ABC listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Breaking news, Elon Musk is arguing with somebody on the internet. But this time, he's arguing with the Australian government. Yes, this week on Download This Show, the Australian Federal Court has ordered Elon Musk's ex, formerly Twitter, to hide posts containing videos of a stabbing in a Sydney church last week. It's not necessarily playing out the way either side expected it to.
Also, on the show this week, what if your social media account could talk to you? Imagine talking to Twitter. All of that and much more coming up, this is your guide to the week in media, technology and culture. My name is Mark Finell and welcome to Download This Show. Yes and it is a brand new episode of Download This Show. We have a very big welcome to our guest this week, Tech Reporter with Capital Brief, Daniel Van Boone, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me with me back.
Oh, you know, we do it under suffering. Duncan, he's lovely to have you back on the show and ABC National Tech Reporter and good friend of the pod. It's just a phrase I've wanted to say. I think it's not even one I could claim and to love off here, welcome back. Thank you so much. It does feel good to say. It feels good to hear. Excellent. All right, not 100% sure whether we're all aware of this, but it turns out Australia's at war with Elon Musk and how did that happen?
It was pretty hard to miss and boy has it escalated. Look, Elon Musk has been at war with Australia in various ways at varying volumes, quietly, loudly for quite some time. But most recently, this is because X would not take down the videos from the Wacley stabbing. The E-safety commissioner has the power to tell platforms to take down content. They told a whole bunch of platforms to take down that video because it really was everywhere. The thing is almost everyone complied.
Meta was a little bit slow. They have to push Meta a little bit harder, but Meta ultimately cooperated to hear E-safety commissioner tell the story. Whereas X has made a really big point of not complying. In the process, making an enemy of somehow, everyone in Australian politics galvanizing support for all kinds of measures to reign in big tech as that's the rhetoric coming out of Canberra at the moment.
I guess, I don't know if E-safety commissioner is getting annoyed, but whatever feelings in E-safety commissioner has, they are having them at the moment and have, yes, since taking further legal action to try and get X to comply with this takedown order. At the time of recording, there is a bit of a legal action underway. We're going to talk a little bit top line about this. Out of curiosity. Elon Musk has dubbed what's going on here as censorship. Is he right, Daniel?
I'm not sure, because there's not really an agreement about what is actually being spoken about. So the E-safety commissioner has said that they have requested that X take down the actual like stabbing video. And Elon Musk and Twitter are claiming that they were asked to not only take down the stabbing video, but all commentary around the stabbing video. And so whether or not it's censorship, I think, relies a lot upon which of those people are lying.
I have my suspicions about which one of those are telling the truth, but yes, it very much depends, which is one of the things we will find out in the coming days. I think there's also some subtlety around, for example, if there was a post with the video in it and commentary attached to that, and then the takedown order applies to the post, and then if you were so minded, you may characterize that as they're telling us to take the post down as well. Well, sure, that's part of the deal.
But I wonder how much, you know, that it might be sort of rounded up or rounded down based on those kinds of finer points. And it's, yeah. I mean, it is a standing achievement to achieve bipartisan support in Agederville and Musk. Why do tech companies care about what the E-safety commissioner in a country all the way on the other side of the world says? Why do they care? They can find you quite a bit of money. Well, this is another thing we're going to find out.
The E-safety commissioner is probably the biggest test that's a relatively new commission that's been around since 2017. In the past, tech companies, like mostly meta and Twitter before I was asked, have actually been pretty good about like complying, at least on the surface with their like request to takedown like child sex abuse material or hateful content, things along those lines. This is the first time one of the big tech companies has really like taken a stand against them.
They don't know really what their powers are. One of the things they say they can do though is find access to Twitter, you know, up to I think it's about $700,000 daily while the content is still up. So whether or not that will stand, we will find out. But eventually, even for Elon Musk, that kind of racks up. I think this was very quiet. This didn't get anywhere near the same amount of coverage as the current spat is getting.
