Speaker 1: As Media.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed Zichron.
Speaker 1: What.
Speaker 2: It's been a shitty week for many obvious reasons, and
Speaker 2: I challenge you at this time to be kind to
Speaker 2: yourself and to the people around you. Be kinder, old,
Speaker 2: I'm closer, be more supportive, say nicer things. But specifically
Speaker 2: to my trans listeners, I love you, You're loved and accepted.
Speaker 2: Fuck these people, Fuck the Executive Order. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2: And anyone who agrees with the that EO or is
Speaker 2: against trans people, you can go fuck yourself. Like I
Speaker 2: need you to download something else, go and do something
Speaker 2: else with your time. I'm not interested in helping you.
Speaker 2: You are not my friend. You will never be my friend.
Speaker 2: If you're against trans people, I'm against you. Anyway, back
Speaker 2: to the podcast. So, I've been back from CEES for
Speaker 2: a week now and I'm finally recovering. And I appreciate
Speaker 2: everybody who listened to the thirteen and a half hours
Speaker 2: of audio we put out, and a big thank you
Speaker 2: to the whole team there, Edward and Gwayso Junior, David Roth,
Speaker 2: Phil Broughton, Matt Sowski and everyone else who came along.
Speaker 2: Now we're back to our regular format, and it's likely
Speaker 2: going to be a rotation between more of the talk
Speaker 2: radio stuff you heard at cees and then heard with
Speaker 2: Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis, and then stuff like this
Speaker 2: spoken word. I'm back baby. But twenty twenty five it's
Speaker 2: going to be a chaotic year. You're going to feel
Speaker 2: a deficit of hope. I've said this before, but I'm
Speaker 2: going to say it again. The best thing you can
Speaker 2: do right now is to hold those people you love closer,
Speaker 2: Treat everyone around you, like I said, a little more kindly,
Speaker 2: Listen more keenly to the things that people are saying,
Speaker 2: and put your heart and soul into the things you
Speaker 2: do and the things you do for others. You may
Speaker 2: not be able to change much at scale, but you
Speaker 2: can improve your immediate orbit the bubble around you.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: In this week's two parter, I'm going to talk to
Speaker 2: you about the people who choose to do the direct opposite.
Speaker 2: They use their power on their platform to exploit and
Speaker 2: hurt people for money, or they use another platform to
Speaker 2: help maintain the status quo, usually at the cost of
Speaker 2: other people's happiness. You see, in the last few weeks,
Speaker 2: we've seen the emergence of what I call the true
Speaker 2: Meta and of course the true Mark Zuckerberg As the
Speaker 2: company chose to end its fact checking program in early January,
Speaker 2: claiming that and I quote fact checkers have been too
Speaker 2: politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created
Speaker 2: on both Instagram and Facebook, the latter of which are
Speaker 2: shown in a study from George Washington University to by
Speaker 2: design and I quote again afford anti vaccine content producers
Speaker 2: several means to circumvent the intent of misinformation removal policies.
Speaker 2: Metas also killed its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, something
Speaker 2: that I expect other tech firms to copy, unrestrained by
Speaker 2: any kind of societal norms under an administration that seems
Speaker 2: intent on destroying as many of them as possible. Shortly
Speaker 2: after announcing the policies, Zuckerberg went on the Joe Rogan
Speaker 2: experience and had what I would describe as a full
Speaker 2: scale pissfit, claiming that corporate are culturally newted and that
Speaker 2: companies should have both more masculine energy and have a
Speaker 2: culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more, and then
Speaker 2: he added that said culture would have its own merits
Speaker 2: that are really positive. I none of this means anything.
Speaker 2: Zuckerberg also believes that the modern corporate culture has somehow
Speaker 2: framed masculinity is bad, something that he doesn't really attempt
Speaker 2: to elaborate on or explain or frame with any kind
Speaker 2: of evidence because he's on the Joe Rogan experience, and
Speaker 2: because he also knows no one's going to fucking ask him.
Speaker 2: And it's it's just this kind of directionless grievance, and
Speaker 2: it feels me full of piss and vinegar myself. And
Speaker 2: this means, by the way, that Metin has now and
Speaker 2: I quote their own announcement, gotten rid of a number
Speaker 2: of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity, and gender
Speaker 2: that are subject to frequent political discourse and debate, which
Speaker 2: in practice means that Meta now allows you to say
Speaker 2: that being gay as a mental illness, or describe immigrants
Speaker 2: as filth and as an immigrant. I find that disgusting.
Speaker 2: I find all of this so fucking disgusting. They, as
Speaker 2: I'll get to in this episode, they never really cared
Speaker 2: that much. But to formalize this stuff is so utterly hurtful.
Speaker 2: It's a template for worse people. And Facebook of Meta
Speaker 2: is right down at the fucking bottom of a barrel.
Speaker 2: This is going to give other companies something to borrow.
