Loading summary
Transcript42 lines
- [00:03]
Dina Temple Raston
From recorded future news and prx, this is click here. In our previous episode, we talked about governments building walls around the Internet. China built one of the biggest the Great Firewall, a system designed to control information, to decide what people could see and what they couldn't. But that's not the only way the Internet changed. Because somewhere along the way, something else happened. The Internet got very, very good at figuring out what each of us wanted to see. And once that happened, we stopped sharing quite so much of the same reality. Today, two people can open up the same app, search the same topic, even live in the same neighborhood and come away with completely different understand the world.
- [01:00]
Ethan Zuckerman
I think the mistake we made looking at Internet censorship in the early 2000s was assuming that it would come from nation states.
- [01:13]
Dina Temple Raston
From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click Here, a show about the people making and breaking our digital world. I'm Dina Temple Raston. For years we worried about governments controlling what people could see online. But what happens when nobody is controlling it and we still end up divided? Is there any way back? That's after the break. Stay with us. Support for Click Here comes from Decagon. Growth sounds like a good problem to have until it's 2am Customers are waiting for answers and your support team is stretched thin. A lot of companies turn to AI for help and then discover that most AI tools aren't really solving the problem, they're just creating a different one. Decagon was built for that moment. It helps companies create personalized concierge style customer experiences with AI agents across chat, email, voice and SMS. They're available 24, 7, feel natural to talk to, and can resolve customer requests on their own so businesses can keep up with requests without losing their personal touch. Workflows can be updated using natural language so the teams can make changes themselves without long engineering cycles. Decagon gives your team full visibility into why agents make decisions and what's happening across every conversation. It's helping power millions of conversations every day for brands you know and love like Avis, affirm, fanatics and Aura ready to transform your customer support. Go to Decagon AI Clickhere to get a personalized demo and see what Decagon can do for your team. Check out Decagon at Decagon AI Clickhere. That's Decagon AI Clickhere. Support for Click Here comes from Quince. Summer always makes me rethink what I'm reaching for every day. Lighter fabrics, better materials, pieces that just feel good the moment you put them on and they look effortless. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on high quality essentials. Think breathable linen, soft, organic cotton, washable silk, but without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated but still easy. Quince has beautiful everyday pieces like 100% European linen pants, dresses and tops with styles starting at $32. Their denim is soft and easy to wear, and their organic cotton sweaters are perfect for layering on cool summ. Everything at Quint's is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. And Quint's works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman. So you're paying for quality, not brand markup. But it's not just clothing. Quint's has really become a destination for elevated essentials across home kitchen, bedding and beyond, making it easy to bring a more premium feel into everyday life. I just got a Quince bathing suit that looks like one of those expensive European brands, but for a fraction of the price. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com clickhere and get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com clickhere for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com clickhere. Ethan Zuckerman is a professor of public policy and information at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. And he's spent years thinking about what the Internet is supposed to become and what it actually became instead. Ethan, welcome to Click here.
- [05:17]
Ethan Zuckerman
Oh, it's great to be with you, Tina. Thanks for having me.
- [05:19]
Dina Temple Raston
Of course. So when we say the Internet, we make it sound like it's one place. Was it ever one place?
- [05:29]
Ethan Zuckerman
I think it probably was more of one place 20 years ago than it is right now. There's been a real history to this sort of long process of the Balkanization of the Internet. In the early 2000s, we were really worried about the ways in which governments would try to keep people from accessing parts of the Internet. If you were in Saudi Arabia, you couldn't see sexual content or content about alcohol. If you were in China, there was the great firewall preventing you from lots of different political content. And the sense was if you could just get to the US Internet, everything would be fine.
- [06:11]
Dina Temple Raston
Back then, Americans tended to think that censorship was something that happened somewhere else. Then Washington tried to ban TikTok, and suddenly the question wasn't whether democracies censor. It was what censorship looks like when
- [06:26]
Ethan Zuckerman
they do, we literally passed a law that said TikTok is so dangerous, we're not going to allow it to be the United States. That was crazy. That was something that democracies don't normally do. But hey, we did it and did it pretty recently. We thought we had created this open Internet that was a refuge for people who wanted to get around government censorship. And then it turned out that if our government was the one doing the censoring, we actually had very few protections against it.
