BONUS: Meta doesn't care anymore

Producer Grant joins Ryan to talk about how Mark Zuckerberg went from looking and acting like “Every Guy Walking Down the Street in Boston in the Mid-2000s” to his current era, “I Work in the Financial District and I’m Dating A Girl from Bushwick,” and said man’s recent announcement that Meta would no longer be employing fact checkers, instead relying on community notes to flag offensive content. Catch the full episode and plenty of other great bonus content, plus ad-free episodes, by joining our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games.

• 0:01Speaker 01

  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 0:04Speaker 02

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Filmed for IMAX.

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Make them remember you.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 0:18Speaker 03

  Did you ever have a moment where you thought Facebook was cool? Or is going to lead to something not terrible? Think back.

• 0:29Ryan Broderick?

  Hmm. The most, the most use I ever got out of Facebook was in college. This was before smartphones. And it was during this period of time where Facebook put invites out publicly and there was really, for, for events? And there was like no way to really like gate who saw your event. Like there wasn't like a private event feature as I understood it. This would have been like 2007 or 8. And so all the houses around my college would do Facebook events for parties and we would print them out like on a printer. And we would put down the address and we would make like a pirate map of like all the house parties we were going to go to.

• 1:11Ryan Broderick?

  And that lasted seemingly for about six to seven months. And it was great. And I really enjoyed, I felt like, oh, cool. Like I can see everything that's going on in the community I'm in. That was cool. Uh.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  At those parties were you raiding girls?

• 1:32Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that was.

• 1:33Speaker 03

  To barn animals?

• 1:34Ryan Broderick?

  No, but I did do, okay, so if we're gonna go down this road, I did. So there, I didn't want to pay the cover for the frat parties, right? So what I would, what we would do is we had a guy who had a backpack with all the different solo cup covers. Because like the frat parties use the colored solo cups to prove that you paid the cover. And one of these we got into and we were like, okay, we got the solo cups, cool. And we like didn't like this frat, but like we wanted to drink free booze. And then they had bins of jungle juice, like, like plastic bins of jungle juice. But because we came in the back, the story's about to get kind of dark. We didn't see that the bins were labeled girls and guys.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Oh, fuck.

• 2:11Ryan Broderick?

  So I was dipping my cup in the bin that was labeled girls. Unbeknownst to us, they had, uh, they, they created what they called napalm, which was full of Rohypnol or, or a similar, uh, date rape drug.

• 2:25Ryan Broderick?

  So I essentially roofied myself and fell asleep for like three days after like just projectile vomiting and having to be carried out of the house. But apparently a lot of other people did too. And this was one of the, uh, the original conversations that led me to work at the school paper. So, you know, a little, little journalism origin story for me.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  That's so dark.

• 2:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I always think about these stories when, you know, I don't want to get too up on my high horse about Gen Z like not having fun or like doing things or being social. But then I'm like, the amount of, the amount of malfeasance that like we experienced in our late teens and early twenties. I'm not sure I would wish that on any generation. So perhaps Zoom calls and FaceTimes are better for them.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  If the youth isn't playing Edward 40 Hands and friends absolutely refuse to untape your friends' hands.

• 3:12Ryan Broderick?

  If you're Gen Z listening to this, you should buy a 40 ounce of Colt 45. You should drink it to the label and then you should get, uh, I think they still sell Four Loko without the caffeine or juice, which is like a knockoff. And you dump it into the 40 and you turn it green and it's called a space monkey.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  If we reach 1,000 patrons, which is, which is a needed goal.

• 3:34Ryan Broderick?

  It is a needed goal. We need that.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  Uh, Ryan and I will record a bonus while doing that. But anyways.

• 3:42Ryan Broderick?

  Good luck editing that.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  No, no, I'm leaving all this in. Um, but cue up the intro music. You know, who would bring a bunch of different solo cups like that to parties, Ryan? Mark Zuckerberg, clearly your friend, a guy you clearly admire. Uh, I'm Grant Irving. Joining me today, the host of this podcast, the Joe Rogan of the left, Facebook lover, Ryan Broderick.

• 4:04Ryan Broderick?

  I love Facebook. It's the best. I love connection.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Thank you for doing your show.

• 4:20Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you for having me on my show.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  This is a little technical, so, so correct me if I'm wrong, Karen. So Meta announced they are really jelly of all the attention Elon has been getting, and are gonna toxify their platform, quoting here again, "super hardcore." Do I have that right? Is this factually accurate?

