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- [00:00]
Joseph
Foreign. Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist found the company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404 Media Co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content@ 404 Media co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the 404 Media co founders, Sam Cole. Hello. Emmanuel Mayberg.
- [00:39]
Jason Kebler
Hey, what's up?
- [00:40]
Joseph
And Jason Kebler.
- [00:42]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Hello.
- [00:42]
Joseph
Hello.
- [00:43]
Emmanuel Mayberg
If you're watching this video on YouTube, I'm wearing a knockoff 404 Media Horse T shirt. Please don't pirate our shirts. This is for an article in the future. However, our merch is now in stock. I'm shipping it actively, so you can check that out on our website.
- [01:00]
Joseph
You're talking about the real merch is in stock, as in, we have new designs we mentioned last year. People will start getting them soon. As you say it's arrived, but the shirt you're wearing is. Well, whenever you tweet a T shirt design, all of those bots jump in and it's like, oh, my God, here's the designer copied, or whatever you said you're going to write about that, so I'll leave it there. But hey, it's a good shirt, you know, it seems so cool.
- [01:27]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah, it's pirated, though. Don't do it. Don't do it.
- [01:30]
Joseph
Yeah, please just get the actual merch from us. That's actually good. Happy New Year to all of our listeners. This is the first real sort of new podcast of the year. It has been an exceptionally busy day. A location data company was hacked. Jason did a bunch of stuff on Meta. Emmanuel did stuff about AI and minions. Honestly, there is almost too much to talk about, so maybe we'll even revisit some of those stories in future episodes. But let's start with some of those Meta stories. And, Jason, this is one you wrote just basically a minute ago. Facebook deletes internal employee criticism of new board member Dana White. So what's this new appointment?
- [02:21]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah, it's been a really, really busy day. Busy week for Meta and Controversies and Mark Zuckerberg, et cetera, et cetera. But basically on Monday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Dana White, who is the president of UFC and also appeared at the Republican National Convention with Donald Trump, would become a board member of Meta alongside some folks also who, like the CEO Ferrari is going to be on the board for some reason.
- [02:56]
Joseph
I didn't know that.
- [02:57]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah. Reasons that I couldn't possibly explain to you, nor will I try. But Dana White is a very controversial figure because, one, he slapped his wife at a nightclub on video on New Year's Eve 2023, and was not really punished for it in any way, shape or form. You know, he's very much aligned with Donald Trump. Joel Kaplan also is like, was promoted to be head of global policy. Nick Clegg is out. And if those words mean anything to you, then your brain is slightly poisoned. But basically they got rid of this guy who I thought was quite bad. Nick Clegg was. Oversaw like some policies at Meta over the years and replaced him with someone who seemingly is going to be even worse. Joel Kaplan was in the George W. Bush White House. And all this sort of coincides with Mark Zuckerberg announcing that they are going to do a return to, quote, free expression. And what free expression in Mark Zuckerberg's world means no more fact checking. For one, you will be allowed to essentially do hate speech against gay and trans people. More or less. It, like, explicitly is going to be allowed now on Meta platforms. They're going to delete a lot less content in general and they're going to show more political content, which is really interesting considering the New York Times did a gigantic story literally like three months ago saying Mark Zuckerberg is done with politics. Since then, he's gone to Mar a Lago, he's donated a million dollars to Donald Trump, and now they're sort of explicitly turning to this right wing, ish, like world. And I know that's a lot of setup, but essentially like, we got leaked internal communications comments from all of these announcements that they were doing where pretty much any criticism of Dana White, of this decision was being deleted by this internal. These like, internal content moderators, which are essentially like an arm of Facebook hr.
- [05:27]
Joseph
Where's this conversation taking place? It's like an internal message board, basically inside Facebook, just so people can visualize it.
