← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
X, TikTok, and the AI Revolution Explained
00:26:39
In the past month, President Donald Trump extended the TikTok ban deadline, Elon Musk sold X (formerly Twitter) to his company xAI, and AI has become a fixture on nearly every major social network.
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Progressive Insurance
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Claire Duffy
Listener Supported WNYC Studios.
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. In the last few weeks, there has been a lot of news coming out of the social media world. Just last week, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, took the stand in an antitrust trial and defended the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump postponed the enforcement of the TikTok sale or ban law for another 75 days. Trump's political advisor, Elon Musk sold X to his own AI company. Blue sky announced it was adding a blue check to verify users like X or Twitter did before you could buy them. And then there were issues of national security when the Defense Department decided to use Signal more than once to help us understand what's happening in front of and behind the scenes of our favorite apps. CNN tech writer and host, CNN's Audio podcast terms of Service Claire Duffy joins me in studio. Nice to see you, Claire.
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Claire Duffy
Thanks for having me.
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Alison Stewart
Listeners, we'd like to get you to participate in this conversation. What social media platforms have you found yourselves using? More Twitter, BlueSky, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok? Or did you give up social media altogether? Just tell us why. 212-433-969-2212-4433 wnyc are you worried about misinformation or data security? What about messaging? Do you use 2124-3396-9221-2433 wnyc? You can call in, join us on the air or you can text to that number. Let's start with the antitrust trial. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended himself against claims from the ftc, the Federal Trade Commission, that the company built a quote, social network monopoly last week. What are the basis for these claims?
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Claire Duffy
Well, so the FTC basically says that Meta acquired Instagram for a billion dollars in 2012 and WhatsApp for 19 billion dol so that it wouldn't have to compete with those startups. Basically, it wanted to quash competition, so it acquired it instead and in that way has built this social networking monopoly that the FTC says basically no other company can compete with. Now Meta says that it has plenty of competition from companies like TikTok YouTube, Snapchat. And that's basically what they're arguing about in court right now.
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Alison Stewart
So why has the FTC decided to step in now? You said 2012 was when they inquired.
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Corey
Instagram 2019 for WhatsApp or 14 for 2014.
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Claire Duffy
Yeah. So that, I mean, that is part of Meta's question and sort of pushback here is how are we going to unwind these acquisitions that happened more than a decade ago. But basically the FTC argument is that, you know, the company has managed to, over time, build this giant monopoly and that now we're in a situation where it is affecting competition, it is affecting choices for consumers, it is affecting, potentially prices for advertisers. So that is the. The issue here, and it's part of this bigger wave that we've seen from regulators in trying to crack down on big tech companies. This is just one of a number of antitrust cases that are happening right now against not just Meta, but a number of big tech companies.
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Corey
Zuckerberg also said Facebook's biggest rival isn't just TikTok and Snapchat, but Google's YouTube platform. Why? Why YouTube?
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Claire Duffy
Well, YouTube has been pushing forward in this short, short form, video sort of format that's become really popular right now. And Mark Zuckerber sees video as one of the sort of areas where the future of social media is going. And so he's saying essentially that people are spending a lot more time on YouTube watching videos, both short form and long form. He actually said that people are spending potentially more time on YouTube than both Facebook and Instagram combined, even as those platforms are trying to catch up in the video space.
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Corey
Did he give a reason why Facebook might be losing listeners? Losing listeners?
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Claire Duffy
Well, I mean, he's concerned that Facebook is losing users because of competition from other platforms like TikTok, like YouTube in the video space, but also to its own platforms. There's basically this dynamic that's been set up in some of these court discussions where Mark Zuckerberg, both before the Instagram acquisition and since the Instagram acquisition, has been grappling with the fact that more people want to spend time on Instagram, you know, sharing photos with not just friends, but for a larger content audience than people want to do, interacting with their friends and family on Facebook. That, that.
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Corey
Oh, that's interesting.
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Claire Duffy
That way of using social media to connect with friends and family is just becoming less popular. He said people are actually adding fewer friends on Facebook these days. And he thinks that also the future of social media is moving to more messaging. So People want to use those public feeds to find interesting, entertaining content, often from third parties, not from their friends and family, and then go discuss that content in private messages with friends, but not do that friend sharing on public feeds, which has really been the basic basis of Facebook, the reason that he founded it. And so you hear in his testimony a real concern that he thinks that the future of Facebook is dwindling.
