SAG strike ends with AI concessions!; New Facebook whistleblower drops; Omegle shuts down; RIP Jezebel; The Future of Online Media – NEWS ROUNDUP

a little bit of great news. It's great news for our friends in the entertainment industry, but also I'll explain, while it's great news for all of us, after one hundred and eighteen very long days, making it the longest strike in Hollywood's history, the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists otherwise known as sag AFTRA, has reached a deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture

and Television Producers aka the Studios. So both sides have been pretty quiet about the particular and specifics of what's in this deal. But you know how on that episode of Real Housewives of New York when Leunn Mary's Tom and She's like, we got the yacht.

that protects actors digital likeness. SAG was like, uh uh, we don't think so, and countered that proposal, stipulating that background performers per the proposal that studios that put forth could be scanned, paid for the day, and then turned into digital characters that studios could use for the rest of eternity. Now the studios dispute this, but knowing the studios,

I don't know, it sounds plausible. Keep listening. So the issue kind of went back and forth until last weekend, when SAG reviewed what the studios were calling their last best and final offer. SAG was like, I don't think so fast, what else you got? They rejected that offer claiming, quote, there are several essential items on which we still do not have an agreement, including AI. So this is really wild.

A follow up story in The Hollywood Reporter revealed that the studios had issued a proposal that would allow them to pay for AI scans of some performers and then following those performers as death. It would allow studios to use scans without the consent of the estate or SAG. So SAG wanted compensation for reuse of those scans along

with consent. Yeah, I'm pretty sure they did. Who wouldn't want that incredibly basic respect for their labor protected, Like the fact that studios were proposing that even in death, some performers would have to have their likeness used without consent for the rest of time. That is such a wild proposal that I cannot believe studios would put it forth.

somebody's digital likeness just forever. Like it's like the zombification of people having to work and make money for others in eternity. It's really creepy.

Whatever your job is, they're going to get rid of you so they can buy more yachts and pollute the earth with more shit. This is the actual inflection point, and I completely agree. I remember that that sentiment really

resonating with me. So to put all this in context, just this week, the Tech Venture capital firm Anderson Horowitz warned that billions of dollars of AI investments could be worth a whole lot less if the companies who are developing a technology are forced to pay for the copyrighted data that makes them work. Or to put it another way, yo, if we're not able to just steal from people to make this to all work, we won't be able to make the tons of money from AI like we were planning to.

those provisions, I think it is a good sign. I think it is going to be good for the rest of us because it draws a line in the sand that's like, no, you can't just exploit and steal and grift your way into fatter pockets. We will not allow it.

Cheryl Sandberg, I feels a little different, but I don't think and Cheryl Sanberg we have like met, we've had conversation, well conversation singular, not plural, but again having met her, you meet her and you like, you know who she is, you know what she's about. A little bit more of a pr slick vibe than Zuckerberg, but it's very clear.

Adam Mosseerri, I feel like it's doing a different thing where he is trying to convince us that he's this super quirky fun guy, like, oh, I'm wearing funky socks and a sweater and like, my ties got a print

on it, and I'm wearing horned rimmed glasses. And he also does this thing where he is often obviously with intention, the face of announcements, and so if I follow him on Instagram at this point, it's like I do it for the show to get it, you know, whenever there's updates or whatever, like I need to like know them.

But it's almost like a hate follower, where every time his face shows up, I'm like, Oh, what is this dork going to be trying to What is this hateful dork going to be trying to convince us is actually good for us while it actually harms people. And so Instagram, as spokes probably know, was its own app before Facebook thought it. It felt different, it felt good. Instagram essentially bought it and then turned it into this like marketplace

for the pain of children apparently. And I just think that Adam Mosseerri is trying to leverage this like quirky, kind of non threatening, inoffensive, nice guy in the office persona where he shows his face with intention when he speaks to the public as a means to mask the fact that the app actually does incredible harm to children, is damaging children and that he's making money from it. You look at Mark Zuckerberg and you're like, this is a guy who's making money from the harm of children.