- [05:34]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah, it looks exactly like Facebook, like it's a clone of Facebook, but only Facebook employees can see it. And so Mark Zuckerberg does a post there and then there's a bunch of comments beneath the post. And sort of like beneath the post announcing Dana White, there were comments from people who are employees of Facebook saying things like, quote, kind of disheartening to see people in the comments celebrating a man who is on video assaulting his wife and another who was recently convicted of Rape, which was referring to Conor McGregor, who was like a really big UFC fighter who was forced to pay $250,000 by a court after being accused of rape. Another person said, we have completely lost the plot. And then another person said, quote, I can kind of excuse individuals for being unaware, but Meta surely did their due diligence on White and concluded that what he did is fine. I feel like I'm on another planet. All of these posts were deleted.
- [06:38]
Joseph
Right? That's what I was going to get to. Because it's not just people are making these comments, these employees, and they're saying internally, look, we're not happy with this person being appointed to the board. That's already an interesting and important story and one that would be worth covering. It shows discontent inside one of the most important tech companies. Even if it's relevant somewhat, it's kind of going off the rails. And I think we'll get into that with some of the AI stuff as well. But that would already be a story. But as you say, there's all of this context around Meta shifting to the right or even to zoom out even further. They're going from like a hands on approach to basically a hands off approach where they're saying, I know, do whatever you want, Community notes will sort it out, blah, blah, blah. We're not going to fact check stuff while Zuckerberg is saying all that. These comments by employees are being moderated and are being censored. So what's the deal with them being deleted? Why are they being deleted?
- [07:42]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah, so Facebook has this team called the internal community relations team, which is essentially like content moderators for what you say to other people within Facebook, like what Facebook employees say to each other. And they have to abide by these rules called the community engagement expectations, which are like rules for how you talk to your coworkers. And basically like a member of that HR team comes in and says, hey, like, we've deleted a lot of. A lot of stuff. And the thing that the HR team says essentially is, you know, these violated the cee, which is the community engagement expectations. And they're. They said, quote, we need to keep in mind that the CEE applies to how we communicate with and about members of our community, including members of our board. Insulting, criticizing, or antagonizing our colleagues or board members is not aligned with the cee. So.
- [08:46]
Joseph
But.
- [08:47]
Emmanuel Mayberg
But you can. A lot of these things are, like, very respectful. Like, very respectful. Just like, hey, like, why did we appoint someone who slapped his wife to our board? Like, why are we Doing these sorts of things. They were like very run of the mill criticisms and these were getting deleted and saying, you know, it, they didn't apply to this. They didn't follow the cee like these internal rules. And so there's been people beefing. And then meanwhile, publicly, Mark Zuckerberg is saying, like, we're rededicating ourselves to free speech. We're going to moderate less so rules for the public are gone. Internal rules when they like cause problems for Facebook or when they cause any sort of strife, because these decisions are very unpopular within the company. I don't know, it's just like, it's a mess.
- [09:40]
Joseph
So in meta, you can't insult or even mildly criticize a new board member. But. But you can say that gay or trans people are mentally unwell and that's literally in the policy now. Right. We didn't write this. There was a Wired piece that just came out and you sent it to me, Jason as well. But just very, very briefly, what's that in that? Along with this announcement from Zuckerberg, there's also changes to the actual code of conduct. And it's something along the lines of, well, this is part of the national conversation now in America, so you should be allowed to. To say that trans or gay people have mental health issues. Is that basically the sum of it?
- [10:21]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah. I mean, Zuckerberg recorded a video like explaining these sort of like wearing a giant chain and with his new look, saying that they're trying to simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse. And so what this means in practice, which was reported by Wired, as you said, there's been specific changes to Facebook's community guidelines, which are the internal, the outward facing rules for using meta platforms. So Instagram and Facebook primarily, and threads. And now you can essentially do what you just said. You can call gay people mentally ill, which is something that you like, could not do previously on meta platforms. It sounds like politics is out of Facebook to me for sure.
