Instagram Threads is here to crush Twitter

The Verge's David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Alex Heath discuss Meta's launch of Threads, a new competitor to Twitter. Later, Nilay Patel calls in to give his take. Further reading: Instagram Threads: why Meta is competing with Twitter Meta unspools Threads Instagram’s Threads: everything you need to know about the new Twitter competitor Instagram’s Twitter competitor, Threads, briefly went live on the web Instagram Threads won’t be available in the EU at launch. People are posting a lot on Threads. Here’s how Twitter’s leadership is responding to Instagram Threads. Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko on what Threads means for the fediverse. Instagram flooded Threads with celebrities and brands at launch So what’s next for Threads? DMs “maybe...” Mark Zuckerberg on when Instagram Threads will get ads Spielberg, Scorsese, and Anderson have swooped in to save Turner Classic Movies Google confirms it’s training AI using scraped web data The TSA will use facial recognition in over 400 airports Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:30David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of cloning other people's apps and calling them slightly different names. I'm your friend David Pierce, and that is all we're going to talk about today. Alex Cranz is here. Hi, Alex. I'm your friend who wants to start a new website called The Flurge. It's fine. It's about floors. It's like a flirty verge. Yeah, I like that better. Better. That's better. Alex Heath is here from, I think, a studio or just a surprisingly soundproof place. I don't know. What's going on?

• 1:58Speaker 03

  It's not that secret. It's our, it's our LA office. But yes, I suppose, I suppose secret for all intensive purposes.

• 2:05David Pierce?

  We have to make sure Adam Mosseri can't find you. That's, that's the important thing.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  I am here and I have too many damn apps on my phone. I'm not sure what to do about it. I don't know about you all.

• 2:14David Pierce?

  I think it was Walt Mossberg who posted something today with just a folder of apps called new Twitter? Question mark. And there were like 10 apps in there. It's like, yeah, this is, this is the world we live in now. I suspect we are going to spend the entirety of this show talking about Instagram threads. So anyone who is expecting anything else, I'm so very sorry. This is what we're doing here.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  We just lost half the audience, but.

• 2:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's, it's fine.

• 2:35Alex Cranz?

  We got a lightning round. Stick around for the lightning round.

• 2:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, listen, if, if you want me to have strong feelings about nothing phone leaks, just wait two or three hours and we'll be there. But let's, let's just get into this. So as we're recording this, it's Thursday afternoon. This app has been live for less than 24 hours and kind of already feels like it has taken over the universe. Heath, you've been, you've been tracking this kind of minute to minute as it has launched. Where do we stand? How is this thing going so far?

• 3:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. So as we're recording this, Mark Zuckerberg shared on threads this morning that they have surpassed 30 million signups, which I want to be clear, blows away the internal projections they had for this thing by a crazy multiple. They're now internally at Meta talking about can we beat the chat GPT record for the fastest

• 3:22David Pierce?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  consumer software product at 100 million users. So that's, that's the scale of threads right now. There have been over 95 million posts, or I guess threads they're called, spools, whatever you want to call them.

• 3:36David Pierce?

  We're going to get to that. Don't you worry.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, on threads to date, according to some internal data I reported on this morning on the site. And that sounds like a huge number, but what I think it shows is if you actually map it to the publicly stated signups, you're seeing a similar thing happen to Twitter where, and this has been true of Twitter from the earliest days, the, a very small percent of the overall users contribute much of the content. And that similar dynamic is starting to play out on threads even, you know, before it's a week old.

• 4:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, so let's actually go back a bunch because the launch was super fascinating. We were all in sort of watching people roll in. I was gonna say we should all compare numbers of who got in first, but Heath you won, so that's no fun.

• 4:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Heath cheated, though.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  User 2,770 something.

• 4:23David Pierce?

  Wow, look at you.

• 4:25Alex Cranz?

  Look at that flex.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  It's a flex. So backstory on this, like, there were only about 1,000 people on this app, all mostly internal meta people and some friends on the 4th of July. They were at just under 3,000 users when I came on, and this was probably four or five hours before public launch. They really moved quickly on this thing. They weren't actually planning to release Threads this week, they were planning to do it next week. And what happened is they saw the Elon rate limit fiasco on Twitter over the 4th of July weekend and rushed it out, and employees started working on the holiday to get it out. They wanted to have more time for celebs to get on boarded. Celebs didn't get on boarded until about a day before public launch. So this is all moving really fast.

• 5:09David Pierce?

  I had wondered about that, actually, because you could not have imagined a more perfect time to launch an app like this. And there have been a lot of these sort of fortuitous moments to try and compete with Twitter over the last eight months or so, but this one in particular, because I think, what was it, Saturday the 2nd, I think, was when Elon tweeted, "We're rate limiting people, and if you're not paying, you only get to see 600 tweets a day." They put up the login thing, so you couldn't see tweets unless you were logged in. And there was this very clear, like, closing down the walls of Twitter thing that everybody, some combination of thought was stupid and ruthlessly made fun of, both of which I think were correct responses to those moves. But then, I was just thinking about this yesterday as this launch happened, like, holy

• 5:52David Pierce?

  god, what a perfect moment if I'm a meta executive sitting there saying, "We're about to launch a thing that kind of looks a lot like Twitter." And if they had launched this four years ago, everybody would have been like, "Oh, god, they launched Twitter." But now they picked this perfect moment, and everybody's like, "Oh, my god, they launched Twitter!" Like, it's the best news of all time, somehow.

• 6:09Alex Cranz?

  I thought it was impressive that they got around, like, a lot of people might have assumed that the rate limiting and everything was in reaction to the impending launch. And it was like, no, this is very clearly, these guys suck. We're gonna do it too, and hopefully we suck less.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  How weird is it that we're talking about Meta in like the context of a good guy almost right now?

• 6:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  It's very strange.

• 6:31Alex Cranz?

  I think that's, like, I don't want to call them a good guy, but a more pleasing alternative.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  Okay, that's more fair, I guess, but like, Zuck is on threads like boasting about how many hours he gets to sleep a night and posting pics of him spending time with his baby in the morning. And this meanwhile, like, record signups, like, it's just this level of like, them feeling good and getting really positive energy that I haven't seen in a very, very long time for Meta.

• 7:00David Pierce?

  It is really fascinating. And that's actually, you talked to Adam Mosseri, I think, in like the hours running up to the launch.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:05David Pierce?

  And that was one of the things you guys talked about, right? Because there are two things about being Meta that are very funny to me here. One is that, like, over the last, say, half decade, I can't think of a company, more people have said, oh, maybe they shouldn't be in charge of all of our social networks. Like, Meta has not been a company you want running your social life over the last several years. And then on the flip side, Meta's history of launching new apps is like as bad as any company other than Google that I can think of. It launched a thing called Threads already and killed it. But you were talking to Adam, and the sense I got was there's, there's a lot of confidence inside that company for how they can do something like this right now.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think they were confident, but they were at least publicly trying to project the sense of, like, Adam told me it was a risky bet, that they know that launching a new app in the year 2023 has a much more likely chance of failing than not versus tacking it on to an existing app like Instagram that already has over a billion users. I think they're being proven in their early signups that the instinct was right to split it off. And as Mosseri kind of explained it to me, the main reason for doing so is they wanted to give equal weight to not only the posts but the comments. And on Instagram, that's just really not an intuitive experience. It doesn't make sense on Instagram. And it's

• 8:25Speaker 03

  really Twitter's magic. And Threads, I mean, it's called Threads. They want the Threads to be the most Prominent thing and they realized to do that, they wanted to split it out. They've been trying to simplify Instagram. They didn't want to add another tab, which I am very much in favor for. And it's smart to use the Instagram social graph as the kickoff here and let you bring your Instagram onto threads because the kinds of people on Instagram who are active posters probably maps the closest to Twitter's most active posters than any of Meta's properties.

• 8:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think if it had tried to pull your Facebook friends, it would have vibed very differently.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:59David Pierce?

  And I was just thinking about this as I was going through because I think one of the first things you have to do is basically decide like, do you want to bring your Instagram graph? In with you when you sign up for it. If I'm remembering it right, this is all so long ago now. You have to use your Instagram handle, but then you sort of get to choose what else from Instagram you want to bring in, right? There's like a button that's like, do you want your Instagram bio? There's another button that's like, do you want your followers and follows? And I was just thinking about it and I was like, my Facebook friend graph, I just have not like thought about or touched in years. And so it's like, all of my exes and people I don't talk to from high school and like my random relatives

• 9:40David Pierce?

  who I don't ever talk to otherwise, who have crazy political opinions. I don't want that in another social app.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  You don't want your college classmates' opinions on RFK Junior in threads?

• 9:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, believe it or not.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Come on, David.

• 9:53David Pierce?

  I went to college in the South. Let's just say that. That's all.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  Same.

• 9:56David Pierce?

  That's all I say. Yeah.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  I say that's why I said that.

• 10:00David Pierce?

  But yeah, Instagram seems to be the kind of place people curate a little more and pay a little more attention to. And I think that for me was like, the startup there was really nice in that I just hit the like, follow everybody and it has mostly been okay so far.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's something about Meta's relationship with the news industry here that I think it's important for us to talk about early on and I'm curious what you guys think of that. I know they really do not want to, I guess, embrace the news industry on threads, even though they know that that's critical to actually killing Twitter. That's Twitter's, at least up until Elon, that was Twitter's lifeblood was the fact that news broke on Twitter. Meta has been actively trying to distance itself from the news industry for the last several years. They've been literally deprioritizing news in the feed on Facebook and Instagram. And they didn't do any concerted outreach to big media brands, to journalists ahead of this, besides me and a handful of others getting access a few hours early just to

• 10:59Speaker 03

  see it, to write about it. And I think for this thing to succeed, they have to embrace the news industry. If they want Threads to be the kind of, as they say, public conversation platform, news is such a critical part of that, and it's what people got a lot of value out of Twitter for. I think they hope that Threads will just be this kind of text version of Instagram with all the creators on Instagram, the athletes, the celebrities, the influencers and all of that. But I think for Threads to really be the Twitter killer, it has to nail news. And I'm not sure Meta has the institutional appetite to embrace that right now, and I'm not sure what that means.

