Amazon Rigs Search, Social Media 'Ampliganda,' Netflix Protests — With Adrianne Jeffries, Renee DiResta, and Zoë Schiffer

Join us for a 'mega' episode with three guests! The Markup investigative reporter Adrianne Jeffries leads off with a discussion of Amazon's self-preferencing in search. Stanford Internet Observatory's Renee DiResta joins for our second segment to discuss her story on bottom-up propaganda on social media, something she calls 'ampliganda.' Verge Reporter Zoë Schiffer rounds out the week with a look into the state of worker activism at Netflix and Apple. Check out Adrianne's story on The Markup, Renee's in The Atlantic, and Zoe's on The Verge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay?

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. And Boyd, we have a packed show for you today. We're going to actually try out a new format. We'll do some news at the top and then move to analysis in the second half with a new guest. Our first guest today is going to be Adrian Jeffrey. She's an investigative reporter at The Markup. We're going to talk about this bombshell Amazon story that she and a fellow reporter at The Markup dropped, and then in the second half, we'll have Renee DiResta come up and speak with us about what she calls "ampliganda," amplified propaganda coming from the bottom up. And not from the top down. But first, let's speak with Adrienne. Adrienne, welcome to the show. It's great having you here.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Hi, Alex. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, thanks for being here. You are the lead byline on one of two bombshell stories about Amazon this week that both focus on the company's private label brands. These are the brands that come from Amazon that are fairly indistinguishable from the rest of the brands on the marketplace. On the website, there's long been discussions of whether Amazon favors its products. Jeff Bezos famously kind of waffled on the question in front of Congress a few years ago. But now we have proof that Amazon is not only preferencing its products in search, it's also copying private label brands, not in a haphazard way, but in a systemic way, which is something the Reuters story got into.

• 2:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  But let's talk about yours. So you and your co-author decided to go and examine whether Amazon was preferencing these private label brands, the brands that it has created on its own in search results. And it seems like that you caught the company right-handed with some serious self-dealing. So do you want to share a little bit about what you found?

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Sure. So we've been told by lawyers to avoid phrases like "serious self-dealing", so I'm not sure I can go that far.

• 3:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, yeah. No, no. This is the fun part of the show, right? I'll make the big proclamations. You can walk me back and tell us what the truth is. So go ahead.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Perfect. Yeah, so we did this story. So my reporting partner is Liang Yan. He's a data journalist. And the way the markup works is we typically take a big story and assign a team of a reporter, that's me, and a data journalist to work together. So I mostly did the reporting, talking to sellers, interviewing experts. And Liang did the data collection. And then together, we worked on the analysis and how to tell those in a human, understandable way.

• 3:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. But what did you find?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we, we started looking at this because we did a similar story last year about Google's search results, where we looked to see how much of the page was actually directing people back to other Google stuff. So this is like the one box answer, or Google Maps, or Google Flights. And we found pretty, uh, pretty significant findings there, that they were taking up a lot of the page, especially at the top, to send people back to their own stuff. So, once we finished that story, we were riding high. We were like, let's just do this again for Amazon. Amazon has its own stuff. Amazon has search results. Everybody uses Amazon's search. We'll do it. It'll take a couple of months. It ended up being a really complicated data collection project and took much longer. However, we

• 4:36Speaker 01

  ended up with a similar finding, that Amazon's private labels and its exclusives, which together, that's a category that Amazon refers to as our brands, those were very frequently in the number one spot. And they were often outranking products from competitors that had, uh, more, more reviews and better star ratings. Yeah, so that was the base, the basic finding.

• 5:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  So if I'm getting it right, the finding is that Amazon has some products that I can list only exclusively on Amazon. So you can't find them elsewhere. Products that it creates itself. And when you search for the product categories, let's say a coffee grinder on Amazon, even if the product has been in market for shorter, even if it has less, uh, reviews, even if it has less favorable reviews, when you do that search, you're gonna find the Amazon product first.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Right. So, this is, um, we don't know the exact mechanism by which this happens. We did talk to some former Amazon employees who described a practice that's also reported in the Reuters story called "search seeding," where you can introduce a new Amazon label. They don't do this anymore, but for a couple of years, this is how they were doing it. They would introduce a new product, say, Amazon Elements Baby Wipes, and they would just set that product's score in the search results, whatever the relevancy score is. They would match it to another popular product. So for their own baby wipes, they said, "These baby wipes, they probably should have about the same score

• 6:13Speaker 01

  as baby wipes from Huggies." So they would set it up so that as soon as they dropped the product, the Amazon one would appear in the top right after the Huggies version. And that's something that third-party sellers obviously can't do. If you launch a product, you started zero, and you have to claw your way up to the top. So that was a really clear way that they were preferencing their own products. We didn't find the exact mechanism by which that's still happening. They are using what they call merchandising placement, where they stick a product often, we saw up to three times on the page, but in the number one spot is usually where it appears first. And it's an Amazon product or an exclusive, and it says "featured from our brands."

• 6:56Speaker 01

  And so, and we asked Amazon, "Is this an ad? What is this? Is this a search result?" And they said, "No, it's a merchandising placement," which is a phrase that they made up to describe this situation. So we don't know exactly how that happens. But in the data, it came out very clear. Knowing only whether a product was an Amazon brand was enough to predict whether it was going to be number one, like far more than any of the other things we were able to measure.

• 7:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And so the argument against this, and the argument will continue to be, that this is Amazon's store. And, you know, just like brick-and-mortar stores are able to create their own products, think about Costco and the Kirkland brand, why can't Amazon create its own and put them at the top? I mean, it is its own site. So where do you see the issue here?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think what some antitrust advocates will say is like, okay, just because Walmart doesn't too, does it too, doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't hurt competition, that it's not having a deleterious effect on the economy and customers. So that's the first response to that defense. But also, there are some things that make it just different when you're on a platform versus when you are doing like a traditional brick and mortar sort of placement.

• 8:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  What's that?

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Like, well, on the Amazon platform, there's just a million different levers that Amazon can pull to try to push people towards certain products. Whereas if you're in a store, they really can only do a couple of things. They can like, put a big sign on it. They can put it at eye level. They can put it on an end cap. But they can't do as much to direct the user through the user interface to buy a certain thing. The other thing is that on a store shelf, you're not necessarily, you don't necessarily assume anything about the product based on where it is on the shelf. Like, I'm not thinking, oh, because like, this soap is on the top shelf, it's the best soap. Whereas, we surveyed people and found that they pretty much believe that the number one

• 8:58Speaker 01

  search result on Amazon means it's either best rated, best seller, or lowest price. And not that it's just an Amazon product. So consumer expectations are really important for these kinds of questions also in the eyes of regulators.

• 9:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's a good point. And the other, the other thing that someone who's defending Amazon might say, just I'm going to advance it for the sake of the argument, and to be able to really discuss this in a full 360 way, is that Amazon is a website that people go to. And if they're not getting value out of amazon.com, they can always type another value. So by placing its own brands at the top here, Amazon's actually taking a pretty significant bet, that if they don't deliver for people, they're not going to keep coming back to Amazon. So what do you think about that?

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think all the antitrust arguments kind of hinge on whether or not people have a choice between Amazon and something else. So the first step in any antitrust case is to establish what the market is and who the dominant players are and how much choice there is. From talking to sellers, they pretty much feel like they have to sell on Amazon. Conservative estimates, Amazon is 40% of retail, of e-commerce retail. So it's a lot. And there are estimates that are higher than that. So that's, that's kind of the first step is to say, you know, how much choice do you have if you're not getting good quality from amazon.com? Can you really go somewhere else? If you're a seller, can you really make a

• 10:27Speaker 01

  living somewhere else? If you can't, then it's potentially a problem for competition under US antitrust law.

• 10:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you think people can go other places? What is your perspective on this?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  My perspective as a somebody who lives in North Brooklyn is that Amazon is pretty dominant.