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Corey
Let's talk to Corey, who's calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Corey, thanks for calling, all of it.
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Pat
Yeah, first time, long time, happy to call.
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Corey
Great. I'm glad to hear your perspective.
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Pat
Yeah, so I basically spent the last four months on a flip phone. Most of the time I got off of social media and really limit my computer use every day. And that was largely just kind of a pushback to the way that our devices and our apps just keep us on our phone for just such ridiculous periods of time and the level of consolidation of personal data that's happening with these services.
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Corey
Did something cause you an instance, cause you to decide, I've had it with my phone, I don't want to be on this anymore.
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Pat
I think it's just like the more I spent thinking about the amount of time I'm on my phone and like, you think about if you're on your phone 5 hours a day or even up to like 10 hours a day sometimes if you do the math on how much of the rest of your life you're going to be on the phone, it gets into years to decades of your life where, you know, you're not really doing anything productive. And once I had that realization, I decided I need to make a change. And it's been really hard, but it's also been really gratifying and I feel a lot more present. And I've gotten mixed feedback from people I know, but I've also seen other people in this kind of community, especially on the Internet, there's a small and growing community of people who are kind of supporting this change. And I think it's going to. It's going to grow. I think there needs to be a point where we need to realize the full impact of what it's doing to our lives.
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Alison Stewart
Corey, thanks for calling in. I want to get your response.
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Claire Duffy
Yeah, it's so interesting because I have actually been hearing from more people like Corey who have made the decision to switch from a smartphone to a flip phone. We talked to actually a teen, an 18 year old on terms of service, who had done the same thing. And a lot of her reasons were the same as Corey she basically said, I realized that I am spending. Spending too much time, and if I keep going like this, I am going to have spent so much of my life plugged into my phone. She realized she it was impacting her mental health. And she actually started this club in Brooklyn called the Luddite Club that brings teens together to spend time off of social media, off of technology. But it's interesting that we're seeing people make this decision for themselves to pull back on their technology use. As we've seen regulators kind of drop the ball in terms of reining in these companies, which, you know, the company's profit motive is to keep people scrolling on their devices for as long as possible.
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Alison Stewart
Let's talk to Pat from Reddington, New Jersey. Hi, Pat. Thank you so much for calling, all of it.
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Larry
Thank you for having me. I have a, I guess a bit of a different perspective. I've never been a big social media user, but I did go on to Facebook to see what was going on. I did use Instagram somewhat and I canceled them. And my main reason is I will not support Zuckerberg. I will not support Musk, which I never was involved in Twitter, Twitter or X. I even canceled Amazon because I used to use them a lot. And I just won't support these companies. The unfortunate part of it is I will receive texts and emails telling me to go to Facebook to see something that somebody wants to see, wants me to see, and I don't even do that. I pick up the phone and I call them and I asked them what they were trying to send me. But my main reason is I will not support these companies, these men in particular, and I hope some other people will do the same because there's a phone, you have it in your hand, pick it up and call people.
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Corey
Pat, thank you so much for calling in.
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Alison Stewart
Do you find that in your reporting, people speaking out against the corporate owners?
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Claire Duffy
Yeah, absolutely. I feel like this year more than ever, because people are really frustrated by the fact that many of these big tech billionaires have sort of tried to cozy up to President Trump, in particular donated to his inauguration. We saw them sitting front and center at the inauguration. And people are frustrated by the feeling that these billionaires control so much of our time and perhaps have these policy positions, these political positions that they don't necessarily agree with. So I feel like we have, especially since November, seen this big wave of people deciding that they don't want to engage on these platforms that are owned by billionaires. And that is in part why I think we've seen too, the rise of alternate platforms like Blue Sky.
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Corey
We'll talk about that in a minute. We're discussing the latest news around social media with CNN tech writer and host of CNN's audio program terms of Service, Claire Duffy. We are taking your calls. We want to know what social media platforms have you found yourself using more lately or less of lately? 212-433-969-2212, wnyc, bluesky, Twitter. Which one do you want to talk about first?
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Claire Duffy
Well, I mean, they're so connected because we've seen the rise of Blue sky, because we've seen, you know, some would say the decline, some would say the change of Twitter. Now X.
