00:02:18.540Well, we got AI. That was the first thing I thought when I heard, when I was like hearing whispers about the deal. I was like, we got the, yeah, but we got AI. Well, we probably got AI. At least it seems like we got AI.
00:02:34.680So for folks who don't know, AI was rightfully a major sticking point in these negotiations.
00:02:50.240SAG was like, uh-uh, we don't think so, and countered that proposal, stipulating that
00:02:55.480background performers, per the proposal that studios had put forth, could be scanned, paid
00:03:01.800for the day and then turned into digital characters that studios could use for the rest of eternity.
00:03:07.920Now, the studios dispute this, but knowing the studios, I don't know. It sounds plausible. Keep
00:03:12.580listening. So the issue kind of went back and forth until last weekend when SAG reviewed what
00:03:17.680the studios were calling their last, best, and final offer. SAG was like, I don't think so. Pass.
00:03:25.020What else you got? They rejected that offer, claiming, quote, there are several essential
00:03:29.560items on which we still do not have an agreement, including AI. So this is really wild. A follow-up
00:03:35.040story in The Hollywood Reporter revealed that the studios had issued a proposal that would allow
00:03:40.060them to pay for AI scans of some performers, and then following those performers' death,
00:03:45.240it would allow studios to use scans without the consent of the estate or SAG. So SAG wanted
00:03:51.840compensation for reuse of those scans along with consent. Yeah, I'm pretty sure they did. Who
00:03:58.500wouldn't want that incredibly basic respect for their labor protected like the fact that studios
00:04:04.960were proposing that even in death some performers would have to have their likeness used without
00:04:10.820consent for the rest of time that is such a wild proposal that i cannot believe studios would put
00:04:16.720it forth yeah anything anything where you've got a contract that lasts for eternity for all of time
00:04:23.540It's like a little bit of a red flag, especially when it's something like a likeness of an actor performing in a movie or a TV show or a video of some sort that is typically labor that a person gets paid for.
00:04:38.340If studios are able to do that with somebody's likeness after they're dead forever, that just feels like dark.
00:08:01.400Walk into a Target and do a little disrupting.
00:08:05.000No, no, we're not advocating you steal from Target. Do not do that.
00:08:07.780No, the joke is that stealing is wrong.
00:08:11.120Okay, so to put this in conversation, Biden just put out that executive order on AI last week. Did you see that?
00:08:17.700I did. Yeah, I saw it. I read it. It was, I thought it was pretty good.
00:08:24.020And it does seem like we're at this inflection point where everyone, perhaps except for the people who were poised to make money from AI, has kind of come to realize that a future where the wealthy get to exploit and steal from the rest of us, to get wealthier with no oversight or no guardrails just is not it.
00:08:42.300So I think if actors were able to get the AI provisions that they were asking for, even some of those provisions, I think it is a good sign.
00:08:49.580I think it is going to be good for the rest of us because it draws a line in the sand that's like, no, you can't just exploit and steal and grift your way into fatter pockets.
00:08:58.600We will not allow it. That is not the future.
00:09:00.780Not if we have anything to say about it.
00:11:05.240okay so there is a new facebook whistleblower that we absolutely need to be talking about
00:11:12.460new facebook whistleblower just dropped new facebook whistleblower just dropped it is
00:11:17.400arturo bahar a former facebook engineering director from 2009 to 2015 who later worked
00:11:22.980as a consultant at instagram from 2019 to 2021 bahar testified that top facebook officials people
00:11:29.460like Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, enemy of the show, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram,
00:11:35.620they did not do enough to curb harm experienced by their youngest users on the platform.
00:11:41.380Bridget, I noticed you had a little extra venom in your voice for Adam Mosseri.
00:11:45.700What's the story there? You had more for him than Zuckerberg even.
00:11:49.840Wait, have we not talked about this on the show? Maybe it's never come up why I hate him so much.
00:11:55.920Because I do hate him more than the others.
00:11:57.860Yeah, I don't think you've ever really gotten into it. I mean, close listeners of the show will notice a pattern where you get a little extra edge in your voice when talking about him. But what exactly is the story, Bridget?
