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- [00:00]
A
In cybersecurity, speed is everything. Breaches often begin with a single exposure, an open cloud bucket, a forgotten subdomain, or an API spun up without your knowledge. The question is, who finds it first, you or an attacker? Enter Intruder, the exposure management platform that helps lean engineering and security teams stay ahead of threats by unifying vulnerability management, attack surface discovery, and cloud security. Intruder continuously detects vulnerabilities across your entire infrastructure, including over a thousand Attack Surface issues other platforms miss, and it's always on, giving you peace of mind by catching cloud misconfigurations early and checking your systems within hours when new vulnerabilities emerge. Using real world threat intelligence, Intruder highlights the issues most likely to be exploited so you can fix your real risks before attackers take advantage. The platform helps you save time and speed up fixes with integration with Jira, Slack, Microsoft Sentinel, and more, plus support from Greg, your embedded AI security analyst. Stop breaches before they start with Intruder. Plans start at just $99 a month. Start your free trial today at intruder IO 404Media hello and welcome to the 404Media podcast. Joseph and Sam are out this week, so you get me Jason Kebler and I'm here with Emmanuel. What's up Emmanuel? Hey, how are we feeling about a full on takeover of this here show?
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B
Finally the time has arrived for us to do a four hour podcast of us just rambling about whatever not related to technology or our reporting at all.
- [01:51]
A
That's what I wanted to do, but you seemed scared. You seemed scared to do it. You didn't want to upset the listeners. So we're going to talk about our stories. Speaking of, Joseph and Sam are both out reporting so they're not gallivanting. They're doing stuff that you'll hear about quite soon. I'm sure.
- [02:10]
B
People might have seen Sam was in the courtroom for the sentencing of Michael Pratt, who was the ringleader behind the Girls do porn case which he has covered for years. And I think she was the first to post about the sentencing and some shocking statements from the Jane does involved in the case so people could check that out. But yeah, that's why Sam is not here and Joe is on a secret mission and unnamed parts of the world.
- [02:40]
A
Unnamed parts of the world. We can't even contact him so hopefully he's okay. But he'll he'll be back I think next week in any case. Yeah, check out Sam's Girls to Porn reporting. We are not going to talk about it on the podcast because we think it will be still relevant when Sam is back, so more to come there. So for the first story, we're going to talk about one that I wrote, which is called AI generated boring history videos are flooding YouTube and drowning out real history. Okay, so should we do a confession?
- [03:16]
B
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to get into here, but I wouldn't mind if we spent most of this podcast talking about how you stumble upon these videos because they. We can't go into this without going into like your YouTube consumption habits. Can you please explain to our audience when you watched Slash listened to the videos we talk about in the story?
- [03:46]
A
Yeah, so all of the videos that we're about to talk about I discovered at 3am or later, because most nights, not all nights, but most nights I will put my AirPods in and I will turn on a YouTube video. Whether that's. Well, I go through phases of what I listen to, and my most recent phase is listening to history videos. So for a while I was listening to history videos about indigenous cultures in the Western hemisphere run by a guy called Ancient Americas, who I actually talked to for this story. He talks about like, you know, the Mayans, the Aztecs, but then also like the Toltecs and other indigenous societies that we don't hear about very much. Incredibly interesting. But also he speaks at a cadence that puts me to sleep very quickly. And so for a few months I would be listening to his hour long videos and I would make it like five minutes and fall asleep and then I would just leave it on and eventually the video would end and YouTube would autoplay something else. And like one night, I guess a couple of weeks ago, I like woke up like I jolted awake listening to this. And maybe we'll play the clip here.
- [05:16]
B
In the end, Anne Boleyn won a kind of immortality not through her survival, but through her indelible impact on history by the early 1770s. Before we move on, let's just like dwell on the fact that, I mean, this is probably a night where you're having trouble falling asleep. So you put in your AirPods, put on one of these videos and try to lull yourself to sleep. And I have done that before, but I feel like it's probably one of the least healthy things that I do to myself. Like that can't feel good to fall asleep that way. That can't be like a restful good night's sleep.
- [06:03]
A
I mean, I really don't know. I really don't know. I've done, I, I tried to do research on this topic once. So back at Vice we had theme weeks occasionally and I think it was 2017, we did something called Sleep Week. And so everyone on staff would write an article about some aspect of sleep, you know, the techification of sleep, the science of sleep, whatever. And mine was, I was trying to figure out if my falling asleep with a TV show on habit was bad for me because we hear quite a lot about like blue light which is emitted from your cell phone, is emitted from like, you know, a laptop, like a game console, whatever. It's like not good. It disrupts your sleep. It messes with your like melatonin and circadian rhythm, et cetera. And. But, but like, what was unclear to me was that I was watching these TV shows with like my laptop facing away from me at first because I was doing it on a laptop for a while. And then that eventually morphed into listening to YouTube videos. So I would like start the video on YouTube and then put my phone face down because I didn't pay for YouTube Premium.
