There are No Girls on the Internet. As a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative, I'm bridgeitat and this is there are No Girls on the Internet. I am here with my producer Mike, and here's what you may have missed this week on the Internet. So, as y'all know, in the pandemic, Zoom became such.
An ubiquitous part of all of our lives.
You would have your work meeting on Zoom, through therapy on Zoom, your happy hour on Zoom, your book club on Zoom. But Zoom is still a tech company, and tech companies can be very tricky, and that they love to quietly slip some updates into their terms of service, you know that thing we all click without really reading
too much. Last week, people started posting screenshots of Zoom's new policies that state that people who use Zoom, just by using the platform, consent to the company's use, collection, and storage of quote service generated data for any This includes quote training and tuning of algorithms and models. And so just by showing up to a Zoom meeting, you are consenting to use whatever comes up in that meeting, whatever you talk about, images, whatever, for Zoom's quote machine learning,
artificial intelligence, training and testing, among other uses. According to zd net, just by showing up on Zoom, users would then give Zoom quote a perpetual, worldwide, non exclusive, royalty free, sub licensable and transferable license and all other rights required or necessary to redistribute, publish, import, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display, copy, distribute, translate, transcribe,
create derivative works of and process all of our content. That's pretty bad. That is a lot of like just by showing up to this meeting, you know, that's well, that's a lot of data to be giving over to Zoom just to show up. So Zoom told Vice that they actually made this change to their terms of service back in March. Notably, it sounds like Zoom didn't really go out of their way to make this super public until this week users started posting screenshots of this new
terms of service. After all the backlash and outcry, Zoom then put out a blog post this week where they kind of walked back this terms of service and basically said, yeah, you know all that stuff that I just read from their terms of service, they promise, promise promise pinky promise that they will not do it without users consent, like opting into it, promising that Zoom will not use audio, video or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence
models without your consent. That was a big part of the issue before that Zoom users basically had to consent to this. There was no opt out. One interesting thing is that folks were asking, like what about people who use Zoom for like therapy sessions, like my therapy happened over Zoom, or you know, medical reasons. It does sound like those use cases are completely different Zoom contracts, and so Zoom is required to keep those conversations like hip hoop compliant.
Is that right, Mike, Yeah, I believe that's right. I think that it's like a separate category of contract that enterprise clients who have Hippo protection needs signed than general users like most of us.
So yeah, it sounds like that for most of us general Zoom users, there was no way to opt out of this. If you were gonna use Zoom, you had to consent to let Zoom use your data in this way. But now they are saying promising that they will allow users to opt out. However, the d Net pointed out that Sean Hogel, business and intellectual property attorney, is not so sure on why. Combinator Hogel wrote, quote, Zoom's lawyers are trying to pull a fast one with these revised terms.
The new sentence on user consent being required to train AI applies only to customer content, not service generated data. Zoom can use this data, which is derived from your conference and materials without your consent. Also, surprise, in their blog posts clarifying their terms of service as it pertains to AI, Zoom assures all of us, no, no, no, don't worry. It sounds scary, trust us. This is gonna be good
for you. It's for your own good, pointing to the ability to opt into Zoom settings for things like meeting transcriptions and summaries and how it will quote improve the performance and accuracy of these AI services. So if you want to use these services with Zoom, then you will have to opt in to sharing your data with the platform. Something that I find kind of interesting about this, Like I was talking to somebody about this and they were like, well, what do I care if, like Zoom wants to use
my data in this way? Like, explain it to me. Like I'm five. Why this is a problem, Well, first of all is there are pretty big intellectual property concerns anybody who uses a platform like Zoom to discuss things where their ownership of those things is key. So like for me, I'm a podcaster, if I were having podcast interviews on Zoom, Zoom can essentially say oh, hey, actually, because you use Zoom, we could have the rights to what you talk about in this episode. You no longer
have the rights. We've talked about how folks like Sarah Silverman are suing companies like Open Ai for intellectual property threats because they have taken her intellectual property which she owns,
to train their algorithms and machine learning. So if you are somebody who has to discuss scripts that you own or discuss creative content that you own, using Zoom under those original terms of service would not be a really secure place to do that, because just by using Zoom, you're kind of giving them consent and ownership to use that intellectual property however they see fit to make money for their company.
And not just intellectual property, but any sort of trade secrets or internal information that you wanted to keep private among you and your your team your business associates, your partner anything, right, Like it's chat GPT can just using that as one example. But you know a lot of these large language models are different, and who knows how many of them work. But chat GPT seems pretty good at repeating back information from specific copyrighted works, you know,
specific pieces of its training corpus. And so who's to say that what might happen to something that you say during a Zoom meeting that you think is private, that then gets used to train a large language model. It's a pretty like brazen attack on privacy and confidentiality.
