ABC listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. What happens when a burnt-up satellite lands on your house? Yes, this week on Download This Show, inside the wild world of space junk and who pays, when it crashes to Earth, plus, did Uber try to kill an Australian tech company? That is what a court is trying to work out at the moment. Also on the show, made by AI, the new label you'll start to see on at least one major social media service.
All of that and much more coming up, this is your guide to the week in media, technology and culture. My name is Mark Fnell and welcome to Download This Show. Yes indeed, it is a brand new episode of Download This Show and very big welcome to our guest this week. Social media expert at Coffee&T, make Coffee Welcome Back. Hello there. And the founder of Bite Side Shamers Burn Welcome Back. Good to be here. Who is Uber trying to kill?
Apparently, according to a court case at the moment, they're trying to kill a company. See how I let that one just hang out there? Drama. So, Shamers, there's a court case at the moment unfolding with Uber. What's happening? Yes, so GoCatch was one of those very early apps in the Australian market when it came to particularly, I guess, being able to order a taxi remotely via an app.
You know, we're talking sort of 2012 era, so still pretty early in all of that sort of fun of being able to use your phone to do more than just bring people and look at internet pages. Yeah, magical time. Yeah, and Rebirds was probably just emerging. One of us was so inspired that they started a podcast about technology, media culture. I'm not kidding. The really big issue here is that GoCatch was getting early traction in the Australian market.
Uber was just starting to decide to move into international markets, and that same year first launched. It's Uber Black, which was the higher car-only luxury sort of a service. And the court cases essentially go catch saying that we feel like Uber specifically targeted us and specifically tried to destroy our company as part of rolling out into Australia. Now, at first, I thought, well, maybe this is that sale grapes thing that can happen between
companies. And then as the evidence sort of starts to emerging, you're like, oh, including spyware to steal their drivers, you start to think, okay, yeah, there's probably an actual real argument here that GoCatch was targeted. Yeah, because I was going to say this feels like a fairly late in the game for this kind of lawsuit. Certainly, there's been lawsuits between taxi companies and local tech companies and Uber
all around the world. But this is largely retreading events that, as you say, go back to 2012. It's the things that have come out of the case, Meg, that have made this really stand out. Correct. Which is why you never put in writing something you don't want read in court. There is all of this stuff that is coming. I'm going to use stuff loosely, but it's emails and conversations that have come out around when there was the launch of Uber into Australia and how
they went about it. Now, a lot of people may remember or may not remember, but it was pretty controversial when Uber first came here. And there were lots of conversations around, is this service actually even legal? And the practices that they're doing and the way that they're going about this ride sharing and the drivers is any of that legal. And what we're kind of finding out now is maybe that it wasn't. And they were doing some pretty, um, iffy things, shall we say?
So, it talks me more about the allegations of corporate espionage. What sort of stuff came out of this sadness? Yeah, so there was this particular app. This is kind of definitely the really big one was that Uber actually developed spyware that was called SurfCam, or at least codename SurfCam, but it was specifically aiming to monitor, go catch driver data, including getting their names and phone numbers so that they could then start to target calling these drivers and trying to
convince them to join Uber instead of driving on the go catch service. And so, you know, that is a really explicit and something that has sort of been, you know, confirmed along the way. And again, I guess the wheels of the legal aspects always kind of turn pretty slowly here. But so, that's kind
of one of the really big ones there in terms of the targeting. But then also, as I think go catch makes interesting point that, you know, they were focused on working with the taxi industry, but then actually Uber decided to launch its peer-to-peer ride sharing, the classic kind of Uber service here in Australia more than a year before that kind of ride sharing was deemed legal in
Australia. So, it was that I guess that aspect of saying they've tried to use that international market dominance, those forces, and then to even try to slow down any legal action against them for having rolled that out while another company go catch is trying to play by the rules. And in that process essentially loses the market because the other company has specifically aimed to launch services that were not legal. What stands out to you, Meg, is being the most interesting thing that's
come out of the case so far? The email is probably the fact that they put the stuff in writing that there's things that lead to we're going to get these guys and we're going to go after them and look how many drivers we've caught to not caught, but like how many drivers we've transferred over today. And I think just the blatant arrogance in all of it and the fact that they just sort of came in and we're like, yeah, we don't have to respond to people, we don't have to supply the information