- [07:26]
B
It's so funny that it's a premium feature, but. Yeah, go ahead.
- [07:29]
A
Yeah, I mean, I've now started paying for YouTube Premium because of this. Like, I was. I've been listening to these videos now for years and literally within the last like month. I want to say you pretty much can't listen to. And I always say listen to things on YouTube because I so rarely like actually watch it. I just am listening to it. But like every five minutes you're getting an ad and the ad is really loud and that would be really jarring. So I would be falling asleep listening to this stuff and then an ad would come on and I'd be like, oh, that's probably not healthy. And then sometimes you get a YouTube ad that was like 35 minutes long. So I would like wake up and I would be in like minute 20 of some ad. Anyways, I talked to sleep scientists and it's like it's not studied that well. It's not really studied that well what like audio does to your brain because your brain is nominally consuming these voices. But I feel like I'm not processing really any of it once I actually fall asleep. And I find it to be like quite calming and soothing. And I think a lot of people fall asleep to a podcast. There's various boring history podcasts, there's like soothing sleepy time stories podcasts. Trust me, I've tried them all. Like ASMR stuff.
- [08:47]
B
There's a thing that's happening on YouTube now also where it's like whatever YouTube algorithm you're in it will suggest that. But in, like, you can sleep to this format. So I listen to, like, comedy podcasts and I get offered via the recommendation algorithm, like, four hour compilation videos of, like, like this comedy podcast to fall asleep to. So it's like, it's doing that for everything. Sorry, like, two more things quickly, because Joe is not here to stop us. And then we can go back into the journalism one. I do this sometimes, but, like, when I do it, I definitely feel like shit. Like, when I wake up in the morning, I'm like, that was bad. That was like a bad choice. And like, the healthy thing to do is not watch anything and, like, read a book. And whenever I do that, I'll read like half a page and fall asleep like a baby and have really good night's sleep. But I don't know, for whatever reason that you understand, I'm sure it's like, hard to do that. And then the second thing, there's a really good episode of Dexter's Laboratory. The cartoon.
- [09:51]
A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
Where he falls asleep trying to. He's trying to learn French in his sleep. So he puts on like a learn French record when he goes to sleep, but the record skips and the only phrase he hears is omelette du fromage. And then the next.
- [10:04]
A
I remember that one.
- [10:05]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's the only thing he can say. But somehow it's the best day of his life because it's, like, always appropriate for the situation. Great episode. Okay, wait, wait.
- [10:14]
A
But so not to the journalism yet, though, because it's interesting, though, because I agree with you entirely. And I. I actually rarely use YouTube to fall asleep initially. Like, I will often fall asleep, but then, like, one hour later I will wake up and it will be the middle of the night. And I don't want to turn off. Like, maybe I could get a Kindle or something. But I don't want to, like, turn something on to read from. And I also don't want to have my eyes open staring at my phone. And so this is why I do it. It's like, I'm like, I'll look at my phone for 30 seconds to put on one of these videos and then fall. Try to fall back asleep. And it usually works. And at some point in the night, I usually, like, toss my AirPods away, like, unconsciously. And so, I mean, I agree it's probably not the best, but there's a huge market for this. Like, there's a huge market for this because of what we're about to talk about. It's like, um. Yeah, so. So anyways, like, I. I was listening to these human creators who spend a lot of time.
- [11:25]
B
You're. You're watching these history videos. Yeah, let's talk about, like. Cause it's. It sounds like in the story, you, in the morning realized that you were listening to something that was AI generated. But, like, in order to illustrate that, can you describe, like, what a good one of these videos is? Like, and then what this AI generated video sounded like?
