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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hello, and welcome to the this should be free edition of Sleep Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. We are a free podcast. You can get us anywhere that good podcasts are found. But we are not totally independent and free in a way that Wikipedia is, because Wikipedia doesn't even have ads. I'm afraid we do have ads. So that's the difference between us and Wikipedia. We are going to have a deep dive into exactly how Wikipedia works and what it does with Catherine Ma.
- [00:45]
B
Great to be here.
- [00:46]
A
Katherine. Ma is in for. You're off a. You just got off a plane from somewhere. You're about to get on a plane to somewhere else. But in between planes, Katherine's made it to Brooklyn, New York, to record. This is going to be an awesome episode of Slate Money, all about the information economy. We're going to talk about Wikipedia, obviously. We are also going to be talking about, like, the anti Wikipedia, which is Elsevier, which is this big Dutch company that makes a whole bunch of money off research that was all funded by taxpayers and how dare they. And we are going to talk about crypto wars, which is the inevitable consequence of the Facebook pivot to privacy. Do we believe that Facebook is going to pivot to privacy? Emily is shaking her head no.
- [01:29]
C
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
- [01:33]
A
Oh, and I should make sure that we introduce everyone else.
- [01:35]
B
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
- [01:36]
A
I am Felix Salmon of Axios. Emily Peck is from Huffington Post. Huffington Post. And Anna Shymansky is.
- [01:42]
D
I'm Anna Shamansky.
- [01:43]
A
It's just Anna Shymansky. She works for a mysterious company that we cannot reveal. She doesn't even tell us she's an international woman. But we are very happy to have Anna here, and all of that is coming up on Slate Money. So, Katherine, you literally know everything in the world because you run the organization which encapsulates and incorporates all of the information in the world. And you are the smartest person in the world.
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B
I cheat. I look it up on Wikipedia.
- [02:17]
A
You look it up on Wikipedia, but it's there. And I remember my favorite story about the, you know, the stripe. The Collison brothers. My favorite Collison story is that before they founded Stripe, they got, like, the seed money to found Stripe by doing an app. And the app was all of Wikipedia in an app.
- [02:40]
B
But isn't that just Wikipedia?
- [02:42]
A
Well, this was kind of before data plans, and everyone had, like, the Internet on their phone.
- [02:46]
B
Oh, they had, like, an offline Wikipedia.
- [02:48]
A
And so you downloaded this enormous app and it cost like 10 doll. And I did it because one of the Carlson brothers made me. I downloaded all of Wikipedia onto my phone and it was just sitting there on my phone. And you could look stuff up even if you didn't have an Internet connection.
- [03:02]
B
That's actually, we have that app and it's really popular in many parts of the world.
- [03:06]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [03:07]
B
Because not everyone has stable Internet and.
- [03:09]
A
You don't need to pay $10 for it anymore.
- [03:11]
B
That's right. We make it free, actually. It's kind of our jam.
- [03:16]
A
So. Yeah. So tell me what you are up to these days, because I think a lot of people who use Wikipedia, a lot of sleep money, people who use Wikipedia will have looked at it and say, well, it looks pretty much the same as it did sort of five or ten years ago.
- [03:33]
B
I mean, from a user experience standpoint, it looks kind of the same. It looks like an encyclopedia. We like keeping it like that. But there's actually a reason for that too, because not everybody, as we just said, has access to a high quality Internet connection. And so Wikipedia is really fast no matter where you are in the world. But on the back end, things changed a lot.
- [03:51]
A
And on the content side, even if the sort of English language, Wikipedia has kind of reached a steady state, the other languages and stuff like that are growing.
- [04:01]
B
They all are growing. Wikipedia adds thousands of articles every single day. It's 50 million articles these days. English Wikipedia is the largest. It's five and a half million articles. But then other Wikipedias are really large. Swedish is a surprise win. It's up there in the millions. You've got German, Spanish, French, all the sort of big European languages. And then a lot of the languages from outside of North America and North America and Europe continue to grow at a pretty rapid clip.
- [04:30]
D
Although, isn't this so One of the issues with Wikipedia, though, is that if you look at the number of people who edit from, say, the Netherlands, it's more than all of the people who edit from the entire continent of Africa.
- [04:41]
B
Yeah, that's right. In fact, that is a huge part of what the Wikimedia foundation focuses on. Really. Our work is so split up into hosting the websites. We actually still host everything ourselves. We've got our own engineers, we don't use the cloud infrastructure. We have our own. And then the remainder of what we do is really about trying to support and expand Wikipedia's use in other places in which what we call our emerging communities, places in which Wikipedia has not always been as popular, languages in which are not as well Developed communities that don't necessarily contribute. So the Netherlands is what, 16 million people? And it has an incredibly popular Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, and something like less than 2% of African contributors come from the entire African continent. So there's clearly just huge swaths of the world that are missing. So this idea that Wikipedia is in any way steady state actually feels just like there's no way that's possible.