- [11:15]
Joseph
Yeah. It's interesting how they say immigration and gender and that the conversation of that has changed sort of in the mainstream. Yeah, because Trump got a slight percentage point over or whatever. It's just the point is that these companies will shift with different administration and this time it's been basically mask off in that it's not just sort of going along with the administration, but actively sort of pandering to it. So you wrote this other meta story that I think we'll just talk about briefly. And this sort of happened over the holiday break, but it's called, I think it was over the holiday break. Meta's AI profiles are indistinguishable from terrible spam that took over Facebook. It's a great headline. What are these? Or were these AI profiles? Exactly, yeah.
- [12:15]
Emmanuel Mayberg
So in September 2023, Meta announced that it was going to have these AI profiles where they were, quote, unquote, like people, like profiles on Meta, but the people were not real. They were AI generated. All the content that they made was AI generated. And you could also chat with these AI generated people. And when they announced it, there were 28 of them and 15 of them were based on celebrities. The. The most memorable one to me is that Snoop Dogg was a dungeon master, like a Dungeons and Dragons dungeon master. And you could, like, talk to Snoop Dogg about dungeons and dragons. Mr. Beast also had one. There was like a handful of other ones. And they announced this, and this was a big deal for a moment, and then no one used them at all. And Facebook, well, Meta deleted all of the profiles belonging to celebrities. So of the 28, they delete 15 celebrity focused ones, presumably because they didn't want to, like, keep paying the celebrities because they were on. Yeah, it just, like, wasn't working. They left up 13 other profiles that were not based on real people, that were just like these, I don't know, like themed stereotypes of people. So there was Carter, who was a Latino relationship coach. There was Izzy, who was like an independent singer songwriter. There was Alvin the alien, who was like a blue alien that talked about how Earth was weird. And they were all like, using metas imagined by meta AI to post images that were like engagement bait, more or less.
- [14:06]
Joseph
And they did as if they were real users, like, oh, hey, I'm the alien and here's my Facebook profile and I'm posting funny little pictures like. Like, obviously they're not misrepresenting themselves. Like they are saying they're. They're AI, but they're trying to act like a normal user, basically.
- [14:22]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah. So like Izzy, for example, the singer songwriter, posted an image of a concert, like an AI generated image of a concert, and said, still reeling from last week's show, what's your favorite show you've ever seen? Like, that's the type of thing that, that they were posting. So these were like, launched in September 2023. They existed for a few months and then they all stopped posting. Then a lot of time passes. No one really talks about it. None of these profiles were, like, popular in any way. A lot of the posts had like 6 likes, 2 comments, things like that. And then over Christmas, the Financial Times does an interview with this Meta executive named Connor Hayes, who tells the Financial Times that Meta is going to allow people to create their own AI profiles. Meaning you'll be able to like, create an AI profile, like a. Create a character type thing, and then set it up with its own Instagram profile or its own Facebook profile and let it loose on the world, more or less, which is very similar to other products like character AI and, and some that Sam have written about. This interview gets a lot of attention. People get very mad about it because it's a dumb idea first. And like, I think the consciousness around the types of like, AI that Meta is shoving down people's throats is, Is a lot more well understood now. But in the aftermath of that, people find these old AI profiles that Meta set up. And there were two in particular that were very ridiculous. One was Liv, who was, quote, a black queer mama who is just like offensive on its face because she's a caricature of diversity at a company that notoriously doesn't have a lot of diversity.
- [16:27]
Joseph
Yeah, they bundled all the diversity into one AI and they thought that would be good enough. And then, I mean, you'll get to it. But who knows if that was even trained on data that came from diverse people, whatever, who knows?
- [16:40]
Emmanuel Mayberg
But then you look through Liv's posts, or people start looking through Liv's posts, and there's one about it's quote, kicking off the new year in service of our community, leading this season's Coat Dry was an honor, especially because it provided my little ones a tangible example for helping others. And then the AI generated image is of, like, coats being donated to homeless people. And it's just like, this didn't happen. Like, you didn't donate coats to homeless people. Like, it's very offensive. And then there's another one about, you know, her hanging out with her daughters at her house. And it's a slideshow of three images. And in the first image, the children are black. In the second image, the children are much darker black. Like, they're definitely different children with a different skin tone. And then in the third image, the children are white, just like straight up white. And they're different children in each image. And their hands are fucked up, their faces are fucked up. They're obviously AI generated. And it's just like, what? What are we doing here? Like, this is crazy.
