Speaker 1: Adam back in May, you find yourself in an interesting situation.
Speaker 1: Oh God, I can't believe we're gonna do this. So
Speaker 1: you were at a pub in London with your friend.
Speaker 1: I was. I was at a pub in London with
Speaker 1: a friend who was visiting from San Francisco, and we're
Speaker 1: having a beer and then I get a text from
Speaker 1: my sister. It said, you're on subway creatures. Oh m
Speaker 1: g subway creatures. Yeah, it's this Instagram feed. She and
Speaker 1: I follow this, just pictures and videos of people caught
Speaker 1: unsuspectingly doing stupid stuff on the subway. We occasionally text
Speaker 1: about it when we see something really ridiculous and that
Speaker 1: ridiculous person becomes you. I know. I thought she was kidding,
Speaker 1: but then she said look on Instagram, and I looked
Speaker 1: in there I was this video of me grimacing down
Speaker 1: at my phone, looking really weird, and the comments on
Speaker 1: the post we're starting to pour in the one I
Speaker 1: remember most said texting, bitch face. That's my sister, Aaron. Anyway,
Speaker 1: you weren't doing anything. You did have a very strange
Speaker 1: look on your face. People were starting to do memes
Speaker 1: like what you look like when and we're putting stuff
Speaker 1: in there? Do you what do you remember that I
Speaker 1: was doing? Remember anything specific? I remember I was just
Speaker 1: texting ferociously with this like really mean, weird look on
Speaker 1: my face. And it was strange because it was a
Speaker 1: video of you doing that, but then it zoomed in
Speaker 1: on your face. The person was sitting across from you. Okay,
Speaker 1: so Adam, you're still at the bar in London at
Speaker 1: this point, texting frantically with your sister. I was. I
Speaker 1: was freaking out, wouldn't you What did my coworkers see it?
Speaker 1: My sister suggested I send Mr Subway creep, you're a note.
Speaker 1: I even had her draft it for me because I
Speaker 1: was so frazzled. Hi. I noticed I was taped without
Speaker 1: my knowledge yesterday and posted to your site. Please remove it?
Speaker 1: And then I hit send hi em though, I'm Adam Satriano.
Speaker 1: And this week on Decrypted, we're going inside this strange,
Speaker 1: voyeuristic corner of social media where people, including Adam, unwittingly
Speaker 1: become a source of amusement. It's not an enjoyable place
Speaker 1: to be, but beyond the embarrassment, the experience taught me
Speaker 1: a good deal about the changing nature of privacy online.
Speaker 1: We'll meet Rick Maguire, the thirty three year old who
Speaker 1: runs Subway Creatures from a New York apartment. He'll tell
Speaker 1: us about how he got into this strange Instagram world
Speaker 1: and how he's trying to turn it into a business
Speaker 1: and it's own little way. My experience demonstrates the tightrope
Speaker 1: that social media companies are walking right now. Increasingly, companies
Speaker 1: like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, are being asked to regulate what's
Speaker 1: appropriate content, what's fake news, what's bad, what's good, what's
Speaker 1: in between? Do we want to further empower these already
Speaker 1: very powerful companies to be the editors of our digital lives?
Speaker 1: Stay with us? Okay, so Adam and take us back.
Speaker 1: You emailed the Subway Creatures guy and you asked him
Speaker 1: to delete that video of you. It felt like an
Speaker 1: absolute lost cause I thought, no way, this guy is
Speaker 1: gonna do that. But he actually replied right away and
Speaker 1: he took it down. I was very surprised, pleasantly so
Speaker 1: so I struck up a correspondence with him. Ricks from
Speaker 1: New Jersey. He played hockey in college. He's actually kind
Speaker 1: of sort of very normal for her, a guy who
Speaker 1: creates an Instagram account like this it sounds like you
Speaker 1: kind of like him. Now. I was very curious, like,
Speaker 1: how on earth do you come to operate a thing
Speaker 1: like this. We're in the famous Promenade and Union Square,
Speaker 1: tons of things to see out here. Our producer piaged
Speaker 1: Kari went to meet Rick. I am a huge people person,
Speaker 1: like I love people watching, and I obviously started seeing
Speaker 1: what we all see every day in the New York
Speaker 1: subway New York City subway, and you know, I realized
Speaker 1: there's not really a platform for this. So I wound
Speaker 1: up starting a website that featured a lot of the
Speaker 1: stuff that I saw daily, and before I knew it,
Speaker 1: it kind of gained traction. People started sending me stuff
Speaker 1: and I didn't even have to look for it anymore.