- [05:30]
A
So the big growth is in the future in terms of like, just the percentage of the population of the world that you're going to reach. You're good on the Dutch, but not so much on, like the.
- [05:40]
B
We're very good on the Dutch. No, we love the Dutch. No, if you look at most of Wikipedia across, like, sort of the mature markets such as North America and Europe, we're at about 85, 90% brand awareness. And if you go into places like Mexico, it's more like 45%. Nigeria, it's more like 35%. And so one of our big focuses is like, how do we actually engage communities around tools like an encyclopedia? If you actually don't, your culture doesn't have a concept of a bunch of books sitting on a shelf. If you haven't, don't have anything in terms of not anything. But if you have more of an oral tradition rather than a written tradition, what does it mean to be able to participate and see yourself reflected in Wikipedia? So I think that that's a major growth area for us when you consider that by 2100, Africans will make up about 42% of the world's population.
- [06:28]
A
So how do you deal with oral traditions? Do you have a big spoken oral, I don't know tradition? Is there a way of doing that on Wikipedia?
- [06:39]
B
It's an ongoing question. This is part of what the Wikimedia foundation tries to do, is invest in people who are looking to solve sort of knowledge problems. Right. Epistemological questions about how do you actually think. Think about what a reliable oral tradition looks like, as opposed to a reliable source, as we think of a published journal article or published newspaper. And there's a really interesting Namibian Wikipedian who talks about how there's a community in Namibia that meets every year and they tell their oral traditions together and then they go away and then they come back the next year to retell those oral traditions in a way that allows the entire community to validate and reaffirm what those traditions are. So there are certainly ways within oral tradition that knowledge is considered reliable. So I think we're interested in what that might look like is that storytelling? Is that being able to cross reference against other sources? But it's enough that we haven't fully cracked.
- [07:33]
D
And I think this is really interesting about the positive potential of Wikipedia just from its structure, because I think a lot of the criticisms you can make of just like the low number of biographies that are about women, that kind of thing. Unfortunately, that was the case with regular encyclopedia, too. Right. But I feel like now Wikipedia, because it does have these abilities, could, down the line, actually start to change this.
- [07:55]
B
That that is our goal is to think about. You know, it's really hard for us to correct the historical record, 2000 years of people not being written about, but it's certainly the case that we can think about, what does it mean to actually address gaps in knowledge as we move forward, and how do we measure those gaps? And then how do we think about what does it look like to reframe what knowledge actually means? So those are some of the questions that you get into Wikipedia and you very quite quickly slide down this slippery slope of, like, epistemological justice.
- [08:21]
C
How do you go about recruiting new editors and getting more women and getting more Africans and doing all that? What's sort of like the nuts and bolts of doing that?
- [08:29]
B
The nuts and bolts? I think there's two different things. There's a social component about how do you do outreach and engage people where they are in the actual community side, and then there's the product side, which is how do you make the experience of contributing to Wikipedia and making it accessible? To Felix's point about downloading it, where there are people who are not online, how do you actually make that an easier experience? And in the product experience, we're looking at, how do you do social pairing in ways that let people know that there's a community out there that you're not contributing sort of in to avoid? How do you actually reaffirm when someone does work that is valuable and useful? How do you give people sort of guide paths into what is valuable and useful? So if you're somebody who wants to edit on grammar, then let's find some grammar for you to fix. Right. As opposed to somebody who wants to write an article. So those are the things that we're working on on the back end, and then on the front end, which is the community component of it is we find the most successful way to get people engaged is to actually do events, explain what Wikipedia is, help them meet other people in person, develop relationships that will bring them into the space, and recognize that there's Sort of a pro social component to what it is that we do. So we find that the number one way to engage women editors is to actually invite them into social spaces to learn how to edit. And in those social spaces, representation of women tends to be about 45%, as opposed to the on wiki space, which is more like around 15 to 20%. And so that seems to be a really positive space for us in terms of having success there and how to now transitioning that into an online capacity.
- [09:57]
C
And have you been able to get your percentage up of women editors in the online space?
- [10:03]
B
It's hard for us to know exactly because we have privacy policies where we don't actually collect any demographic information about you. You don't have to register to edit Wikipedia. We don't even ask for your email address. You can give it if you want. So there's no data that we have on our users, which is very unusual in this day and age relative to the rest of the web. But what we can do through self sampling and the like is we've seen real increases in places that we refer to as, like, leadership positions, organizing positions. In terms of overall representation of women in our spaces, it gets a little complicated, but those numbers have gone up to about 35%. So, yeah, we've seen a real improvement there.
- [10:42]
A
I have two questions which have come up a lot. One, just as a journalist, there's a big debate. Well, not a big debate. There is a debate in the journalism community about can you. Should you link to Wikipedia as a reliable resource? And I get. And Emily is frowning and shaking her head and saying, I mean, I love Wikipedia, but I would never link to it as a resource.