that the courts are asking us for. Uber, we're untouchable. It was an interesting period actually, this time in Australian technology because we had a whole handful of really big well-known international brands, Uber, Netflix, that hadn't launched in Australia, but everybody kind of knew they existed and therefore you did see a suite of startups that were trying to do what those companies were doing overseas locally before they got here. And a lot of them have either been
presumed into other companies or shut down entirely. And there's a part of me that looks back on that history shame, I'm saying, is it bit sad that we never, well, we don't have many stories of companies that emerged out of that time that survived or could have been our local versions
of things. It really does waive the flag for globalism, doesn't it? Yeah, there's an element here where when you look into the nuance of some of this and I do love that the GoCatch barista has conceded that the company had management issues, they're not saying that it only had problems because of what Uber did, but it did have wider issues as well, but this was clearly a big factor
in being targeted in this way was important. But when you think about things like user experience, it's totally the sort of domain where when the Netflix arrives, when the Uber arrives, and the first time you use their version of an app, there is an element there of going, oh,
man, this is so much easier to use. This is so much nicer to deal with. All of that expertise that I guess they sort of bring to the table because they've been doing this on a much larger scale for longer and the speed at which they're able to update and iterate their apps, that's always that element where you go, man, when it's just nicer to use, sometimes that's a big part of the reason why you decide to use it. I think that user experience and I think a lot of apps these days
in businesses forget about that. If it's not smooth, if it's not simple, that first touch that the customer has with it, that's your chance to get them on board and I think that that's where Uber, I mean, I remember it because I didn't have to put my address in. I could be as drunk as I wanted to just hit a button and it would take me home. It remembered, you know, that was there was a lot for that back in the day when I used to drink like that. One of us is still drinking like that.
Download the show is what you're listening to. It is your guide to the week in media technology and culture. Mark Fidel is my name. I guess this week, Meg Coffee, social media expert and Shamestburn from Byteside and Meta, the company behind Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook have just announced new rules around how AI will live on their platform. Meg, what made through the basics?
What have they announced? So finally, they have decided that it would probably be a good idea to start labeling things that were very obviously made with AI as well as the things that they think were made with AI. And it's fantastic because they should have done this a long time ago. So what they have historically done is they've, you know, they've sort of put some labels on, we think that this might have been impacted. We think that this might have been digitally altered.
But what they're realizing is that as we go into all of the elections around the world this year, AI is a major issue and it has a potential to change things. So if they're going to have content on their platforms, it's probably in their best interest to start labeling it as this has been digitally altered. This has been influenced by AI. So I think it's as of May 1st, they're going to start putting these labels on and it'll just be on the video that you see or on the photo that
you see to try and let people know that what they're seeing is not real. How are they actually going to be able to work out what is AI and what isn't changed? Well, you know, the detection system so far proved themselves to be pretty weak. You can make a lot of assumptions about sort of whether something is or isn't, but ultimately the detection systems are not very good and certainly aren't
getting better. And so your false positive rates will certainly be a big question here. I guess the issue is going to be around things like photo realistic images because there's plenty of that sort of AI cartoonish type content that does the rounds where you can kind of pick up on what's going on. But yeah, the detection systems aren't great right now. Meta knows it's own tools that have been used. It will absolutely be able to of course, you flag that this is AI generated.
Yeah, they said they're going to be looking for watermarking that is essentially being rolled out across a lot of the AI industry that will sort of be able to flag for them that something was AI generated. But yeah, overall, I think there's going to be plenty of sort of gaps
in the system. But you know, I mean, today when you go to Facebook, you know, there are these pages that are just pure AI generated art content farms that are all about just trying to, you know, target cute animal niches and religious iconography niches, you know, and in the mix, they just kind of put in links to spammy websites. Yeah, it's like there's a big mess there right now that I guess to the human eye is pretty obvious in a lot of regards. And that's where I feel like this effort to
just, I guess, tag things. They're not even saying they're going to down rank things or any of those kinds of terminologies that they often use when they decide that it's not what they want to focus on. But instead, they're just saying, oh, we just, we'll put labels on it like, you know, a nice passive aggressive sharehouse post it note on the fridge. And you can decide what to do with it. One of the things that we particularly curious about is if it did apply to advertising as well.