• 11:35Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think they're scared of it, right? Because when they embraced news, there was congressional hearings.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  I mean, they're literally being sued and forced by the Canadian government and others to pay news publishers for links. And they're saying, "We will literally just turn off news in your country rather than pay you to post links," which we could, that's a whole nother, I actually think they're right on that, but that's a whole nother discussion.

• 11:56Alex Cranz?

  There's an interesting, because there's an opportunity here for them, because this is a different product, because it is treated differently by the users so far, and kind of perceived differently by everyone. There's a real opportunity here to make that pivot and to actually be a good partner with news organizations. But I think you're right, there doesn't seem to be any appetite, and I don't know how they get that.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  There's two parts to that. Do news organizations want to be partners with Meta? I can tell you, no.

• 12:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, no.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  Do journalists want a Twitter alternative? Absolutely. So it may be this bottom-up kind of bubbling thing that forces the big publishers to embrace it.

• 12:36Alex Cranz?

  Honestly, I think that's the way they get out of it, too, right? Like, the problem that they're terrified of is, are we putting MSNBC at the top rather than Fox News, and thus we're censoring people, right? That's the terror there. That's the fear, is that they're going to be accused of censorship from one side or the other of this mass politicization of news. And you can get around that by like, just not being a part of that, by also de-emphasizing algorithms and doing that stuff, which the algorithm side of this is kind of interesting, right? Like, the that main feed, no, like, do you know what's going on there? Because no one on threads does.

• 13:14David Pierce?

  Are y'all's feeds like 97% people you don't know? Mine is overwhelmingly people I don't know.

• 13:20Alex Cranz?

  Mine starts people I know, and then the further I go, they're like, all right, I'm just gonna start throwing you some other people.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  I followed a lot of people right before it went to public launch, so I may have a skewed, like, version of this, but I've been following people pretty quickly. I don't actually, they actually hide how many people you're following, which is an interesting choice. I follow a lot of people. It's actually been pretty good also at surfacing people that I would want to follow, that people I follow have responded to, and I can see the little plus icon and tap it in the feed. I do definitely get, you're already seeing the Instagram, LinkedIn-type thirst trap influencers on there. It's crazy.

• 13:55David Pierce?

  The Hustle bros found it so fast.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. As the network builds, I have a feeling that will get sorted out, and they're gonna keep, there's no one who understands tweaking algorithms better than meta to produce outcomes. So they're doing a very light ranked version of basically the Instagram feed for this in terms of what is prioritized. This is built off of Instagram's tech stack. This is basically a different version of Instagram.

• 14:17Alex Cranz?

  So no boobies?

• 14:18Speaker 03

  No boobies. No nudity at all, which is actually a very key difference to Twitter. And I saw a very funny tweet today that just said Twitter may just become Tumblr for incels after all this. But yeah, there's, there's no nudity. This is the Instagram code of conduct, community guidelines. There, I saw some internal docs on this where very severe violations, so sharing CSAM, that sort of thing, on threads will result in penalties on your Instagram account. But for the vast majority of things, misinformation, bullying, that sort of thing, the penalties and strikes you get on threads will not port over to your Instagram account. So for now, at least, they are treating the apps, even though they're sharing account data as separate things to moderate.

• 15:01Alex Cranz?

  How is that moderation gonna work? Because I feel like, like Instagram is less of a trash fire than a lot of the other social media products out there, right? And it's because of that extensive moderation. But also, how does that help foster? The conversations that they seem to want to foster.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  I mean, over a billion users, I don't know, seems to be working.

• 15:21Alex Cranz?

  That's fair.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  I mean, everyone has their own view of this, right? You can have a wildly different experience based on who you are, your race, your gender, your identity, all those things, right? This is the thing with these social networks is we have our own opinions that are based on our own view of them. And we're really unable to see the full picture. The only one who sees the full picture is Mark Zuckerberg. They think they can make a nicer version of Twitter. Zuckerberg's been very clear about that publicly in threads and sees the fact that Twitter has become meaner. And I would say a much less friendly place to be in the last several months. And it's very just ironic to me that this is Meta now coming in and saying, we're going to make the nice social network. Yes, we contributed to people rioting January 6th, but that was a long time ago.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  Let's forget about that. Let's move on.

• 16:09Alex Cranz?

  Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it.

• 16:10David Pierce?

  I just went back and found a big Wired feature that happened when I was there. When Kevin Systrom was in charge of Instagram about how they wanted to make Instagram the nicer place. And basically moderate more aggressively and push harder towards being a place where people are actually nice to each other. And I do think to some extent that worked. I also think the way Instagram is structured has hidden a lot of that, right? And that goes back to the like posts and comments thing. It's like the awful stuff people do to each other in replies to stories, most people don't see. Like so much of what happens on Facebook, people see because it's there. And on Twitter, it's even more public, so it's more obvious. Whereas Instagram is like, everything is kind of a couple of layers down.

• 16:51David Pierce?

  So just your exposure to the bad stuff that happens on Instagram as a bystander is just much less. Which I think is the thing that is so interesting about threads. And back to your point about the news business coming in, this app is so deliberately public, right? Like there's no DMs, there's no groups, there's no community like, and Mosari keeps saying over and over, like, we see this as a place for public conversations. And I think what that's going to do is just show the whole platform to everybody. And especially as they do things like improved search. And if hashtags become a thing, like it's just going to be easier to move around inside of threads. And as you do, whatever they don't do moderation wise is going to become really obvious really fast.

• 17:32David Pierce?

  And I wonder how that changes the way people feel about the platform when you can just see.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I will say that institutionally Meta is in a very much different spot than it was in 2016, 2017, 2018. They realized that they really over-censored, at least they think that now in retrospect. Even honestly through the COVID pandemic, I think they would do some of that differently. I think a lot of the big internet platforms would in terms of what was initially censored versus not. And I do think they want to be a little looser on the censorship this time. And that is a general sentiment in Silicon Valley at the big internet platforms, that we are entering a looser phase of the internet in that regard.

• 18:14David Pierce?

  I also think if I'm Meta, I have been sort of, I don't know, bullied into not caring anymore about some of these things now. Like Nick Clegg gets paid a lot of money to take everyone's heat about all things content moderation, and the rest of the company just doesn't have to care that much. Like Mark Zuckerberg is off doing other things. He's not, he's not picking political fights anymore. He's like, oh, you, Congress wants to yell at us again? Like, whatever, we're gonna keep doing our thing. I just think if I'm Meta, they're like so inured to this at this point, that I think that fear doesn't seem to exist within the company as much as it used to.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  Well, for now, until, until we have the Threads election.

• 18:49David Pierce?

  Well, yeah, that's fair. Yeah, 2026, or I guess 2028 election is gonna be, it's gonna be wild on Threads.

• 18:56Alex Cranz?

  You don't think it's gonna be 2024?

• 18:58Speaker 03

  Uh, at this rate, if they hit a hundred million users in a week, I mean, is RFK Jr. on there yet?

• 19:05David Pierce?

  The Threads ChatGPT election is just gonna be outrageous. No one is ready for this. Alex, can we, can we talk about what we call these things yet? Alex Cranz?

• 19:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, I have really strong opinions about it.

• 19:16David Pierce?

  I know you do.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  I know you do, Krantz.

• 19:18Alex Cranz?

  And I know you guys all think I'm wrong, but we should just call them tweets.

• 19:21David Pierce?

  Make the case for this. I would like to come back to this, but I, you, you wrote the thing about it, so you get to go first.

• 19:26Alex Cranz?

  I wrote it, and I was, the, the best comment I got was somebody being like, I thought this was just gonna be memes, and you actually had an argument. And I was like, yes, that's right. I thought about this for more than two minutes. At least three minutes.

• 19:38David Pierce?

  We call that the Krantz special. This seems like I'm just bullshitting you, but I actually have some thoughts here.

• 19:44Alex Cranz?

  But you know, tweets started as a thing that was necessary because an app needed to put something on there besides post, because I think post in that language was like weird. That's why it started. And they were like, oh, you should just call it a twit. He was like, call it a twit. And everybody's like, that's stupid. Call it a tweet. And he's like, oh, that's a real word. I'll just use that because it's a real word that already exists and everybody likes it. And he knows what it means. And we've, we associate it with Twitter because they eventually trademarked it. So that's fair. But it originally started as just like, I need a way to like, pop off a pithy response. That's called a tweet. And I think like, it's, it's surpassed the company that, that trademarked it, right? Like a Kleenex. You're not checking what brand of Kleenex it is. It's just Kleenex. Same with e-ink. It's

• 20:29Alex Cranz?

  almost certainly e-ink. But like, you're not checking what brand of electronic paper it is. You're just gonna assume it's e-ink.

• 20:35David Pierce?

  Google's really the example here, right?

• 20:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Google is the best example of this.

• 20:38David Pierce?

  You Google stuff on Bing now. Like, that's a thing people do. They go to Bing.com and they Google something.

• 20:43Alex Cranz?

  Google hates that.

• 20:45David Pierce?

  It's hilarious.

• 20:46Alex Cranz?

  They hate it so much. I think it's a normal thing that the English language does. I think it's okay to accept it and embrace it. And I think that I'm really tired of every single time there's a new platform, everybody being like, I got the jokes. What are we gonna call this one? And then we have to have like, this, this joke conversation for three, three cycles, it feels like. And everybody's just like, ah, here's my jokes. And I'm like, no, just call them tweets.

• 21:12David Pierce?

  I worry sometimes that it's not a joke. Like, Blue Sky users seem to think they're called skeets. And on Mastodon, they are technically called toots. Like, this is the world we live in now. Like, we, we can't let this happen. We can't.

• 21:25Alex Cranz?

  They got rid of toots. What's the guy like, the guy didn't know that it meant fart in English. And so like, a YouTuber was like, hey, I'll pay your Patreon if you keep using toot because it's so funny. And he's like, okay. And so he did. And then later he was like, oh, I was saying farts all this time. That sucks. And he got rid of it. Like, it was like, November 2022. He was like, we're getting rid of toots. And the Mastodon users were like, not our toots. And it's like, I don't want to be involved in that conversation. You're fighting for the word toot.