- [11:10]
C
There's definitely a reticence among journalists because it's pretty relaxed. I mean, it's. The entries are very reliable.
- [11:18]
A
There is. There is absolutely no. Any journalist who says they don't use Wikipedia as a resource is lying. They all do.
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B
And that's.
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A
They then when they link to the information that they find that found out from Wikipedia, they're very hesitant to actually acknowledge.
- [11:32]
C
I'll just go to the footnote. Yeah, whatever the information is, I find I, like, hunt the footnote and then go to the footnote information just to make sure.
- [11:39]
B
Yeah, we're fine with that.
- [11:40]
A
Okay.
- [11:41]
B
That's why they're there.
- [11:42]
A
Yeah, exactly. But a lot of the time, like, Wikipedia will have a list of, you know, all of this or all of that, and those lists don't exist somewhere else. And so you're like, can I link to this list? Do you link to it, Felix? I am pro linking to Wikipedia, but I will admit that I'm in the minority on this one.
- [12:00]
B
I feel like linking to Wikipedia as a journalist. If you're doing it as a representation of something like a list, this is the aggregate information that's available. That's one thing. If you're using it as Wikipedia says as a definitive source that this number is this. I don't, I wouldn't advise that.
- [12:15]
D
And this is why I think Wikipedia is really interesting, because it's in terms of accuracy, it's accurate about what people think right now.
- [12:22]
B
Oh, exactly, yes.
- [12:23]
D
Right. In a way, it's almost like kind of the markets, in a way, it's like the what the market has processed all the information it currently has right now. Does that mean something's properly valued? Well, not necessarily.
- [12:33]
B
Every time someone says, you know, that Wikipedia is a source of truth, I'm like, no, we're a source of consensus, source of what is understood right now based on who can participate.
- [12:42]
A
And the other source of truth, again, going back to Anna's earlier point, like, it's not like it's less reliable than, you know, the Encyclopedia Britannica and, you know, there are errors everywhere.
- [12:53]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's actually more reliable. And if you think about it as a consensus oriented project, it reflects the views of everyone who's writing on any particular topic at a time, or not everyone, but representative sample. I think that that is what the power, that's what's so powerful about the model is that not only does it bring all these different sort of diverse inputs together, it also evolves as our understanding of issues evolve. But that's why it's not the truth. There's not static about it. It sort of takes from the scientific method. As new information comes along, it evolves too. And I think that that's what's actually really exciting and dynamic.
- [13:26]
A
And as far as journalists are concerned, they're very uncomfortable with the idea of like fluid epistemics and the idea that the truth is something that evolves over time. And they're like, no, it has to be either true or false.
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C
That's right, strict constructionists.
- [13:42]
A
But the other big question I have about, about Wikipedia is the way you fund yourselves through donations. When you could put a tiny little text ad in the corner somewhere and that would pay for the entire project in a millisecond. What is the reason why you don't do that?
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B
Well, we just don't believe that knowledge should be commoditized in that Way we believe that we exist like a library on the Internet and that there is a space for that. That knowledge is something that we've built collectively together. Certainly it has value, has. What I love about it is that for the economists, it's non rivalrous value in the sense that the more people take away from it, it doesn't actually diminish the value for anyone else. So we feel like there should be a space for free information on the web and that that information should be supported by the same people who use it. It's very similar to the way that the knowledge itself is created. It's literally created for people and by people. And it's sort of owned by people too, because it's all under an open license. We think that's just sort of how it should be. It keeps us independent, it keeps the integrity of the sites really indisputable and it gives people stake in what Wikipedia actually is. Because not that many people can contribute to Wikipedia in the sense of not necessarily have the time or the resources, but lots of people can make a $3 donation and 7 million people every year do.
- [14:59]
A
So let's talk about the other end of the information spectrum, which is extremely expensive information in the form of Elsevier and their publications, because this was in the news. Emily, you can explain what happened with the University of California.
- [15:14]
C
The University of California dropped Elsevier, who's a big academic publisher, and basically they were paying them several million dollars a year to have access to their journals.
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B
25% of their annual scholarly publication budget.
- [15:32]
A
And then Elsevier, that contract was coming to an end and they wanted to raise that amount by 80.
- [15:37]
C
Yes, the profit margins of Elsevier are about 37%. They make a lot of money off scholarly journal articles. And this is controversial because the research that goes into these scholarly journal articles is government funded. Taxpayers are effectively paying twice, right? They're paying to get the research done, they're paying again to read the research. And there's a growing movement that says, you know, this information should be open source. And UC as sort of the biggest university system to fight back and say, enough's enough, we're not going to pay for this anymore.