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Corey
All right, let's talk about Blue sky gained about 2.5 million users during the same period that X lost that many followers. What would you say is the mission of Blue Sky?
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Claire Duffy
Well, I mean, I think there's a few things. I think Blue sky was created because, you know, people were frustrated with the policy changes that Musk was making at X. And people felt like there needed to be a new place for, you know, different kinds of discussion to happen. People felt like their networks had sort of disbanded on X because Musk started promoting different kinds of content there and people wanted a new place to have these conversations. So I think that was sort of the start of Blue Sky. But what's also really interesting about Blue sky is they want to make it less centralized. So we've seen them, you know, take a number of steps to allow people to create different kinds of feeds, for example, for themselves, just give users more control over their experience versus a lot of these more centralized social media platforms that are controlled really at the end of the day by one person, often a male billionaire.
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Corey
Let's listen to a clip. This is Blue Sky CEO Jay Graeber in an interview with on the Media host Micah Lowinger.
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Alison Stewart
Take a listen.
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Claire Duffy
You've said that Blue sky is billionaire proof.
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Ira Flatow
This has become a kind of marketing.
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Claire Duffy
Term for the site. What do you mean by that? How is it billionaire proof?
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Progressive Insurance
What this means is that if a billionaire acquired the Blue sky company or did something to take over the foundation that bluesky is built upon lets users freely migrate. And so if something happened down the road where bluesky changed hands, like we've seen with other social companies, users could move over to another app and importantly, keep all of their relationships and their followers and their same username. This reduces the incentive, actually, for billionaires to come and make a big change with bluesky or for Me to drastically change business direction because we would lose users.
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Alison Stewart
What's different about the way CEO Jay Grabers approaches business?
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Claire Duffy
Yeah, this is huge. What she's talking about there is the fact that on Blue sky, you are allowed to take your followers, your connections, and migrate them to another platform. Whereas on Twitter, a lot of the frustration when Musk took over is people felt like they had to start completely fresh and they had all of these professional connections that they essentially lost, and they had to go try to find and recreate those networks and other places. What she's saying there is that. That if a billionaire were to take over Blue sky, that you could take those connections to another platform and not have to start from scratch. And I think that, you know, is a learning from the fact that Musk was able to buy Twitter and take it over and make such big changes. The industry is adjusting to that.
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Alison Stewart
She's also a woman.
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Claire Duffy
She's also a woman, which is huge and unusual in this tech space still.
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Alison Stewart
Let's talk to Larry from Reading, Connecticut. Hi, Larry. Thank you so much for calling, all of it.
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Mary
Hi, pleasure to be here. First time, long time. So I approach this issue as. From my background, my training, I'm an economist, and I view the social media landscape essentially the way I view a commons. And therefore, I also view it as a tragedy of the commons. If you have a platform, a commons that might, of course, underline be owned, but no property rights are sort of are exercised in it, then what we know from economics is the commons will be depleted and abused. And I tend to find that everywhere I look in social media. So whether it was the early days back in Facebook or ultimately to Twitter x, more recently, LinkedIn and even now, substack, all of these areas are subject to the same problem, which is that they ultimately degenerate to the lowest common denominator. And therefore, like perhaps our former caller, I don't use social media anymore. I find it really a disheartening place because it looks like a cesspool, something that's been polluted in the same way that the commons are, in the economic sense of that. So maybe not a perfect analogy, but certainly my way of looking at the landscape. And I'm curious if. If your. If your speaker has. Has any objections to that sort of approach or sees it differently. Thanks.
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Corey
Thanks, Larry.
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Claire Duffy
Yeah, I mean, look, Larry, I think that. I think that a lot of people would agree with you, and I think that's part of why we're seeing these efforts to transition to an Internet where users have more choice and more control over their experience on the Internet. For a long time in tech, you know, we've said that if you're not paying for a service, you are the service. And these tech companies have got, you know, given us these services for free, but they've used our data. And I think people are starting to wake up to what that means and how then they're able to use that data to, to keep us on their services longer or get us to spend more money by advertising to us. And so I think Blue sky is an interesting example of this effort to give users more control. There are a number of other efforts in that space that I think are really interesting. You know, I spoke with Frank McCourt, billionaire Frank McCourt, who is one of the bidders for TikTok. He has a sort of similar vision where they want to give users more control over their feed. They similarly want users to be able to take the content and the following that they build on TikTok and be able to take that elsewhere if they choose. And so I think we are starting to, to see this reaction to the way that tech has evolved in the past few years where there are a number of leaders who really do want to start to change things and give users more control over their experience and of their data.
