Facebook, Twitter take steps to limit the president’s false election claims

While the counting for the 2020 presidential election still goes on, The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Adi Robertson discuss what steps social media platforms have taken to limit misinformation. Additional reading: Watch the great people of Philadelphia count ballots live Facebook, Twitter take steps to limit the president’s false election claims Twitter restricts Trump campaign official’s tweet alleging Philadelphia voter fraud Before the votes are fully counted, Trump falsely claims victory Twitter restricts yet another Trump tweet for making up election rules People are mistaking a Baltimore Orioles meme for an election misinformation botnet Facebook shuts down huge ‘Stop the Steal’ group YouTube says video claiming Trump won does not violate its election misinformation policies Democrats call on Twitter to suspend Trump as election results file in Massachusetts passes ‘right to repair’ law to open up car data California poised to establish a new privacy regulator with ballot measure win Uber, Lyft drivers aren’t employees after all, California voters say Portland, Maine has voted to ban facial recognition Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  Two episodes of the Vergecast this week. On this episode, Addie Robertson joins us to talk about the election and all of the efforts made by the big social media platforms to control the spread of information, make sure people are getting the right news at the right time, and quite honestly, moderate the president. That's coming up now on the Vergecast.

• 0:19Speaker 01

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• 1:38Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of democracy. See, it's topical. I'm Neil Appertel. Dieter Bohn is here. I'm trying to come up with a good Greek word for friend and I got, I got nothing. I don't, don't know. Addie Robertson is here. Addie, how's your Greek?

• 1:53Speaker 03

  Pretty bad, I think, probably.

• 1:55Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, if you know the Greek word for friend, let us know. So we're doing two episodes this week. It's obviously election week in America, potentially election month in America. We don't really know. There's a lot of platform policy stuff to talk about. That's why Addie is here, our senior reporter on our policy team. There was also a lot of tech news to talk about. PS5 review, Xbox, Xbox's review. There's an Apple event next week. So we, I said this on the other episode too, but we couldn't quite figure out how to jam both of those things in one episode. If you can come up with a transition, you know, we'll release a special edition where I make the transition, but we couldn't figure it out. So with Tom Warren, we did all the tech news in another episode that's in the feed right now. If you are electioned out,

• 2:36Nilay Patel?

  you just want to hear about gadgets, go listen to that one. But a lot of very meaningful tech news, you know, Addie, whenever you're on the show, we end up talking about platform policy, how they're moderating. I would say this is the disinformation content moderation nightmare to, to end them all right now, ongoing in America. The platforms are taking all kinds of steps. They're being very aggressive. They're changing their rules as they go. A lot to unpack, but let's start with the beginning. And right before we started recording, Addie, you said something, which I think puts that whole thing in a context. Everyone was preparing for the worst and the worst immediately happened. What, what do you mean by that?

• 3:15Speaker 03

  So before the election, we had just weeks of, I'm going to primarily just talk about Twitter, Facebook, YouTube here, because they were the ones that made a bunch of preparations. They were talking about, okay, look, what happens if somebody preemptively calls the election? We're going to have a bunch of mail in ballots coming and it's a weird, huge chaos moment. So we're going to put in place all these safeguards. We're going to add all these banners. We have these rules where we won't let people preemptively call the election, but hopefully that won't happen. And then it was, I forget exactly what time, I think it was maybe around 2 AM on election night that it happened.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. A key piece of contextual information, if you're listening to this, we're recording Thursday night, 5:12 PM Eastern. We still do not know who has won the presidential election. It appears that Joe Biden might. By the time you're listening to this, you might know, but just keep in mind that right now, we're still in that limbo period. That limbo period really began sort of at the end of the night on Monday, when I, you know, I'm just going to say it. I think the cable news networks did a kind of a horrible job explaining the thing that everyone knew what was going to happen. Cause they kept coloring their maps in and being like, Trump, Trump is winning again. And then they were like, but hold on, we're going to explain that our infographic is wrong. I thought that was very confusing for a lot of people, but we all knew that there was this huge amount of mail in ballots. That's why Trump had been talking about mail in ballots forever

• 4:37Nilay Patel?

  and ever and ever. So the calls had largely not been made. And at 2:30 in the morning, Tuesday morning, Trump made a speech where he said, I've won. And I think that set off just like the panic buttons in every platform. What happened next, Addie?

• 4:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, interestingly enough, he did in fact not make this claim on social media like you mentioned. He made it on TV, which has proven to be sort of pertinent. But immediately, Trump has basically gone into two modes. One is claiming he won the election, and two is claiming that there is a bunch of fraud and the election's being stolen and a bunch of nebulous things are happening that he cannot actually explain the details of. And so platforms have pretty much gone into overdrive trying to contain those two things with Trump and then just a bunch of Trump surrogates and general other Republicans. And the general uncertainty of the whole election has occasionally also meant that like Democrats get wrapped

• 5:35Speaker 03

  up in it, like someone preemptively called Wisconsin and they had to label it. But this is largely a Republican phenomenon at this moment.

