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- [00:00]
Charlie Warzel
How do you make an Airbnb a vrbo? Picture yourself in a vacation rental. You're wondering why you earn loyalty rewards with hotels, airlines, coffee shops you visit, even your local ice cream spot. But this vacation house gives you nothing. When all of a sudden, look at that. You've earned loyalty rewards. Now it's a vrbo where each stay earns you rewards towards your next stay. Want a vacation rental with rewards? Make it a VRbox. OneKeyCash is not redeemable for cash and can only be used on Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo.
- [00:38]
Tim Miller
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We've got the perfect guest for today's Facebook news. Charlie Warzel. He's staff writer at the Atlantic, author of the newsletter Galaxy Brain, about technology, media and big ideas. He's also the co author of out of Office, the Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home. That's not on our to do list today. We have too much to discuss to discuss my working from home thoughts, but maybe another day. How are you doing, Charlie?
- [01:06]
Charlie Warzel
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.
- [01:07]
Tim Miller
You know, I initially had reached out because you had an awesome article about crypto and I was like, I want to do a crypto episode with Charlie. And you know, the news gods had other ideas. We'll, we'll get to crypto at the end for people dying to hear our hot takes of about Ethereum. But Mark Zuckerberg is out with some news this morning and I just want to read exactly what the announcement is from Facebook so we can make sure to get it right here. He is replacing, not that that matters anymore, but he is replacing fact checkers with community notes in the model of Twitter. That's number one. Number two, simplifying content policies to remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with the mainstream discourse. He's moving the trust and safety content teams from California. The California teams were too biased. He's going to move them to Texas, which is a beacon of just right down the middle of the road. Political ideology in Texas, no bias in Texas or moving the moderators who have the worst jobs in the world. I think the content moderators, those people, the moderation slums, are moving from California to Texas to weed out bias. We've also, I think has it's going to get less attention, but I think potentially the most pernicious thing that is happening is they're bringing back more political content to the algorithm and the newsfeed. They're not deranking that anymore. Crazy shit people post is going to be back in your Facebook newsfeed, if you are of the demographic that uses the Facebook newsfeed. So those are the big updates Joel Kaplan went on Fox to discuss. I have some audio from that I want to get to, but I want your big picture thoughts on the changes first.
- [02:46]
Charlie Warzel
Sure. I woke up to this, like full cander like an hour ago.
- [02:50]
Tim Miller
Yeah, same.
- [02:51]
Charlie Warzel
My thoughts on this are basically, I think that Mark Zuckerberg is very, and I, I felt this way for a while, very ashamed of everything that he and Facebook did between, let's say, March 1, 2020 and January 10, 2021. Right. So beginning of the COVID pandemic right into, you know, post January 6th. I mean, the fact that this announcement is coming on January 7th, I'd go.
- [03:22]
Tim Miller
Back, I think he's probably ashamed of what they did starting in 2016. Trying to root out.
- [03:26]
Charlie Warzel
Yeah, I would agree.
- [03:28]
Tim Miller
But Cambridge Analytica stuff and all that, I don't think he cares about, actually.
- [03:31]
Charlie Warzel
I would agree with that. But I think too, you know, they were up against a lot of pressure there and they were always sort of trying to do the very least, like they were being kind of dragged along by people and. But Zuckerberg did an interview in March or April of 2020 with my, my old boss who was at the Times then, Ben Smith, about like Covid misinformation. And it was like the only, the first interview I really heard from Zuckerberg where he was basically like, no, it's good that we're like censoring, quote, unquote. Right. Like, it's good that we're taking action against this. This is a very clear cut situation in which there is actual harm, you know, connected to this type of content, these type of words. And I think I bet you if you had to like read that to him in front of him, he would just like cringe, like, full body. Right. Because I think there's this, this real understanding in his mind, in the mind of a lot of the people who he's running with in these circles in Silicon Valley and in the world of like UFC or jiu Jitsu or whatever, that there is this, you know, this huge overreach during the COVID and the, you know, the lead up to the 2020 election. And then of course, the big one right after January 6th, you know, getting rid of Trump, all of that stuff. I mean, the fact that this announcement is taking place on January 7, four years later, is like, it's a big like middle finger. I feel like to this idea of like the hall monitors like you have lost is I think what he's trying to communicate here.
- [05:08]
Tim Miller
Yeah. So I think that there are two elements to this. One is the forward looking Trump suck up part and one is the regrets looking back part. We're going to get to the Trump suck up part, but let's continue down to the looking back part first. Bill Kristol in our internal Slack wrote this. I told him I was going to steal it from him, but I'll credit it. He was like, here's the thing. The fact checking ended up being mostly pointless. There's not a lot of evidence of the fact checking part work. I think deranking things from Feed mattered but like the fact checking ended up not being that useful. Open to the fact that there's counter research on this. Maybe you've seen that Bill, writes Zuck now denouncing Facebook's fact checking when he implemented it, was in charge of it, arranged it, supervised it, paid for it for years. Is like a Stalinist show trial type of self denunciation for the new leader. And I think it is part putting on the hair shirt for Trump. But I do think he also has some of his own regrets about it. But he hasn't, he hasn't done the mature thing of accepting responsibility for the decisions he made as one of the richest people in the world. And in this announcement, it's like the legacy media and these annoying hall monitors forced me to do this. And now it's like, now this is my big middle finger back at them. But as you point out, that's not really. He could have done whatever he wanted, really. It's not like the Biden regulators were coming for him and he believed a lot of the stuff based on that interview with Ben Smith, but that he hasn't kind of accepted responsibility for that. It doesn't feel like he's blaming this on you, Charlie. It's your fault that he has had to do this.