- [06:57]
Dina Temple Raston
And though not official government policy, he pointed out that two major US political figures own social media platforms. Donald Trump with Truth Social and Elon Musk with X platforms, both with enormous influence that don't exactly stay out of politics.
- [07:17]
Ethan Zuckerman
So, for instance, if you are using Elon Musk's X, you have a much greater chance of seeing far right viewpoints than you do left wing viewpoints. They aren't necessarily being censored, but they're being de amplified to the point where it sort of feels as if they're being censored.
- [07:35]
Dina Temple Raston
But governments aren't the only entities deciding what people see. Increasingly, some of the most powerful gatekeepers aren't governments at all. They're recommendation engines for all the hand wringing around China or Russia. Ethan says platforms like Truth, Social, X and Meta have discovered something governments always wanted. The ability to decide what gets attention and what doesn't.
- [08:00]
Ethan Zuckerman
I think the mistake we made looking at Internet censorship in the early 2000s was assuming that it would come from nation states. I think we did not anticipate that platforms in particular, and in particular through recommendation algorithms, would become in some cases much more effective sensors and much more powerful balkanizing forces than nation states would be.
- [08:28]
Dina Temple Raston
So instead of one big switch, you're saying it was just lots of smaller ones, and that's why we didn't notice.
- [08:33]
Ethan Zuckerman
And highly personalized ones.
- [08:38]
Dina Temple Raston
Facebook got there first when it decided to curate your feed. By having you only see what your friends were posting.
- [08:45]
Ethan Zuckerman
Facebook concluded that that wasn't good enough. And what they needed to do was start giving you an algorithmic feedback.
- [08:53]
Dina Temple Raston
This is what you see now, not just on Facebook, but across almost every major platform. Some of what you asked to see and a lot of what the platform wants you to.
- [09:03]
Ethan Zuckerman
We're going to shape what you end up seeing. Who you follow may be completely irrelevant. This isn't censorship as we normally know it. You can be an ardent leftist and still post on Twitter. The question is whether anyone will see what you're saying. You're not being silenced, but the odds that you actually reach a meaningful audience change substantially. This is a completely non transparent method of fragmenting the Internet and so everyone thinks it's happening to them. I think that we've moved into a world with extremely high opacity and I think most people hate it. I think if you ask people how they feel about having their content picked and filtered by them by social media, they will tell you that they liked the world much better before these algorithms were all powerful. So I think there's enormous fear of how these systems work.
- [10:06]
Dina Temple Raston
And for Ethan, that's the deeper problem. It's not just that we're seeing different things, it's that we often have no idea why we're seeing them. The systems shaping our view of the world have become harder to understand and increasingly harder to question. Social media changed what information reached us. Now AI is starting to change something else. Not just what we see, but the answers we get in the first place. That's when we come back. Stay with us. Support for Click Here comes from Serval. Every company says AI will make employees more productive, but most employees are still stuck waiting on it, waiting for app access and password resets, waiting for someone to fix a laptop issue so they can get back to work. That operational drag adds up fast, and IT teams are overwhelmed trying to keep up. SERVL was built to automate that work. You describe what you want in plain English and Servl built it for you. No complicated workflow, no consultants, just faster support and fewer tickets slowing everyone down. The platform is designed to eliminate repetitive tickets so it can focus on strategic work instead of constant firefighting. The company guarantees customers can automate 50% of it tickets. Learn more or start a free four week pilot at cervel.com clickhere that's S E-R-V-A-L.com clickhere serval.com clickhere Support for Click Here comes from NPR's Planet Money podcast. Curious about the economic forces shaping your daily life? The Planet Money podcast makes the economy make sense by telling stories about the people inside it. Take the wnba. Most people heard the leak, landed a big new collective bargaining agreement. But Planet Money went deeper inside the negotiations themselves. They found a Nobel Prize winning economist helping players make their case with something surprisingly a pie chart. Because the real fight wasn't just about bigger salaries. It was about revenue share and whether players would finally get a bigger piece of a rapidly growing business. Planet Money explained why that matters and why this deal could reshape women's sports for years. To come. That's what Planet Money does. It takes ideas that sound abstract. Collective bargaining, sanctions, labor markets, and turns them into stories that feel immediate and human. Other episodes have explored why Pokemon cards are outperforming some investments, or how Russia's economy adapted after years of sanctions and what a 750 pound restaurant robot says about the future of work. Planet Money is economics told through curiosity, surprise and great storytelling. Follow NPR's Planet Money podcast and understand how money shapes the world.