• 4:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, basically. They are getting rid of their fact-checking, most of which was done by third parties, and they are allowing all kinds of new, fun ways to torment each other, which were previously banned. The biggest being that you, if I understand this correctly, you cannot make fun of someone for being mentally ill on Facebook unless you're saying that they're gay and that's why they're mentally ill.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  We'll get into the specifics in just a moment. But I have three images I want to show you. If I can figure out a way to share my screen in Riverside, I think I can. And I want you to describe the portraits you're seeing.

• 5:24Ryan Broderick?

  So this is Mark Zuckerberg in college. He has a Vio laptop, pretty nice. And he looks like every guy walking down the street in Boston in the mid 2000s. Just like absolute New England NPC. And he's got big, stupid headphones on. They're the kind of guy that like, has casual feelings about the band Guster, you know?

• 5:50Speaker 03

  There's a reference for all 20 of you.

• 5:52Ryan Broderick?

  You know what I mean? The band with the bongos, Guster?

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:57Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, he's like the guy that like, only goes to restaurants that have TV screens, but he's not actively listening or looking at the TV screens. Mark Zuckerberg is like a classic, just nothing man from Massachusetts. He's not from Massachusetts, but he's like a nothing man that goes to school in Massachusetts. There's thousands of them.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  What about this guy?

• 6:17Ryan Broderick?

  This is during his like Hawaii surfing phase, right? So he's like got his weird...

• 6:22Speaker 03

  So this is probably like Height of Power?

• 6:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, he's got his like super short turf bangs, and he's like trying to like move away from the hoodie era, so he's got like a different kind of hoodie on. And he's like tanning in a weird way, so his eyebrows are blonde in this. And this is, I believe this is part of the same photo shoot where he has like all the stupid suntan lotion on his face or whatever. So yeah, this is like his, this is like his first Trump era look.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's from the move from like, uh, "I'm just a baby super genius, you can't hold me responsible for anything," to like, "I'm an adult, but like, guys, I like, wanna be a relatable guy."

• 7:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, this is like, clearly the moment where like, the PR people were like, "You have to find hobbies, so that people think you're a human being."

• 7:07Speaker 03

  And, uh, what about this guy?

• 7:09Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, so this is his newest era, this is the hype beast, Mark Zuckerberg. He looks like he works at an illegal dispensary pop-up in Brooklyn.

• 7:20Ryan Broderick?

  You know, he, this is the like, "I work in financial district and I'm dating a girl in Bushwick" look that he has right now. I think in many ways, this is his most authentic self. Um, I think this is truly who he is on the inside, or rather, who he would have been, if he, like, had the sort of social capacity to be that, uh, in his twenties. Like, this is very much like a midlife crisis Zuckerberg.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  I like that you can see the tanning goggle line.

• 7:53Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I've wondered about this as well, if this was like, on purpose to look like Trump, or because like, he's a client, like, he just doesn't understand how to tan his eyes. Um, yeah, it's a strange look. Uh, but I do think this is his best look, so far.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  Do you have a favorite Zuck moment or rebrand?

• 8:14Ryan Broderick?

  I don't, only because, and I, and I feel like I do this every time we do one of these episodes, where I'm gonna like, break your format. I find him deeply uninteresting. And in many ways, almost like incidental to Facebook. Um, and this is based on, just my distaste for the man. Uh, once again, think he, uh, belongs sort of like, at the Nightwish Brewery in the north end of Boston, talking about how this IPA is really good, you know? I just think he's a very boring man who takes up space in my home state.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  No, no, these guys are now into like, fourteen dollar lagers that taste exactly like Engling, but...

• 8:55Ryan Broderick?

  Not in Boston, they're not. Uh, because Boston is about five years culturally behind the rest of the country. So I find him boring and incidental to Facebook's story. Not just because I think he is boring and incidental as a human being, but because... I think that there's essentially a moment that happens around 2012 or 2013, where Facebook becomes so large that no one person has any sort of say in how it works or operates, or even fully understands it. And that, that kind of opinion that I started to form in the 2010s, I think has only become more solid in my mind since. I don't get the feeling that any one person inside of Facebook really knows what's going on and couldn't really change it much, except for like minute little tweaks at this point.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Does that include the recent changes? You think they're minute?