But Elon Musk was actually already suing the E-safety or in a legal fight with the E-safety commissioner over a takedown notice that they didn't want to, that the company didn't want to obey. It was to do with some, you know, alleged hateful content about a transgender Australian man who had been targeted, you know, misgendered and I guess, yeah, awful things said about them on that platform, the E-safety commissioner issued a takedown notice, Musk and X wouldn't go with it.
So there was already, there were already kind of suing or they'd filed the action and it had been received that, you know, it hasn't been heard or anything yet. But, you know, these fights do exist. Elon Musk is also making a real virtue at the moment of a fight that he's having in Brazil around free speech. If you look at his feed, it was very tickled to see him effectively fund raising early this week saying, hey, if you want to support free speech, turns out these fights are really expensive.
Why don't you buy a premium membership in order to support this? So I think for Elon Musk, he answered your question, why do they care? I think he cares because, I mean, he's characterized himself as a free speech absolutist. This is kind of, which is, you know, he's absolutely been more than happy to kick certain journalists off X at various points. So you could certainly argue that he is not that. But he's absolutely interested in his own free speech that much is clear.
Yeah, he is interested in Elon Musk. Elon Musk is interested in Elon Musk's free speech. He's sort of about positioning an ideology for him, I have to think, but why they can more generally, I think, is to do with whether or not Australia can be influential in, you know, what happens in Australia does matter globally because tech regulation is a very movable space at the moment. There are all kinds of changes happening in key markets. And so to that extent, it matters as well.
If we get delving to the psyche of Elon Musk for a bit, which I feel like it's not been done enough, it's more or less like a 30% of this show these days. Yeah, over the weekend, it was announced that he canceled a trip to India, a Tesla related trip to India, I believe, because, you know, Tesla is kind of on fire at the moment, like he doesn't really have time to be with. He may have figured it out laterally.
Figuratively, you know, they've kind of bunch of staff and they're not meeting their numbers, which is kind of standard. You know, he's over there going hardcore mode or whatever he's saying is and not he doesn't have time to meet the Indian prime minister.
But here he is picking fights with, like the Australian E safety commissioner over, like quote unquote, free speech, which the Brazil thing is pretty much a very similar thing, like that all happened because Brazil's justice on the Supreme Court was essentially saying that the court was getting death threats and misinformation and that X needed to ban some posts. And Elon Musk decided to like have a rower about that.
And so he's got, I guess the ultimate case of the Twitter brain because, yeah, instead of like doing his job, which is his jobs, which are, you know, pretty important. It feels like he's just arguing with people on the internet for fun. There is one kink in this story that's probably worth pointing out, which is over the weekend when they did ask for the takedown of the content. They kind of did take it down just not for people outside of Australia.
And that is one of the points of contention here isn't an ang. Right. So this is geo blocking. And so there was a measure of cooperation, we should say, but the safety commissioner in, you know, filing for an injunction this week has been arguing that is not good enough. There should be an actual, there should be needs to be an actual takedown. So just to play devil's advocate for his egg in here, why should the E safety commissioner of Australia's jurisdiction extend beyond Australia?
What's her argument there? Well, I mean, it's a really interesting point, right? Because I think, I think the rhetoric you're hearing out of Canberra, you know, Peter Dutton over the weekend saying they can run their own race overseas, but the Australian law applies in Australia. So it is a good question. The argument you could advance is whether geo blocking is sufficient in that there are ways around that. You know, a lot of people use VPNs.
I'm wondering if the people that they're especially worried about seeing extremist content online are exactly the people who are going to be getting around geo blocking. I guess you also have to distinguish the legal argument from like the moral argument. And I guess like legally we're going to find out. And I think it is a perfectly fair devil's advocate. Like do they have the authority to ask for that?
But then like on the moral side, like, would you ever, you know, in the crash search live stream, would you ever say just geo block that from New Zealand and it's okay to be seeing everywhere else? No, it's an interesting point. I just don't know the answer. I'm as curious about it as anybody. And I do think there are interesting nuances to it. At that time of recording this season, in front of the court. So I'll be very interested to see where this goes. And try not to.