• 21:51David Pierce?

  If I ever pick it for anything, I'm gonna write, not our toots on my sign. That's just, that's what the sign is gonna say. Heath, they really want to call it threads, right? That's the, that's the idea? Is that?

• 22:01Alex Cranz?

  That's the official.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  That's the official thing. You're gonna threads on threads.

• 22:04David Pierce?

  That sucks, right? Like, we don't, we don't like this.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Or just call it a post. Like, we don't, you know, let's not overthink this. Like, we're posting. We're posting on main.

• 22:12Alex Cranz?

  But they're little posts.

• 22:13David Pierce?

  On main. We're gonna open a diner called Posting on Main.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  They're 500 characters. They're bigger than tweets. What are you talking about, Cranz?

• 22:20Alex Cranz?

  500 characters is not a lot.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  It's bigger than tweets.

• 22:23David Pierce?

  It's bigger.

• 22:23Alex Cranz?

  It's bigger than tweets, but it's still smaller than a blog.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  What is a blog anymore? It's, they're, these are all posts. They're just posts. Don't call it tweet.

• 22:31Alex Cranz?

  We have to be able to drill down. We have to be able to be like, like, micro, like, I don't wanna do micro blogs. I don't wanna call them micro posts. That's stupid.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  We're posting on main. The at Verge account, Ruben, he's going wild right now. He's posting on main.

• 22:44Alex Cranz?

  He keeps calling them Zucks, and I'm gonna fight Ruben.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  I kinda like Zucks.

• 22:48Alex Cranz?

  Nope, nope. I'm sorry I said it.

• 22:50David Pierce?

  Zucks is what Facebook has to call its digital currency, so that is spoken for.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Which, which is dead now, so maybe it's good for this. It rhymes with, you know, great stuff. Fun fact, Cranz, Twitter did actually come up with the word tweet. The first popularization of that was Twitterific, a third-party client.

• 23:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was the Twitterific guy was like, I need something to call it.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:13Alex Cranz?

  And so he called it Twit, and it was a Twitter employee who was also a Twitterific beta user, who was like, hey, call them tweets. And he used it. And then like a year and a half later, Twitter was like, we also call them tweets.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. Twitter, famous for taking all of its early good ideas from its third-party developers, then it then killed in the cradle.

• 23:33David Pierce?

  And then never having any other good ideas ever again after that. Let's talk about the decentralization piece of this, cuz this is like, for, for me, as a, as an open social web believer, this is the thing I've been most looking forward to. And you've been reporting for months that this is a thing that, that Instagram's looking into for threads, that it was gonna interoperate with Activity Pub. And the Mastodon people have been up in arms and.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 23:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah. There's been a lot of feelings on the internet about what this thing was gonna be before anybody knew what it was gonna be. But it launched with no Fediverse anything yet. But Mosari, in your talking to him, seemed to be more enthusiastic about Activity Pub than I even expected. Is that your read?

• 24:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I reported in Command Line last week, my newsletter, that they were telling big people in the Fediverse that they were going to delay Activity Pub integration into Threads by several months. I have a feeling it may be later now. We could be talking six-plus months, just given how much Threads has scaled beyond what they were initially expecting. They onboarded the entirety of the Fediverse to Threads in like, three hours. So to give a sense of like, the scale here. Yes, they have been meeting with large server admins, the CEO of Mastodon himself, big third-party developers on Activity Pub for the last couple of weeks, to talk about this. They want to set up a roundtable of,

• 24:55Speaker 03

  you know, Fediverse leaders to kind of inform them as they try to integrate into the network. I was kind of surprised, I guess, though not entirely, to hear Mosseri say that he thinks this is the direction that the internet is headed in, these decentralized platforms, which I know, David, your eyes must have gotten really huge when you saw that. Music to my ears, man. Yeah. Yeah. And for Meta, of course, this is a creator thing where they think the pitch can be, if you're a creator and you build an audience on Threads, if we decide to shut down Threads, like we did every other standalone app we've ever launched as a company that we didn't acquire, you'll at least be able to take everything with you to Mastodon or to another Activity Pub client. That's, that's at least the pitch. Whether they

• 25:39Speaker 03

  follow through with that and that all works as planned remains to be seen. And there's obviously, you know, you should have plenty of skepticism with the largest centralized social media platform in the world saying it's going to embrace a decentralized protocol. Yeah. I do think the fact that they're doing it with Threads with a new app and not Instagram signals that they're serious about this. And in Mosseri's retelling to me, they really can't retroactively embrace Activity Pub on an existing app that's at that kind of scale they needed to have something fresh. And it's pretty clear that he drove this. I was rewatching a TED Talk he gave last year about this and about how creators will inevitably brace, embrace these open protocols for a lot of these reasons. This is something he's been saying even before Threads was a, was a twinkle in Meta's eye. I do think-

• 26:23Speaker 03

  They're going to be met with extreme fierce backlash in the Fediverse. They know this. They're already getting this. I've been hearing from people in the Fediverse that you're supposed to just say Fediverse, not the Fediverse. I'm going to get a bunch of angry toots about that.

• 26:37David Pierce?

  People from Fediverse? No, I'm out on that. It's like Brooklyn. It's like a neighborhood.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  I'm all for it. I think Activity Pub's a great idea. I will say the early pro-powerful community on Fediverse, y'all are a little too anal on your terms. Like, just like, let's just loosen up a little bit. But yeah, there's no trust of Meta here. I tend to side with John Gruber on if you're gonna really say that this is an open protocol. You need to treat it as one and you need to let anyone come on and not just be already talking about blocking them. At least see what they're gonna do.

• 27:10Alex Cranz?

  But I mean, that's like the beauty of Fediverse. I'm trying to embrace it.

• 27:15David Pierce?

  I hate that already. No.

• 27:16Alex Cranz?

  There's an article that should go there.

• 27:17David Pierce?

  That was awful. I didn't. It's like, it's like when Tim Cook says, "We, this is iPhone." Like, no. It's not. It's D. It's an iPhone. It's the, it is the Fediverse.

• 27:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but this is like the point of the Fediverse is that if you don't like, if you go and you build a big audience on Threads and it finally goes live and you don't like that you can't post boobies, you can go to a server where you can post boobies.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Except the boobies will not be on Threads. So where, what server has the biggest audience? It's going to be Threads by a factor of many X. So do you care about, you know, censorship? Do you care about distribution?

• 27:54Alex Cranz?

  You're gonna have to make a choice. Threads or boobies?

• 27:57Speaker 03

  It's very clear, and of course Meta knows this better than any other company, is that distribution trumps all. And I will say the earliest bull case for Threads is that the notifications are just popping off. Like, I know Neelai and others were talking about this when they first got on.

• 28:13Alex Cranz?

  I thought my phone was ringing last night.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  It's insane. I had to mute it instantly because it's got that Instagram graph built in. The day one distribution that you have on Threads is just, it's so much more than Mastodon. It's honestly more than Twitter these days. Like, there are eyeballs there. And as a creator on one of these platforms, when you're not getting paid by the platform, guess what? You're gonna want to use the platform with the biggest reach. And so Meta knows this, and I think even when they hook into Activity Pub, they know they're gonna be the server with the biggest reach. And so they're going to buy that very fact, be able to extend their policies, their way of doing things throughout the... The Fediverse. And that's, I think, what's really getting a lot of this other server admins worried

• 28:57Speaker 03

  is that all of a sudden, this giant open protocol may be just governed by the Instagram content guidelines.

• 29:03Alex Cranz?

  Are they gonna actually monetize threads? Like Twitter was notoriously difficult to monetize.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Yes, for many reasons. I would say incompetence was up there.

• 29:16Alex Cranz?

  Is that really the play here? Or is it just like, we're, this is our goodwill project? Now you all like us, go use Instagram and Facebook where we make our money.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  We're no longer in a zero interest rate environment, Alex Grants. No, they're absolutely going to put ads in this thing, I would say sooner than they had even expected, given the scale. This is Meta's playbook. They wait for something to have the kind of velocity that it could hit a billion users and then they do ads.

• 29:42David Pierce?

  I think Mosseri wants you to think that they're not interested in monetizing. He has said a couple of times, like, he keeps calling it a champagne problem. And it's like, well, no, this is either gonna work and you're gonna make money off of it, or you're gonna shut it down. Like, there's no, there's no middle option where this thing continues to live without being monetized.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, they want to make sure the product's sticky, has good retention. They worry about retention. They kind of set the industry benchmark for retention in social networks. They, they have the playbook that they invented, that the rest of the industry follows for. So they will use that playbook. They will add ads when it's at this nice, kind of like self circulating, self building place. And yeah, it's gonna look like Instagram in terms of that.

• 30:23Alex Cranz?

  I guess I just wonder how valuable that is, because Twitter, in addition to being terrible at monetizing, also was much smaller than a lot of these other ones, right? Like, like it was way smaller than Facebook. It was way smaller than Instagram. And threads, even if it gets to Twitter's size, is gonna still be way smaller than the cash cows.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you have to approach this as a marketer if it's another toggle.

• 30:46Alex Cranz?

  I can never do that. So walk me through it, please.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  Okay, I talk, I regrettably have to talk to these people for my job. Sorry, no, I'm just kidding. I love marketers. Keep, keep talking to me about the platforms, please. If it's another toggle in your dashboard when you're running an ad on Instagram to run it in threads and you can reach, you know, 100, 300 to 300 million people on there, you're gonna do it. It's, it's zero cost to you. It's all upside. This is where the benefits of scale and graphs kind of coalescing at the plus billion mark is going to just keep giving Meta kind of tremendous incumbent advantages with new products like this. And they know that.

• 31:23Alex Cranz?

  This is why we're not seeing it in Europe yet, right? Is like, because when, when you first hear about it and you hear about threads, you're like, well, this should go in Europe. Because I know they're afraid of the DMA, but.

• 31:35David Pierce?

  That's the first thing you think of when you think of threads is this should go to Europe?

• 31:38Alex Cranz?

  Always think of it.

• 31:39David Pierce?

  Threads seems very European to you?