No trouble believing that. Cheryl Sandberg again, I'm like, well, this is a woman who is like buying pantsuits via the money that she made harmon kids. No trouble believing this. I feel like Adam Moseiri wants us to think something else when we look at him, and that's why I

hate him so much. It's like a very like I'm sure people listening are like, wow, she really has strong feelings about this, But I do believe he is leveraging a persona of like quirky, non threatening guy in the office with like funky thoughts to mask harm that he is profiting from. That's just a fact. That's not me. That's not me speculating he profits from harm and of sentence.

to the Wall Street Journal. So his testimony basically confirms what we already know, right all the stuff I just said that Instagram was very aware that their product was harming very young people and did nothing to address it, and in fact, they prioritized time spent on platform as a key performance indicator. Bihar released a trove of emails

showing exactly this. Something interesting about Bahar that really sets him apart from earlier Facebook whistleblowers let people like Francis Hougan, is that Bahar has a teenage daughter who, like a lot of teenage daughters, his daughter was fourteenth at the time uses Instagram. He saw that his own daughter was getting continually harassed, as were her friends who were the same age on Instagram, things like abusive, misogynistic comments and

unsolicited graphic pictures. He says. It is testimony. I asked, why do boys keep doing that? His daughter replied, if the only thing that happens to them is they get blocked, why wouldn't they so this understandably deeply upset, he decided to go back to work as a consultant at Facebook to genuinely try to help them fix this issue and to flag them to the top people. Here's a little bit of his testimony.

on the experiences of teens themselves. Instead, the company wanted to focus on enforcing its own narrowly defined policies, regardless of whether that approach reduced the harm that teens were experiencing. I discovered that most of the tools were kids that we had put in place. During my earlier time Facebook had been removed, I observed new features being developed in response to public outcry, which were in reality kind of a placebo, a safety feature in name only to placate

the praise and regulators. I say this because, rather than being based on user experienced data that were based on very deliberately narrow definitions of harm, the company was creating its own homework.

sexual advances. From firsthand knowledge working at Facebook, he says that doing this is completely easy and totally plausible, but he told BBC, I believe the reason that they're not doing this is because there's no transparency about the harms that teenagers are experiencing on Instagram. And that's why I'm coming forward right now. This is my retirement from technology.

So it's interesting because Instagram already does have like a general report button, like if somebody sends you a harassing comment or a message, you can like generally report them. But Bihar says that when you look at what they know about how young people are actually using the platform,

that general report button is just not cutting it. He says, research we did in twenty eleven shows that thirteen year olds are uncomfortable with the word report because they worry that themselves or somebody else is going to get in trouble. Imagine you're a thirteen year old and you get an unwanted sexual advance. How uncomfortable that is, how intense the experience is, and there's nothing they can use to say, hey,

can you please help me with this? If that button was available, then there will be data about who's initiating those contacts. So Horr is really like, we need to be setting our users up to give us more information about the things that are experiencing on the platform, and that.

to convince Zuckerberg to put some safeguards and some tools into effect to protect young people, and it was Zuckerberg

personally that shot them all down. I thought that was pretty interesting that they, you know, and I don't think they were acting out of genuine concern for young people, but they were concerned that this very that they were going to find themselves in this position a couple of years down the road of really being you know, sued and looked at heart by legislators and regulators about their lack of action. And I think that totally has come true here.

that policy. Alex Jones comes to mind that that Mark Zuckerberg personally initiated a loophole to keep him on the platform even after he was banned, right, And so yeah, it doesn't surprise me that it's the very tippy tippy top that is allowing this kind of harm to continue. Yeah, so Bahar's testimony has really reignited convert stations around legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act, which she might have cleaned. If you've been listening to our other episodes, is not

legislation that we're really that hopeful about. This legislation and other legislation that seeks to sort of reign in big tech as it pertains to harming kids has kind of stalled despite a lot of bipartisan support, and now lawmakers are blaming big tech lobbying and big tech money. It is an indictment of this body, to be honest with you, that we have not acted. And we all know the reason why big tech is the biggest, most powerful lobby

in the United States Congress. They successfully shut down every meaningful piece of legislation. Do you have any idea which lawmaker said that I'll give you a hint fist pumping during the insurrection?