Speaker 1: It was coming to me. There are more than six
Speaker 1: hundred thousand people following this Subway Creatures Instagram account. On
Speaker 1: top of that, Rick has followers on Twitter and Facebook
Speaker 1: and a website too. It's it's a little voyeuristic, uh,
Speaker 1: this content. It's it's kind of in a category of
Speaker 1: its own. Um but the closest it's just user generated
Speaker 1: content that you know. It's the good part about it
Speaker 1: is that the content is endless and there's never going
Speaker 1: to be an end to it as long as there
Speaker 1: are smartphones out there where you can record something and
Speaker 1: have it put up in almost instantly. Let me give
Speaker 1: you a sense. Crazy haircuts, weird outfits, unusual tattoos, pets.
Speaker 1: There's owls and peacocks on there. There's also a lot
Speaker 1: of pictures of people who fell asleep in a strange position,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people who are drunk on the subway.
Speaker 1: It could be subway performers. Uh, people singing. A lot
Speaker 1: of the time, people have earphones in and they're singing
Speaker 1: out loud and don't even realize how loud they're being,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, it could be that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: So that's how Rick stumbled into this, you know, front
Speaker 1: row seat to internet culture. He's a freelance TV producer,
Speaker 1: so his day job is also related to making stuff
Speaker 1: people want to watch. I it's it's been awesome, it's
Speaker 1: it's honestly, I never actually pictured it to get as
Speaker 1: big as it is right now. But in the world
Speaker 1: of social media, he can watch the embarrassing content he
Speaker 1: collects bread sometimes with frightening velocity. I've had someone, uh
Speaker 1: send me a video while they were on the train
Speaker 1: of something. I posted it while that video was going viral.
Speaker 1: This person was still sitting across from the person on
Speaker 1: the train, So technically that person could have seen in
Speaker 1: real time themselves going viral, which I when when you
Speaker 1: look at the big picture, I think that that is
Speaker 1: extremely interesting that that something like that can happen. Nowadays,
Speaker 1: Ricks has one of the first things he does in
Speaker 1: the morning is checked to see what people have sent
Speaker 1: to post on subway creatures. The weirder the better. There's
Speaker 1: some reason one of the most popular things that I
Speaker 1: get sent are people bringing very exotic, strange animals onto
Speaker 1: the subway. We had an instance where there was someone
Speaker 1: who brought up peacock, another person who brought a lizard,
Speaker 1: a lot of snakes. Rick started Subway Features as a website.
Speaker 1: In today, Instagram is where he has his biggest audience,
Speaker 1: but he continues to update his website too. Rick has
Speaker 1: his own rules for what he posts. He rarely features kids,
Speaker 1: and he doesn't post images or videos of people he
Speaker 1: thinks might be mentally ill or homeless for his website.
Speaker 1: Anything else is fair game. That would be like people
Speaker 1: flashing on the subway. Uh, anything that would get pulled down, uh,
Speaker 1: because of discretion. Would normally go on the website because
Speaker 1: there are no guidelines on the website and it's kind
Speaker 1: of the wild West on there. But when he posts
Speaker 1: on Instagram, Rick has to be more selective because Instagram
Speaker 1: has its own community guidelines that it enforces. Instagram will
Speaker 1: send a notification. First, they'll pull it down, and then
Speaker 1: they send a notification saying, due to guidelines on Instagram,
Speaker 1: we've now pulled the content down. And basically you get
Speaker 1: a warning or a strike against you. Um, just because
Speaker 1: if people are repeatedly posting, you know, stuff that's not
Speaker 1: supposed to be up there, Uh, the account, the account
Speaker 1: gets suspended. That hasn't happened to me. That's why I
Speaker 1: try to be very careful with what I post, because
Speaker 1: I don't want to get my account suspended for any reasons.
Speaker 1: And even for power users like Rick, it's tricky navigating
Speaker 1: those guidelines. He says he doesn't quite understand the rules.