- [16:11]
A
And what UC said was, we will. What they were trying to negotiate before the negotiations fell through was, okay, we will pay you for the journals, but any research that comes out of our system that needs to be open source and you need to make that free to everyone. And it looks like Elsevier was kind of okay with that, just so long as they kept on getting that. You know, $20 million a year or whatever it was. And UC was like, no, that's just too much.
- [16:40]
C
And this is, I think a real bell bellwether. If it can stick, then other university systems are going to probably follow University of California. And this could be a big change for academic publishing, which as I'm reading about Elsevier, I'm thinking, oh my God, like the rest of the publishing industry could really, it's the envy of everybody else who's writing articles right now that this company is 37% profit margins.
- [17:02]
D
Well and I think that part of the reason for that is because they don't really do anything. I mean like I'm all for for profit companies, but this is a useless for profit company. They don't pay the people who do the peer review. They don't pay the people who are writing the articles. They essentially are just, you know, if any bundling things, which is not even how people consume knowledge anymore. There it's just this legacy model. No, there's no value add.
- [17:26]
C
And listening to you talk about knowledge being free and open, I mean really, if you just think about it like people should be able to access scholarly articles like we're seeing right now with climate change. You know, we'll talk about David Wallace Wells book in an upcoming episode. But one of the problems is people don't understand climate change. They don't understand what the research has been, what scholars are saying. And I'm not saying everyone's going to run out and read academic articles about climate change, but maybe, I mean they should be free. People should understand this, Stu.
- [18:00]
B
So we do a lot of work with open access publishing and one of the things that we, well, not we, but external researchers have found is that when an article about a scientific concept is in an open access journal, it is more likely to be understood by the general public. It's also more likely to be in Wikipedia and represented effectively in Wikipedia. So I don't know whether that's correlation or causation, but there's no question to us in our mind that the end outcome is a positive outcome. If we want the general public to be engaged in matters of scientific debate, inquiry and sort of new insights, then making that information available feels like a critical step to an informed public.
- [18:36]
C
I think without it, you have public health crisis, you have anti vaxxers not vaccinating their children and then you have, you know, outbreaks of the measles.
- [18:44]
A
I mean, it's important. I'm not 100% convinced that like the anti vaxx thing is a function of bad science?
- [18:51]
C
No, bad. Not being able to access the good science.
- [18:55]
A
But I am 100% convinced that something like the Public Library of Science, PLOS One is an amazing resource that I use. I use SSRN or there's a huge number of like pre print exchanges in just about every academic discipline. And the weird thing is as a journalist, I know that whenever there's a interesting paper, all I need to do is email the author of the paper and they will send it to me.
- [19:25]
B
Because they can under their contract terms and yet.
- [19:28]
A
But you need somehow, like, if I'm not a journalist, if I'm actually someone who wants to work with science and improve science, and that's harder. And I need to have these insanely expensive subscriptions which effectively marginalizes any scientist who isn't working in the sort of Western interlibrary system.
- [19:47]
B
And even in the West. I read the staggering statistic that the US taxpayers pay about $140 billion a year in subsidizing research that, that they don't have access to.
- [19:56]
C
That is just.
- [19:57]
B
That's shocking.
- [19:58]
A
Oh, you mean the taxpayers don't have access to.
- [20:00]
B
Yeah, well, that we don't have access to.
- [20:01]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it might be that, you know, the chairman of the research department has access to it, but yeah, Joe Public does not. And it's. And I think, I think one of the things we're learning. Learning is that there's no, There's a lot of unintended consequences, I guess, to walling off this information, which people never really thought about back in the day. Like there's on some level a lot of this research, especially when it comes to medicine, is very hard to read and understand. And it uses a bunch of words that no one understands. And you're like, why would a normal person even want to be able to read this? But I think we're increasingly learning that these things are. It's actually not as hard to understand as you might think a lot of these papers.
- [20:45]
C
And plus, as public university systems are under financial pressure right now, you're asking them essentially to pay twice to pay for things that they've created themselves. I mean, it's, it doesn't seem.
- [20:59]
D
And that's exactly it, is that even though, yes, most universities are paying these fees and then that is allowing people to have access like they shouldn't have to be paying, that money could be better spent to. Honestly, that money could be better spent on the people who are actually doing the research.
- [21:12]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [21:13]
B
One of the things that I think The UC thing also needs to be understood as an overall shift. Right. It is one of the largest purchasing systems across the United States. It's in terms of an academic institution. But this comes actually right on the heels of a decision in the European Union to make a recommendation that all science published in the EU has to be open access by 2020. So this is the bells are tolling for the industry is how I would read this. I think this is a harboring era of things to come.
- [21:39]
A
Do we think that amazing Russian woman who created Sci Hub, what was it like 15 years ago, and, and she was working with like Aaron Swartz, I think back in the day to like, you know, basically download all scientific papers and start mirroring them in like, you know, countries with weak copyright laws and just say like, here, come and read them.