00:12:12.020Oh, so Adam Mosseri, it's so personal and stupid. He just rubs me the wrong way. I just get0.99
00:12:20.520major bad vibes from him. And me saying that about a tech leader, like a white guy tech leader is
00:12:26.180really something. I think with people like Mark Zuckerberg, nobody looks at Mark Zuckerberg and
00:12:30.940thinks this is somebody who is meaningfully interested in creating a better world. You
00:12:35.040look at Mark Zuckerberg and you know what he's about. You know who he is. You know what he does.
00:12:38.400It's very clear. Sheryl Sandberg, I feel, is a little different, but I don't think... And Sheryl
00:12:44.560Sandberg, we have met, we've had conversation, singular, not plural. But again, having met her,
00:12:52.680you meet her and you know who she is, you know what she's about. A little bit more of a PR
00:12:57.420slick vibe than Zuckerberg, but it's very clear. Adam Mosseri, I feel like, is doing a different
00:13:03.220thing where he is trying to convince us that he's this super quirky fun guy like oh I'm wearing
00:13:09.740funky socks and a sweater and like my tie's got a print on it and I'm wearing horned rimmed glasses
00:13:15.940and he also does this thing where he is often obviously with intention the face of announcements
00:13:24.120and so if I follow him on Instagram at this point it's like I do it for the show to get it you know
00:13:29.340whenever there's updates or whatever, like I need to like know them, but it's almost like a hate0.92
00:13:33.100follow where every time his face shows up, I'm like, oh, what is this dork going to be trying0.97
00:13:37.800to, what is this hateful dork going to be trying to convince us is actually good for us while it0.99
00:13:42.860actually harms people? And so Instagram, as folks probably know, was its own app before Facebook0.96
00:13:48.560bought it. It felt different. It felt good. Instagram essentially bought it and then turned
00:13:53.140it into this like marketplace for the pain of children, apparently. And I just think that
00:13:58.760Adam Mosseri is trying to leverage this quirky, non-threatening, inoffensive, nice guy in the
00:14:06.680office persona where he shows his face with intention when he speaks to the public as a
00:14:12.880means to mask the fact that the app actually does incredible harm to children, is damaging children,
00:14:19.480and that he's making money from it. You look at Mark Zuckerberg and you're like,
00:14:22.840this is a guy who's making money from the harm of children. No trouble believing that.
00:14:26.260Sheryl Sandberg, again, I'm like, oh, this is a woman who is buying pantsuits via the money that she made harming kids. No trouble believing this. I feel like Adam Mosseri wants us to think something else when we look at him. And that's why I hate him so much. It's like a very... I'm sure people listening are like, wow, she really has strong feelings about this.0.98
00:14:45.700But I do believe he is leveraging a persona of, like, quirky, non-threatening guy in the office with, like, funky socks to mask harm that he is profiting from.
00:15:04.940Well, thanks for sharing your opinions about that hateful dork.0.98
00:15:09.080i just feel like if you're gonna have the audacity to profit from the harm of children0.98
00:15:16.040don't do it while wearing a funky sweater like have have the have the decency to be like yeah0.97
00:15:21.420of course i'm a hateful asshole look how i'm dressed yeah put on some like skeletor like0.81
00:15:26.640armor or something so yeah i mean yeah like so like why i hate him is really grounded in the0.98
00:15:34.480fact that his app harms kids. And that's exactly what Bahar is clarifying from the inside.
00:15:42.920So basically, Bahar testified to the subcommittee. And this comes after he published a bunch of
00:15:49.180leaked internal information, including emails from his time working at Facebook to the Wall
00:15:53.080Street Journal. So his testimony basically confirms what we already know, right? All the
00:15:57.500stuff I just said, that Instagram was very aware that their product was harming very young people
00:16:03.260and did nothing to address it. And in fact, they prioritized time spent on platform as a key
00:16:09.580performance indicator. Bahar released a trove of emails showing exactly this.
00:16:14.140Something interesting about Bahar that really sets him apart from earlier Facebook whistleblowers,
00:16:18.900people like Francis Haugen, is that Bahar has a teenage daughter who, like a lot of teenage
00:16:23.980daughters, his daughter was 14 at the time, uses Instagram. He saw that his own daughter was getting
00:16:29.980continually harassed, as were her friends who were the same age, on Instagram. Things like
00:16:35.080abusive, misogynistic comments and unsolicited graphic pictures, he says in his testimony.