- [06:39]
Charlie Warzel
Well, yes. And you know what, I'll take the blame. I agree with that completely. I've been covering this company for, you know, I don't know, more than a decade now. And there's this classic thing that that Zuckerberg especially does where he sort of rolls out something new and basically says like he speaks as if he has amnesia from the past or as if like, you know, a totally new paradigm has formed. Right. It's like we're getting into groups, we' getting into community building. We like everyone just Wants to gather with people around shared interests. And then, like, QAnon happens, and he's like, I don't know what people were doing, you know, trying to gather in these groups. And we're just forcing people into these groups. So what we really want to do is this, like, they were all about news and prioritizing the news feed. I mean, when I worked at BuzzFeed in 2013, one day, literally just one day in October, we had 300 times the amount of referral traffic that we normally had to the entire site. And it was because someone at Facebook turned a dial and there was all this stuff because Facebook wanted to get in bed, partner with these news organizations, be a place where news reading, where all this happened. Then they realized, that's quaint.
- [07:54]
Tim Miller
When they cared about reading.
- [07:55]
Charlie Warzel
Then they realized, oh, your grandma is getting radicalized. It's a terrible experience for absolutely every person on the app to be inundated with political news 24 7. And they were like, this political news, it's bad. It's like, you did this. You did this. You control the website. You are making the editorial decisions, and yet they sort of act like it's these gravitational forces that are pushing and pulling us into these behaviors. Facebook is the one dictating what we see, what we do, how we act on the platform.
- [08:26]
Tim Miller
JBL wrote about this in the triad today. It's like, be an alpha. Like, why are you such a surrender monkey? You're one of the richest guys in the world, and you do the jujitsu and the mma. Why are you acting like you are unable to resist the critiques of the Atlantic and you are forced into making these policy changes because there were a handful of tech reporters that were mean to you. Why are you acting like you were forced into these changes by the Biden administration, which wasn't really like, that aggressive on these matters at all. Like, the whole thing is very. It's very beta. It's like, I'm not. I'm not really in control here. And now. Now it's just like, now I think the best thing to do is just become the clockmaker God and let. Let a thousand flowers bloom at free speech, and that will solve all the problems, and that's going to create new problems, and he'll have a new announcement in four years that pretends like this was not his fault either. This was Donald Trump's fault, probably.
- [09:27]
Charlie Warzel
Well, and I think we also have to talk about the Elon Musk of it, all. Right? I mean, he is essentially adopting the Twitter practice Like Community Notes, right? Which, I mean, like, hand up Community Notes is an interesting feature. Like, of the Muskian features, it is the one that sort of makes some sense.
- [09:48]
Tim Miller
Probably the best thing he's done.
- [09:49]
Charlie Warzel
Yeah. And it is Community Notes fact checks all of Elon Musk's bullshit all the time. Right. Like, it does a reasonably good job.
- [09:58]
Tim Miller
Even though it seems like he takes those down.
- [10:00]
Charlie Warzel
Yes, it does.
- [10:01]
Tim Miller
It does. Free speech absolutism has its limits.
- [10:04]
Charlie Warzel
It sure does on. On x dot com, But I mean, going to that. And then also I get this sense, and I. You know, the reporter in me, like, I can't really, like, prove it, but I think that these guys, like, when I. When I saw all the announcements, you know, the glib part of me is like, Zuckerberg just wants people to be able to say the word retarded, you know, which, like, everyone uses on X now. And it's like, oh, we're, you know, free speech is back. We can say things, you know, that we used to say in the 90s that we would have gotten canceled for. I feel like those are the waters that, you know, these guys are swimming in all the time, right? They're just having this, like, very weird edgelordian discourse all the time. And I think, like, he sees that on a place like X and sees that there is kind of like a charge to it, right? That there's all these people who are really excited about being able to speak a certain way and triggering a certain type of lib and, you know, whatever. And I think it's like he's feeling left out by this sort of. I would never describe Elon Musk as cool, but there's like a. In that world, a sort of, you know, like, renegade nature to the way that he's running his platform. And I think that Zuckerberg is, frankly, just like he wants that.
- [11:22]
Tim Miller
It all goes back to being stuffed in the locker and to making a page about which girls are the hottest at Harvard. You know, it just really. It's true about Elon, too. And all. It's for all these guys. All these guys were super nerds and want to feel cool. And it's like, great, now we can call gays fairies again or the other F word, and the AI bot won't put up a little content note. One more thing about these content notes, it's just worth bringing up because I sometimes am like, you have to be so deep online and so aggressive about your political posting to even interact with the Facebook moderation regime. Like, the right Wingers online. And Zuckerberg now himself is pretending he's accepted their fake narrative that, like, they were really cracking down. And there was a lot of censorship. Like in most of the cases where it's not like porn or murder, like, it was just a little note at the bottom. It was a little fact check note. And in most of the cases that wasn't getting taken down. And like, even in those cases, you had to be saying really extreme or weird stuff. I post all the time like, I'm a super poster. I'm like, I've never encountered a moderation regime in any way. Like, just think about what kinds of stuff you have to be posting to even know that this is happening. Like most normal people, this doesn't, doesn't even affect them. It's like a small number of edgelord super posters that have now, like, taken control of the entire narrative about online censorship.
- [12:50]
Charlie Warzel
I agree with you on, on that. The one point of pushback I will have is, I think, as always, like, Instagram is the thing that's going to get like forgotten in all of this. And I, and I do think the changes, if we feel them at all, right, like, this is the thing with all meta, Facebook, whatever changes is like they can be subtle and they can make a big deal out of them because they're subtle and no one, your experience will barely change. Or they could be wild, right? And all of sudden, like every meta product is going to look like X or 4chan or whatever. We don't know. But I do think, especially like, the inclusion of like, you know, not filtering out any politics stuff. And by filtering, what Facebook means is like, Facebook was still showing people politics stuff across all the channels. If you showed interest in it, it was just making sure not to show it. If you hadn't showed interest, right. Instagram's experience could change drastically. If people are like, I just want to see Timothee Chalamet at the Golden Globes. I'm just into that. And all of a sudden it's just like the worst people you've ever met in your life posting about. Yeah, exactly. That could piss a lot of people off. And I guarantee if that happens, he will come back and be like, they were pushing politics on us. It was the whole post election. Trump won. We're going to stay away from that. As if he had no hand in it.
