tools got taken down uh through some sort of action or for whatever
00:56:18.360reason and so the tool no longer existed but people were still searching for it other companies
00:56:24.300would pay would bid on those search terms when they would buy their ads on you know meta or x
00:56:31.300or wherever and so there's a great example of just money flowing directly to these platforms
00:56:38.660to keep these tools in the zeitgeist in circulation um yeah you raise a great point
00:56:47.500Like, shouldn't they have some accountability for making money off of these tools that in a lot of cases can be, like, very harmful?
00:56:56.600I mean, Christiana had the cops show up to her doorstep for supposedly stealing a package that they said was worth less than $25.
00:57:04.880At what point are the cops going to show up at Elon Musk's doorstep for this?
00:57:09.280Yeah, that is another good question, Bridget.
00:57:11.060we we better move on to the next segment before we start going out a full-on revolution
00:57:17.920you know who i want on my side of that revolution will smith well you're gonna get bob ferguson
00:57:26.580he just needs to charge his phone yeah he just needs to charge his phone
00:57:32.360gotta make a call do you do you want to say what our halloween costumes are gonna be
00:57:37.780oh yeah happily i i am i i am bob ferguson from the movie uh one battle after another
00:57:45.700uh leo's character it's uh i put together what i think is a pretty pretty good costume
00:57:53.440and uh i've just been like wearing it around every time i've gone out for the past week
00:57:58.620um a few people get it and they really like it yeah a few people what's funny is that i i know
00:58:38.540The funny thing about it, though, is like if people don't recognize it from the movie,
00:58:41.880you know, it got like a big oversized flannel robe and like a hat and those like big dark sunglasses that people can wear over their regular glasses.
00:58:52.600If people don't recognize the costume, I just look like a bum.
00:58:55.920Which again, no offense, but like, I don't know how to finish the sentence without sounding offensive, but you know what I'm getting at here.
00:59:05.960I think I do. I mean, generally in my life, people aren't mistaking me for a bum all that often. I guess it comes up. How about you? What are you going to be for Halloween?
00:59:19.820Blade. Blade from the movie Blade, the titular, titular Blade from the movie Blade, which we, you and I rewatched recently, holds up very well, I thought.
00:59:31.020Yeah, it moves along. It's action packed. He barely speaks. But when he does, he's got some good lines. He kind of talks like this. I've been working on my blade voice. He has a very low voice, but he doesn't really say a lot. But it's a lot of cool one liners delivered like this.
00:59:51.860Yeah, the cool one liners. That's that's that's what I want in an action hero. Blade, Spider-Man. Who else? A lot of them have good one liners like that. You don't want long soliloquies. You just want a quick little one liner and then maybe some perching.
01:00:12.860I'm worried that people are just going to think I'm goth.
01:00:15.520They're not going to know that I'm Blade from the movie Blade.
01:00:19.080They're going to just think I'm...0.67
01:00:20.680Is this an old goth, an old black goth?
01:00:25.420Well, I think that Katana will probably help them figure it out.
01:00:29.060An old black goth martial arts enthusiast just hanging out on Halloween?0.91
01:00:55.440Shout out to 404 again for another banger.0.68
01:00:58.560So this rogue librarian on Goodreads is editing book titles to protest Goodreads censorship.
01:01:05.920According to 404, one of the site's volunteer moderators, which Goodreads calls librarians, swapped the blurbs and pictures and titles of a handful of books, books like Reese Witherspoon's thriller Gone Before Goodbye, which I did not even know Reese Witherspoon, the actress, is now writing thrillers.
01:01:25.220Love a Thriller. Need to check that out. And the Nicholas Sparks bestseller, Remain. They are
01:01:30.460swapping out all of the information and blurbs of those books with the pictures and blurbs from
01:01:37.020Eric Trump's book, Under Siege, adding the subtitle, quote, Goodreads censorship in favor
01:01:44.560of Trump. So I did not even know that Eric Trump had written a book. I don't even need to look it
01:01:49.600up. Guarantee that thing was ghostwritten for sure. Basically, they are altering all of these
01:01:54.720books and swapping in Eric Trump's book, explaining that Goodreads is removing criticism
01:02:01.420of Eric Trump's book from the site, saying, quote, silencing criticism of political figures,
01:02:07.140especially those associated with authoritarian movements, helps normalize and strengthen those
01:02:12.480movements. When we let powerful people's books be protected from criticism, we give up the right to
01:02:19.320hold power accountable these changes were up on goodreads for a few hours before being corrected
01:02:25.420so that that librarian is absolutely correct that is uh the story in as far as i can tell
01:02:35.700every democracy that has slidden into authoritarianism that's how it happens just
01:02:42.180Like people dialing back criticism of the people in power, self-censoring, and just letting them get away with it.
01:02:57.080So this librarian, this rogue librarian who is protesting Goodreads, which is owned by Amazon, says that Goodreads is censoring negative reviews of Eric Trump's book.
01:03:06.460They said that Goodreads deleted negative reviews of Under Siege as they came in after its publication on October 14th.
01:03:13.360These were honest opinions from real readers who disagreed with the book's content, the librarian said in their post.
01:03:19.360When people noticed and complained, Goodreads deleted all reviews of the book, positive and negative alike.
01:03:25.920This wasn't an accident or a one-time glitch. It was a deliberate pattern.
01:03:30.060So 404 reached out to Goodreads to ask if the platform was disallowing these reviews.
01:03:34.880And it does sound like Goodreads was trying to prevent review bombing of Eric Trump's book.
01:03:40.460In response to the questions about the reviews for the book, a spokesperson from Goodreads told 404 Media that Goodreads has systems in place to detect unusual activity on book pages and may temporarily limit rating and reviews that don't adhere to our review and community guidelines.
01:03:56.940In all cases, we enforce clear standards and remove content and or accounts that violate these guidelines.
01:04:02.700So we did an episode about this, but review bombing is a legit problem on Goodreads.
01:04:08.180But this is also the nature of the complaint, according to this rogue librarian.
01:04:12.660They said, when a platform removes criticism of a political book while leaving praise or removes everything to hide that that criticism ever existed, they're not staying neutral.
01:04:48.040I also just love that it took a rogue Goodreads librarian volunteer to pull this off.
01:04:54.540Like, not a whistleblower, not a hacker, just a super annoyed, pissed off, fed up volunteer.
01:05:02.920It really reminds me of that Margaret Mead quote.
01:05:05.920Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.
01:05:10.100Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
01:05:12.640In this case, never doubt that an annoyed, bookish volunteer can also change the world.
01:05:19.020Yeah, and not just any volunteer, a librarian.
01:05:22.240Yes. Shout out to the librarians. Sometimes it really does feel like they are the only thing standing between us and a complete descent into a fascist nightmare hellscape.
01:05:33.240Absolutely. They are the keepers of knowledge during a time when knowledge is being questioned. Reality is being questioned. We live in different realities. Maybe librarians will be the ones to help us make sense of it and save us.
01:05:55.560So, Bridget, today is Halloween. How are you going to be celebrating in your Blade costume?
01:06:02.220Oh, I give out candy every year, even though I live in a building in a neighborhood where people might not associate giving out candy.
01:06:09.900It is truly one of the things I love the most.