There Are No Girls on the Internet. As a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative, I'm brigitat and this is there are No Girls on the Internet. I'm here as my producer, Mike. Mike, how you doing today?
Doing pretty good? There's a lot of smoke in the air, but other than that of do pretty good.
Well, let's see if you can clear out some of that smoke with news stories that you may have missed this week on the internet. So we have to start with talking about the Supreme Court. By now, you've probably seen that the Supreme Court ruled on affirmative action, ruling that race can no longer play a part in college admissions. Notably, the decision just applies to race. It does not applied to things like gender or legacy status or donor status
being considered in college admissions. So I thought, what better time than now to revisit some of the myths about affirmative action and break down some of the online chatter that I'm seeing and have seen about the issue. So first, I think it's really easy to think that affirmative action has only helped black folks like me, but that is not the case. In fact, that is actually not even
a little bit true. According to the United States Labor Department, the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action are white women, and because the Supreme Court ruling only applies to race and not gender, that means that white women will continue to benefit. What's weird is that, despite being the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action, white women are also more likely to be
against affirmative action. This is according to a twenty fourteen Cooperative Congressional Election study that found that nearly seventy percent of the twenty thousand, six hundred and ninety four self identified non Hispanic white women surveyed either somewhat or strongly opposed affirmative action. So I've already seen a lot of people online saying that the reason why this happened and the reason why affirmative action was struck down was because
Asian American people were big mad about not getting into Harvard. Now, I get how it's easy to think that, but it's not exactly true. I would actually argue that Asian American people were being exploited by one person who pretended to actually care about them and their interests in order to better serve his own agenda right like tail as old as time, and it's also worth pointing out that it's just messed up. I think to blame this on Asian
Americans as a group. In fact, Asian Americans are actually more likely to be supportive of affirmative action. According to NBC polling found that a higher share of Asian Americans support affirmative action, with fifty three percent who have heard of the policy saying that it's a good thing. Another
nineteen percent say it's a negative thing. A different twenty twenty two survey, which polled registered Asian American voters, found that sixty nine percent of them favored affirmative action programs designed to help black people, women, and other minorities get better access to higher education. So branding Asian Americans as against affirmative action just is not correct. You know, we've already living through a time where there is so much anti Asian hate going on, and we need to be
Chris's so clear about this. This ruling is a symptom of white supremacy full stop, and that means that it is a victory for the same white supremacist who are fueling that current wave of anti Asian hate. So When people try to blame this ruling on Asian Americans, they are falling into the trap of white supremacy that pits marginalized groups against each other in service of white supremacy. So how did we get here, Well, it all started
with conservative litigant Edward Blum. I say litigant because that's what he is, right, Like, if you go to his Wikipedia entry, that's how it describes him. He is a professional lawsuit bringer. He connects potential plaintiffs with attorneys who are willing to represent them in test cases, which he then tries to use to set and establish legal presidents.
He's the founder and also the only member of the Project on Fair Representation, which he founded in two thousand and five, which focuses on voting, education, contracting, employment, racial quotas, and racial reparations. So you can kind of think of him as like a professional like he isn't even a lawyer. He's just wealthy and well connected. He is actually responsible for the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. This is
from the Guardian. Shelby County versus Holder, a case that he sponsored in twenty thirteen led to the Supreme Court to overturn a key provision of the nineteen sixty five
Voting Rights Act. Now, Blum told The Guardian that he was worried from the fallout of that ruling, even though, like it's not clear what he thought was going to happen, But that ruling spurred conservative legislators in Texas, North Carolina and other states to revive laws that the Justice Department had previously blocked or were expected to block on the grounds that there were vehicles for voter suppression. So, basically, Blum has been trying to come for affirmative action since
twenty thirteen. Y'all might remember that back then he was working with Abigail Fisher, who was this white woman with red hair like. If you don't remember her name, you probably remember this image of her standing on the Supreme Court steps with Blum. She had this like red hair like. You might remember that image in your mind. So who is Abbagio Fresh? Well, Abigail Fisher did not get into
the University of Texas because her GPA was mid. Basically, she sued the University of Texas at Austin in two thousand and eight after it denied her admission. Interestingly, she sued them when she was thirty so like several years after this denial took place, her GPA was three five nine as a senior, which put her just below the cutoff of the state law requiring University of Texas to accept students that graduate in the top ten percent of her class. So she was not in the top ten
percent of her class. She was under the top ten percent of her class, although she argued that her extra curriculum activities, combined with her academic record, would have qualified her if UT had not used race as a factor in its holistic approach to selecting the remainder of its twenty eighteen freshman class, in what she said was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendments Equal Protection Clause. Now, it didn't work with Abigail, And if folks remember, she actually
kind of was treated like a little bit of a joke. Mike, do you remember this at all?
Well, I have to admit I don't, But like hearing you describe it, it's pretty wild that she feels like race and all of the historical baggage that comes with that should not be considered for college admission, and yet you know her extra curricular activities should and that they somehow counted up to make up for her totally middling gpa, and somehow she wants like the law to come in on this side. I don't know, it's I actually don't remember this story. I kind of wish I did, but it sounds wild.
Yeah, she was, I have to say, like roundly mocked. I think because her gpa, Like it's a fine gpa three five nine, it's like nothing to sneeze at, but it's not an it's fine, I have an automatic acceptance to the school of your choice, Like you would still have to work and be well rounded and all of
that to be accepted with a GPA like that. I think the reason why she was sort of treated as a joke is because she was just not a very sympathetic character, right, Like, she had a pretty good, not great GPA, and I think that she came off as somebody who was entitled, Like, you know, I believe that I'm good enough to get into this college, Like I can't imagine that it was me that my GPA and my extracurriculars weren't as good as I thought they were in my mind, I have been wrong because I did
not get into.
Ut Yeah, I think entitled sounds about right based on this story.
So Blum, when the Abigail thing didn't work, Blum stepped back and regrouped, and he came back and decided to make the face of the victims in scare quotes of affirmative action Asian Americans. So this is why I say it's not accurate to say that Asian Americans were angry about not having gotten into their colleges of choice, and that that is why affirmative action has been rolled back.