00:16:41.420I asked, why do boys keep doing that? His daughter replied, if the only thing that happens to them is
00:16:47.380they get blocked, why wouldn't they? So this understandably deeply upset Bahar, he decided to
00:16:53.240go back to work as a consultant at Facebook to genuinely try to help them fix this issue and to
00:16:58.840flagged them to the top people. Here's a little bit of his testimony. She and her friends began
00:17:03.540having awful experiences, including repeated unwanted sexual advances, harassment. She reported
00:17:12.560these incidents to the company, and it did nothing. In large part, because of what I learned
00:17:21.640as her father, on October of 2019, I returned to Facebook, this time as a consultant with
00:17:27.980Instagram's well-being team. We tried to set goals based on the experiences of
00:17:33.740teens themselves. Instead, the company wanted to focus on enforcing its own
00:17:39.080narrowly defined policies, regardless of whether that approach reduced the harm
00:17:44.360that teens were experiencing. I discovered that most of the tools for
00:17:49.100kids that we had put in place during my earlier time at Facebook had been removed.
00:17:54.440I observed new features being developed in response to public outcry, which were, in reality, kind of a placebo, a safety feature in name only, to placate the praise and regulators.
00:18:11.300I say this because, rather than being based on user experience data, they were based on very deliberately narrow definitions of harm.
00:18:21.080The company was creating its own homework.
00:18:23.780Later, he makes clear something that I always kind of suspected was happening at Facebook,
00:18:28.140but it's good to hear validated from somebody who would know, that Facebook does indeed,
00:18:32.640in his opinion, have the tools and the information to make the platform safer for young people,
00:18:37.260but that it actively chooses not to do so.
00:18:39.760In an interview with BBC, he specifically said that Facebook should implement a button
00:18:43.800specifically for young users that allows them to flag specifically unwanted sexual advances.
00:18:50.480From firsthand knowledge working at Facebook, he says that doing this is completely easy
00:18:55.460and totally plausible, but he told BBC, I believe the reason that they're not doing
00:18:59.780this is because there's no transparency about the harms that teenagers are experiencing
00:19:19.180But Bahar says that when you look at what they know about how young people are actually using
00:19:24.360the platform, that general report button is just not cutting it. He says, research we did in 2011
00:19:30.020shows that 13-year-olds are uncomfortable with the word report because they worry that themselves or
00:19:35.160somebody else is going to get in trouble. Imagine you're a 13-year-old and you get an unwanted
00:19:39.120sexual advance. How uncomfortable that is, how intense the experience is, and there's nothing
00:19:43.900they can use to say, hey, can you please help me with this? If that button was available,
00:19:47.820then there will be data about who's initiating those contacts. So Bahar is really like,
00:19:53.360we need to be setting our users up to give us more information about the things they're
00:19:58.400experiencing on the platform, and that will help. Makes sense. You know, as much as you
00:20:03.720hate Mosseri, I read an article earlier today that was talking about some new court documents that
00:20:11.480had come out, I think, connected with this, or timed to go with this hearing at the subcommittee.
00:20:19.700And the documents were pretty damning about a lot of conversations that happened between
00:20:24.580Zuckerberg and a lot of top executives at Facebook and Instagram, including Adam Mussari,
00:20:31.880where the other executives were actually trying to convince Zuckerberg to put some safeguards
00:20:39.580and some tools into effect to protect young people and it was zuckerberg personally that
00:20:46.380shot them all down uh i thought that was pretty interesting that they you know i don't think they
00:20:54.800were acting out of genuine concern for young people but they were concerned that this very
00:21:04.000that they were going to find themselves in this position a couple years down the road of
00:21:08.560really being sued and looked at heart by legislators and regulators about their lack
00:21:17.540of action. And I think that totally has come true here. Yeah. Something tells me that was
00:21:23.200probably a bit of a like, do you ever use the phrase cover your ass move? Oh, totally. It was0.99
00:21:28.920entirely cover your ass. But you know what? Sometimes you want people's asses to be covered.1.00
00:21:33.000Yeah. I mean, if that's the only way that you're going to do the right thing is like, well, I don't want this to be read in testimony in front of lawmakers one day. So let's maybe stop harming the kids. Yeah, I'll take it. If that's the best we got, the best we can hope for from them, I'll take it.0.96
00:21:50.560Yeah, exactly. You know, I have no illusions that capitalists and corporations are acting, you know, in the public interest or to benefit society, right? They're acting in their own selfish interest. And that's why they get fined when they do egregious stuff.
