You're list Saints KFI AM six forty. The Bill Handles show on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
Our tech reporter is joining us, Mike. It's a pleasure talking to you again. It's been a while since you and I have connected, and I'm so glad that we get to because of this Tech Tuesday, and I got to find out what's going on with my Instagram. It looks like we've got a lot of well trash littering my insta feed.
Yeah.
So Meta is rolling out a new approach to content moderation, and that might be kind of what you're seeing in your feed, though at this point, Meta says that a lot of this stuff is still in testing that you're not actually going to see it if you're just kind of a run of the mill Instagram or Facebook or threads user. So what are we talking about here. We're talking about specifically Community Notes. This is their name for
their new approach to content moderation. This is something that was first previewed back in January when Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, announced that they're moving away from fact checkers. Community Notes is kind of the thing that's designed to take the place of those fact checkers. This is a community based system, a bunch of volunteers from Facebook and Instagram and threads. Users of those platforms are gathering together to basically write notes that will appear next to certain
pieces of content on those platforms. And that content, you know, is thought to be sort of misleading or controversial or harmful in some way, and these notes are designed to add a little bit more context to those posts. So you can imagine election misinformation, misinformation related to public health, that type of thing. That's the content that we're talking
about here. And they say that they're rolling this out and testing starting today, but again they want to get it right, they say, so it's probably not going to start appearing in your feed at least for the next few weeks or so.
Mike, I've seen this on x before. Twitter, they've got something similar, like the community votes. How do they decide? Because if there's something that is blatantly wrong, for instance, say you've got a flat earther that posts something and then people are going to say obviously that's wrong, They're going to issue a community notes.
Deal.
There must be tens of thousands of people that are trying to put a community note on somebody's post. How do they pick which one they're going to go with? Is it the one that's the most popular, does it get up votes of some sort? How do they know which community note rides with that post.
It's a great question, and it's part of the system that they're figuring out right now, part of the reason that you're probably not going to see a community note in the next week or two as they figure this out. So you're right to mention X there they are, of course, formerly Twitter, they have used a community notes system for the past few years, and Meta is actually borrowing an algorithm from them, an open source algorithm that X is
made available to other social media platforms. This algorithm gets at exactly what you were describing there. How do we evaluate the validity of a note, the helpfulness of a note? This algorithm is designed to do that. Because metas drawn from a wait list about two hundred thousand volunteers. There's a lot of people, a lot of different opinions, a lot of different perspectives, and they kind of have to coalesce behind one common note to add to any given post.
That's kind of complicated. So Meta says they want these volunteers to come from a range of backgrounds. They want people who you know, disagree normally to agree on the content of a note, and all of that is going to be decided by this algorithm. So there's still a little bit of technology at play. It's not a purely you know, like human system at the end of the day, but ultimately these notes are going to be written by humans.
The algorithm will just dictate kind of the people who are able to contribute to.
Each specific note.
So that's their idea that they're using this algorithm to kind of draw from a range of different ideas and perspectives. It's all part of this broader effort from CEO Mark Zuckerberg to make things a little bit less moderated on their platforms. He says they're stepping away not just from fact checking, but from moderating content in general, handing it a little bit more over to the communities on those platforms. He says this is all part of an effort to
cut down on bias. He says this is a better way to address bias on these platforms. He says the old fact checking system made too many mistakes and overly censored these platforms, and this is a better way to do it.
I'm interested in this, Mike, because the philosophy geek in me says, doesn't this doesn't this invite by doesn't this invite group bias?
In Uh, it doesn't.
It isn't necessarily more accurate as much as it's it's more of a democratic system where whatever the popular opinion is will be considered the community.
Note, I suppose.
But is that less is it less biased or are we just playcating a different bias.
Yeah, it is popularity correct necessarily, and that's the sort of that's a very philosophical question at the end of the day. That is a problem with the community note system. This is something that you've seen crop up on X before, which is that these are kind of easy to game, these community notes. You can imagine people who are volunteers here. They can kind of get together and make sort of a jokey note or a note that might not be totally correct, but you know it agrees with their politics
or their viewpoint or whatever it happens to be. That is a potential way to gain this system.
That's something that Meta is going to need to figure out.
In addition to that, there's also just a logistical problem here, right, Things so viral very quickly on these platforms. Billions of people use metas products, and many of them get their news from these platforms. That means that the length of time it takes for a note to go from being thought of to something that you can actually see in your feed, it's going to be really important if something goes viral and is seen by a lot of people
before a note shows up. As people are as the volunteers are trying to figure out specific wording or whether a note is helpful or not, you know, the damage might have already been done by the time that note shows up, and that's another thing that they're going to need to address as they continue to roll this out over the.