It is because this guy made a deliberate, specific choice to make Asian American students the faith of the quote victims of affirmative action. So Blum and his group brought two cases that led to this decision, one on behalf of Asian American students who claim that Harvard's admission policies discriminated against them, and another for white and Asian students
denied admission by the University of North Carolina. So why I bring this up is because it is a great example of how effective it is to pit marginalized groups against one another in service of white supremacy. Because I believe that these Asian American students probably thought that Blum had their interests, you know, at heart, and were doing this for like genuinely doing this to serve their interests, and they might have like genuinely had questions about the
policies at these universities or whatever. However, this ruling I don't think is act going to help these Asian American students because it basically, I think is going to help white people. If legacies and donors and people who are well connected and white women are still allowed to get whatever leg up that university admissions policies have been giving them, I don't see how that will actually end up helping
these Asian American students. And so I think that these students have been misled by Blum and the in fact, are having their interests exploited by somebody in service of their larger agenda to roll back progress in this country, which they have done time and time again. Like has made no mistake about that being what they want to do.
Yeah, it seems pretty transparent that is what he's after here.
Yeah. And you know, just something else that I find interesting about these conversations around affirmative action is just how many people in the United States think that black people one get automatic entrants to whatever college we want, and two get to go to college for free. I've had people tell me that's to my face. It is a This might sound shocking or surprising, it is a commonly held miss piece of misinformation that people actually genuinely believe.
And again, it really goes to show you how insidious but also nonsensical racialized misinformation is because it doesn't even really have to make sense if it feels true and speaks to people's worst imaginings of marginalized people. Because think about it, if black people can get into any college we want automatic acceptance and also attend college for free
takes spots from white students. And then another piece of like commonly held misinformation that it is mostly black people who are like living off welfare or living off of the system more than other groups. How do those two things make sense together? Right? Like, how is it that like black people can go to any college they want for free, but also are the largest recipes and some things like welfare and social programs. It doesn't make any sense.
No, it totally doesn't make sense.
And I think, like, I don't know, it's just a it's just a tough time. I think when we think about like where our country is. I can't help but mention that we're talking about this almost a year to the day after the role after Supreme the Supreme Court rolled back row you know, book bands left and right. Like, it does feel like we're in this place where the very fabric of our country is being eroded and it
is difficult to know what to do. Like and people who say, like, oh, you got to go out and vote. The thing that gets me about that that narrative of the like voting narrative, And obviously voting is pretty important, but I think it was, like what the majority of the justices who helped usher this decision in, we're a point, we're put there by presidents who lost the popular vote. So I don't think we can vote our way out
of That's like, that's not really how it works. And so people being like, oh, the importance of voting, it doesn't really seem like a good answer to the kind of cosmic problem it feels like we're facing right now.
Yeah, I get that, Like voting is totally necessary and it's completely insufficient. Yeah, I mean I could go on about Supreme Court reform, which is also necessary and also insufficient, right,
like this is a cultural thing. You were just talking about those irreconcilable, nonsensical beliefs that people have about affirmative action and the like, Yeah, the ways in which black people are like super privileged in our American society and like get all this free stuff given to them, and how like white people are excluded from this and that, and it's obviously so bananas, right, Like that's just like it's obviously not true.
I mean, I got my free car from the government. I got I got my college was paid for. I could go to Edny College that I wanted to for free, and yet I still decided to attend a shitty state school in North Carolina. Weird. I know when I could, when I could, when I could have gone to Harvard, I could just I don't have to apply. I can just show up and be like, I'm here Harvard. I just get to go for free. You know, we got all this free stuff. You know how it goes. I
guess you don't cause you're white. You don't get it.
No, I don't get it. I'm shut out. I'm you know, I'm completely shut out from all these things.
I Mean, everybody knows that. For too long it has been the black woman who has had her boot on the throat of white men like you, Mike.
This shit is so sad though, because like affirmative action was so positive, right, Like it made colleges more diverse. And it's interesting because it is a population level intervention that is designed to address population harms that are have been done to black people over generations due to a legacy of slavery and then Jim Crow and whatever term historians want to give to this era we're currently living through.
There are like deep systemic forces keeping black people down, and affirmative action in college admissions is one way to
address those population level harms. And also it is like a population level remedy to not just like provide justice for those past harms, but also like fix the future by making our society more equal and providing more paths to opportunities so that the people who graduate from college and go on to have more influence in society and government and business and our communities are a more diverse set of people, which just makes us all better, healthier, more resilient.
Well, I think that's the point. I think that the reason why people like Lum and the people who support this rolling back. They don't want a world where people who look like me have a chance to beat, to even have a I wouldn't even say equal footing to be in those positions. And I also think like they for so long have been drumming up this fear about sending your kids to college. Your colleges are going to
be hotbeds of like woke indoctrination or whatever. I think that for them, rolling back affirmative action is another way to be like, Oh, I can safely send my kids to school. There's going to be less marginalized people there. They will be less likely to be influenced by those people. What they're actually doing is preventing their children from being around different people, people who have different backgrounds, different perspectives.
That is what college is all about. And so it's so funny how these are the same people who have been able to call, you know, other people like, oh, you're snowflakes. You're so afraid of what happens at college campuses. You're not letting speakers come, blah blah blah, all of that, When it's really them, they're the ones who are afraid, are afraid. They're the ones who don't want their you know, daughters to have to go to school with people who
are different. And I think that's really what it comes down to. That's why these people are championing this. I think it's exactly what you said, that they that they that they want. It feels like payback for what little progress black and brown people have made in this country, and it is a way to kind of, hopefully from their perspective, make it so that when their kids go to college, they are not having to come home on weekends and be like, Dad, are you a racist? Dad?
Are you like, do you have like shitty attitudes about people of color?
Yeah? And I think it's important to also, you know, to not think about this in a vacuum, but to consider it in the context of what other changes and
policy debates are happening around higher education. I suspect a lot of the people who are cheering this ruling are the same people who are demanding, you know, budget cuts to universities, demanding that curriculum be stripped of any sort of discussion of you know, race or gender identity, and also probably the same people who are you know, insisting that what little resources are left over for higher education all get funneled into you know stem or you know
engineering or technical skills, which are like great fields. I love science, I love technology, I love engineers, I love math. These are great things and people should definitely pursue them, but they are not sufficient for a well rounded education. They don't They alone do not train people how to be good citizens who contribute to a good society on
their own. And I think the people who are advocating for that really view college as just like a certificate program that makes people eligible for such and such a job.