• 5:42Speaker 04

  Can I just, real quick, there's a PhD in rhetoric thesis to write about how TV, it was easier for the misinformation to get stated directly on TV than it was on social networks because TV at most can do maybe two things at once, but it's generally linear. So like, one thing happens and then you comment on the thing after the thing. They can put up a chyron that's like, we don't know what this person is saying. But on social media networks, they can put all of that meta stuff on the thing itself. So Twitter can like hide it behind a warning. Facebook can put a thing at the top of the feed or whatever. And so the linear nature of traditional television meant that the misinformation was able to

• 6:24Speaker 04

  be stated in a context that is completely different on social media because they actually have the ability to put stuff around it. So you could draw a line from like, I don't know, a scroll to a book to something, something, something. And the ability to put marginalia or meta information on top of the information that you're trying to fix is really fascinating to me, relative to how the cable networks handled it, which was, let him say stuff and then freak out because he said the stuff after he said it.

• 6:52Nilay Patel?

  I think I might have a slightly different point of view on that. I'm not, many PhDs will be written about this election. Many dissertations for decades to come, many books will be written about this election. I don't think we quite know the answer. But with Twitter, I think everyone kind of knows and admits that the effectiveness of these labels in combating disinformation and misinformation is unknown. Yeah. But the, the argument that you're making is, I think, a good one, which is we're going to slow down the potential virality of the president saying he's won, or it's being stolen. We're going to label stuff. If you look at the president's Twitter feed right now, it is just a wall of labels.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  I think we figured out it was almost one-third labels, yes. In the tweets he's made since the, since very early morning on November 4th.

• 7:37Nilay Patel?

  Which is very remarkable for, in particular for Twitter, the smallest of these companies, the most exposed from like a revenue perspective, they have the least money, coming off a hearing about their supposed censorship of the president. They did not back down, right? They're as aggressive as ever. But that's the strategy that's happening with Twitter and Facebook. On cable news, Dieter, I think my disagreement is sort of, it didn't quite happen the way that you're saying, because they let it run live. And then every other time it was referenced, someone would show up and say, this was a bizarre and threatening moment in American democracy. This is bad. Look at the bad thing.

• 8:18Nilay Patel?

  Whereas on Twitter, because of the, it's like an atomic unit of information, the label has to go along with it, but you don't, you don't always hear about it in that context. So like, I don't think the cable news networks acquitted themselves well on Monday with their presentation of how the returns were coming in and what that might mean. And as we sit here on Thursday, it is very clear that everything that was being communicated to us about election returns coming in on Tuesday night, didn't make any sense. Right? It's just like, didn't have any particular bearing into what would actually happen. What has happened since then is, I think the cable networks, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, to a, to a surprising degree, have like, figured out the narrative of the ballots are coming in, the counting and all that.

• 9:00Nilay Patel?

  And the social platforms, I think Twitter started at the most aggressive, it continued to be aggressive. Facebook has been aggressive and YouTube largely has failed. And they have slowly gotten more aggressive because they see the volume of disinformation coming up. And so Addy, you said, you know, they've been, it's this like extended Republican network of people saying things like Twitter and Facebook had to change their policy around election claims to say it's not just the candidates that we're going to moderate. It's anyone else notable. And one of the factors is how viral the posts might go. And I really, when Facebook announced that, I was like, oh, this is the Rudy Giuliani rule.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 9:37Nilay Patel?

  Like Rudy Giuliani is going to go to Pennsylvania and start tweeting nonsense about like anti phone the streets and Facebook is saying, we're going to shut it down.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  Which is like very reasonable.

• 9:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, how is that played? I mean, I'm just, I'm looking at our list of headlines. Facebook and Twitter take steps to limit president's false election claims. Twitter restricts Trump campaign's official alleging Philadelphia voter fraud. Twitter restricts yet another Trump tweet for making up election rules. Facebook shut down a group called Stop the Steal that was organizing protests that hit the street. Like after a year of covering content moderation and a hearing where label like was it Mike Lee redefined censorship as putting a label on things like they came into it knowing the scrutiny was on them. Do you think they're doing a good job?