Speaker 2: And it's just when I read this stuff, I just
Speaker 2: I hear the Perry Mason music from kill Bill. Anyway,
Speaker 2: moving on with the episode. Now, surprise here, Casey Newton,
Speaker 2: a platformer who I have been deeply critical of and
Speaker 2: will be very critical of in a later episode, has
Speaker 2: done a really excellent job reporting on exactly how horrifying
Speaker 2: these policies are, revealing how Meta's internal guidelines allow Facebook
Speaker 2: users to say that trans people are both mentally ill
Speaker 2: and don't exist. Which, to be clear, if you're listening
Speaker 2: to this and saying that you agree with that, I'd
Speaker 2: like you to stop listening for a second. I'd like
Speaker 2: you to get your car keys of you to close
Speaker 2: your garage, don and I'd like you to start the
Speaker 2: fucking ignition just in case it's really it's not clear
Speaker 2: enough how I feel about anti trans people. It also
Speaker 2: included one of the most wretched things I've ever read.
Speaker 2: Alex Schultz Meta CMO, who is a gay man, suggested
Speaker 2: in an internal post that people seeing their queer friends
Speaker 2: and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead
Speaker 2: to increased support for LGBTQ rights. This is, and I
Speaker 2: don't say this lightly, one of the most disgusting and
Speaker 2: offensive and stupid things I've ever heard a tech executive say.
Speaker 2: But let's be abundantly clear, this is exactly the kind
Speaker 2: of social network that Mark Zuckerberg wants, an unrestrained, unfiltered,
Speaker 2: unrepentantly toxic, and noxiously heteronormative, one untethered by the frustrating
Speaker 2: norms of making sure that a social network of billions
Speaker 2: of people doesn't actively encourage hate of multiple different marginalized groups.
Speaker 2: And I am so angry about this because it's all
Speaker 2: so needless. It's all so needless. But everything, everything, has
Speaker 2: to be thrown into the fire for growth. That's who
Speaker 2: these fucking people are. But dear Listena, don't worry Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 2: He's finally free. Finally, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of
Speaker 2: Meta can do whatever he wants, as opposed to the
Speaker 2: past twenty years, where it's hard to argue that he's
Speaker 2: one of the most, if not the single, most punished
Speaker 2: man alive. You see Marky Marx net worth recently hit
Speaker 2: two hundred and thirteen billion dollars. He's running a company
Speaker 2: with a market capitalization of one point five trillion, and
Speaker 2: he can never be fired from it. He even owns
Speaker 2: a fourteen hundred acre compound in Hawaii, And while dealing
Speaker 2: with all of this suffering, he had to once, sorry,
Speaker 2: I mean twice, sit in front of a Senate hearing
Speaker 2: and lazily apologize for something non specifically he was tortured,
Speaker 2: tortured only six years after having done it last. I
Speaker 2: am being very sarcastic. Obviously this man has not suffered.
Speaker 2: I don't want to say the next part of that sentence,
Speaker 2: but he's not suffered at all. He's had the easiest
Speaker 2: go of it, just like the rest of these fucking people.
Speaker 2: Few living people have had it easier than Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 2: He's a man insulated from consequence, risk, and responsibilit and
Speaker 2: he has been for like twenty years. The sudden and
Speaker 2: warranted alarm to this, by the way, and I will
Speaker 2: say the media has acted with enough alarm here. Here's
Speaker 2: this air of surprise, though it frames Meta and Mark
Speaker 2: Zuckerberg like they just suddenly were like, hmm, what if
Speaker 2: we were super bigoted? What if our new network could
Speaker 2: what if it could be more racist. We need to
Speaker 2: please Donald Trump, because that's not what Meta has been
Speaker 2: doing before, right, They've never been Well, we'll get to
Speaker 2: that in a bit, but I kind of want to
Speaker 2: take you back in memory lane a bit a long
Speaker 2: time ago, by which I mean August twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: The people in the media today saying, oh wow, Mark
Speaker 2: Zuckerberg has suddenly gone conservative, He's suddenly right wing. Me
Speaker 2: months ago, they were fawning over this guy. They were
Speaker 2: fawning over his new look. They were desperate to hear
Speaker 2: about his gold chains and why he was wearing them,
Speaker 2: and they declared that he had the swagger of a
Speaker 2: Roman emperor, and that he had and I quote the
Speaker 2: Washington Post here, transformed himself from a dorky democracy destroying
Speaker 2: CEO into a dripped out, jacked AI accelerationist. In the
Speaker 2: eyes of potential Meta recruits, Zuckerberg was, until these last
Speaker 2: few weeks, being celebrated for the very thing that people
Speaker 2: are upset about right now. Flimsy, self conscious and performative
Speaker 2: matro bullshit that only signifies strength to weak men and
Speaker 2: those credulous enough to accept it, which in this case
Speaker 2: means almost every media outlet. The only difference between then,
Speaker 2: when Mark was with his chains in his big baggy
Speaker 2: T shirt and he looked like Kevin Fedline and now
Speaker 2: is that Mark Zuckerberg has finally decided to be honest
Speaker 2: after all. Where was the punishment or judgment for his
Speaker 2: last matro media bullshit? If anything, it kind of proved
Speaker 2: that anyone will accept anything that Mark Zuckerberg does at all.
Speaker 3: Yet, I really want to be clear that what.