And in some ways, you know, I think those criticisms are maybe kind of fair, but in the bigger ways, I think they completely miss the mark of what a college education can be to opening up people's minds to this world that we all live in together and this life that each individual student lives on their own, and just you know, shutting people out, making it a more narrow experience in terms of the people that aud and gets to interact with, a more narrow experience in terms
of the ideas and subject matter that they get exposed to. Just yeah, just really is limiting and narrow and sad. Yeah, it's sad and also scary and reinforces a white supremacist worldview of oppression.
Let's say a quick break at our back. So this is not the only thing happening in the courts right now. Let's talk about open ai versus the people. A new class action lawsuit that's been filed against open ai, the company run by Sam Altman that develops chat GPT, which has kind of become like the face of AI. The lawsuit alleges that open ai stole quote massive amounts of
personal data to train chat GPT. The lawsuit claims that open ai has basically been mining the digital footprints of you and me, regular people, whether you use AI tools or not. Open ai crawls the Internet to collect huge amounts of datas to train its programs to learn language, including a lot from social media sites. The lawsuit claims that open ai went far beyond simply scraping the public Internet, and that the data access included quote private information and
private conversation, medical data, including information about children. Essentially every piece of data exchanged on the Internet it could take without notice to the owners or users of such data, much less without anyone's permission end quote. So this amounted to quote the negligent and otherwise illegal theft of personal data of millions of Americans who do not even use Ai tools, The lawsuit claims, so it's about everybody, whether
you use chat GBT or not. The suit also claims that open ai stores and discloses users private information, including the details they enter to create open Ai accounts, their chatlog data, and social media information. And in case you're thinking, well, I've never used chat, GPT or another open ai program, the suit says that it also disclosed the data of people who use sites that were integrated with chat SHEPT. That includes sites like Snapchat, Stripe, Spotify, Microsoft Teams, and slack.
Now.
The lawsuit is calling for open ai to basically pause until this is all dealt with, by issuing a temporary freeze on commercial access to and commercial development of open AI's products until the company has implemented more regulations and safeguards, including allowing people to opt out of data collection and preventing its products from surpassing human intelligence and harming others. The lawsuit also seeks financial compensation for people whose data was access to train bots.
Yeah there's a lot there, and I will admit that I don't know the details behind that, claims in this lawsuit. But the claims of the lawsuit are pretty intense, right, like the idea that they didn't just scrape the open Internet, but they essentially, and I'm paraphrasing here, if I understand correctly, like looked into every nook and cranny of to find any piece of private information that was not locked down, whether it should have been or not, and then use that. And that's that's not cool.
Yeah, the lawsuit makes it sound like it wasn't just a once over. It was like a deep cavity search of these Internet nook and crannies any information that was out there. According to this lawsuit, it took to train their models. And I think this lawsuit makes it pretty clear that AI is developing way more quickly than we
have guardrails for, and clearly we need those guardrails. The people who make AI are in such a rush to skip over that part that now we're already in the like convincing everyone that AI is the future and that we all need to get on board part, But we don't even necessarily know what it is we're getting on board with. How will we be used, how will we be exploited, will we be harmed? Who will make money
off of us. These are all questions that have not really been answered, even by Sam Altman, the head of Chat, GPT and open Ai. He has not answered these questions, and so I do think it just shows that we can't just move so quickly for technology that is so powerful. I don't want to get to the part where I just accept all of this as like the future without answering some of these critical questions about my role in this, even if I'm somebody who's never used an open ai program a day in my life.
Yeah, this is a super interesting story and I'm really interested to see where it goes and how it evolves. I think a pretty interesting thing about it is that it's a class action suit brought on the behalf of a bunch of individuals, but really those individuals represent all of us. And it's completely consistent with a lot of stuff that Sam Altman has said. That they would just take what data they could get right whether they had permission to use it or not, that wasn't their concern.
They just wanted to get the data train these models get as much data as they could, and it's an interesting contrast with some other domains that have been using AI video games. For example, I read a story earlier this week about Valve, the company that owns Steam, and how they had rejected a developer's game because it relied on some AI and he couldn't prove that he owned the rights to the underlying intellectual property that was used
to train the AI. And I think that's related here, because in that story it's business entities who are very prone to suing each other, especially over things like intellectual property. And I think there is this sense the Internet and the data that belongs to you and me, ordinary Internet users who are not engaged in some sort of commercial activity, but just like using the Internet, there's a sense that
that data is just like up for grabs. And this lawsuit, if I understand it, correctly, says that that's not the case. That actually we should have some expectation of privacy, regardless of whether you're trying to build the world's greatest AI tool or anything. And so I think that's an interesting aspect of it too, that I hope gets affirmed.
Yeah, this is I mean, I could talk all day. I find this so fascinating, But there is a precedent online where when we're talking about regular people are information the things that we put online when it can financially benefit somebody else, then there tends to be this idea of like, well, the Internet is just like ideas and data and information out there and who knows who owns one, and like whenever somebody else can benefit. But it's interesting
to me when it's like business entities. Of course they need to protect their intellectual property and their data, and so it's like, you know, I think, taking a step back here, it's easy to create technological innovation when you steal, when you just take things that don't belong to you. Like, that's just what's going on here. When we talked about it in our episode about aiart, when the Lensa selfies were all over social media, half of those quote AI
generated selfies had watermarks on them. They weren't AI generated, they were stolen. They were art that a human artist made and put online, and that Lensas their AI art selfie app just stole. So yeah, it's easy to rush technological innovation when you just take what doesn't belong to you.
And I think that it's time for us as regular people to say, yeah, some stuff belongs to me, My data belongs to me, if you don't have my permission to my you know, private information and my private data that I put online, you can't just scrape bit for profit. Unacceptable And I'm curious to see how this lawsuit shakes out.