- [17:46]
Joseph
So it's just bad. It's just. It's not it's not even offensive for what it's doing. It's also just really shit at what it's doing as well.
- [17:54]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah, all of the above. And so people get really mad that this sort of, like, was happening and thought that this was, like, the new AI profiles that Meta was, like, announcing. And so I wrote a story kind of explaining, like, actually these profiles are old, still bad, that Facebook tried this and that seemingly there's more to come, even though this was a horrible failure and no one liked it. And then people pointed out that you couldn't actually block these AIs. And so meta then goes and, like, deletes all of them. Um, so they're all gone now. And there's been a lot of people who've, like, been talking to these AI characters, as in, like, chatting with them and trying to expose more about how they were trained or, you know, whatever, like, interviewing them. I don't want to talk too much about that, because these are like hallucinations. These are not. You cannot take what these things are saying seriously. But it's very obvious that these are, like, deeply broken tools that were just sort of, like, rolled out onto the platform. Said a bunch of, like, really caricatured, stereotypical stuff. And, yeah, big mess. Big, big mess.
- [19:18]
Joseph
Yeah. So, I mean, you say they kind of haphazardly just rolled out. And I think sort of the main question, just before I ask about sort of the other spam that you've covered, but what does this show us about Meta, the company? They have this where they're. They're rolling this out, kind of like stepping on a rake multiple times as they're doing it. They have this other story you did that we don't need to get into, but basically where Instagram was showing a user's own face back at them in some sort of AI experiment. We had Meta and the Metaverse, obviously, and that was a gigantic flop. Like, what the fuck is Meta doing? Like, what. What does this show us about this company? Is it just flailing around, trying to figure out what to do, or.
- [20:06]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Yeah, I mean, I don't think Mark Zuckerberg has any idea what he's doing, to be totally honest. It's like he had that. He had the one great idea with Facebook. They bought a bunch of other companies. They're desperately trying to find the next big thing with the Metaverse, and then now with AI, and it's not working, really. Like, it doesn't seem like users want this, but at the same time, the company is so large and so powerful that it's able to experiment on with these, like, really fucked up AI things. Change its algorithm to promote AI, you know, get rid of various content, moderation rules, change them all the time. And people are sort of limited in what they can do to fight back. Because a lot of people feel like they have to be on these platforms because their friends are there, because they. They feel like locked in. Like, that's kind of my takeaway. But I actually am curious what Emmanuel and Sam think is going on here, because it's like all I've been thinking about for the last several months. And it's just, to me, it seems like a super messy company that is just so powerful that it can do these things. But I do wonder if at some point there'll be an actual backlash.
- [21:28]
Sam Cole
I mean, just the fact that they have to have a moderation team for their own internal employees is crazy to me. That just shows how fucking huge this company is and how many different moving parts of it there are. Like, we know this. Like, obviously you see the numbers everywhere, but just in practice, that's. How do you even get, like, one good idea launched in an environment like that where you're collaborating with like, thousands of other people potentially? I don't know. It sounds like a nightmare. It's also. It's hard to imagine, like, Facebook, and this is me just talking as someone who's like, not a Facebook reporter. Like, it's. There are people, much smarter people doing this, but, like, it's hard to imagine Facebook being as big as it is, having the issues of, like, growth pressure, which I assume is what this is like. It's got to be just like investor pressure and the need to grow in order to stay alive and going. They have to keep growing and they have to. Or growing, you know, quote, unquote, growing. Like, they have to keep launching new bullshit and see what works. And if stuff doesn't work, they just trash it and move on. Which I think of as a problem of, like, startups or, like, new, you know, accelerator companies or something. It's not like Facebook's been around for what, like 15, 20 years or something. So how do they still have that problem is crazy to me. I don't know.