• 10:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  But, uh, yeah, that's the kind of thing that antitrust regulators would have to investigate carefully. And that's the sort of thing where Amazon would push back and say, you know, you're measuring the market wrong. Like, you can't just have one big market for all e-commerce. That doesn't make sense. Uh, we have lots of competition. Um, one funny thing that I enjoyed from the, there was this big antitrust subcommittee report that came out of Congress last year. And at one point, they asked Amazon for a list of their competitors and Amazon submitted a list with lots of names. And one, one of them was Eero, which actually Amazon owns. So it's gotten to the point where they own so many brands that they may be losing track of them internally.

• 11:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. I, I personally think that the argument that Amazon is a monopoly or you can't go anywhere else is going to be extremely difficult to prove. Uh, you look at the increasing competency that a company like Walmart has. Uh, you look at the success of Shopify and how it's empowering some of the same. Independent vendors to sell on their own sites and use things like Facebook ads or Google to promote their their goods as as opposed to relying on Amazon. You know, that's going to be tough in in any antitrust case to prove. I mean, but the, you know, I think we are starting to see some movement to rewrite

• 12:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  the rules and actually explicitly ban this type of stuff when it comes to the tech giants. So also this week, we had a story, I mean, it's all over the news, but I'm just looking at a headline in the Washington Post, Senators Aim to Block Tech Giants From Prioritizing Their Own Products Over Rivals. Right, it goes exactly to to this point here, which is that if you own a big platform, if a bill like this passes, you will be prohibited from doing something like rigging the search results in your favor. So I'm curious what your view is on that bill. I mean, it's it's a matching bill in the House and the Senate. It's kind of gotten stuck in the House. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I haven't heard any noise about it ever since it came out. But there could be some momentum now that it's in the Senate as well.

• 12:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  So what do you think the chances are that something like this passes? And do you think it will have an overall positive effect on the market and and competition if it does?

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's tough to place a bet on Congress passing any laws. They just don't seem to pass a lot of laws.

• 13:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's true. It's not their favorite thing to do.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. But there is a lot of attention and a lot of energy around the power that the big tech platforms have. I think people have just started to feel like that the amount of power they have is is getting really large and it's kind of scary, just sort of in a broad ambient way. And members of Congress are picking up on that. And then the possible impact on the elections also has made elected officials, I think, feel threatened. So could this actually, it is really encouraged, this is part of a package of bills that were introduced in the House. There are several that are aimed at curbing big tech power, and this one seems to be

• 13:56Speaker 01

  the one with the most traction. It's called the American Choice and Innovation Online Act, I think. And, yeah, it says.

• 14:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Very catchy name.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Sorry?

• 14:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Very catchy name.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, very catchy name. So, I mean, yeah, it, the, a law would be a much faster way to get.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Any kind of enforcement on this stuff. Like lots of people will say what Amazon is doing, what Google is doing with preferencing their own products is already illegal under antitrust law. But antitrust law has been very loosely enforced for the past couple of decades. And the way to get something done without having to undo a lot of precedent

• 14:41Speaker 01

  with antitrust enforcement would be to to pass a new law that's explicitly aimed at this. And yeah, the law seems to be.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  It it does seem like it would make this stuff illegal if it's if they're playing dirty like that. It doesn't say Amazon can't compete on its website, but it says they can't.

• 15:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Can't use data.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Advantage themselves.

• 15:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, can't use data would otherwise not have to improve its products. And and I I think that sort of goes to, and I want to get to the Reuters story before we hop off. But it goes to the to the crux of the Reuters story, which essentially showed Amazon trying to sell its own or through a partner, its own exclusive or private label brands. And there being a lot of returns. And so Amazon basically looked at, you know, competing, it was a T shirt brand, competing T shirts, and pulled the measurements off the ones that were doing extremely extremely well, transpose that on to its brand, and then all of a sudden got a leg up. And, you know, I it it's a complicated thing because when you have access to a platform the size of Amazon, you can turn

• 15:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  basically nothing into a large business if you hit it right. And so the company does provide opportunities for companies to do it. But there is this sense among third party vendors that as soon as you get too big, all of a sudden, Amazon is going to figure out what makes you special, copy it, and then either put you out of business or knock you down a few pegs. And until this past week, that was largely something that people were. Kind of feeling in their bones, but we didn't have the documentation and now we do. So I do, I do wonder what you think about, about that situation.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  It does seem like you look at that and then you look at the copying. You look at the fact that they're rigging the search results and it does paint a different picture of Amazon. And maybe that's what we come out of this week looking at.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. That's another thing that this American Choice and Innovation Online Act makes explicitly illegal is using that secret data to inform their own decisions about what to launch.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  And yeah, what Amazon did in India was pretty blatant. Based on this reporting by Reuters, which is they didn't publish the documents, but they quoted from a lot of these internal Amazon documents. And it's, it's pretty clear that there was a deliberate strategic

• 17:08Speaker 01

  push to make Amazon's own private labels get more market share in India. And yeah, I think that the data question is, you know, like this, there's an analogy in US history with the railroads. So like

• 17:27Speaker 01

  this, this bill is looking at non, it's looking at non discrimination.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  And the railroad analogy is like you have the railroad, they own the tracks. They also own companies that ship things on the tracks. So they're like, oh, our coal, it's going to go first down the railroad and competitors are going to have to wait until our coal has been shipped and then you can ship your own coal. And that is kind of the crux of what's going on with Amazon is that they own the infrastructure. Everybody else is building on that infrastructure. You know, there's lots of advice not to build on other people's infrastructure because this is one of the things that can happen. But it does come down to like, what, what impact does that have on customers? What impact does that have on competition and innovation and the American economy? And that's something that there's definitely a lot of attention around.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  So maybe we'll get an answer to it at some point.

• 18:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and we will continue to focus on that stuff on this show. It's obviously a moment where all the big tech companies are facing questions about the way that they influence competition. And those questions don't seem to be going away, no matter how slow Congress is moving. So it's a key issue, something we'll keep focusing on. But Adrian, thank you for coming here and sharing a little bit more about your findings and your reporting and what the implications are. We appreciate it.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Of course, thank you.

• 18:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thanks. Coming up after the break, we're going to speak with Renee DiResta, Technical Research Manager at Stanford Internet Observatory. She wrote a great piece in The Atlantic called "It's Not Misinformation, It's Amplified Propaganda." And the story looks into why misinformation is actually kind of a bad word for all the or useless term in some ways for all the bad stuff that we see online. It's become this catchall that's now meaningless. And she's going to talk a little bit with us about how there are these bottom-up influence campaigns that are coming, not from Russians, not from bots, but you know, from within the House. And we're going to get into that and talk about what it means for social platforms. So thanks so much for sticking with us through the first half.

• 19:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  We'll be back right after this on the Big Technology Podcast. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data, and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what Avpoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate. Your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf. It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence. So innovation scales without scaling risk.

• 20:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Avpoint, the unifying trust layer for AI. Head to avpoint.com to see how enterprises deploy AI with confidence. Learn more at avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. That's avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast.

• 20:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast for our second segment. Joining us is Renee DiResta. She's the Technical Research Manager at Stanford's Internet Observatory, and she's out with a great piece in The Atlantic that you have to check out. It's called "It's Not Misinformation, It's Amplified Propaganda." This is the part of the show where we're going to get a little bit more into analysis, some deeper thoughts about the tech world. And Renee, I love this because, first of all, you start off talking about how misinformation is really a clunky word for all this suspicious and manipulated stuff we see online, and you coined this new word, "propaganda."

• 21:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Why don't we start off by telling the story of Shahid Bhutar, who used a network of very real people to game some algorithms and get a hashtag "Pelosi must go" trending and spark a discussion that really spanned many communities?

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it was a really interesting morning. We were doing some observation of the conversation around the primaries. And in California--

• 21:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  2020?