Speaker 1: For example, Instagram's guidelines say that pretty much any kind
Speaker 1: of nudity is banned, but Instagram doesn't catch everything. That's
Speaker 1: the subjective aspect of it is that I don't know
Speaker 1: what actually constitute something as being too explicit? Obviously, if
Speaker 1: there are people having sex on the train, Uh, you'd
Speaker 1: think that that would that would cross a line. However,
Speaker 1: I posted a video a couple of months ago of
Speaker 1: two Yankee fans coming home from a Yankee game, and
Speaker 1: they would appeared to be having sex on the train
Speaker 1: that never got pulled down. How Then, and then to
Speaker 1: go to the other extreme, Uh, there were there would
Speaker 1: be stuff as far as, uh, maybe a guy wearing
Speaker 1: shorts that are a little too short and something's hanging
Speaker 1: out that gets pulled down. Or take this example. There
Speaker 1: was a video that went viral a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 1: It was from Toronto in the subway and this woman
Speaker 1: got into a physical altercation with a man and she
Speaker 1: was splashing mop bucket water at him. So the guy
Speaker 1: turned around and picked up the bucket of water and
Speaker 1: dumped it over her head. So I I mean it
Speaker 1: was a it was a mutual confrontation. She wasn't getting
Speaker 1: you know, other than the water going on her. She
Speaker 1: wasn't physically being abused. She did have water dumped on her. Uh.
Speaker 1: That was posted went super viral. Um not only my account,
Speaker 1: but a number of popular accounts posted it. However, it
Speaker 1: was only my page that it got reported and taken down.
Speaker 1: Rick says he's still confused about why Instagram didn't just
Speaker 1: block the clip on every account that had shared it.
Speaker 1: How come he was singled out. He also said he's
Speaker 1: tried contacting Instagram a few times, but they've basically never
Speaker 1: responded to his questions. Now more than ever, Instagram has
Speaker 1: been a little too sensitive on policing what goes up
Speaker 1: and what and what gets taken down. And I think
Speaker 1: there's a very fine line of uh, policing the content
Speaker 1: and censoring, So I don't know where that falls, but
Speaker 1: I think that there needs to be a little more
Speaker 1: conversation about it. Rick says he acts quickly when people
Speaker 1: ask for stuff to be taken down. When he was
Speaker 1: talking to our producer Pia, he mentioned the time that
Speaker 1: I contacted him, I took it down immediately. There's he
Speaker 1: was very uncomfortable with the fact that someone was recording
Speaker 1: him on the subway, which I don't blame him, and
Speaker 1: he knows there are a lot of people out there
Speaker 1: like me, people who love subway creatures. Until one day
Speaker 1: they became the ones that were ridiculed on the account.
Speaker 1: So it's it's one of those catch twenty two situations
Speaker 1: where I feel like people love the web. They love
Speaker 1: the website, they love the page, they love every day
Speaker 1: looking at all the crazy stuff that happens in the subway. However,
Speaker 1: I think it's a completely different scenario once they are
Speaker 1: actually the subject of the video. So you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's almost like a love hate relationship with the page.
Speaker 1: Of course, that does not stop Brick from doing what
Speaker 1: he does. He clearly loves this. When Po was riding
Speaker 1: the train with him, he spotted a potential quote unquote
Speaker 1: creature and got so excited. Yeah. So here we are
Speaker 1: at Union Square on the l and there is a
Speaker 1: man doing repeted circles dancing to this music. And it's
Speaker 1: pretty amazing, to be honest with you, and I wish
Speaker 1: I we could film this right now, because this is great.
Speaker 1: I'm actually I might have to record this. You might
Speaker 1: also think there are rules against people filming each other
Speaker 1: without getting permission first, but you'd be wrong. I spoke
Speaker 1: to Albert Gaderry, who's the director of Privacy at Stanford
Speaker 1: Center for Internet and Society. Al says there's more than
Speaker 1: a century of case law on Rick's side, because the
Speaker 1: people being filmed are in a public space. In when
Speaker 1: Justice Brandeis in the US wrote his seminal piece on privacy,
Speaker 1: he said, what happens in public is public. And that
Speaker 1: video of you, Adam that made it onto subway creatures,
Speaker 1: that was taken when you were in a public space. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was just on the subway in London looking like
Speaker 1: an idiot. So Rick was never legally obligated to delete
Speaker 1: that video of you, even though he agreed to do it. Anyway,
Speaker 1: you implicitly consent to be seen, and if someone takes
Speaker 1: your photograph, you've assumed the risk that that will happen.
Speaker 1: Now in a world where everybody is a videographer, everybody
Speaker 1: is a photographer, everybody is a publisher. Um, those notions
Speaker 1: of of of being obscure in the crowd, the notion
Speaker 1: of a right to have a nanimity to have a
Speaker 1: different uh circle around you, of privacy in your residential
Speaker 1: neighborhood versus in a shopping mall, in a stadium where
Speaker 1: a football game is going are all under rethinking today.