- [22:02]
B
A lot of people do.
- [22:03]
A
Do you think that. Yeah, and those libraries, like there are now dozens of them and you can, you know, and obviously people like Elsevier are trying to shut them down because they're incredibly illegal, but they're not having a lot of success. And I wonder whether at some point they just have to sort of say, okay, well the facts on the ground are that a lot of this, if not all of this information is public anyway, thanks to the Internet.
- [22:28]
B
That's an interesting question. You know, I was just thinking, why is it that they've had such a difficulty shutting this down when the music industry was able to get piracy under control in a very different way? And I think it's because of the access models. Right. If you're looking at paying 40, $100 per article, you know, the competitive access is not the same as paying a dol on itunes. Right. It feels as though there's a market solution here potentially, but the publishing, I think the industry isn't willing to engage with it. They're 37% profit margin.
- [22:55]
A
The success of Spotify is not, is, is, is proof that people are actually okay paying for music. It's not that the, you know, Napster and the free music went away. If you want to download any song on in the world, you can find it and you can do that, but it's just too much of a pain in the ass. It's so much easier to just, just do it legally.
- [23:13]
C
And in the case of music, there are artists that are being rewarded and compensated. And most people would agree that artists should be compensated somewhat, but in the case of Elsevier, it's like, who's making the money here? It just seems like rent seeking. So it's easier to understand why you'd want it to go away. There's also such an interesting contrast, I'll say again, to what's going on in journalism right now, where it seems like everything went free for a while and now people are pulling back behind a paywall. But for some reason, and to me, maybe because I am a journalist, it seems like that's fine.
- [23:45]
D
But to me that is different though.
- [23:47]
A
Because it's the same as the music, it's just compensating the creative.
- [23:50]
D
Exactly. And it's not government backed.
- [23:55]
A
If the government wants to pay me to commit journalism, that's problematic. A whole other reason then. If you work for the BBC, that's fine.
- [24:03]
B
I do feel a little bad for the humanities though. All the focus has really been on open science. It does make me wonder about, you know, I was reading that the number of historians has dropped. People seeking history PhDs has dropped something by 45% in the last few years, which seems concerning and just as a matter of how we understand the world. Certainly as a Wikipedian it concerns me, but with all the focus on open access being really around open science, I wonder what sort of the unintended consequences of that is for the humanities.
- [24:30]
C
Also, I feel the history papers would be much more readable.
- [24:34]
A
Yeah, historians have generally the best writers in the academy, I think, just telling stories. But let's talk about the real money, which is the multi gazillion dollar Facebook money because we did talk about Facebook last week and then they went and committed a whole bunch of news. So now we have to talk about Facebook again because this is a big thing. Mark Zuckerberg There was a little mini scandal. There's always a mini scandal at Facebook and there was a little mini scandal about how when people were using their phones for two factor authentication to make sure that Facebook was secure, suddenly those phone numbers they had had to be available to all of your friends whether you liked it or not. And they were like being used as phone numbers rather than just little security device. And amazingly the next thing you know you get like this 3200 word blog post from Mark Zuckerberg going we are pivoting the entire company to privacy and and all of your status updates are going to evaporate unless you try and make them permanent. And we are really going to be a much more privacy focused like group messaging company basically with end to end encryption on everything. And what do we make of this?
- [25:55]
D
Well, because it's just so odd because up until the day before Facebook's whole thing is like we're connecting the world, we're making the world more open. And you're like, now they're wait about that. And so it does make you also wonder like how real this is.
- [26:10]
C
I mean, part of what they had in the works already, because part of the thing he said in his 3200 word blog post was how he wanted to make it easier to message people who are using Instagram or WhatsApp or Facebook, you know, whatever platform you're on. They've been working on that for a while.
- [26:26]
A
And this is where Elizabeth Warren comes in. Because this is a way of basically changing the facts on the ground. If you build them all on the same, if they're just different, like skins on the same messaging back end, it basically makes it impossible at that point to break up Facebook and to say no, you have to spin off Instagram, you have to spin off WhatsApp, because they're all basically the same service. And that's what he's really afraid of. And that's what Elizabeth Warren has now said that she wants to do.
- [26:54]
C
On Friday, as we were heading in to talk, she published a blog post on Medium, sort of outlining how she wants to break up the big, big tech companies, defined I think as 25 billion in revenue and above.
- [27:05]
B
That is a bold statement and a policy prescription. But look, I just got back from Europe and this is actually what the German regulators have said, they said this about two or three weeks ago, is that they were potentially considering blocking, I don't know what regulatory authority they have there, but potentially considering trying to block this integration of these three messaging platforms for anti competitive purposes.
- [27:28]
A
I mean, as long as they're all owned by the same company, it's anti competitive anyway, right? So the only reason to block the integration would be with an aid to eventually breaking up the company. Or am I wrong about that?