Next few weeks or so.
For what it's worth, these notes aren't going to impact the relative virality of any given post and the old way of doing things in the fact checking system, you know, a subject matter expert, a lawyer or political scientist, a doctor, what have you would go in and say, yes, this is definitively a piece of misinformation that could do harm. Right,
this is misinformation about the pandemic, for instance. Then Meta would go in and down rank that piece of content, they would allow it to not show up in as many people's feeds in order to cut down on the potential harm for it to do. Mark Sarthborg says they overdid that, right, They over cranked that lever, and they ended up with a biased system. These notes will not impact the virality of any given post. Just because a post has a note on it doesn't mean that it
won't go viral. That you might still see it. You'll just see it with a note next to it.
Again, more popular means more eyeballs on it, and spreading the misinformation is allowed, especially if you get more people in their community and notes that spread their own biases. Interesting, like, it's very it's very interesting. Mike Debusky is our ABC News technology reporter. Mike, stick around for just a second. I want to talk about I'm seeing some stuff about Apple and people are mad at Apple for over promising
and under delivering. I want to talk about that, and if you don't mind, I'll slide in some of the astronaut news here when we come back as well. We'll continue with Tech Tuesday.
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty.
Joining me is Mike Debuski, our ABC News Technology reporter.
It is Tech Tuesday. Mike.
I'm very excited. I wanted to just share this audio briefly. This is the This was the sound as our an astronauts made their way away from the space station. All hooks are open, open hookers and on doc and confirmed.
Freedom is free of its moorings. Freedom is free. Sonny Williams and Butch Wilmore began a lot there.
It is on their way home from ABC. Uh So, Mike, that's exciting. It's been months or something since they.
Were up there.
That's yes, I believe I'm writing saying that there. It's the longest uh time that anyone has spent up there, or at least a much longer than they planned.
Certainly they planned right, a little shy of the record. I think the record is just over a year. But yeah, they were supposed topt there for what a week?
And then yeah, that's these I understand it. It was kind of just a routine mission and then you know, one thing led to another and.
Here we are.
As a matter of fact, we spoke here at ABC and Radio Department to one of the astronauts who was supposed to be on that mission who ended up being cut from it originally to go up and relieve those astronauts who are up there, and that was in sort of June of last year.
So, you know, good ed its decites that they've been.
Up there for a long time, but it's good to know that they're coming home.
Yeah, Mike, I know that there was a bit of controversy. I'm not going to put you on the spot on this. I'm just going to wax here not so poetically for a moment. There was a bit of controversy around that, especially when we had a president that came out and said Biden left them up there, just totally abandoned them, ditched them in space there, left them up there.
Not exactly the case.
There's always a contingency plan if something goes awry, there are supplies that are sent.
And there was another.
Mission that was planned to bring other astronauts back home that had already been up there. So then the decision had to be made, did we bring the other astronauts back on schedule, or do we bring these astronauts back and then leave those other ones up there that have been up there already for a long period of time. They decided, let's stay on schedule, We'll create another mission to go get Butcher and Sonny. So that's what they
That's what they ended up doing. So it's part of the reason that they were up there that long, is it. That was the decision that was made. It wasn't anybody about He's on the bus.
At the end of the day, it seems like.
In the spacecraft, that's exactly right.
Maybe what we need to come up with this is an extra long space craft, like like we have the Suburban Excels or something.
Right exactly.
Yeah, So I'm seeing a lot of stories that pop up on my homepage.
You talk about Apple.
Kind of losing track of the narrative here when it comes to their Apple Intelligence. And I got an iPhone sixteen. It is my first new phone in six years or so, so I held off. This is supposed to have Apple Intelligence, This is supposed to be the hot new thing, and there seemed to be a lot of delays in rolling this out, at least the full version of it.
Yeah, that is absolutely the case, and it's expected to be the major topic of discussion at a pretty high profile meeting of Apple executives this week. This is their top one hundred meeting, Their top one hundred executives at the company meet at an off site location. We don't really know where, but.
It's expected to be very.