• 31:40Alex Cranz?

  We've been talking a lot, like, there's been a lot of noise today about how it's not in Europe yet. And that's, that's, that seems to be because of the DMA, right? Like, that's the fear is that, that they can't do it because of the DMA. And what the DMA says is that, like, you, you have to be kind of open and honest. You have to, like, be good stewards. And you need to let people take their, their followers where they want to go and all of this. And that's like, okay, that sounds like everything that Threads does. And then I guess the other side of that is that also it's part of Meta. And Meta is huge and will inevitably swallow everything whole. Because when you're that big, that's just how you process everything.

• 32:18David Pierce?

  I just have one more thing to say on the monetization before we go, which is this is another place that it is very useful to be part of Instagram, which has a number of very good monetization tools for creators that would lend themselves very well to a product like Threads. Things like gifts and subscriptions and the tip stuff they can do and shopping. Like, all that stuff is built and at scale and making huge amounts of money for lots of people. And you can just stick it into Threads without all that much work. I think the interface designers would have some work to do. I think the interface designers already have some work to do, which we can talk about if you guys would like to. But let's, let's get into, I both want to talk about the, the Europe stuff. And then I want to get to some of the questions that you got about Threads on Threads.

• 32:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:58David Pierce?

  But first, let's take a break. We'll be right back.

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• 34:22David Pierce?

  We're back. Let's talk about this Europe thing. I don't want to dwell on this for too long because it's boring policy, but it is worth explaining. And Heath, you talked to Moser specifically about this. What is your sense of why this thing didn't launch in Europe?

• 34:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Threads is not available in the EU. I'm sorry to everyone in the French countryside on vacation right now.

• 34:43David Pierce?

  And according to Krantz, it's a very European app, so it's a real shame.

• 34:45Alex Cranz?

  It's very European. Everybody wants it.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  You'll have to cry into your cheese and your wine. But that does leave out a market of, you know, hundreds of millions of people. It's a huge missed market opportunity for Threads initially, and they know this. This is a really interesting example of what the EU is doing regulation wise with big tech. They have the Digital Markets Act, which is going into effect next year. And it labels Meta and other big companies like Apple and Google as gatekeepers. And with that distinction comes a whole new host of compliance requirements that if are not met, result in insane fines, like not just like your one-off fines that these companies happily pay, but debilitating fines.

• 35:27Alex Cranz?

  Which is the way fines should actually function.

• 35:29Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 35:31Alex Cranz?

  They should discourage whatever the things you're not supposed to do from doing.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  Yes, no, I agree. Fines should be proportional to the company size. Yeah, they've been parking tickets so far. This is not, you know, Meta is not alone here. I've heard people at Apple, Google are also freaking out about how to comply with the DMA. There's a lot of unknowns. There's a bunch of interoperability standards. There's self-preferencing standards that have to be met. I think with Threads in particular, they're worried about being compliant with the data sharing and the data leakage between Threads and the rest of Meta. Since Threads is this quasi separate thing, but it still is connected to Instagram. It has its own terms of service, but it also has, you know, meta influence, meta content guidelines. They're definitely going to be sharing that data.

• 36:17Speaker 03

  And basically whatever Meta tests to how they operate this, they are very much liable to that attestation being accurate under the new DMA. And if not, they're going to get fined.

• 36:28David Pierce?

  And not only that, they have to be able to prove it like aggressively and constantly. And that was one of the things Moser said that I thought was really interesting is that like the tooling just to be able to document this stuff is a huge amount of work.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a huge amount of work. This is one of the companies with perhaps the strongest global, if not one of the strongest global lobbying policy presences in the world. They've had more headroom on this than anyone. And they, I think it's very interesting that they don't feel confident to launch what they think could be the fastest growing software product since ChatGPT in Europe, even though the DMA does not go into effect until maybe spring of next year, because they're that worried about potentially being liable. I think this means that other big product launches like this will also not go into the EU region initially as well. I don't think this will be the only one. They do really want to get into the EU. I just think it's going to take several months at minimum before they can make sure that they can hold up to their, you know, attestations of how they're using the data.

• 37:25Alex Cranz?

  So kind of like video games going to Australia, where they always have to wait forever because there's all the Australian regulation and they're like, okay, now I get to kill everybody.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  Or China, as in, you know, China is an even more stringent example.

• 37:38David Pierce?

  Well, and again, in this particular case, Instagram was in such a rush to get this out that it was, it so clearly sensed a moment to do this.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:47David Pierce?

  That it made what seems like sort of a calculated decision to say, this is a problem we could not solve by July 5. So our option was either don't launch on July 5 or don't launch in the EU. And I think they just picked that.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, Mosseri was very clear to me and others that they felt they had a very narrow window to launch this thing to really capitalize on the Twitter turmoil and they didn't want to miss that window. And their instinct was probably right there, as hard as it is to not have a massive market that can use the app. What do you guys think about that? Do you, I mean, I think there's a lot of people, we've had people in our Slack that are a little more sympathetic to the EU here versus, you know, Meta. Obviously, Meta doesn't have a great track record with privacy. People think that, you know, what the EU is doing is generally good. I don't really know. I haven't formed a full opinion on that. I think GDPR has been widely considered a disaster and did not actually make the internet more

• 38:42Speaker 03

  private. And if anything, just kind of solidified incumbents who could pay for the internal tooling and all of that to-

• 38:49Alex Cranz?

  If you get to click a little button.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 38:51Alex Cranz?

  Every time you go to a new website, you click that button.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  Do you feel like your data is more protected because of that button?

• 38:57Alex Cranz?

  No, I feel like I'm annoyed I have to click the button.

• 38:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, this, you know, the last big sweeping regulation was, was that pop-up that the EU gave us. And I haven't seen any independent analysis that what the DMA is proposing will result in anything substantially better. I hope it will. I think these gatekeepers need to have more incentives to allow for competition. It's just very tough to craft this kind of regulation. Very tough.

• 39:23Alex Cranz?

  They're trying to cover a lot of different companies with one law.

• 39:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:28Alex Cranz?

  And like, every one of these companies is very different. They all have different goals. They all have different, like, size of customer bases, the different stuff that they do really, really poorly that, that destroys our privacy. Like, there's not a lot of consist, there's consistency there. And I think it makes sense that Meta said, no, we're not going to go in there. We're not gonna, we're not going to challenge this right now. We are going to acknowledge it. I think, like, that feels like it's working exactly how it's intended. And hopefully, European users don't get mad and be like, well, we just should get rid of this law so I can have, give Meta my data. And I'm sure Meta would love it if, if all the users rose up and were like, give us, give us threats.

• 40:10Alex Cranz?

  But I'm like, I think this is working exactly how it's intended. And I wish other countries would be thinking more about legislating this stuff. Not necessarily in the DMA way, because they don't know enough about it to, like, have a really strong opinion on it beyond it sounds nice at, like, first glance. And like, I would love more legislation that sounds nice and actually works and actually provides fines that are meaningful and do things like, like, I think that's working great. The fact that Meta looked at it and was like, I don't want to risk the fines. I want to figure out and make sure that we're complying with this law. Like, that's wonderful. That's working exactly how it's intended, and that's great.

• 40:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, I tend to agree. I think if I'm the European Commission and the folks who wrote the DMA, they're probably thrilled that this is how it went down because a big part of the goal is to make these companies sit down and think about the consequences of their actions. And I think the challenge for a lot of these regulators is that they've always been somewhere between like one and 65 steps behind the tech industry. They're regulating and litigating old problems while all these other companies are out talking about like crypto and AI. And then they skip right past privacy and try to regulate AI and they will have moved on to something else. And the DMA basically swung such a big hammer that it was like, okay, we're going to stop everybody for a minute. And

• 41:26David Pierce?

  I think this seems like, from what I've heard from folks, the kind of policy that is going to play out really slowly over time and is only going to be sort of answered as it gets litigated. And questions about like, who is a gatekeeper and what does that mean? And how do we decide who has that power and who doesn't? Like, that stuff is going to take a while to really shake out. But I think just the fact that it made Meta take its time on this, I think they're going to see as a big victory. And again, this is kind of an unusual situation in that they didn't have time to iron out some of the policy issues for a global launch. The question for me will be whether that becomes the thing like you're talking about. If the move becomes these companies take longer to launch their

• 42:10David Pierce?

  global products as a result of trying to get the regulation right versus everybody launches everything and then launches it a year later in the EU when they can figure out how to do the paperwork correctly. I have no idea which one of those is going to play out, but one of those is going to be politically significantly less popular among European people than the other.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  People really want their tech and their services and especially things like networks that have a global kind of Utility to them. And I'm very curious to see if the EU gets blowback in that regard.

• 42:40David Pierce?

  I just keep thinking about all the Instagram users. Like, there's a thing on your Instagram badge now that shows what number user you were on threads. And I I bet you there is a not insubstantial number of people in the EU who are pissed at how not how high their number is going to be.

• 42:56Alex Cranz?

  Maybe they'll give them like a special one, like they have their their official thread number and then their EU thread number.

• 43:02David Pierce?

  Oh, that's that's fun. I like that.

• 43:03Alex Cranz?

  So that way they can still have a little bragging rights, but not as much as Keith.

• 43:07Speaker 03

  I want to get into threads reader questions, but I also quickly I quickly I want to address. I've just seen a lot of commentary on this and have been asked this directly. Why didn't I ask Moser about this? People have been pointing to the App Store privacy labels for threads and all of the data they collect. And we could talk, we should actually do like a what has been the impact of Apple's privacy labels in the App Store segment at some point. There's a lot to unpack here. Newsflash, they have not really worked and they don't actually mean anything.

• 43:38David Pierce?

  I was just gonna say, I actually think there's nothing to unpack here. I think the answer is it's basically security theater.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  I think the simplest thing we can say now is that if you already use Instagram, if you are an Instagram user, you have absolutely no reason to be complaining or saying you're not signing up for threads because of these privacy labels. You're already using Instagram, which is governed under the exact same data policy as threads. So that's that's my short answer. We should absolutely talk more about privacy labels and maybe talk to some developers who have gone through it later, but I just wanted to get that out of the way.