- [11:48]
A
Yeah, so, I mean, interestingly, like, a lot of the ones that I listen to are not designed to make people fall asleep. They're just like history podcasts, for lack of a better term, usually with visuals. And sometimes they're. They're more than that. Like this one guy, we're gonna talk about history time, this man named Peter runs it. A lot of Peters in this story, actually. You know, he will read like four or five books on a topic, and then he will consult, like, academic journals, and then he often does site visits. And so, like, if he's talking about an ancient war or something like that, he will like go to the battlefield and will film there. And so he's making documentaries that are often two, three hours long. And like, any given one of these documentaries can take months, they can take years. He told me some of them he worked on for over five years. Just in terms of, like, he was doing other things also, like, other videos came out, but, like, he will be working on multiple of these at a time and they're really popular. Like, he became quite a big YouTuber. He has, I think, like 1.2 million followers. And, you know, he puts out like a video every month or two. And that is probably like the upper limit of what a human being who's trying to make really high quality, really well researched videos can do. If you're reading multiple books for each one, if you're reading multiple academic papers about like different perspectives on some ancient war, some ancient civilization, or the types of food that they ate in medieval times. Like, there's all sorts of different videos that, that I've become interested in. I've become interested in this channel called let's Talk Religion. And they will talk about, like, the, like, different perspectives on like, drinking alcohol in Islam, for example. And like. Like, where did this come from? Like, where did the idea that Muslims shouldn't drink alcohol come from? Like, throughout. Through a historical perspective. Like, that's an example of one of the videos that I've watched. There's another one that's like an entire history of Zoroastrianism which is a religion I did a project on in eighth grade, and I'm like, oh, now I've like, it's. It's a predecessor to Christianity and, and Islam and Judaism, and it's still practiced by, by some people. But I was like, oh, what's the deal with this? And it's like a very academic level look at these sorts of things. It's a human being who's doing like a ton of research. And then like, not only are they doing a ton of research, they're then also finding imagery to go with it, which I don't watch, but like a lot of people do. And this imagery is often like Creative Commons license stuff. It's stuff where they're getting permission from universities to use it. Like, a lot of the people I spoke to for this article said that they are doing a ton of legwork just to script the video and then of course, like edit the video, you know, add music to the video, record it with their own voices, like all of this stuff, and they've made careers out of it. Like a lot of them made careers out of it. Because history stuff does really well on YouTube. You know, a lot of the videos, like the most popular videos, have millions of views and so they're collecting money. A lot of them have Patreon, stuff like that. But anyways, along comes these new AI slop channels that I started getting auto fed. And as a journalist and someone who writes about AI slop, I did recognize them as slop pretty much immediately when I was coherent in the morning and was scrolling through my YouTube watch history. And it's funny because I had quote, unquote, like watched like dozens of them, right, according to my watch history, but I didn't even realize it. I was consuming them in my sleep.
- [15:57]
B
Yeah, the good videos remind me of like a very popular early history podcast is hardcore history that maybe people have heard of. And I would describe them as meticulous. And then also something that I think it's Dan Carlin, the guy who makes it, often jokes about is that I think he'll go like two years without putting out a podcast because of all the research. And then like you said, the editing, right? It's like it's very carefully put together. So that's like a good version. Describe one of these AI generated videos, because in theory, I don't know, you could go to ChatGPT, generate some text about some period in history, feed that to an AI tool that has AI voice generation, and you basically have a video like why? What does that actually. What does that look like in practice?
- [16:51]
A
Yeah, so I would say that the accounts are called, like, Boring History for Sleep. And then there's a bunch of different variations of it. They have clearly AI slop thumbnails, first of all. And all of the visuals are pretty clearly AI slop, although it's pretty hard to tell in some of them because a lot of the visuals are medieval paintings. And AI is pretty good at doing that. And so if you're not, like, up to date on, like, historic oil paintings, you might not notice them as slop. But here's some of the, like, video titles. Why It Sucked to be an Aztec Sacrifice Victim, and more. Totally Wrong Medieval Facts. Everyone still believes Medieval Irish food, peasant to king the queen who slept with her stepsons, your life as a eunuch, crazy facts about Queen Cleopatra, et cetera. So it's a lot of stuff like that. And then, you know, I watched some of these and there are facts in here. You know, I think whoever is making them, I'm not exactly sure what tools they're using. I was trying to reach out to them. I would imagine they're probably using some combination of, like, ChatGPT for scripting, maybe like 11 labs to record the video. It's always the same narrator. The narrator has a British accent. It's not really, like, whispered. It's like, very soft spoken. And one thing I noticed is that it uses a ton of adjectives. It just is like, imagine you are a peasant in 1400s England. It was a cold and dreary night. The willowy wisps, like. And it's like, really a lot of filler stuff. And then it's like kind of a list of very basic facts. And the. So I basically, like, I spoke to the guy who runs Ancient Americas, which is a channel I really like. I talked to History Time, which channel I really like. And then another one called the French Whisperer, which is an ASM artist from France who does a lot of research as well for his videos. He does, like, science and history videos. And pretty much all of them were like, yes, we are aware of these things. The guy who does history time told me. I think they may be modeled on my videos, which could be possible because a lot of the topics are the exact same. And then the voice sounds really similar to his, which is concerning. And then the videos are usually like two to three hours long, which is how long he's doing them. But he's basically like, it's really, really, really, really surface level. It's like glossing over, like a lot of them are maybe not totally wrong, but it's like, it's like reading a Wikipedia article. You know, it's like reading a Wikipedia article but not clicking like any of the citations or anything like that.
- [19:55]
B
I've read a lot of AI generated books for some of our reporting. And I would say two things that the AI generated content has in common almost always is a yes, it's like it reads like a Wikipedia article. It's very surface level. And then I wonder if you agree, if you've listened to enough of these to say, but like something that is good about like what I liked history as a subject in school. And what I liked about, like what I like about history podcasts and stuff is usually the person who is making it is not just listing facts about the time or the figure. It's like there's some sort of point or narrative that they're trying to get. There's some sort of thing that they're trying to say about this period of time. And I imagine that these videos lack perspective, basically.