Haugan became a whistleblower. She was everywhere I was thinking about this, and Mike, you and I happened to be traveling together when Francis Hagen blew the whistle on Facebook. And I don't know if you remember, we were in the hotel bar and they had a TV and they were playing her sixty minutes interview on that TV in the hotel bar like it was a pretty big deal.

the show notes. Sophie spoke to this issue too, how when you present a certain way as a whistleblower, you will be more amplified and probably more supported, And if you're not able to present in that certain way because of your identity, you might be treated very differently. Sophie was sort of framed as this disgruntled, poor performing former employee of Facebook when she came forward as a whistle blow or about Facebook's arms. Hagen was treated very differently.

And let's really keep it real, like Francis Hogan is a blonde, wealthy, conventionally attractive white lady. I don't say any of that to diminish her or her work or the courage that it took for her to come forward as a whistleblower. But our Turno Bihar is Latino and he's also coming at this from like a very specific position, that is of a parent, particularly a parent of a

teenager of color. You know, when we talk about the impact of social media on young people on how parents can support those young people, more often than not we are talking about white young people. Yet research which is mostly done on white youth is taken to be universal for all youth, despite the fact that kids of color are actually having like very unique and specific experiences online.

Researchers at the Youth Media and well Being Research Lab found that black and Latino fifth through ninth graders adopt social media at younger ages in their white peers, and despite having the highest reported access to the Internet and social media, Asian American youths still remain underrepresented and studies on digital media and their well being Asian Americans in later adolescents and early adulthood. So eighteen to twenty four year olds are more likely to be cyberabully than their

white or Latino counterparts. They are also the least likely to report negative experiences on social media in order to avoid embarrassment and maintain a positive image to the outside world. So Bahar as this whistleblower, the parent of a Latino child and somebody who worked at Facebook is really filling this gap and helping us understand this issue and how

it impacts marginalized youth and their parents. And I just hope people listen, even if he's not a flashy, wealthy white blonde woman with like a slick pr machine backing her up.

in his thirties through omagle. That man forced her to take naked photos and videos over a three year period, starting when she was eleven. Carrie Goldberg, an attorney who specializes in crimes involving tech facilitated abuse, who we've interviewed on the podcast before about section two thirty, we'll throw her episode in the show description. Was the attorney on

the case. She told Wired, the permanent shutdown of omgle was a term negotiated between Omegle and our client in exchange for Omas getting to avoid the impending jury trial verdict. So I thought of omgole as like technology that was kind of of an era. It started back in two thousand and nine, kind of fell off until the pandemic when it gave people isolating in their homes another way to use technology to connect with strangers and stave off loneliness.

You would enter omagle and instantly be matched with a random person. You could click to be instantly rematched with somebody new, so as you could leave that conversation if you weren't feeling it and be connected with somebody else, but you could not go back to who you were just chatting with. So because of this instantaneous nature of omagel, you really could like sign on and find yourself looking at a stranger's genitals like instantly.

that platform. And I almost caught myself like recalling this almost a bit fondly, until I was like, wait a minute, what like that actually wasn't okay? Like I think it is a relic of a time before. Maybe I'm always speaking for myself, but before it was clear how not okay that was, and how harmful that could be to people, and how risky that was, like you know, And it's funny because on Twitter, the conversation was very much like

people remembering the same thing. Like I saw somebody be like, oh, shout out to all the thirty five year olds who like showed me their genitals when I was fourteen. I think we were all sort of thinking of this as a rite a passage on the internet and using technology and looking back, it's like, well, should we have been? Should that have been and write a passage?

was consensual. Abusers could, and it sounds like did, have a field day with that platform. In twenty twenty two, there was one hundred and eight thousand, six hundred and one reports of child exploitation in Omegle. To the nonprofit the National Center for Michigan exploited children. Of all of the sites the center tracks, only Facebook, Google and thram

and What's App ranked higher. Now platforms are generally protected by Section two thirty of the Communications Decency Act, which means that they cannot be held liable for what happens on their platforms, but the judge in this case found that omagle was at fault because the site's design is what allowed for miners to be sexually targeted, and thus omagle was not protected by Section two thirty. According to