00:22:11.300I will say, though, this thing about Zuckerberg personally being like, no, I don't think we're going to do this. That does not surprise me. I can't tell you how many times Facebook has made some sort of like horrible policy decision that is really harmful. And it turns out that it was Mark Zuckerberg personally intervening to institute that policy.
00:22:30.900Alex Jones comes to mind that Mark Zuckerberg personally initiated a loophole to keep him on
00:22:38.140the platform even after he was banned, right? And so, yeah, it doesn't surprise me that it's
00:22:43.520the very tippy-tippy top that is allowing this kind of harm to continue. Yeah. So Bahar's testimony
00:22:50.060has really reignited conversations around legislation, like the Kids Online Safety Act,
00:22:55.460which you might have gleaned if you've been listening to our other episodes.
00:22:58.220is not legislation that we're really that hopeful about.
00:23:01.580This legislation and other legislation that seeks to sort of rein in big tech as it pertains
00:23:06.840to harming kids has kind of stalled, despite a lot of bipartisan support.
00:23:11.140And now lawmakers are blaming big tech lobbying and big tech money.
00:23:16.000It is an indictment of this body, to be honest with you, that we have not acted.
00:25:15.360a move that he said is effectively knowingly ending his career in tech.
00:25:20.220And that's really one of the reasons why I wanted to include him in this conversation today,
00:25:25.160because I don't think he's really getting the attention nor the seriousness that his testimony
00:25:30.740warrants. Think back to when Frances Haugen became a whistleblower. She was everywhere.
00:25:36.880I was thinking about this, and Mike, you and I happened to be traveling together when Frances
00:25:40.780haugen blew the whistle on facebook and i don't know if you remember we were in the hotel bar and
00:25:46.240they had a tv and they were playing her 60 minutes interview on that tv in the hotel bar like it was
00:25:52.620a pretty big deal yeah i do remember that it was it was surprising because hotel bars don't
00:25:59.000typically play 60 minutes no they don't they don't it wasn't like a news themed bar no although
00:26:04.940wouldn't that be fun and so i think one of the reasons why francis haugen's testimony was
00:26:10.160everywhere, and she was being treated a little bit differently than whistleblowers like Arturo
00:26:15.020Bahar, is that one, she was kind of billed as the Facebook whistleblower, even though there were
00:26:21.940other Facebook whistleblowers before her, women like Sophie Zong, who we interviewed on the show,0.85
00:26:27.000we'll link to her episode in the show notes. Sophie spoke to this issue too, how when you
00:26:31.420present a certain way as a whistleblower, you will be more amplified and probably more supported.
00:26:37.460And if you're not able to present in that certain way because of your identity, you might be treated very differently.
00:26:43.680Sophie was sort of framed as this disgruntled, poor-performing former employee of Facebook when she came forward as a whistleblower about Facebook's harms.
00:27:13.100And he's also coming at this from a very specific position that is of a parent, particularly a parent of a teenager of color.
00:27:21.380You know, when we talk about the impact of social media on young people and how parents can support those young people, more often than not, we are talking about white young people.
00:27:29.920Yet, research, which is mostly done on white youth, is taken to be universal for all youth, despite the fact that kids of color are actually having very unique and specific experiences online.
00:27:42.880Researchers at the Youth Media and Wellbeing Research Lab found that Black and Latino 5th through 9th graders adopt social media at younger ages than their white peers.
00:27:51.100And despite having the highest reported access to the internet and social media, Asian American youth still remain underrepresented in studies on digital media and their well-being.
00:27:59.920Asian Americans in later adolescence and early adulthood, so 18 to 24-year-olds, are more
00:28:04.600likely to be cyber bullied than their white or Latino counterparts.
00:28:07.920They are also the least likely to report negative experiences on social media in order to avoid
00:28:13.140embarrassment and maintain a positive image to the outside world.
00:28:16.500So Bahar, as this whistleblower, the parent of a Latino child, and somebody who worked
00:28:22.820at Facebook, is really filling this gap and helping us understand this issue and how it
00:28:28.440impacts marginalized youth and their parents. And I just hope people listen, even if he's not
00:28:35.460a flashy, wealthy, white, blonde woman with like a slick PR machine backing her up.0.97
00:32:25.600I mean, when I saw this headline, I was like, oh yeah, Omegle.