- [20:50]
A
They definitely lack that. And then, you know, I am not a historian, I've watched a lot of these. But something I really appreciate is that history feels like it's a conversation with different perspectives. And so a lot of these, the best human made channels will be like, well this, this like academic study or this historian says this, but like this other person who is also a well renowned expert in the field says that. And it's not quite exactly the same. So you need to like consider it from these different perspectives and then sort of decide, you know, what you believe to be the truth. And I think that there's, there's absolutely none of that in here. And it definitely doesn't cite any of its sources. Like it's, it's so funny. I'll be listening to one of these ancient Americas videos and it will be like, oh, like the, these Harvard anthropologists wrote a study, you know, dating these ruins to a specific time. But like these other historians say that's impossible because the migration patterns that are, that were known during this time period don't line up or whatever. And like that's, that's obviously very vague, but it's a lot of that and I find that to be extremely interesting. Despite, well, these AI ones market themselves as boring history. None of the other ones say boring. I don't think they're boring. But they put me to sleep nonetheless because I'm tired, not because I think it's boring.
- [22:25]
B
So you talk to this guy P. Kelly, who runs History Time, one of these more popular human YouTube history channels, you talked a little bit about how everyone thinks these videos are very surface level, but what did. I thought he had some very interesting things to say about how, like, what does this mean for the audience and what does this mean for how we are recording history or explaining history now on the Internet?
- [23:02]
A
Yeah. So I think that this one was a really tough one for me because obviously been writing tons and tons about AI slop. And I think that this is some of the most insidious stuff that I've seen. And that is because these real historians, again, spend months making a single video and these AI slop factories make videos that look and feel the same in form, if not the actual information. Like every, you know, every day they're publishing one and there's dozens and dozens and dozens of these channels. And so there's tons of them out there. And there's no way that even all of the world's historians, if they were making videos, like they're going to be drowned out by this very quickly. And so I think like the discoverability aspect is a massive problem because if you search for, I don't know, what was life like in medieval times? Like, you're gonna get a bunch of these, maybe you'll get a really high quality human made video still like at the top right now. But like that's, that's been changing really rapidly. And so I think it's gonna be like really, really hard to find these things. Every creator that I talk to, every human creator, said that they've seen their YouTube views go down this year and they think it's because they're now competing with this slop. So it makes it like less tenable for them. It makes it a lot harder for new people to break into this space. Because if you have no following whatsoever, how are you going to build one if you're competing with, with this stuff? And then also it just, it like again glazes over the intricacies of, of history and what is like really complicated, often really complicated, often very contested things. So you're getting like a really surface level sort of thing. And then, you know, that's to say nothing of the fact that a lot of the companies that make large language models are trying to make them like more centrist and like less woke and whatever. And so you can like see Grok like changing its answers about historical events in real time according to what Elon Musk wants and things like that. And so I think it is really, really insidious. And I think it's something very difficult for humans to fight back against because there's just not enough time in the day to, to be making, to, to be competing with the AI. AI on this. I think.
- [25:47]
B
I'll, I'll, I'll do a slight tangent again because no one is here to stop us. But it's like I agree that like across the board, I think sometimes people wonder if we're like over focused on what we call AI slope. And this is why I don't think we are, because this is the most insidious and like terrifying outcome in my opinion, where AI companies hoover up all the human made research, content, art, whatever it is, and then we reach some sort of tipping point where we can't even find that stuff because we're flooded with all this fake bullshit and we're already seeing it. It's like it's the same. What you just said is true for news websites, for books, for academic research, for YouTube, for adult entertainment content creators. It's like everything is being drowned out by AI generated slop and it's easy to imagine a situation where we're not even able to find the human stuff. And that's terrifying. And I just had one of those weird weeks where it's like I was looking at Blue sky and Facebook and I feel like every other post with someone complaining about some AI generated slop, they sign a completely different category of life. It's like, oh, I'm watching TV and like clearly this art in this ad is AI generated and it looks like shit. I'm scrolling Instagram and this influencer is AI generated. I'm buying a book from Amazon and all these books are AI generated and people are like very fed up and like that is why we focused on it and why we continue to focus on it. And it's not clear how it's going to shake out. And it's a very big problem.