Yeah. And I think it could have much grander consequences than Elon Musk ever intended or perhaps even imagined. The norm for the longest time has been that tech companies have co-designed the rules. Certainly in Australia and in other jurisdictions as well. They co-design the rules. And you know, at the moment, a lot of their commitments, most of their commitments for, you know, what happens online and the safety around that, they're voluntary.
And this is potentially a real turning point in that, in that we might, and Peter Dutton and the Coalition has expressed support for moving towards a mandatory model. We're seeing that change happen in the EU. We're seeing, you know, the beginnings of it in the US. And I wonder if maybe this is, this is Australia's moment as well, which goes far beyond X. This isn't a fight that Elon Musk has picked, but will have consequences potentially for every platform.
Download the show is what you're listening to. It is your guide to the week in media, technology and culture. I guess this week, Angela Voipier, ABC National Tech Reporter and Daniel Van Boom from Capital Brief. Now, if you scroll through the internet and you see Dr. Karl's face and he's flogging you vitamin gummies or miracle bills, Dr. Karl amongst a whole host of other celebrities have a message for you. And that is, it's not me, it's a scam, Dan.
Tell me a little bit about what's happening here. Yes. So Dr. Karl is one of many celebrities, Australian and otherwise, which are being used to spruke various products along the lines of miscalaneous health bills, investing advice into various cryptocurrencies. And Koshy's death for some reason, have you seen all those ads that you know? The world's about Koshy being Richard Wilkins being arrested, Grant Daniel being arrested, Koshy in financial ruin. So some of them, they're horrific.
Some of them are like, we're trying to scam you for money and some of them are just, we want to watch the well burn, I feel. Yeah. So why are there so many of these at the moment?
Yeah, I think, I mean, Dan makes a great point in that I think you do need to like separate out the different categories because now have this like magic machine called AI that can make whatever you want if you are willing to put just a little bit of time and effort into it and you don't necessarily need that much skill. But there are all kinds of purposes that serve. There is content farm, so really just looking for clicks, selling cheap ads and that can just be bilge.
There is technical term, very technical term. Yeah, look it up. And then there's the, we are trying to sell you things, but that's a bit of an gummies, crypto, whatever, slightly different goals, still commercial though. And then of course, you've got the misinformation, the kind of more ideological, flavored variety of AI generated, fakery and shakhanery online. You know, this one very much falls into that second category. Yeah, the reason it's everywhere is because it's very, very easy.
It's the short answer, Mark. There was a really interesting case last week. There are some researchers in the US. They're called Newsguard. And please tell me that way, armour, please. I assume we've only ever emailed and spoken on the phone, but I constantly picture them in armour. And one of their researchers, Jack Brewster, went about setting up a propaganda site, like a forever machine, a propaganda forever machine, just like online going to churn it out, it cost him $105 to do so.
That is some cheap shakhanery. Yeah. And it's endless. Like that will just keep going. And so what he done is he didn't do it himself. He found someone, I think on Fiverr, which is a platform where you can find people to do these kinds of things. You have a sort of gig economy for designers. You want somebody to design your logo, you go to find it. Precisely. Yeah, you can get all kinds of things done there.
But so he paid $105 and got this set up and the way that it worked is it would scrape new sites and you just sort of instruct what kind of ideological flavour you want to have. And it's then churning out posts and content in whatever shape that you want. This is going to sound like a potentially dumb question. But these scams, and they're certainly not unique to Australia. They happen everywhere in the world. And they usually, the bottom of websites, they're badly photoshopped or done using AI.
Do they work? Yeah, they sure do. So the throwback to this though is that this is not technically a new thing. I think it's a new way to scam like the same group of people, unfortunately. But like people who are not digitally native, for instance, have been falling for like a surprising amount of people still fall for the Nigerian king uncle, like email tree. Yeah, he promised me he'd send me money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm going to use that to buy the doggy.