Well exactly that, And I think that's another big issue is that yes to all of the intellectual property concerns and trade secret concerns, kind of like what you were saying, it's also just kind of the principle that people's private meetings should not be fodder for training Zoom's AI that like that dynamic where by by just by using this software that has become so ubiquitous to all of our lives, how work gets done, how people communicate and connect with
each other, that just by showing up on that platform, you are consenting that basically you're like an employee of Zoom that whatever you whatever comes up in that space belongs to them, and that's like a fundamental dynamics that I think that it's it's the principle of that that's kind of what why people felt so outraged by this
move by Zoom. It's just like the fundamental shift that we as users of these programs are just fodder for whatever Zoom wants to do, and however Zoom wants to make money, and I think that people are The fact that people really raised hell about this to the point where Zoom had to like walk it back, I think shows that there's a little bit of a shift happening in terms of how folks are thinking about the relationship between themselves tech companies and how their data is used
or misused. And this is not the first time that Zoom has really stepped in it with regards to things like user privacy. Mike, you got a little bit of a check from Zoom because of this, right.
That's right. I got to check for fifty three dollars from a class action settlement against them.
Wow, what did you spend that whopping fifty three dollars on?
I think I got some uber eats.
Well, the reason why you were able to get that Uber eats is because Zoom had to pay out a historic eighty five million dollar lawsuit for zoom bombing, basically not having secure enough system that allowed for bad actors to disrupt the privacy of folks as private meetings. This
has happened to me before. I have been on pretty high stakes important calls on Zoom where like presentations about things that are like important but need to be secure for specific security reasons, and bad actors and folks looking to disrupt have been able to gain access to those spaces to disrupt them. So it's pretty serious, Like it's
it's pretty high stakes what we're talking about. And like I said, I think that people are just starting to ask questions about whether or not these tech companies are actually obviously they're not acting with our best interests as users in mind, but like how much are they not
acting with our best interest as users in mind? I think really recently there have been a lot of big examples of people being like, wait a minute, you're using my data or my work or my intellectual property for what exactly, and really pushing back against that dynamic that everything of their should just be for the taking of whoever wants it for them to make money. For instance, this week, this guy Benji Smith was rightly like kind of bullied by authors of the Internet into taking his platform,
prose Craft down. Prosecraft was meant to use AI to analyze the structure of a whole library of thousands and thousands of books looks he notably did not have any
right to be using or reproducing. Authors like rox Sane Gay were pissed, and eventually he took the platform down because it turns out that authors really don't love it when their material is being taken without their consent, so they spoke up about it until he put out a statement apologizing and eventually was like, oh yeah, wow, like y'all really hated this, and announced he was closing up shop.
On the show, We're actually gonna be talking to another author, Jane Friedman, who recently found out that somebody or somebody's is impersonating her name as an author and using AI to create like poorly written AI generated knockoffs of her books under her name, and that Amazon then added those books that were not written by her to her Goodreads author profile, and Google, for instance, just recently went on record as saying that their AI systems should have the
right to mind publishers work unless those publishers specifically opt out of doing so. When asked how a system like this might work, Google didn't say they didn't really have an answer. And I think that we've really hit a wall with how regular people are thinking about the future and the way that tech companies are using all of us.
I think folks are starting to push back against this idea that everything we do, everything we do online, everything we say, whatever we bring to these platforms can just go to enriching these tech companies that already have so much, have so much money, and have so much impact on how all of us live our lives.
I hope you're right.
Let's take a quick break at our back.
So speaking of that, we have to talk about this black woman in Detroit who was falsely arrested. This story is infuriating. So back in February, a thirty two year old, eight month pregnant black woman in Detroit named Portia Woodruff was arrested for our carjacking that she did not commit. Why well, facial recognition technology misidentified her, as it often
does with black people. The New York Times reports that when the police came to her house, she actually gestured to her stomach to indicate how pregnant she was and that like how unlikely it would be to have an
eight month pregnant woman commit at armed carjacking and robbery. However, that did not stop them from putting her in handcuffs in front of her neighbors and her four babies, leaving her four babies at home with her fiance as they cried, and taking her to the Detroit Detention Center for booking. She says that she was held for eleven hours, questioned about a crime that she had no knowledge of, and
had her phone ceased to be searched for evidence. She told The New York Times, I was having contractions in the holding cell. My back was sending me sharp pains. I was having spasms. I think I was probably having a panic attacked. And the reason that she knows all of this is because she's a nursing school student. I
was hurting sitting on those concrete benches. So she was charged with robbery and carjacking, released on one hundred thousand dollars bond, and when she was released on bond, went straight to the hospital where she was diagnosed with dehydration and had to be given two bags of ivy fluids.