the BBC, Omagle had almost no moderation. The entire company was seemingly run solely by the founder, Leif Kbrooks, with no other registered employees. BBC said that it was operated from his lakeside house in Florida when he was either asleep or offline. No complaints were acted upon. If you go to omagle dot com right now instead of the site, what you will find is a long sort of goodbyepost from the found or leave K Brooks, in which he argues that shutting down the platform to him is kind

of the end of an era of freedom online. We'll post the whole thing in the show notes, but here are a few key snippets. He writes, I launched Omegle when I was eighteen years old and still living with my parents. It was meant to build on the things I loved about the Internet while introducing a form of

social spotaneity that I felt didn't exist anywhere else. If the Internet is a manifestation of the global village, o'magle was meant to be a way of strolling down a street in that village, striking up conversations with people that you run into along the way. Unfortunately, there are low lights. Virtually every tool can be used for good or for evil, and that it's especially true of communication tools due to

their innate flexibility. The telephone can be used to wish your grandmother happy birthday, but it can also be used to call in a bomb threat. There can be no honest accounting of omeagle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes. To an extent, it is reasonable to question the policies and practices of any place where crime has occurred. I have always welcome to constructive feedback, and indeed omagle implemented a number of improvements

based on such feedback over the years. Side note if you believe that BBC article, it does not sound like that was the case. However, the recent attacks have felt anything but constructive. The only way to please these people is to stop offering the service. Sometimes they say so explicitly and avowedly it can be inferred from their act of setting standards that are not humanly achievable. Either way,

the net result is the same. Omagel is the direct target of these attacks, but their ultimate victim is you, all of you out there who have used or would use omagle to improve your lives and the lives of others. When they say omagel shouldn't exist, they are really saying that you shouldn't be allowed to use it, that you

shouldn't be allowed to meet random new people online. That idea is anathema to the ideal's eyeshair, specifically to the bedrock principle of a free society that when restrictions are imposed to prevent crime, the burden of those restrictions must not be targeted at innocent victims or potential victims of crime. I've done my best to whether the attacks with the

interest of Omegle's users and the broader principle. In my mind, if something as simple as meeting random new people is forbidden, what's next That is far and away removed from anything that can be considered a reasonable compromise of the principle I outlined. Analogies are a limited tool but a physical world analogy might be shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there, or perhaps more provocatively, destroying a universe because

it contains evil. A healthy, free society cannot endure when we are collectively afraid of each other to this extent. So there's a lot more to it that I'm only

reading snippets. But it's complicated because in some ways I agree with him, right, Like, I do think that there is an era of freedom and promise coming to a close kind of what you were alluding to earlier, Mike, that like the era where we might have thought it was a pure net good to be randomly connected to random strangers from the comfort of our own home anonymously. And I I kind of in some ways I kind

of see what he's getting at. But if that promise means just accepting and tolerating the harm of miners, it is not a promise worth keeping. Like I think that that's what he's missing, that if this platform that you've built, that you've imagined us this like great utopia, comes at the cost of the safety and wellbeing of kids, then it is not a utopia. That's not just something that we should just like laugh off or normalize as a right of passage for understanding how to have experiences online.

It's not okay. And it sounds like that freedom that he's pointing to the cost of that freedom is harm at miners. And I don't think that is a cost that we are okay with. Maybe we hadn't realized what that truly cost us before and he's he yearns for that time, and I understand, but now we have a better understanding of the true cost of this like principled utopian internet that he's laying out. What do you think.

a telephone to call in a bomb threat. That's true, but the Internet fundamentally changes the scalability of harm, right, Like, one of the cool things about the Internet is that some eighteen year old guy can build an app or a web app or whatever it was, and you know, doesn't cost him a lot of money, doesn't cost him a lot of like server capacity to run, just serve it out of his garage and make it available to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. That

is super powerful and really cool. But it's also really dangerous, right, and he alludes to that, and there has to be some kind of responsibility when you build something that is affecting so many people, it changes the math. Right, Like, if if he built this tool and like a dozen of his friends were using it and one person got unintentionally harmed, that's not great and he should probably think about that. But that's different than you know, hundreds of

thousands of people around the world using it. There's a responsibility there that is just nowhere in this lengthy letter that you read.