That's why I gave him my paypal to this. Yeah, yeah. The things that, you know, digitally native people would instinctively and immediately be able to identify as a scam. Like even the Dr. Carl videos, if you see them, if you're like, I hate to make generalisations about age, but if you're a millennial, you're probably going to spot it like immediately. Yeah, the same group of kind of older people who have been falling for the same kind of scams. It's kind of a new way to get them, which is sad.
Yeah, I think I don't know. I would make a distinction there as well because I used to sort of feel the same way. We've always had content farms. We've always had like, well, not always. But for far too long, we have had, you know, people trying to vlog us weird crypto or NFTs online. And you know, also misinformation and foreign interference of that nature. We've always had it. So what is the big deal? I think that $105 price tag really, it tells you something, right?
This is a scale that we have not previously encountered and it's a price point that we have not previously encountered. And the sheer volume makes it a different proposition. I also think that sure we can spot it now, but we also want to trajectory in terms of the sophistication. You know, six months ago, a year ago, you couldn't have had that Dr. Carl video. Now you do. And that is only going to increase certainly faster than the laws to reign it in or the measures can keep up.
I would like make a distinction between like misinformation farms and like active scams which are being advertised on Facebook and like various other sites. Or a subsequent point to add to that is that like these scams have kind of always existed and surprisingly always work. But they shouldn't be allowed to be advertised on Facebook. Like you don't actually need new laws about like AI deep fakes to restrict these ads because I'm pretty sure they definitely run a foul of existing consumer war.
Beyond increasing media literacy, which I think is just an understandable first response to this kind of content, are there strategies that are important in place anywhere in the world for how to actually tackle these things, something that works at the scale at which they're being pumped out? So something really interesting that Google has been doing and this was in their March update is they've started de-indexing AI generated sites, right?
So it was hundreds I think, but so it's not at all at the level, but what it was was a bit of a shift in policy and a certain people, particularly people in March, I had the misfortune of stumbling into I guess a marketing corner of LinkedIn and that was where I discovered people actually really angry about this being like, oh it's punishing legitimate content sort of thing.
But yeah, Google was de-indexing all these sites and you can imagine that if they're willing to do it on some level, that list of sites that a de-indexed may grow. You also see, for example, news guard, those researchers that I mentioned earlier, they have a Chrome extension and they rate various sites. So you 10,000, 10,000, I think, many, many, many news sites or, you know, air quotes, news sites around the world.
And so they're, you know, they're, it's like the labeling thing versus getting rid of it altogether. And I think that's kind of where we're going to land on this. I'm not sure if I'm aware of any country that's had a successful, like digital literacy drive to curb the success of these kind of scams, but I would say like to piggyback on your point, I do think this is legitimately an area where the social media companies are responsible.
Like, obviously some of these scams are being like pushed out on like miscalaneous sites, but they're also on Facebook. And Facebook says that they've removed like 650,000 of them, but I feel like if AI is sophisticated enough to replicate Dr. Carl, then you can get AI sophisticated enough to identify those replications. The thing that kills me is they're not even replicating them. They're just taking existing photos and doing what would appear to be some very mediocre Photoshop work.
Yeah. Exactly. Well, they did make a video as well. And that was surprisingly, I don't know. I do. Oh, wow. In OK, so forget it. Yeah. So there's a video and there's his voice and he sounds like Dr. Carl. And the ABCs sort of tried to get them to take it down. And it's, yeah, I mean, it is at a level. It wouldn't have been possible technologically before. So we are moving a rate of knots here. The other thing I would add is that, as you mentioned before, this is certainly going to get worse.
Open AI, the company that makes charge GBT, they've said that they actually have already created or are very well in the way of creating a AI model specifically for speech replication, but for obvious reasons, they've not really set to the public yet. But then we're going to hold off until after the US election. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's much harder to create a realistic, visual representation of someone talking.
If you take out that factor and just rely on the audio, I feel like you'll be able to do much more damage. On your point before, there is something instinctive. There's an instinctive logic that if we can create it, we can detect it. But the point I would make is that that is absolutely not been proven to be the case with AI. We are so much better at making the tools that create this content than we are at detecting it. We still don't really have good detection.