• 21:53Speaker 02

  In 2020, yes. So we'd been following along with a number of these conversations, and what we saw time and time again was completely authentic accounts that would manage to get particular things trending. This is just a form of networked activism. But the public conversation about it, the kind of meta-conversation, often insinuated that there was something inauthentic that was happening, that these were bot accounts, that they were, in some way, you know, they were kind of hearkened back to this idea of the Russian bots of 2015, 2016. And what we were seeing at Stanford Internet Observatory is that these were completely authentic, very real, legitimate activists. And so this led to some interesting questions about was this.

• 22:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Before we move on, so let me just make sure I have this right. So there are big trends in the 2020 primaries as we start to see congressional candidates make moves and maybe presidential stuff. And so people who have this experience seeing the way that the Russian Internet Observatory or Internet, what are they called?

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Research Agency.

• 22:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Internet, that's not you guys.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Not us.

• 23:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes, didn't mean to imply that. Anyway, so the Internet Research Agency has hijacked some of these trends and gotten stuff moving on social media. People see stuff moving on social media and immediately go to the bots. But what you found was it was actually very real people who had found a way to gamify these algorithms and put their talking points front and center.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Yes, and this is just activism. And so it's not misinformation. There's nothing falsifiable about anything that is that is happening in this momentum. This is just real people expressing themselves politically across a variety of, you know, places along the political spectrum. And so the interesting question becomes, you know, where is that line with coordination? Where is that line with authenticity? Where is that that line with thinking about how we as a country in our political process are incorporating in these networked movements into our political conversation? And then the sometimes unexpected ways in which the networked activism community intersects with the media as the media kind

• 24:04Speaker 02

  of picks up and reports on the hashtags using this, generally speaking, it was things like people on the internet are saying, people on the internet are talking about X, Y, Z was trending.

• 24:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  I worked at Buzzfeed, I know those stories well.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  The fact that something is trending is a story, which is in and of itself kind of remarkable. It's a meta story. It's not focusing on the substance. And interestingly, when I was talking to Shahid, this is what he starts to say to me as I asked him about that morning. So Shahid is a democratic socialist who was running against Nancy Pelosi in the in the the race for for Congress in San Francisco. And so.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  The way that the California primary works, she had had a Republican challenger as well, but it's the two top vote getters who go on to the general election. And so in this case, it was Shahid, who's a democratic socialist, so to her left, and then her. And so he remarks upon the fact that she won't debate him, so there's not a lot of media coverage that he's able to get for his campaign. He's talking about the issues that he cares about, Medicare for All, and the kind of democratic socialist platform, fossil fuel industry, stuff.

• 25:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and he pulls the classic move of debating an empty chair.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  He debates an empty chair, and so he wants to get attention for his campaign. He wants to get attention actually for his ideas, but the incentives for how we communicate online are not to talk about the ideas. You're not necessarily going to get that hashtag about, "This is my political plank on fossil fuels." That's not going to trend. Not a whole lot of people are going to pay attention to that. But Pelosi must go. That's the hashtag that he and his team kind of land upon. Well, that's kind of like a Rorschach test, right? Anybody can read anything into that. And so it becomes something that a whole variety of different activist communities can aggregate around. They can see what they want to in it, and they feel compelled to participate from whatever

• 26:05Speaker 02

  political point of view it is that they hold, in opposition usually to Pelosi. But we do see people begin to come in, trying to reclaim the hashtag with content like, "Pelosi must go straight to the White House to take over the presidency." So there's people, her supporters are in there too at some point, and so all of a sudden, the entire internet is talking about this Pelosi must go on this Sunday morning. And it was just fascinating to watch it kind of hop around the ecosystem.

• 26:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  And how did he get it trending in the first place? Did he and his supporters coordinate it on some Discord channel? And you were watching this go down as...

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was watching it in real time.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  You know, we were interested in looking for, actually, that foreign interference, those Russian bots that, you know, that everybody thought would be much more prominent as they had been in 2015, 2016. And really, the platform integrity teams, to their credit, they kill off inauthentic accounts very quickly lately. They deprecate bots, so automated accounts don't surface in trends. There's the gray box, where kind of low-quality garbage accounts, people's sock puppets and throwaways, they don't actually surface. And so what you have instead is just these very highly activist online communities that sometimes coordinate and sometimes compete. And that's kind of an interesting dynamic, too. So even

• 27:29Speaker 02

  though the democratic socialist left that precipitated this hashtag has very little in common with the kind of Trump right that picks it up, through that act of shared participation in the hashtag, they elevate it to the attention of the public as it hits number one on Twitter trends. And for the ordinary public, who is not aware that this was coordinated in the Discord and some Twitter chats, and then picked up by other activists on the other side of the political spectrum, they don't see any of that. All they see is the hashtag. So it looks like hundreds of thousands of people are very angry at Nancy Pelosi on this random Saturday morning or Sunday morning in July.

• 28:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I think it's important to establish, how did they get it trending in the first place? So was it like, everybody on this Discord channel that supported Shahid Bhattar, who's the candidate, said, "On this day, at this time, we're all going to tweet, Pelosi must go. Don't have more than two hashtags, then the system will think you're a bot. And if we push it with enough momentum, the system will start to see that something's happening here, and then others will glom onto it, and it becomes a story."

• 28:43Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. And so this is, you know, this is a marketing tactic, this is an activism tactic. There is nothing that is inauthentic necessarily about this tactic. When people want attention on the internet, this is a thing that they do. And more often than not, you know, many of these attempts at engineered virality fail because the hashtag isn't appealing enough, and it doesn't have that...

• 29:08Speaker 02

  That, you know, the je ne sais quoi that like makes people wanna get up and like fight about it, you know, but this particular one, Pelosi must go, it did, right? It it had that, um, I can read into it my political beliefs and I, a passionate person on Twitter on a Sunday morning, I'm going to add my contribution or retweet the people who were in there. And so it started off as this, um, this moment where if they could get critical mass, they would begin to climb the leaderboard. And then as it climbs the leaderboard, other people notice it, observe and begin to participate. And that's the, uh, and then it starts to kind of bounce around the, um, this, the Twitter sphere. And sometimes you see, um, hyper partisan media on one side or another will write that

• 29:53Speaker 02

  people on the internet are saying article.

• 29:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And so the problem here is that the stuff that we see on social media that we think might have shown up organically is actually something that's been, uh, you know, put on a trending topic or into our feed through a, you know, coordinated, uh, manipulation of the algorithm. And we don't know because it's never labeled that that's what happened.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  What I was thinking about as I wrote the article was, was not even that it was manipulative. Actually, it was the question of what is manipulative? What, what is, um, what is reasonable? What is normal today? How do we think about this? What kind of visibility do we want to have into Twitter trends? What make, what might make us have some better understanding of why a particular thing is put forth in a format that is designed to capture our attention and make us want to participate? Is it engineered virality? Which maybe engineered virality is perfectly fine if it's done by legitimate accounts. I, you know, I think that's actually one of the really interesting questions that I think we need to be thinking about.

• 31:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  But when you have those moments, when you have the kind of, um, the things that rise to the top of Twitter, I think that there's a innate belief among much of the public that it's happening because groups of people just happen to have a strong opinion on a particular day. Imagine you've had this experience, you see a trend and you click in and you, you're curious, right? You're like, why is this hashtag here? You go, you click in, you like, you start reading the conversation, you go down a couple of rabbit holes, you're trying to figure out, what did this person actually do? I've seen a couple of these because you know, other groups that were really, really good at getting things trending before Twitter took action after January 6th was QAnon. So do you remember like Wayfair, right? The, uh, the, there was the story that Wayfair

• 31:49Speaker 02

  was trafficking children.

• 31:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  And this again, we have, there's some really interesting questions around this, which is that, that, that trend begins to happen because a group of people come to the conclusion that Wayfair is selling children, not filing cabinets. And these get hundreds of thousands of engagements on Instagram. They have evidence collages. They've made all of these, these snippets of the filing cabinet next to the headline with the name of a missing child.