- [13:13]
Ethan Zuckerman
This is Ira Glass of this American Life. Do you know our show? Okay, well, either way, I'm going to tell you about it. We make stories, old fashioned stories that hopefully pull you into the beginning with funny moments and feelings and people in surprising situations. And then you just want to find out what is going to happen and cannot stop listening. That's right. I'm talking about stories that make you miss appointments and ignore your loved ones. This is American Life. Every week, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [13:55]
Dina Temple Raston
One of the things Ethan Zuckerman worries about is that we're entering a world where fewer and fewer people are drawing from the same pool of information. For a long time, that shared pool was easy to see. Maybe it was the evening news, maybe it was the morning paper. Later it was Google. But increasingly, information is becoming filtered through systems that are tailored to each of us individually. And now AI is taking that a step further. Because AI doesn't just help you find information, it helps construct the answer. And that means two people can ask similar questions and come away with very different understandings of the world. Ethan says you can already see hints of that happening. Take Grock, the AI assistant on X.
- [14:47]
Ethan Zuckerman
So someone asks Grok, what's the biggest threat to humanity? And Grok comes back and says, mis and disinformation. It's a real problem. And then someone says, who's the biggest spreader of MIS and disinformation? And Grok comes back and says, just in terms of reach, it probably has to be Elon Musk. Musk does not like this at all. Goes to his engineers. Two days later, you ask the same question to Grok and it says, the biggest threat to humanity is low birth rates. We have to repopulate the planet. You know, this far right talking point of somehow we're going to face civilizational collapse. He's quite literally forcing the reprogramming of these information systems to align with his political beliefs. That was hard for any of us to believe was going to happen. I think I would have assumed that people would have just run screaming from any platform that gave you that clearly politicized information. But in fact, these platforms seem to be thriving.
- [15:51]
Dina Temple Raston
Another term people sometimes use for Balkanization is digital sovereignty, the idea that countries should control their own digital future. But in the age of AI, governments are asking a new question. If AI is going to explain the world to our citizens, whose version of the world will it be?
- [16:09]
Ethan Zuckerman
You're seeing some European nations essentially say, hey, AI seems like it's going to be really powerful. It seems like a very bad idea to let either the US or China decide what's going to be accurate and representative information. If you are in France and you're choosing between an American AI and a Chinese AI, you're in France, you're going to say, I think I'd like to choose a French AI. I think I would like to honor the centuries of culture and writing and literature, all the things that we know. I think we should ensure that those are represented in our information systems. And so digital sovereignty, I think, is likely to Balkanize us in a very interesting and possibly positive way. It's possible that as we get into an AI age, if digital sovereignty turns out to be the paradigm that we follow, you might get a really interesting way of triangulating your way to knowledge by looking at a Nigerian AI, a French AI, a Singaporean AI, and trying to figure out where they agree and where they disagree.
- [17:27]
Dina Temple Raston
For years, people worried about filter bubbles. Ethan says AI creates something even stranger. Not bubbles, but pods. This matters because AI is starting to become the window through which people see the digital world.
- [17:41]
Ethan Zuckerman
I think people are spending less and less time on the traditional text and image web. They are now interacting with the world more and more through AI used as search engines or AI used as companions.
- [17:54]
Dina Temple Raston
And AI balkanizes the world in new and slightly different ways because it's entirely opaque. Yes, Twitter may be sending you different things than it sends your friends, but on some level, it's all public.
