Pod Insights The Vergecast Trump banned from Twitter, Facebook, and others / Parler banned from app stores About this episode Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Adi Robertson, and Casey Newton chronicle the week since the Capitol riot: Trump gets deplatformed and Parler is removed from app stores.
Further reading:
It’s 2021, and the pandemic is still here
FDA tells US health providers not to modify COVID-19 vaccine dose schedule
Florida counties use Eventbrite to schedule COVID-19 vaccine appointments
Twitter permanently bans Trump
Twitter is deleting Trump’s attempts to circumvent ban
Twitter bans QAnon supporters, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn
Twitter pulls Trump video that it said posed a ‘risk of violence’
Facebook bans Trump ‘indefinitely’
YouTube says it will punish Trump and other channels that continue to spread election lies
YouTube removes Trump video addressing Capitol attack
Platforms take action against Trump after Capitol mob attack
Reddit bans r/donaldtrump forum for inciting violence
Twitch disables Trump’s account indefinitely
Big Tech pauses political spending after Capitol riot: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Airbnb are pausing spending
Shopify takes down Trump’s campaign store
Google pulls Parler from Play Store for fostering calls to violence
Apple removes Parler from the App Store
Parler CEO says even his lawyers are abandoning him
Parler is gone for now as Amazon terminates hosting
Parler posts, some with GPS data, have been archived by an independent researcher
Parler sues Amazon for kicking it off the internet
Why the post-Capitol deplatforming was necessary
Trump’s ban from Twitter creates the ultimate case of link rot in posts across the internet
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Transcript 13,399 words · 9 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Nilay Patel? On this episode of The Vergecast, Casey Newton, Addie Robertson join the show to talk about Twitter, Facebook, a host of other platforms banning Donald Trump, and another set of platforms, Apple, Google, AWS kicking Parler off the internet. A big moment in platform regulation and moderation. That's The Vergecast coming up now.
0:16 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:01 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:50 Nilay Patel? Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of content moderation standards. It's hard to make the joke, but I'm committed to it. It's our bit. I'm Eli Patel. Dieter Bowne is here. Hello, hello, hello. Casey Newton is here. Hey, Casey. Hey, my old friends. And Addie Robertson is here. Hey, Addie. Hey there. So we're gonna do two Verge Casts this week. There was a coup attempt in our country, which you may have noticed. So I asked Casey and Addie to join us on this episode to talk about the platform implications. Twitter and Facebook could ban Trump. Later in the week, Dieter and I are gonna do another episode hilariously and perhaps somewhat aptly. CS
2:33 Nilay Patel? is just barreling ahead during a coup attempt in this country. Truly, the gadgets cannot be stopped. So we're gonna do another episode, just split the two conversations. It feels appropriate. So a little later in the week, we'll do a CS show, talk about what's happening in the world of tech. There's a lot, actually, coming out of CS this year, surprisingly. Way more than I expected. But we do spend a lot of time in the show talking about policy, tech policy. So I wanted to focus on what is going on with the platforms now. To begin with, as always, I just want to do a quick COVID update. I will tell you, I think it is still the biggest story in the world. It's still the most important thing shaping the events of our world is the pandemic. We're in a weird spot with it. The vaccines are here. They're not being
3:15 Nilay Patel? rolled out well. We're covering that very closely in our science desk. Mary Beth Griggs has a newsletter called Antiviral, which you can subscribe to. Just some examples. Florida counties are now using the platform Eventbrite to schedule their COVID-19 vaccine appointments because the other software they're using did not work well. So they're just using Eventbrite. And the FDA has told US health providers not to modify the vaccine dose schedule to only give half the dose, which they were considering doing, but they told them not to do it. So that rollout is happening. It seems like the Biden administration is going to change logistics of how the vaccine is rolled out across the country. It is the biggest story in the world. Science team doing a great job.
3:55 Nilay Patel? Uh, covering it. I just, I urge everyone to not lose sight of it, even as there's literally a coup attempt that happened and a lot of platform repercussions from it. So check that out. Uh, Mary Beth's newsletter is antivirus and obviously Virgescience continuing to cover that. Okay. So last week was a strange one in America, in the world. On Wednesday, a mob attacked the Capitol. As more time has elapsed since the attack, we've learned it was much more violent, uh, much more deadly and much more directed, uh, than it appeared in real time. It was remarkable that we were watching it in real time in the way that we were. Many of the riders were live streaming. They were literally Getty photographers in the building, sending photos wirelessly as the attack was
4:40 Nilay Patel? happening to news services. But as time has elapsed, we've seen it's gotten even worse. Next to that, and I think this is, it's important to just that it happened. There was an attack on the United States Capitol. We came very close to, um, a pretty serious mass casualty event with the entire chain of succession of the United States government under threat and potentially, uh, very close to, to being killed or injured. So that's that. That's not a tech policy question. That's just a real thing that happened. As we speak today, uh, on Monday, we're recording, um, the House has a, a bill to impeach the president again, uh, for incitement of insurrection. So that is one whole thing that happened that can be bracketed from what the platforms did in response to it. Um, and really there's
5:23 Nilay Patel? two things to talk about here. One is the actions the platforms took against Trump, banning him from their platforms. And then another issue, which we're going to separate is, uh, the service parlor was effectively removed from the internet, from a variety of platforms in a variety of ways. And that's a separate track, a different set of facts. So let's start with Trump. Addy, walk us through the timeline of the Trump bans.
5:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, so obviously on Wednesday, there was the coup attempt. That happened. Then for a while, everything seems like it's kind of in a holding pattern. Nothing's really happened with Trump. And then Trump puts out a video where he says people should go home, but he does not denounce them. It's a really inflammatory video, says that he, this election was stolen. And suddenly all of the platforms have to decide what to do with it. So on Wednesday, they basically decide they're going to take it down and they're going to hold. So Facebook removes the video, Twitter removes it. And Twitter then issues a 12 hour suspension that says, okay, he has to get rid of this or it's facing a ban.
6:29 Speaker 02 Facebook and Instagram also give Trump a 24 hour ban. It seems like this is just, there's a cooling off period. We're going to figure out what happens. Then there are just, it's a slow bursting of floodgates. The day after that, Facebook bans Trump indefinitely. Shopify starts taking down his campaign store. Twitch bans him, which it has actually done before. That's not totally new. And then there are a bunch of sort of ancillary things that are Trump related that get banned. So there's this mass Twitter purge of QAnon related accounts that include Trump, former Trump lawyer and Michael Flynn, a former advisor. There's Reddit bans a platform, a subreddit called R Donald Trump that Trump supporters
7:13 Speaker 02 were using to incite violence. And then Trump gets banned from Twitter. His Twitter account gets nuked. And that's kind of where we're at. It's unclear what happened with a bunch of other Trump things. It's not really clear what his email status is. For example, he's stopped sending fundraising emails very abruptly. But Twitter is Trump's platform. It's the thing he loves. He spent a bunch of time trying to just pop back up under other accounts and the other accounts would get banned because circumventing bans is against Twitter's rules. And he has not come back there.
7:48 Nilay Patel? It is amazing that the games we play with our shit posters and like our comments and forums are now happening at literally the highest possible level of government. Like, "We IP banned you," and then they get a new... It's like, it's literally that at the highest level. Casey, I'm curious, this cooling off period, they, you know, Twitter and Facebook banned him for a little while, and then he put out another video that was, it seemed like he was afraid of them, and it was a much more calm video. "Everybody be peaceful, I'm committing to a transition of power." And then they, they kind of used that video, in particular Twitter used that video and said, "This is an incitement to violence again, he's gone permanently." Do you have any insight into sort of that thought process?
8:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, so, I mean, Twitter laid out the thought process. I agree with you. When I first saw Trump's tweets upon coming back, I didn't think, "Oh, this is a crisis." But, you know, Twitter, like the other platforms, has access to intelligence that the rest of us don't have, right? Like, they are in contact with the FBI and other national security authorities. And it seems very clear that there is going to be more attempted violence against the United States between now and the inauguration. And so, one of Trump's tweets said, "I'm not going to the inauguration." And Twitter said, "We are interpreting this as a message to the president's followers that they are free to attack if they want, because the president himself will not be harmed."
9:12 Speaker 03 So, um, you know, I mean, it's, I, it feels crazy saying these things out loud, that this is sort of where we've come to as a country, but that was the rationale that they used to ban him permanently.
9:25 Nilay Patel? Do you think they backed into that rationale? I mean, I hear what you're saying about intelligence, but if they were gonna take this step, there were, there were many other tweets that were much more specific, less of a gray area, didn't require the assumption that they have intelligence we don't have.
9:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's an open question. Like, is there anything Trump could have tweeted upon returning that could have kept him on the platform if he had said, "I renounce all of my previous 57,000 retweets and I promised only, like, post puppy pictures from here on out"? Like, would he have been okay? You know, maybe, but, but, you know, to your point, he had already incited violence on multiple occasions in the past against his own people. And, you know, maybe it just took Twitter a day to fully digest the ramifications of what he had done. I mean, you know, I'm still talking to people who I think are struggling to grasp the magnitude of what happened on January 6th. And, you know, it's not surprising to me that the platforms have been caught up in that.