Yeah, it's an interesting take you just articulated there. It's like an anti colonialist approach to privacy and protection of intellectual property because you know, it kind of feels like there's parallels, right, like if you can just go and take resources from another people and make them your own, Yeah, that's going to fuel a lot of growth and wealth. And I think that's something that we've seen happen a
lot of times throughout history. People love to take stuff from other people, and you know that's also something that is really facilitated by othering specific groups.
Oh that is a great setup to this whole story with Canva. Okay, so last year the graphic design company Canva, who I actually I actually love Canava. Use it almost every day if you don't use Canva. It is a tool that makes it easy to create kind of plug and play drag and drop graphics. Many folks use it for work because they don't have access to a graphic designer so Canva last year announced its text to image app,
which uses AI to curate and design images. According to their website, they say, with this magic new feature, you can turn your imagination into reality by watching your words transform into stunning one of the kind images. In the announcement, Canvas says that they invested heavily in safety measures that help the millions of people using our platform be a good human and minimize the risk to our platform being
used to produce unsafe content for text to image. This includes automated reviews of input prompts for terms that might generate unsafe imagery and of output images for a range of categories including adult content, hate and abuse. And apparently these unsafe images include hairstyles of black women like me.
That's according to Adriel Parker, a diversity and inclusion professional and the author of the Inclusive Leadership Journal, who posted on LinkedIn that she was playing around with Canvas text to Image app and prompted it to generate a picture of a black woman with bant two knots, which, if you don't know what that is, it's a black natural hairstyle where you kind of like twist your hair up into little, tiny, little buns all over your head. It's a cute style. I can't really pull it off, but
it's a cute style. And when she did this, an error appeared telling me that bantwo may result in unsafe or offensive content. In response to her LinkedIn posts, Canva apologize, saying yes, we fix this in text to image and have raised the elements concerned with that team too. This is from their trust and safety product lead at Canva, who also said thank you for flagging it, Adrielle Parker. These are actually a great pair of examples of the
balancing act that we have. On the one hand, if the safety's over trigger, like in text to image, it can result in perceptions like raise here. On the other if the safeties don't trigger, we can end up showing offensive results like in the elemental search that you've also highlighted. He continued, of course, we do strive for simply not having offensive representations. That is not easy to do at scale, and feedback like yours is crucial to helping us find
things that slip through the gaps. But Parker wasn't having any of it right. Parker said, honestly, doubling down on a message and implying that on an image of black women with natural hairstyles like banto knots is potentially unsafe for inappropriate content for your community, is not it? At the very least craft and more thoughtful and intentional can Responts again, please do better. There are plenty of folks out there like myself who are already and willing to support.
So yeah, I mean I again. I love Canva and I have been a big champion of Canvas Story, which is like very inspiring. Was founded by a woman who got lots of nose for funding until finally getting as to the rest is history. But I do think this kind of goes to show that technology like AI really is not neutral. It's easy to think that AI is like a computer brain. Look a a sci fi movie that is just like spitting out computer stuff that we don't understand. That is not coming from us. That is
not true. It is being trained and programmed by humans. And as humans, we all have biases and baggage, and if you're not careful, those things can just be recreated by that technology. And I would say having those biases be even more entrenched in our society because the technology is so powerful We've talked a bit about this off Mike. You have some like very interesting questions about what's going on here, right, Mike, I do.
I am so curious. My primary question is this, and I would love for somebody from Canva to come on the show and answer it for us.
Oh my god, as a Canva devote hey, I would welcome that.
Yeah. So, like my big question is how did the word band two end up on the disoey right? And Like, I've been thinking about this a lot, and you know, maybe it's naive of me, but I really want to give them the benefit of the doubt here that you know, there was no malice, that Canva was really just trying to like prevent their platform from producing offensive images, and they messed it up, Like they said, they got this
balancing act wrong. It's pretty rare that I'm willing to give tech companies the benefit of the doubt, but I'm willing to do that here, maybe just because for the sake of argument. It makes things more interesting. It's like, how did the word band tu end up on that list? It's it's a name for hashtyle, it's a name for
a people. It is not a slur and it. You know, it really made me think that at the end of the day, you can have like the fanciest, most sophisticated AI platform available, but between the outputs of that platform and the end users, there is a list of words that what are more humans have put together and been like yep, that one's not allowed, that one's not allowed. Like is that how it happened? How did this happen? That's one of my questions, how did this happen? How
did this word get on that list? And then the other question is less direct, but and you know, you and I talked about this a little bit of like where where is the line where trying to police an algorithm so that it never produces anything offensive crosses over into territory where it starts to other people who are just trying to use it and like you said, reinforce those entrenched you know, racism, sexisms, all the isms that we try so hard on this show to fight against.
Where is that line? It's a hard question, it's a.
Good question, and I would say, like, I don't know if this is the answer, and it might sound simplistic, but this is why you need to make sure from the start you have people in the room who are training and designing and building this technology, who look like and can share the background of the people who are going to be using it, because I mean, again, I don't know, but I can imagine someone being like, ooh, bantu, I don't really know if that's an offensive term or not.
We'll just add it to the to the problematic terms list. And that is so deeply marginalizing to just sort of say, like, even if it's done with good intentions, to just sort of say, like, well, just sides up the issue by saying any word that is indicative of blackness or rape, like race, we're just going to add that to the list. Interestingly enough, I have heard in our episode that we did with Nandaine Jammy from check my Adds, the ad
tech watchdog organization. She's talked about how brands who don't want their advertising or their images next to things that are offensive will just be like, Okay, anything to do with blackness, gender, sexuality, and ething like that, we'll just not include that. And so they're doing it because they don't want to have to figure out like is this going to be brand safe? Is this not? But in doing so, they are just further marginalizing communities and identities
who are already marginalized. And I guess yeah, like this is why it's important to have inclusive teams. Like it's not just because it's the right thing to do or the nice thing to do, which it is, it's because that is how we can make decisions that are not marginalizing, even decisions that are made with like good intentions of not wanting to offend or not wanting to have offensive things on your on your platform.
Hell yeah, you know, can't be neutral on a moving train.