- [27:43]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think like, as we've said, it's also, there's very, very little incentive for anyone enabling this to fix it. It's like Google is pushing the tools to make this stuff. And so YouTube has said that it's going to like demonetize low effort content, but it's not, it's not demonetizing this. It's like the, you know, Google has a lot riding on Gemini and Veo and like all these other tools that they, they make that are AI tools. And so I don't think that it's going away and I think it's like, it still feels really early days, even though things have changed so much since we started reporting on this. It's like this is still. There's still probably only a handful of people actually making these videos right now. And they're so easy to make. It's like there's going to be more and more people doing the same thing very soon. And I don't know what the Internet looks like after that happens. I think it's like a very bleak situation. And then the last thing I'll just mention is that a lot of these accounts are using like, spam and like, they're basically like all commenting on each other's YouTube videos in like a concerted way. So. So they're like manipulating the algorithm in addition to flooding the. Flooding the platform. It's like I found dozens and dozens of of these accounts. I think they're probably all run by the same person because they all like, link to each other and they all comment on each other and you can tell that they're doing like bot type activity. And so, you know, add that on top of all, all of the other problems we just said and it's like, it, it just gets really difficult. And then the other, the only other thing I'll mention is that History Time told me, like, he is making a lot of his videos by going to like, special academic libraries where you like, check out like the old English book, like the, the old manuscript and stuff, and is like going through that sort of thing. And, you know, these AI companies have tried to train their, their LLMs on like, as much stuff as they can get a hold of, but they're still largely just scraping the Internet and sometimes scraping like commercially available books. Whereas, like, a lot of these history youtubers and historians are like, I don't know, they're going into like the archives in a basement somewhere and like reading the old scrolls and like. Yeah, so he's like, I'm giving you like a real, like, really diverse, interesting perspective, whereas these AI is just like taking what's on Wikipedia and like regurgitating it somehow. Should we leave that there? That was a, that was a real, that was a, a real indulgent segment.
- [30:49]
B
That's good. Only. Only two and a half more hours to go.
- [30:52]
A
Only two and a half more hours to go. All right, we'll leave that there. And when we come back, we are going to talk about Instagram and a story that Manuel did. Hiring is hard, like, really hard. You want to give everyone a chance, but you're likely to get flooded with candidates who might not have the right experience and a bunch of bulk generated resumes and cover letters. Then you need to organize the interviews, make sure you're asking the right questions, and turns out some of the candidates weren't actually interested in the first place. Well, the future of hiring looks much brighter because ZipRecruiter's latest tools and features help speed up finding the right people for your roles so you save valuable time. And now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com 404media With ZipRecruiter's new tools, you'll be able to find and connect with qualified candidates in minutes. More than 320,000 new resumes are added to ZipRecruiter monthly, which means you'll constantly have a new talent pool to hire from. ZipRecruiter can match you with potential employees quickly, saving yourself and your company time, money and headaches. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Go to ZipRecruiter.com 404Media use ZipRecruiter and save time hiring four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter. Get a quality candidate within the first day, and if you go to ZipRecruiter.com404Media right now, you can try it for free again. That's ZipRecruiter.com 404Media ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire Fall is planting season did you know that many plants and trees actually do better when planted this time of year? But you have to know where to start. That's why I love falling fast. Growingtrees.com doesn't matter if you live in the sunny south or if the air is getting chilly where you are. 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That's 15% off@fastgrowingtrees.com using the code 404 Media at checkout. Now's the perfect time to plant. Use 404 Media to save today. Offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. Check out the link below or in the show notes and support the show. Listeners to the 404 Media podcast know that we like to go a layer deeper on the stories we cover. It's not just about how technology is impacting people, but it's also about what's behind the tech. That's why you should go check out the new podcast Interconnected, a new video and podcast series from Equinix that offers a rare look at the underlying infrastructure and tech advances driving the innovations of tomorrow. Through candid conversations with industry experts and visionary thinkers, Interconnected's hosts guide you through emerging technology trends, the infrastructure making them possible, and the connected future they're shaping. The first episode of Interconnected covers AI in medicine, taking a look at the data centers and systems that power the technology, leading to totally new methods of doing diagnostics, personalized medicine, drug discovery, and underlying clinical research. The first episode of Interconnected covers AI in medicine, taking a look at the data centers and systems that power the technology, leading to totally new methods of doing diagnostics, personalized medicine, drug discovery, and underlying clinical research. We hear a lot about how AI is changing the world, but what I like best about the show is that it explains the actual physical infrastructure and basic science that's powering it, which is critical to know no matter how you feel about AI. Discover the digital infrastructure powering today's biggest tech trends with Interconnected. Follow interconnected on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we are back and the story is Instagram account Promotes Holocaust Denial t shirts to 400,000 followers. I feel like this is something where you woke up one day and were like, I'm going to write about this account that I've known about for a long time, even though I have become so like inured to this type of content on Instagram and the Internet. I guess what is the account? And like how did you first find out about it?