00:32:29.340And I remember like playing with it a few times and it kind of is like a cultural relic to a time where, you know, maybe we didn't even realize how unusual it should be to be seeing a stranger doing something sexual online, whether we wanted to or not.
00:32:48.560When I first started reading about Omegle shutting down, I was like, oh yeah, me and my friends saw so many men masturbating on that platform. And I almost caught myself recalling this almost a bit fondly until I was like, wait a minute, what? That actually wasn't okay.
00:33:03.280Like, I think it is a relic of a time before, maybe I'm always speaking for myself, but before it was clear how not okay that was and how harmful that could be to people and how risky that was.
00:33:18.500like you know and it's funny because on twitter the conversation was very much like people
00:33:25.600remembering the same thing like i saw somebody be like oh shout out to all the 35 year olds who like
00:33:30.480showed me their genitals when i was 14 i think we were all sort of thinking of this as a rite of
00:33:38.240passage on the internet and using technology and looking back it's like well should we have been
00:33:44.400should that have been a rite of passage yeah it's almost like that was a simpler time back when the
00:33:50.880idea of being randomly connected with a stranger on the internet with video seemed like something
00:33:57.860that someone would want yeah so so hold that thought because that's going to be relevant in
00:34:02.220just a minute um so as y'all might have gleaned by now omegle was a place where sex just really
00:34:10.640ran rampant. Like that was definitely my experience playing with Omegle. In a piece for Mashable,
00:34:15.880someone using the pseudonym Hannah called it, quote, a digital glory hole. And that is
00:34:20.820my recollection of it as well. Some of that sexuality on Omegle was consensual,
00:34:26.240but a lot of it was not. You know, not all of the explicit stuff happening there was consensual.
00:34:31.740Abusers could, and it sounds like did, have a field day with that platform. In 2022, there were
00:34:37.680608,601 reports of child exploitation on Omegle to the nonprofit, the National Center for Missing
00:34:44.240and Exploited Children. Of all of the sites the center tracks, only Facebook, Google, Instagram,
00:34:50.200and WhatsApp ranked higher. Now, platforms are generally protected by Section 230 of the
00:34:56.200Communications Decency Act, which means that they cannot be held liable for what happens on their
00:35:00.520platforms. But the judge in this case found that Omegle was at fault because the site's design is
00:35:05.540what allowed for minors to be sexually targeted, and thus, Omegle was not protected by Section 230.
00:35:12.060According to the BBC, Omegle had almost no moderation. The entire company was seemingly
00:35:17.200run solely by the founder, Leif K. Brooks, with no other registered employees. BBC said that it
00:35:23.180was operated from his lakeside house in Florida when he was either asleep or offline. No complaints
00:35:29.040were acted upon. If you go to omegle.com right now, instead of the site, what you will find is
00:35:34.920a long sort of goodbye post from the founder, Leif K. Brooks, in which he argues that shutting
00:35:40.920down the platform to him is kind of the end of an era of freedom online. We'll post the whole
00:35:46.340thing in the show notes, but here are a few key snippets. He writes, I launched Omegle when I was
00:35:50.88018 years old and still living with my parents. It was meant to build on the things I loved about
00:35:54.860the internet while introducing a form of social spontaneity that I felt didn't exist anywhere
00:35:59.500else. If the internet is a manifestation of the global village, Omegle was meant to be a way of
00:36:04.620strolling down a street in that village, striking up conversations with people that you run into
00:36:08.860along the way. Unfortunately, there are lowlights. Virtually every tool can be used for good or for
00:36:14.340evil, and that is especially true of communication tools due to their innate flexibility. The
00:36:18.960telephone can be used to wish your grandmother happy birthday, but it can also be used to call
00:36:23.220on a bomb threat. There can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people
00:36:27.700misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes. To an extent, it is reasonable to question
00:36:33.080the policies and practices of any place where crime has occurred. I have always welcomed
00:36:37.280constructive feedback, and indeed, Omegle implemented a number of improvements based
00:36:41.040on such feedback over the years. Side note, if you believe that BBC article, it does not sound
00:36:46.800like that was the case. However, the recent attacks have felt anything but constructive.