- [22:57]
Jason Kebler
I think a couple of years ago they stopped reporting monthly active users or one of those metrics, because that's what companies do when that number slows down. But probably for advertisers, they keep having to juice the numbers. And I think that's just like, ultimately what is going on. It seems like it is inevitable that at some point it will collapse because advertisers will figure out that all the engagement around their ads is bots talking to bots. But like, that seems to me pretty clearly what is going on. I feel like we've mentioned it a couple of times and we'll probably keep talking about it until either I don't know, that just becomes the new normal or it blows up in their face. But it seems across the board that is what they're doing with all of these AI features.
- [23:47]
Joseph
I just can't get over the low quality of it. And just very briefly to touch on the headline, it says this stuff is indistinguishable from terrible spam that took over Facebook. That's referring to the stuff that Jason's led everybody's coverage on around Shrimp Jesus. And there's an artist uploads this thing, then AI rips it off and posts it, blah, blah, blah. And it's spamming all over the place. And people are commenting on it sometimes as if it's real, Sometimes the comments are bots, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. To be honest, the spam sounds like it's better than some of these meta AI profiles, which are kind of inconsistent. And they can't even have the children, you know, remaining identifiable from photo to photo. What do you make of that?
- [24:34]
Emmanuel Mayberg
The spam is better. The spam that people are making is more engaging and people are engaging. It's like shows in the numbers, it's more successful. What I think is happening is that Facebook, well, meta has been trying to incentivize people to post on its platforms. And I think that the overall appetite, Facebook's goal is to have people on its site forever and for there to be an endless stream of new content and for people to engage with that content endlessly. And even though you have literally billions of people posting on Instagram and Facebook, there is you're going to run out of content at some point for specific niches. And what Facebook has learned over the years is that if you can hyper target ads to people based on their interests, their behavior, blah, blah, blah, that is a lot more effective for advertisers. And therefore you can charge more money and more people are going to advertise, so on and so forth. And so what I think they're banking on is that they will be able to create like an endless supply of hyper specific, artificially intelligent generated content that will be hyper, hyper specific to each individual person eventually and that it can then sell ads that are really, really well targeted based on that behavior and that and that that is a more like sustainable model for endless content creation than it is like relying on user generated content forever. Like that is where I that's what I think their big bet is. I don't think it's going to work, but that is like why I think they're leaning into this so, so hard.
- [26:26]
Joseph
I mean, I don't know, but it sounds like you hit the nail on the head. So we'll leave that there and we'll, we'll come back to Messa when it continues to burn to the ground. We'll be right back and we will talk about a story from Sam which you know, has been several stories leading up to this point about how pornhub is now basically blocked in the majority of the US South. We'll be right back after this.
- [27:05]
Emmanuel Mayberg
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- [31:42]
Joseph
All right, and we are back. Sam, as mentioned, this is one you wrote. The headline is Pornhub is now blocked in almost all of the US South. So when did this come into effect? December 31st, January 1st. When did this become reality?
- [31:58]
Sam Cole
Yeah, so it's been, like you said, a long time coming. It's been something that's been in the process for, oh, I want to say two years now, almost two years. Where these states are kind of slowly, we're seeing this creep of age verification laws being passed and enacted in all these states, mostly in the south, also some in the Midwest. And I can list the states in a second. But this is news now because three more states passed age rapification laws as of. Or they passed them, but then they're enacted as of January 1st. Although I will say. And this isn't in the blog, which I should probably update the blog. Tennessee. A judge in Tennessee blocked the age verification law in that state as of January 1st. So you can still get to Pornhub in Tennessee. God bless. But a couple other states joined the list. So it was Florida and South Carolina were the other two. And that kind of, you know, if you look at a map and I, I made a little map. I made a map on a website. On a website called map chart.net.
- [33:12]
Emmanuel Mayberg
Dude, the map ruled the map. The map.
- [33:14]
Sam Cole
The map is good, right? Yeah, it felt very, I don't know, like color by numbers.
- [33:20]
Joseph
But we're doing data journalism.
