I Was Ridiculed on Instagram. Here's What I Learned

unsuspectingly doing stupid stuff on the subway. We occasionally text about it when we see something really ridiculous and that ridiculous person becomes you. I know. I thought she was kidding, but then she said look on Instagram, and I looked in there I was this video of me grimacing down at my phone, looking really weird, and the comments on the post we're starting to pour in the one I remember most said texting, bitch face. That's my sister, Aaron. Anyway,

you weren't doing anything. You did have a very strange look on your face. People were starting to do memes like what you look like when and we're putting stuff in there? Do you what do you remember that I was doing? Remember anything specific? I remember I was just texting ferociously with this like really mean, weird look on my face. And it was strange because it was a video of you doing that, but then it zoomed in

on your face. The person was sitting across from you. Okay, so Adam, you're still at the bar in London at this point, texting frantically with your sister. I was. I was freaking out, wouldn't you What did my coworkers see it? My sister suggested I send Mr Subway creep, you're a note. I even had her draft it for me because I was so frazzled. Hi. I noticed I was taped without my knowledge yesterday and posted to your site. Please remove it? And then I hit send hi em though, I'm Adam Satriano.

And this week on Decrypted, we're going inside this strange, voyeuristic corner of social media where people, including Adam, unwittingly become a source of amusement. It's not an enjoyable place to be, but beyond the embarrassment, the experience taught me a good deal about the changing nature of privacy online. We'll meet Rick Maguire, the thirty three year old who

runs Subway Creatures from a New York apartment. He'll tell us about how he got into this strange Instagram world and how he's trying to turn it into a business and it's own little way. My experience demonstrates the tightrope that social media companies are walking right now. Increasingly, companies like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, are being asked to regulate what's appropriate content, what's fake news, what's bad, what's good, what's

in between? Do we want to further empower these already very powerful companies to be the editors of our digital lives? Stay with us? Okay, so Adam and take us back. You emailed the Subway Creatures guy and you asked him to delete that video of you. It felt like an absolute lost cause I thought, no way, this guy is gonna do that. But he actually replied right away and he took it down. I was very surprised, pleasantly so so I struck up a correspondence with him. Ricks from

New Jersey. He played hockey in college. He's actually kind of sort of very normal for her, a guy who creates an Instagram account like this it sounds like you kind of like him. Now. I was very curious, like, how on earth do you come to operate a thing like this. We're in the famous Promenade and Union Square, tons of things to see out here. Our producer piaged

Kari went to meet Rick. I am a huge people person, like I love people watching, and I obviously started seeing what we all see every day in the New York subway New York City subway, and you know, I realized there's not really a platform for this. So I wound up starting a website that featured a lot of the stuff that I saw daily, and before I knew it, it kind of gained traction. People started sending me stuff and I didn't even have to look for it anymore.

It was coming to me. There are more than six hundred thousand people following this Subway Creatures Instagram account. On top of that, Rick has followers on Twitter and Facebook and a website too. It's it's a little voyeuristic, uh, this content. It's it's kind of in a category of its own. Um but the closest it's just user generated

content that you know. It's the good part about it is that the content is endless and there's never going to be an end to it as long as there are smartphones out there where you can record something and have it put up in almost instantly. Let me give you a sense. Crazy haircuts, weird outfits, unusual tattoos, pets. There's owls and peacocks on there. There's also a lot of pictures of people who fell asleep in a strange position, and a lot of people who are drunk on the subway.

It could be subway performers. Uh, people singing. A lot of the time, people have earphones in and they're singing out loud and don't even realize how loud they're being, and uh, you know, it could be that kind of stuff. So that's how Rick stumbled into this, you know, front row seat to internet culture. He's a freelance TV producer, so his day job is also related to making stuff people want to watch. I it's it's been awesome, it's it's honestly, I never actually pictured it to get as

big as it is right now. But in the world of social media, he can watch the embarrassing content he collects bread sometimes with frightening velocity. I've had someone, uh send me a video while they were on the train of something. I posted it while that video was going viral. This person was still sitting across from the person on the train, So technically that person could have seen in real time themselves going viral, which I when when you look at the big picture, I think that that is

extremely interesting that that something like that can happen. Nowadays, Ricks has one of the first things he does in the morning is checked to see what people have sent to post on subway creatures. The weirder the better. There's some reason one of the most popular things that I get sent are people bringing very exotic, strange animals onto the subway. We had an instance where there was someone who brought up peacock, another person who brought a lizard,

a lot of snakes. Rick started Subway Features as a website. In today, Instagram is where he has his biggest audience, but he continues to update his website too. Rick has his own rules for what he posts. He rarely features kids, and he doesn't post images or videos of people he thinks might be mentally ill or homeless for his website. Anything else is fair game. That would be like people flashing on the subway. Uh, anything that would get pulled down, uh,

because of discretion. Would normally go on the website because there are no guidelines on the website and it's kind of the wild West on there. But when he posts on Instagram, Rick has to be more selective because Instagram has its own community guidelines that it enforces. Instagram will send a notification. First, they'll pull it down, and then they send a notification saying, due to guidelines on Instagram, we've now pulled the content down. And basically you get

a warning or a strike against you. Um, just because if people are repeatedly posting, you know, stuff that's not supposed to be up there, Uh, the account, the account gets suspended. That hasn't happened to me. That's why I try to be very careful with what I post, because I don't want to get my account suspended for any reasons. And even for power users like Rick, it's tricky navigating those guidelines. He says he doesn't quite understand the rules.