00:36:52.080The only way to please these people is to stop offering the service. Sometimes they say so
00:36:56.080explicitly and avowedly. It can be inferred from their act of setting standards that are
00:37:00.120not humanly achievable. Either way, the net result is the same. Omegle is the direct target
00:37:05.580of these attacks, but their ultimate victim is you, all of you out there who have used or would
00:37:10.000use Omegle to improve your lives and the lives of others. When they say Omegle shouldn't exist,
00:37:14.960they are really saying that you shouldn't be allowed to use it, that you shouldn't be allowed
00:37:18.480to meet random new people online. That idea is anathema to the ideals I cherish, specifically
00:37:23.440to the bedrock principle of a free society, that when restrictions are imposed to prevent crime,
00:37:28.760the burden of those restrictions must not be targeted at innocent victims or potential victims
00:37:33.900of crime. I've done my best to weather the attacks, with the interest of Omegle's users
00:37:38.520and the broader principle in my mind. If something as simple as meeting random new people is
00:37:43.140forbidden, what's next? That is far and away removed from anything that can be considered
00:37:47.360a reasonable compromise of the principle I outlined. Analogies are a limited tool,
00:37:51.400but a physical world analogy might be shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there,
00:37:55.580or perhaps more provocatively, destroying a universe because it contains evil. A healthy,
00:38:01.280free society cannot endure when we are collectively afraid of each other to this extent.
00:38:06.340So there's a lot more to it. I'm only reading snippets, but it's complicated because in some
00:38:12.740ways I agree with him, right? I do think that there is an era of freedom and promise coming
00:38:21.560to a close, kind of what you were alluding to earlier, Mike, that like the era where
00:38:26.680we might've thought it was a pure net good to be randomly connected to random strangers
00:38:33.720from the comfort of our own home anonymously.
00:38:36.680And I kind of, in some ways, I kind of see what he's getting at.
00:38:41.480But if that promise means just accepting and tolerating the harm of minors, it is not a
00:38:49.180I think that that's what he's missing, that if this platform that you've built, that you've imagined as this great utopia comes at the cost of the safety and well-being of kids, then it is not a utopia. That's not just something that we should just laugh off or normalize as a rite of passage for understanding how to have experiences online. It's not okay.
00:39:11.980And it sounds like that freedom that he's pointing to, the cost of that freedom is harm at minors. And I don't think that is a cost that we are okay with. Maybe we hadn't realized what that truly cost us before and he yearns for that time. And I understand. But now we have a better understanding of the true cost of this like principled utopian internet that he's laying out. What do you think?
00:39:38.500I think the freedom that he's describing and, you know, lamenting the loss of here is the freedom of a child who has no sense of the responsibility that comes with freedom.
00:39:54.740Uh, and I also think that he uses a lot of analogies to try to justify why it's okay for him to have built this platform that, you know, led to this child being sexually abused.
00:40:14.180Uh, you know, he, he made the analogy of a telephone.
00:40:20.140He's like, oh, well, you could use a telephone to call in a bomb threat.
00:40:22.820that's true but the internet fundamentally changes the the scalability of harm right like
00:40:33.660one of the cool things about the internet is that some 18 year old guy can build an app
00:40:39.880or a web app or whatever it was and uh you know doesn't cost him a lot of money doesn't
00:40:47.880cost him a lot of like server capacity to run,
00:41:06.540And there has to be some kind of responsibility
00:41:10.420when you build something that is affecting so many people
00:41:16.620it it changes the math right like if if he built this tool and like a dozen of his friends were
00:41:25.200using it and one person got unintentionally harmed that's not great and he should probably
00:41:31.400think about that but that's different than you know hundreds of thousands of people around the
00:41:37.960world using it there's a responsibility there that is just nowhere in this lengthy letter that
00:41:47.820you read yeah that is something that is really downplayed in his like long thing is the ways
00:41:55.680that he just abdicated responsibility to keeping users safe in the ruling you know one of the
00:42:02.920reasons why the judge said that he was not that the subsection 230 did not apply is because
00:42:08.160the judge said he could have put some some safeguards in place so that adult abusers
00:42:16.440were not being connected to kids like that like the judge described how because of the like
00:42:21.080you know functionality of omegle where you can just hit next until you get what you want
00:42:28.260abusers essentially are just like shopping for people to abuse and they can just be like not
00:42:35.340what i'm looking for not what i'm looking for not what i'm looking for and what i'm looking for
00:42:38.800and so there's there just seems to be a lot of downplaying of his own responsibility
00:42:44.580in why this platform had to shut down there's no acknowledgement that responsibility even exists
00:42:51.580but i think that when he talks about the what he's like oh i'm i'm i yearn for a different time
00:42:57.480I think that what he is actually talking about is a time before we really understood what was at stake and the harm that could be caused.