I noticed this morning I was being served at a bunch of ads on Instagram for clothing. And I was like, those people don't look real. And it's occurred to me in the last couple of months that my eyes now getting trained for AI characters. I feel like our literacy for being able to identify these things Meg is actually improving. Oh, I don't, I don't think so at all. And I'm devastated by that fact. I think maybe your literacy, my literacy, those of us that have to pay attention to
it all day every day. Yes. But I'm absolutely petrified about media literacy in this country and around the world at the moment. If you look at the average Facebook page and the average, you know, consumer of it, no, they're not trained to see it. You know, I'm looking at a lot of housing stuff at the moment. And I've just realized that one of these housing accounts that I follow are house design accounts that I follow every single photo is actually AI generated now that I've
looked at it harder. But that's because I pay attention to these things. My friends, my neighbors wouldn't have a clue. What do you think? Do you think our literacy is getting better at worst? I think the big issue here is that the vast majority of people do not care. And so they see a cool picture on the internet and they hit that share button and go, wow, isn't that amazing that that six-year-old made that cool sand sculpture that was just like an incredible house right there
on the beach? Yeah, I think we're seeing so many of these things where it's like, that's almost miraculous in how cool that thing is. And it's like, yeah, and you didn't pause to think maybe that isn't real. And that then does ripple across a lot of other aspects of how people think about, you know, whether or not things are real. Staying on the topic of Mesa, we're also seeing that apps like Instagram and Threads are slowly rolling out a change that will no longer recommend
political content by default. It's an interesting change that I'm kind of curious to know, Shamus, have you actually noticed this? Have you actually noticed content of a certain kind not appearing as often? Absolutely. I think one of the really big ones, and I know I do it. I've seen plenty of other friends doing it. Whereas if you want to share something interesting with friends that happens to exist in a link on a news or other kind of large blog website,
you can't put that link in the body of a Facebook post anymore. You sort of need to write the post and then stick the link in a comment because nobody will see it if you put it in there on that sort of, you know, the first main part of the post. And so there's absolutely impacts here. And I think you kind of do need to sort of tie these aspects together like saying that it's related that we have both news and politics being essentially deeply devalued and at the same time,
they're also saying, oh, but AI, we'll just put a label. Do we need political content on social media, Meg? I know that sounds like an outlandish question, but I guess the only reason I pose it is because the negative implications of a more polarized community live online. And I get the sense that not just met a bit of a whole bunch of tech companies just don't want to be the town hall for that stuff, right, for a whole range of reasons. On the face of it, it sounds like an easy answer,
yes, right? But I also wonder if they can't police it effectively. If they can't manage it, then maybe it shouldn't be the space for that. I know that sounds like I'm not necessarily saying that as as my personal opinion. I'm just sort of broaching it as an idea for discussion, Meg. Yeah, I mean, it's all too hard. Let's just walk away, right? But the problem is is that the younger generation doesn't get their news from the traditional sources. They're not watching television. They're not
reading the newspaper. Every single study shows that the younger generations get their news from social media. They are getting it from watching it on YouTube. They're getting it from Instagram or Snapchat TikTok. You know, we worry about the boomers in Facebook. We need to worry about, you know, Gen Z and TikTok. And I think that by just completely throwing your hands in the air and going, it's all too hard. We're going to not even just have any access to it. I think that's
problematic because I think that it has the potential to disenfranchise a generation. I completely see where you're coming from in that, you know, if we can't police it and it's too hard, I mean, there's so many thoughts going through my head at the moment. You're looking at, you know, in Australia and Canada where metadata has taken the news away and they're fighting that and they're trying to say, you know, we're not a news platform and we're not. I can see why the platforms don't want to be
involved. But then if they also want the users, it is complicated and it is so multi-layered. But I do think that in the world in 2024 where we currently are, that if you have an entire generation that has proven they get their news from these platforms, then it is wrong to limit that. What do you think, Simon? Yeah, I think, you know, in essence to put my kind of media studies
academic hat on for a moment, it's like, all media is political, all content is political. When you decide that actually things that are explicitly one thing or the other are no longer allowed, then what happens when some, you know, wellness page is kind of flirting on all those edges of vaccination discussions and all those kinds of things where you know that there is inherently political discussion that is going on here. But it's okay because that's about health and that's
not political. It's like, you know, there's just so many layers to this where what feels the gap if no actual factual news is being distributed on your platform, you end up with these wild sort of misinformation pages will probably not be talking about anything political and they will just
be distributed along those news feeds perfectly reasonably. And then if someone clicks to and reads that page, they'll start to find all those posts that were deemed political that will start to be surfaced to them because they're now following that page because of all the nice, fluffy things that that page was also posting. So, you know, I think there are really sort of deep issues here with that question of what feels the void if you have explicitly said there is no
news, there is no politics. And let's also remember that the politics that will be allowed is
advertising. And therefore, if you have money, you're allowed to talk about politics and you're allowed to target a specific audience within Facebook and the vast majority of people will never even see those political messages because it can be so targeted to the point where it starts to even get incredibly difficult to be able to push back against certain ideas that can be flat out lies because they're so targeted that we just can't even see where the lies are being sent.