- [33:23]
Sam Cole
Yeah, that's the vibe. But yeah. So if you look at this on a map, it's like, holy shit. Like, it's all of this. Almost all of the south and then a huge chunk of the. The Midwest. And, you know, it's just. It's like a really stunning thing to look at because it's like it's most of the states at this point, so. Or it's not most of the states, but it's like this huge chunk of the United States. So. Yeah. Shall I just list the 17 states?
- [33:52]
Joseph
Yeah. And sorry if it's boring to listen to, but I think it's worth hearing the exact hammers. Yeah, you do that. And then I have a question about why those states here.
- [34:01]
Sam Cole
Okay, so it's Pornhub is right now. As of January 1st, Porno is blocked in Virginia, Montana, North Carolina, Arkansas, Utah, Mississippi, Texas, Nebraska, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Indiana, Alabama, Oklahoma, Florida, and South Carolina. And in Georgia There is a bill that has passed and is set to go into effect in July, which we can assume the same effect will happen. Pornhub and all of its success sister sites will be blocked or what they will pull out of the site state. And then in Louisiana, which kicked all this off, they passed a law in 2022 where it became like the blueprint. But there, LA actually has an ID, like a digital ID, like it's called LA wallet or something, but it's this digital ID verification that's run by the state. So Pornhub is using that on its network of sites, or Alo, which is the company that owns Pornhub is using that on its network of sites to verify age because it's more secure. They don't have to roll their own age verification, things like that.
- [35:12]
Joseph
So pornhub is in Louisiana, but you have to jump through those age verification hoops, whereas in other states pornhub is like, we're not even going to engage because we have to build this age verification system. Yeah, okay, Very, very pretty stupid question. Why is it these states, you know, like, why is there a trend there?
- [35:33]
Sam Cole
I mean, so the trend is that, I mean, like, obviously we're talking about like the south and the Midwest, we're talking about a lot of red states. Virginia is not a red state. So we can. It's like not a perfect analogy, but you know, it's. And you know, at the same time, it's like Arizona blocked this law from going into effect very strongly and that's a red state. And Tennessee obviously. So it's not a perfect one to one kind of comparison. But what we're seeing is the people who are pushing these laws to pass are always or almost always conservative politicians who are equating porn with harmful material. It's like these are the same thing in the rhetoric that they're using. So it's not just we want to keep kids from accessing porn until they're old enough and then they can, you know, then they're adults and they can do what they want. It's that porn is harmful as a product, as content, and it's bad for society. And that's kind of the. That's the messaging that they're using. And they're starting with, well, porn shouldn't be accessed by anyone without showing an id. And they use this analogy that's like, well, you have to show an ID to buy cigarettes and alcohol. So how is this not the same thing? And it's a totally different thing from showing a card physically to someone in person than it is uploading all of your personal information that's very sensitive to potentially some kind of database or, you know, it's like it opens up the sites themselves to a whole lot of security issues and it's just. It's a totally different beast online than it is in person.
- [37:22]
Joseph
So, I mean, yeah, I covered that site or Autotix or however it is. They have a really, really weird written name, Au10tix. Anyway, they were an identity, yes, an identity verification provider for TikTok and I think Uber and that sort of thing. And you know, they had exposed credentials and research, managed to get in and find a bunch of IDs. So you're right in that there's a distinct difference between quickly flashing ID to somebody in a store to be able to buy beer or whatever, to uploading an identifier which is stored on the server somewhere, which is then potentially, depending on how it's implemented, links to while you're viewing or something like that. I mean, I'm sure they could design in a way where it's not actually linked to the viewing, but, you know, it's still not a nice feeling and obviously people don't want to do that. And Sam, I'll ask you about VPNs in a second, but Emmanuel, because you look a lot of like, you know, when people go and they find pretty horrible stuff on Telegram or they go down rabbit holes and that sort of thing. And you look at a lot of these sites as well, along with Sam, we have spoken about it before, but just to hear your thoughts on it. What happens, do you think, to at least some people when they can't access pornhub, what are some of the sites that they may end up on?