• 9:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, I mean, I think the changes that were announced recently are quite minute, because most of the bad stuff that's happening on Facebook has already been happening. What this will do is allow Facebook to not have to deal with it anymore.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  So I'm sorry to tell you, you, you didn't ruin this outline. I think we're actually agreeing. I, um, I look at Mark's different errors and I see a guy who is appearing as whatever is most advantageous to him, and I think that's what we see with the whole company.

• 10:14Ryan Broderick?

  Always.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  The only thing that I think is, is, is kind of telling, and maybe it's just because I, I, I love this. It is my favorite billionaire fact, but he, uh, he, when he had the stupid haircut, it was to style it off of Augustus Caesar. And I think if anyone is styling themselves and is in competition with a Roman emperor, there, there should be forced bankruptcy of that person.

• 10:39Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's right. I have a piece of Zuckerberg gossip I've been sitting on, which I think I can use here.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:47Ryan Broderick?

  Um, and perhaps if any Meta employees are listening and they would like to confirm this for me, I've heard that he only eats chicken nuggets.

• 10:59Ryan Broderick?

  And this is not me doing a bit. I have heard that. So if anyone would like, you know, you know, I want to be, I want to do my due diligence here. If anyone listening can conform or deny that Mark Zuckerberg has a, a private chef that's making him chicken nuggets every day, let me know. I'm very interested in hearing that, uh, whether that's true or not.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  It is so believable.

• 11:22Ryan Broderick?

  It is.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  So, uh, our timing of our January 6th episode was perfect, uh, and also exactly wrong because of a lot of what the episode was. And, uh, you should fucking listen to it if you, if you haven't, because it is so, so relevant. It was in particular about how Facebook facilitated and/or enabled the interaction, and how most of their attention was not on combating extremism as a real problem, but rather making sure they wouldn't get blamed for ending democracy. Is that a fair summary?

• 11:57Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. And I think Charlie and I had sort of different takes on when Facebook stopped trying to moderate itself and stopped doing due diligence, let's say. But we both are in agreement that at some point between 2020 and 2021, Meta threw up their hands and were like, "We're not gonna play ball anymore." And most of their decisions before that period of time were about not getting blamed, and now they're just like, "We're not even gonna bother stepping in." And the decisions that they made recently around fact-checking are totally in line with that idea, which is like, "You can't yell at us, because we're just not gonna

• 12:42Ryan Broderick?

  play ball anymore."

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Can you give, before this moment, can you give an example showing how Meta cared more about the PR than the problem?

• 12:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, the best examples were not in the US. So their total inability to admit that they helped facilitate the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar is probably the biggest and most important example of this. But there were waves of Facebook-led riots across the global south and even in parts of Europe throughout the 2010s. And Facebook refused to ever truly acknowledge them. And they would say, "That actually has nothing to do with our platform, and it was people using it poorly, and that's not how it's meant to be used."

• 13:35Ryan Broderick?

  In the incident in Myanmar, if I remember correctly, essentially, the riots kicked off because a rumor spread about a tea shop owner in a small town.

• 13:47Ryan Broderick?

  People like stormed and it spread on Facebook. People stormed the tea shop and like tried to lynch the owner. And then that spread out into like, you know, sectarian violence across the country, which then literally led to a genocide. And like Facebook's role has been well documented in that. And in fact, when Facebook announced the, the end of fact checking this week, Meta employees told Casey Newton, a platformer, that this was going to lead to another genocide. Like employees inside the company know the power that Facebook has. And it, and it, and it sounds very crazy when you start to talk about this because you're, what you're talking about is essentially rumors and you're talking about misinformation and you're talking about harassment and bullying online on Facebook,

• 14:32Ryan Broderick?

  which then spills out into real world violence. And the, the jump from online to offline is where Meta goes like, actually like, we, we can't, you know, you can't blame us for that. And so they put out all kinds of safeguards and they say-

• 14:45Speaker 03

  It's like you throw a rally by the Capitol where you say, "Go, go, go, we're gonna, let's go march to the Capitol." But what happens once you get to the Capitol?

• 14:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  What do you mean? That was, that was 30 minutes ago. How could we be held responsible for what these people did on their way from one, from point A to point B?

• 15:05Ryan Broderick?

  Right. And like, I think I've talked about this on the show before, but like, you know, I would reach out to Meta before they were Meta, when I would reach out to Facebook for comment on all kinds of stories where I'd find something horrible on the site. And they, they'd either lie to me or, or they would delete it before I could publish. You know, they would, they, they-

• 15:27Speaker 03

  Can you give an example of that?