- [27:41]
B
I am not an expert in antitrust law. The definition of anti competition in this country has tended to revolve around pricing models. And certainly I think that's usually the argument about why these companies don't fall under sort of anti competitive oversight. But then again, it might also, because we don't really just do antitrust anymore in this country. But I mean, I'm not totally sure what German rationale was. But I will say that when I saw this yesterday, or not yesterday, when I saw this, when this came out, my first response was, well, that puts a huge target on encryption again, it raises the specter of the crypto wars all over again, which we just sort of had a conversation about two years ago and it sort of died down. And now I think it'll come right back. Because if you have, what is it? I don't know their total user base across those three platforms, but if you have, say a third of the world at the minimum, on an E2E end to end encryption platform in which law enforcement is now going to be wondering about what's going on in those sort of dark pipes, it makes me think that the very next conversation is going to be, all right, we need backdoors and encryption again, which has huge implications for all sorts of different sort of web security, commerce and the like.
- [28:45]
C
And Casey Newton, I think, mentioned in his newsletter that particularly on WhatsApp, a lot of bad stuff kind of happens behind, behind these encrypted walls and then, you know, like fake news and other bad, bad stuff.
- [29:00]
B
It's seen as accelerant. I think it was WhatsApp was, was pointed to as one of the messaging platforms that was responsible for the deaths of something like two dozen people in India recently.
- [29:13]
C
Right. So there is sort of a balance that a company like Facebook has to strike between keeping information private and then, you know, protecting it.
- [29:20]
A
It's a little bit of a cop out on one level. Like when Mark Zuckerberg got quite rightly in the neck about the way the use of Facebook to foment, you know, effectively genocide in Myanmar, basically what they were saying, what everyone was saying, which was correct, was like there was a whole bunch of activity going on in Myanmar on Facebook, which Facebook knew about. And it was, you know, leading to lots of people getting killed and Facebook should have done something to prevent that. And then this move seems to me on one level to be like, oh, well, if we end to end encrypt everything, we just won't know what people are saying to each other. So it's not our problem anymore.
- [30:00]
D
Yeah. And I think this is one of those issues that we are simply never going to solve. It is always going to be moving back and forth between the desire for people to have more privacy and then the fact that when you give people more privacy, some people are going to use that to do very bad things and governments are going to be concerned about that. You're obviously going to get some countries that are probably going to simply say there is no Facebook if you're going to do this. But then you're also, I mean, even countries like the United States are going to be very concerned about this. And I just don't think we're ever gonna Solve this.
- [30:27]
C
The other thing I was thinking was Facebook, the news feed itself, they're seeing sort of a decline. And this is sort of like.
- [30:34]
A
Like people are using. It's a smaller and smaller part of what Facebook does.
- [30:38]
C
Yeah, exactly. And so Facebook now, with this announcement, like, they're making it sound like it's about privacy, blah, blah, blah. But what it's really about is Facebook leaning into where the market is going. And they're trying to compete with, say, Apple's iMessage, which is really becoming like a social network on its own, where you're talking with your friends and you're in your. You're sending pictures and GIFs and sometimes even payments, and you feel like it's private. Like, I don't have any concerns about using Apple iMessage. I'm not worried that I'm going to see an ad for something I'm talking about. Well, I think that, you know, Facebook trying to lean into where things are going.
- [31:13]
B
Facebook building, WeChat, it is exactly it.
- [31:16]
D
It's tencent that I think they're really looking at. They want to get more into payments, they want to get more into commerc. I mean, they've been saying that for years, and honestly, it kind of does make sense.
- [31:24]
B
Well, because right now, if you actually. I mean, I haven't. I actually have not been on Facebook in more than a year. But the. The product experience, last I recall, was so diffuse. Right. In terms of it had sort of markets over here and it had news feed over here and it had sort of events over there. And it seems like this is actually just a way to push everyone into an integrated platform.
- [31:41]
D
Yeah.
- [31:42]
A
Are you more active on WeChat? Because it seems to me, because I'm not. And I. I'm not on WeChat, I kind of. I kind of feel like WeChat is this kind of nirvana that Mark Zuckerberg looks at of, like, imagine if I could get even, you know, 20% of the way to WeChat.
- [32:01]
B
Are we gonna get so much the.
- [32:02]
A
Way that people live? Exactly. But you see. But then that's the thing, right, Is that you. That you can't and won't actually genuinely have privacy on Facebook because the entire Facebook business model is based on Facebook knowing exactly who you are, knowing exactly what website you visited, and being able to target things incredibly narrowly at you. And that's not going away because that's how they make all of their money.
- [32:24]
B
Well, this is the amazing thing to me, right? So I said, I haven't been on Facebook in more than a year. You know, most companies send you out those reminder emails like, hey, we miss you, Katherine, come back. I haven't gotten a single reminder email from Facebook to sign back in because they don't need me to.