- [38:46]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, it's funny because I listen to a lot of podcasts of comedians, a lot of whom moved to Texas to be near their king, Joe Rogan. And it's funny to hear them all talk about how they're blocked and from viewing pornhub in Texas. So like one.
- [39:05]
Joseph
Do they talk about that?
- [39:07]
Jason Kebler
They do, yeah, they joke about it. And like the, the, the, the not very harmful result is that people just go to other very popular similar sites that are not getting picked on as much by these laws because people don't know about them. They don't have the same brand recognition as pornhub and that's not so bad. But then as we've said before, um, because of pornhub's brand recognition, because we've done a lot of reporting on it, it's like a pretty cleaned up site at this point after like much turmoil after. The site frankly has done a lot of damage to a lot of people but now it's pretty good. But a lot of the alternatives are not, you know, have, have not been scrutinized as much and have a lot of like very harmful content on it. Whether you're going to telegram or sites that are dedicated to non consensual PO or just like any other, you know, tube site that's like fast and loose with, with the rules and is hosted in a different country where they're not worried about what like local law says in Texas. So people are just being exposed to worse sites with worse content as a result of these, of these changes.
- [40:26]
Joseph
So it's basically a harm reduction argument in a way. Whereas in the same way like you know, you don't want to or you can't tell people to stop doing xyz, be that drugs or something else, you just create the environment where they're less likely to hurt themselves. You can't really stop people wanting to watch pornography in a moderate amount or whatever. So why not allow them to view it on a site where there is moderation and they have removed non consensual pornography and all that sort of thing. And to be clear, pornhub was really bad. It was really, really bad. And then you, Manuel and Sam did a ton of reporting on how there was basically a sex, well there was literally a sex trafficking ring on pornhub and then there were all these changes. So it's not like pornhub was magically this heavily and well moderated place. That's only come after years of people getting very, very hurt and then lots of reporting and investigations. But some people will be in Texas or one of these other states or whatever and they will continue to access pornhub but they'll probably use a VPN which of course routes your traffic through another country or another state. Sam, have you seen anything specifically come this January 1st deadline where now the majority of the South Pornhub is blocked in. Have you seen a spike in VPNs or anything like that? I know it's sometimes hard to tell.
- [41:52]
Sam Cole
Yeah, I mean it's hard to tell for sure. Pornhub themselves told me that they when. I mean you can see this happen all the time from Google Trends where suddenly because Google Trends breaks it down by state and location, things like that country even. But you can see searches for VPNs go up when these laws go into effect, which is just like darkly funny. People are immediately like, what's a vpn? But yeah, and there's always a spike when these, when these laws are enacted. But pornhub said that they, they could see from their end. And you know, I, like, I have no way of really checking this, but they told me that they could see that traffic was moving from their site. And then I assume they're using a site like similar web or something like that to check this. But they could see where people were going, traffic was going down on their site and going up on other sites that are not, like Emmanuel mentioned, that are not moderated. So people are just jumping to the next thing. But with VPNs. Yeah, it's like any teenager knows how to use a VPN at this point. It's not like some elaborate hacking thing that I think people think it is. Like, it's just an app that you can install on your computer or your phone commonly.
- [43:11]
Jason Kebler
Widely advertised everywhere also.
- [43:14]
Sam Cole
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And advertised a lot of the time as something that you can use for porn specifically, a lot of the times. But yeah, VPNs are. VPN advertisers are everywhere. Yeah, they're definitely. I mean, people just get around it. Like it doesn't, it doesn't work. Like that's, that's kind of the thing. It's not just like, oh, this is infringing on adults rights. It doesn't work to protect children from anything either. If anything, it creates more harm for kids because they're going to sites that are less moderated.