- [14:13]
Tim Miller
Now that you mention it, this maybe says something about the type of content that I'm consuming. The only experience I've had with any meta content moderation is occasionally, I See gays complaining that they have had their speedo pictures censored. Censors by Instagram. I don't know if the rules are changing on that. I think that maybe lascivious speedo pictures are still going to come under the, you know, long arm of the. Of the content moderation law while posting. The r slur is cool. I don't know. We'll see.
- [14:45]
Charlie Warzel
I don't know. I mean, this stuff with X is, you know, he's been very against any kind of, like, sexualized content or nudity on. On all meta platforms. It's like, been a very prude platform since the beginning of its existence. If you go on X, like, X is just feeding. Feeding you hardcore porn when you're not asking for it all the time. So I don't know if he's ready for that. Part of the, you know, free speech wing of the free speech party.
- [15:10]
Tim Miller
Well, this is just a whole. This is like, I've written so much about this. The whole moderation discourse is always so stupid because it's like, it's so hard. I guess I should say this. Like, I consulted for Facebook like a year, 15 years ago, and I had some overlap with the moderation team when I had to do pr. And like, when you talk to the people that are in charge of actual moderation, I mean, what they see every day is so insane. I mean, like, the dregs of society, like the. Just with the scale that Facebook has or Twitter, any of these things have even random message boards. The scale, a small message board, has the amount of, like, gross porn, you know, murders. Like, stuff you would never want children to see on the platform. Something adults don't want to see. Stuff that they were showing at the end of the substance, which I suffered through last night, like, teeth coming out of people's mouths and like, racist stuff. Like, it is so challenging to moderate all that, even with AI, even with technology. And so like this, if you turn down the notch on, like kind of the automatic vetting, you know, of certain keywords or key terms or key images, like, then the amount of shit you don't want to see elevates spam. I just should have include spam in there and it becomes Craigslist. It's like literally becomes crazy. Like, remember, Craigslist was a great place to like, buy tickets or sell furniture and stuff now. And now it's like the only thing on Craigslist is, like, scammers, like, trying to steal your money and porn and weird stuff.
- [16:35]
Charlie Warzel
It's a really good point because people don't realize, right? It all gets caught up in the censorship conversation. And so much of the job, like you said, everywhere on the Internet, from the smallest message board to whatever, like moderation is just. It's like people should think of it as like, okay, here's a Starbucks, right? Like, we have to clean the bathrooms, right? We have to wipe down the counters every night. At the end of the day, it's like, that's what.
- [16:58]
Tim Miller
You can't let a naked person walk through the store. You can't let somebody like blare it with an iPad, like showing NC17 cadaver porn. You can't walk into the Starbucks doing that, right? Or else people won't go to the Starbucks.
- [17:11]
Charlie Warzel
And that's what it is. And occasionally there's an edge case, right? There's a guy who comes in who's playing by most of the rules, but he's listening to his iPad too loud and you have to say, hey man, sorry, can you turn it down? And that becomes the censorship. Yeah, the edge cases are frustrating. It sucks to be on the other end of that, especially when you didn't think you were violating the rules. But you have to have some kind of standard in a communal space. It's just like basic humanity.
- [17:40]
Tim Miller
Was kicking around with some of the parents at a child's birthday party over the weekend, deciding how we're going to manage January. We just had the January 6th anniversary inauguration coming up. You want to stay in touch with the news, but also take the edge off a little bit. And one thing that came up, Sole's out of office gummies and I got good news. This podcast is sponsored by Sole. Sol's new out of office gummies are perfectly microdosed with hemp derived THC and CBD to give any day that chilling on the beach vibe. And if you've been listening to this pod, you know you can now buy hemp derived THC products in all 50 states. Because of the 2018 farm bill. Hemp derived THC is now legal and accessible nationwide. The out of office gummies help you get that much needed me time at the end of the day or during the day, depending on what kind of job you have. They're convenient and delicious. Out of office gummies give you that warm, fuzzy, euphoric microdose feeling without sending you to the moon. You can go for a jog, watch your favorite TV show. Though I would not recommend watching the substance on gummies or maybe on anything. I don't know, maybe you're not a soft boy like me. The substance freaked me out. But maybe some of the other TV shows, the lighter TV shows. Silo I've been watching. That's good with a little gummy. Whatever floats your boat. Soul was founded five years ago by brother and sister duo Mike and Angie Lee. Mike's a former world ranked boxer and Angie is an author and professional speaker. They wanted to create natural alternatives to medication that tackle problems. They deal with themselves and Sol's products. They're grown right here in the usa. So if you want to feel your best head to getsold.com and use code the bulwark for 30% off your order. That's 30% off your order. Using code the Bulwark one last time. GetSoul.com and code the bulwark for 30% off. Now we got to get to the Trump part of it, which is more in my realm than yours. But I need to play this for you. Have you had a chance to see Joel Kaplan on FOX and Friends this morning? This is great. We're going to do it live. Joel Kaplan, for you who don't know, is a longtime Republican, kind of, you know, pretty normie Republican, traditional Bush Republican, but was good friends with Kavanaugh. People say he was radicalized maybe is an overused term but you know, quasi, you know, moved towards the MAGA direction after the treatment. What he felt like was unfair treatment of his friend Brett Kavanaugh and has been at Facebook for a long time. He's just elevated in his role, has been a longtime opponent of, of the fact checking regime that his own company was doing. They made this announcement this morning and the rollout was not to discuss it with, you know, I don't know, my friend Savannah Guthrie over on, over on the Today show or something. His first interview is with Fox and Friends and I want to play a clip from it. There's no question that the things that happen at Meta are coming from Mark. But there's also no question that there has been a change over the last four years. We saw a lot of societal and political pressure all in the direction of, of more content, moderation, more censorship. And we've got a real opportunity now. We've got a new administration and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression. That makes a difference. One of the things we've experienced is.
