Simon Adler

From WNYC. See? Yep.

From WNYC. See? Yep.

From WNYC. See? Yep.

Hi, I'm Daniel from Madrid. Leadership support from Radiolab Science Programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Turpentine Foundation. Fundational support from Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Hi, I'm Daniel from Madrid. Leadership support from Radiolab Science Programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Turpentine Foundation. Fundational support from Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Hi, I'm Daniel from Madrid. Leadership support from Radiolab Science Programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Turpentine Foundation. Fundational support from Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Okay. Alright. You're listening to Radiolab.

Okay. Alright. You're listening to Radiolab.

Okay. Alright. You're listening to Radiolab.

It feels a little bit like X, formerly Twitter, is the mirror image where it's like, we're just going to rile you up all the time.

This past month.

Is that right?

And is that what we're going to just see more of, which is come to this platform island for emotion A, come to that platform island for emotion B?

Jimmy Kimmel can't say that anymore.

The late night host taken off air indefinitely.

As we all know, free speech was in the news again.

I remember one of the big questions, probably in the first piece we did, was this question of, like, what kind of space to consider Facebook?

Because the First Amendment treats private spaces differently than public spaces.

So it matters whether or not Facebook is more like a mall or a public square, right?

And so given all these changes you've just mentioned, like, what is the metaphor now?

I have one based on what you've said, but I'm curious what yours is.

Well, to me, it's now or certainly the direction things seem headed based on what you've said is that it's now just it's just broadcast again.

Yeah.

And with broadcast, there is no free speech, right?

No.

Like ABC, NBC, they can cancel a show at any time.

They get to decide exactly what the evening lineup is.

But with this, with social media, it's like a broadcast camouflaged as an organically generated thing.

And these questions of who can say what, where, and how much pressure the government can or can't exert just felt fresh and vital all over again.

Yeah, I'm not for and have never been for the federal government coming in and molding Facebook's content moderation policy.

Of course not.

But if something no longer resembles a public square at all and instead has become...

To keep reusing my label like a camouflaged broadcasting network where it's like, yeah, these are individuals saying something that they believe in.

But then that is being collated, amassed and pushed out as a opinion changing product by someone on high.

I am OK at that point with there being some sort of regulation.

It's not regulating maybe what people are allowed to post, but maybe how it's being aggregated.

I don't know.

There have to be some clever, somebody smarter than me who could come up with these sorts of rules.

And so I called Kate, yeah, to see how this is all playing out online.

You know, I think one of the reasons you and I have gotten along so well over the years and have worked so well together in this now trilogy of stories is that we both had sort of an unorthodox approach to this.

I mean, most people were saying that these Facebook guys were idiots, that they're bad, that they're causing lots of trouble, that we should just, like, cast scorn upon them.

Yeah.

And you...

And then me sort of following your lead, we're more like, what if we actually try to understand this problem?

And I guess now, with hindsight, I'm wondering, like, did we miss something here where we sort of played the fool?

I would say we would be useful idiots.

I didn't call you.

I'm asking if we are is the question.

Okay.

I'd love to give you one more idea that I've been playing around with for a couple of years.

If I was ever going to write a short sci-fi story, it would be about the quote-unquote perfect piece of art.

You step in front of it.

It does a quick facial scan of you, pulls everything about you that it knows from the Internet, and then it puts forward an image perfectly generated for you that will evoke a feeling.

On Tuesdays, it's happiness.

On Wednesdays, it's sadness.

And so it's this visual tableau personalized to every person that evokes the same emotion.

And once you have that, once you can control the emotions of people with the flip of a dial by putting something in front of them that's going to only pique that feeling for them, then you could just control everybody.

Well, I guess before we get into all of that, let's build a bit of a foundation first.

This story was reported and produced by me, Simon Adler, with some original music and sound design by me, mixing done by Jeremy Bloom.

Of course, huge, huge thank you to Kate Klonick, as always, and yeah, we will be back next week saying some more things.

Until then, thanks for listening.

Sure.

So I guess how has the actual practice of keeping stuff up and taking stuff down changed and why?

You're right in here.

Okay, how so?

You're going to be speaking in that microphone.

This guy?

Nope, the one closer here.

Hey, I'm Simon Adler.

So they're just taking tons and tons and tons of stuff down.

This is Radiolab.

Okay.

One, two, three, four, five.

Can you hear me, Kate?

If I can put a stupid man's term on it, it's like they are choosing to push things up instead of pull things down.

Yep.

And that is Kate.

I have a confession, which is that I've maybe spent five minutes on TikTok in my life.

I've talked to her a bunch over the years.

Well, and on that...

It is interesting that TikTok figured out how to make banal stuff compelling because we were certainly told that, well, the reason Facebook wants to leave some of this stuff up is because it's the highly emotive, highly reactive stuff that keeps people around.

We did a couple different stories that felt like news at the time about Facebook's rules for what we can and can't post on their platform.

So what did we have wrong there?

Was this just like an adjacent path to the same outcome, which is keeping people on a platform?

Fascinating.

So it's like Facebook figured out the sort of information that would keep you there.

TikTok figured out how to package any information to keep you there.

And it seems to then be a very different informational ecosystem you're creating because if you're pushing up everything that falls within certain bounds and you're deciding what those bounds are, it becomes –

Far more like it's controlled.

The right word.

What's what's the word?

Sorry.

Excuse me.

What is prior restraint?

Oh, so it's not redacted.

It's that it was never printed.

Wow.

OK, I didn't expect us to be talking about TikTok so much, but I'm glad we have.

So if I'm telling the story of this, it's like once upon a time, Facebook creates content moderation for everything, all these policies, all these rules.

Meanwhile, TikTok is sort of lurking across the Pacific, eventually jumps over and Zuckerberg and the Silicon Valley folks see they're doing it this very different way.

When does that actually start to shift, not just the way Facebook is thinking about its content moderation, but also maybe the way people are experiencing Facebook as a result?

I prefer to swear on the radio as much as possible.

We covered the origins of these rules and just how complicated they can become.

Okay, well, and talk to me, like, when we say Facebook got rid of its fact-checking, at its sort of height, what was Facebook's fact-checking?

But beyond the specifics, what we were really exploring was how the ideal of free speech plays out in different spaces in our society.

Right.

And if I'm going to mount the best defense for conservatives about censorship by big tech, it would be that during the pandemic, there was sort of a party line as to what was an acceptable way to talk about the origins of of the pandemic.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

Okay, take it before.

And what was the justification by Facebook?

You know, from a good old public square where anyone can say anything they want to lightly regulated broadcast TV to straight up private spaces.

Point taken.

Okay, well, so then, like, what has changed then?

If, yes, there was some censoring going on and censoring of things in these sort of critical moments, like, would that not happen now?

Is that the difference?

And we were asking, like, where does social media fit into all that?

Okay, so Kate, you were saying that TikTok has this fundamentally different approach to content moderation.

That instead of reactively taking stuff down, they are proactively flooding the zone with happy-making stuff.

That Facebook and X and others have taken notice and started adopting this approach.

And that all this has happened as folks have begun to see that content moderation itself is, I think you said, a vector for power.

And, you know, I kind of thought we were done talking about all this.

But then... I'm happy we still have a show, too, I guess.

And in that way, so if we were gone from filter bubbles to...

platform islands where the owners of the platform get to push up whatever it is that fits whatever their ideological ends are.

China and TikTok, it seems to be like milk toast stuff that's not going to rile you up, but it's going to keep your eyeballs on here.