Nope, you cannot. More. After a quick break, let's get right back into it. So let's quickly talk about this kind of interesting new study. So you might associate falling for fake news with your boomer parents, but younger folks
might actually be the most susceptible to misinformation online. This is according to a new test developed by some psychologists at the University of Cambridge, which is the first validated misinformation susceptibility test that is meant to give an indication of how vulnerable a person is to being duped by
fake news online. So they paired examples of real news from real news outlets like Pew and Reuters, and then they made confusingly credible headlines similar to the misinformation encountered in the wild, in an unbiased way using chatchbt hope their data was safe when they were using it. It went out there. Okay, so here's what the test found. The good news is that we're actually not doing two
too badly. On average, adult US citizens correctly classified two thirds, or sixty five percent of headlines that they were shown as either real or faked. That's actually pretty good news. I'm surprised that it was that good.
Yeah, it is nice to highlight the good news. Yeah, maybe people are the dumb dums we think they are.
Maybe they're not. They did find that younger adults are worse than older adults and identifying false headlines, and that the more time someone spent online recreationally, the less likely they were to be able to fell real news from misinformation. Some thirty percent of those spending zero to two recreation hours online each day got a high score, compared to just fifteen percent of those spending nine or more hours online.
So that's super interesting. We do need to keep in mind that this was a cross sectional study, so we can't say what does that mean, So it means that's a great question. Bridget across sectional study is a study. It was conducted at a single moment in time across a group of people. Right, so I just found associations
the result you just described there. You know, they split people into two groups of people who spent zero to two hours online each day versus a group who spent nine or more hours online eachd Right, we've got these two extreme groups. They're extreme in the sense that they're
very different. And they found that those in the you know, the people who only spent two hours online each day, thirty percent got a high score, meaning that they were pretty good at telling apart misinformation from real information, and the people who spent nine or more hours online got a low score. You don't only And so that's interesting. And so one might want to jump to the conclusion that, like, okay, spending time online on social media makes one worse at
telling apart the difference between truth and falsehood. But that's not a conclusion that this data supports. Right, It's just as likely, based on these data from this cross sectional study that was conducted a single moment in time, that maybe those people spend more time online because they're more susceptible to misinformation, and all the misinformation they're encountering out there is more appealing to them, or more enraging or
emotionally a baka to them or something like that. So this study can't say that spending time online causally makes anybody better or worse at telling apart misinformation from truth. What this study does tell us is that people who spend a lot of time online, those are the people that have the biggest problem telling apart truth.
From Mike, who died and made you the expert on studies like this and how they're done.
I mean, nobody died. I'm not the expert. I do have a PhD in psychology. This is the kind of thing that I do, you know. I Experimental design is something that I get paid to do. So I'm not the expert. But I think most experts would agree that one cannot infer causality from a cross sectional design like this, which is fine. We can still learn a lot of valuable things about these associations.
Okay, so maybe Unsurprisingly, people who get their news mostly from social media scored worse than people who get their news from legacy newers. Organizations like MPR or the Associated Press.
And again we can't make any inferences about the direction of causality there, but it is a very interesting association.
And lastly, there was a party split. Democrats performed better than Republicans on this test, with thirty three percent of Democrats achieving high scores compared to as fourteen percent of Republicans. However, almost a quarter of both parties as followers were in the low scoring bracket.
One thing I really liked about the method that they used for this test is that the fake story stories were truly fake. They were literally made up by chat GPT, so there's zero room for anybody to whine about research or bias or anything like that.
So I think it's kind of interesting to see these commonly held believes about misinformation and who was following for it be challenged, right, Like, it's easy to think that young people who grew up online as digital natives are like too savvy to fall for fake news. This is a good reminder that can happen to the best of us, even me. I fall for it, Mike, Have you fallen for it.
For fake news? Yeah? I do? You know you're you're in It's nice to see her are commonly held attitudes challenged, and it's nice to see some data affirming the fact that there is wisdom in age. That's kind of a nice thing to take away. But I'm just kind of like stalling for time. Have I fallen for fake news? Yeah?
Of course. Like earlier this week, somebody who I really like and respect and think of as a very like smart person sent me a post saying that Twitter was suspending the accounts of people who blocked too many other accounts and particularly other advertisers, And I was like, oh my god, this is what Elon's done now. And I was like ready to take it to the bank and file it away and talk about it on this news.
Take it to the bank, well, you know the pod the bank where we put are like the document where we like our like our news idea round up bank, not like the bank where the money is stored.
Yeah, right, the news idea round up bank. Yeah, not the money bank. No, I don't. I don't take anything there. I make contact. But I was like, all good to go on it and I'll set And then I was like, well, let me just look into this and like find some evidence that supports this thing that this guy said, and it just wasn't there. There was just zero evidence to
support it. There were like a couple people who said that they thought maybe there was a rumor that it was happening, and maybe it is happening, right Like, I would not put it past Twitter, but I was not able to find any evidence to suggest that that was happening. And if listeners are aware of evidence, I'd love to see it, you know, we can talk about it next week. But I was totally taken in with it because it really fit with my preconceived ideas of what kind of
nonsense shenanigans Elon Musk's Twitter would get up to. It seemed like a totally believable thing. I wanted to believe it because it was just one more piece of evidence about what in nefarious people they were or he is. But you know, fortunately there was a couple of days between then and now, and uh, cooler heads prevailed and now we're just talking about it as a faith thing.
Yeah. I saw that story, and I also was willing to believe that that's something that Elon Musk would do.
Yeah, And to be clear, I still believe it is something he would do. I just am not confident that it is something he has.