Speaker 2: We're seeing with Meta and by extension, Zuck is not
Speaker 2: sudden at all. It's the direct result of a man
Speaker 2: that has never ever ever been held in check. It's
Speaker 2: utter fantasy to describe or even hint that these changes
Speaker 2: are the beginning of some sort of unrestrained Meta rather
Speaker 2: than part of the intentional destruction of this product and
Speaker 2: all of their products in the market. Leader of rot economics,
Speaker 2: this is the rot economy. This is everything I've been
Speaker 2: telling you about growth at all costs. Except the costs
Speaker 2: now are the safety of trans people, a safety of
Speaker 2: LGBTQ people, the safety of immigrants. This hostile network that
Speaker 2: was already pretty hostile, and I will get to that
Speaker 2: is now basically saying thumbs up, go nuts, be as
Speaker 2: bigoted as your fucking one. It's disgraceful. And as I
Speaker 2: said in the middle of last year, Metas spent years
Speaker 2: gradually making the experience of its products worse in pursuit
Speaker 2: of perpetual growth. And if you go back to the
Speaker 2: people Destroying Facebook that podcast episode that was actually from
Speaker 2: Mark Zuckerberg, you wanted something like twelve to fourteen percent
Speaker 2: perpetual year of a year growth. Insane stuff. But when
Speaker 2: I say intentionally, I mean the product decisions like limiting
Speaker 2: the information in notifications as a means of making users
Speaker 2: click more and go around the page rather than I
Speaker 2: don't know, being notified of something and knowing something, or
Speaker 2: heavily promoting clickbait articles. This was all to keep people
Speaker 2: on the site longer, and they've been doing it for
Speaker 2: years in broad daylight, and it's led to this deterioration
Speaker 2: of Facebook and soon Instagram that is just disgraceful, but
Speaker 2: not as disgraceful as formalizing horrible hate field policies. And
Speaker 2: some are touting Zuckerberg's current move as some sort of
Speaker 2: master plan to appease Donald Trump and the conservatives, and
Speaker 2: they're suggesting that this is a magification of these platforms
Speaker 2: where conservatives will somehow be given I don't know, preferential treatment.
Speaker 2: Perhaps maybe like Facebook's algorithm, it could promote more conservative content. Man,
Speaker 2: wouldn't that be really bad? Wouldn't it be bad if
Speaker 2: Facebook's algorithm was intentionally and repeatedly recommending conservative content. It's
Speaker 2: been doing it for fucking years. Why are we pretending
Speaker 2: like this is new? Why is everyone acting like this
Speaker 2: is new? On going insane? I am actually going in
Speaker 2: ain't because the actual problems here have been there a while.
Speaker 2: The only thing that's changed is they formalize them.
Speaker 3: And I am so.
Speaker 2: Angry in this episode because I can't leave these people unaccountable.
Speaker 2: I cannot have people that wrote about this pretend like
Speaker 2: this is new, like this is sudden. It's time for
Speaker 2: everyone in the media to take a little bit of
Speaker 2: fucking responsibility for what we've done. But give me a second, though,
Speaker 2: I actually want to lead you through someone who did
Speaker 2: a pretty good job. And you're not gonna believe me,
Speaker 2: but it's Kevin Russ of The New York Times.
Speaker 3: You see.
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty, Russ created an automated Twitter account called
Speaker 2: Facebook's top ten listening the top performing posts, So what
Speaker 2: post was shared, viewed, and commented on the most on
Speaker 2: Facebook by US Facebook pages, and he posted it on
Speaker 2: a daily basis. He was able to do this using
Speaker 2: something called crowd Tangle, a data analytics tool provided by
Speaker 2: Facebook specifically for researchers and journalists to understand what was
Speaker 2: happening on the world's largest social network at the time.
Speaker 2: Ruce's reporting revealed that Meta's top performing links regularly skewed
Speaker 2: toward right wing influences like Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro, and
Speaker 2: Sean Hannity, as well as outlets like Fox News and
Speaker 2: the page of then President and I guess now President
Speaker 2: Donald Trump. Internally, Meta was kind of freaking out, suggesting
Speaker 2: that Ruth wasn't really getting what it meant because engagement
Speaker 2: was a misleading measurement of what was popular on Facebook.
Speaker 2: They suggested that the real litmus test was something called reach,
Speaker 2: as in how many people actually saw a post. Ruce
Speaker 2: also reported that the internal arguments of Meta led it
Speaker 2: to suggest it'd make a separate Twitter account of its
Speaker 2: own that had what they would call a more balanced
Speaker 2: view of its internal data, which one hundred percent makes sense.
Speaker 2: Meha even suggested the obvious answer sharing reach data, as in,
Speaker 2: again how many people actually saw a post, and that
Speaker 2: this would somehow vindercate their position. One nasty little detail
Speaker 2: bone crowd Tangle CEO told them that well foursome misleading
Speaker 2: news stories also rise to the top of the reach list.
Speaker 2: In simpler terms, they didn't share the reach data because
Speaker 2: it would prove that Facebook was in fact a misinformation machine.
Speaker 2: The reporting around crowd Tangle, though, danced around in important detail.
Speaker 2: They were just talking about posts and you know, these
Speaker 2: are just the posts that happened to be on Facebook, right,
Speaker 2: It just happens that Dan Bongino got to the top
Speaker 2: all of these times. How did that happen? Well, let
Speaker 2: me tell you how it fucking happened. They were likely
Speaker 2: recommended by Facebook's algorithm, which is reliably and repeatedly skewed
Speaker 2: conservative for years. A study in the Economist from September
Speaker 2: twenty twenty found that the most popular American media outlets
Speaker 2: on Facebook in a one month period were Breitbart and
Speaker 2: Fox News, and that both Facebook page engagements and website
Speaker 2: used heavily skewed conservative. This is quite old that this
Speaker 2: has been happening a while.