Watermarking yards in the works, but in the works is the operative part of that sentence, the important part. We don't know how to catch this stuff properly yet in a clean way. Yeah, I know Adobe's been working on some processes as well. I do love that Chattie Petit have decided to hold off for the US election, but just in time for somebody else's election, somewhere else around the world. Also, the most easily-faked voices on the planet, the US president and Donald Trump.
All right, download the show is what you're listening to. It is your guide to the weekend media technology and culture. And over the weekend, a brand new social media platform went, no, they just keep making them. It launched. It is called AirChatt. It has been pitched to something like a combination between Twitter. Yes, I'm persisting with calling it Twitter. Not X. And Clubhouse. Damn, you've tried it. Just for somebody that's never experienced it before, just describe the experience.
Well, here's my pitch for those people. You know how social media is great and you definitely need more? Well, have I got the new one for you? So it basically works like Twitter except to post a tweet or a AirChatt. You have to record yourself, voice memo, and then it transcribes that and post it both as a text. And when you scroll down it, it reads your voice aloud. So I actually tried it this morning, other than the fact that there's only like 12 people on it.
It was actually the number of you asked me. Yeah. It was actually not as horrible as it sounded. It's actually founded by the founder of Tinder and a very famous Silicon Valley investor. So the pedigree is there, I guess. It was a lot better than I thought it would be, but I still just keep going back to the thing of like, who needs more social media? OK, so the reason I want to talk about this is because I've often wondered if people had to verbalize the things that they tweet angrily.
Would they still write half the things they tweet? That's why I thought it was worth talking about. So it's interested in about how it changes or has the potential, or maybe not at all, to change us and. You're bang on, right? That's why people won't use it. Do you know what I mean? Like, there's something there. There's this extra user barrier.
Like part of the experience of being online and it's sort of like seamless slipping between locations and not having to use your voice, it's like it's entirely cerebral. And so this gets in the way of that. That cuts across the appeal, the other thing that cuts across the appeal. You've got to go to the party. They've got to be people that you want to see at the party in order for you to show up.
And at the moment, as far as I can tell, there's a lot of like tech types on the site, which checks out their, the early adopters. But they're kind of the people like, look, the quiet part of the sentence whenever someone launches a new social media platform at the moment. And some, you know, some of us do just go ahead and say it out loud. It's like, oh, maybe this will be what Twitter once was. Like maybe this will be the nicer version of Twitter.
But. The eternal hunt for the nicer version of Twitter. Right. But it sounds like the people that you would be wanting to avoid on Twitter are the first people who have started at air chat. Me, you mean? Yeah. Well, in fairness, we made you do it. On that, like the eternal hunt for a good Twitter, like I was saying before in regards to like who wants more social media, I feel like we've been through a few rounds of that, like Blue Sky. What was the other one that are the nice Twitter?
Uh, and another like Blue Sky. And one more. But all of them. Mastered on it. Like all these things that are definitely part of the pop of the conversation that everyone knows about. Yeah, exactly. Totally. And if you've never heard of those things before, don't worry, you will never need to hear. Yeah, the basic premise was that they were like Twitter, but not bad. Yeah. And everyone was just about it for a week and then just gave up.
Um, I think the path to success for air chat would be like teenager adoption, maybe. Just people who have not been completely disenfranchised by, uh, Twitter and meta and such. That's an interesting point, right? Obviously there are online services that are built on voice, right? I mean, Twitch, for example, and you know, not exclusively voice, but it's not like we don't do voice online. Just cool. It does happen. Just discord exactly.
But at the same time, um, there's a staff that I always come back to. There's a couple of years ago, I worked for Beyond Blue, the mental health organization. One of the things they said is that one of the most taken up of their services was chat. A lot of young people, and I don't have a number to put on. I'm a lot of young people referred to have a conversation with a mental professional via chat rather than verbalizing.