• 10:22Speaker 03

  I mean, they're moving really, really fast. I will like say that in their favor over the last day or so. If something shows up and they're going to act on it, Facebook and Twitter have largely acted very quickly. I think Twitter has been really aggressive. Facebook, I think it was smart to preemptively say, look, we're just going to try to make clear that you always know that the results are still coming in. I think that the fact checking in general, like when it comes to the claims that someone's trying to steal the election, those are the places where I am most curious about the fact checking efforts that they're making because the network's approach is largely just, it's not like they're going to do a politifact check of a lot of this stuff. It's that they're just going to add a banner that says, hey, this is probably generally like not necessarily true.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  This is disputed. And I'm curious how that's going to turn out. Like there is some evidence that say exposing people to correct claims about something it like can actually change their mind. I am a little bit less confident that Twitter saying actually mail in voting works under a thing about like mail in voting fraud is necessarily going to help people. But there is just this massive amount of data. And in addition to like the semiotics dissertations people are going to write, I really hope somebody is scraping all of this and trying to like play with it to figure out how fact checking works.

• 11:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think, and the other thing I really want to know is, this is the truly black box part of both of these platforms. They've said they're limiting the reach of some of these posts, that they're tamping down on how viral they can go. Twitter, I think, is always slightly more transparent. They're not letting people retweet or like certain of these posts. Facebook is just saying it. That is data sets that I think after all of this, both platforms need to release. So we can see if that actually had an impact beyond just making us feel good that they understand that there's a difference between speech and reach, which is the framework that we've been operating in for a long time. But what really gets me is Twitter has been this aggressive. I think Facebook is right in that middle zone. And then YouTube just

• 12:24Nilay Patel?

  doesn't, it seems like they played it as neutrally as possible. Casey wrote an issue of Platformer, his newsletter about it. He's like, YouTube has tried to have it both ways. They put ineffective labels on everything to claim that they're doing something, but they are not actually sort of adjudicating what isn't, isn't bad. So everything gets a label, but the label doesn't mean anything. I mean, as you've been watching this play out, have you seen YouTube get more aggressive?

• 12:48Speaker 03

  I'm not really sure. It's really hard to tell with YouTube, but it seems like they haven't necessarily, like their feet kind of got held to the fire after there was a very misleading video that said that, basically said Trump had won the election. And it seems like they have, like they removed ads from it.

• 13:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's fine. I mean, what is the most crushing punishment YouTube can dole out of its platform? It's funny that their approach to election misinformation is the same as like, one creator who says something kind of problematic.

• 13:19Speaker 04

  And it's also the same as you accidentally included an audio clip from a music video, because it was on a TV in the background and, you know, it's like, all the same solution.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  I mean, YouTube seems like it is much less prepared to act like it is a disseminator of news, like a news network, a thing that Twitter is totally adapted to, because that's what it is. And Facebook has gotten closer to, but YouTube feels like it's just not really acknowledging that. I don't know.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  It has never really wanted to.

• 13:45Nilay Patel?

  Actually, if you look at the YouTube app on a TV, they have more and more often made the second or third row just be news. And they're just putting live news clips, news and like, information from ABC, CNN, all blah, blah, blah, blah. They really do know that people are coming to it for news. They're not blind to that. At least the people that make the TV app aren't.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  Oh, I think they definitely do. That was their strategy beforehand was, look, we're just going to make sure that there's this carousel where you can always get, A, like a large feed of news networks that we trust, and B, we're going to feed in like AP results and give you factual information.

• 14:22Speaker 04

  Right. But like, if the algorithm has taught us anything over the past couple of years, it's that people end up in sources of information and videos that you would not expect. They, you can go very quickly from something that is relatively mainstream that YouTube is pushing directly in its carousel to something pretty wackadoo.

• 14:41Nilay Patel?

  So I guess one, there's multiple threads here. There is the platform moderation taken to its most extreme point, which is we have to moderate the president because he is the single biggest source of disinformation. And it's like a whole conversation to have, to be had. Then there's the, the algorithms will radicalize you into believing conspiracy theories piece of this. And then there's kind of like this moment, which it, we're talking about who the president of the United States is going to be. Like, at the end of the day, this will be the most known fact like we can have. And so it kind of feels like the other two pieces of the puzzle have been backgrounded in a way on these platforms just by the nature of the controversy. Ben Smith, who's the, he's the editor in chief

• 15:26Nilay Patel?

  of BuzzFeed, he's not the media critic at The Times, is like, it's impossible to overstate like the bizarre outsized influence of the TV networks. Right? Like, if CNN just says Biden is the president, that becomes real in a, in a way that like no amount of Twitter botnets can ever hope to achieve.

• 15:44Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:44Nilay Patel?

  Do you think that that is playing a, like a role in this? Like, they just can't get over the hump of, you can convince people that Pizzagate is real because there's no other source of information. But here, you're trying to convince people that something is real in the face of like an insurmountable amount of credible information about a single fact.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  I think it depends on what you think the goal is. Like, if you think that the goal is just to literally make people believe that Trump is the president, then, like, yeah, that's, that's gonna be kinda hard to keep reality away from forever. If you believe that the goal is just to delegitimize the entire decision-making process and to sort of erode the general consensus reality, or just to, like, let Trump avoid saying he's not the president if he's not for a while because he doesn't want to, then, I don't know. I think that social media is very good at, like, muddying waters. And that seems to be the thing that people are going for right now.