A month later, in March, the Wayne County Prosecutor dismissed the case against her, and this week she filed a lawsuit for wrongful arrest against the City of Detroit in the US District Court of the Eastern District of Michigan. Portia is the sixth person to report being falsely accused of a crime because of facial recognition technology. All six
of these people have been black. Because we already know that facial recognition technology disproportionately misidentifies blackfaces, Portia Woodriff is the first woman reporting it. So basically what happened in this situation is that a man called the police to report that he had picked up a woman who he had been drinking with outside of a liquor store, and that this woman pulled out a gun, robbed him, and
stole his car. The police department uses a facial recognition vendor called data Works Plus to run unknown faces against a database of criminal mug shots. The system returns matches ranked by their likeliness of being the same person. A human analyst is ultimately responsible for deciding if any of
the matches are a potential suspect. The police report said that the crime analyst gave the investigator Portia Woodroff's name based on a match to a twenty fifteen mugshot that she had because she had been arrested for being pulled over while driving with an expired license. They then showed the victim six photos of black women, and the police say that he the victim picked out Portia Woodroff's picture.
If Portia gets her settlement, which she should, this would be the third case where the city would have to settle for folks who have been falsely arrested of a crime because of faulty facial recognition technology. The New York Times reports that on average, Detroit runs over one hundred and twenty five facial recognition searches a year, almost entirely
on black men. An attorney for the ACLU, who represented a man who was falsely arrested for shoplifting because of facial recognition technology, is trying to get Detroit to gree to collect more evidence in cases involving automated face searches to end what he called the facial recognition to line up pipeline so I need to be clear. It is not like we do not already know the dangers of
the use of this kind of technology. Doctor joy Bolomwini, researcher at MIT back in twenty eighteen, did a whole bunch of research showing that facial recognition technology routinely fails to accurately read the faces of marginalized people. There's an entire fascinating Netflix documentary about it called Hidden Bias. However, apparently police officers in Detroit have not seen this film
and have not heard of this research. This is a good example of how technology can really harm marginalized people and how we know when that technology is allowed to become commonplace. Anyway, it is a real problem, like there are real world consequences, and unfortunately this technology, despite being
knowingly faulty, is also becoming really commonplace. You have probably gone into venues that use facial recognition technology and might not have even known it, and that then used like Madison Square, Garden City Field, Cleveland's First Energy Stadium, Miami's Hard Rock Stadium, the Pachanga Arena in San Diego, and others used this technology on fans entering venues for concerts
and sporting events. I've heard horror stories like there was a story of a young girl who was being who her parents had dropped her off at a skating rink and I think it was in Chicago, and the skating rink happened to be using facial recognition technology it misidentified her as someone else, and the skating rink owners basically threw this girl into the night without her parents because they said that she was someone that she was not
based on this technology. There was another case with Madison Square Garden where an attorney who was representing the parent
group of Madison Square Garden. She was representing them and in a legal suit, but not directly involved with Madison Square Garden, just like their parent group, and that apparently that parent group has a rule where if you are not just one of the lawyers involved in a litigation against Madison Square Garden or their parent company, even if you are a lawyer who just works at that firm, you are not allowed to come into Madison Square Garden. And so she was taken her kid to like see
the rockets for Christmas. They stop, we're at the door and they say, we know you're an attorney and you can't come in. And so this technology is becoming more and more and more used and commonplace, even though we already know it is disproportionately misidentifying black folks, women and
folks of color. In fact, the organization Fight for Our Future organized a boycott led by musicians like Tom Morello of Rage against the machine of venues that utilize this technology, and they actually got smaller venues like House of Yes and Brooklyn one of my favorite spots, the Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles, and the Black Cat Here in DC. These smaller venues actually pledged not to use facial recognition
at their shows. But as this technology grows, I think these problems are going to become more and more pronounced and happened more and more often, with bigger and bigger consequences. It's one thing to not be let in for a concert. It's quite another to spend eleven days in jail when you're eight months pregnant.
The fact that she was so pregnant and had to spend like her eighth months of pregnancy in jail feels pretty It feels inhumane.
It does feel inhumane, And something that she said that kind of like broke my heart was that she said that she was as horrible as it was to be very pregnant in this holding cell for eleven hours, that she was kind of happy that she was so pregnant because at least it provided some kind of a seed of doubt to the police officers and investigators that this could not have been her, because the victim in the carjacting did not say that this person, the person who
did this to him, was pregnant, and so oh, it's pretty obvious when someone is eight months pregnant. So she said that as much as it was horrifying to her, which I'm sure it was, being pregnant, she believes it was almost kind of a saving grace because at least it's the police officers had put some doubt in their mind that they had the correct person.
Maybe we just need to figure out a way to move that doubt a little bit further up the causal chain of events and like not arrest the pregnant, innocent women from the beginning.