Oh, anything that anyone would say is something I would be like, yep, that's h would do that. I believe he would do that. There's not there's not much out there that I would not believe that he would do. Just to be really clear, but something about the story also seemed not legit to me, so I didn't share it. I didn't like, I don't I don't know why something about it. I was like, I don't know, like I don't know. Uh, to be clear, I don't know if it's if it, I cannot I can either confirm or
deny that it's happening. I have not looked into it. But something about the story didn't seem correct to me, and I saw it and did not engage with it. I had a I myself, i've shared some bake news recently. It was a and I unshared it and was like, oh, this was not true. So it was a video that purported to show South African firefighters who were all dancing in an airport en route to being sent to Canada to help fight the wildfires. It was like a cute
video of these men dancing. I shared it immediately, and I know, you know, usually when someone shares something incorrect online, it's because it is like speaking to some emotional need that they have or some sort of like emotional like place that they're in. And I can tell you exactly what it got in me. You know, this is a second or third day this summer that I've been unable
to leave the apartment because of the wildfire smoke. You know, I have pretty bad asthma and a whole host of respiratory issues, and so I really when stuff like this happens, I really can't go outside. And seeing this video of like smiling South African men, black men, like dancing, and you know, the idea that like these are these are the men who are going to like go to Canada and like fix the smoke, it really gave me warm fuzzies.
Come to find out that video was taken like five years ago and had nothing to do with the current wildfires. So like, technically it's not it's not fake news, but it is like like I'm taken out of context, but I shared it because it spoke to my emotional needs, like I've been stuck in the house. The idea that these men were coming to fix the fire so that I could go outside. Finally was really spoke to me and I shared it, and I had done share it. So it does definitely happen to the best of us.
It does not matter if you're young, digital native, tech savvy, grew up online. It can happen to the best of us.
Yeah, it can. We all got to be vigilant, especially everything else that you know, fit with our preconceived notions of how things are going to be, or like you said, fulfill some sort of emotional need that we have.
Facebook and Google have both been battling with the Canadian government over a new law that was just passed in Canada called the Online News Act.
Now.
This law would require that Google and Facebook pay news organizations and publishers for distributing links to news stories. The law has not gone into effect just yet, but once it does, Google and Facebook say that they're going to start removing news articles by Canadian publishers from their services
in the country. According to NPR, the Canadian government estimates that the law would result in a cash injection of some three hundred and twenty nine million dollars into the Canadian news industry, which, just like you're in the United States has been plagued by news staff layoffs and other downsizing in recent years. Supporters of this legislation have argued that it could provide a much needed lifeline to the ailing news industry, which has been gutted by Silicon Valley's
ironclad control of digital advertising. Now, this Canadian law is modeled after the law in Australia. We did a whole episode on that like a few years ago, which will link to in the show notes, and folks might remember, I'm sure Australians do that that tense negotiation between Facebook and news publishers led to Facebook being temporarily shut down in Australia. There's a similar bill here in the US in California that would force tech companies to pay publishers,
and yep, Facebook and Google have threatened blackouts there too. Now, both Facebook and Google like don't seem to see news as a key part of their strategies, and it seems like they're thinking, like, oh, it'll be easier just to block news altogether rather than pay for it. Now, I want to be clear that I absolutely think that something needs to be done, but how this should play out is like a little bit above my pay grade. MPR has a great summary of some of the different positions
they write. While most major publishers in Canada back the new law, outside media observers have not been so sure. Tech writer Casey Newton has argued that attacks on displaying links would effectively break the Internet if it was applied to the rest of the web. Other critics have pointed to the lack of transparency over who would actually receive the cash and fusion from the tech companies. Some fear that programs could be hid by disinformation sites that learn
how to game the system. Yet press advocates insisted that tech companies retaliating by threatening to systemically remove news articles will be a blow to civil society and the public's understanding of the world. At a moment when disinformation swirls in our public discourse, ensuring public access to credible journalism is essential. So it's deeply disappointing to see this decision
from Google and Meta. This is from Liz Woolery, who leads digital policy at PEN America, an organization that supports freedom of expression. Wellery continued, as policymakers explore potential solutions to the challenges facing the journalism industry, platforms are free to critique, debate and offer alternatives, but reducing the public's access to news is never the right answer.
Yeah, it's a tough one. Like, I hear what she's saying, but like you pointed out, newsrooms are facing cuts after decades of facing cuts. Ror Like it's it's just been decades of cuts, cuts, cuts, cuts, And you know, there's at least two sides to giving the public access to news. There is making the news available to them to read when it's been written, and there is funding the news outlets that pay the people that write the news. And we need both.
Yeah, I mean, I listen, I worked in media for a long time. It's not a coincidence that that is no longer the case for me. Broadly, I think that Facebook has had way too much control over our media landscape. You know, for a while, Facebook would actually direct traffic to media sites, and now it just keeps you on Facebook, right Like it used to be, when you click the link on Facebook, it would take you out of Facebook. Now Facebook is just interested in keeping you on Facebook.
When I was working in media, the great pivot to video fraud happened, which, like I'm still angry about nobody except for Facebook executives, are certain when Facebook is allowed to just gut entire industries that people rely on to stay informed like they have. And I think that Facebook and honestly like media executives who are chasing the shiny new thing, have vastly contributed to this precarity of media
in general. Right, Like all of my friends who still work in media, they are all either laid off about to be laid off, or they're like delusional, or they're just starting a freelancing business because they know they're probably going to be laid off and rehired to do their same job at a fraction of the cost, so they may as well get you a leg up on that now. And so it's not a good time to be in media.
It is an incredibly precarious situation, and I think that Facebook really should take a lot of the blame there. You know, entire strategies and budgets were built around things that Facebook said, in the case of the pivot to video, things that Facebook said that weren't even true. They were lies, right, and then Facebook will just change with no warning, and all that money, all that energy, all that capacity is
just gone. So those people just get let go. And for a while Facebook was saying like, oh, we want to be involved in journalists, we want to save local journalism by partnerships with local newsrooms. And now Facebook has basically been like, hmm, no, actually we don't even need news. And the people who were leading those partnerships have been laid off from Facebook. And so I don't know what the answer is, but I do think that people need
access to accurate news. I think that Facebook, like, the answer can't just be that Facebook gets to take whatever it wants without paying for it, and the only the only people who benefit here are Facebook. You know, I don't know what to do, but it's it's it is a it doesn't look good for media, and I think that is in part because of Facebook.
Yeah, I mean, between Facebook and Google, I think that is most of the advertising online. I guess TikTok has taken a big chunk out of it. I couldn't say how much. That's not an area that I'm an expert in, but yeah, Facebook and Google they're like it. They sell all the advertising online. And there sure are a lot of news outlets posting stories that we all read all the time. It doesn't seem radical to think that they should get some of that money. How to make that
work in practice? Like you said, it's above my pay grade.