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B
So I don't know what is the first time I pulled on this thread, but I got fed into an algorithm on Instagram that I think you're familiar with as well, where I don't even know how I would define it other than like, racist. Like, it's not even maga. It's not even right wing or Republican or conservative on issues that are in the mainstream. Even if you strongly disagree with them or think that they are racist, like ICE raids or whatever it is. It's not even that. It just like straight up, this race is bad. This, you know, Jews control the world. Black people are a burden on our society. Just like a lot of mocking of Anne Frank and George Floyd and just like very, very inflammatory images and language and stereotypes of the most vile kind you can imagine. And Jason, you're familiar. Jason is nodding. It's just like it's this algorithm that you get into that is awful. And I've been looking at that stuff for, I don't know, about a year now. And I didn't really feel like it was worth covering because people know that that stuff exists on Instagram because other people get fed into this algorithm as well.
- [38:02]
A
And.
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B
There'S no effective way for us to like, encourage Instagram to ban thousands of accounts that are doing this or hundreds of accounts that are doing this. But as I'm watching all these racist memes as I'm scrolling through reels, I saw one that is the exact same aesthetic, saying the exact same type of stuff. But it was then also showing off T shirts and hats and hoodies that had some of that same imagery on them and selling them. And it looked like. Not high end, but not like, not drop shipping. Not drop shipping. I would say now that I've clicked around Shein for an article that Sam was writing last week, it's like above Shein level of quality. And I was like, okay, what's going on here? And I'm not going to name the channel because unfortunately Meta decided that this channel didn't violate their terms to the point where it would ban it. But it's a huge channel with a huge following, 400,000 followers, real people interacting with it. And it's selling merch with all this, like, vile stuff on it. And then other people are sharing selfies of themselves wearing the merch. So it is like a very real account that is just promoting and monetizing hate speech on Instagram. And I mean, we can, we can talk about how we got there. But despite sending Instagram clear evidence of all this happening, they were like, you know, they removed a couple of videos that have flagged, they kept other videos that have flagged, and generally they just let it slide.
- [39:56]
A
Yeah, I think. I mean, you sort of touched on it, but I guess a big thing for me is like, I could log on to Instagram right now and scroll, like through reels, maybe like one. One thumb swipe and be like, that violates Instagram's rules. Like, that is horrendous. Like, I see such horrendous stuff on Instagram. And, you know, we have reported extensively about the fact that, you know, Meta has rolled back a lot of its restrictions on hate speech, a lot of its restrictions on, like, racism and misogyny and, and anti Semitism and. And all sorts of just like, awful, awful things. Transphobia. But even given that it has rolled back a lot of these things, like, if. Even if you sort of agree with the idea, which I don't really, that social media should be more like, anything goes spaces, a lot of the accounts that I see are in blatant violation of the stated rules of. Of Meta. And so I guess, like, the. I don't really know what to take from that other than, like, they aren't doing content moderation like they used to. They have, you know, really gutted those teams and they just simply, like, don't care. And I'm curious, sort of what you think, because I'm. I know. You can log on. I know, I know. If I said, like, hey, right now, go find, like the worst Instagram account and you probably will find something like, really, really bad in like, two seconds without even looking. It will be fed to you.
- [41:46]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly, that's exactly the thing and why you have to write an article like this once in a while. We all see this stuff. We're desensitized to it. And then I saw this channel. And then it's also. I saw. Honestly, like, another reason I wanted to write it is the Verge wrote an article about this anti Semitic shirt that was advertised on A. A TikTok shop where it's like, you can buy stuff directly from a TikTok account. And I was like, that's totally fair. And it's like, good to call TikTok out on this shirt. And they reported it and TikTok took it down. But that sort of snapped me out of it, where I'm like, if this is a story, I'm swimming in, like, a totally much more terrible level of garbage every day. And there's more of it. And they're also selling shirts. You know what I Mean, so I was like, okay, let me look into, like, let me look at the facts of the story and see if it's worth covering. And it's like, as I'm like, you know, writing notes about what this story would be, I'm like, this is. This is crazy. We're in such a crazy place with Instagram that it's like you just, like, you have to wonder what's going on there. You know, I. I'm not even going to, like, I don't even know how I feel about, like, what is the correct way to do this? I'm not sure you know what I mean? But the fact is that Instagram has decided that it's not an everything goes space. It doesn't allow pornography, it doesn't allow various forms of hate speech. And that is how it decided that it manages this huge, influential platform. And I go into this example in the story where a few years ago, in response to Trump's election and people being very, very upset about what was going on on Facebook and how extreme it was and how, as you and Joe exposed at a piece you wrote for Motherboard, how ridiculous their moderation efforts were, they formed this thing called the Facebook Oversight Board, which they frame as like, the Supreme Court of Facebook moderation. And essentially the way that it's supposed to work is that it's like an independently run body with independent members who are like judges. And when there's like a moderation dispute on Facebook, it gets elevated to the Supreme Court, the Facebook Oversight Board. And they then very carefully look at the facts and make a recommendation to meta about what to do, which, as far as I can see, usually they adopt. And there's this case that started in 2020 where somebody posted an antisemitic scene Squidward meme, where it's like, you know, it suggests that Jews control the world or something like that. And the history of it is that people see the post, they see it's anti Semitic, they flag it to Instagram, where it was posted, and Instagram repeatedly decides to keep it up. So it keeps getting reported. Instagram keeps saying it doesn't violate the rules. It keeps going like that until it's elevated to the oversight board. They deliberate it for a year, and then they put out this ruling and they're like, we decided after much consideration, that this should be removed. And from now on, all types of content that suggests that Jews control the world or something should be removed. And this whole process took four years. This meme was posted in 2020, and the ruling Came down late last year. So Meta has spent so much time and so much effort to have this charade about rules and make decisions about what is and isn't allowed on the platform. And then you scroll Instagram and it's just like, it's all of that stuff nonstop, right? Like, if you get fed into that algorithm, that is all you see. And it's upsetting on the level where it's like, okay, well, what is the point of having a moderation team and what is the point of having an oversight board if you don't even attempt to act on your own policies, right? And again, it's like, it's not like I wrote this story and then published it. And I was like, haha. And I caught Meta missing something. I sent them the posts. I sent them the fucking post. I showed them the account. I was like, here's every single thing that it says. And you know, in this violation of your policies. And they're like shrugging, we don't care. And I'm not some random user, right? It's like, I have a relationship with these people to a degree. We're not friends. You know what I mean? We're not. We don't.