And that's where I'm with you, right? I don't think that you should have political advertising. I don't think that that should be allowed on the platforms. And I think, you know, when we look back to, you know, 2008 and 2012, when you had Barack Obama and the way that Facebook and the social media platforms worked for him was fantastic in the Arab Spring. What social media allowed to occur there was fantastic as far as getting the word out and spreading the word about causes.
I'm all for that kind of stuff. I don't believe that we should have political advertising on social media because then you can buy your way in exactly as you just said, James. Out of curiosity, do we have any sense of how they go about processing what is considered political and what is not? I don't believe there's any particular transparency at this point when it comes to that question, Mark.
Right. I guess the reason I think about it is because of the thing you were saying earlier, shame is about the idea that, you know, and you write it is very media studies, everything is political, but there is ways in which that is absolutely true for everything, right? Yeah. And I'm just wondering there'll be a lot of people, news organizations, I suspect, listening to this going, are we just about to get downgraded and have no sense of what's happening because of the content that we're
sharing? Yeah, it's interesting. I went through and I changed a bunch of settings on my public accounts, the other day, to take away news because I was like, because I realized as I was doing, I have no
idea. I have no idea how they're defining what is news and what isn't news. Yeah. And look, I mean, related to that, back on that AI part of this discussion, was that the meta oversight board, where they like to sort of flick some of their two hard questions and then the oversight board is actually quite often going, you need to fix your rules because these rules are actually pretty ridiculous. One of them was that out of curiosity, do we have any sense of how they go about
processing what is considered political and what is not? I don't believe there's any particular transparency at this point when it comes to that question, Mark. Right. I guess the reason I think about it is because of the thing you were saying earlier, shame is about the idea that, you know, and you write it is very media studies, everything is political, but there is ways in which that is
absolutely true for everything, right? Yeah. There was like a manipulated video of Joe Biden that was doing the rounds and meta didn't take it down because they didn't believe it was AI manipulated and therefore their rules said they would only take things down that were manipulated by AI. But if you go manually edit that thing using a perfectly normal editing suite, apparently,
they're not going to take that down. So like, there really are all these kind of ridiculous aspects of how their rules work that of course, and again, a normal person isn't ever going to go looking for the nuance here. They're going to go, well, they didn't take it down. So it must have been true that Biden said that and it turns out it's just because of a weird nuance in their rules that some manipulations are perfectly acceptable. You are listening to download this show. It is your
guide to the week in media technology culture and space. We're branching out this week. I want you to imagine sitting in your living room and hear a washing sound and then crash. And you look down and there's a hole in your ceiling. You look down as a hole in your floor. And inside that hole is a sort of largest tube. Looks a bit hot. Then you think, where did this come from?
The answer is space. And this is apparently what happens to a gentleman in Florida. And he alleges that the chunk of metal that emerged from the sky is actually a piece of the International Space Station. And it raised all kinds of questions when I saw this story, which is when a piece of space junk hits part of Earth, who's responsible? What happens who pays for it? And do you get to keep it at the end? Meg, I'm going to start with you here. I'm just going to repeat that these are
allegations from this guy. And not a lot here that's been proven so far. But as a discussion point, do we have rules over what happens when a piece of space junk hits the Earth? What kind of? But it's not necessarily 100 percent defined. The rules basically are, did it intend? Was it by accident that you came across it? Or was it part of a controlled thing that you
came across it? And what I mean by that was when they got rid of it out of space, they are meant to have these in controlled situations in this gentleman in Florida, which by the way, it landed in Naples, Florida, which is the retirement capital of Florida. People would have been losing their mind. All the oldies going, what is this stuff falling from space? So this stuff is falling from space. And he's like, who is this? Right. So in this one, apparently it was batteries that they
had intended to jettison in a certain way. However, it missed its takeoff or it missed its point. And so it's kind of just been floating around. So to me, that means that the space station lost it. They're no longer in control of it. Whoever finds it, finders keepers. You know, we've been in space for a while now. And there's a more space junk in the air than there's ever been, right? How is it that there are more like defined rules around this,
Sam? Well, look, I do kind of love that, you know, so what, there's a 1967 out of space treaty. And then there's a 1972 liability convention. And you know, again, in that early era, when you think sexy words like liability convention, you're doing things to me. I just love that in that early era, they actually really were going, there's probably some plans and rules we need to put in place here. And then as everybody's gotten more and more excited, like it's really easy now to
like throw a cube sat into space, you know, universities do it all the time. And you know, there is now all this stuff sort of floating around up there. But the big issue here is, you know, it's like Meg was saying, it's like, did you mean it or was this accidental? I just love that, you know, that this guy literally tweeted at someone from NASA kind of going, so like I've said, I've left some messages from NASA because this, you know, my nest camera footage basically
shows that this thing just slammed through my house. And at the time, he's all kind of line up pretty well. But yeah, just kind of crazy that he's like, oh, you know, I mean, you know, we thought that X wasn't useful for anything anymore. But it turns out like complaining to companies might still be one of those things where you can actually get someone's attention. I'm also genuinely curious about the fact that if it's an international space station, as opposed to just a piece of
NASA equipment, does that change who you get to sue? Well, they also believe that this particular piece of equipment was sent to the space station from the Japanese space program. You know, if someone else on the space station has jettisoned it, but it was part of the Jackson space program, then we do end up with a bit more confusion because it didn't belong to NASA, but it's been ejected by whoever is currently on the space station. So it does actually get quite tricky.