• 16:39Nilay Patel?

  So, let's, let's take the other two pieces in turn, the, the sort of 2:30 puzzle. This is the most aggressive, sort of, we have 2:30 moderation ability we've ever seen, right? We're, we're literally moderating the president by putting labels on his stuff, and we're happy to do it. I think Twitter thinks morally they're obligated to do it. Do you think this plays into the next round of 2:30 debate? Like, the bad 2:30 takes are like, that, that Twitter account is like, can barely keep up.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Oh, my god, yes. Um, I, I don't know, because, again, if we're looking at a world, say, where Trump is not the president, then it becomes a little less clear how much drive there's gonna be behind any of this. Like, if Biden is the president, the thing he's really upset about is, like, yeah, he hates 2:30, but he hates it because they're not, like, moderating enough. So, that's probably gonna look very different. Um, and if Trump wins, I, the weird thing about this is that it feels like the social networks have actually just managed to recede to the level of, like, conversation influence that kind of makes sense for websites on the internet. Like, everyone's talking about the fact that we're picking a president.

• 17:49Speaker 03

  Um, so, I don't know, it's hard to tell how much the attention's going to focus on them in, like, the coming weeks or so if, say, Trump does win. Like, is he just gonna be so caught up with a bunch of other enemies that he's going to forget about them for a while? Or is he just going to go on this scorched earth campaign along with the rest of the Republican Party to, like, burn them to the ground?

• 18:09Nilay Patel?

  Even if he loses, and again, I'm just reminding the audience that where we sit right now, 5:28 PM, on whatever day it is, we don't know who the president is, that's Thursday, at 5:28 PM on Thursday, we, we still don't know the answer. But even if Trump were to lose, the Josh Hollies, the Ted Cruzes, the Brendan Cars of the world are motivated

• 18:32Speaker 04

  To say that these companies have so much power over speech. And now they have, you know, pages and pages of moderated tweets from the President of the United States alleging election fraud. That Twitter was like, nope, you shouldn't get to see that. Doesn't that, doesn't it seem like that will just become fodder forever?

• 18:49Speaker 03

  I'm sure it will, but I mean, the weird thing is just anything they do has been kicked over for so long. And they spent so much time beforehand saying, hey, look, it's gonna be pretty weird if he does this thing. Let's warn about him doing this thing. It's gonna be complete nonsense. We're gonna moderate it because it's ridiculous. I feel like that kind of actually served them well. Like that they set a baseline for this is a behavior that we're just not going to accept because it is corrosive to democracy. Like, that's relatively sympathetic. And I say this as someone who is often pretty uncomfortable with the power of social networks.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would actually give credit to the American people on this, that I think the level of media savvy is way higher than I think we'd by default assume. I think people get it when Donald Trump goes off and tweets something. We've, we've had enough of that to know that, oh, well, we shouldn't take this seriously quite yet. Right? Or it's, it, we don't know if this is an angry tweet or it turns into something, right?

• 19:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's gonna be a healthcare plan. We're building an LCD factory in Wisconsin.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:52Nilay Patel?

  Forty-five million Google engineers are building a website.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  It's also just, it's really low content material is the thing. It's not like Trump is tweeting a thing out usually and being like, here's a detailed thing that people should look at for fraud. He's just like, stop the count.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:06Nilay Patel?

  So it's interesting, so they didn't moderate the stop the count one, right? And this is where, one of the funnier moments of today, funny, is, you know, we go and ask Twitter, like, tell us about these tweets. And then they reply, and I've just noticed over the past couple of days that the replies have become templated. Like, they're like, regarding this tweet. And then they're like, here's our rule. And it's like, oh, we're at the point where they're just doing macros.

• 20:31Nilay Patel?

  They just know their own answers. So stop the count. They did not moderate it.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  Which makes sense to me.

• 20:37Nilay Patel?

  Okay, explain that one.

• 20:38Speaker 03

  So let me actually just, I need to pull up his Twitter feed so I don't get the words wrong. But there are three tweets that I think it is instructive to look at. The first tweet that stopped the count, which is not, was not moderated or called misleading, because Trump is just saying, hey, we should not do this thing. It's a general policy wish. He's like, we should stop doing this thing that, like, the thing he's calling for is like a thing that you can't do. It would be illegal if you were actually doing it. But he's just making a general policy wish.

• 21:12Nilay Patel?