- [46:41]
A
They like, respond to your emails, though.
- [46:43]
B
It's like, they know who I am and they're just like, whatever, man, we don't care about this. And it, it just. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to. I don't want to talk in circles.
- [46:51]
A
But it's like, well, they also know that you have a platform like, like they know you're writing an article about it. It's not like, oh, this is going to be reported by like random user number 4000, 273. And you know, if we don't take down their report, they're going to like, write a Yelp review about Facebook or something. It's like they know you're writing an article and that people are probably going to like, read the article and see what is. Has been left up. And like, what has been left up is. Is heinous. It's like heinous stuff.
- [47:21]
B
Yeah, it's really bad. And like, I'm sympathetic to the moderation challenge, as we always are. Right? Like, it's impossible to report on this stuff and not come away with a conclusion where it's like, wow, it's like really, really hard, if not impossible, to moderate all the bad content on these giant platforms. And I think this one, I think, like right now, to be honest, I think it's particularly challenging because, like, this account and other accounts, there's like this range of stuff you can say where, you know, there's a bunch of memes and shirts and posts from other accounts that are very critical of the Israeli anti Israel. And I think by any definition of free speech and hate speech, like, that's fine. It's like you can totally criticize the government. You can say America is bad, you can say that Donald Trump is bad, you can accuse people of genocide. And that's totally, totally fine. And then, you know, it, it slides into like, you know, Jews control the media and, and stuff like that caricature.
- [48:33]
A
Like historically caricatured, like, depictions of Jewish people that have, like, we've like long decided are like anti Semitic, like classical anti Semitism and again, to the point.
- [48:48]
B
Of the piece, and like Holocaust denial, which is like, very clearly laid out in Facebook's policies and very clearly something that this account is doing. So it's like, I recognize that there is a challenge there, but if you step back for a minute and you're like, if any human being looks at this stuff, they can tell what? Like that this account is bad and has bad intentions and is racist and anti Semitic and all these things. So it's like, I can recognize that they have like, a really big challenge in front of them and at the same time be like, anyone with a modicum of humanity can look at this stuff and be like, fuck this and get it off my platform. And it's just like, clearly not something they're interested in doing.