• 32:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh my God, I just don't know. How you get to... I did. I just don't underst- I mean, maybe it's because I'm out of touch with the internet. I just don't get how you pick Wayfair, which is like, you know, the most inconspicuous furniture company, right? To, to target them. Maybe someone had a bad experience or a table came chip, but that to associate them with, with child trafficking. Yeah, let's hear your perspective on this.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  Let me posit that it's actually a sincerely held belief, right?

• 32:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  How?

• 32:48Speaker 02

  I think that those of us who think that it's crazy, or those of us who think that it's completely outlandish are operating from a very, very different position, whereas those people who have been immersed in QAnon lore and QAnon mythology and have been conditioned to see

• 33:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Look for the proof.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  this kind of content everywhere, right? They, they firmly believe that every company, every democratic politician, all of these people are in cahoots in some way. And so then this inexplicable thing, a $13,000 filing cabinet named Samia, and there had been a missing child named Samia. And so somebody on the internet kind of connects the dots, so to speak, and that

• 33:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Pepe Sylvia, you know, kind of sense of word where, um, the conspiracy theorist version of that. And then they, they tweet it out and then there's a receptive audience there. There's a crowd. Twitter took down 70,000 accounts in this QAnon network after January 6th, but what these accounts were doing was they were constantly surfacing this content. And so they were making things trend. Wayfair traffics children and these other hashtags around Wayfair were trending. Interestingly, this was happening at the same time as Shahid Bhattar's Pelosi must go. This was all right around the same timeframe. And the QAnon people saw the Pelosi must go trend climbing the, you know, climbing the ranks and Twitter trending.

• 34:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  As they're getting up on Wayfair. Yeah.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, but and they start marrying the hashtags. They start using both of the hashtags Pelosi must go and Wayfair traffics children. They begin to create tweets that co-occur. So that anyone who clicks into the Pelosi must go hashtag, trying to figure out what's happening there, then is introduced to and sees the Wayfair traffics children hashtags. And so it's a way to kind of draw another audience to pay attention to their hashtag that they are actively trying to make a trend. And they get trending one or two times and then Twitter starts to throttle it. And then they're convinced that they're being censored because Twitter is now taking action and saying, no, no, no, the Wayfair hashtags are no longer going to trend.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  This is a conspiracy theory and they curate the platform to remove that trend. Leading to the allegation that Twitter is kind of putting its thumb on the scale by deciding what shows up in that in that trending feed. And that actually, you know, that's, that's the question, right? What belongs in that trending section? If the platform is putting it forth and saying, these are trends, these are things that you should be paying attention to. What kind of information should the public have, understanding the provenance? Should Twitter curate out the wildly false or defamatory stuff? Or is that again, networked activism just from a, you know, from a different community? And where is that, you know, where are these lines?

• 35:32Speaker 02

  So this is, I think, the interesting question is not, I picked Pelosi must go as my example for the story. Because I liked that it hit all of these different groups. And if you read the article, it starts with Shahid and his team of democratic socialists makes its way to Pelosi's Republican challenger. Who is now out of the race officially, but still had 300,000 followers, you know, enough following to put her own spin on Pelosi must go, makes it to more of the, again, the QAnon Wayfair set come into the chat, so to speak. And then we have the more traditional kind of pro-Trump right, again, who stridently dislike Pelosi and they have their own spin on it. And so you see this entire constellation of different accounts, but this is how messages spread today.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  And I thought, I wanted to try to get at that dynamic and start to actually interrogate the question of.

• 36:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  What should we be seeing in trending? Trending captures public attention. Trending facilitates media stories. It's not misinformation at all. The Wayfair stuff, like, absolutely. You know?

• 36:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Let's clarify that.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  But a lot of these hashtags, right?

• 36:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  This podcast is not for you. I know.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  But that, I think, I think that dynamic is, is what's so interesting as we think about how to platforms curate, how to regulators who are now very concerned about the algorithm.

• 36:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Sorry, I gotta ask you. You know, we've been talking about this question. What do you think they should do?

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Twitter?

• 37:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, yeah, like, i- i- if, okay, you brought up earlier. So I was saying this is manipulation. You brought up earlier, maybe we don't cla- you know, classify this as misinformation. You said there's a big question of how a platform should, uh, sorry. You said, maybe don't classify this as manipulation. And then you said, there's a big question about how should Twitter handle this? So, okay, we've definitely identified the problem. What's your, your perspective on the solution here? What, what does a platform do? How, how do we, how do we think about this stuff?

• 37:32Speaker 02

  So I think there's a few things. So first, there's the, my, my preference, generally speaking, is to leave content up. Right? I don't, I don't like the takedown of accounts. I don't like the takedown of, of tweets. I think that unless there's, um, you know, kind of direct harassment or incitement, it's actually usually just counterproductive. It just spins up a whole second order, um, you know, thread about censorship and more people see the content than would have if it had just been left up. Um, but I think this question of what constitutes a trend? Like, what is, what is Twitter's intended function with that feature? Is it to inform the public about things that they potentially would want to pay attention to? Um, they are very personalized, you know?

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Even as we were watching, um, this trend climb the, climb the trending hashtags, it was like a slightly different number for me versus some of my colleagues, again, depending on how other things competed for our interests. I think the, the contextualization that Twitter is doing now is a lot better, but in a funny way, it really reminds me of the.

• 38:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Where they give you some information about the trend underneath it.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. And, and a human editor is doing that, right? So there's a human in the loop at that point. And it makes me think a lot about, um, Twitter's actually moving. Almost in the opposite direction that Facebook went. Do you remember Facebook used to have trending topics?

• 38:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And They crushed it, they killed it, yeah.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  And they killed it because they had human curators in the loop who were trying to downrank the wild conspiratorial trends that were happening.

• 39:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  And they got accused of being biased against conservatives.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  Exactly, of anti-conservative censorship, because a lot of what was happening at the time was these sort of, um, this was the age of like the Macedonian teenager fake news blogs. And so a lot of what was surfacing was this was when fake news meant demonstrably false news, you know, versus what it, you know, things that I don't like on the internet. Um, and the, the dynamic that was happening there was the curators were actually throttling the stuff that was really way out there or was coming from these garbage unknown blogs that just managed to, you know, kind of gain the ecosystem and achieve these viral moments. And that was processed as anti-conservative bias. And what Facebook actually did was they removed the humans in the loop. And then all of a sudden, all of this stuff.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  You know, I remember in the science section, there was like a witch blog. It was like some, some Wiccan blog. It had like the old GeoCities style, you know, like, like blinking GIF kind of stuff.

• 40:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  There was, you need it to be made there. You know, I, I

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was.

• 40:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'll say that there was a moment where I was like, Facebook has what, it was at that point, one point something billion people using it. And I was like, what if someone just made a publication that all they did was publish stories that were linked to Facebook's trending topics? And could they make a go of it? I thought about starting it. Um, I obviously ended up landing on big technology a few years later, and I'm happy about that because Facebook killed the trending column. But a lot of people saw the economic opportunity and then just, like you mentioned, they spin up these, you know, uh, bare bone sites using maybe GeoCities or whatever it is, even though I don't think GeoCities exists anymore.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  It doesn't exist anymore.

• 40:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  And, and, yeah, yeah, oh yeah, definitely. GeoCities was the way to go. Shout out GeoCities, but, you know, and then they're, then they're in front of massive audiences, um, with, yeah, anyway, it's, it's interesting.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  Well, and so Facebook ultimately killed the feature, which, which you mentioned, and they killed the feature because it became, when, when there was no longer that human in the loop curation, it just turned into Whoever managed to game the virality, um, kind of, you know, either with an insane headline or with clickbait, click farms, uh, sorry, clickbait headlines, click farms, generating fake engagement, um, throwing things into groups that were highly, highly activist. Again, this, this idea of network activists, who believe that their mission is to share the truth. And those, you know, those people would often be very, very active. Um, kind of called it, I remember when we were looking at the anti-vaccine movement, we called it the asymmetry of passion, right?