  The Speech Act is a request. It could be a command, but even if it was a command, it's illegal and you don't make commands by tweeting. And therefore, it is not a statement of fact. It is a statement of opinion, or at best, it's command.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Which versus a tweet he made very shortly before that, which was, any vote that came in after Election Day will not be counted. And that one is flagged as being misleading, because it is, because he's making a statement about how the law actually works, and that's not true. And then the third tweet is one of the more recent ones, and it is, stop the fraud. And this one is also flagged as misleading. And I don't have the exact language Twitter used there, but that also makes sense to me because it is claiming, hey, there is fraud happening. We have to stop it, which is different. Like, everyone agrees that there's a vote count going on. Like, that's not controversial. It is controversial if he claims that there is fraud.

• 22:05Nilay Patel?

  I would just point out also that if we stop the count at this exact moment in time, he will lose.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, no, that's a whole other can of worms.

• 22:13Nilay Patel?

  There's like a whole logic puzzle of chaos here that makes no sense, but it's just funny that one of the things he's asking for would result in his losing. Vox.com has a number of excellent election podcasts that you can go listen to to fall down that rabbit hole. But I want to just stay focused on sort of platform moderation. It's where we live. It's where we've been focused on so much. What strikes me about all of those examples is they are all extremely subjective judgment calls. All those calls are made relatively fast. Twitter in particular has been moving very quickly. I don't know if they were expecting this expression of chaos, right? Like, everyone's expecting chaos. You might expect Trump to say, I've won the election.

• 22:55Nilay Patel?

  But stop the count, all caps, exclamation points. Like, was that on their, like, big board of possibilities? And they just, like, ran through their flow chart? They're having meetings, they're making decisions on the fly. Do we think those decisions have been relatively consistent? Have they expressed sort of coherent policy view from Twitter? Or is it a scattershot as we've seen the platforms in the past?

• 23:20Speaker 03

  Twitter seems fairly consistent. Facebook, Facebook has had a slightly different issue, which is that it has all the misinformation stuff, but then it also has organizing on the platform. So they banned a group that was called Stop This Deal that people were organizing on because there were, like, calls for unlawful activity, I believe violence. They, so they are also having to deal with, like, organizations of people. And to that end, they also, like, they seem like they are at least trying to address it, but they are running into the problem of just, it's really hard to stop normal people from saying stuff on Facebook and connecting with each other because that's just literally the goal of Facebook.

• 23:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, if you're, if you're, like, in the market for some other people to be mad about vote counting, like, Facebook is a product, is a very complicated product that is designed to bring you together.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. Disclosure, my wife works for the, Natty, what's it called, the group?

• 24:13Speaker 03

  Facebook Reality Labs.

• 24:14Speaker 04

  Reality Labs. The thing that baffles me about a bunch of the reaction of the general populace, but especially these social networks, is it's hard to know. We spent the last six months saying, something like this is probably going to happen, you should be ready for it. And now it's happening, and it's not clear if they were ready for it. And I think that Facebook organizing is a particular instance of that. Facebook has been pushing groups for a very long time. There have been no shortage of stories about Facebook groups being problematic and being a source of organizing for potentially very dangerous people and very dangerous groups. It should have been blindingly obvious from the jump that, that it would be used in the way that Facebook is used to organize people, to put, connect people together, to do that.

• 24:59Speaker 04

  And it's, the question is, are they, are they reacting? Are they just, they not have enough people? How much of this is coming as a surprise to them? Because, you know, we could have predicted all of these things last week.

• 25:12Nilay Patel?

  We could have, but I think you have to make an extremely negative inference in a very uncomfortable way to say, we know there will be this kind of organizing and we are ready to shut it down because we think it will lead to political violence. I don't think anyone in America until recently has been ready to go from zero to 1,000 in that way around political organizing on any platform. You could have a group called Stop the Steal and all it is is a bunch of conservative lawyers doing their best to make the lawsuits slightly more viable than they've been. And I think that's a totally fine use of Facebook.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  I think they would absolutely not be acting as fast as they did on this if it were not for the Kenosha militia incident and a bunch of QAnon recommendation stuff and just this whole organizational nightmare that they've been dealing with for the last six months. Like, they honestly moved faster on this thing than I kind of expected them to.

• 26:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think that what's underneath that is the quickness to make the negative inference around this particular kind of energy going from we all found each other on Facebook to we're going to show up at a rally with guns, right? We're going to show up outside the Maricopa County polling place in such threatening fashion that CNN leaves the building on live TV. Now, the threatening fashion was very funny because they were literally singing YMCA, which I think is a very distant kind of threat. But like, they were armed and they were there and they were angry and the cops are there and, you know, the media and the people watching the account were asked to leave. That's the danger of Facebook bringing people together in a way that eventually led them

• 26:50Nilay Patel?

  to shut down the group. I just don't know how any platform with any, even if you have the most moderators, you have the best lawyers, the speech experts you've brought in, you're... Weirdo outside Facebook Oversight Group that calls itself the real Facebook. Everyone's in the room together. I still don't know that you just make the guess before something shows you that it's bad about a group of people saying, here's our political opinion. I could not tell you when you should be able to do that. So I think to be like, like you're saying, Addy, like Facebook moved faster than we thought, but I don't know that any faster like is comfortable.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  I absolutely agree with that. And yeah, I think the thing that makes this hard is that there are such clear calls for violence in a lot, like a lot of Facebook groups that like, a lot of these things just end up not seeming like edge cases. But I do am at least like happy that Facebook made the call that like the thing that we're doing this is because I just looked up their quote is, we saw worrying calls for violence from members of the group. Like, that's a bar that I'm willing to have them act on. And I am, yeah, I think glad that they took as long as they did to at least make sure that that bar was there.