Oh. And so I'm not saying that that necessarily carries over into all online behavior, but I do think there's a lot of online activities now that we are so used to doing non-verbaly, right? And I do, I question whether there is that much of a desire to do talking Twitter, which is by the way, what I'm going to call this thing from now on. Talking Twitter. It's honestly a better name and probably more than sure.
Maybe in a weird way that you actually have to use your voice as like a novel selling point, like, remember using your voice? You can do it again. I don't know. And you do hear employers, I guess, complain a lot about, I mean, it's just this sort of conversation that Jen Zed scared to pick up the phone in the workplace. Like they are just that much shy. And yeah, because that's a generation and millennials have this to a lesser extent, but it's still present.
We've just been socialized in a completely different way. I just love that we're less likely to be taken in according to Dan. By the way, this whole generational wolf thing, I'm 100% putting on you, we're less likely to be taken in by the Dr. Carl Scam, but we're a terrifying to pick up the phone and call people. Hey man, you can't have it all. You can't have it all. Have you guys got any friends? Like I now have friends who exclusively send me voice members, like they don't text me.
Like I feel like a few of my friends have done the like, I'm sick of this like texting business. Like I'm just going to send you a voice message. Yeah, and the younger they are, the more likely they are to do it. And I was resistant and now I kind of love it. So I'm saying there's something there. I've got one friend that does it and I think she mostly does it because she can't be all of this. Oh yeah. Also she tends to send me all of the, I got there's two reasons to do it.
One, which is you realize that Siri is just not that good at transcribing you. And secondly is maybe only does it look slightly drunk. All right, so let's look ahead. As has been established, we have a whole bunch of different apps that are now vying to be the next Twitter. You mentioned Vasadon, Blue Sky, Threads, which being backed by Metta, the company behind Instagram and Facebook, you would have to assume is the natural successor. But it hasn't really taken off, I don't think.
And the fact that that hasn't really taken off, or has it? Everyone's looking at it. I disagree. I think it's probably, I mean, it's probably the front runner right now. It is like the alternative. Someone characterized it to me the other day as a gay Twitter, which I quite enjoyed. What? I think it's just like, that's where all the queers have gone. I guess I've got a lot of queer networks and so it's kind of like, well, less hate speech.
Well, that's interesting, because that kind of says something, right? Because if you've already found your tribes, that kind of suggests it's working better, right? I mean, one of the issues I think with Twitter is that it was so exposed, right? That you would often encounter people that you often vehemently disagree with. And to some extent, that's good for civil society. But then to another extent, it's toxic trash fire. Yeah, I think there's like a Goldilocks zone, right?
Because one of the other challenges for new platforms is that when you are starting from scratch, you don't have all that infrastructure. Like people you've been following for years, people who have online, you don't want like that binfire on Twitter anymore and X. But the good thing about coming across to threads, I think what made it attractive is that it suggested people who were following on Instagram.
So you had a little bit of scaffolding there to create, you weren't starting from zero, but nor did you have every weird bot that's followed you or every person you regret following in the last 10 years on Twitter. The difficulty for things like air chat is that you don't have that existing network to pour it over.
But the good thing is because it's not just like a different version of Twitter, I can imagine in like two or three years, there being all these novel and kind of goofy ways the platforms being used that we wouldn't predict now. But I could also say it becoming like Clubhouse, i.e. dead in two weeks. I suppose the telling thing will be whether someone's thread account starts to get bigger than their Instagram account. Because at that point, threads will become its own.
You will have your own identity on threads that is unique to just the people you inherit on Instagram. And I think that will be an interesting turning point for lots of uses. And we will wait and find out. Next time. Huge thank you to I guess this week. Angela Buhlpergear, ABC National Tech reporter, pleasure as always. Thanks for having me. And Daniel Van Boom from Capital Breathe. And me of the podcast. Sure. Why not? Give me a baby boomer's. My name is Mark Van Ell.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Download This Show. Don't forget, you can listen to all your favorite ABC podcasts on ABC Listen. And I will catch you next week. Goodbye. You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.