• 15:29Ryan Broderick?

  Um, yeah. The incident where I sort of, where I sort of was like, I'm never gonna like, I'm never gonna trust you guys again. Uh, I was in Mexico covering, uh, the 2018 election and my partner on the story, Anigo, and I were investigating a fake news farm in Mexico City. And we like got access into it, got to see it. Uh, they were responsible for a very viral rumor that Paul Walker was still alive in Mexico, uh, which like apparently like a lot of Mexicans just believe is fact because of how successfully viral this story was.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Paul Walker is their Tupac?

• 16:09Ryan Broderick?

  Essentially, like, they just think like Paul Walker is like living in rural Mexico somewhere. So, we like, we talked to this whole, we did a whole afternoon inside this, this, essentially like an office space that had been like set up in like a, in like a building in Mexico City, full of twenty-somethings just like lying all day on Mexican Facebook pages. And they were being commissioned by politicians in Mexico to spread fake news about that politician, which I thought was a kind of an interesting twist. So, the Mexican politicians were paying this firm to spread rumors about them, so they could accuse their political opponents of spreading those rumors on Facebook.

• 16:49Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Fuck, it's good shit, right? And so, we documented this whole thing, we had all this proof, like, I mean, I, we have, we had a, we brought a film crew to like film how they used Facebook to do this. And Facebook PR people, uh, who, the majority of which at the time, I should say, were former Obama staffers. Um, in case you needed more reasons to not trust that entire period of history, most of those people went from the Obama White House to work in Big Tech. So, I, I went to Facebook and I was like, here's all this proof we have of what's happening in Mexico around the election. It seems like it's actually making like some genuine impact in, at least in like maybe the local level.

• 17:29Ryan Broderick?

  I don't know if it really impacted, uh, the success of Andreas Manuel Lopez-Abreu, the, the former president of Mexico. But, the Facebook PR team totally gave me a runaround. And then the thing that like really enraged me, and we published like a second story about it because I was so angry. Like this, I've never had this happen to me before.

• 17:50Ryan Broderick?

  Before I could, I could write my story, they turned around and sent all my reporting that I had asked them about to the Atlantic Council, which is a NATO-backed fact-checking organization, who I like, you know, I'm cool with, like, I've worked with them before. But they basically leaked my story to the Atlantic Council, who then called me out of the blue to run defense for Meta. And I'm still angry about it to this day. That's like a ridiculous- No, that sucks. That really- I've never had that happen to me before. And maybe it's like just not totally clear for like non-journalists why that's weird, but like it was so weirdly aggressive. And that was the day where I was like, I'm never going to treat Meta as anything other than an antagonistic force. Because like clearly they don't care about anything other than protecting their own reputation.

• 18:35Ryan Broderick?

  And yeah, I'm still mad about that. Like that's a ridiculous thing to do. Anyways, uh, it's extremely petty. So, so to recap, Meta has been very focused on expansion and keeping the brand out of trouble. And will adapt accordingly to accomplish both of those things. And we're seeing that with the recent news. But before we get there, how did they handle the Biden years after January 6th, when people were very pissed at them? The Biden era of Facebook and, and to an extent Instagram as well, I think, has been about minimizing relevance as, as much as they can without losing engagement.

• 19:20Ryan Broderick?

  And what I mean by that is like,

• 19:23Ryan Broderick?

  they basically said like, no more news on Facebook, no more politics on Facebook. Now, obviously news and politics are still being shared on Facebook, but the levers that control the highest points of the Meta ecosystem aren't showing that stuff anymore. And like garbage day researcher and panic world researcher, Adam and I, we look at this stuff every month. We work with NewsWIP and we can see like what's being shared and engaged with across Facebook. And like, over the last two years, it has been largely garbage bullshit. Like clips from like America's Got Talent and America's Funniest Home Videos. And like weird beauty pageants and stuff. Like it's, it's totally irrelevant. They want to see how irrelevant they can be socially without having impact on their bottom, any impact on their bottom line.

• 20:07Ryan Broderick?