• 41:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hmm.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  People who believed that there was a, um, nefarious plot underway, really saw, uh, you know, this conspiracy theorist dynamic was that they really believed that they were telling the truth to the public. And so they were passionate about sharing. And I tried to get into this in the Atlantic as well. Also, this idea of the exhortation, you must participate. This is your moment. You know, you are uncovering the truth, sharing the truth, or spreading the truth. And so that, it, it just, you know, for Facebook, it got to the point where without the human curators, who were accused of being biased, they instead had this wild nonsense trending all the time. And so they killed the feature. Twitter's

• 42:21Speaker 02

  going in the other direction, right? It used to have, uh, the bots and then the, you know, and they did a bunch of re-jiggering to make it harder to get something to trend and came up with this idea of low quality accounts, but now ultimately are moving towards that more curated model.

• 42:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Uh, which then does open up to allocate.

• 42:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Humans. Human. Yeah.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Probably human.

• 42:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Probably.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  Eventually the AI will do it, right?

• 42:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  At a certain point, probably for everything, I guess. I don't know. But sorry. So, so yeah, how, how should, um, so are you suggesting that Twitter should have their human curators, uh, you know, uh, find out when there's one of these coordinated manipulation campaigns of the, of the algorithm and then label that? Or what's the solution?

• 43:07Speaker 02

  I think it's, I think it's really difficult. I think this question of What surfaces and when, you know, should there even be trends is one, you know,

• 43:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, what's your take on that? Are you part of killing the trending column? Or do you think it should stay?

• 43:25Speaker 02

  I wrestle with it because I think that the answer should probably be yes. I think that that it is. Um, yeah, I think that nobody really misses it on Facebook anymore. Right. It's not a thing that we feel that we've lost.

• 43:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  But it is so good fun on Twitter.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  It is so much fun and that's the, that's the thing.

• 43:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it represents some of our worst impulses, right?

• 43:46Speaker 02

  It does.

• 43:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  The main character thing where everybody teams up against one person and tries to destroy their life. Or like what you're talking about this stuff.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and I think that's, that's really the question, which is, um, is there a way either, either we think about curation differently, right? Which is, you know, the onus is on Twitter at that point to, you know, with some public input. Twitter is actually pretty good about kind of soliciting public input and testing things in public. Or there is, you know, there's been some questions about do we change the affordances in such a way where the, um, you know, we stop seeing the metrics. We stop seeing the number of likes. We stop seeing the number of retweets. And the question becomes if we can't see that something has a high retweet value,

• 44:37Speaker 02

  like meaning the number is already high, um, there's, there's a momentum dynamic, right? When you see something that has a lot of likes or a lot of retweets, you're sort of conditioned because it has that high number to believe that a lot of people have engaged with them to pay attention. And one thing that we see in our work on actual inauthentic networks, like we, you know, we do some work on, um, there are still Chinese information operations happening. And they use clusters of accounts to like and retweet and reshare both their garbage troll accounts, but also their kind of prominent public figure state media accounts. So they have inauthentic amplification of. Real accounts, you know, oftentimes blue check accounts even.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  And so there's an interesting dynamic there, which is the recognition that if 500 fake accounts, like a real account, like a Minister of Foreign Affairs account, that tweet is going to look as if more people are paying attention to it, which then, when I see it in my feed, inspires me to think that, hey, maybe this is something worth paying attention to. And there's sometimes a reflexive action that happens there. You see something that's gotten a lot of retweets or, you know, likes and you add your own to it. So even though any individual act of liking or sharing, we're not thinking of it in terms of, in aggregate, we're creating momentum around this hashtag. In aggregate, we're creating momentum around this content. But this is the agency piece, right?

• 46:00Speaker 02

  Where we ourselves are active participants in this dynamic. And that was the other thing I wanted to get at in the, in the article that I wrote for The Atlantic, which was positing that in some ways, we talk about the algorithm and what should Twitter curate and how. To some extent, we talk about what I call the affordances, the tools, our ability to share, our ability to retweet, our ability to like, the capability that we've been given to participate in this way, which is fundamentally different. I get, you know, I get asked a lot, or like, I read this Washington Examiner piece that were like, this is, this is all the same, it's the same as it's always been. It's not, in the sense that we now have phenomenal ability as individual people to shape the way that narratives move.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  And when acting in concert, that ability is even more pronounced.

• 46:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  We can come to the attention.

• 46:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and I like how you put it in.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  And that's the part that I think is understudied.

• 46:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I like how you put it in your, in your story. Um, sorry, I mean, didn't mean to cut you off, uh, but I do want to read this part. Um, you know, you talked about how propaganda, you had propaganda that you would come top down and control the masses, um, from, you know, large institutions, politicians, church. And now, um, you say, uh, social media has ended the monopoly of mass media propaganda, but has also ushered in a new competitor, Ampliganda, right? Which is the stuff coming from the bottom up. So the idea that propaganda could come top down is gone because the top, top doesn't control the message anymore. Now it's much more bottom up. And you say it's the result of a system in which trust has been reallocated from authority figures and legacy media

• 47:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  to charismatic individuals adept at appealing to the aspects, personal or ideological, identity that their audience hold most dear. That is fascinating, a fascinating paragraph and such an interesting perspective about this shift that we're seeing where the propaganda is now coming bottom up. Can you expand on that a little bit? I mean, I think that might have been what you were getting at.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  So the, the term propaganda, and I only got, I got to keep one paragraph on this, but dates back to the Reformation when the Catholic Church is, is trying to evangelize and feeling that they're losing out to the Protestants. This is the age of the printing press. And the Pope, Pope Gregory, has this exhortation, uses the word propaganda, which is a particular form of a Latin verb that carries with it a command. And it means to propagate, meaning to spread. And it, and the command is we must propagate the faith. We must propagate the true faith. And he has this paragraph exerting the bishops to do this. And he's really insisting that this is how you bring people back to the one true faith, the one true reality.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  And I find, you know, when you read things like that and you can see the kind of parallels to today, everybody has their one true reality. There are these influencers who are out there and their, their job is to really reach the masses and many of them have very large platforms, commensurate with mass media, in fact. And so there's this interesting dynamic of this kind of middle layer of influencers who are not mass media, that, that control has fragmented. Propaganda over the years came to be seen as a thing that governments did, right? The, the US in World War I and II, Germany, of course, you know, Nazi propaganda in US, in World War II. The UK had a, you know, had a propaganda office. This idea that states would manipulate the enemy public,

• 49:28Speaker 02

  but also that states, governments and institutions and media would, what Noam Chomsky came to call manufacture consent. It's actually a reference to a phrase from Walter Lippmann in 1922, I think. The idea of manufacturing the consent of the governed. Which in the early days of thinking around propaganda was that you could create one unifying narrative that people would believe. And this was how you could nudge people in the direction of supporting a particular policy. In the 1920s, that was seen as actually a function of good government. The government was supposed to do that because how could the people be trusted to inform themselves? Now, today, we recognize that as paternalistic and terrible. But it took a while to get to that realization.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  And so in Chomsky's book, he uses the same phrase, manufacturing consent, but in a very different connotation, right? And what he is trying to do in that work is expose the extent to which there is this top-down control, he calls it the five filters, that shape what we see. And that model of propaganda comes to be the prevalent one in the mind of the public, right? The idea that propaganda is a thing that governments do to the people to create a unifying narrative and control them. And yet, at the same time, we have these older versions of the term, to propagate information, to spread information with an agenda. And the only reason I thought, okay, maybe we need a new term, is not because I wanted to make a new term. I actually usually think that's really cheesy.