- [43:46]
Emmanuel Mayberg
So yeah, it's also like VPNs are a tool to evade government censorship in authoritarian nations. Like that is what people use them for. Like, I mean, they use them for other things as well. But it's like this is some bleak shit which comes through. But it's like this is how people like evade the great firewall in China. How they evade, you know, government blocks on content in places like Indonesia, Turkey, etc. It's happening in the United States. It's happening right now. It's happening in 17 states. Like, that's really crazy. And Sam, I know you've been covering this for a long time. I have a question very quickly, which is like, this is part of a concerted lobbying effort. Correct. Where like, they're basically going like state by state by state and they in this case is like a group of different lobbyists who are pushing essentially the exact same law. Right?
- [44:45]
Sam Cole
Yeah, this, I mentioned before, this started in Louisiana. So these laws are basically like copy paste almost in some cases of that original law. And yeah, they're backed by groups that, like I said, want to see porn classified as harmful content across the board. Not just bad for kids to see, but bad for everyone to see. And in Louisiana, they. They wrote this law. And it was really strange to me, especially when it first came out. It was so strange that I was like, maybe this is not going to work. There's no way. Right? Like, there's no way our. Our lawmakers are that fucking dumb. But it was like a third of your site must be adult material to fall under this law to be liable for this. Be liable for, like, the fines and the opening up to legal scrutiny and lawsuits from private individuals that would put you under this. This law. So you had to be. It was like 33.3% of your site or something had to be adult material, which is a lot of sites. Actually. It's probably Twitter at this point. It's like, it's just.
- [45:57]
Joseph
It's probably 404 Media.
- [46:00]
Sam Cole
Yeah, it's probably. Probably us. Probably your inbox. Thanks to us. But yeah, it's like, it's just so pulled out of, like, their ass, obviously, that they're just like, oh, a third of a site must be. It's not even like most of your site, 100% of your site, which would be like a foreign site. It's a third, which is so strange. And. And then the. The wording of the laws is like, it. I mean, I don't even know if I want to read it here, but it's like the wording of these laws themselves are pornographic. It's like they list out like, every little, like, sex act and genitalia and all these things very specifically.
- [46:37]
Joseph
That's in the law.
- [46:38]
Sam Cole
Yeah, it's in the. It's in the legislation.
- [46:40]
Joseph
I mean, don't read it now, but I'm gonna go read the law. Yeah, just because I didn't know that. Because that's. Yeah, I didn't know that.
- [46:46]
Sam Cole
A third of the law of the written law is probably pornographic. Like, it's a huge chunk of it. It's just like a list. It's like this is somebody's like, kink list or something. I don't know.
- [46:58]
Joseph
But yeah, someone wrote it was that it was their job to write that list.
- [47:04]
Sam Cole
Someone's. Yeah, to. To figure out what classifies adult material. But yeah, I mean, it's like with the Tennessee being. Tennessee law being blocked, and then in Texas, like Emmanuel mentioned, there's an ongoing, you know, legal battle happening Between Free Speech Coalition and a couple of other porn sites, including Alo versus our bestie Ken Paxton in Texas, where they're fighting these laws, filing challenges, challenge after challenge. It's kind of wild how the process goes sometimes. So there is like, hope, I think, and I think especially in this coming year, I think we'll see more and more legal challenges to this. I think again, it's like these laws kind of go through uncontested because legislators are literally just like, that sounds cool. Signed, my constituency will like this. Protecting children. Nice. We like that. But I think as they go into effect and as people realize that they're actually not useful for protecting anyone and also a huge pain in the ass for constituents, I think we'll see more and more legal challenges and pushback against them, which will be really interesting to see and obviously we'll be tracking that as it happens.
- [48:25]
Joseph
Yeah, yeah, the legal challenges will be interesting for sure. Because I don't know, you think in a country with the First Amendment the government will be able to push laws that be able to step on this sort of speech? But look, we'll leave that there. If you are listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out. But if you're a paying 404 media subscriber, we're going to talk about how the US government is preparing to reveal the quote, unquote key witness who provided it with its own backdoored encrypted chat app. You know you can subscribe and gain access to that content@404 media code. As a reminder, 404 Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404 Media co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really helps us out. This has been 404 Media. We'll see you again next week.