• 28:00Nilay Patel?

  Do we see, I mean, usually when we have these conversations, the big platforms are moderating hard. They're doing things that, you know, some people find worrisome in terms of their power over speech, all that stuff. Isn't this the moment for Parler to like ride, right? Isn't like, shouldn't Triller be having its moment? Are we seeing any of that jump to the other platform or is all the action happening on the, on the sort of the big three?

• 28:25Speaker 03

  I mean, I went into onto Parler this morning and like checked the Stop the Steal hashtag and it wasn't super exciting. It was like 80 posts. I don't know. I think that, first of all, just Facebook's really good at organizing, like Facebook groups. I don't, I think Telegram is a thing that lots of people were wondering about, like clear organizing on. But again, so much of this stuff has not been sort of shadowy militia activity. It's been very kind of close to mainstream organizing and that's put a lot of it on Facebook. And I just, I still haven't really seen alternative platforms in that particular way shine. Like, obviously, the cool thing is that people are actually working on, like,

• 29:08Speaker 03

  going to other platforms to communicate about the election. Like, there was a good piece in The Times about TikTok watch parties. There are people watching on Twitch, and there's Zoom, like, election watch parties, and a bunch of other platforms. But for the things that are just supposed to be explicitly alternatives to Facebook and Twitter, I don't think we've necessarily seen those really, like, break out during this.

• 29:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, I mean, and that to me is, it cuts both ways. Like, one, I'm very happy that the well-moderated platforms seem to be the center of the information universe online. On the other side, though, like, if you're the president, you've got this message to spread, and you keep getting blocked, why do you just keep coming back to the same place? Like, what is the thing that will make Parler useful if not for, we're just not allowing this kind of speech? Right? Like, it doesn't exist over there. And I'm not saying that's like, the market opportunity you want. I doubt it's even the market opportunity the Parler team wants. But it is, as we talk about competition, like, nothing can break you away from Twitter. Even this moment, when Twitter is saying, "Stop, we don't want this here," as aggressively as it can.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  I mean, I think Trump's a little bit of a special case. Like, he is just, he is really clearly just addicted to Twitter. And I say this as someone who can't leave Twitter. He's just, he is just hooked into it. So I think there was a different president that maybe if they were just genuinely more devoted to pure demagoguery than, like, getting retweets and, like, getting attention, that maybe they would move on to a different platform.

• 30:43Nilay Patel?

  So Ezra Klein retweeted a segment of Fox News where Kayleigh McEnany is, the president's press secretary, is saying, "We want to have the votes counted." And literally, Fox News anchors are like, "What are you talking about?" And Ezra's point was, what's interesting here is not The autocracy that's coming out of Kayleigh, it's that there's pushback on Fox now. Like, everyone is pushing back on this. The general vibe here is, we're gonna do the count. We're not gonna allow this crap. And like, maybe that's three and a half years and change of just lying and everyone's just like tired of it and their credibility shot.

• 31:23Nilay Patel?

  But there is an argument to me that the platform limiting the reach and potentially amplifying more reasonable voices is allowing everyone to exist in a more calm place. Do you think that that's like working itself out?

• 31:36Speaker 03

  I'm not sure. I, I mean, again, we don't know exactly how much this is limiting the reach of anything. But I do, I think I could see an argument that if nothing else, they are setting norms that they are willing to establish. Like, here's what we consider to be the bounds of reasonable conversation if you are the president of the United States on our platform. And I can see that, like, I, I can understand the idea that that would give everyone else the ability to kind of decide, okay, we're just gonna work within those norms. But it could also kind of be the other way around, that just there is this, everyone is really sick of having to make stuff up constantly. And the platforms are also tired of that, and they are adopting these norms in response.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  So the, I think the farthest push we've seen is a group of Democrats wrote a letter calling on Twitter, saying, okay, it's time. Just suspend Trump's account. Just call it, call it a night. We're done with this guy. Do you think that's appropriate?