Yeah, I mean, that's what the lawsuit is calling for, that when facial recognition gives a match, doing actual police work and actual investigating to see if you have the right person before you arrest them and hold them for eleven hours, I said, actially if they're pregnant, but even if they're not that like, I think it might be a case where it's very easy to just rely on the technology because you have it and you can that cover of saying like this is why we arrested her,
right like the City of Detroit is saying like, oh, well, in this case, her arrest was actually warranted because of the situation, because the facial recognition technology said it was her. The victim picked her up and up picked her out on a lineup of six. But you know, anybody who's ever done one of those police lineups knows how faulty
those are too. So relying on two different faulty mechanisms facial recognition technology, which we know is faulty, and just a human being's ability to recognize faces at a moment that was probably like scary or traumatic. Just relying on those two things that are so faulty to lock somebody
up for eleven hours is not enough. And so I agree, I think that we need to have clearly, we need to have protocols in place where this kind of thing doesn't happen, and that human investigators are doing work, which I know and nobody likes to do extra work, but that you can't just cut horners when it's people's lives like this, And it sounds like that's happened too many
times in Detroit. But I think the fact that the powers that be are like, let's start using it first, make it commonplace first, and then the Kinks will reveal it. It seems like they're just saying that, like it's okay. The human cost, the human impact is just part of working at the Kinks. And if an eight month pregnant woman had to, you know, be dehydrated in a cell for an eleven hours, that's just the cost of getting on the road of perfectedness technology so that we can
have a pitch perfect digital surveillance state. The whole thing is like a big castle role of awful when I think about it that way. So speaking of a big cast role of awful, let's talk about Linda Yakarino, new CEO question Mark of Twitter. She had her first big splashy Boss of Twitter televised interview this week. By the way, you may have realized that we're not calling it X, We're calling it Twitter. I am going to continue calling
it Twitter. I think it will be funny if X doesn't take, and I'm doing my part to make sure that it does not, so we will continue to call it Twitter. I call Facebook Facebook for the most part. Every now and then, like if I'm reading a statement from the company, I'll slip into meta every now and then. But x's is not going to take. I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it.
Are you doing it?
I guess I'm trying, but it just feels so awkward that it feels weird every time I say X.
So basically, as you reported, a couple of months ago,
Linda Yacanaro was made Twitter's new CEO. It was a weird situation because during that time Twitter had like very big moves, like they changed the name, they announced the payouts, which we'll get to later, all of these big changes, and these changes seem to be from the outside, just Elon Musk's whims, and then Yak and Arrow would have to sort of play catch up and like have a very enthusiastic thread of tweets about whatever random change they
just made. It just did not seem like the behavior of someone who is the CEO of the company, which she supposedly is she often publicly anyway seemed to be like an afterthought, like she I remember the day that they announced the Twitter payouts, she posted like, oh, in order to be eligible for payouts, you have to have forty four million impressions a month or whatever, and then Elon Musk that same day said like, oh, well we're using internal metrics to determine who gets payouts. There's no
way to know who gets what publicly. And it's like, well, then why did she just tweet? Literally is something else? Like why didn't you at least tell her that? So she didn't tweet that? And then have you say something totally different and then it's like, okay, well my tweets has a completely different thing. Get on the same page. Basically, what I'm saying is that it did not seem like CEO behavior to me publicly, and so I was sort of like happy to see that she was doing some
kind of a public facing CEO ish interview. Let's talk about how it went. So you really don't need to watch the whole thing. There's really nothing too surprising that you need to see if you didn't watch it. Basically, Yack and Aro did a lot of spin around Twitter being a healthy place. It is very clear that she really wants brands to feel safe on the platform and
come back. Many brands have left Twitter rightly so since Elon Musk took over, because they probably don't want to see their advertising next to like, you know, slurs or hate speech or child sexual abuse material. So a lot of brands left the platform and took their advertising revenue with them. Yack and Arrow was really excited to talk about the fact that too big brands State Farm and
Coke have come back to the platform. Although funny enough Media Matters after this interview showed Coke and State Farm ads where it's like here here their ads are on the platform next to hate speech and harassment, like good job. And she really kept championing this idea of Twitter being a place force free expression like that was like she'd
probably said that three different times in this interview. As someone who has done a little bit of work around platforms and sort of how people think about platforms, researchers think about platforms, something that she did that I really want to call out is that she repeated a lot of made up metrics that truly mean nothing, like truly are meaningless. She said, I can considantly sit in front of you and say that ninety nine point nine percent
of all posted impressions are healthy. I don't know what that means. It's just it's like not a metric that any researcher would be like, Oh, sure, ninety nine point nine percent of all posted impressions are healthy. She just made that up, and it probably sounds good. It's probably something they're going to be using in their marketing to try to get brands back to the platform because it's
it's very it's a very brand safe platform. If you didn't know, like lots of healthy discussion and free expression is taking place there. Coke and State Farm and other advertisers, please come back, We love you. There was this exchange that I feel like is a pretty good example of the kind of say nothing pr tech spen that I'm talking about.
I can confidently sit in front of you and say that ninety nine zero point nine percent of how all posted impressions are healthy?