Speaker 3: Well, one could.
Speaker 2: Argue that this might just be the will of the users.
Speaker 2: What a user sees on face. This book is almost
Speaker 2: entirely algorithmic now, and it certainly was back then, and
Speaker 2: it's reasonable to assume that said algorithm was deliberately pushing
Speaker 2: conservative content. At this time, metas head of public policy
Speaker 2: was Joel Kaplan, a man whose previous work involved working
Speaker 2: as George W. Bush's deputy chief of staff for policy,
Speaker 2: as well as handling public policy and affairs for Energy
Speaker 2: Future Holdings.
Speaker 3: Really fucked up little story for you.
Speaker 2: This was a company, a private equity firm, kind of
Speaker 2: Katamari situation, which brought up a giant Texas power company
Speaker 2: called TXU forty five billion dollars and then immediately steered
Speaker 2: it into bankruptcy due to the thirty eight point seven
Speaker 2: billion dollars in debt that Energy Future Holdings was forced
Speaker 2: to take on as a means of acquiring the power company.
Speaker 2: It's private equity again. It's always fucking private Jesus Christ. Anyway,
Speaker 2: this is the now, the policy headed META, and he
Speaker 2: has been four years.
Speaker 3: It's all very good anyway.
Speaker 2: Jeff Horwitz reported in his wonderful book Broken Code that
Speaker 2: Kaplan personally intervened when Facebook's health team attempted to remove
Speaker 2: covid conspiracy movie plan from its recommendation engine, and Facebook
Speaker 2: only did so once Kevin Roos reported that it was
Speaker 2: the most engaged link in a twenty four hour period. Naturally,
Speaker 2: Met's choice wasn't to fix things, or improve things, or
Speaker 2: take responsibility or issue were comments saying hard we're going
Speaker 2: to look into the conservative thing. No, no, no, why
Speaker 2: would they do that. By the end of twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: Meta had disbanded the entire crowd Tangle team, and in
Speaker 2: early twenty twenty two, the company had stopped registering new
Speaker 2: users for crowd Tangle. In early twenty twenty four, months
Speaker 2: before the twenty twenty four elections, crowd Tangle was shut
Speaker 2: down entirely, though Facebook Top ten had stopped working in
Speaker 2: the middle of twenty twenty three. What I'm getting at
Speaker 2: is that Meta hasn't made a right wing turn. Meta
Speaker 2: has been an active arm of the right wing media
Speaker 2: for nearly a decade, actively empowering noxious, horrifying creatures like
Speaker 2: Alex Jones, allowing him to evade bands and build massive
Speaker 2: private online groups on the platform so that he could
Speaker 2: still send his shit out even when he was banned.
Speaker 2: A report from November twenty twenty one by medium Mattters
Speaker 2: found that Facebook had tweaked its news algorithm into twenty
Speaker 2: one to help right leaning news and political pages to
Speaker 2: outperform other pages using and I quote sensational and divisive content.
Speaker 2: Another medium Matters report from twenty twenty three found that
Speaker 2: conservatives were continually earning more total interactions than left or
Speaker 2: non aligned pages between January first, twenty twenty and December
Speaker 2: thirty one, twenty twenty two, even as the company was
Speaker 2: actively deprioritizing political content, by which I mean the algorithm
Speaker 2: was allegedly showing year less politics unless, of course, you
Speaker 2: were conservative. A report from last year from nonprofit Glad
Speaker 2: found that Meta had continually allowed widespread anti trans hate
Speaker 2: content across Instagram, Facebook, and threads, but the company either
Speaker 2: claiming that the content didn't violate its community standards or
Speaker 2: just ignoring the reports entirely. While we can and should
Speaker 2: actively decry mes disgraceful new policies, it's kind of ahistorical
Speaker 2: to pretend that this company gave a shit in the past,
Speaker 2: or took it seriously, or just that they cared. It
Speaker 2: pisses me off because if we act now like they've changed,
Speaker 2: they don't get held accountable at all. But then again,
Speaker 2: did they before? Have they ever been held accountable? Oh no,
Speaker 2: the answer is no. By the way, there are reporters
Speaker 2: who have done really good work on this, Russ Kevin Rus,
Speaker 2: who've given a lot of shit. He did some really
Speaker 2: great reporting on crowd tankled Jeff Horwitz from the Wall
Speaker 2: Street Journal, along with the other tea but did the
Speaker 2: Facebook files, which get too later. There are people doing
Speaker 2: great work. The problem is there's just this kind of
Speaker 2: weak and inconsistent approach that the media has taken to
Speaker 2: Meta and to Mark Zuckerberg, and none of these changes,
Speaker 2: none of these things that I'm saying here are particularly
Speaker 2: hard to find. If you look this up, you could say, hey,
Speaker 2: look exactly as I am right now. Hey, this doesn't
Speaker 2: seem to be a new policy. This just seems to
Speaker 2: be them deciding to formalize their lack of effort to
Speaker 2: protect trans people, their lack of effort to stop conservative
Speaker 2: demagogues doing stuff. I mean, it's just it's frustrating. It's
Speaker 2: frustrating and annoying, and seeing them formalize it fills me
Speaker 2: full of poison in my veins. It's just it's hateful,
Speaker 2: it's racist, it's violent, it's cruel, it's bigoted, and it's
Speaker 2: how it's been for so long.