- [32:36]
A
Right. You are still.
- [32:37]
B
They know everything about me.
- [32:39]
A
They still know everything about you. And they are still serving you ads. Yes, because the people think that, you know, the ads are just the ads in News Feed and the sponsored posts in Instagram and it's not. It follows you all around the web. And also the number of people I know who are very proudly patting themselves on the back for quitting Facebook and they're still on Instagram every day. Yeah, this is cognitive disconnect there.
- [33:03]
C
There was a wonderful. I think I saw this on Twitter. The New York Times had some article about Facebook and in the comments section, a man wrote in saying he never goes on Facebook and he won't use it. La la la.
- [33:14]
A
Best own ever.
- [33:15]
C
And then commented, well, honey, I tell you all the time about so and so's getting married or so and so, you know, went on a trip here and there and that all that information's coming from Facebook so you can't escape it publicly. The wife owning the husband.
- [33:32]
D
This suggests that maybe we don't want privacy.
- [33:35]
A
I'm telling you, like that. The New York Times comment section is the new Facebook. Let's have a numbers round. I think it's time for some numbers. What's your number, Emily?
- [33:48]
C
My number is 30%. It is the share of Republican women who said gender discrimination is not. Is a serious problem. So only 30% of Republican women said in the survey that HuffPost and Yahoo, my companies, sponsored. And that's compared with 74% of Democratic women. So I wrote a story about it. I called up the Republican women and I said, why don't you think gender discrimination is a serious problem? They basically told me that while they think it's a problem when women are discriminated against, it's the kind of problem that we can just, like, deal with on our own.
- [34:22]
A
We women or we as a society.
- [34:24]
C
We women, women individually, like, they just need to be strong and be tough. And just. That's it. And it was a really striking difference. The Democratic women that I spoke to were more like, we need laws, we need rules and regulations. And it's hard out there for women. And I read studies about it. But the Republican women are sort of more reflective of that kind of like, pull yourself up by the bootstraps kind of mentality. And it was Just a really interesting perspective to me, because it's like everyone sees the problem.
- [34:52]
A
They're saying that it exists, but it's not a problem, basically.
- [34:55]
C
Yeah, it exists, but it's not a serious problem. It's just like, it's the air you breathe and you just have to. Like it's traffic going to work. Like, you just have to sit in the traffic. You just have to figure it out yourself.
- [35:06]
D
And my guess is, yeah, it's the idea that they would say, yes, this is a problem, but this is not a problem we need to address with public policy.
- [35:11]
C
Yes, they said a couple of them. I spoke to, you know, we have laws. The laws work. And I was like, they don't work, though. I write about how they don't work, you know. Yeah, exactly. They think there's laws in place and, you know, you gotta stand up for yourself.
- [35:25]
B
And it's just like straight up internalized oppression.
- [35:28]
C
I think that's what it is. Yeah, it's interesting. So they see it, but they don't see it as a problem. It's just a mind shift, a mindset.
- [35:34]
A
Catherine, what's your number?
- [35:35]
B
My number is 27. 27 is the number of female journalists currently imprisoned around the world. Out of 334 journalists who are currently in prison today, 8% of them are women, which is an increase from 3% five years ago. I don't know if that reflects better gender equity in journalism or breaking a glass. We're achieving equality in imprisonment, but those women are held essentially by nine countries. And there are seven in prison in Iran, seven in China, followed by four in Turkey, which is the world's largest jailer of journalists. And so on this month of Women's Month, I just thought that that was a good number for us to reflect on.
- [36:17]
A
How's Wikipedia doing in Turkey? I know that there was a lot of sort of weird Erdoan crackdowns on Twitters and the like.
- [36:25]
B
We are not currently available in Turkey. It is one of two countries in which you cannot access Wikipedia. We have been blocked since April of 2017.
- [36:34]
D
Press freedom is so bad in Turkey that you actually have people who rely on Sputnik News, which is like basically an arm of the Russian government. But it is yet to talk about what is going on in Turkey because it's more reliable than anything you can get in Turkey.
- [36:48]
A
So. All right, so I need to ask, if Turkey is one, what's the other one?
- [36:51]
B
The other place we're blocked?
- [36:52]
A
Yeah.
- [36:53]
B
China. Yeah, we've been blocked in Turkey because we Refuse to censor content, which is our. We don't take down content for political reasons. It's just a general policy of ours. And so the Turkish government says goodbye.
- [37:06]
A
Wow.
- [37:08]
B
Yeah.
- [37:08]
D
So I thought I'd bring in a Wikipedia related. So it's 2.5 million. And this may have changed, but. So there's one guy who is responsible for 2.5 million edits. Yeah, this guy's Steven Pruitt. He's this guy from Virginia.
- [37:23]
B
He's lovely.