  And now that Biden has lost, they can be like, oh yeah, actually you can talk about politics all you want now. Like you can do whatever you want now. It doesn't matter. Because what they were trying to do is, is basically fly under the radar for four years to not trigger any kind of scrutiny or regulatory interest from the Democrats. And now that the Republicans are in charge, they are, just the gates are wide open. And that brings us to now.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  I personally feel betrayed that, that creatine mark is a-

• 20:37Speaker 03

  Would do this. I thought I could get on board with with with Yoked Mark and that that he was now a relatable guy. But, you know, sad day for all of us who like games. But for you, a guy who doesn't like games, this was predictable.

• 20:51Ryan Broderick?

  What he's doing is reading the room that like a lot of other people in both tech and culture are are seeing right now, which is that America is going through

• 21:04Ryan Broderick?

  a pretty conservative social backlash. Country music is very popular. Gender roles are very strict. I mean, it's a lot of the stuff that we cover on this show. Like, there's like a real kind of reactionary movement happening and Facebook is has been completely irrelevant for four years, like, does not matter. And and Instagram is going the same direction. And I think Zuckerberg made a really smart decision right now, which is to open the floodgates. And just see what happens and see if, you know, Facebook can be interesting again, if if Instagram can be interesting again.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  I'm going to digress for one second.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  I was talking to an influencer I thought was funny, potentially for a bonus for the show that didn't pan out. She'd made a video where she, you know, she's a chef and she was like, "Oh, I woke up craving fried Oreos. So I made homemade Ozempic." And then she like, like gets beakers and pretends to make Ozempic. She posted it to Instagram and Facebook, and on Facebook, people reported it as a real thing. The idea of anyone taking this seriously literally blew my mind. Do you think that that's actually like representative of the people that are on Facebook?

• 22:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah, I do.

• 22:25Ryan Broderick?

  This is like an uncomfortable thing about Facebook, which is that it

• 22:31Ryan Broderick?

  it is so large and it is so vast that the sort of

• 22:39Ryan Broderick?

  Average media literacy or genuine literacy level of its user base is quite low. It is like a, it is the largest connection of human beings in human history. Uh, it, it, it has surpassed the Catholic Church as the largest organization of human beings on planet Earth. And there are a lot of people who like, don't understand what satire is, they don't understand what jokes are, they don't understand that what they're looking at on Facebook isn't real. They just open it and they react and Facebook has incentivizes that behavior. So yes, uh, I mean, I, I, years ago, when I was interviewing those magicians that were like eating out of toilets and stuff.

• 23:23Ryan Broderick?

  They would say the same stuff, which is that we're just doing jokes that are clearly jokes, but everyone's taking them really seriously. And they're taking them really seriously because there's just a lot of people on the app that like, don't understand. And there is because they're either they're old or they're uneducated or they don't speak English and they're seeing English content. They, you know, the, and it happens going both ways, like the AI images that everyone were freaking, everyone was freaking out about a couple of months ago.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:49Ryan Broderick?

  Were all being made by like Indian hustle bros who were trying to make the most American images possible. So it's like, it's, it's a, it's a platform of constant cultural context collapse happening all of the time. And so everyone is just very angry because they're very confused.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  So with that in mind, on a scale of one to 10,

• 24:13Speaker 03

  how, how consequential do you think the new changes are going to be?

• 24:21Ryan Broderick?

  I think they're going to be pretty, pretty bad. Um.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  Scale of one to 10?

• 24:26Ryan Broderick?

  Eight, let's say.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  We'll discuss how.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  On the Patreon.

• 24:32Ryan Broderick?

  On the Patreon. Yeah, we're going to the Patreon now. You can pay 50 cents to listen this month only.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, you got less than 30 days to get it for 50 cents for the first month. And if we reach 1,000, we're gonna drink something gross on microphones.

• 24:53Ryan Broderick?

  There you go.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  That will happen.

• 24:55Ryan Broderick?

  There you go.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Just use the code PANIC in all caps at checkout at patreon.com/panicworld. But also, if you're just gonna cancel, once it's $5, you're a class traitor and I don't like you.

• 25:06Ryan Broderick?

  They absolutely are going to do that.

• 25:09Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a Garbage Day production. It's written and produced by Grant Irving, hosted by myself, with research from the always fantastic Adam Bumis. A huge thanks to Gabby Cash for designing the incredibly deranged art for this show. And a huge thank you to Kat Rijesk, our lovely video editor. And if you'd like to sponsor an episode, you can reach out to Multitude, our wonderful partners, multitude-productions ads. We have a Patreon, which you can find at patreon.com/panicworld. And I'd like to end this episode with an important reminder. Log off and touch grass while you still can.