• 44:11David Pierce?

  No, that's exactly right. And I think the argument of is this company collecting way too much data on you is the answer is yes, right? Like, Neil, I posted in Slack, he got a thing from threads asking to connect to other devices on his local network, which is like insane, right? Like this app wants everything you will give it, including like your health and fitness information. But if you've ever used a Meta app, you're already giving it that information.

• 44:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:36David Pierce?

  This is not a new problem.

• 44:38Speaker 03

  If you're mad at still about Meta's data collection, like save like 10% of that anger for the data brokers who literally actually sell your data to companies without your knowledge that are completely unregulated still in the US because they so effectively lobby the government.

• 44:53Alex Cranz?

  They're terrifying.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  Direct a little bit of anger towards that versus Meta and we may actually actually, you know, solve a lot of these problems.

• 45:00Alex Cranz?

  Weren't those the brokers that like the NSA and CIA were revealed a couple of weeks ago that they were buying data from? They're like, oh yeah, we buy it from them already.

• 45:08David Pierce?

  All right. We're veering dangerously close to me giving a long rant about how Cambridge Analytica was a fake made up scandal that actually had nothing to do with anything.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  I'm here for it.

• 45:17David Pierce?

  Let's just, let's save that for another day. Heath, you asked on threads for people to ask you threads questions for us to answer on the Vergecast. Let's do a bunch of them. Let's, what do you got?

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. So this is a great one. I'm really curious what you guys think about this. Do you think the discourse can be different here on threads than on Twitter? Or will the format eventually produce the same results? AKA hate speech, bullying, dunking, all that stuff.

• 45:43Alex Cranz?

  I think the format will definitely produce a lot of similar results. But the fact that we're getting the Instagram aggressive moderation might mitigate some of that.

• 45:52David Pierce?

  I think that's right. I mean, I think the, the thing that we've seen is that these platforms develop different norms really fast, right? Like Mastodon is different from Twitter, which is different from Blue Sky, which is different from, I don't know, Telegram. Like these things where people send text to one another do develop different cultures. I think threads absolutely risks basically turning into Twitter and in a lot of ways and for a lot of people will. I also think a lot of people's Twitter experiences were sort of self inflicted. I think who you decided to follow and engage with and what you decided to share, like if you just went on and talked about NBA, you had a very different version of Twitter than people who yelled about politics all day, right?

• 46:36David Pierce?

  And I think to some extent, just having a sort of forced experience of starting over goes a really long way. And I think just that alone is going to change versions of the discourse. But like, are there going to be similarly horrible political fights? And are there going to be main characters on threads who just get ruthlessly harassed until something horrible happens? Like, yeah, it's, it's gonna happen.

• 46:58Alex Cranz?

  Are you guys changing how you use threads versus Twitter? Like consciously, because for me, I definitely have like a different approach. I'm like, okay, I learned Twitter was where I could like kind of stumble along.

• 47:10David Pierce?

  Say more. What are you doing differently with threads?

• 47:12Alex Cranz?

  I'm being more thoughtful about it. Like I'm being more thoughtful about what I post. And like, I have the urge to post all sorts of horrible shit posting. And I usually do on Twitter and I'm like, maybe, maybe I don't on threads. Maybe a bunch of people don't want to hear these thoughts about toe hairs. And I think they all should, but.

• 47:29David Pierce?

  But people on Twitter super did.

• 47:31Alex Cranz?

  They didn't. They didn't.

• 47:33Speaker 03

  That sounds like a Tumblr thing.

• 47:35Alex Cranz?

  That was really a Tumblr thing. I mistook the audience. But I, but I think that the audience feels clearer and at least in these early days of thread of like, what you can do and kind of how mean you can get, how weird you can get. You always want to like scale it back just a little bit. Don't get too mean. Don't get too weird.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  And David, I think your point about, you know, the opportunity to start over is a big one is totally spot on. And I think the early culture of these networks create matters as we've seen with Blue Sky already, for example, and Mastodon in a different way. I do want to just check our like white man privilege of like using these platforms. I do think because of the public nature of Twitter and threads, if you are a minority or someone who is easily targetable, unfortunately, on the internet, you have a wildly different experience with these public platforms. And you don't, it doesn't matter who you follow, like it comes to you. Like I've seen enough examples.

• 48:30Alex Cranz?

  The mansplaining still appears in my, in like my, my threads.

• 48:35David Pierce?

  And that's coming to threads. It really is.

• 48:37Alex Cranz?

  It's already there. It's already there. It started last night, like it's almost immediately. Somebody's like, let me tell you what you're saying. And I'm like, no, I said it.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  And, and Cranz, be honest, like the mansplaining is probably the best of the worst, you know? Like there's actually, there's far worse.

• 48:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was like, this was, this was like fairly mild mansplaining. I've definitely had it way worse and I'm sure it's just going to come. And I think that's just like, I think most people who, who go online and simply exist and people get mad at them. Which is, a lot of us, unfortunately, we're kind of accustomed to it by now. It sucks and it shouldn't happen and there should be tools and stuff. But I think that's a hard problem to figure out how you do those tools, how you balance them and don't turn into whatever happened to Facebook in 2016. You just kind of have to, I mean, this is me saying it as an old haggard witch of a woman who's been on the internet a very long time. You kind of get used to it. You kind of learn to like what stuff to ignore and what stuff to report.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  You shouldn't get used to it. Like, these platforms should do better.

• 49:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you shouldn't, but like-

• 49:36Speaker 03

  But, yes, I know what you mean.

• 49:38Alex Cranz?

  That's a hard, like, something like mansplaining, like, how are you gonna report somebody for being like, "They think they know more than me." Moderator, fix it.

• 49:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:46Alex Cranz?

  Oh, well, that's not gonna work. It's just gonna be like, "Well, yeah, I'm just not gonna engage with you." And at Twitter, I probably would have engaged a few times, right? Like, I probably would have been like, "Let me explain things to you. Let me be optimistic," or "Eat shit, asshole." And, and here, I'm like, "I've done this before. I see you, and I'm just not gonna feed the troll."

• 50:02Speaker 03

  I, I will say it was comforting to see that Threads had basic moderation, things like blocking and muting, built in on day one.

• 50:09Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I've, I've already blocked somebody. It was great. I was like, "Ah, beautiful." I will, you can DM me and I'll tell you who I blocked, but I'm not gonna say it here.

• 50:15Speaker 03

  So, optimistic but cautious, and we should definitely check back in on this. I thought it was a good question. Next one, "Should we expect a high velocity of new feature additions? And would that even be possible under the regulatory scrutiny that Facebook is correctly subject to?" Uh, we kind of already touched on the regulatory scrutiny. I do think there's gonna be a high velocity of feature tweaks and changes to this product, especially now that it has garnered so much attention that exceeded Meta's wildest dreams. And what happens in these big companies is that these projects start as like small resource-constrained things. Threads has like a few dozen people working on it. And when they see that, that it's working, a bunch more people wanna work on it. A bunch of resources get thrown on it. Zuckerberg himself is very excited about it now.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  So I expect that the team building it will swell, and they'll ship a lot faster. I already know, for example, like, the internal employee build lets you do things like tap on a profile and it expands to see it in full. Like, they're already making a bunch of like small tweaks on the edges that will ship soon. And then, yeah, Mosseri's already confirmed a following-only list is in the works. Uh, he has told me and others that they don't plan to do DMs. I have a feeling they'll go back on that after they see how much of a loop, a powerful loop that is. At the very least, they need to make it easier to share Threads to like Instagram DMs, for example, or just other DM apps. That's, could be a lot smoother, and they know that.

• 51:38Alex Cranz?

  Let me shit talk in peace.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Any features you guys want to see like quickly?

• 51:42David Pierce?

  Better search is, I think, the biggest one and something that the company is relatively good at. So I suspect that's coming. But what I think is going to be really interesting is to see how much they want to do here, because I think one of the things that is true is that it is simple and that's part of what is good about it. Also, he, Moser said this to you, Heath, that Instagram, the app, is bloated and messy and too much. And they're actually in the, and this is like, this whole company goes through this constantly, right? They add a million things to the app and then they go, oh my God, this app is a mess. And then they get rid of some stuff and simplify and then they add a bunch more stuff. And this is just like, this is the meta pendulum swing at all times. And they're in a sort of simplification phase right now. And I think also part of what

• 52:26David Pierce?

  has appealed to people about threads already is that it's very straightforward and it works. And so I think the idea that they're going to be like, now you can make a podcast inside of threads is like, they'd be stupid to think that that is the answer, right? And so I think what we're going to see is them try to figure out what is smart to take from Twitter and what is like, actually not what makes the platform work. And I suspect we'll get a lot of stuff really fast. I think you're right, because this team is actually just in a position to ship really fast. Like, building stuff just inside the org structure of something like Instagram and Facebook is hard and takes a long time and a lot of people. And this is a team that just can make things and now has like a big win under

• 53:10David Pierce?

  its hat and is going to be able to make things faster.

• 53:12Speaker 03

  They have Jane Wong.

• 53:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, they got Jane Wong. Yeah.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  Legendary app scooper Jane Wong, which means she probably won't be posting her app dumps anymore, which is a huge bummer.

• 53:22David Pierce?

  Or they just hired her to be threads exclusive, which would be a super cool move.

• 53:27Speaker 03

  She's literally working on threads. She's a Meta employee now. It's pretty wild. Okay, this is a good one, too. How will journalists and other people who provide real time important info be able to be verified? So users know the info being posted is legitimate. We've obviously seen how this has played out on Twitter since Elon changed the checkmarks. I am verified on Instagram because a media brand Worked out in 2015, had a social media manager who knew someone at Facebook, got everyone verified in the newsroom.

• 53:54David Pierce?

  That's how I got verified on Twitter.

• 53:55Speaker 03

  Anyone who's worked in a newsroom long enough knows that that's how it worked. Up until like a couple of years ago. Meta has a paid verified program now, so I think they're phasing out the you have to know somebody to get a checkmark. They're gonna let people who got that checkmark, keep it. So thanks, Meta. But yes, I think going forward, Metal will tell me if I'm wrong. But you need to pay to be verified on Instagram. They actually, I believe, ID check you. So I think there's a level of.