For example, Instagram's guidelines say that pretty much any kind of nudity is banned, but Instagram doesn't catch everything. That's the subjective aspect of it is that I don't know what actually constitute something as being too explicit? Obviously, if there are people having sex on the train, Uh, you'd

think that that would that would cross a line. However, I posted a video a couple of months ago of two Yankee fans coming home from a Yankee game, and they would appeared to be having sex on the train that never got pulled down. How Then, and then to go to the other extreme, Uh, there were there would be stuff as far as, uh, maybe a guy wearing shorts that are a little too short and something's hanging

out that gets pulled down. Or take this example. There was a video that went viral a couple of weeks ago. It was from Toronto in the subway and this woman got into a physical altercation with a man and she was splashing mop bucket water at him. So the guy turned around and picked up the bucket of water and dumped it over her head. So I I mean it was a it was a mutual confrontation. She wasn't getting you know, other than the water going on her. She

wasn't physically being abused. She did have water dumped on her. Uh. That was posted went super viral. Um not only my account, but a number of popular accounts posted it. However, it was only my page that it got reported and taken down. Rick says he's still confused about why Instagram didn't just block the clip on every account that had shared it. How come he was singled out. He also said he's tried contacting Instagram a few times, but they've basically never

responded to his questions. Now more than ever, Instagram has been a little too sensitive on policing what goes up and what and what gets taken down. And I think there's a very fine line of uh, policing the content and censoring, So I don't know where that falls, but I think that there needs to be a little more conversation about it. Rick says he acts quickly when people ask for stuff to be taken down. When he was talking to our producer Pia, he mentioned the time that

I contacted him, I took it down immediately. There's he was very uncomfortable with the fact that someone was recording him on the subway, which I don't blame him, and he knows there are a lot of people out there like me, people who love subway creatures. Until one day they became the ones that were ridiculed on the account. So it's it's one of those catch twenty two situations where I feel like people love the web. They love the website, they love the page, they love every day

looking at all the crazy stuff that happens in the subway. However, I think it's a completely different scenario once they are actually the subject of the video. So you know, it's it's almost like a love hate relationship with the page. Of course, that does not stop Brick from doing what he does. He clearly loves this. When Po was riding the train with him, he spotted a potential quote unquote creature and got so excited. Yeah. So here we are at Union Square on the l and there is a

man doing repeted circles dancing to this music. And it's pretty amazing, to be honest with you, and I wish I we could film this right now, because this is great. I'm actually I might have to record this. You might also think there are rules against people filming each other without getting permission first, but you'd be wrong. I spoke to Albert Gaderry, who's the director of Privacy at Stanford

Center for Internet and Society. Al says there's more than a century of case law on Rick's side, because the people being filmed are in a public space. In when Justice Brandeis in the US wrote his seminal piece on privacy, he said, what happens in public is public. And that video of you, Adam that made it onto subway creatures, that was taken when you were in a public space. Yeah, I was just on the subway in London looking like an idiot. So Rick was never legally obligated to delete

that video of you, even though he agreed to do it. Anyway, you implicitly consent to be seen, and if someone takes your photograph, you've assumed the risk that that will happen. Now in a world where everybody is a videographer, everybody

is a photographer, everybody is a publisher. Um, those notions of of of being obscure in the crowd, the notion of a right to have a nanimity to have a different uh circle around you, of privacy in your residential neighborhood versus in a shopping mall, in a stadium where a football game is going are all under rethinking today. Of course, we saw this play out just a couple of months ago when some of the white nationalists who are marching in Charlottesville were identified with their full names

and even their employers. Some people said it wasn't right to be naming these individuals who were exercising their right to free speech, and other people were like, well, they were in public, they should have known that there'd be a good chance they get out. In the broader context here is that social media companies are facing increasing pressure

to act against objectionable material. We've entered a world where everything that can be collected will be collected in the public domain, and the question is what do we do with that, and how do we accept the consequences of that if we do, or do we regulate it. Until now, social networks like Facebook and Twitter have insisted that it's not their job to be policing what people say. They're just the platforms with intermediary liability or lack thereof. The

platforms are not responsible for user generated content. It's impossible for them to review every image and decide is this a news report or is it an offensive or or embarrassing newsreel about somebody's personal life. But governments around the world are making it harder for these companies to just stay out of it. In Europe, Germany has called on Facebook to help stamp out hate speech on its platform, and Twitter has said it's the leaded hundreds of thousands

of accounts to combat extremism. And as we covered in last week's episode of the show, Shameless Plug, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are now facing a lot of scrutiny over why they didn't do more to stop Russia from spreading misinformation on their platforms. Great episode, by the way, but Albert also talked about the dangers of having our internet companies more actively police their platforms. Do we want to

give them that power? This is such a hard question because one person's fake news is another person's stolen belief, and it's really hard to ask an intermediary to become whether it be the government, or become a platform, to become the arbiter of what's true and not true. There was another person I talked to about this, someone with a lot of experience to ending people whose privacy was invaded on the Internet. My name is Erica Johnstone and