Speaker 3: Why are we not just able to call these people
Speaker 3: what they are?
Speaker 2: And they really will do whatever they want to or
Speaker 2: need to for growth. And I'm going to quote something here.
Speaker 3: I'm going to.
Speaker 2: Quote Facebook's old vice president Andrew Bosworth from an internal
Speaker 2: email from twenty seventeen. I've may have mentioned before, and
Speaker 2: I quote all the work that Facebook does in growth
Speaker 2: is justified, even if it's bullying or a terrorist attack
Speaker 2: carried out on their platform. And yes, that's exactly what
Speaker 2: he said, by the way. And you'd think a guy
Speaker 2: who's like, yeah, you know, growth just we need to
Speaker 2: grow at all costs. And indeed, if something bad happens
Speaker 2: as a result, at least we connected people. You'd think
Speaker 2: that a letter like that getting out was in twenty seventeen, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that would lead to him being probably putting a naughty box.
Speaker 2: I won't get promoted, would he. He wouldn't become the
Speaker 2: chief technology officer, would he? Because that's what Andrew Bosworth is. Now,
Speaker 2: this is what this company is. It's time to stop
Speaker 2: pretending that Meta was ever something noble or good or
Speaker 2: well meaning. Mark Zuckerberg is a repressed coward as far
Speaker 2: from manly as one can get. Because true masculinity, if
Speaker 2: you can even fully I don't even know if you
Speaker 2: can really give it a full definition, but I will
Speaker 2: tell you what is masculine. It's a sense of responsibility
Speaker 2: for both oneself and others and the things that we do,
Speaker 2: and finding strength in supporting, en uplifting those close to you,
Speaker 2: and loving more and caring.
Speaker 3: More for people.
Speaker 2: I don't really want to put down a hard and
Speaker 2: fast one, but that's part of what masculinity is for me.
Speaker 2: It isn't being a fucking crybaby billionaire going on Joe
Speaker 2: row and going where oom oh the company's not masculine enough. Coward, motherfucker.
Speaker 2: It's disgusting and Meta as an institution has been rotten
Speaker 2: for years, making trillions of dollars as it continually makes
Speaker 2: their services work, all to force users to spend more
Speaker 2: time on the site, even if it's because Facebook and
Speaker 2: Instagram are our engineered to interrupt everything you're doing, your
Speaker 2: decision making, your autonomy with a constant slew of different
Speaker 2: forms of sponsored and algorithmically curated crap. The quality of
Speaker 2: the experience, something the media has categorically failed to cover,
Speaker 2: has never been lower on Facebook or Instagram. I'm not
Speaker 2: sure how anyone writing about this company for the last
Speaker 2: few years has been able to do so with a
Speaker 2: straight face. The products suck, They're getting worse, and yet
Speaker 2: the company has never been more profitable. Facebook is crammed
Speaker 2: with fake accounts, AI generated crap and nonsense, groups teaming
Speaker 2: with boomers pushing stupid greeny memes that say I wish
Speaker 2: we had can to a culture of respect, as they
Speaker 2: recommended their third racist meme of the day. Instagram is
Speaker 2: a carousel of screen filling, sponsored nonsense and recommended crap,
Speaker 2: and users are constantly battling with these products to actually
Speaker 2: see the things that they log on to see. I
Speaker 2: want to be explicit here. I do not believe enough
Speaker 2: reporting is being done into the fact that Facebook is,
Speaker 2: as a product both bordering on useless and run in
Speaker 2: such a way that it's actively harmful for society. Some
Speaker 2: important facts to begin with are that the initial feed
Speaker 2: on Facebook is totally algorithmic, with large chunks of the
Speaker 2: screen taken up by stuff that Facebook pushes on you.
Speaker 2: We don't really know how their algorithm works, after all,
Speaker 2: not like there's any legislation or regulation that requires them
Speaker 2: to disclose it, but we do know that it's built
Speaker 2: to get people to engage with the content, even if
Speaker 2: said content is low quality in send, or a racist
Speaker 2: or misleading. The biggest thing to know about the modern
Speaker 2: Facebook experience, and I must be really clear here, is
Speaker 2: that it's effectively unmoderated. I refer to Jeff Horwitz's Broken
Speaker 2: Code earlier. It's a really powerful book. Everybody should read
Speaker 2: it because it's the most clear eyed view of how
Speaker 2: bad this company has been and for how long it's
Speaker 2: been this bad. But the big thing that Jeff brings
Speaker 2: up is that everything internally at Facebook is about remove friction.