• 32:31Speaker 03

  The weird thing is that I am, in a lot of ways, I would be so much more comfortable with platforms just saying, okay, look, political figure, you screwed up so many times that you clearly just like, do not belong on this platform because you have completely different views of what is acceptable than us. We're gonna kick you off. I feel like I am, in a lot of ways, more comfortable with that than with this incredibly precise, like, litigation of the acceptable bounds of speech. Like, the former, it kind of feels like you're just, Twitter's a restaurant and Trump won't stop like getting on tables and throwing things. And you're like, sorry, that's just like not what Twitter's for, man. We're gonna ban you. Versus trying to come up with this incredibly full-featured, like, we're going to define what political discourse is.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  And like, how international relations and the state monopoly on violence should work and like, why it's okay to like threaten nuclear war, but not do this other thing. I, I don't know. In a lot of ways, I find that more troubling, but I also know that there's no way Twitter could ban him, like, while he's president, like. That would just be such a nightmare for them. And I think it's weird for other politicians to call for it also. Like, I don't know. I think this is a thing where if Twitter made this decision unilaterally, I would 100% back them up.

• 33:42Nilay Patel?

  Right, but doing it in response to political pressure means this whole other thing is happening. But don't you kind of need the built out rules to say like, hey, you've broken our rules so many times, we're banning you? Like, those things work in connection.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I agree with that. But I think like after a certain point now, it's just clear that it's not like, oh, you broke these rules, you shouldn't do this, we're going to punish you. It's just like, it's like Trump has just agreed to pay parking tickets over and over and over again for in perpetuity. And so Twitter is just like constantly setting the boundaries of what Trump can say and kind of just letting him break the rules. I don't know.

• 34:19Nilay Patel?

  This was my relationship to the campus police in college. This is like, I definitely parked my car on the quad every day. Just every day. And I was like, they're gonna give me a ticket. What are they gonna do, kick me out of school? And they never did.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  But like, eventually your rules kind of mean nothing if you're just going to let someone break them over and over.

• 34:35Nilay Patel?

  I will say that I was, they threatened to not let me graduate if I didn't return my outstanding library books, but the parking tickets never came up. So whatever metaphor that connects to with Twitter, that's how they should decide to ban Trump. So that's the content moderation stuff. There were some things that actually passed, some new regulations, some new laws that passed. I want to talk about those. We'll take a really quick break, come back, talk about those and wrap this up.

• 35:02Speaker 02

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• 36:18Nilay Patel?

  Let's talk, we've got just a few minutes left. Some things on the policy side did pass. We do know some answers. We still do not know who the president is. Massachusetts passed a pretty comprehensive right to repair law, pretty focused on cars. Teter, you just talked to the iFixit folks. I saw Kyle tweeting about this. He was very excited about it. Any particular background here?

• 36:38Speaker 04

  They're hoping it can become a model for other states. I think there's like, I'm not fully caught up on the particulars of this law, but it was like, you need, you get access to your telemetry, they can't hide it behind some proprietary thing and you're able to now do it with an app. All of which is great. And so the, the question is, will this expand beyond Massachusetts? And if it doesn't, if a car company is forced to follow the rules in Massachusetts, will they just say, screw it, we're not going to, you know, try and break those rules elsewhere in the country? In the same way that, you know, most cars follow California's emission standards and so the most cars you buy in the US end up just having California's standards. It's possible that Massachusetts is big enough and powerful enough that our car makers

• 37:21Speaker 04

  is like, well, if we have to unlock the telemetry for Massachusetts, it's more work to lock it down for everybody else, so screw it. So that could be fun.

• 37:29Nilay Patel?

  It could. I have my, that's the optimistic tape and I hope it happens. But like every website I go onto right now is like, has a button that says, don't, don't sell my data. And you click it and they're like, we've detected that you are not in California.

• 37:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:43Nilay Patel?

  Please try again when you move to California. Like, software-defined features are not hard for carmakers to get around. Whereas I think actually shipping different emissions hardware is a different kind of cost.

• 37:54Speaker 04

  The law that I do think is going to end up being a model for the rest of the country is Prop 22 here in California, which this was the proposition that allows companies like Uber and Lyft to continue to treat the people that use those platforms as contractors instead of employees. There was a massive amount of money that I think that $200 million was spent to get this thing passed. Uber and Lyft like put, you know, little ads inside their apps, just electioneering inside the app. So it passed. And I think that if you're Uber and you've got, you've got a long history of playing fast and loose with the law, and then you've got a long history of like dealing with regulators after that period, you look at your win here and you use that as a model to try and spread

• 38:37Speaker 04

  it out anywhere, anywhere else where they try and force you to make your employees employees.

• 38:42Nilay Patel?

  That one, I think we're gonna have to extremely see how it plays out. The law was in reaction to AB5. This is a long labor law conversation, but AB5 was passed. It led to just an immediate, like, it was just like a bomb that went off in the California labor market in like all sorts of ways. Something that affected us was like, we couldn't hire the freelancers that we were used to because there was a cap on how much freelance work you could do as a journalist. Like, unexpected consequences all over AB5. And I think that played a little bit into Uber and Lyft getting this moment. But I think that this version is also gonna have a huge set of unintended consequences.