Fancy and presumably very minimalist and glamorous in the Apple fashion. And this is a tradition at Apple that has stretched back to the Steve Jobs era, and it's generally meant to get all the sort of leading lights at the company together so they can discuss the future of Apple, this hugely prominent and hugely valuable company. Big topic of discussion is expected to be Apple Intelligence and their continued
struggles with that technology. As a refresher, Apple Intelligence was first introduced last year at their WWDC Developer conference in the springtime. They promised a lot with regards to that technology, that these new AI features were going to reshape how we interact with our phones and our tablets and our laptops. Well, almost a year later, a lot of those features have not yet come to fruition, and that is raising some
major eyebrows at Apple. Bloomberg was the first to report that kind of the big headline feature of Apple Intelligence, which was this AI infused version of theory, This big revamp of their Voice assistant, which had kind of fallen behind competitors in the space. That is delayed, and Apple actually confirmed last week that AI theory does not have a firm release date. They just say it will be out sometime within the next year. That was all over
the marketing for a lot of Apple intelligence features. This sort of reason to upgrade your phone or upgrade your device was to get access to this thing that now we don't know when it's going to come out. This really appears to underline this tension between Apple, their AI team, specifically the people who are building the technology, and the marketing department. Right the technology is still imperfect. We talk about this all the time with generative AI. It makes
things up, makes mistakes, it hallucinates. That's not something that Apple once associated with its three trillion dollar brand, and I think that's why you're seeing the slow rollout of this technology. Clearly the marketing department didn't really get that memo, because that was a big part of the argument for upgrading to the iPhone sixteen, which, as you outlined at the beginning here, still doesn't have a lot of these key features.
Yeah, it seems like Apple is one of these companies that is a little bit.
So they allow for Samsung for the Android phones, for the Google phones, to introduce some other tech, and then Apple comes in later and really tries to offer a more perfect version of that tech. We've seen this play out in the past, but it seems with this AI they are they're over promising and under delivering in all regards. What are they going to provide that could potentially be anything better than we're seeing from what is a Gemini?
What is the The Google is Gemini and Samsung is Galaxy AI. Yeah, and you're absolutely right that Apple is rarely the first to the party, or at least modern tim cook. Apple is rarely the first, you know, in a given market segment. They like to sit back, They like to watch everyone else try something, fail, maybe learn from those mistakes, and then they arrive kind of late to the party, but with a really polished product. That seemed to be the approach they were taking with Apple Intelligence.
Google and Samsung both beat them to market with quote unquote AI phones. However, there's the larger context here, which is that the impetus is on Apple to innovate. Right, the iPhone has not changed in several years. Neither has the Google Pixel, neither has the Samsung Galaxy S series phones. Right, they are updated every year, but not in a radical way.
You mentioned at the off that you haven't updated your phone in six years, and I think a large part of that is because these phones don't really change radically from year to year. Maybe every couple of years there is a big upgrade, but you know, beyond that, it's tough to get people excited about the smartphone market, in large part because these phones are pretty good at what they're intending to do. They all connect to the internet,
make phone calls, good cameras and so on. So AI kind of came along as this potential game changer, right, is this thing to get people excited about the market again, get people to upgrade their phones. But as we've been saying, the technology is still imperfect. It's still not quite there yet. And I think that's also the pitfall that you're seeing
Apple fall into. They wanted this to be the thing that got people excited about upgrading their phones every year, but it just doesn't quite measure up to their standards of very polished technology.
Mike Debuski, our ABC News technology reporter, on a Tech Tuesday. Mike, great catching up with you man, Really appreciate I always let's talk with you.
Yeah, happy to do it. Take care, Verry good.
Mike Debusky, ABC News pleasure. Can't wait until the next time we get a chance to talk with Mike. Is it possible that all the can conspiracy theorist were right?
And if we don't have.
Evidence that they were right, does that mean that the conspiracy runs deeper than we ever thought it did.
We'll find out because we could be getting the truth, the whole truth, and not all the truth. What next?
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty.
Last time when he said it, he meant it, but then they redacted a bunch of stuff. Very very bad, very bad people redacting a lot of things. He now says, there's a lot in here. I haven't read them all, but they're very interesting. I haven't read it, but it's very interesting. This is sort of like me giving a book report on Little Women. I know it's a classic, never read it, probably not going to tell you how interesting it is.
Very interesting, very good read.
The President said there's about eighty thousand pages that are going to be released that's.
A very very lot of pages.
Most people have never even heard of that many pages. It's like a very big book. It's bigger than a dictionary. Nobody's ever seen anything like that before. It's like it's like all the Harry Potter books. Is even bigger than Harry Potter. It's like Encyclopedia Britannica. I had the Encyclopedia Britannica.
I had all the volumes except for Q. It was very small.