Speaker 2: Now you may think, I mean, oh, so that would
Speaker 2: make a really good experience. No, Removing friction in this
Speaker 2: case means allowing people to post whatever they want. Groups
Speaker 2: that are giant scams which I'll get too soon, or
Speaker 2: just nonsense, groups that spread misinformation, fake sports news memes
Speaker 2: that make people pissed off and more racist. And some
Speaker 2: of the shit I've seen on Facebook going back years
Speaker 2: is horrifying. And while there are mechanisms that Meta has
Speaker 2: in place to stop outright illegal things like pornography and violence. Effectively,
Speaker 2: anything else is fair game. I have in preparing this script,
Speaker 2: found fifty different groups that are nakedly scamming users, each
Speaker 2: one with anywhere from one thousand to eighteen thousand different members,
Speaker 2: each trying to work out why they can't access things
Speaker 2: like their Facebook or PayPal account. And finding these groups
Speaker 2: is super easy. Just type Facebook support and scroll down
Speaker 2: into the search bar at the top of your Facebook account.
Speaker 2: And by the way, the scam's fairly simple. People go
Speaker 2: into these groups that are like, oh, I can't access Facebook.
Speaker 2: They are on Facebook at the time, but perhaps they're
Speaker 2: just locked into the app, and they go in there
Speaker 2: and they say, hey, I need help, I need help
Speaker 2: getting back in, and usually a scammer from the Global
Speaker 2: South will be there and say, yeah, message me. They
Speaker 2: get their password, they get their email, they get access
Speaker 2: to something else, and then they start stealing shit. And
Speaker 2: I really must be clear how easy it is to
Speaker 2: find these scam groups and how many people are very
Speaker 2: clearly falling into them. It's really worrying, and it's kind
Speaker 2: of stomach turning as well, and it's time to accept
Speaker 2: the Facebook has become a kind of open sewer run
Speaker 2: with a complete disregard for the user. It's constantly battering
Speaker 2: them with sponsored and recommended content as a means of
Speaker 2: keeping them on the site for longer. The longer a
Speaker 2: user interacts with the site, the more advertising impressions they're shown,
Speaker 2: and in turn they make more money for Facebook and Meta,
Speaker 2: even if there's not really a service being provided. And
Speaker 2: you may think keeping someone on the site that means
Speaker 2: giving them something they want, right negative, it means getting
Speaker 2: in the way of the thing they want, putting a
Speaker 2: bunch of things, jump over little obstacle. Course, it's extremely
Speaker 2: annoying and pisses me off daily. Now, kind of like
Speaker 2: in the episodes that did at the end of twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four, I'm going to walk you through very practically
Speaker 2: the experience of going through Facebook. I want you to
Speaker 2: have as close to a play by play as hu
Speaker 2: mainly possible, because I want you to understand how fucked
Speaker 2: up this website is.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: Okay, you open your Facebook app and you immediately see
Speaker 2: a pop up for stories, kind of the Instagram thing
Speaker 2: where you click them through and there's an entire phone
Speaker 2: screen filling video. But once you've watched some of those,
Speaker 2: you scroll down. You see one post from someone you know,
Speaker 2: then a giant ad that takes up a third of
Speaker 2: your screen and a carousel of people you may know,
Speaker 2: Then a post from a page you don't follow, then
Speaker 2: a series of recommended reels that show a two second
Speaker 2: clip on repeat of what you might see, but not
Speaker 2: enough for you to actually get an idea if the
Speaker 2: video will be good, so that you click through more
Speaker 2: advertising impressions, then another ad, then three posts from a
Speaker 2: page you don't follow, then another ad, and I find
Speaker 2: my app is hitching as I scroll too fast. It's
Speaker 2: kind of getting a bit clunky. So I think, what
Speaker 2: would someone do if they needed help? Though, So I
Speaker 2: decided to search for Facebook Support, which leads you to
Speaker 2: a thin banner for Facebook Support the top. It's like
Speaker 2: a maybe a half inch banner, and then below that
Speaker 2: is this giant, quarter screen long sponsored post about Facebook
Speaker 2: and I quote bringing your community together. And this, by
Speaker 2: the way, has nothing to do with support, it's a
Speaker 2: completely different thing. And then you get a selection of
Speaker 2: groups blow them, the first of which is called Facebook Support,
Speaker 2: with eighteen thousand members, including a support number one eight,
Speaker 2: one hundred and eighth four nine three ninety six that
Speaker 2: does not work. The group is full of posts about
Speaker 2: people having issues with Facebook, with one by an admin
Speaker 2: called Oliver Green telling everyone that this group is where
Speaker 2: they can and I quote discuss issues and provide assistance
Speaker 2: and solutions to them. By the way, Olive Green's avatar
Speaker 2: is actually a picture of political writer Oliver Darcy. It's
Speaker 2: extremely fucking strange.
Speaker 3: Anyway.
Speaker 2: One post on there says, and I quote, please don't
Speaker 2: respond to messages from my Facebook comma I was hacked,
Speaker 2: with one responder called deca tech fix, asking when was
Speaker 2: it hacked and asking them to message him now for
Speaker 2: a quick recovery of an account that they appeared to
Speaker 2: be posting with. Another where a user says someone hacked
Speaker 2: my Facebook and changed all password is responded to by
Speaker 2: another account called retech Man, who adds inbox me now
Speaker 2: for help. Another where someone also says that they were hacked,
Speaker 2: has another account James Miles, responding saying message me privately.