How do you define health? Say? Though? Is porn healthy? Are conspiracy theories healthy? You know?
It goes back to my point about our success with freedom of speech not reach, and if it's if it is lawful, but it's awful. It's extraordinarily difficult for you to see it. But how many millions of people follow Kanye West?
Lawful but awful and he's allowed back on.
You know, Kanye, who hasn't rejoined the platform yet but is planning to do so, will operate within the very specific policies that we have established that we're clear on that everyone who's watching this or listening on spaces can access themselves, and we have an extraordinary team of people who are overseeing, hands on keyboards, monitoring all day, every day to make sure that that ninety nine point nine to nine percent of impressions remain.
At that number.
But we also have to remember what's at the core of free expression. You might not agree with what everyone is saying. We want to make it a healthy debate and discourse, but free expression at its core will really really only survive when someone you don't agree with says something you don't agree with.
I mean, so, what are you what are your takeaways on that? Bet?
Oh, it was pretty empty. She used a lot of rhyming phrases.
The business world to Johnny cochrane.
Yeah, She was asked, how do you define that, and she responded, I think with another rhyme. At first she said ninety nine point nine percent of posts are healthy, which like, what does that mean that she says ninety nine point ninety nine percent, which further makes it seem like she's just making this number up. And it just sounded like very pr speech in a way that was like transparently, so like she wasn't even trying to make it seem like she was actually talking about these problems.
She sees no problems. From her point of view. She is they have solved all the problems, and it's just all about free speech, which to her means anybody can say anything.
So her obsession with free expression and open dialogue, healthy dialogue. I don't think that's really what we're talking about when we're talking about problems on platforms like Twitter. I don't think that anybody could say that they go on the platforms like Twitter and they only see takes they agree with. It's such a like false reality that like, oh, what people are upset about is that they're seeing takes that they don't agree with. But have you ever considered, dear user,
that that it's free to have speech? It's like, no, that's not really what people are upset about, Like me being called a slur is not on a pian that I don't agree with. Right, And here's an actual metric. According to Twitter's own API, usage of the N word on Twitter jump from about three hundred and ninety instances on October twenty sixth, twenty twenty two, before Elon took over to twenty seven thousand, seven hundred and six on November fifth, twenty twenty two, after Elon took over. So
that is an actual, tangible, specific metric. And that's what I'm talking about. If there are about thirty thousand people calling me a slur on the platform, that is not thirty thousand takes that I happen to not agree with.
That is not discourse, That is not free expression. And so she's doing this very tricky rhetorical thing where she's making it seem like people's complaints and concerns about the way Twitter is being moderated now is grounded from a place of not wanting to see opinions they don't agree with. Who owns any social media platform, ever, is only engaging with or seeing opinions they say they agree with. That's not what people are saying, and it's like this insistence
on digging into this false, self serving reality. Really it's just so obvious. I also think like the person interviewing her in this clip really did a good job of kind of trying to hold her accountable a little bit for some of the things that she was saying, like saying like, oh, we are going to be focusing on healthy speech on the platform. Kanye West tweeted a literal swastika and got his platform back, and so she's saying, oh, well,
he's going to be operating under specific rules. First of all, Kanye Kanye West is probably not doing anything that you expect him to be doing at this point. We all, it's all clear. What she's actually saying is that he will not be eligible for the revenue sharing model and that advertising won't be next to his tweets. But he still has millions and millions and millions of followers. He
has more followers than there are Jewish people worldwide. And so you're gonna tell me that when he tweets a swastika it's no big deal, because oh, don't worry, he's not going to it's not gonna be add sex to that like she speaks like somebody for whom the only thing she can think about. The only measure of success of this huge, important platform is whether or not brands are there, and that Kanye West using his millions of followers to tweet anti Semitic garbage is only a problem
inso much as it affects advertising. There's no other reason why one would have a problem with that.
The only other reasons that she articulates to you know, care about content moderation policies is to ensure that free speech is protected, like by her telling you know, we should welcome the opportunity to see swastikas and hate speech and slurs, right because it's like a difference of opinion, and that's valuable in itself, which which is just wrong, right, Like we we don't want that need to be rules for discourse in polite society, and hate speech has no place there.