- [37:25]
D
You know, it was interesting when I was reading the article. He sounds like a very nice person. Like. And he even was like, part of a project to get. Get more coverage of women. So I was like. It was actually kind of a nice story. I'd recommend looking him up.
- [37:37]
C
Stephen Pruitt, what does he do for a living?
- [37:40]
D
He works for the government, Customs enforcement or something.
- [37:44]
A
So, yeah. Is this like a side thing for him? Just in his spare time, he makes two and a half million edits to Wikipedia.
- [37:51]
B
Yeah. I mean, a lot of people who edit at that volume do so with really systematic ways. So they have sort of bots that they use to track pages and they make sort of micro edits that are really about governing the platform itself at scale, you know, reverting. Vandalism is. That stuff happens every single day on Wikipedia. And so if you're perhaps the person running a bot on that, that all counts to your total. So it. It's a lot of edits, though. I think I read somewhere that it represents about. He's edited on about a third. Was that the number of all English Wikipedia articles? And as I said, there are five and a half million of them.
- [38:26]
C
It sounds really fun to edit Wikipedia.
- [38:28]
B
It is so much fun. I really enjoy it.
- [38:30]
C
I kind of want to. Yeah.
- [38:32]
B
Did you.
- [38:33]
A
So I have done it, although I don't have.
- [38:35]
C
You have.
- [38:36]
A
I don't have the permissions to publish a page. You need to be a special person to be able to publish a page.
- [38:42]
C
I have permission to publish a page. I nominate him.
- [38:45]
B
Yeah. Well, it just means that you need to edit more so that your publishing can go through.
- [38:50]
A
I'm gonna talk about everyone's favorite minotaur this week, which is lift. Do you remember the Minotaurs? They were the things which I've decided.
- [38:57]
B
I mean, not personally, but to coin.
- [38:59]
A
A term, which is because people keep on talking about unicorns, which is the companies who are worth a billion dollars, which is what you would be if you were private. I've decided to coin this new term, which I did a Little project on Axios about this called the Minotaurs, which is not the companies which are worth a billion dollars, but the companies which have raised a billion dollars in equity capital, which is an amazing amount of money. And the one that's going public, which we know about because they filed their S1 is Lyft and my number is $911 million, which is the amount of money they lost in 2018. And I'm like, how is it even possible to lose $911 million in one year? And yet we're going to see the Uber numbers pretty soon and they're going to be even bigger. The amount of money that is possible for a private company to lose is bigger than it has ever been in the history of the world.
- [39:55]
C
World seems bad.
- [39:58]
A
Seems bad, yeah.
- [39:59]
C
That's my analysis.
- [40:00]
A
It's, you know, subsidized car rates for all of us. What could possibly go wrong?
- [40:06]
B
Climate.
- [40:07]
A
So yeah, and so apparently if you lose that much money, you're worth $20 billion.
- [40:12]
C
How's that right?
- [40:12]
B
I could lose money. I lose money every day. I mean, not professionally, sadly.
- [40:18]
D
We are all just not growing at the same rate as Lifter back in the so.
- [40:23]
A
So Catherine, we are going to talk to you even more on Slate plus about the ways that Wikipedia is used by for profit companies to make lots of money, which is fascinating. So it's going to sound a bit like this.
- [40:37]
B
Yeah, I've seen valuations range anywhere from 10 to 20 billion dollars.
- [40:43]
C
Seems to be broken up.
- [40:44]
B
We're not vesting anytime soon.
- [40:47]
A
For everyone else. Thank you very much for listening to Slate Money. Thank you very much to Catherine Mayer for coming in. Thank you very much to Max Jacob who has been a magnificent producer here around these parts for these, you know, a certain amount of time and is now leaving us going to become the head of the world somewhere in midtown Manhattan at NBC. He's got this amazing job. So well done, Max, congratulations. We will be very sorry to hear you see you leave Slate, but you're gonna be rocking it elsewhere and I should also.
- [41:22]
B
And I will continue to listen to the show, which is the best compliment.
- [41:25]
C
I think I can make do.
- [41:25]
A
Continue to listen. If Max is listening to the show, he will be sending us email on slatemoneylate.com and we'll be reading it and we'll be like, max, you can't leave us, can you? And I have to say as well, if you've been listening to the Tuesday shows on Slate Money Travel, we have the best guest ever on Slate. Manning Slate Money Travel. Who is Kathryn Marr? Kathryn Marr's going to be. Yeah. You travel a lot.
- [41:54]
B
I do travel a lot.
- [41:55]
A
That's basically what you do, is you travel.
- [41:57]
B
I pay rent in San Francisco and I live on a plane. It's a terrible deal.
- [42:00]
A
We're gonna talk to Katherine a bit more about that on Sleep Money Travel on Tuesday. And so, yeah, with all of that, thank you very much for listening. And we will be back next week on Sleep.