• 50:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. You don't strike me as the Tom Friedman type, so when you came up with a new term, I'm like, okay, let's listen to what this is all about.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Well, I felt that there was a need to point to this dynamic by which now the public has the capability to do that. The public has the ability to create content. The public disseminates content. The public amplifies content. And that is so fundamentally different, that is such an inversion of the old power dynamic, because this is fundamentally all about power, right? It's about who shapes the narrative, who controls the public perception. And that, I think, is really what is so remarkable about what's happening today. And it's this fundamental inversion. And we see it deployed particularly in topics like elections, right? And this is where manipulative, the truly manipulative side comes in, not with something

• 51:49Speaker 02

  like Pelosi must go, but when you get into things like hashtag stolen ballots, hashtag stop the steal, where the material that is being put forth is

• 52:01Speaker 02

  False and manipulative and also highly resonant because the people who are going to amplify it trust the influencer and they're unified in their community. And that is also what we see with the QAnon dynamic as well, that idea of the tightly integrated community where the the sort of body of facts is actually sort of fundamentally outside of the other body of facts. So this is where, again, that reference to the idea of the one true faith or the, you know, the one unifying narrative, that's no longer a possibility. Now we have these competing, these many, many competing narratives, many, many competing bodies of fact. And that, I think, is what's most interesting about what's happening today and what, you know, what networked activism

• 52:46Speaker 02

  is evolving into.

• 52:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And so let's, there's one last thought I want to end on, which is that one of the things that's been interesting. So Eugene Wei has this great post called Status as a Service, and he talks about how people who, people use social, the power users of social media will use it in order to achieve status they might not have elsewhere. And he talks a little bit about how social networks at the beginning will start and people will try to build status there. And if they find that they're not getting it, they'll go elsewhere. And what's really interesting about these social networks, you're thinking about that framework, by the way, I recommend folks go read that, also read Renee's story. But what I find really interesting about these, the activism that you see on social media is it almost always comes from

• 53:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  the fringe, because if you have status elsewhere, you don't need to engage in these campaigns. So it's interesting when you talk about this, you know, long shot challenger to Pelosi, it's like, oh, yes, of course, you know, that's the type of person that's going to end up using these techniques. Because like you mentioned, you know, you talk about these folks that are passionate about this stuff. It's like, yeah, they're going to be passionate because they can't get any, any, any way to break through otherwise. So, understanding that this is mostly going to come from the fringe and these are very powerful tools. What do you make of that combination? Some people might say that's good, where we're going to bring voices to people that didn't have them otherwise. But some others might say it's bad because, like you mentioned, you're going to end up just getting this, you know, massive amplification

• 54:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  of stuff that's, you know, false and potentially damaging.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  Well, when I think further out, I do think that that rise in voices is good. Actually, I do think that that proliferation of opinions is good and is where we need to be. I'm curious to see if actually the sort of moderate center begins to play in the same game. Actually, I am curious if they begin to realize the extent to which the polls are doing it and, you know, and start to try to participate in that regard.

• 54:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's hard to imagine, like, you know, there's a trend, you know, people coming together to get the hashtag Pelosi is just okay, you know, trending across social media.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  I know, I know. It's really the, again, it's that asymmetry of passion. You know, for your point, some of the earliest things that I looked at were, again, anti-vaccine activists who media rightly stopped covering conspiracy theories alleging that vaccines and autism were in any way related. And so they turned to social media where they could, you know, kind of commandeer, you know, other people's hashtags with this theory. Again, that same way of that we saw Wayfair come into Pelosi Must Go. They used to put forth these, these kind of vaccine, anti-vaccine hashtags into Black Lives Matter. Actually, it was one of the places that they kept trying to stick it in. And I, so I think that potentially the center does begin to participate in some way.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  Maybe, maybe we move into hashtags that are more policy oriented or express some form of fact. This may be like a total pipe dream. It probably is.

• 55:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's a great dream. You owe me the dream.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, well, I always, you know, when I was watching the vaccine stuff play out in the early days in 2015, I felt like it seemed impossible that tech platforms were going to change anything. Because you may remember in 2015, this was also when like the ISIS accounts were all over Twitter. Right? And if we were letting terrorists recruit on a platform, you know, and then calling that free expression because, you know, this, what a slippery slope. If you took them down, you know, what even was next? And so it seemed at the time like platforms weren't going to change. But then we did see actually really material changes. And it's an interesting adversarial environment where anytime the platform changes the rules of the game by changing the structure,

• 56:43Speaker 02

  the, you know, the policy, you know, we have a saying. In some of our work at Stanford Internet Observatory, "Policy Shapes Propagation," right? The rules that you set, your determination, your policy, determine what people see, determines what people pay attention to. And so there are arguments for, is there going to be a creation of, for example, like a public interest internet? Ethan Zuckerman's doing some thinking on that. There's some people who are trying to think through this now, how do we regulate the algorithm? Which is an interesting, you know, interesting complex challenge. Should it be regulatory? Should it be self-regulatory? There's a variety of arguments kind of for and against those positions.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  There are people, you know, interested in things like CDA 230 amendments that take into account whether a platform proactively pushed something to someone, thinking about amplification of speech as opposed to carrying of speech. You know, is there a line in, should platforms carry the content but not boost the content? I actually do, I'm very sympathetic to the idea of carry the content but don't boost the content. I'm slightly less sympathetic when it comes into how do we incorporate CDA 230 protection into that dynamic. I think there are certain things that are, you know, particularly hard to regulate since this is speech and expression.

• 58:09Speaker 02

  And so I think ultimately there is going to be a lot of education and norms, norms building that's going to happen. I think that making people perhaps a little bit more aware of how things work. I would occasionally ping people on Twitter who were alleging that they were being censored. And I've asked a couple, you know, asked a few of these accounts, why do you think you're being censored? What is the reason for that? Because these are very small, ordinary people accounts, not big, we talk influencers who Twitter would potentially throttle in some way. And the response is, well, my friends don't see all my content.

• 58:49Speaker 02

  And so the idea that there is an algorithm curating what goes into your feed is something that I don't know, actually, that the entirety of the public really understands. That there's such a glut of content that when you take out your phone, that kind of pride of place, those top six tweets that show up right when you when you open your app, that that is selected for you because of a belief that this is what you are going to be most likely to respond to for a variety of different reasons. The, I think it had created an impression among a lot of these folks that Twitter was censoring them out deliberately because their friends weren't seeing their stuff.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  And I thought that's a really fascinating interpretation of, you know, the idea that a curated feed is somehow silencing you.

• 59:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  And so I think that that education is also really key, helping people understand how, you know, how and why platforms decide to surface what they do.

• 59:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Well, look, I always love to end on a dose of optimism. So no matter how far fetched, I'm really glad you brought it up. And Renee, I appreciate you joining today.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  Thanks so much. I appreciate you having me on.

• 1:00:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Definitely. All right, folks, make sure to read the article. It's on Atlantic.com. The title is "It's Not Misinformation, It's Amplified Propaganda." I'll also link it here. And Renee, I'm sure that the type of work that you're doing isn't going to go out of fashion anytime soon, so please come back.

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  Thanks so much.

• 1:00:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, we're going to have one more guest, surprise guest, here at the end of the show. Zoe Schiffer from The Verge is coming on. She's been doing some great reporting on how Apple and Netflix have fired activists inside their company in the past. Seems like companies like Google would be willing to listen to people. Now it seems like the tech companies have learned from that experience and they're showing them the door. So we will be right back with Zoe for another few minutes here on Big Technology Podcast, right after this.

• 1:00:58Speaker 03

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee.

• 1:01:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome back to one final segment here on the Big Technology Podcast. Well, look, it's been a crazy run of news, and there's a story that I think we have to cover before we sign off today. And that is that both Apple and Netflix, over the past week, have fired organizers of worker activism movements. Now, you might remember that Google had a very large and intense worker activism movement. And the company listened to its activists in the beginning. It spoke with them. And then eventually, it pushed many of them out. And it seems like Apple and Netflix, which have nascent worker movements, aren't taking any chances.