- [20:52]
Charlie Warzel
That when you have a U.S. president administration that's pushing for censorship, it just.
- [20:57]
Tim Miller
Makes it open season for other governments around the world that don't even have the protections of the First Amendment to really put pressure on U.S. companies. We're going to work with President Trump to push back on that kind of thing around the world. Well, if Joel was here, I'd ask him how Trump's ass tastes. But since he's not and you're here, I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. The Donald Trump fighter of free expression wants to take away broadcast rights from people who criticized him. Sued Bill Maher for calling him the son of an orangutan. He's got his new FBI director suing our friend Olivia Troy for being mean to him on cable news. Just a free expression, absolutist, lover of the First Amendment, Donald Trump. That's why they're doing this, right, Charlie? Just because they just are right in line with these first principles with the new administration.
- [21:41]
Charlie Warzel
Was that Fox Business or Fox News?
- [21:43]
Tim Miller
Fox News.
- [21:44]
Charlie Warzel
Okay. I thought it was Fox Business. I was like, that's really like. Then you've really gone, you know, down the rabbit hole, man. I mean, that says it all, right. Like, that really, to me, says it all right. We're just. How do we get an audience with the big man before without going to mar a lago is clearly. Let's get on Fox News and say some nice things about. About that. I mean, I don't know. I, I get the whole pandering to. To Trump thing, but I almost feel like there's something real about it now. I wonder if the circles that he. That Zuckerberg is, you know, hanging out in like, the proximity to like, the MMA crowd. I don't think he put Dana White on the board of Facebook yesterday because he is trying to pander necessarily to Trump. I think he likes to hang out with Dana White. Can I be bothand I think it can be. I think it can be both. And what I'm just, there's a way to pander to him, and I think that that is like signaling and I mean, I think he kind of did it pre election, right? Like the Tim Cook style of pandering, right? The donate to the transition. Send a nice tweet that's like, we look forward to working with President Trump, blah, blah, blah. I think this is slightly different. I mean, this really feels like we're actually tailoring the platform. We're actually restructuring our corporate governance to do this. I don't know. I mean. And then on the flip side, right, Trump said he wanted to potentially put Mark Zuckerberg in jail. So I guess the stakes are pretty high for him.
- [23:23]
Tim Miller
Yeah, this is the point. I mean, Stealth Brian Stelzer writes this this morning. Matt is facing an antitrust trial in April. They've got business before the government. Trump threatened to send Zuckerberg to prison, as you just mentioned. I think that Zuckerberg can both be red pilled and want to say retarded, you know, like on his platform. I think that can be true. He can be like, you know, trying to relive, like boys state, kind of like hang out with his new MMA bros and want to say non PC things. And like, he thinks that's cool. I think he can both feel that and also be like, this is easy pickings, Trump suck up stuff. Right? Like, this is just like, we can go on Fox. Sure, we can butter him up. I can go down to Mar a Lago. I can do the. I can go from censoring Insurrection material to putting my hand over my heart as they sing the January 6th choirs rendition of the national anthem. You know, like, I just think that this can be both of those things at the same time.
- [24:29]
Charlie Warzel
You're probably right about that. I think what is always true about the right these days, in the past, whatever, 10 years, Trump will always turn on you. Obviously, we've seen that. Trump will knife you in the back if it's convenient. But I do think that there is an acceptance, an eagerness to have somebody turn. There's always been a joke that I would hear when I was talking to other people who covered the far right, which is that tomorrow I could be a right wing social media influencer if I just sold my soul and just said I worked at the New York Times. And let me tell you, I'm the whistleblower. It's such an easy path because they're so accepting of those people.
- [25:20]
Tim Miller
Yeah. Where do you want to work? You want to work at the Free Press? Do you want to go to Fox? Yeah. I mean, we could just, I get you a promotion. I don't know what they're paying you over at the Atlantic. We could get you a, we could get you a raise.
- [25:30]
Charlie Warzel
And that's always been this, like, you know, this, this kind of joke that. Because they're so accepting of that type of person. Right. As long as you're willing to sort of sell the entirety of your soul to that. And I think that that's always kind of a difference, especially that, like in the big tech space Right. Between Republicans and Democrats, like there is, there's really nothing that Mark Zuckerberg being one of the richest people on earth, who has presided over Facebook for two decades now, there's really nothing he can do to, like, ingratiate himself. Like, even if he changes all of the policies of whatever, there's always going to be the balls and strikes of, you know, content, moderation stuff. He's always going to be, you know, a capitalist billionaire.
- [26:15]
Tim Miller
Always going to be an annoying progressive complaining about him. I know, I know. Yeah, it's tough. It's tough. You're gonna always get complained about. You know, there's not and there's nothing. And if that bothers you, well, that's.
- [26:26]
Charlie Warzel
What the money's for, right? But I think, you know that it is like when you do break MAGA or whatever you want to call it, right? There is obviously Trump turns on everyone, but there is this kind of like, you know, okay, like, you want to play. That's great. Like, we, we will actually give you, like, sort of the blanket pardon as long as you walk the line. And I think that that's really, like. It must feel pretty nice for someone like Zuckerberg to just be like, okay, all I gotta do is sell my soul, have Joel go on Fox once a week, talk about Trump being a crusader for free speech. And finally, I can just get some people who are just gonna be like, hey, he's a good guy. Yeah. Oh, he's nice. He does a good job.