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Corey
We're discussing the latest news around social media with CNN tech writer and host of CNN's audio show terms of Service, Claire Duffy. We are taking your calls. We'll have more after a quick break. This is all.
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Alison Stewart
You are listening to, all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest in studio is Claire Duffy. She's a CNN tech writer and host of CNN Audio's Terms of Service. With Claire Duffy. We are going through the social media news. You can call in. We want to know, are you participating in social media? Have you gotten off altogether? Our number is 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYCK all right. It's been interesting because you said Twitter X. Twitter X. It's amazing that it hasn't been able to have its name changed.
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Claire Duffy
It is amazing. I mean, people were just, people loved the Twitter brand. The people that worked there loved it. The people that used the platform loved it. And it really became like its own verb. It's one of those tech things like Google that to tweet became a verb, to repost, which is a feature that was born on Twitter, became a verb that now we use across different platforms. So it's so hard to Shake.
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Alison Stewart
All right, X. Twitter Elon has sold. Elon Musk, by the way, has sold X to xai, an artificial intelligence company, his artificial intelligence company. What does X now being owned by an artificial intelligence company mean for the future of the platform?
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Claire Duffy
Well, it's so interesting because XAI was always sort of integrated into the X platform from the start. It's how you access Grok, which is Xai's chatbot. You always accessed it on X. So they've always been really intertwined. And this whole news seems kind of silly, like Elon Musk is selling this company to himself. It just like a strange story, but I think what they probably realized is that the AI business model was a much more sustainable business model than the Twitter X business model, which has never been particularly sustainable. And so having X be underneath the XAI umbrella was maybe a smarter business move. I also think that xai, you know, has really relied on X to train its large language models. It's using all of the data from all of our posts, all of our pictures to train its large langu language model. And so that is an important component of why X is meaningful to xai. And I think we'll likely continue to see more integrations of the AI of the GROK chat bot onto the X platform. I mean, already people are interacting with Grok. There's now a new feature where you can ask basically tag Grok in a post and ask it a question and it will respond in a thread on the X feed. And I think we're going to just continue to see that integration of the AI features into the social media platform.
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Alison Stewart
Let's talk to Mary from Greenport, Long Island. Hi, Mary. Thanks for taking the time to call. All of it. You're on the air.
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Erica
Good afternoon. I found myself that I was using a ridiculous amount of time on Facebook. I'd pick it up for a minute two hours later. So now I just recently started from sundown Friday to sundown Sunday, trying not to go on Facebook at all. And I just started, and it's getting better because it's. Because I. I never made it through the first week. I realized, Mary, it's only Saturday, not Sunday, you know, so. But it's getting better and I have to cut down because like other people have said, you realize how much of my life am I wasting? I have so many other things to do, and I don't go on Twitter anymore at all with, well, it's X because of Elon. He's just so, so repulsive. So I can't Use that.
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Alison Stewart
Thank you for calling.
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Corey
This says I'm late to social media, but I enjoy Instagram for friends and entertainment, Twitter for a wide range of perspectives. But unfortunately I've had people impersonate me on Instagram and TikTok as I have a real estate license. And this brings me to an important episode of your show about fact checking, about when we need to fact check social media posts. First of all, Meta, they've kind of done away with their fact checkers right.
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Claire Duffy
In the US they have gotten rid of their third party fact checking network. And the way that Mark Zuckerberg described this was he felt like fact checking had become too politically biased and that too many people's opinions were being removed from the platform when they should not have been, and that it was censorship. But what's really interesting about that is that the way that Meta's third party fact checking network network worked is that these third party independent fact checkers would pick a post to add a context label on and basically would say, this post has been fact checked. If you want more information, you know, click here and read an article about them sort of breaking down the claim in that post. But the fact checkers never actually had any control over Meta's moderation policies or what posts got removed or didn't get removed. That control sat with Mark Zuckerberg at the top of the company. So he is sort of trying to push, I think, responsibility for the company's policies and the way that it decided to moderate onto fact checkers when in fact it was always just Meta that made the decision to remove certain posts after they had been fact checked.