• 39:24Nilay Patel?

  But it is true that they politicked their way into a win using their apps, using their war chests. They bought a bunch of endorsements. We'll see. That's a big one. It was not, I think that one could have gone either way, but Uber and Lyft carried that one. California, another one, poised to establish a new privacy regulator.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  This one is a tough one because there was already a pretty strong privacy law here. This amended it in certain ways or changed it in certain ways, and it seemed like the tech companies were generally behind it. And so you could make the case, I think the ACLU maybe even did, that this law has some benefits, but on the whole, you should vote against it because what it's, what it's doing is it's like ensconcing the privacy framework that tech companies feel they're comfortable with. And if tech companies are comfortable with the privacy framework, you probably shouldn't trust it.

• 40:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a lot of like corporate capture of regulation happening in California. It's like, that's the two of these together. And then lastly, I think my favorite one is Portland, Maine has voted to ban facial recognition.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  By public agencies.

• 40:22Nilay Patel?

  By public agencies.

• 40:23Speaker 04

  No, I just like in general, like I'm bad at faces in the first place. So to have a law of just ensconcing that would be great.

• 40:30Nilay Patel?

  I think this one's really interesting. Like, we've just seen, the police are interested in this in general. Many kinds of public agencies are interested in this in general. We've seen a little bit of, you know, corporate self-regulation. Microsoft has said, hey, we, we don't want to do this until there's a law in place. So having, doing it township by township is one approach that's happening here. The question is whether this filters into the, the bigger ecosystem, but you know, tech-related stuff on the ballot, sort of across the country this year, a few of these have, we know the answers. I think we're gonna know a few more answers as the days go by. Addie, are we missing anything? Is there any, what, I mean,

• 41:09Nilay Patel?

  I usually end conversations like this by saying things like, what happens next? But that seems ridiculous at this moment in time.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  It is possible we will know what happens next by the time this goes up, yes.

• 41:20Nilay Patel?

  I think the big question for me, the outstanding question for me is whether this level of moderation is the new normal for the platforms, or whether they're in a heightened state because of elections, democracy, how much they all got criticized in 2016, and then they're gonna draw it back down. And I, I don't know. Honestly, I don't know. I, there's a part of me that says Twitter is like feeling pretty comfortable, right? It's just like the way they're behaving. They're calm, they're not freaking out. They're, when you ask them why they did a thing, they're generating answers and being public with them. Like, there's a part of me that says this is just how they act now. I'm curious to see if that, that persists.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think maybe it was Russell who was saying, like, we're seeing sort of two big norms on Twitter. And the first is that if you are a really big account, you are held to a higher standard. And the second is if there, there are topics that are just so important that we're going to hold everyone to a higher standard around them, like the election. And it will be interesting if that is sort of a new organizing principle for the site.

• 42:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's, in particular, you're saying Trump is addicted to Twitter. I mean, you're the one who makes this point, I think, the most of anyone. Twitter is the smallest one. It always, it has the most to lose. And they, the fact that it is also the most aggressive, there's an interplay there that I think is super, uh, super interesting, but we'll see how it goes. Okay. Hopefully by the time you're listening to this, we know who the president is. It's maybe we're gonna do two episodes next week, too. Who knows what's gonna happen, but hopefully by the time you're listening to this, we know who the president is and this conversation is still contextually, uh, meaningful. But we'll have our policy team members back. We'll have Addy back to talk about the aftermath of all this platform work, uh, very soon. So thanks a lot, Addy. Yeah.

• 43:05Nilay Patel?

  All right. That's our show. Micro episode number two, complete. If you somehow thought you were gonna be listening to PS5 this whole time, I applaud you for sticking it, sticking it out. There is a PS5, Xbox, Apple preview episode in the feed right now. You can go listen to that. Tom Warren joined us for that. It was great. Other than that, we're back on Tuesday with my new show Decoder. It's happening. We're launching it on Tuesday. New interview show from The Verge called Decoder. I'm very excited about our first guest. I'm still hyping it up. Not gonna say who it is yet, but it's gonna be good. Uh, that's coming on Tuesday. We'll be running some episodes in this feed, but eventually it's just gonna be on its own feed Tuesday. I'm, I'm really hyped for it. It's hard to see past today, but I promise you the next Tuesday's coming. It's what I've been telling myself.

• 43:48Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so check that out. You can tweet at us. I'm at reckless. Addy's at the dextrarchy. Dieter's at back lawn. We'll see. Hopefully we'll know by the time you listen to this. Rock and roll. Wear a mask.

• 44:18Speaker 06

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• 45:09Speaker 07

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