• 54:25Alex Cranz?

  Actual verification.

• 54:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:27Alex Cranz?

  So I cannot make a Neelai Burder account.

• 54:30Speaker 03

  Well, you can try. I mean.

• 54:32Alex Cranz?

  I will try.

• 54:33Speaker 03

  We should try.

• 54:34Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna wait till he's back on the show to do it.

• 54:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, but there is a level of actual scrutiny of someone's identity when you become verified on Instagram that far exceeds what Twitter is doing currently. So if you see a checkmark on threads, it's the real deal. Don't hold me to that, though. I don't want to be sued. But yeah, how do we feel about this? The the checkmark thing with threads?

• 54:55Alex Cranz?

  I didn't know you could pay. That seems.

• 54:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:58Alex Cranz?

  It's basically like Twitter in that they're trying to get away from the the checkmark means.

• 55:04Speaker 03

  You're special.

• 55:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, special.

• 55:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:07Alex Cranz?

  Which is honestly the only reason I ever liked the checkmark. I love like very visual ways to validate myself. Thank you.

• 55:14David Pierce?

  But Meta is at least trying to make sure that not everyone demands a blue check.

• 55:18Alex Cranz?

  But yeah, Meta is actually checking, whereas like Twitter's thing was like, oh, you have a credit card, you're in. And so that's good. Like, I think that's actually how it should work. Not necessarily that you should have to pay. But that like they are actually checking and making sure that the person is the person. Like, that's great. Go for it.

• 55:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's right. And I think part of me wonders if the whole idea of the blue check is just being sort of beaten out of usefulness. Twitter kind of bastardized what it means. Tumblr would just like sell you one as a joke, which I thought was very funny and still love very much.

• 55:55Alex Cranz?

  Buy 20 if you want.

• 55:56David Pierce?

  Yeah. And so I kind of wonder if we're at a point where we're going to need some other connotation of this person is who they say they are. And to some extent, being connected to Instagram is useful in that way because there are just more tools to verify people on Instagram than there are on Threads or Twitter at this moment. And so I think having those connections might be useful. But I don't know, I continue to wonder if any kind of check is going to mean much to people for very long.

• 56:23Alex Cranz?

  At some point, I feel like it's just going to be a little like thing you kind of look over and you're like, oh, that person's really who they say they are. Oh, that's a parody account. Oh, that's just somebody who's too lazy or, you know, a brand or something like.

• 56:37David Pierce?

  I hope so.

• 56:38Alex Cranz?

  I think at some point we'll get that and that'd be great. But different way of working on the internet.

• 56:43David Pierce?

  This is also, I would point out, a potential upside of the Fediverse is this becomes a thing that not every platform has to do for itself, that we can have bigger, broader, cross-system tools for verifying people that actually make a lot more sense.

• 56:55Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God. That's gonna be the first big fight between Meta and the Fediverse.

• 56:58David Pierce?

  I think one of my great conspiracy theories about Threads and Activity Pub in general is that Meta actually has no interest in doing things like that and only does it out of basically obligation because it runs the platform. Meta doesn't care all that much about your content. Your content is just annoying for Meta, generally speaking. It wants your activity. It wants you to be paying attention. It wants you to be on its platform. But it didn't really give a shit what your posts are. It just wants you to like hang out. So giving you a feeling that your posts are yours and someone else can deal with all the hard work of doing something like verifying that you are who you say you are, but you can just use Threads because it's a better app, they can just focus on making a good app, and all the stuff you do around it doesn't have to be their problem anymore. I actually think that's an enormous win for Meta down the road.

• 57:44Speaker 03

  I think you're right. Okay, one last question, then maybe we can call Eli, TBD. Will there be third-party API platform integration for other developers on Threads? I highly, highly doubt it because Meta, as a company, their last time they tried to do a developer platform, it resulted in Cambridge Analytica. So. They have decided as a company.

• 58:08David Pierce?

  Jesus, when you say it like that.

• 58:10Speaker 03

  No more.

• 58:11Alex Cranz?

  They could do it again. They did do a very good job.

• 58:14Speaker 03

  You see, Mark Zuckerberg's still running the company. I think he remembers those Senate hearings and the lawsuits and the fines, the record fines.

• 58:22Alex Cranz?

  But he took the wrong, he took the wrong thing from that. Instead of being like, oh, I shouldn't collect as much data. He was like, mm, I guess that means no third-party apps.

• 58:31Speaker 03

  Oh, is this really, David's teased us. Are we really gonna have to explain?

• 58:34David Pierce?

  No, I'm not doing this.

• 58:35Speaker 03

  No. Cambridge Analytica was not about your data. It was because Facebook let third-party developers use your data in ways they shouldn't have. Okay, end of story.

• 58:44David Pierce?

  Go watch the documentary, The Great Hack. It gets almost everything wrong.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  No, quickly, just to summarize, no, I do not think they will do a third-party platform because of that. It's probably a good idea. I don't, I would say it's at the very, very end of their to-do list and probably something that their senior leadership does actually just not want to do at all. So, sorry. Uh, but it's a good idea, but no.

• 59:04David Pierce?

  I think that's right. My question would be, Heath, on, on that respect, I think, because I can't stop talking about Activity Pub. One of the things Mr. Eri has said a couple of times is that part of the upside of Activity Pub is you can support the standard and kind of be part of the ecosystem. But you can also build threads-only stuff just inside of the app. So what I wonder is less like, do they want to support developers and more, do you think they'll go the road of like, I would call it like the iMessage thing, right? Where it's like, you can send SMSs through iMessage, but if you're iMessage to iMessage, you get this whole like universe of other stuff you can do.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 59:36David Pierce?

  Is that where Threads ends?

• 59:38Speaker 03

  That's totally where it's going, and it's so ironic, given that Meta spends all its time shitting on iMessage. Whenever it gets a chance, in ads and in interviews. But yeah, Threads will be the blue bubble of the Fediverse, uh, and we're all gonna have to live with that.

• 59:52David Pierce?

  That's very, that's good. Yeah, I like that.

• 59:54Alex Cranz?

  You just made all the Fediverse green bubbles so mad.

• 59:57Speaker 03

  Get at me with your toots, guys. Okay, those are, those are reader questions. What's next?

• 1:00:03David Pierce?

  Uh, let's, can we talk about the Twitter response, just for a couple of minutes before we throw to another break?

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08David Pierce?

  It, it got more aggressive over the 24 hours, but basically the first response from Twitter, well, let me just read you the tweets, both from Elon Musk and from. Linda Iaccarino, the CEO. So Elon Musk said, "It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter than indulge in the false happiness of hide the pain Instagram." That's what Elon Musk said. And like, what does that mean?

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  That's a sentence.

• 1:00:30David Pierce?

  What? Sure. And then the CEO Linda Iaccarino said, "We're often imitated, but the Twitter community can never be duplicated." That is a much better line and a much better selling point, I would argue. And I think is gonna be the thing, right? And like, even Mosseri said this to you a couple of times, Alex. He's like going way out of his way to give Twitter credit for like, pioneering the format, which I think you could make a strong case it didn't really do, that like there are things that looked like Twitter before Twitter. But also that it is, it is a big community full of engaged people and that's actually a hard thing to unseat. And even if Threads works, it probably won't kill Twitter. Both of those read a lot like, "I'm not scared, I'm not scared, I'm not scared, don't tell everybody I was scared" responses, right? Is that, is that what you guys take from this?

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  Okay. Pretty much.

• 1:01:15David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:01:16Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:01:16David Pierce?

  Cool. And then, just to prove it's not scared, Twitter also threatened to sue Instagram over Threads. Heath, you were looking at this just before we started recording. Do you want to explain what we know?

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  Oh my God. I was just reading it while you were saying that. It is, so this is Alex Spiro, Musk's personal lawyer, who has also been taking point on them not paying rents, etc. This whole letter is hilarious, but it's to Zuckerberg and the part that I think is super relevant is that, "Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former employees. Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter, that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information, that these employees owe ongoing obligations to Twitter, and that many of these employees have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices." That sounds like your problem, Alex Spiro. "With that knowledge,

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop in a matter of months Meta's copycat app with the specific intent that they use Twitter's trade secrets, etc. and violation of law, etc." So this is, I guess, some vague threat of like a IP, software IP, property rights lawsuit, which hate to

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  Break it to you, Musk and Alex Spiro, but if there's any company that has researched the actual legal grounds for successfully winning a case on copying software, it is Meta, considering they have copied more software than any social media company to date in a cumulative.

• 1:02:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think if Snap couldn't win a lawsuit, Twitter's probably not going to win a lawsuit.

• 1:02:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is the part of the show where if we had an Eli, he would be going on a rant about the state of copyright law in America.

• 1:02:53David Pierce?

  Thank God he's not here.

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  Thank God he's not.

• 1:02:55Alex Cranz?

  But it's not really a copyright thing. It's very much like a trade secrets from employees thing, which is.

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  I guess.

• 1:03:02David Pierce?

  And again, the irony of that is like, remember when Elon Musk took over Twitter and promptly fired more than half the company?

• 1:03:08Alex Cranz?

  You're gonna have a hard time proving it. If you fired everybody, you didn't do any due diligence to recover everything from them because you fired them so quickly. And like, you have to prove what trade secrets that they're using, which is pretty, in this particular case, probably gonna be pretty hard to do unless they're like, in Slack saying, "LMMO, I'm using this, I'm just gonna copy paste this stuff we used on Twitter," which hopefully they didn't do, but they might have.

• 1:03:33Speaker 03

  Oh, and here we go. Andy Stone, a Meta spokesperson, has already, this is so great, we're already seeing now, so when Meta people, they finally have a place to respond to tweets that isn't Twitter.

• 1:03:44David Pierce?

  He threaded it?

• 1:03:45Speaker 03

  I just got sent a thread from Andy Stone.

• 1:03:48David Pierce?

  What a day.

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  Responding to this letter, saying, "To be clear, no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee. That's just not a thing."

• 1:03:55Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's great.