Speaker 2: There are hundreds of interactions like these. Seriously, just go
Speaker 2: on this site and look, go and look. Type in
Speaker 2: Facebook support is completely insane. This site makes them so
Speaker 2: much may billions and billions of dollars from this site.
Speaker 2: It's so fucking strange. So another group is called account hacked,
Speaker 2: and it has eighty five hundred members, but I'll add
Speaker 2: it hasn't been updated since the end of twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: but it immediately hits you with a post that says,
Speaker 2: and I quote message me for any hacking services. Facebook recovery,
Speaker 2: Instagram recovery, lost Funds, recovery, I cloud bypass, et cetera,
Speaker 2: with a few users responding, along with several other scammers
Speaker 2: offering to help in the same way. There's another group
Speaker 2: with sixty seven hundred members, this time called recover an
Speaker 2: old Facebook Account you Can't look into, and it offers
Speaker 2: yet another one eight hundred number that also did not work.
Speaker 2: A post from December fifth, twenty twenty three, from a
Speaker 2: user claiming that their account was compromised and their email
Speaker 2: and password was changed has been responded to forty four times,
Speaker 2: mostly by scammers attempting to offer account recovery services, but
Speaker 2: a few times by other people experiencing the same problem. Elsewhere,
Speaker 2: a group promising to literally send you money on PayPal
Speaker 2: has twenty four thousand members and ten plus posts a day.
Speaker 2: Another called PayPal Problem Solution, which reminds me of a
Speaker 2: hive song offer similarly scammy services if you can't get
Speaker 2: into PayPal. Another called cash App Vemo PayPal Zel Support
Speaker 2: has fifty eight hundred members now. I also, as of
Speaker 2: my research for this, joined another group and it was
Speaker 2: called Facebook Support. It is just every day people going
Speaker 2: on and on and on and on about how they
Speaker 2: can't get into accounts and then being told hey, call
Speaker 2: our toll free number. And it sucks. It sucks because
Speaker 2: this took me no effort to find. There are hundreds
Speaker 2: of people every day just going on this thing, begging
Speaker 2: for help and then being aggressively scammed. Someone here saying
Speaker 2: live chat, can I get someone from meta live Chat
Speaker 2: day later help me recover my disabled account. Plus, someone
Speaker 2: stole my pictures from Instagram and is using the scam
Speaker 2: men through offers of sexual content and meetups. Facebook won't
Speaker 2: delete the account because they use a different name than mine.
Speaker 2: Someone hacked my Facebook account now he changed all its
Speaker 2: details and name too. I think the meds and I
Speaker 2: send the complaint in Facebook help center. They restrict the
Speaker 2: account and gave me a link to recover it. When
Speaker 2: I tried that and recorded a video selfie. It didn't work,
Speaker 2: and every time when I tried to make the video,
Speaker 2: every time has failed to load. Anyway, some of these
Speaker 2: people don't have the best English. I can't speak of
Speaker 2: a languages. Not going to judge them for that, But anyway,
Speaker 2: I have a product idea for Meta is this idea
Speaker 2: of deleting every one of these groups so that people
Speaker 2: don't get fucking scammed. Important detail though, Now, last year
Speaker 2: Meta came up with a bloody interesting new idea, this
Speaker 2: new feature. Not a big product company, Meta, but they
Speaker 2: came up with this idea. It's called Meta verification. Now
Speaker 2: do you know what you get for your fifteen dollars
Speaker 2: a month where you get a little check mark and
Speaker 2: they know who you are and they say you're the
Speaker 2: real person.
Speaker 3: You know what?
Speaker 2: You also get support, customer support. It's an actual kleptocracy.
Speaker 2: It's an actual situation where they are making it so
Speaker 2: that only those who pay will have help. Now there
Speaker 2: may be an argument from some of you, You say, well,
Speaker 2: that's just not particularly fucking fair, is it. These poor companies,
Speaker 2: Poor Mark Zuckerberg, right, poor Mark Zuckerberg. He doesn't make
Speaker 2: anything from the poor, these horrible little free pigs who
Speaker 2: oinchored him and say, Mark, Mark, please don't let me
Speaker 2: get scammed, don't let people steal from me. And Mark says, ah,
Speaker 2: I I couldn't possibly make because I make only forty
Speaker 2: dollars are usual. He makes forty fucking forty dollars and
Speaker 2: sixty cents per user. This is more valuable than a
Speaker 2: regular subscription, though of course fifteen bucks a month would
Speaker 2: be making more than that, But nevertheless, that's an insanely
Speaker 2: large amount of money. That's an insanely large amount of
Speaker 2: money for a service that is decaying and being decayed
Speaker 2: by a lack of responsibility in stewardship from the fucking
Speaker 2: burke who runs it and the scumbags who run it
Speaker 2: with him. And this is what Facebook is, by the way,
Speaker 2: It's just this whole of sponsored content and outright scams,
Speaker 2: and Meta is not a steward of this product. It's
Speaker 2: been fucking awful for years. They've been making it worse
Speaker 2: to grow revenue, but also on top of that, they've
Speaker 2: not been trying to keep it anything like a reliable product,
Speaker 2: like a good product. It's like if you got on
Speaker 2: the bus and one of the wheels fucking fell off
Speaker 2: sometimes and they went, well, you know that happens with buses.