Speaker 1: Of course, we saw this play out just a couple
Speaker 1: of months ago when some of the white nationalists who
Speaker 1: are marching in Charlottesville were identified with their full names
Speaker 1: and even their employers. Some people said it wasn't right
Speaker 1: to be naming these individuals who were exercising their right
Speaker 1: to free speech, and other people were like, well, they
Speaker 1: were in public, they should have known that there'd be
Speaker 1: a good chance they get out. In the broader context
Speaker 1: here is that social media companies are facing increasing pressure
Speaker 1: to act against objectionable material. We've entered a world where
Speaker 1: everything that can be collected will be collected in the
Speaker 1: public domain, and the question is what do we do
Speaker 1: with that, and how do we accept the consequences of
Speaker 1: that if we do, or do we regulate it. Until now,
Speaker 1: social networks like Facebook and Twitter have insisted that it's
Speaker 1: not their job to be policing what people say. They're
Speaker 1: just the platforms with intermediary liability or lack thereof. The
Speaker 1: platforms are not responsible for user generated content. It's impossible
Speaker 1: for them to review every image and decide is this
Speaker 1: a news report or is it an offensive or or
Speaker 1: embarrassing newsreel about somebody's personal life. But governments around the
Speaker 1: world are making it harder for these companies to just
Speaker 1: stay out of it. In Europe, Germany has called on
Speaker 1: Facebook to help stamp out hate speech on its platform,
Speaker 1: and Twitter has said it's the leaded hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of accounts to combat extremism. And as we covered in
Speaker 1: last week's episode of the show, Shameless Plug, Facebook, Google,
Speaker 1: and Twitter are now facing a lot of scrutiny over
Speaker 1: why they didn't do more to stop Russia from spreading
Speaker 1: misinformation on their platforms. Great episode, by the way, but
Speaker 1: Albert also talked about the dangers of having our internet
Speaker 1: companies more actively police their platforms. Do we want to
Speaker 1: give them that power? This is such a hard question
Speaker 1: because one person's fake news is another person's stolen belief,
Speaker 1: and it's really hard to ask an intermediary to become
Speaker 1: whether it be the government, or become a platform, to
Speaker 1: become the arbiter of what's true and not true. There
Speaker 1: was another person I talked to about this, someone with
Speaker 1: a lot of experience to ending people whose privacy was
Speaker 1: invaded on the Internet. My name is Erica Johnstone and
Speaker 1: I'm a lawyer in San Francisco. I specialize in privacy law.
Speaker 1: I specialized in representing victims of revenge porn. Revenge porn,
Speaker 1: by the way, is the sharing of sexually explicit material
Speaker 1: online without that person's consent. For example, think of a
Speaker 1: guy who decides to publicly post nude photos of his
Speaker 1: ex girlfriend as a way to get back at her
Speaker 1: for breaking up with him. So Erica spends a lot
Speaker 1: of time thinking about what's probably some of the worst
Speaker 1: possible invasions of privacy that could ever happen to a person.
Speaker 1: If digital privacy invasion is on a scale my experiences
Speaker 1: on one end and the kind of victims she represents,
Speaker 1: or on the other. I told her about what happened
Speaker 1: to me on Subway Creatures. What was interesting to me
Speaker 1: about your story was that you did follow the feed,
Speaker 1: and I wonder if you could explain why you followed
Speaker 1: the fee to start and if that changed at all
Speaker 1: once you yourself were featured on it. I had been
Speaker 1: turned onto the feed just by a friend and as
Speaker 1: something to kind of follow as a laugh, and I
Speaker 1: had turned my sister onto it, and then after this
Speaker 1: happened to me, I immediately stopped following it. And you know,
Speaker 1: if my sister was saying to me afterwards, she was
Speaker 1: giving me a hard time. She's saying the watcher doesn't
Speaker 1: like to be watched. She put you on the spot.
Speaker 1: She did, but she was right, And I wish that
Speaker 1: everyone could have that experience without necessarily being the person watched, right,
Speaker 1: because we all change our behavior when we think that
Speaker 1: could be me. Then we suddenly shut it down and
Speaker 1: we feel differently about the idea of following this feed.