• 1:02:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  At least, that's the perspective that I have reading the stories. Why don't we go to someone who's been reporting and writing the stories? Zoe Schiffer is a senior reporter at The Verge, first time guest here on Big Technology Podcast, but certainly, I hope, not the last. And she's published a couple of these stories just a few hours between one and the other. And it seems like it's all happening at once. So appreciate her coming on. Zoe, welcome to the show.

• 1:02:41Speaker 04

  Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

• 1:02:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's great having you. So let's just talk about it. Apple, Netflix. They both have worker activists. Now, they've fired some of the leaders of them. And usually, there was a process where this took a little while before. You know, the company found some creative way to push people out. But both these companies and Amazon have just said, we're going to nip these movements in the butt. What's going on? And what's your perspective on what's happening here?

• 1:03:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, I think that a lot of these companies looked at what happened with Google in 2018 with the walkout and said, we don't want to be Google. We don't want to let it get that far. We're going to nip this in the bud a little bit. Particularly at Apple, you know, it's historically been so top down, so hierarchical that it's highly unusual. We've seen employees speaking out like this and creating a platform, the Apple two platform, where other people can submit stories of harassment and discrimination. And we had two very public faces of that movement. A woman, Cher Scarlett, and another one, Yannick Parish. And Yannick was fired just this morning. So I think we're seeing.

• 1:03:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  This is me. Yeah, this is Friday morning. We're going to delay it a couple of days. So last Friday. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.

• 1:03:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. On Friday. Yeah, I think we're just seeing the limit of what Apple will tolerate. They're using very similar excuses to Google in terms of like the reasons that they're giving. Things like data, violating data security, confidential information, et cetera. But I think internally, the sentiment is this is retaliation for organizing.

• 1:04:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So before we go on to Netflix, what's Apple two?

• 1:04:18Speaker 04

  So Apple two is this movement that came really out of the remote work advocacy channel. So internally, employees at Apple were very unhappy with the idea that they were going to have to return to the office. There was a ton of advocacy happening around that, sharing stories with Tim Cook about how it would impact people's lives if they were forced to return to Cupertino. That kind of spawned a whole bunch of worker organizing, people sharing stories about how they'd been treated internally. And finally, kind of coalesced in this platform called Apple two. It's essentially just a website with a forum where employees can submit stories about what they've experienced internally. And then two women, two employees have been sharing those stories on Medium.

• 1:05:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, wow. And so a lot of this organizing happened on Slack originally?

• 1:05:06Speaker 04

  Yes, on Slack, and then it's being shared out on Twitter primarily, and then on Medium, there are a few different channels.

• 1:05:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And now one of those two organizers is out.

• 1:05:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, and the other one is on medical leave, so it's looking like.

• 1:05:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  They always put, they always put people on medical, I've heard this before, where like someone has a problem with the company and HR will be like, why don't you take medical leave? Just to sort of, it's, it's pretty unbelievable. I mean.

• 1:05:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, unfortunately we're seeing a lot.

• 1:05:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Google organizers have been speaking out today saying, oh, this is the Google playbook. And I think that that's really true, that there are new playbook these companies use.

• 1:05:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Okay, Netflix, uh, what's going on there?

• 1:05:46Speaker 04

  Okay, stop me if I get too verbose here, but so Netflix, this has actually started a few years ago. Trans employees have been meeting with executives for years, telling them which content might be transphobic, harmful to the trans community. In the past, they felt like these conversations went pretty well. If something was going to be super contentious, it would have kind of a disclaimer at the front saying like, hey, trigger warning, this might be offensive to certain groups. With the Dave Chappelle special, they actually did meet with executives prior to it coming out. They said that the jokes in the special were transphobic. Dave Chappelle had really doubled down on some of the previous jokes he'd made about the trans community.

• 1:06:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:25Speaker 04

  And executives essentially said, we hear you, thanks for your input, it's going up anyway. When the special came out, a whole bunch of trans activists and LGBTQ groups started speaking out about how it was transphobic and dangerous. And this kind of prompted employees to start speaking out externally as well.

• 1:06:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, there was a tweet storm.

• 1:06:44Speaker 04

  Exactly, um, that this woman Tara Field did a trans employee talking about her experience at the company and her kind of views on the special that went viral. She was then suspended, Netflix said it was because she attended this director level meeting that she wasn't supposed to. There was big public outcry, she was reinstated. And then just today, um, the company fired an organizer of the walkout. Employees had been saying on October 20th, we're going to walk out of work. Now the leader of that, who was also the leader of the trans ERG has been fired from the company.

• 1:07:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, ERG is Employee Resource Group.

• 1:07:18Speaker 04

  Yes, thank you.

• 1:07:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  But, but Netflix, uh, well, you know, we just, acronyms galore, so, uh, anyway. So Netflix say that they, says that they fired this activist because they.

• 1:07:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Uh leaked the, they suspect they leaked the actual um cost that are the amount of money that they paid for the Chappelle special. If if that's the case, is that isn't that a fireable offense?

• 1:07:43Speaker 04

  I mean, so it was unusual that the numbers leaked. There was this report in Bloomberg that said how much Netflix paid for the special.

• 1:07:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, very rarely happens.

• 1:07:51Speaker 04

  Um, how many people it had reached, how much it had paid for it. I think the number, the price set on it was like twenty four million dollars. So it's pretty eye popping. Um, the employee had shared those metrics internally as part of their job. And this is not unusual for employees to do. Netflix has this culture of open transparency, open dialogue, et cetera. So there's a lot of numbers being shared around.

• 1:08:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:12Speaker 04

  For it to leak externally was highly unusual. You know, if the employee did it, then I think um Netflix has more grounds to fire them, but I don't think that that's the view. Many employees who I've talked to who say, okay, this employee did share stuff internally, but we do not believe that um they were the person to leak it externally as well.

• 1:08:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I I guess like, you know, we're thinking about Apple putting one of the organizers. Uh, this is a mo- again, this is happening in a moment where tech giant employees have felt empowered to stand up and protest. And um and Google obviously very publicly took, you know, a a big hit. Um, I guess if you ask Google executives, the workers might be happier about what happened. Uh, but but definitely a lot of executive time and resources went into addressing some of the concerns of their workers. Uh, what do you think it means for for tech activism now that, you know, we're we're far beyond like the Google walkout, which was, you know, seen as somewhat impress unprecedented.

• 1:09:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  And now almost all the walker walkout organizers uh have either left or been pushed out of the company inside Google. Amazon has fired some of its, you know, whistleblowers or, you know, whatever you want to call them, employee protest leaders. Apple, of course, has brought down the hammer and now Netflix. Um, is this the end of employee activism inside tech companies? I mean, you know, at a certain point, you do wonder, you know, it it seemed like Google employees felt empowered to speak up because. They had been taught that in their culture, you you you speak up and that's fine. But now is the signal being sent and there's a message being heard that employees just can't do this inside big tech companies. What do you think?

• 1:10:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that there's going to be a chilling effect of the hammer coming down on these individuals. But I think we have to differentiate between the individual outcomes and the systemic outcomes. You know, a lot of these individual employees have been pushed out, they have been fired, but they haven't been silenced. They're continuing to bring charges through the NLRB. And particularly when we're talking about the fired five at Google, we're seeing those cases wind through the courts right now. And really, they could create precedent that would impact the entire tech industry. So you think with Amazon, you know, they had this big union vote in Bessemer. The NLRB said that some of Amazon's tactics there were likely illegal. There's going to be another vote.

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  So I think that we still have yet to see what the systemic impact of all this activism will be. I think it is definitely true that there will be individual consequences, unfortunately. But I don't think there's any like stamping out the movement completely. I think employees are organizing, they're speaking out and they're seeing that when they tell the truth on Twitter, when they talk to colleagues on Slack, that they get a lot of support and they can kind of create their own platform so that they cannot be silenced completely.

• 1:11:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, what what do you think the companies want? Because it seems it seems like, you know, they'll push out people on, I don't know,

• 1:11:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  on the left who are activists. It seems like they'll push out people who have like conservative views or, you know, views that are unpalatable to the left, like Antonio Garcia Martinez at Apple. So it is, do the tech companies just want employee bases that will sort of, you know, have these kind of milquetoast political views and sort of leave them alone and allow them to run their businesses?