- [18:07]
Ethan Zuckerman
AI doesn't have that presumption. There's sort of the presumption that my conversations with Claude or ChatGPT are private. I can't see what everybody else is saying and doing. And what that suggests is not so much filter bubbles or echo chambers, but just pods. It's just us and the machine. There is no public. It's just us having this relationship with this incredibly powerful entity which is filtering the world for us to see it. Is democracy possible in that world? Yeah, sure. Is it going to look anything like the democracy we have right now? It's going to look real different.
- [18:50]
Dina Temple Raston
So if it keeps going this way. What actually changes for people day to day?
- [18:55]
Ethan Zuckerman
I think the big change day to day is that it gets harder and harder to have consensus about the world that we're living in. And maybe now the center cannot hold, you know, maybe we no longer have that one reliable source that keeps everybody more or less on the same page.
- [19:15]
Dina Temple Raston
So it seems like what you're saying is that we've lost our shared context. So it becomes harder to have common conversations or agree on basic facts.
- [19:26]
Ethan Zuckerman
I think it's increasingly hard for people who live in different informational universes to agree on what is real and what needs to be a priority. We've gone through many different changes and democracy shifts every time we do it. This is Kennedy versus Nixon, where suddenly having the ability to see the candidate as well as hear the candidate might change who we vote for. And I think each time we've had these moments, we've had moments of panic. But I am reluctant to say that democracy cannot survive in this new era. At the same time, I am also reluctant to accept that democracy is simply going to adapt on its own. I think there are certain things we need to work on.
- [20:17]
Dina Temple Raston
So if you could wave an optimistic wand to fix this, what would you change?
- [20:24]
Ethan Zuckerman
I would mandate interoperability. So I realize this sounds incredibly technical, but it's really not.
- [20:34]
Dina Temple Raston
He points to cell phones. There was a time when switching providers meant giving up your phone number, which meant giving up your connections, your family, your friends, your contacts. Congress eventually stepped in and changed that. Now your number belongs to you, not the phone company. Ethan dreams of a similar world for social media. A world where people could leave a platform without leaving the people they care about behind.
- [21:00]
Ethan Zuckerman
People use the tools they use because their friends are on them. You are probably never going to get me off of Facebook because my sister uses Facebook. And that means if I want to see photos of my niece and nephew, I've got to go to Facebook. You could imagine mandating interoperability for platforms over a different size. And at that point you could imagine people moving towards social media tools that work well for them. Right now we have very, very little mandated interoperability. The EU did a tiny, tiny bit of it. If you actually had Twitter having to interoperate with Facebook, having interoperate with BlueSky, having to interoperate with Mastodon, maybe you could actually see this sort of explosion of values driven community run social media networks that might behave differently.
- [21:57]
Dina Temple Raston
Is it too late for us to pull something like that off?
- [22:00]
Ethan Zuckerman
I don't have a lot of hope for it in the United States right now. I actually do have some hope that the EU might get there the next time they pass a big package of legislation. We've got to figure out how to have a voice there, and interoperability is going to be a big part of that as well.
- [22:18]
Dina Temple Raston
Ethan, thank you.
- [22:19]
Ethan Zuckerman
Oh, my pleasure, Dina. It's been really fun talking with you
- [22:25]
Dina Temple Raston
for years. The Internet promised to connect us, and it did. Just maybe not in the way we expected. Instead of one global conversation, we've got billions of smaller ones, some separated by borders, some by algorithms, some by AI. And maybe that's the irony. The technology that was supposed to bring the world together is giving each of us a different version of it. This is Click Here. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and prx. Today's show was written and produced by Megan Dietre, Sean Powers, Erica Guida, Zach Hirsch and Maya Fawaz. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Sarah Cavedo and fact checked by Darren Ankrona. Original music is by Ben Levingston with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley, our illustrator is Megan Gough, and our sound designers and engineers are Jake Cook and Jesse Niswonger. I'm Dina Tumble Raston and we'll see you next week. Support for this program comes from Recorded Future. In cybersecurity, the biggest risk isn't what can be seen, it's what gets missed. Recorded Future analyzes billions of signals to help organizations stay ahead of threats. Recorded Future Know what matters act first
- [24:03]
Ethan Zuckerman
if you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up today's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication the Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to the Record Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.