But then stepping back about her saying like, oh, we want to foster healthy engagement and healthy dialogue on the platform. Ever since Twitter announced these payouts, which we have a big update about that for you at the end of the show. But the platform has just gotten it's gone from you know that you don't know. I don't know if you're familiar with the expression it's gone from worse to worser, if anything, like it's gone from from worse
to worser, if anything, it is. I have definitely seen an uptick in more accounts rage baiting and clickbaiting and outrage baiting because there is now a financial incentive to do so. You might not even ever get that check, hint, hint. But now that that that has been financially incentivized, I have seen more and more people give more and more asinine tweets that are just clearly meant to anger you
into engaging because they think that it is financially incentivized. Like, there was this account earlier this week that like posted a picture of a woman who runs a coffee truck in Vancouver, and she made a cute TikTok where she's like, Oh, I make my coffee and I like, I'm really polite
to everybody. And this guy, I guess, just because he didn't happen to find this woman like attractive, personally took her TikTok from TikTok, posted it on Twitter with like a mean comment, and the only thing this woman had done wrong was just like exists and like happened to put her existence on Twitter. And so it's like these kinds of things that are that are kind of relying on people like me replying and being like that's awful, how dare you like blah blah blah because they think
it will put money in their pocket. I saw this, like pretty well known right wing grifter doing that thing where he posted an image of a really sexy looking woman dressed in a UPS uniform and he tweeted it with the caption, you get a package and she's your delivery driver? What are you saying to her? And it's like just the lowest of the lowest quality engagement bait of like that you see on like your MEM's Facebook page. That I mean, that is not healthier discourse. That's not
better discourse. People being incentivized to have the worst or most obnoxious takes that they can to get people to engage with them so they can put money in their pocket is not making anybody's discourse healthier. It's just making us all more annoyed, myself specifically.
More After a.
Quick break, let's get right back into it.
Linda Yakarvino's Big first public interview as Twitter CEO was happening against kind of a weird backdrop. I have to give a little bit of a heads up for child abuse on this one, because the day before her big interview, Nick Pickles, who is the head of Global Government Affairs at Twitter, was grilled by the Australian Parliament about why Twitter restored the account of someone who shared a still
from childhood sexual abuse material. Remember that Elon Musk touted how he was going to crack down on childhood sexual abuse material on the platform and was like bolstering this zero tolerance policy, and then he actually criticized Twitter's Twitter's former leadership as being too busy censoring conservatives and speech to care about protecting children online. Well, now it sounds like the new policy is kind of like hmm, depends on the vibe. So a right wing social media influence.
Dominic McGee who goes by dom Luker, who has over a half a million followers on the platform and it's big into Cubanon posted an image from a well known child sexual abuse material video. He said that he posted these images to spread awareness about child trafficking. The still is from a video that is known to investigators. It's actually the specific video that led to the arrest of
Josh Dugger from the show nineteen Kids in Counting. The Washington Post reports that when this image was posted to Twitter, it got more than three million views and eight thousand retweets, and when he posted it to Twitter, he watermarked the image, which I feel like is a special kind of like you gotta be a real creep to do something like that.
Yeah.
So Nick Pickles, the head of Global Government Affairs at Twitter, basically said that he felt the person that shared that image did so because he was outraged by the image, which, again, that is not a zero to Laban's policy, right, That's not what a zero tolerance policy is. Pickles testified, quote, one of the challenges we see is, for example, people sharing this content out of outrage because they want to raise awareness of an issue and see something in the media.
So I guess I'll if you put like a sad face emog next to it, or like you're like this, like hate this, then like it's okay. You know, there is nothing in Twitter's terms of services says it's okay to share child sexual abuse material if the user is doing it because they're outraged or looking to quote raise awareness.
Uh.
The policy says viewing, sharing, or linking to child sexual exploitation material contributes to the revictimization of the depicted child, and it's one of the platform's most serious violations. And it's just beyond obvious that, regardless of anybody's intent, nobody should be sharing that kind of material ever, point blank,
full stop, end of sentence. And it really kind of goes back to something that came up in our interview with mind Miles Klee two weeks ago, the author of that Rolling Stone article about the trafficking movie Sound of Freedom, where so much is done to quote raise awareness, like, oh well, even if it's even if it's upsets you, it raises awareness and that's okay, And it's like, no, actually, it revictimizes the person depicted in this harmful image, and
it has no place. It's not discourse, it has no place in place society.
Yeah, and raises awareness towards what end. Like the field of public health is littered with failed awareness campaigns that did successfully raise awareness of something but achieved zero impact in like reducing the harm of it or reducing the scope of how many people it affected. So like, how does it help anyone to raise awareness of the specifics
of an image of childhood sexual abuse material. It just reinforces the idea that the people who are like deep down this rabbit hole of like fixation on trafficking, Like it just feels like a lot of them just kind of like it, right, Like it's like a smoke screen to share stuff.