Nobody needed Q. There's nothing in the Q volume at all. It's the worst of all the volumes. But you're gonna love this. Gonna be unredacted. There's gonna be no redactions, very few redactions, probably no reactions. I was thinking about redacting, but I'm not redacting. Haven't read it, but it's unreducted. That's what we can expect, according to uh, the President. I guess, So what are we going to learn? Are we going to figure out that there were actually other
gunmen on the Grassy Knoll? Are we gonna find out that CBE was behind it the whole time, that this was all part of Castro's plan? Are we going to find out that the CIA was in on it? That's a good question. So I turned to News Nation, who was talking about the potential for JFK conspiracies coming to light.
Joining me, now, I have Phil sheenan investigative journalist and author of a cruel and shocking act, The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination. Phil, good morning to you, I mean, as some of those who has dedicated his career to Kennedy's assassination. Your hopes and expectations for today, sir, I look good.
We really have no idea.
This seems to have caught everybody by surprise yesterday.
The guy who is the one of the leading experts has no idea what to expect.
That's great. This could be a total surprise, could be a total dud.
Eighty thousand documents. I really don't even know what that refers to. We've previously been told that about thirty four hundred documents were held back. Now these may be documents related not to JFK, to his brother RFK, or to Martin Luther King. But there's a great mystery about what this is and when it will be released.
Yeah, and it was also fascinating.
Yeah, but he said the Kennedy files, So are they just rolling it all into like all Kennedy's. We got to find out that Joe Kennedy had the business dealings overseas too, or this is not about JFK? Is this about all Kennedy's.
Yesterday when we heard the President say he's going to leave these eighty thousand pages unredacted.
Actually the headline from the New York Times is Trump promises again to release all Kennedy assassination files. Maybe they do mean more than just JFK. Yeah, more than one Kennedy assassinated.
Ask them to be untouched. Do you think we walk away with anything new and earth shattering?
You know, I doubt it in the sense that you know these We've had these releases periodically since President Trump's first term, and most of them have turned out to be pretty unrevealing. You know, there's certain names and addresses we hadn't seen before. I don't think anything in these documents will substantially change the history of the assassination. I don't think they'll point to a second gunman in Dallas, for example.
Oh that's what we're all hoping for.
Although if the official documents don't point out a second gunman, that must mean that there are unofficial documents hiding somewhere that we're not being privy too.
What is the government hiding?
But there have always been these reports that Oswald told people what he was going to do before the assassination, and those people might have helped him or encouraged him, And in that case, you might be talking about a conspiracy, a conspiracy that really has never been revealed.
Yeah, you bring up the fact that.
Wait a minute, what was the conspiracy That he told other people that he was going to do it, and.
Those people might have helped him or encouraged him, and in that case, you might be talking about a conspiracy, a conspiracy that really has never been revealed.
Oh, okay, so he acted alone, but that other people were like, good idea, Lee.
I guess you bring up the fact that for years he's been kept private because of identities being kept confidential. Has that been the crux of why this has all been secret for so long? Just people's identities who worked on this case.
I mean a lot of these documents do identify law enforcement informants or secret sources for the CIA, people whose identities should have been protected forty years ago. If those people are still alive, they'd be very old right now, and it's not quite clear why they would need to
be protected. And I think a lot of the reason for withholding all these documents over the years has been the fact that both the CIA and the FBI had Lee Harvey Oswald under surveillance, pretty aggressive surveillance in the weeks before the assassination and after the assassination. They didn't want to admit that. They didn't want to admit that they knew a lot about this man. A lot of these documents refer to this surveillance that's never been fully explained.
Yeah, of course, so they're surveilling the guy and then the guy goes and kills the president. They don't want that revealed because the people are going to go, wait a minute, they were watching this guy, how could this happen under your nose? And it would have been an egg on their face. So they didn't want that to happen. Obviously, Jay Edgar Hoover had a lot of control over information that was released at the time, and he didn't want that. He didn't want that embarrassment either.
If the files were to reveal major new evidence of a cover up, which I'm assuming I mean you and I both know what happens when you assume, but I'm.
Assuming I know what happens you make an ass of you and me.
If that were the case, these wouldn't be revealed today. But what would that mean for public trust in the government moving forward?
Nothing?
Well, you know, any effort at transparency is welcome, even though it's kind of fifty years late. And you know, the Kennedy assassination really was the mother load of conspiracy theories. It's what sort of gave us this era of conspiracy theories.
Ooh, he's kind of right.
The Vietnam War, Watergate, it ran contra everything that followed.