More after a quick break, let's get right back into it. So folks might remember that trans influencer Dylan mulvaney who became the target of an extremist hate campaign after she did a partnership with bud Light. Well, Dylan mulvaney broke her silence this week. Dylan rose to prominence for her series on TikTok, where she chronicled her life as a trans woman. It was a cute series. It would be like day whatever of being a girl. I thought it was cute. People liked it. It's like why she became
kind of an influencer. Bud Light was trying to kind of shed their frat boy image and did a brand partnership with Dylan. Now, the logistics of this brand partnership were way overblown. Basically, bud Light sent Dylan mulvaney one beer can, like a promotional beer can with her face on it. These cans were not for sale in stores, these cans. It wasn't like they were stamping her face on every bud Light can. Ever, that everybody had to use it. They sent her a can with her face
on it. One she made a video on her social media profile about bud Light talking about this can they sent her, and that was it. You would have thought that bud Light had named Dylan mulvany their new CEO, and that every time that you bought a bud Light a dollar personally went into her pocket. No, it was
just one social media post and one can. But extremist groups melted down over this right, and to be clear, they were explicit that this was a specific tactic right to target and go after one brand at a time and attack them from what they perceived as like woke positions like partnering with a trans woman or supporting Pride in the case of target the store. So these people are a very vocal minority, but they know they can
drum up attention. Like we talked about many times, an Internet hate machine, brands do not always respond well and sometimes they just caved this bullying. Essentially, you know, extremists would be filming themselves. I think it was like kid Rock, which like, who the fuck is listening to kid Rock? In twenty twenty three, but he posted a video of
himself shooting bud Light cans with a gun. People were driving sam rollers over them, like all because of this one can like I I can't, it's it's so it's so ridiculous, I can't. Bud Light actually did have a dip in sales because of these protests against bud Light. Marketing vice president Alyssa Heinersd actually stepped away from the
company when she became a target too. It's not clear if she was fired or she just like stepped away, Like I read reports that she was fired, then I read reports that bud Light was like, oh, she wasn't fired, So I'm not totally sure she was became a target of this too. Extremists found a picture of her drinking a beer at all at college, like back when she was in college, and they tried to make her look like a hypocrite because oh, you liked beer then, but
like now you think it's freddy or whatever. It's just so stupid.
I just gotta stop you there for just a second though, because like, yeah, she was drinking beer. She was the vice president of Anheuser Bush right, Like she sells beer. The idea that that is somehow disqualifying or in baring just emphasizes how separated from reality any of this is.
It wasn't even like a good like gotcha photo of like look at this, like like I could see if she was doing like a keg stand. It was just a normal it's just like a normal person drinking at college. Like it wasn't even like anything exciting.
Yeah, like person who sells beer drinks beer. What a hypocrite?
Right, Okay, So back to Dylan. Dylan after all of this basically had to go offline because of the hate that she got. That got so bad. She was stocked, she was her rash, She feared for her life. These people, their anger toward her was so intense, again over one beer can and one video. So Dylan finally came back online for the first time, and here's what she had to say.
For a company to hire a trans person and then not publicly stand by them is worse, in my opinion, than not hiring a trans person at all, because it gives customer's permission to be as transphobic and hateful as they want. And the hate doesn't end with me. It has serious, engraved consequences for the rest of our community. And you know, we're customers too. I know a lot of trans and queer people who love beer, and I have some lesbian friends who could drink some of those
haters under the table. But to turn a blind eye and pretend everything is okay, it just isn't an option right now.
So this is heartbreaking. And I feel like if you listen to Dylan's experiences and you don't feel bad for what she went through, that really says a lot about you. Like if somebody could listen to what she says that she experienced and still feel like, oh, well, good for her, she deserved it, Like you're not a good person. And what really is wild to me and like bums me out, is that nobody from bud Light reached out to her. And I think that that's my thing, Like just an email,
a phone call, how you holding up? It doesn't have to be a public a public I mean, it should be a public thing, but like it's it's like a lack of at that point, that's like a lack of class. It's not even I'll get to what it says about how they treat people that they seek out for brand partnerships, But at the end of the day, it's like there's a standard for how people treat people, and I that
shocks me. And I just think that, like a company like bud Light, if you're gonna work with marginalized people, particularly trans people, right now, in this climate, this drummed up climate of hate and targeting of those people, you
gotta have their backs, you gotta support them. If you're just gonna back away and like abandon them without so much as an email to check up on them, If saying yes to your partnership means death threats for them, means they will have to flee their homes for their own safety and fear for their lives, and you're not even gonna check in to see how they're doing, you should not be working with marginalized people at all. If that is the case, Dylan is the one who is
being courageous. Dylan is the one who is taking all of this heat simply because she said yes to bud Light's offer of being a brand ambassador for their brand, bud Light. If Dylan is being made to shoulder all of this for doing nothing wrong, for just saying yes to you, you got to stick up for her, or don't work with talent like that, like that's just not how you treat people. Like, I'm really appalled.
Yeah, and I think brands that want to make it in twenty twenty three and in the future should be standing up for people like Dylan, right, Like that's the young people are tolerant. The people who are running over these beers with steam rollers and shit shooting them, they do not represent the future of America. And they're just so hateful, Like who would want to be associated with them?
All Dylan did was like b trans. You know, she's not even accused of doing anything other than just being trans, and like that's enough to spur all of this hate. It's despicable.
Well, that's really what these people are saying. They're you know, they have so many ways of kind of like masking it when it's like, oh, we're just concerned about girls in sports, we're just concerned about the safety of women in bathrooms. When it comes down to issues like this, you really just see like we don't like trans people
and we don't want to have to see them. We don't think they belong in public life, we don't think they should be here, right, Like, the issues like this make it because because Dylan is not a controversial person like she likes cute outfits and you know, some glasses and stuff like she doesn't. She's not someone who like has done something wrong. And it just makes it so clear what these people are angry at. It's her existence.
It's the fact that she exists and is affirmed. That's what they don't like.