- [27:11]
Tim Miller
Yeah, there's something to that. I've always said that it's one thing Democrats could learn from Trump is being a little bit more generous to converts. Maybe not this one. Not the whole cult thing where if you put on the blue hat, then all sins are forgiven and whatever. But being a little bit more generous to people would probably help the Democrats political, the progressive political project in the long term. But that's for another day, y'all. There is obviously much uncertainty in the world with Donald Trump coming back into the White House. These big oligarchs are figuring out how to deal with it by sucking up to them. But regular people need to be thinking about this as well. And there's one thing that you can do that will bring certainty or at least peace of mind about tomorrow, and that's life insurance. Select Quote is one of America's leading insurance brokers with nearly 40 years of experience helping over 2 million customers find over $700 billion in coverage since 1985. Other life insurance brokers offer impersonal one size fits all policies that may cost you more and cover you less, while Select Quotes licensed insurance agents work for you to tailor a life insurance policy for your individual needs in as little as 15 minutes. And if you've been worried about getting coverage with a pre existing health condition, Select Quote partners with carriers that provide policies for a variety of dose. If you have high blood pressure, no problem. If you have diabetes, that's fine too. Even if you have heart disease, Select Quote partners with carriers that can cover that condition and others. Head to selectquote.com and a licensed insurance agent will call you right away with the right policy for your life and your budget. Selectquote they shop, you save, get the right life insurance for you for less@SelectQuote.com Bulwark Go to SelectQuote.com Bulwark today to get started. That's SelectQuote.com Bulwark I want to get into your Internet brain rot article around misinformation, but it kind of it relates to this story in one way, right? Which is we don't exactly know how or what to what degree, but one of the planks that Zuckerberg laid out today is that they want to bring politics back to the news feed on Facebook, on Instagram, on threads. As you rightly point out, the Instagram part of it is potentially more interesting since Facebook is like an elderly message board right now and threads. Threads has become very niche to say the least. So the Instagram part of this may be the most interesting. But to me, like that was the effective change, effective in air quotes, but like the change that made Some difference after 2016, 2020 for Facebook More than the fact checking stuff was let's kind of derank some of this political stuff and you know, get that out of the newsfeed and try to reemphasize Facebook's original mission of whatever people posting pictures of their friends at keg parties and like, and emphasize those a little bit more. And to change back I think has some potentially dangerous consequences, particularly as it relates to your article about conspiracy theories around various hot button issues. What do you think about that?
- [30:17]
Charlie Warzel
I think that the changes could be small. Right. And it could be sort of on the margin stuff that is going to sound really good to people like Donald Trump and you're not going to see that much of a difference. Right? That's totally possible. It's also possible that this is a classic maneuver by Facebook to push so far in a direction they historically don't seem to think through the externalities of what they're doing. Right. Like for me, the idea of, you know, deranking some of this quality news, you know, whatever stuff, that's a big one. But for me the biggest one was this focus on groups and communities, right? And just throwing people together based on some of these shared interests. And you know, every time that Facebook chooses to prioritize something really heavily, its algorithms are pushing people in this way that they don't really notice, right? They don't really totally understand.
- [31:12]
Tim Miller
It's all of a sudden unintended consequences. This is my classical Okshadi and small C conservatism coming out. You know, you make a big change like this, you don't exactly know what's going to come out the back end.
- [31:22]
Charlie Warzel
And I think, you know, you saw the sort of logical endpoint of all of that, right? Was like Facebook's architecture was perfectly suited in late 2020, November, December 2020, to allow tens of thousands of people to gather around the Stop the Steal movement. Like, if you remember on November, whatever, 6th or something, 2020, like I was watching the Stop the Steal Facebook group, somebody like in early in the morning was like, hey, you should check this out. This like election denying group has like 15,000 members. And then I went, by the time I looked at it, six minutes later, it had 50,000 members. And it's like, that shit doesn't happen. If you don't make a series of changes from 2018 all the way through to try to get, you know, Uncle Jim and Aunt Sally into knitting groups and, you know, Rotary Club meetings and whatever. It's oops. And so it's just like, I think that they make these.
- [32:22]
Tim Miller
We met book clubs. We met book clubs, not insurrection.
- [32:25]
Charlie Warzel
And so it's like this kind of stuff has the potential for these really large kind of gnarly changes because there are billions of people on this platform. And like, if there's one thing covering Facebook for as long as I have, or meta or whatever we're calling it, is this idea that, like, they are so naive or act at least so naive as to how people like actually use the Internet. Like there's every time they talk about these changes in the way it works, it is always around the knitting club or just two people getting together, shaking hands and breaking bread and, you know, talking kitchen table issues, connecting cultures.
- [33:07]
Tim Miller
You know, like from Malaysia to America, you know, people are going to be sharing recipes. It's like, no, actually there's going to be a guy living in Malaysia that is sharing election fraud, odd conspiracies that has a ton of interest.
- [33:22]
Charlie Warzel
A bunch of guys in a room in Malaysia with 186 smartphones hooked up to a thing like basically reposting each other's generative AI shrimp Jesus. Facebook spam to trick grandma and grandpa into thinking that, you know, I don't even know what. But it's like people go on the Internet. I have this, like, theory which is called, like the toilet theory of the Internet, which is that like most things that you see that either delight you, enrage you, whatever that are just posts by a human being were probably like typed out with two thumbs on the toilet by somebody else. The Internet is very wonderful. It's horrible. But it's also just really quotidian. It's used by people all the time to stave off boredom in random moments. And Facebook never sees that. Right. It's always just the breaking bread over the table, even though they know better. And I just think when you make these changes, especially when you make these sort of radical changes very quickly, the unintended consequences always rear their ugly heads 18 months down the line in like a totally unforeseen way.
- [34:28]
Tim Miller
One of your other theories I want to talk about a recent article, was that the Internet is not functioning so much as a brainwashing engine, but as a justification machine that people find information to justify any pre existing crazy view that they have. And I thought it was interesting, your comparison between like the January 6th conspiracies, how people, you know, initially were like, oh, it was antifa. And it's like, oh, the FBI did it, like whatever they needed to find to justify the fact that they weren't the baddies. But comparing that to the 9, 11 conspiracies and how it took a lot longer for them to bubble up, they bubbled up in more heterodox kind of ways because it happened not the pre Internet, but in the early Internet, before the social web. Talk about that.