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Corey
Want to make sure we get to TikTok the sailor ban. TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, has invested billions of dollars in AI. However, the app continues to face potential BAN in the U.S. what does a TikTok ban mean for the. The creators on TikTok?
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Claire Duffy
I mean, it would be huge. TikTok has 170 million American users. I think 7 million small businesses use the platform to sell products. It has such influence over culture. The, you know, the way that we speak, the way that we consume music. It's just got such an amazing influence and a lot of creators have built a business on the platform. And one of the things that creators tell me is that TikTok is really unique in terms of the ability to build an audience really quickly because TikTok has always been focused on just serving people content that it thinks they'll be interested in, rather than content for people they follow their friends it's just easier to build a business, to build an audience on TikTok than some of the other platforms. So while there are lots of other platforms out there where you could build a business, creators are really worried that losing TikTok could really hit their bottom line.
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Corey
It has been postponed twice by the Trump administration. First of all, where are we now?
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Claire Duffy
Well, where we are now is that Trump has extended the, basically the enforcement of this law for another 75 days. Technically, the law said that the, the ban could be extended once. It could be a 90 day extension if there was significant progress made on a deal. It's not clear that that has ever been the case. Basically what he's saying is, I am not going to enforce this law. My DOJ won't come after the tech companies that are partnering with TikTok, but you know, at this point, technically they are all in violation of the law and just counting on his reassurance that he won't come after them. Now, apparently there was a deal in the works that would have handed off control of TikTok's US to American investors. ByteDance would have retained a minority stake, which would have been allowed under the law. And that was ready to be sign, sealed and delivered. It sounds like up until Trump announced his terror policy tariff hikes on China. And then ByteDance, which is based in China, said China is not going to sign off on this deal while these tariffs are in place. And so Trump had to extend it again. So we'll see if he can bring, by dance, bring China back to the table on this.
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Corey
Let's try to get one more call in here. Erica's calling from Lyndhurst, New Jersey. Hi, Erica, thanks for calling, all of it.
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J
Hi, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.
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Corey
Let's hear your story.
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J
So, yeah, so I personally, if I could just not be on social media at all, I wouldn't be. But I have been a small business social entrepreneur for a little over 20 years and also a Reiki master. And so I've used, you know, many of them. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. LinkedIn is probably my favorite because I do come from a background of business, business and marketing. And so I appreciate that community and the professionalism which kind of is going by the wayside a little bit with just the way the world is. So that's an aside. But I also was on Twitter and so I got off of that. That was, that was my story here because it really did get very toxic. It's just, it didn't work for me. It did not gel with my vibe, so to speak. And energy for me is everything. And so I found a new community on Threads, which is a really nice space. Yeah. And I wanted to give them a little bit of a shout out because real quick, there's a lot of, I speak about New Earth, the New Earth Rising, the New Earth Consciousness. And there's a lot of people there, vegan. It's a great community for people. If that's where you want to, you know, those are the. If that's your tribe, go there.
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Alison Stewart
There you go. Thank you so much for your call. Before you go, Claire, what is something in social media and around tech that we may not be aware of, but that you have been keeping your eye on? You've got about a minute.
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Claire Duffy
Well, one thing I would love to talk about is we've got an episode coming of Terms of Service that is all about how algorithms impact our beauty standards, our understanding of beauty, our feeling the need to invest in new beauty products or beauty procedures. I talked with Elise Hu, she works for npr. She, she was so fascinating talking about this trend and just the way that we see beauty trends change so quickly and how much we all feel pressured to keep up with them. It's something that I feel like we all kind of notice, but being more mindful about it and what we feel like we need to consume based on our feeds versus because it actually makes us feel good. I think, I think one thing that I've been trying to do in my life, and I think we hear a lot from these callers, is just be more mindful about the way that tech is sort of manipulating what, you know, how we spend our time, how we spend our money. And so that is one of the things I'm thinking about right now.
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Alison Stewart
You should listen to Claire Duffy on CNN Audio's Terms of Service with Claire Duffy. Claire, thanks for sharing your reporting with us.
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Claire Duffy
Thanks for having me.
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Ira Flatow
This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.