• 1:03:56Speaker 03

  So, yeah, I honestly, like, I should have said this earlier, but a huge part of Threads and why Meta's so excited about this is that Mark Zuckerberg and all their execs finally have a place to post Twitter-like content that isn't Twitter. I loved that, like, his first tweet in 11 years was Zuckerberg posting the Spider-Man pointing meme.

• 1:04:16David Pierce?

  Unbelievable tweet.

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  Unbelievable.

• 1:04:18David Pierce?

  The best possible thing he could have tweeted. I was so impressed by that.

• 1:04:21Speaker 03

  We're gonna enter this hole as a reporter. It's just like, I'm gonna have to be checking Twitter for the Twitter response to the story and then Threads for the Meta response, whatever. This is the new world we live in.

• 1:04:30Alex Cranz?

  Which one is getting more engagement?

• 1:04:32Speaker 03

  Ah, it's a good question. I'll have to report back on that.

• 1:04:35David Pierce?

  X. To that point, my one request, Adam Misery, if you're listening, and I know that you are, build a web app. I'm sure you're going to. Do it first. Just, I don't want to have to spend all day at work looking at my phone. I'm using my phone as my webcam right now. I can't be on threads. Come on, help, help it out. Help me out.

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  Well, David, to be fair, you can open threads on web. If there's a lot of replies, it cuts off and tells you to get into the app, but you can at least see them on the web.

• 1:05:01David Pierce?

  I'm just gonna go guess threads URLs and see if there are any sick posts at whatever URL. It's gonna be amazing. Alright, we need to take one more break, but before we do, Neelai is pinging me in Slack and apparently just landed and has some deep thoughts about threads he would like to share. So we're gonna call him up. I think he's at baggage claim and hear what he has to say.

• 1:05:27David Pierce?

  Where in the world are you, Neelai Patel?

• 1:05:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm at the airport with Max. Can you say hi, Max? Hi. We're waiting for our bags, but I need to react to Instagram threads in a very deep, meaningful way, like a spiritual way, which is why I'm calling you from there to force my way onto the show.

• 1:05:45David Pierce?

  That's correct. So, we, we've spent a long time on this podcast talking about threads already, but you, I want to know, because you are the guy who has been on this show specifically saying things like, I don't want feed-based social media in my life, and then you just showed up guns blazing on threads. What's going on here?

• 1:06:04Nilay Patel?

  It's like six posts in a day already. I'm off the wagon, man. We're drinking straight from the hose.

• 1:06:09David Pierce?

  You're smoking again.

• 1:06:10Nilay Patel?

  It's two things. One, you know, I missed it. It's fun to post on a new social network in that vibe. You know, I post on Blue Sky a little bit. I, I tooted on Mastodon. But here, I think the Activity Pub integration that Meta is promising is actually really interesting. In a way that I don't know if the AT protocol from Blue Sky will be successful, or maybe it will be, but I can just see a world in which having a presence on a large decentralized social platform can connect directly to our work and what we do. And I think that's really exciting. And I'd rather be invested in that sort of opportunity than just building on someone else's closed platform yet again.

• 1:06:51David Pierce?

  What do you make of like the app itself? Heath and Krantz and I didn't talk that much about like the actual mechanics of using the app. I kind of think it's like it works, but I kind of think it's like hideously ugly. What's your sense?

• 1:07:03Nilay Patel?

  It's a little bit ugly.

• 1:07:04David Pierce?

  Right?

• 1:07:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a little bit ugly.

• 1:07:06David Pierce?

  Why are the share buttons so big? I don't understand.

• 1:07:09Nilay Patel?

  The button for reply and the button for whatever, the paper airplane. I'm just confused. I don't know what's going on at the bottom of every post. I think they know some of it isn't there and needs to be improved. It's just, it's hard to know how much this version you have to take seriously right at this second. It, it's a very minimum viable product and it, it shows.

• 1:07:28David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:07:29Nilay Patel?

  They, they clearly rushed this out because of Twitter's rate limits. But I will say this, I posted that the embeds were a little bit broken because we wanted to put thread embeds in our stories and quick posts and the feed and all this stuff. And like three different meta engineers, including the person who wrote the embed product, replied to me and then they fixed it. And that's just like the most fun you can have. It's, everyone's building things together and talking about the products in earnest. And that's the fun part of making the internet. I, I keep saying the internet feels like 2011 again, and that's the part I really liked and the part that I want back.

• 1:08:04David Pierce?

  Totally. And it feels, I mean, in a funny way, it feels like if you go back to that era, that's like the early Instagram era, where all of this stuff was being built the first time, before it was a giant monolith that was hard to ship new stuff into and before everything that changed got rolled out in tiny little doses. This, they're just back to like building it live right in front of us, which I agree is, is fun and different and feels really different from Meta. I wasn't sure Meta like had the muscle to be this kind of company anymore.

• 1:08:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think the same thing. I think they're excited. The energy is like palpable. They have skyrocketing user growth again. I also just keep thinking how bad it must be in the like Reality Labs and Horizon Worlds division, where they're just trying to brute force the next version of like the metaverse internet into existence. And they're just like alone in their headsets while Zuck is a conquering hero, like posting Spider-Man memes. Maybe the answer was much simpler than they thought.

• 1:09:01David Pierce?

  Yes. I do think it's going to be interesting to see how the vibes shift in like week two of this, right? Because right now it's very exciting. It's kind of amazing that it works as well as it does. But I think the question of like, where are we going to be seven days from now when opening this thing is less exciting is going to be really interesting. And we've seen this a few times where it feels really cool and everybody like, is this, is this thing going to be be real? Or is this going to be something more meaningful?

• 1:09:26Nilay Patel?

  I think it just comes down to, does it send anybody any traffic? Like they did the growth hackiest growth hacky thing, which is it's just always buzzing at you if you have notifications on. So the platform just feels alive because it's constantly sending you notifications. I actually turned them off like too much. This is everything I did not want about feed based social media. But then even when you have them off, when you have the app open, it still buzzes at you whenever you get a reply or a notification. And that's like, pretty good. Like they built a good feedback loop in there. And I think that's going to carry them, especially if the pace of signups continues to just accelerate like we've seen.

• 1:10:02David Pierce?

  Totally. All right. Well, before you go, I know you have more bags to pick up and traveling to do. The, one of the last things we talked about before we got on with you was, I don't know if you saw this while you're on the plane, but Twitter is threatening to sue Instagram for essentially ripping off the app. They're saying they, you know, hired a bunch of people with devices and trade secrets, and they came and built a copycat app. I would just like to hear lawyer Neelai's initial impression of whether this is anything and the extent to which this is nothing.

• 1:10:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's the saddest shit I've ever read, man. Like, what are they even complaining about? Twitter's trade secrets? What are Twitter's trade secrets? Twitter's IP stack is basically nothing. And then on top of that, Twitter promised ages ago to never use its patents offensively. I actually wrote a big story in 2013 about this thing called the Innovator's Patent Agreement, the IPA, this big Twitter initiative where they agreed to never use their patents against anyone except defensively. And they tried to get everyone else to agree to it as well. So like, they got nothing except quote unquote trade secrets and like, good luck. If I'm Quinn Emanuel, like Elon's law firm, I would be totally embarrassed by this desperate letter. They should have definitely told him not to do this.

• 1:11:11David Pierce?

  There you go. All right. Go get your bags. Thank you for coming on. I suspect we will have more chances to talk about threats very, very, very, very soon.

• 1:11:19Nilay Patel?

  All right, Max, can you say goodbye?

• 1:11:20David Pierce?

  Bye, Max.

• 1:11:21Nilay Patel?

  Goodbye. We're out of here.

• 1:11:24David Pierce?

  All right. And with that, we need to actually take a break and then we're going to come back and do a lightning round. We'll be right back.

• 1:11:34Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how Cloudflare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:11:55Speaker 07

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.

• 1:12:20Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:12:33Speaker 00

  This series is presented by EY. Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now? Expense reports, receipt chasing, month-end close that takes weeks. You become what you spend on, and that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com/af.

• 1:13:16David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Let's stop with threads for a minute and let's do, let's do a little bit of a lightning round because it is July, so like, news is slow and news is going to be slow for a little while because everybody's on vacation for the next several weeks. Have you guys already started getting like the, the increase in out of office responses from people? Mine has definitely spiked the last few days.

• 1:13:36Alex Cranz?

  No, I aggressively work hard to not email people ever.

• 1:13:41Alex Cranz?

  It's not going well, but it's going well enough that I haven't gotten any yet.

• 1:13:44David Pierce?

  I respect that. Just carrier pigeons or nothing. Let's do a little bit of lightning round. The only rule for this lightning round is you can pick anything you want to talk about this week, except threads. Threads is off limits. Kranz, you get to go first. What do you got?

• 1:13:57Alex Cranz?

  Okay, so we're gonna talk about Daddy Zaslov, one of my favorite people on the planet.

• 1:14:02David Pierce?

  Who has had quite a week that been.

• 1:14:04Alex Cranz?

  He has had quite a week. Uh, we, should we go into all of it?

• 1:14:09David Pierce?

  There's a few, just give us the quick rundown, because there's a bunch of stuff happening simultaneously here.

• 1:14:13Alex Cranz?

  Okay, here's, here's the quick rundown. About two weeks ago, Turner Classic Movies lost a lot of employees. People were very upset, particularly a lot of like big fans of old Hollywood movies like Steven Spielberg and Scorsese and Wes Anderson, and they all complained. And Zaslov was eventually like, okay, but you guys can come and help us and be a part of this, and we won't fire everyone at Turner Classic Movies, and you guys can like help us choose movies. And so that happened, and everybody seemed to settle. There was much joy in the kingdom, as much joy as can happen in the kingdom of Zaslov.

• 1:14:49David Pierce?

  Yeah. Picking a fight with Turner Classic Movies, by the way, weird move.

• 1:14:53Alex Cranz?

  Weird, but, well, and also, he allegedly loves classic films. Like, he's a big fan of them. He's a huge fan of Turner Classic Movie.

• 1:15:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, but you know what he likes more, Alex? Is tax breaks.