- [35:15]
Charlie Warzel
I read this piece that came out on January 6th with this researcher, Mike Caulfield, who studies information environments and all the bad stuff. And the idea is basically that we're always thinking about misinformation, as again, Uncle Tim gets on his computer, sees a piece of misinformation, and all of a sudden like, you know, oh, yeah, like Hillary Clinton has babies trapped in the basement of a pizza parlor.
- [35:41]
Tim Miller
Like, I'm convinced now the moon's made of cheese.
- [35:44]
Charlie Warzel
Yeah. And really what's actually happening is that it is keeping you locked in your beliefs. Like the misinformation peddling that's going on everywhere is to keep people from having to experience cognitive dissonance for having a piece of information come in and make them rethink their entire worldview. And January 6th is this great example of this, right, because we can't forget. Like I saw them, you know, on the, on the four year anniversary, like dredging up tweets from, you know, Erik Erickson being like, shoot the protesters, right? Like all these people on the right saying, this is unconscionable, this is horrible. Right? So there was this moment where a crack lets the light in, right? And it's like, oh, are we the bad guys here? And this entire system spins up with these justifications, right? Offering this parade of evidence so that people do not have to experience that cognitive dissonance they get. Oh, actually, yes. See, it was antifa. Yes. There were FBI agents leading people in all that stuff. As we were trying to think through this idea, this theory, it's like, so what does that do to people? And it creates this stuckness, this inability to look backward or to hold people accountable. So, you know, with January 6th, it's like, oh no, we realized that, you know, it's, it was just like a big false flag situation or it was a peaceful protest or it was whatever, right? Our mind is made up. We're not going to go back. And so the January 6, you know, committee commission was then framed. It was either completely ignored by, you know, right wing media institutions or, or it was framed as a bunch of democratic scolds who are obsessed with the past, who are hall monitors who have Trump derangement syndrome, you know, blah, blah, blah. And there's this inability to look back because all we're doing is looking forward towards the new barrage of evidence that makes us feel, you know, like, comfortable in our beliefs. And I mean, the reason why we compared it to the 911 stuff is the 911 Commission, obviously it wasn't like January 6th and 911 aren't completely analogous events, but they are both really visually intense attacks on the country. The 911 Commission, the report comes out, it's long, it's dense, it is a national bestseller for like four months. Like over a million copies are sold. Like, you can go back and take a look at. It was a cultural event of people saying, let's get to the bottom of this thing. Let's look back at the history. Let's look at the way that this institution, Congress investigated it and try to understand.
- [38:22]
Tim Miller
And I mean, that had its own flaws, right? It's not perfect going back. I mean, they did some masking over some of the Saudi involvement and still other little conspiracies bubbled up. And another true pushback to that commission bubbled up. But that's more of a natural course of Socratic public discussion.
- [38:41]
Charlie Warzel
Yeah, I'm not trying to say that any of these things are perfect on their own, but just the difference between a cultural desire to look back and investigate this versus what happened with January 6th. And you had a lot of people, I'm sure, a lot of people who, you know, listen to this podcast, who watched the hearings, who are interested, who felt that accountability was right and necessary. And I think it was. But there was also this huge gulf of people who didn't fall in the MAGA category, who didn't fall in the watching it on MSNBC category, who were also just like, I'm just trying to live my life. I'm barraged with information all the time, and I didn't really pay attention to it culturally. The two events are so different in the way that they were analyzed and received. And I think where I ultimately fall with it, and this is maybe where it could be a stretch for some people, is in this world where we have this justification machine just constantly humming, where there's this barrage of evidence, it's really hard for the Democrats, say, to make the 2020 election a battle for the soul of the nation. It pins the hopes on something like January 6th being resonant four years later. And I think the way that information moves, the way that these ecosystems move, it's not as resonant as people might want it to be. Right. History does not pull out as long as it used to. And I think that's just a really brain scrambling thing to confront.
- [40:14]
Tim Miller
It is the other element that I wanted to bring up that you mentioned in the article that might be a little brain scrambling for some of our listeners to confront is we're all susceptible to this. So there's this idea of wanting to find information that justifies pre existing beliefs. And when you're in this marketplace on social media where you have all these different outlets and all the people you can follow and you unfollow people who are unpleasant to unfollow. It's very easy to find yourself in a, in a hole. And one example you guys gave, which is obviously not a conspiracy on the level of antifa, did January 6th, but was this notion that Trump's momentum is losing, Trump is about to collapse, that found huge purchase among people on the left and we just see this. I'll put my hand up. If we posted on YouTube a poll that was like, Trump's losing and the views skyrocketed. That's a natural instinct at some level. I use this comparison all the time. I Listen to the Nuggets podcast after they win to hear the analysis more often than I do after they lose. So that's. It's a natural human impulse. But people got to really believe this, right? And I've seen some people in our lives because they were only clicking on things that were showing Trump's weaknesses, and they convinced themselves, like, oh, yeah, like, MAGA is dying, Like, MAGA is collapsing. Like, even smart people, really engaged people I know, were saying this to me and going up into the election. And I think it's just because the same impulse to look for something that justifies something that you want to be true so bad or that you believe to be true so bad.
- [41:49]
Charlie Warzel
Yeah, there's certainly an asymmetry between the MAGA coalition and what's going on, but it happens everywhere. And I think that it's like, we can't think of it as just like, we have to understand that this is what the media ecosystem is doing, whether we want to be that type of media consumer or not. And I think. And have less judgment about it happening when it's happening, you know, kind of in good faith. I'll see this all the time. A very small example of this in my own life is I'll see a piece of news pop up on social media in some way. And it's not that I'm trying to, like, find a way to immediately discredit it, but if it's, like, kind of shocking to me, I'll be like, does this person know what they're talking about? Are they an actual political reporter? Is this analysis? And sometimes the initial instinct of me being skeptical of that is because it's a piece of information that doesn't make sense to my worldview. And sometimes it is bullshit, but sometimes it's actually just right. But that instinct of me going and being like, okay, so is this guy credible? It's good, but it's also because of this idea of, like, whoa, we're not used to. We've sort of lost our defenses for information that makes us question our worldview a little bit.