This is the law and order spin off I need. You can have your SVUs what I want is space edition. Oh, with all the oldies and Naples. I can, but he's my other question with this. When it hits the ground, who owns it? Like, can you claim it? Is anyone have any answers on this one? I think it's again, how did it come to be in your space? Like in your land, right? Like, did they intend for it
to land in that spot or did they lose it along the way? And if they intended for it to be there, and it just sort of missed its landing spot, like you jump out of a airplane and you don't quite land the parachute in the hole, but you know, in the circle, be land to the edge of the circle, you've still landed, right? But I think that, yeah, if they lose it on the reentry, then it is finders keepers. Yeah, I've definitely read something that says finders keepers doesn't apply
for most kinds of space trash. Well, I guess if it didn't crash into his house, where, therefore, he is looking for damages. Well, hello, literally, you've damaged my house. I don't want to have to pay for this. He'd probably happily go, he'll have it back, just fix my house. But let's say it landed in his yard. He might go, that's kind of cool. And I'll just like stick it in the shed and put a box on it and go, like, look at this cool thing that fell out of
space that I'm now going to keep. Given the sheer amount of space trash that we have now, more than has ever been before, this is going to happen more, right? Surely that, you know, this isn't the beginning of these kinds of stories, not the end of it, checklist. I mean, yes, it will continue to happen. Again, when things hit the atmosphere in a certain angle, then they will
burn up typically. And that's again, like, even the future plan for the space station itself, is that it will undergo, like, a controlled descent into the atmosphere and burn up might look really pretty in the sky, hopefully, and not land on anybody's houses. I think it's grossed. But I think, you know, one of the biggest concerns, and again, actually back in those sort of earlier days,
like a scientist came up with what is called Kessler syndrome. And this is the fact that it's almost less about what space junk will land on Earth and more a question of how space junk will crash into other space junk and create more and more small pieces of space junk that will just start to gum up the whole use of low Earth orbit. And, you know, Starlink's doing an amazing job for a lot of Australians right now where they can't get good internet anywhere else.
But if low Earth orbit continues to have a lot of junk floating around and it starts to break up banging into each other, then we really could get to a situation where it is, like, a massive problem that would need cleaning up and would be incredibly hard to clean up at the same time. Meg, before we go, what is the one piece of space that you would most like to land on your backyard? Well, here's a little anecdote for you. It's already happened.
It has. So I grew up in Dallas, Texas, and I unfortunately saw the Columbia explode over Texas upon reentry. And there were bits of the Columbia space, whatever it's called, I've just completely lost the word, shuttle. That went all over the Dallas Metroplex. And we had a bit of it land in our backyard, well, the neighbors backyard. And we had to give it all back because it's all like scientific and they needed all of it to find out exactly what it happened
to the Columbia. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's pretty horrific actually. Yeah. And I was a kid in school. And so it was, you know, it was a fascinating time because as a kid, my parents are trying to teach you what's happened. But it was, yeah, it was a, it was an interesting time. We are out of time. Huge thank you to our guests this week. Meg, coffee, thank you so much. Always a pleasure chatting with you guys. And Chema Spurn, thank you so much. Thank you.
If you enjoy the program, make sure you leave a review on whichever podcasting app you happen to listen to us on. They're all quite good. But if you want to listen to Heaps of ABC stuff, you should probably check out ABC Listen. And with that, I'll leave you. My name is Mark Fonell, and thank you for listening to yet another episode of Download This Show. You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio, and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.