• 1:11:44Speaker 04

  I mean, it really depends on which tech company we're talking about. We've seen organizations like Coinbase that say very explicitly, we don't want you to have political discussions internally. And then on the flip side, you have organizations like Netflix that say, we really value employee dissent. We really want you to speak back to executives. But I think what they're seeing now is kind of the limits of those ethos. Like, we really don't want that to ever leak externally. And it's kind of untenable to ask employees to voice their opinions. But then when they start voicing them a little more broadly to fire them.

• 1:12:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, so there's there's two philosophies that are emerging in terms of like, what's the best way to run a company? One is allow for, you know, political discourse and dissent, you know? And that's some of the stuff that you've seen inside Google and potentially a little bit of Netflix, although they've pulled back a little bit. And the other one is, don't speak about politics at work, which is the Brian Armstrong Coinbase theory. Focus on the mission and if you need to talk about politics, we don't pay you for that. Go do that somewhere else. So I do wonder, what do you think the best approach is? I mean, is there an optimal way to do this?

• 1:12:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Because the Brian Armstrong perspective, you know, as we see some more activism taking place inside companies, has won a lot of fans. And so curious what your your thought is on this part.

• 1:13:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I personally believe that it's a fallacy to think that you can keep politics out of the workplace. Like, the very nature of that company is political in some ways. And I think we have to remember that what we're seeing from Apple, from Netflix, from Google, is a breakdown in the communication internally. Many of these employees tried every avenue internally to have their voices heard, to have an open discussion. And they only spoke out externally when they felt like executives were not listening. And so I think there has to be a way to have those political discussions, to have an open debate, but to have more responsiveness from executives and more accountability to the employees.

• 1:13:55Speaker 04

  So that there's an ability to kind of take care of some of these issues internally first.

• 1:14:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, sometimes that might not be feasible. Like, I imagine there were some real discussions about that Chappelle special before it went out.

• 1:14:10Speaker 04

  There were, absolutely.

• 1:14:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  And there's going to always be part of the employee base that's just not going to be satisfied in the company's answers.

• 1:14:17Speaker 04

  Completely.

• 1:14:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  So it's tough stuff.

• 1:14:19Speaker 04

  But again, like, you know, for example, a lot of what we're seeing with Apple right now with the leaks, these are a lot of what executives were extremely upset about was an all-hands meeting that leaked in September to The Verge. The comments of this all-hands meeting were incredibly benign. Like, as a reporter, I was like, this is very boring, there's no news here. But Apple made enormous deal about it. And I honestly think it shot itself in the foot a little bit because it lost trust with employees by clamping down so hard on these leaks that weren't actually really leaks, almost to just make a point. And I think internally, employees are feeling like, I didn't leak the designs of the next iPhone. I would never do that. I'm just thinking out about like, you know, these policies that I don't believe in. And their reaction feels so outsized.

• 1:15:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Life and Fortress Apple. And then Tim Cook wrote an email to employees, you know, about, about how they shouldn't be leaking and that leaked as well. Did you publish that one?

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I did.

• 1:15:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that was one. We love the leaks about the leaks. I understand how, how people inside companies, you know, might feel negatively about leakers. But I think you're really right. Like, it does come down to, can you have a productive discussion inside? And generally, when stuff, you know, goes as wrong as it does, it is, it is a product of, well, I don't know. I was gonna say it's a product of communication breakdown inside. I'd agree with you. But also, then I think about the Chappelle special. And, you know, it's, it's a tricky one.

• 1:15:55Speaker 04

  But that, that, there was a breakdown there as well. You know, there were those initial discussions, but they also, employees have this open Q and A document where they can submit questions. And historically, executives have been really good about being in that document and responding to people. And there, a few days went by and there weren't responses. There were a lot of questions that I saw firsthand, very, very thoughtful questions from, like, many, many employees that just were sitting there. And I think people felt like they were being ignored.

• 1:16:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you think that, and let's just end on this one, because this is a sort of interesting question. I mean, the Chappelle special, I think we'll be talking about that and its impacts to Netflix for, for a very long time. And there've been some strong headlines about it. Like, The Times wrote that Netflix has lost its glow. Weird way to put it. Do you, do you think that?

• 1:16:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  There would have been a way for Netflix to reconcile with its employees and still run that special. Because from my perspective, it does seem like there was this kind of line in the sand, where some employees were like, basically, the only way we'll be happy is if you take it down. Like, was it a matter of communication? Or was it a matter of content?

• 1:17:06Speaker 04

  I really think it was a matter of communication. One thing that I know from talking to tons of Netflix employees over the past couple of weeks is that no one I spoke to wanted the special to be taken down. And they weren't asking executives for it to be taken down. Not one of the questions that I saw in that open Q and A document was, can we take it down? It was really, can you talk to me about our line between hate speech and commentary? Can you talk to me about how the decision was made? How are we going to help employees who feel unsafe? So they really wanted an open dialogue. And I don't know if really, the result that they were intending was for the special to be taken down. And as we've seen, executives have not.

• 1:17:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Not coming down. Yeah. Okay, but that is fascinating. It is, it is, I think we would all benefit from a conversation, like the one that they were advocating for. It is also, it is interesting how Netflix has allowed the culture war to play out on its platform through comedy. And, I don't know, to me, it just, I don't know, it seems like comedy is a good venue to have these discussions. It's tricky stuff. It's hard, it's hard. There's a, you know, I mean, I read something this week about how you need to be able to laugh at yourself. And I certainly see that viewpoint, and I could also see the viewpoint of the people inside the company.

• 1:18:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  You might have felt hurt by some of the lines or wanted some clarification from executives.

• 1:18:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. Well, that's it, we're, we're, we're being told by the buzzer to wrap it up. So, big thank you to you, Zoe. Keep up the amazing reporting. I feel like I've learned so much from your stories about what's happening inside these companies. And people can find you, why don't you just shout out like the URL and on Twitter, so people can find you?

• 1:18:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's just my name, Zoe Schiffer on Twitter.

• 1:18:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, great.

• 1:18:55Speaker 04

  Or on the verge.

• 1:18:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, well, we'll continue to watch, and.

• 1:19:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  And these stories for sure, this isn't the end. You know, so it'll be fascinating to see how it plays out, especially Netflix. This stuff's wild.

• 1:19:13Speaker 04

  No doubt.

• 1:19:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 1:19:14Speaker 04

  Thanks so much for having me on.

• 1:19:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thank you for being on, Zoe, and thank you, everybody, for listening. It's been a long one today, but hopefully a productive one, one you've enjoyed. If you have any thoughts about how today's show has gone, please feel free to email us, [email protected]. I'd love to hear your feedback, especially with the new format. And I just want to say thank you once again for listening. Thanks to Nate Kwatney for editing and mastering the audio. Thanks to Red Circle for hosting and selling the ads. And thanks to all of you, the listeners, most important of all, we appreciate you being here every week. We'll see you again next Wednesday with a new show with tech insiders and outside agitators. Hope you have a good week. Until then, take care.

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:20:37Speaker 05

  In this life, you can't win.

• 1:20:39Speaker 06

  When the world gets you down.

• 1:20:41Speaker 05

  No!

• 1:20:41Speaker 06

  Escape to Pluto TV.

• 1:20:43Speaker 05

  This is objectively fantastic.

• 1:20:45Speaker 06

  Relax into the movies and shows you already know and love, all for free. Shwing! Even our news is uplifting.

• 1:20:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  You stay classy, San Diego.

• 1:20:52Speaker 06

  Watch School of Rock, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The X-Files, Wayne's World, and so much more.

• 1:20:58Speaker 05

  We're not worthy!

• 1:21:00Speaker 06

  The best things on TV really are free. You just have to know where to look. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.