- [43:08]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I'm the same. The other side of the coin is the same for me. More positive in my nerdy politics and policy feeds that I follow. If somebody's posting. If your colleague Jerusalem Dempses, who I love, is posting a. She's like, ooh, just read a new study showing that we need to build more housing in urban areas. I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm clicking on this. I want to get a couple sentences I can use from the podcast, right? If I see somebody else, like an anti immigrant person, it's like, I've got a new study out. That's like, the real problem is that we have too many immigrants here that are taking up too many houses. I will either just not click on that at all or do what you're doing, like, click on that person and be like, this person's got to be bad, right? I got to find some reason why this person's bad. Right? Like, that's just a natural. That's human. But these are like the Winnie the Pooh and the tuxedo version of the problem that, like, there's some, like, other people doing the same thing that are like, people that are just like, you know, Winnie the Pooh naked eating honey, right? So, like, how do you even. How do you combat this?
- [44:08]
Charlie Warzel
Right? Yeah. Hurricanes aren't real. This has been the problem my entire career, right? Is like, I feel like I write.
- [44:15]
Tim Miller
Things, identify a problem, and then you're like, sorry, guys, here's the problem.
- [44:19]
Charlie Warzel
But I do think, like, the person who has the, you know, the foolproof solution to that problem will probably win, like a Nobel Prize because it'll, like, save humanity to some degree. I mean, there's all kinds of things, right? There's the fixing different issues of media literacy, which is the boring and sort of, you know, eye rolling answer to that. Clearly, we're not going to get any platform regulations, but also platform regulations are their own minefields. The way that I like to look at this issue, and I think I've said this in different places before, is the Internet and the, you know, democratization of speech in this way. Like, think about multiple billions of people on Facebook at a given time. Like, that is historic, right? In the sense of humanity. We have not connected people in this way ever before. It is a media revolution on par with something like the invention of the printing press. And if you go back to that, that's centuries of tumult and disruption. And I think that, like everything in the Internet age, we will speed run that. But I think, like, we are all trying to figure out what the hell is going on, how to process it. Like, it is rewiring our relationships to each other and to ourselves. And I think that it's this long process, right? Where we develop new norms around how to communicate, how to share, how to do all these different things. It's a very unsatisfying answer, but I think when people are like, what button can I push to make life more sane? It's like, there is no button, there's no net underneath. Like, this is a new experiment for civilization to be doing this. And unfortunately for, or maybe fortunately, I don't know, we're all sort of born and living in this time period of like massive, massive societal, technological, cultural disruption. And it's, it's bonkers.
- [46:18]
Tim Miller
Yeah. And actually we're going to spend the next four years not trying to fix it.
- [46:21]
Charlie Warzel
So there you go, there's that.
- [46:22]
Tim Miller
All right, we got to do crypto. There were two topics in your article that I want to cover really quick. One was you lead the article saying, for years crypto skeptics have asked what is this for me among those skeptics? And for years boosters have struggled to offer up a satisfactory answer. They argue that the blockchain is itself a genius technological invention. I agree with that. But once you get beyond that, the question is what value do these coins provide for people that don't want to use them to commit crimes? Your answer to this is that maybe the purpose that crypto has found for itself is that it is a cultural one where it's serving a need that certain people have to oppose incumbent interests. Talk about that a little bit.
- [47:07]
Charlie Warzel
Yeah, I mean, the very nature of like, if you go back and you read the bitcoin white paper, which I don't really suggest anyone does, it's only like 11 pages, but it's pretty dry.
- [47:16]
Tim Miller
It's a hard 11 pages, depending, two.
- [47:20]
Charlie Warzel
And a half in depending if you read it, like, obviously it's not overtly political, but it is a political notion to want to build a technology that circumvents the need for middle men or middle institutions, or it's basically trying to come up with a decentralized form of global finance. Right. That in itself is just, it's an anti institutional idea. And that technology, when it first, you know, came out and no one was really caring about it except for like engineers and super nerds. And I mean that, you know, in a, in a, in a loving way. Like those types of people are like techno cyber libertarians. Right. They are people who want that sort of democratization, who have a healthy skepticism of institutions and authorities and power and would like a technological tool to circumvent all that. So those are a lot of the people who had an early investment in bitcoin who got in on the ground floor. And by the ground floor, I mean the real ground floor, and the people who have hundred thousand x returns on their investment at the moment and who have been made incredibly rich. Then you Have a lot of the other speculator class and people like that. But so many of the people who have been on this bandwagon for a long time got in not necessarily just because it was a really good speculative asset. They got in because of this sort of ideological rooted connection. Those people being made really rich like they are now a meaningful political constituency because of their money. And that influence in this moment is another, like, really big cultural factor in our like anti institutional moment.
- [49:17]
Tim Miller
And I think that the Democrats had a miss here. I mean, I am for crypto regulation for the reason that I want to close the top of the pod with the kind of like disdain of it or this desire to attack it from being the institution taking on the guard of the Democrats are the protectors of the big institutions. That is just a bad place to be in politics in a changed world. Just setting the merits of this aside because Trump didn't give a fuck about this. Trump would have been happy to regulate crypto to get rid of crypto to whatever. It's not like any of him or the core people. Well, now the new core of Andreessen and them care. But the original MAGA crowd doesn't have strong crypto things. Trump society can make money on it. And so did. And there was then just like a general laissez faire. It's like, oh, all these libertarian, anti establishment crypto bros who are probably culturally kind of liberal, but like their crypto asset, they're for me because I say I'm not going to f with them like Gary Gensler has. And I think that that was a meaningful swing demo, not like a decisive one, but for Trump this time.