- [49:38]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think we maybe talked about this. I. I definitely thought about it quite a lot regarding the Meta Ray bans at ICE raids story that I did a few weeks ago. And it's like a lot of the PR people at Meta who, you know, I don't know exactly what's going on behind the scenes there, but it's like our experience is when we want to talk to someone at Meta, we send a request for comment. And it has now been years since we were able to talk to anyone in like a kind of like, let's interview you sort of way on the record at Meta. Like, there was a period where I would be like, oh, I'm curious, like, how your hate speech policy works or like, why you're allowing this sort of thing. And so I sent a request for comment and then I would get sent, sent to like, a policy expert there and I would do like an on the record interview with them, meaning I wasn't talking to, like, Meta's public facing people. I was talking to the people who were, like, actually making the policies, actually making decisions, whatever. And I found a lot of those people to be quite, like. Like, I didn't always agree with them, but it seemed like they were trying hard. Like, they were trying hard to, like, solve a difficult problem. And now. And it's been this way for years at this point, like, the last couple years. But now it's like, you talk to a PR person and then the PR person sends you a statement, or they say, like, we're not commenting. And it's like, you have no idea whether that PR person, like, talked to anyone internally at Meta, whether they, like, it was actually escalated in any way. Like, you have no insight into that process whatsoever. And that's fine. Like, it's not fine. It's not a deal. But it's just like, that's the way it is now. But it's weird because the PR people that you deal with will act as though everything is the same as it always has been in terms of, like, oh, like, we're trying hard to, like, to operate in good faith and sort of, like, make decisions that are good for society and so on and so forth. And it's like the actual reality is that Mark Zuckerberg is, like, getting dinner with Trump, like, regularly. He's, like, going to Mar a Lago. He's, like, sitting in the Oval Office at these meetings. He's like, you know, I don't know if you saw this video the other day from when Zuckerberg was sitting next to Trump in the Oval Office, but Trump asked him, like, how much money are you investing in the United States? And. And he, like, makes up a number. And like, he was like, oh, like $9 billion, sir, or something like that. And then. Or no, I think it's like $600 billion. I think that's what he said. I don't remember. It doesn't matter. But then, like, a minute later, like, all kind. He's like on a hot mic, Zuckerberg goes to. To Trump and is like, oh, you, like, put me on the spot. Did I, like, say the right number, sir? And it's like, they're not taking this stuff down because they're. They don't want. Like, this is what is happening. In my opinion, they're not taking this stuff down because if it catches the attention of Donald Trump, it's going to cause problems for the company. Like, when they were moderating more, like, better, when they were, like, actually doing, like, moderation. Like, conservatives got mad, Trump got mad. Elon Musk got mad. Everyone got mad at them and said that they were, like, being too woke and there were, like, repercussions for them. They used to also fear companies would stop advertising with them. And it's like, there's not that fear anymore because there's not that many other places for companies to put their money. And so they don't care about brand safety that much anymore, which is like, you know, your Procter and Gamble ads showing up next to, like, instructions on how to drink bleach. Like, Procter and Gamble bleach to kill yourself or something like that. That is, like, not of concern anymore in the way that it used to be.
- [53:46]
B
I. I think that when they were doing moderation very seriously and also making a show of it, they thought what a lot of people naively but understandably thought in 2016, where it's like, Trump was elected, that was kind of a fluke, and it's gonna swing back and we're gonna return to some, like, not even progressive, just, like, a liberal order of things. And they were preparing for that. And when it became apparent that that is not the case, they were like, fuck it. And that's where we at. And last thing I'll say to this, I said it again, but I just want to stress it. Whatever the reason is, like, if we're totally wrong about why this is happening, it doesn't change the fact that it is, I think, impossible to overstate how bad it is for society for us to be awash in this imagery. It's like, it's not normal. It's not good. I think a lot of us, because there's so much of it, and we're used to it, and we grew up on the Internet and we saw a lot of this stuff. We're like, you know, okay, whatever. But it's like, it makes me kind of sick to think about how much of this is out there and how it's being shoved in our faces constantly.
- [55:07]
A
Dude. I also hate to say it, but it's like, you could always find this stuff on the Internet. But, like, I don't know. When I found it on the Internet, I found it in the, like. Like, context of reporting or on, like, how deep does the Internet go? Like, what is on, like, rotten.com and then, like, linked from, like, rotten.com or, like, some weird forum to some, like, other weird form or whatever. And. And so it was, like, difficult to find, first of all. And second of all, it was like. I came to it with the context of, like, I know I'm in a deep, dark, bad part of the Internet and I've like clicked too many times. Whereas now it's like you have the entire social media going, populace of the entire world shown this stuff when they log on. And so much of the like, so many people consider like Instagram to be the main thing that they do on the Internet or Facebook to be the main thing they do on the Internet.
- [56:12]
B
The moderate one, like the fairly normalish one. But yeah, that's a great point. It's like that used to be part of the sales pitch for our type of reporting. Right. It's like we're going to the dark corners of the Internet and it's. The dark corners of the Internet are the front page of Instagram. It's like algorithmically being spoon fed to you.
- [56:29]
A
Yeah. It kind of makes me feel bad as a reporter because I'm like, oh, like I need to find something to write about today. Like, I don't, I don't need to go spelunking anymore. It's like I just need to like click the Instagram app and like scroll for five seconds. But anyways, anything else on this? Should we leave it there?
- [56:50]
B
Let's run. Let's leave it there.
- [56:52]
A
All right, so we are going to leave that there. If you are a 404 media subscriber, we are going to have a bonus segment for you about the AI Darwin Awards. If you're listening to the free version of this podcast, you can get access to our conversation about the AI Darwin Awards by subscribing to 404 Media at 404 MediaCo. You will get a bonus segment every week on our podcast as well as our behind the Blog segments on Fridays. You get other bonus podcasts. You get other stuff as well. It's a good deal, so consider subscribing. Anyways, thank you for listening to 404 Media. This is the 404 Media podcast, a production of 404 Media LLC. As always, we will be back with a new episode next week. This episode was mixed, mastered, produced by Kaleidoscope and you can subscribe to us and find more at 404media co. I am this week's host, Jason Kebler and we'll see you soon.