Yeah, that came up in that mild Cley interview as well, that like that film is like very gratuitous, and so all these people who are like, we are trying to raise awareness about trafficking are also like watching a movie that kind of like has a gratuitous depiction of it. And so it's like, well, you're kind of consuming the thing with which you are saying repulses you in a way that is like very weird. And you know, this
idea of raising awareness. I don't think that people need to see an image from childhood sexual abuse material to know that that is wrong and that is bad. I truly don't think people to see that to have their aware. I think that most people already know it's wrong and horrible. I don't think that that image really helps change anybody's mind,
and in that interview with Linda Yakerino. I do think that, you know, the way that the tenor of that interview seem to me that folks are interested in asking pointed questions to get at what the truth is because they understand that this platform is so important to our discourse. And I think kind of in the same way that the tide is sort of turning around how we respond to big tech companies who want to be using us
and everything we do online to train their AI. I think that we're kind of seeing folks turn on Musk and the people in his orbit as well. Casey Newton published a piece over at platform Or called It's time to change how we cover Elon Musk. In it, he breaks down Musks many many, many many lies and calls for a shift and how journalists cover him kind of not totally dissimilar to Trump, Like how do you cover someone who lies so much? I mostly agree with the
substance of the piece. I have a couple of big quibbles. One is that Newton says that in business reporting, it is generally commonplace to take CEOs at their word and like not assume that they're just lying, bold faced lying to you. I would really push back on that. I would say, like, yeah, if you're lazy, Yeah, if you
like can't imagine a CEO ever lying or distorting the truth. Yeah, if you are caught up in the fact that this person has power and a company and money and access and privilege, and therefore us are bought into this idea that they are smart and worthy and valid and upstanding. Sure, maybe, but I think that for the most part, I don't when I'm if I'm talking to a CEO, I'm not gonna assume that CEO is automatically telling me the truth.
And it's also worth noting who, like which specific journalists take hucksters and liars like Elon Musk at their word, because I sure didn't right to cover Musk without mentioning his deep history of lies, his embrace, his open embrace of things like white supremacist talking points and eugenesis talking points, failing to pay his bills, fostering workplaces that foster sexism and racial mistreatment, cracking down on journalists and freedom of speech, etc. Etc. Etc.
Like union busting, like blaytant transphobia, all of that, choosing that those things are not part of the story and choosing to not to not include the men stories is a choice. It is not being objective, it is not being unbiased. It is a choice. And I do think that the tech press has spent a long time really not including these things that I believe are so at the core of who Elon Musk is, not just as a person, but as a leader as well, and they
basically helped him rise to power. They helped give him this reputation as a brilliant genius who you know, is playing three dimensional chests, who is so brilliant we could never fully understand the moves that he's making because he's just too smart, when in reality he's actually just like a wealthy manchild born on third base who thinks he hit a home run, right Like. I think that a lot of tech folks got really invested in this idea
of who Musk was telling them. By the time they opened their eyes to who Musk actually is and who he has been for a really long time, and who he has made clear time and time again who he is, I think they were like, oh wait, I have spent a long time not asking these questions, and so you know, I'm glad folks are getting there I do think the
tide is turning a little bit. I think that like the fact that this this big first interview of the new CEO wasn't just a cushy you know, Q and a about her rise to power whatever, but it was like real questions of substance about this platform that is so important to all of our lives and our democracy. I think it's it illustrates that, like the tide is
turning a little bit. And I guess I would just say this that if we are reaching a point where folks are more apt to be calling out Musk for who he is, I hope that when the next tech leader comes along selling us a lie and a dream or snake oil or giving us harm and a package, is that they've wrapped up and said it's good for us that we are not so quick to launder that that people with power and platforms really do the work of asking the question of like, who is this person really?
Not not who are they saying they are? Or who would it be nice if they were? Who are they really?
It's a good plan. I hope we do that. I don't know. I'm a little skeptical. I think we have got a long history of just really wanting to embrace hucksters and not just willingly but enthusiastically get behind the con that they're selling, because it's almost like a like a rising tide lifts all boats, like a self serving con serves everybody who gets behind it.
Yeah, until it doesn't, until it's revealed as a con. And like if your folks in Trump world, you start going to.
Jail, right, yeah, right, until it does it.
Okay. So one last thing, speaking of Elon's lives, one big update that we promised y'all is on those Twitter payouts. You might recall that Twitter promised they were going to start paying out on their ad revenue sharing program to people who drove AD dollars on the platform. People were posting screenshots of like thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars and they were meant to be getting from Twitter. And I was skeptical, We'll say that's the word I'll use.
I was skeptical because Elon, much like Cheat Whitfield from Real Housewives of Atlanta, who's sometimes known as Charay, she don't pay. Elon Musk does not pay his bills, just like sorry what Field.
Well, comparing Elon to charat.
I have a lot of questions from both of them, and most of them are like, did you are you gonna pay not to go? Don't get me on a Housewives tangent, but no, this is.
Why people tune into you because you can take the you know, the complicated digital things going on in the news and put them in terms that people understand.
Elon Musk is the Charae whitfield of technology. I'll stand by that.
You know, just like before you you were going through all of the things that he has done openly, repeatedly that journalists ignore when they cover him. Uh, and a lot of them, it's like, okay, you know, fostering a sexist and racist workplace. I can see how his people would be cool with that, but it really truly surprises me the extent to which people on the right seem totally fine with their like cult leaders, personality leaders just
not paying their bills. I really would have thought that that would be more of a problem for people on the right who were like the Party of like personal responsibility. According to them, it's not true, or like fiscal responsibility also not true. I guess it's all just like not true. But like these heroes who just openly don't pay their bills. It's surprising, it's so interesting.