• 1:15:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, exactly. He was like, I love them, but I love tax breaks more. And they came and were like, yeah, but do you ever want to work with any of us again? And he's like, I do. So never mind. Tax breaks. Backseat. So then, over the weekend, GQ published a story that, that talked a lot about this, but also talked about the fact that Zaslov isn't exactly known for like his film taste. He, he's, you know, he's a guy who, who did like the 27 Kids and Counting, or whatever it's called. He did a lot of reality show, a lot of reality TV that a lot of people consider trashy. They don't like it. And, and this, this GQ article really took him to task for, for that. And the fact that he was that guy, and now he's out here

• 1:15:46Alex Cranz?

  running one of the largest movie studios in the world. And then the story disappeared.

• 1:15:51David Pierce?

  Well, first it got aggressively edited.

• 1:15:54Alex Cranz?

  It came back aggressively edited, but with no byline on it. And then it totally disappeared. And it turns out that someone on Zaslav's camp reached out to GQ and were like, "This is really mean." And to be fair, it was a very mean article.

• 1:16:09David Pierce?

  But it, as far as we know, didn't say anything that lots of people were not already saying publicly.

• 1:16:13Alex Cranz?

  It was, yeah, there was nothing inaccurate in it. It was a lot of opinion, and that opinion was, "You suck."

• 1:16:19Speaker 03

  It was not that bad. Like, this is what you're gonna have your PR person try to spike?

• 1:16:23David Pierce?

  Like, really?

• 1:16:24Alex Cranz?

  So it sounds like what happened was that they, they reached out with a whole list of things. And PR does this a lot, where they really dislike a story, but there's nothing actually inaccurate. So they just have a bunch of things to like, be like, "Well, but you could have also said that he loves babies. Why didn't you talk about how he loves babies?" And people at GQ, they pulled the story. Lot of upset, folks. It turns out that the, the EIC of GQ is also producing a film that's being made at Warner Brothers. Everybody looks terrifically stupid in this situation. Zaslav just looks really, really thin-skinned. And he is still in negotiations with both SAG and the WGA, with all the other producers in Hollywood right now.

• 1:17:07Alex Cranz?

  So probably not a great time to look really thin-skinned and like, you hate the movies and people.

• 1:17:13David Pierce?

  And also, like, truly excellent Streisand effect example.

• 1:17:17Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:17:18David Pierce?

  Of taking a GQ story that I, I had not heard about or seen, and no one really paid that much attention to, and turning it into like, front-page news all over the internet.

• 1:17:27Alex Cranz?

  I didn't read it until it had already been pulled. And then I was like, "Oh, this is what you went after?"

• 1:17:32David Pierce?

  Thank you to the Google cache for providing that.

• 1:17:35Alex Cranz?

  I gotta be, I gotta be meaner in, in my own stories about Warner Brothers now. So, let's see what can happen.

• 1:17:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, big week for David Zaslav. Heath, have you picked one yet, or do you want me to go while you look?

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have one. We wrote about this. Wes Davis wrote about this on the site. The TSA is going to be expanding its use of facial recognition to over 400 airports. They claim a 97% effectiveness rate on the 25 airport pilot program they've been using so far. This is just a bad idea. Can we just say beyond a shadow of a doubt that like we should not be giving the TSA our faces?

• 1:18:08Alex Cranz?

  TSA shouldn't have anything. They shouldn't have funding.

• 1:18:11David Pierce?

  Also, 97% success rate on this is not impressive.

• 1:18:14Speaker 03

  No, it's not.

• 1:18:15David Pierce?

  Our security system misses three out of 100 people. It's like, not good.

• 1:18:19Speaker 03

  Like, I've seen these things and I'm sure other people have going through TSA. Like, I see it at LAX and I've seen it in New York. Obviously, like, avoid it at all costs. I really hope this stays opt-in. They should not mandate this. There is no federal privacy law about facial recognition data. There is no law that stipulates how the US government uses this data. TSA claims they delete it. I do not believe them. I think we have, we can be skeptical of the data practices of private for-profit corporations that we choose to use all the time. I'm not saying that that's bad. We should absolutely be way more skeptical and concerned about government agencies using our personal and face data.

• 1:19:02Speaker 03

  And so this is a giant thumbs down for me. The TSA sucks and they should not use our face data.

• 1:19:08Alex Cranz?

  Well, someone's gonna get a really good look in his bag next time he flies.

• 1:19:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, you just made a list somewhere for sure.

• 1:19:14Speaker 03

  Definitely on the list now. Whatever, I've got global entries. Stop me, bitches.

• 1:19:19David Pierce?

  Clear, bitches, yeah. I love it. Alright, mine is Google, you may have heard of it, changed its privacy policy to say that it uses publicly scraped web data to train things like Bard and Cloud AI. I believe those are the two things it added to the privacy policy. This is one of those things that like everybody already knew and Google is sort of retroactively being like, no trust us. It's super cool that we do this. It's no problem. Don't worry about it at all. And this sparked like a minor uproar because it had a lot of people asking questions about like, okay, is Google Using my Google Docs to train AI models.

• 1:20:00David Pierce?

  I believe the answer is no, because that doesn't actually count as a thing on the public web. But I'm sure that's complicated if you like, make it a public link like, who knows? All this stuff is a mess. And the response to it, like updating your privacy policy is one of those things you do when you hope no one will notice. Because who reads privacy policies? Mercifully, there are people on the internet who have it set up so that when Google changes its privacy policy, you get an email about it. Love those tools. Congratulations, everybody. But I think this is the kind of thing, there are just going to be a lot of moments like this in the immediate future. And there are a lot of questions about what it means that all of this is happening. And what it means for you as a person that none of these companies are doing a good job of communicating. Obviously, none of this is regulated in any kind of meaningful way yet.

• 1:20:45David Pierce?

  And it's going to keep sparking all of these fights about all of these companies. Like, we went through this with the social networks. So you guys remember, I think it was Instagram actually changed its privacy policy a bunch of years ago. That it was like, we can use your images in marketing materials or everything. And everybody's like, wait, what? You're going to use my photos in an Instagram ad? And Instagram was like, why would we do that? That's ridiculous. We need it to be able to like propagate your image across our services. And this stuff, people just don't understand how this stuff works and they shouldn't have to. And we are reaching a point with all the AI stuff again, where it's going to get real scary. There's going to be a lot of like FUD out there as people panic about it. And it's just going to get real messy and I'm not looking forward to it.

• 1:21:28Alex Cranz?

  Well, it was really weird for people to be upset about the scraping of this case because like, that's literally Google's business. Google's business has always been to scrape the internet and monetize what it does. Like, oh no, they're doing, like, have a debate.

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, but this is a new product. This is a new product that further abstracts the core content, the source content.

• 1:21:49Alex Cranz?

  That's fair, that's fair.

• 1:21:50Speaker 03

  Sourcing. I think that's the key thing here. We're witnessing like potentially one of the greatest like copyright scams in history with these models.

• 1:21:57Alex Cranz?

  I mean, if they're allowed to maintain copyrights with those models, which they might not be able to.

• 1:22:02Speaker 03

  Again, if Neil was here.

• 1:22:03David Pierce?

  Thank God, we already hung up on Neil.

• 1:22:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank God.

• 1:22:08Alex Cranz?

  He's calling back right now. Liam, don't let him in. Don't let him in.

• 1:22:11David Pierce?

  All right, we should go. This is enough Vergecast. We've gone long as we want to do. Should we tell people how to find us on threads? Is that what we do now? We like stopped telling people our Twitter handles. Should we tell them our threads?

• 1:22:23Alex Cranz?

  Yes, we should, because I want you to say Neelai's, because it's funny.

• 1:22:28David Pierce?

  The thing is, I don't want to say the phrase "threads me" because that sucks. So maybe this is why, maybe tweets is the answer. Tweet me on threads.

• 1:22:37Alex Cranz?

  See?

• 1:22:38David Pierce?

  I'm David Pierce, because I'm gonna kill whoever has David Pierce, and then I'll be David Pierce. But until then, there's an "I'm" at the beginning of it.

• 1:22:45Alex Cranz?

  That other David Pierce dies in the next week?

• 1:22:47David Pierce?

  He's like a lawyer in Phoenix, and we are in a permanent war for David Pierce usernames.

• 1:22:52Speaker 03

  Is there an apostrophe there with the "I'm" or no?

• 1:22:55David Pierce?

  No, just all, just letters all the way down. Alex, you're Alex Heath, you know, whatever, Mr. Low Number Joined. Alex Cranz, you're Alex H. Krantz, right?

• 1:23:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's what I used on Twitter. It seems fine.

• 1:23:07David Pierce?

  The H stands for Hustle.

• 1:23:08Alex Cranz?

  Yes, it does.

• 1:23:10David Pierce?

  Go to Krantz for all your Hustle Bro content. Decoder is a podcast. Neelai's not here, so don't listen to it. Decoder's awful. I hate it forever.

• 1:23:16Alex Cranz?

  But where can you follow him? You didn't say where we can follow Neelai.

• 1:23:20David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. Reckless1280 on threads. Because that's the year he was born, 1280. Next Wednesday on the Vergecast, we're gonna talk about AI. We're also gonna talk about video games with Ash Parish and Chris Plant from Polygon. We talked about all our favorite games. It was very fun. And we're also gonna talk about a whole bunch of new Apple software, we think. It's all coming very soon, so we're gonna talk about it. Until then, we'll see you on threads. That's it. That's Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:23:46Speaker 03

  See you, guys.

• 1:23:52David Pierce?

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected]. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Moreno. Our editorial director is Brooke Minterz. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:24:23Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how Cloudflare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:24:45Speaker 07

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.

• 1:25:09Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.

• 1:25:25Speaker 08

  Support for this show comes from Harvey AI. The future of law is agentic, not just tools that assist, but AI agents that navigate complex matters. That's why Harvey created agents that can do the work from end to end. They build a plan, pull from secure data sources, run subagents in parallel, and draft the work product ready for your review. So you delegate the work and on the judgment. Trusted by more than 60% of the AmLaw 100 and leading Fortune 500 legal teams, Harvey is the AI operating system designed specifically for legal work. Harvey AI, tailored for law. Learn more at harvey.ai.