I'm a lawyer in San Francisco. I specialize in privacy law. I specialized in representing victims of revenge porn. Revenge porn, by the way, is the sharing of sexually explicit material online without that person's consent. For example, think of a guy who decides to publicly post nude photos of his ex girlfriend as a way to get back at her

for breaking up with him. So Erica spends a lot of time thinking about what's probably some of the worst possible invasions of privacy that could ever happen to a person. If digital privacy invasion is on a scale my experiences on one end and the kind of victims she represents, or on the other. I told her about what happened

to me on Subway Creatures. What was interesting to me about your story was that you did follow the feed, and I wonder if you could explain why you followed the fee to start and if that changed at all once you yourself were featured on it. I had been turned onto the feed just by a friend and as something to kind of follow as a laugh, and I had turned my sister onto it, and then after this

happened to me, I immediately stopped following it. And you know, if my sister was saying to me afterwards, she was giving me a hard time. She's saying the watcher doesn't like to be watched. She put you on the spot. She did, but she was right, And I wish that everyone could have that experience without necessarily being the person watched, right, because we all change our behavior when we think that

could be me. Then we suddenly shut it down and we feel differently about the idea of following this feed. So maybe if more people got caught doing mildly embarrassing things on so weakre jers, they think twice before consuming this kind of content. So Monica Lewinsky has this really great TED talk on the price of shame, and my favorite line from this is that the invasions of others as a raw material, raw material efficiently and ruthlessly mind

packaged and sold at a profit. A marketplace has emerged where public humiliation is a commodity and shame is an industry. How is the money made? Clicks? The more shame, the more clicks, the more clicks, the more advertising dollars. All of these platforms and websites. What they're fighting over is our attention. And if we collectively stopped going to those websites, then it would dry up the supply for them, and they wouldn't be able to use our attention as their

commodity that they make money off of. And so I think that, like when we talk about resistance, like how do we resist this definition of the moment we step out of the house, everything is fair game. We start by averting our eyes, We start by being the ones to not go to those websites. It's worth noting that Rick isn't currently making any money from subway creatures. He's thought about it before and even had some brands approach him,

like Adam and Eve, who sells sex toys. But Rick says he's really anti advertising, and so he's still thinking of ways he could present a message to his followers they wouldn't feel like he's pushing ads at them. So adding some powerful words from the lawyer Erica there and some personal lessons for you, Yes, lesson number one, don't look weird on the subway noted and number two I just it gave me some new empathy for people who

you see stuff posted about on the Internet. There's other accounts in addition to Rick where you see stuff posted from people unsuspectingly, and it gave me a new appreciation of just how creepy that is, you know, did your sister stop following subway creatures on Instagram? She did not. She still follows it. But she'd tell me something interesting, which is that people are now posting more pictures on

there with emojis over people's faces. So adding a touch of privacy to those people who are also being a bit ridiculed and just saying so like a proactive measure there, Yes, just a little pat on the back as he send you into the humiliation world, you know, thinking about this. Clearly, Kevin's systrum didn't create Instagram so that strangers would laugh

at you, add I'm furiously texting on your phone. No, but that's the sort of bigger point here, is that these platforms have gotten so big that they take on a life of their own. And what can the companies do to rein that in or if they should even try. Yeah, it becomes a free for all. Right, it must mean you have to create at least some rules. Yeah, But like the digital privacy expert al from Stanford said, we

have two questions. Answer is that the job of the social network to be policing what we post and see online. And also if it really did happen and other people really did see it. In today's digital world, do we really have the right to expect that that material will stay private? In my case, I got kind of lucky because Rick deleted it really fast and now it's gone from the Internet. But for a lot of people it's not. So we can't look to the platforms to police uh

these sorts of things. Well, the question is whether anybody should right. I think the the image that's taken in a public place maybe embarrassing, but as it false, it is a footnote in history, if you will, so it's not like it is a fabrication. And that's it for this week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. Do you have a story like this where you were affected, Send us an email at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net, or you can reach out to us on Twitter. I'm at

Satriano and I'm at aki Eto seven. If you haven't already, please subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts, and why you're there. I really do hope you take a minute to leave us a rating and a review. This does so much to get us in front of more listeners. And check out our email newsletter fully Charged, where we recreated the video of me on the subway. This episode was produced by Pia Getkari, Liz Smith, and Magnus Hendrickson. We'll see you next week.