responsibility to keeping users safe. In the ruling, you know, one of the reasons why the judge said that he was not that the sub section two thirty did not apply is because the judge said he could have put some some safeguards in place so that adult abusers were not being connected to kids like that, Like the judge described how because of the like you know, functionality of Omegel, where you can just hit next until you get what you want, abusers essentially are just like shopping for people

to abuse, and they can just be like, not what I'm looking for, not what I'm looking for, not what I'm looking for, and when I'm looking for, And so there's there just seems to be a lot of downplaying of his own responsibility in why this platform had to shut down.

shown to a child wasn't a big deal. Like I think that he's like, I think that he's thinking about it a completely different way than we are.

place would probably agree that it wasn't better. And so, yeah, I A lot of people are trading his goodbye letter around the internet as if it's a treatise on a better time, and I'm just I really would caution against that. I think that it is really fundamentally normalizing a time that really maybe wasn't so great for a lot of people.

Maybe he does. He was truly making it because he thought it was fun, and you know, I respect that, and I can see how it would be really sad for him to have to shut it down, especially in this Oh oh okay, they made money, I didn't know profiting off of it. Yeah, So that's also relevant and does not show up anywhere in his statement right that he's profiting on this. It's not like he's trying to foster human connection and serendipity to achieve greater understanding in

an altruistic way. He's trying to make money off this, And that also changes the math on the responsibility one has to keep people safe when you're charging the money for what you're selling them.

total fucking baller. Shout out to her. She is incredible. So the website was really something special in media, particularly in women's media. It came about at a time where the dominant understanding of like what women wanted from media was like polish and airbrushing and quizzes. On Jezebel's foray, they offered a ten thousand dollars bounty to anybody who sent in pre airbrush photos of a model that eventually became a glossy magazine cover photo. The winner was a

photo of Faith Hill, unretouched for Red Book magazine. So this might sound silly, but it's one of those things that if you weren't there, if you didn't like, live through it. It is really hard to overstate the impact that Jezbell had on media culture and the way that content on the Internet exists, especially content for women, but

content more broadly as well. Jezebel came up around the same time as Twitter, and in many ways, the Jezbel comment section was like the prototype for what Twitter would eventually become. Like their comment section was Oh God, like I used to spend a lot of time in their comment section. Jessbel was started as a spinoff to Gawker Media, but eventually surpassed its parent site Gawker in popularity and

page views. In two thousand and eight, the Autawa Citizen had found that community based women's websites were with political sites as the Internet's fastest growing category, while also citing ad Ages research showing that women's Internet use was outpacing men's at that time. So Jessbel was really foundational to this era that really was like women are online, women are seeking content on the Internet, and we got to

give women readers and audiences something they actually want. We absolutely would not have an entire generation of women's focused media if not for Jezbell. Sites that you know and love like Reductriss Exo, Jane, the Frisky, the Hairpin would not exist if not for Jessbell. You know, there really wasn't a place for this like voicy, zeitgeisty, snarky writing for women that also was like feminist and intersectional and

explicitly political. Like hell, I don't even know if I'd been making this podcast right now if not for Jezzbell. I was a voracious reader of Jezbel. One of the first like serious pieces quote unquote that I ever got published was about being black in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Was for Jetzbel, though Mike my first big byeline, and I think that's probably true for like an entire generation

of media folks. Jessbell's parent company, GoMedia, which publishes Gizmoto and The Onion, recently was in some hot water for publishing a slew of AI generated pieces without input from human editors that contained lots of errors and just like flat out false information and ultimately we're just not good after this, they actually stuck by that choice publicly and said that they were going to keep publishing AI generated articles, saying it is absolutely a thing we want to do

more of. That's from Meryl Brown, geo's editorial director. What's worse is that, according to Daily Beast, it sounds like the layoffs were just like not handled in a great way. There was us meeting where staff was assured there would not be layoffs, only to later tell everybody that they would all be losing their jobs effective immediately shortly thereafter. It sounds like the laidoff staffers squarely place the blame

on senior leadership. We are devastated, though hardly surprised at Geomedia and Jim Spanfuller's ability to run our website and the cruel decision to shutter it. That's from the Writer's Guild of America East, which represents Geo Media staffers, adding in their statement quote, a well run company would have moved away from an advertising model, but instead they are shuttering the brand entirely because of their strategic and commercial ineptitude.