Speaker 1: So maybe if more people got caught doing mildly embarrassing
Speaker 1: things on so weakre jers, they think twice before consuming
Speaker 1: this kind of content. So Monica Lewinsky has this really
Speaker 1: great TED talk on the price of shame, and my
Speaker 1: favorite line from this is that the invasions of others
Speaker 1: as a raw material, raw material efficiently and ruthlessly mind
Speaker 1: packaged and sold at a profit. A marketplace has emerged
Speaker 1: where public humiliation is a commodity and shame is an industry.
Speaker 1: How is the money made? Clicks? The more shame, the
Speaker 1: more clicks, the more clicks, the more advertising dollars. All
Speaker 1: of these platforms and websites. What they're fighting over is
Speaker 1: our attention. And if we collectively stopped going to those websites,
Speaker 1: then it would dry up the supply for them, and
Speaker 1: they wouldn't be able to use our attention as their
Speaker 1: commodity that they make money off of. And so I
Speaker 1: think that, like when we talk about resistance, like how
Speaker 1: do we resist this definition of the moment we step
Speaker 1: out of the house, everything is fair game. We start
Speaker 1: by averting our eyes, We start by being the ones
Speaker 1: to not go to those websites. It's worth noting that
Speaker 1: Rick isn't currently making any money from subway creatures. He's
Speaker 1: thought about it before and even had some brands approach him,
Speaker 1: like Adam and Eve, who sells sex toys. But Rick
Speaker 1: says he's really anti advertising, and so he's still thinking
Speaker 1: of ways he could present a message to his followers
Speaker 1: they wouldn't feel like he's pushing ads at them. So
Speaker 1: adding some powerful words from the lawyer Erica there and
Speaker 1: some personal lessons for you, Yes, lesson number one, don't
Speaker 1: look weird on the subway noted and number two I
Speaker 1: just it gave me some new empathy for people who
Speaker 1: you see stuff posted about on the Internet. There's other
Speaker 1: accounts in addition to Rick where you see stuff posted
Speaker 1: from people unsuspectingly, and it gave me a new appreciation
Speaker 1: of just how creepy that is, you know, did your
Speaker 1: sister stop following subway creatures on Instagram? She did not.
Speaker 1: She still follows it. But she'd tell me something interesting,
Speaker 1: which is that people are now posting more pictures on
Speaker 1: there with emojis over people's faces. So adding a touch
Speaker 1: of privacy to those people who are also being a
Speaker 1: bit ridiculed and just saying so like a proactive measure there, Yes,
Speaker 1: just a little pat on the back as he send
Speaker 1: you into the humiliation world, you know, thinking about this. Clearly,
Speaker 1: Kevin's systrum didn't create Instagram so that strangers would laugh
Speaker 1: at you, add I'm furiously texting on your phone. No,
Speaker 1: but that's the sort of bigger point here, is that
Speaker 1: these platforms have gotten so big that they take on
Speaker 1: a life of their own. And what can the companies
Speaker 1: do to rein that in or if they should even try. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it becomes a free for all. Right, it must mean
Speaker 1: you have to create at least some rules. Yeah, But
Speaker 1: like the digital privacy expert al from Stanford said, we
Speaker 1: have two questions. Answer is that the job of the
Speaker 1: social network to be policing what we post and see online.
Speaker 1: And also if it really did happen and other people
Speaker 1: really did see it. In today's digital world, do we
Speaker 1: really have the right to expect that that material will
Speaker 1: stay private? In my case, I got kind of lucky
Speaker 1: because Rick deleted it really fast and now it's gone
Speaker 1: from the Internet. But for a lot of people it's not.
Speaker 1: So we can't look to the platforms to police uh
Speaker 1: these sorts of things. Well, the question is whether anybody
Speaker 1: should right. I think the the image that's taken in
Speaker 1: a public place maybe embarrassing, but as it false, it
Speaker 1: is a footnote in history, if you will, so it's
Speaker 1: not like it is a fabrication. And that's it for
Speaker 1: this week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. Do you
Speaker 1: have a story like this where you were affected, Send
Speaker 1: us an email at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net, or
Speaker 1: you can reach out to us on Twitter. I'm at
Speaker 1: Satriano and I'm at aki Eto seven. If you haven't already,
Speaker 1: please subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts,
Speaker 1: and why you're there. I really do hope you take
Speaker 1: a minute to leave us a rating and a review.
Speaker 1: This does so much to get us in front of
Speaker 1: more listeners. And check out our email newsletter fully Charged,
Speaker 1: where we recreated the video of me on the subway.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced by Pia Getkari, Liz Smith, and
Speaker 1: Magnus Hendrickson. We'll see you next week.