00:43:06.220And it's almost like a kind of like good old days when people thought that non-consensual images of genitalia being shown to a child wasn't a big deal.
00:43:17.340Like, I think that he's like, I think that he's thinking about it in a completely different way than we are.
00:43:21.600yeah i think you're right i think he's yearning for the the good old days which were a time of
00:43:28.600ignorance before we had thought about any of this stuff and before we knew i think i think that
00:43:34.440you know it seems like this technology has been around for so long but it really hasn't
00:43:40.320and we're only now starting to like truly grapple with the impact i think in a real way because it
00:43:47.180hasn't really been that long and i think that he what he's saying is like remember back before
00:43:51.780we understood the impact and like nobody cared and it was like better i'm not so sure that it
00:43:57.480was better i think that the the plaintiff in this place would probably agree that it wasn't better
00:44:02.980and so yeah i i a lot of people are trading his goodbye letter around the internet as if it's a
00:44:10.180it's a treatise on a on a better time and i'm just i really would caution against that i think that it
00:44:16.740is really fundamentally normalizing a time that really maybe wasn't so great for a lot of people
00:44:26.500yeah i i feel you it's it just reminds me of like a 16 year old reading voltaire a little bit
00:44:34.920yes yeah like 16 year olds should read voltaire and that's great but uh and and this particular
00:44:41.980example is kind of a tricky one because it sounds like maybe he wasn't monetizing this maybe he just
00:44:48.420he was truly making it because he thought it was fun and you know i respect that and i can see how
00:44:54.720it would be really sad for him to have to shut it down especially in this uh oh okay they made money
00:45:02.180i didn't i didn't know that profiting off of it yeah so that's also relevant and does not show
00:45:09.360up anywhere in his statement, right, that he's profiting on this.
00:45:12.420It's not like he's trying to foster human connection and serendipity to achieve greater
00:50:28.640It sounds like the laid-off staffers squarely placed the blame on senior leadership.
00:50:33.380We are devastated, though hardly surprised, at Geo Media and Jim Spanfler's inability
00:50:38.080to run our website and the cruel decision to shutter it.
00:50:41.880That's from the Writers Guild of America East, which represents Geo Media staffers, adding in their statement, quote, a well-run company would have moved away from an advertising model, but instead they are shuttering the brand entirely because of their strategic and commercial ineptitude.
00:50:56.200Liz Lenz, who's been on the podcast before, tweeted, Jezbel was a place where women could unabashedly write about culture, politics, and everything with voice and humor and a whole range of human emotions.0.82
00:51:07.000The fact that it was killed by inept men is truly a metaphor.
00:51:10.300So what's really resonated with me about how important this specific kind of work that Jezbel produced is at this moment is that in addition to a lot of their like snarky, gossipy content, their reporters also published some of the most in-depth reported pieces on issues that impact women.
00:51:28.160From the elections in Virginia and Ohio to the Republican debate just last night, it could not be clear how important of a topic abortion is right now.
00:51:37.400And there are just not a ton of places with really good in-depth reported pieces on the huge intersections of technology and abortion, for instance.
00:51:47.020Jezbel was doing that work, but now there is one less place for it.
00:51:50.900A lot of folks were understandably wondering how a popular, well-liked website like Jezbel
00:51:56.120just could not find a way to make it work and had to shut down.
00:51:59.540A piece in 404 Media written by Jason Kobler and Emanuel Mayberg sheds a little bit of
00:58:13.160Thanks, guys. Really appreciate it. This all sounds very doom and gloom, but I mean, we have to choose hopefulness. Like, we have to choose. I do see hope in the way that people are saying, I don't fucking think so to a lot of these tech billionaires and a lot of the proposals that they lay out for how they intend to continue to get rich off of us.
00:58:39.620whether it is exploiting our likeness in perpetuity or forcing ads into more and more of real estate online.
00:58:51.140So, yeah, I think there is reason for hope.
00:58:54.020We have to be hopeful that something better can be out there on the horizon.
00:58:59.740Mike, thank you so much for being here, as always.
00:59:02.320Thanks for having me and thanks for listening.
00:59:09.620If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our merch store at tangody.com slash store.
00:59:15.940Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi?
00:59:19.460You can reach us at hello at tangody.com.
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