Yeah, that's a great point. It really just lays it out. You know, there's there's no school competition issue. There's no like bathroom scare, you know, none of that like smoke and mirrors nonsense. It's like she's a transperson and they don't like it. And I really feel for her, like, you know, she did. She didn't ask for any of this. A brand sent her a product and she held up that product on her social like that's it.
Yeah, because they asked her to like saying yes to bud Light, asking her to do this gets her death threats and she has to go dark. You like, yeah, and you can't you can't even be bothered just to be like hey girl, you are right, Like yeah, it just it's despicable. It's despicable. Speaking of despicable, We're gonna do a new segment on the Roundup called.
What's Elon done now?
And I have to give major shout outs to my favorite podcast, WHO Weekly. If you listen to WHO Weekly, it's kind of inspired by their segment what's Rita up To? They have this amazing theme song before they do it where they introduce the segment. I won't sing it, but if you if you know the show, you know it's very catchy. So hopefully we can have some sort of like what's Elon done now? Theme song in the style of that one.
Yeah, we're gonna work on it. If anybody has anything they'd like to share, we'd love to hear it. We aspire it to be anything like uh, WHO Weekly.
I think of us as the WHO Weekly of tech.
Okay, yeah, all right, Uh maybe someday we'll be them.
Oh being a WHO is so much funner. Okay, so you gotta ask me, Okay, Bridget, So what's Elon done now?
Okay, Bridget, what's Elon done now?
Well, here's what Elon's up to. So back in October, Twitter rolled out a TikTok competitor that mimics TikTok's swipe up for more videos. Functionality Musk just recently highlighted it introducing it to droves of new users. So how's it going? Because it involves Elon Musk not well, and by that
I mean animal torture, homophobia, and violent assaults. NBC reports that many users using the video feature were alarmed by a stream of graphic videos that they encountered while scrolling through the feed, including videos showing gun violence, police brutality, physical altercations, and vaccine misinformation. So where TikTok is like, Oh, here's some videos about how to properly use your washing machine or your dishwasher or whatever. Twitter is like, here's
some videos of a cap being abused. And because it's swipe up functionality, these videos are just being surface to you algorithmically, right. It's not like you're clicking on them to view them. They're just being surfaced to you. Some of the original posts were seen on the timelines of millions of users within less than twenty four hours since
they were posted. And Musk, what's he doing now? Well, it sounds like he is well aware of this issue because he tweeted that some of the videos on the platform could be quite edgy.
Ooh, he's such an edgy guy.
So I think that that just really shows that Elon Musk doesn't get what people are looking for from social media, why they come to social media. You know, I don't think he understands like why people come to Twitter. No, I think that was clear from how he has the changes he has made on Twitter that he's not He
doesn't understand like what makes it good. And I think you know, when people come to a platform like TikTok, if TikTok was all garbage videos, people wouldn't stay there, right, Like if it was just like videos of like stuff that was upsetting and you know, it might be it might generate engagement perhaps, but it does it won't make people feel good about being there. And so it almost feels like Elon Musk's strategy is like how can I make people feel bad? And how can I make showing
up to this platform feel not good? You know, I just don't think that he's someone who understands what people are coming to social media platforms for, what they want to feel when they come to those platforms and what keeps them there.
Yeah, it's it's not surprising that Twitter's new feature is stupid and bad and like offensive and mean. That's just like what he's going for. But I also just want to take a minute to step back and reflect on how we've all just accepted as normal that these big legacy social media platforms like Twitter, companies like Meta are they're just a band in any pretense of innovating, and
they're just like aggressively copying each other. It's like that trend in the mid aus when like every restaurant had to become every other restaurant and like they all started selling chicken sandwiches and burgers. It's like every social media platform has to be exactly the same and like have the same functionality of everyone, and there's there's no innovation, there's just copycat And like if that if those sorts of videos were what I wanted, why would I go
to Twitter? Why wouldn't I just look at it on TikTok?
Like as a user of social media platforms, I kind of like that they're different, right, Like if they were all the same, that would be boring, And somehow, over the past like year or two, that just became the standard strategy for these big legacy companies and you would expect them to be embarrassed about it, but they're just like upfront and open about the fact that they do not have any ideas, that all they can do is try to like steal, steal the idea of somebody else.
It reminds me so much of this article that I read back when Instagram last year, when Instagram basically said that they wanted to become TikTok and they were going to focus on video. I forget who said it was a great quote. He said that Facebook doesn't know why it is that people come to Instagram and they're trying to become more like TikTok. It's as if your mistress got plastic surgery to look more like your wife. You would be like, don't you understand what this is? Don't
you understand? Like why I'm why I'm coming to you. This is not what I want at all.
That's a good analogy.
In our last newscast, we put out a call that people like Elon Musk, RFK, Joe Rogan. I might throw Glenn Greenwald in there, that like brand of guy. We don't have a name for that brand of guy. We have names for other brands of guy, like we've got. If I say Bernie bro you probably conjure up in your head the kind of guy I'm talking about. If I say, oh, that guy is a member of the dirt Bag Left, you probably have an idea in your
head of what I'm talking about. But we don't have a name for that particular sub section of guy and I think we need one. And actually, listener Elizabeth dmd me on Instagram and said that she thinks they should be called tinker bells because quote, they don't feel like they exist if they aren't filling the internet with their hot takes, which I love. Thank you, Elizabeth. It is finally nice to have a collective term for your Elon's, your Joe Rogan's, and the rest of the tinker bells.
Yeah, it's a great term, Thank you, Elizabeth. Yeah, now we got a term for these tinker bills.
Well, thank you so much for listening, and Mike, as always, thanks for going through these stories with me.
Thanks for having me here, Bridget it was a pleasure.
As you can probably tell, it was kind of a big news week this week, and there were so many stories we wanted to talk about that we couldn't get to them all here. So to hear the full rundown, check out our Patreon at patreon dot com. Slash ten Goody. If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our mark store at tenggodi dot com. Slash store. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi? You can reach us at
Hello at tenggody dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tengody dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget Tod. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unboss Creative, edited by Joey pat Jonathan Strickland as our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Almada is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.
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