I mean, I have a new philosophy on this where it is not fruitful to point out hypocrisy with some of these folks of like, well, if I was like a young person who was drowning in student loan debt, you would be like, pay your bills, You should pay your bills, personal responsibility, YadA, YadA, YadA. If I'm a billionaire and I have lots of money, but I don't pay my bills, it's like, oh, what an innovative strategy to cut down on costs squatting.
Yeah, somebody said it a while ago that their goal is a you know, they want the freedom to do what they want to do and also the freedom to tell you what to do.
It's just exactly.
Completely completely hypocritical, and it does nothing to point it out. And maybe Elon and Yagorino have already figured that out, and maybe they are ahead of us in their vision of an open discourse where uh, you know, there is no point in actually talking about inconsistencies and ideas or anything. It's just like free speech is just people yelling slurs at each other.
Well, why do you need to talk about things like inconsistencies or accountability when you've got a little thing that rhymes. You've got any but you've been practicing a little rhyme in the Mirror'll that'll get them?
She had two things at rhyme.
I'm like trying to talk to you and also rack my brain to come up with like a little rhyme.
Like if you could have come up with a little rhyme, it would double our listeners.
Okay, Lydia, give me a second. When Linda talks about the tweets, there are very few deats.
Oh that's good.
That's the best I can do on short notice. If anybody has a good rhyme out there, tell it. Tell it to me. I'm going to like memorize it and then drop it on the show as if I just came up with it, and then I will not give you credit. So that's help the homework. If that sounds appealing to you, let me know. Okay, So back to Chara, I mean elon so. On August fourth, Twitter put out a statement saying, quote, the volume of people signing up
for revenue sharing has exceeded our expectations. We previously said that payments would occur the week of July thirty. First, we need a bit more time to review everything for the next payout and hope to get all eligible accounts paid as soon as possible. So basically, like the last time, they were like within seventy two hours, it was like a very specific time frame, and now they're like, look, I ain't got it, So do you want me to say you're time.
We're gonna pay you as soon as possible.
Listen, I am very familiar with the language of somebody who like owes money but they don't have it, So like I definitely recognize this, Like, oh, what he needs to say is like come up with some sort of convoluted story, convoluted but detailed story of like, well, so I was going out to put the checks in the mail, and I remember because it was raining and so I had to get my coat. And when I went out to get my coat, I realized, you got to come
up with some sort of like convoluted, detailed story. Don't just be like mmm, it's taking and I love how it's like because so many people were interested in this like program, so many of you loved it and could see that it was lucrative and worth your time. Now because of all of that interest, you know what, Holy shit, that's exactly See what Charay said about why her She Buy Charret website didn't work. She was like, too many people were interested in it, and it crashed the website.
So when you went to her website, when she launched her line, her website didn't work. And everybody on the show was like, you know, took you all this time to launch this brand and your website doesn't work, And she was like, oh well, there was so much interest it crashed. It's actually a good thing. There's this I'm gonna this is this comparison is apt. This comparison is apt.
X bite Elon Yes, like.
I would I see a charae Elon Musk collab in the future. So if you are owed money from Elon Musk, the check's not in the mail. Basically, you're not getting it. Just like I said, I knew it. I knew he wasn't gonna pay all. It sounds like he did pay out like a select handful of right wing influencers, but did not pay the vast majority of them. I think that he's thinking that people will see these big numbers and be like I'm gonna join, but there's the pot
of money is like empty. Just today this week they were selling off not just old Twitter memorabilia with birds on it, but also couches and stuff, so like not just now off brand stuff, all their furniture. That is not the behavior of somebody who has this big pot of money to pay people out. Yeah. So if he owes you money, I don't know, don't bank on it. This is not the behavior of somebody who has the money to pay.
Yeah. Their whole thing is that they like don't have any money. They're leveraged up to their eyeballs. They're losing all their advertisers and revenue. Yeah, paying out a bunch of people doesn't really help that.
Yeah, well, I will say, at least Charet Whitfield, when like push comes to shove, you can like back her into a corner. She will pay. It takes some work, but she'll pay eventually. Elon Musk comes on a thing or two about about life from Surey Whitfield.
Yeah, I'm still waiting for those ex joggers.
Joggers, we're doing joggers. People who don't watch househongs are like what the hell are you talking about? I also have a little bit more to say, specifically about the tory Lands trial for shooting Megna Stallion on how disinformation played a role on that. Do you want to hear that? You can find it on Patreon at patreon dot com, slash tangoty, where you can get ad free content and support the show. Mike, thank you so much for riunning
down these stories with me. As always, thank you for listening. If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our March 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 tengody 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 Time. 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.
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