- [50:32]
Charlie Warzel
Oh, definitely. And it has so much overlap, right, with the. Not even the manosphere, but sort of like the bro podcast sphere that he was going on and trying to court. There's an overlap there. So there's a whole culture that, you know, I mean, really during the pandemic is when it. It kind of took its. Its form that it has now and through, you know, the whole like Gamestop and SBF and all ftx, the. All that stuff that happened in the last couple of years, you know, the laser eyes meme kind of stuff, like sort of edgelordy culture that formed around it has a lot of overlap, right, because it is anti authority, anti institution. It is sort of like people on X who, you know, want to use words they feel like, you know, would get them canceled. In, you know, polite liberal spheres. There is an overlap with that audience. So I think it was actually very Smart for the Trump campaign to court that, to adopt that. I also think that when I would like to have been in the room the first time that someone actually explained like crypto and not like the blockchain, but I mean, like, you know, the world of speculative asset trading and money laundering and stuff and yeah, Trump coin and all that to him because I'm sure his eyes got like really wide because it's like basically like if Donald, like finance Donald Trump's way, right? Like, oh, I can, you know, I can get people to give me sort of like in kind political contributions by, you know, by investing in my coin. And I can have my son be like the head of research for this, you know, dubious startup based in, you know, a garage in Palm Beach. Like, sweet.
- [52:14]
Tim Miller
I can plant my logo on something, but it's just online now. I don't even have to put it on a building. I can put it on like on an Internet thing and then people will pay me to put my, to put my, you know, face on it. Amazing.
- [52:27]
Charlie Warzel
I'm sure he was like, this is like made for me. Right? But I agree with part of what you said with the, you know, it shouldn't be treated in like a, in a changed world. It shouldn't be treated by Democrats with this like, gross sort of sustain, like, turn off the people for whom crypto is like the one, you know, thing that they're voting. They're the single issue crypto voter. Like, yeah, it's probably not a great idea, but I think where we might be going with this conversation, like, there is a really large concern when it comes to like, I'm not like a defender of like big investment banks by any stretch, but I, I also think commingling our financial system with the most volatile speculative assets ever really to exist is a freaking nightmare. And that is where we might be headed under a Trump administration.
- [53:21]
Tim Miller
It is. That's our final topic. People should read the whole article. There's also Trump corruption stuff that we could spend a ton of time on. A Chinese national cryptocurrency Entrepreneur recently bought $30 million worth of tokens and Trump's shitcoin for one example. So there's much more that came from. We'll have the link in the show notes. But here's my last note on my Google Doc for this podcast. I wrote in all caps because I just hadn't really thought about this that much. I just, you know, I read about crypto stuff, but like, once you get deep into the crypto, like regulatory elements, it hadn't set in for me until I read your article. Letting big banks commingle with crypto would be insane. Did nobody read the Big Short? Like what? Like really like, like. It is, it is wild that there is not going be just some basic regulations and guardrails. I honestly forget even regulating crypto, but just preventing the banks that are too big to fail to cause the Great Recession from being exposed to this type of risk asset.
- [54:29]
Charlie Warzel
For that piece I talked to this researcher named Molly White who studies, reports on, is deep in the, in the crypto world and the regulation stuff and all this. And this was her like red flag concern, which is basically like think about when FTX crashed, right? It was a, you know, an exchange that was insolvent. The bottom fell out. A lot of people lost everything. Most of the people who do lose everything are the people who have the least. Right. Like the whales usually don't lose at all. They're diversified, whatever. It was a terrible thing for a lot of people. It was totally contained though from the global financial system. It was not like when the bottom drops out of a bunch of people defaulting on their mortgages that all of a sudden we end up with bankers in the street lighting their little boxes of their desk stuff on fire. That is what protects us right now. You can be for all of this, you know, I want a decentralized currency. It's easier to send money to people in different countries. I like the culture around it. I like to essentially gamble on the price of Bitcoin, like all that stuff. Hey, like if I can.
- [55:46]
Tim Miller
Free country, right?
- [55:47]
Charlie Warzel
Sure, Exactly. But the idea that like a bunch of people are going to like pump and dump into this, into this currency that you know it's going to be. There's no guardrails between Citibanks holdings in this realm and in the crypto realm and the fact that if we do have another FTX style collapse of some kind. And this realm of crypto finance too is just. It's the wild west. You have so much money laundering going on, so many people using it for crimes. It's not to say that the traditional world of finance is great, but to have those things together in that sense and then to have a potential global financial crisis because all these banks have FOMO and don't want to miss out on giving their clients access to something like this because their son likes to trade it on coinbase, all of that is just maddening. It's like freaky. And so I think that is the place where I think you could find reasonable Democratic opposition. Which is to say, like, hey, it's a free country, but we don't want people losing their shirts and not even investing in it.
- [57:05]
Tim Miller
We need basic protections for retail investors. Retail. And that includes retail hawk to a coin investors. Like, that's a fine place to be. You know, as long as you're not just kind of throwing away a growing demographic despite one that is a little confusing to me. I was about to let you go. But I have one breaking news item. Trump says we're changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
- [57:34]
Charlie Warzel
Is that real?
- [57:35]
Tim Miller
Is that real? That's something for people. That's something for everybody to think about overnight. And they can Google for themselves whether or not that's real. Could be real. Could be fake. Who knows in the world of the new Facebook algorithms? And why would it matter? Why would. Why would we need to correct it if it were untrue? No value in that. Charlie Warzell at the Atlantic. Check out his work. It's so good. Come back soon.
- [57:56]
Charlie Warzel
Thank you.
- [57:57]
Tim Miller
Later.
- [58:09]
Charlie Warzel
Smelling like roses. I'm in. The new edition made it way too efficient. Made us a guinea pig. It did it with no permission. Told her to call her friend. Didn't tell her to listen. So very scary. So binary01 let go to SL I dreamy color, not black and white. You sell your daughter on that day. The dream. Don't call me naked. No. Humans don't understand. Humans will sell a lot. Humans got to survive. We know we going to die. Nothing can live ever. You know we going to try life. It really worth it. The algorithm is perfect. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Feeling like the devil did it. You hop up behind it. The algorithm is perfect.
- [59:46]
Tim Miller
The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.