Yeah, but then the Pentagon papers came out and it proved a lot of those conspiracy theories were true, so that was a bummer. And then the Watergate proved that a lot of conspiracy theories about what was going on behind the scenes were true.
So yeah.
The trouble with these conspiracy theories is that in the sixties and seventies, a lot of them panned out, So that gave curt blanche to everyone to use their imagination of whatever could be the wildest of conspiracy theories.
People believed.
After the Kennedy assassination.
The government wouldn't even tell them the truth about how their president had died, and that suspicion I think has sort of metastasized into the world we live in today.
Yeah, totally true.
So are we going to get any information that changes anything we know about the Kennedy assassination?
No, we're not. You're not going to get anything.
Eighty thousand pages unredacted, and what we're going to learn is like what hotel room he stayed in when he was visiting his mother, something like that.
I mean, that'll be it. That's it. That's what you're gonna get.
Eighty thousand pages of just what TV shows he watched when he was falling asleep. That'll be it. I hope I'm wrong because I would love for there to be blockbuster news, but there won't be, and the conspiracy theories will continue to flourish simply because there isn't validating information. It's the beauty of a conspiracy theory, for every day that you don't validate the conspiracy theory, it grows stronger than it must be true, and that the conspiracy runs deep.
There's a good chance.
If you look around your house you take a look at those family photos, and there is one. There is one in that photo you love more than all the others. It's not the middle child either, as much as they want to brag about it, it's not. You'll find out who we're loving the most in the family photos.
Next, you're listening to Bill Handle on demand from kf I AM six forty.
If you're visiting a friend and you you walk in and they've got that picture up in the living room and it's the whole family. They're so excited. You've got dad who's standing tall. You've got mom who's on a stool, and Dad's arm is on her shoulder. She's got one hand on her on her own knee, and then another hand around one of the children, and the other child just sitting to the other side of that ratty kid.
So many ratty kids, all piled up. And then below them is the is the family dog, just happy as could be to be in the family photo.
And you look, you look, you look at this, and you think, what what a lovely family. Right?
Would you assume that the parents in that photo have a favorite family member? They all look so happy together. The answer is yes. First, they have a favorite one, and it's the dog. Pet Owners are spending over four grand every year on their pets. Gen z Is lead the way. They spend over six thousand dollars on their pets.
Millennials at five thousand. Boomers not pets are accessories. They spend less than twenty five hundred dollars a year on their pets, and that probably includes medical spending as well. Pet Owners are willing to make significant sacrifices for their pets. Sixty three percent say they give up years of their own lives to stend their own kids. What else would you give up to extend your pet's life? Would you forego alcohol for a year? Two thirds say yeah? Would
you get off social media? Two thirds say yeah. Half of people would give up three years of vacations, half would give up ten thousand dollars, and about two out of every five would pass up a job promotion if it meant prolonging their own pets life.
And this is turning.
These stats are turning into a business decision. Pet Co says their plan is to win back customers that were lost after the pandemic by letting them know that their fur babies are indeed their own a pet parent. Where this turns into troubles. I have a friend of mine I lose. I use that term loosely. So this friend of mine goes to one of these restaurants. It's offering free meals for Father's Day. My friend doesn't have kids, he's not married, he's not even dating anyone.
He doesn't, he doesn't have any kids.
But he goes into the restaurant and he's wearing a shirt that says cat Daddy on it. And he sits down and then he says, I'm here for the free meal. They gave it to him. They gave it to him. Hoffman, Is that a ya or an a free meal on Father's Day for pet owners?
That doesn't make any sense to me.
I love I love my dog, but I wouldn't consider myself my dog's father. Nope, No, because I saw his mother and I'm not his mother was a bitch.
You guys, hey, as a lady, I would like to defend my brethren. Where I almost said something totally cross, let's just let's just say restraint has been shown early.
We're off the rails.
I think that's more of a people who don't have kids things.
But even I don't know.
I don't know.
No, that's not true.
I know people who call their their pets their babies when they've had kids.
So much lower maintenance. So I don't know.
It all seems way too much for me.
I've raised three kids and four dogs. They'll think the dogs any day of the week.
How old are your kids?
Thirty twenty? What seven? You like? Thirty? Yeah?
No, I married old lady with three used kids. So oh, you know, all broken in a little.
Bit, broken in a little I'm going to walk away. Smart move Gary and Shannon up next. I'm looking forward to the show. Guys. Thanks off on the right foot.
Love it you've been listening to the Bill Handle Show. Catch my Show Monday through Friday six am to nine am, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.