Liz Lenz, who's been on the podcast before, tweeted Jezbel was a place where women could unabashedly write about culture, politics and everything with voice and humor and a whole range of human emotions. The fact that it was killed

by anept men is truly a metaphor. So what's really resonating with me about how important this specific kind of work that Jessbell produced is at this moment is that, in addition to a lot of their like snarky, gossipy content, their reporters also publish some of the most in depth reported pieces on issues that impact women, from the elections in Virginia and Ohio to the Republican debate this last night, it could not be clear how important of a topic

abortion is. Right now, there are just not a ton of places with really good, in depth reported pieces on the huge intersections of technology and abortion. For instance, Jess Bell was doing that work, but now there is one less place for it. A lot of folks were understandably wondering how a popular, well liked website like jez Bell just could not find a way to make it work and had to shut down. A piece in four h four Media written by Jason Kobler and Emmanuel Mayberg sheds

a little bit of light into that. They actually suggest that jez Bell's in depth reporting about important topics and I was just describing might have actually been one of the reasons that led to jezz Bell closing. As I said, Jessbell did not shy away from tackling tough topics, things that we all need to know about, which understandably are sometimes heavy or complex. But because of the advertising model, brands were sometimes wary about their ads showing next to

any content that might have been controversial. In quotes, Lauren Tosionnan, Jezbell's interim editor, and told four four Media that Jessbell was told that brand safety, you know, the fact that advertisers don't want to be next to the kind of content that Jess Bell was publishing was one of the biggest factors that led to GEO to stop publishing the site and to lay off the whole staff. She adds in a couple of weeks ago, the ad sales team even asked if the website could remove Jess Bell's tagline

sex Celebrity, politics with Teeth from the site. She says they took it off because they're like, let's see if this makes a huge difference. So yeah, it was very much the problem here that no one would advertise on jez Bell because we cover sex and abortion. I know that taking the tagline off was to see if the algorithm advertising would change and if it was removed. One of the editorial directors was like, I'm seeing an ad

for j Crew for the first time ever. Maybe this will be good, which led to the staff really wondering whether or not sticking with that particular advertising model to make money really made any sense at all. And I think that it's closing to me, like really signals the end of a certain kind of media climate and a beginning of something that frankly doesn't feel that great, and

a really fascinating piece for The New Yorker. Anna Holmes, Jezebel's founder, looked back on what she built at jez Bell and the media legacy that it's leaving behind, writing I see jezz Bell not as the beginning of the end of the digital media era, but as a moment a spark with an ongoing discussion about gender politics. That conversation has led to new realities around sexual assault and harassment, pay, inequity,

and cultural depictions of women. It also makes some people uncomfortable, in part because it involves women expressing their anger in public and sustained ways. Every woman has a well stocked arsenal of anger Audrey Lord Road in nineteen eighty one, which can act as a powerful source of energy serving progress in change. If that's part of Jezbel's legacy, I'll take it. It's about everything I could have hoped for.

in a bottle. It really caught something special. Obviously, kind of going back to the conversation we were just happening. It wasn't without its faults, like some if you were around for those Jezbel days, you probably remember some of the wild conversations that happened there and some of the wild antics of some of the folks that worked there. But yeah, it was it was of an era.

In places like Canada, they've banned it entirely, and I have to imagine that that is very much connected with this phenomenon that you were just talking about of our media ecosystem being a handful of legacy outlets and all of the you know, I don't know, alt journalism or what would have been alt weeklies thirty years ago, are I don't know less less abundant less. I'm sure they would love to have some extra money.

have to choose. I do see hope in the way that people are saying, I don't fucking think so to a lot of these tech billionaires and a lot of the proposals that they lay out for how they intend to continue to get rich off of us, whether it is exploiting our likeness in prepartuity or forcing ads into more and more of real estate online. So yeah, I think there is reason for hope. We have to be hopeful that something better can be out there on the horizon. Mike, thank you so much for being here as.

as our producer and sound engineer. Michael Lamada was our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us.