Speaker 2: That just happens. Sometimes you sit on a bench in
Speaker 2: a park and it just explodes, splinters all up in
Speaker 2: your ass. Yeah, that's just what benches do. Mate, the
Speaker 2: bench was free, you fucking ass whole. It's so annoying,
Speaker 2: and I really must repeat myself that it's been like
Speaker 2: this for years. Meta's been gradually and aggressively making the
Speaker 2: experience worse, and they've just let this hellhole kind of decay.
Speaker 2: It really is decay. That's the word I keep coming
Speaker 2: back to because it sucks.
Speaker 3: And some of you.
Speaker 2: I've heard from a lot of you who say, oh,
Speaker 2: I just don't use it. I just don't use it.
Speaker 2: Even if you don't use this, even if Meta is
Speaker 2: something you have cut out of your life, there is
Speaker 2: a real consequence to a social network being used by
Speaker 2: billions of people. That is this unregulated digital ecological disaster.
Speaker 2: It's this open wound in the side of the Internet
Speaker 2: where scammers and spammers the light in tricking and swindling
Speaker 2: people without any fear of repercussions from Meta, and honestly,
Speaker 2: they stop giving a shit years ago. Now, if I
Speaker 2: get a comment from Meta about this, and by the way,
Speaker 2: if you're listening from Meta, put Mark on my show.
Speaker 2: Otherwise I don't want to fucking hear from you. I
Speaker 2: don't care. I'm not interested. Actually, give me boss Worth,
Speaker 2: give me Buzz. I'd love to have a chat with Buzz.
Speaker 2: You and me, Buzz, Let's chat it up. But anyway,
Speaker 2: I'm sure their comment would be, where we do stop scammers, Well,
Speaker 2: you don't really stop them all. And indeed, if I'm
Speaker 2: the one, one, one surly dipshit with the microphone that
Speaker 2: can find this hive of scammers with really no effort,
Speaker 2: why don't you have any automation to do this? Why
Speaker 2: don't you have something to stop that? And the answer
Speaker 2: is Meta doesn't care. Meta does not care. They stopped
Speaker 2: giving a shit a while ago. And it's revisionist history
Speaker 2: to pretend that Mark Zuckerberg has suddenly chose to take
Speaker 2: the guardrails off. It's insane how many people I'm reading
Speaker 2: who are acting as if this is new. But I
Speaker 2: need you to realize a Meta all things are justified undergrowth,
Speaker 2: like making the platform harder to navigate so that users
Speaker 2: spend more time trying to find the things they actually
Speaker 2: want to see, or allowing giant groups of scammers and
Speaker 2: spammers to flourish, so there's always new content for people
Speaker 2: to get lost in, even if it sucks or it's
Speaker 2: harmful or it hurts them. And you can hear how
Speaker 2: much distaste I have for all of this.
Speaker 3: But but it's me. I wouldn't be done after just one.
Speaker 2: Now this is a two parter, and in the next episode,
Speaker 2: I'm going to get into how Zuckerberg got away with
Speaker 2: all of this, and he did so by taking advantage
Speaker 2: of members of the media that were either asleep at
Speaker 2: the wheel, hamstrung by their editorial side, or actually just
Speaker 2: willing to help run air cover for Mark Zuckerberg. And
Speaker 2: then once I've done that, I want to explain what
Speaker 2: the actual consequences are, because they're not great. None of
Speaker 2: this is great. But I don't want to leave you
Speaker 2: completely depressed. Right now, you're probably you're seeing the inauguration
Speaker 2: feeling pretty dark. I really do mean hold those closes
Speaker 2: to you closer. I do mean be a little bit
Speaker 2: more loving with the people around you. Big theme of
Speaker 2: CES was love and companionship and solidarity with your fellow
Speaker 2: human beings. Call your friends, Text your friends, tell me
Speaker 2: you love them. Any of your friends whore like why
Speaker 2: he's telling me, I love it, you love me. That's
Speaker 2: a that in and of itself, is the symptom of
Speaker 2: a society that has lost love. Everything feels really fucking dark.
Speaker 2: Don't get me wrong, but you're still an autonomous human being.
Speaker 2: You're still capable of talking to the people around you.
Speaker 2: To quote ned Bta won't say write your congressman. I
Speaker 2: don't know what I would tell you to tell them,
Speaker 2: but I will tell you this. The people around you
Speaker 2: need you. The people around you love you, and if
Speaker 2: they don't, don't talk to them. But show more love
Speaker 2: to those around you, Show more love to everything, and
Speaker 2: put more love into everything you do.
Speaker 3: And you'll hear the next episode soon.
Speaker 2: He'll only be a few days, and I think you're going.
Speaker 3: To really like it. But I love you all.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and
Speaker 2: composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You
Speaker 2: can check out more of his music and audio projects
Speaker 2: at Matasowski dot com, M A T T O s
Speaker 2: O W s ki dot com. You can email me
Speaker 2: at easy at better Offline dot com or visit better
Speaker 2: Offline dot com to find more podcast links and of
Speaker 2: course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to
Speaker 2: chat dot Where's Youreed dot at to visit the discord,
Speaker 2: and go to our slash Better Offline to check out
Speaker 2: our reddit. Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 1: Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
Speaker 1: more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
Speaker 1: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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