10:25 Speaker 04 The thing that is difficult to, I don't know, square here is this ongoing debate of are these networks creating, like, a rule-based law? Or are they rationalizing something after the fact because they're making it up on the fly? And I actually, I think Casey, you might have tweeted something in this zone that making it up on the fly is like, that's actually an unfair characterization because like, a lot of things get made up on the fly, and maybe that's okay. So part of me is like, well, look, there was, there was a literal attempted coup. And so having a strong reaction to that makes perfect sense. But the flip side is we've spent three years watching all of these social media networks
11:07 Speaker 04 say, "Well, this is the rule. This is how we're going to apply it." And they're performing that same dance and, you know, saying those same things now in a completely different context. But all of their reasonings and rationalizations, it's tough for me because, like, well, you could have done that two years ago with, like, the same rule and it probably would have applied. And so this, this whole balance between, are they actually, like, setting real things? Or are they just making it up on the fly? Is hard for me to parse. And I would be really, really stressed out about it, except that there was, like, a historic coup attempt. And so it's okay to just, like, do something in reaction to something that monumental.
11:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think that's exactly it. You know, maybe we would all feel better if in the terms of service of every website, it says if a user ever uses their authority as an elected official to incite a coup against the government, we'll remove their account. And then they could point at that rule and say, this is a black and white case, you know? And it is also true that these platforms should adhere to principles and apply them transparently and consistently, and that is something that we should push for. But I do sort of chuckle when I see some of these academics in the timeline who are tut-tutting about the lack of a clearly followed procedure here. It's like, you know who else didn't follow the procedure? Donald Trump, when he incited a coup.
12:29 Speaker 03 And so if things get crazy after the man tries to overthrow the government, let's maybe have a little bit more sympathy for the platforms and put the focus where it belongs, which is on the attempted overthrower.
12:40 Speaker 02 I think also Twitter and Facebook over the last year have been relatively clear, albeit maybe not like letter of the law clear, that they take potential harm into account. That that's just a major principle, that if there's a real world harm that clearly is happening because of something that's on the platform, then that's a thing that they're going to balance in deciding whether to remove it, whether or not the actual text meets like the letter of a thing that they laid out.
13:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, no, let me complicate it, though. Okay, because, you know, Neelai was sort of talking about how it's crazy that the Trump administration has followed all of these like online posting dynamics. And one of the dynamics that he has followed is that he has escalated his behavior over time. I think it is inarguable that Trump was more inflammatory in 2020 than he ever had been before. There was the when the looting starts, the shooting starts post in June, which I do regard as a clear incitement to violence. Later in the year, he said liberate Michigan in response to COVID restrictions. And there was later a plot unraveled to attempt to kidnap the governor of Michigan. So, you know, these are very, very serious things that the president had called for.
13:49 Speaker 03 And so I'm sympathetic to those like Dieter who say, oh, you know, now you're worried about violence. But here's where it's different from me, and a lot of folks disagree with me about this. But I think it is actually the fact that Trump is in the process of losing power and to my mind had given up any legitimate claim to power by seeking to overthrow the government that is the thing that made deplatforming him not only possible but necessary, right? When he was president, yeah, it was awful that he was inciting the violence, but at the end of the day, if he'd been removed, you know, his surrogates would have been tweeting up a storm. I just don't think it would have had the practical effect that a lot of people believe it would. But now that he is losing power, he loses that exemption, right? So that's just kind of where I stand on it.
14:34 Speaker 02 I think we'd be having a really different conversation if the police, for example, had stopped the coup, though. Like, if five people, I guess six people now hadn't died as a result of this, if people hadn't been able to storm the Capitol, if there actually had been some kind of law enforcement response that diffused a bunch of this, I think we'd be having a really different conversation.
14:56 Nilay Patel? Well, that, to me, is the, when I say as time goes on, it feels like we're just learning more and more about this event that makes it more terrifying, right? Like, the fact, I'm sure all of us had this reaction when we were watching it unfold on television. I kept saying, where are the cops? Where's the military? Why isn't this being stopped? We all lived through the summer of Black Lives Matter protests. The Verge did an entire package on cop behavior at protests, which were largely peaceful, and the cops were the ones inciting violence. And here, they weren't there. And that, to me, is, okay, he's the president. We are now learning that the Pentagon slow-rolled some of the
15:37 Nilay Patel? response. This happened outside of Twitter. And I think one of the things I am struggling with, one of the reasons this podcast episode is a couple days late, is I didn't want to have a conversation just about the four corners of Twitter or Facebook. We are talking about real people in a very dangerous situation, the fabric of the government of our country itself. Whether or not he can tweet actually feels like a much smaller percentage of the import than anything else. And the fact that we've kind of like slid into this mode where we're discussing whether Twitter should just implement the restrictions of the First Amendment, whatever you think that is. As opposed to the president led an attack on his own government is crazy to me.
16:22 Nilay Patel? And I do think that Casey, the way the more cynical version of your reading to me is they were afraid to stand up to him before. And now he has, he has given up any sense of authority that he might have. And there's a new administration that doesn't like him and the House and Senate are controlled by Democrats. And so they can take these bold actions without fear of reprisal.
16:44 Speaker 03 Right. And so then the follow up questions as well. Should social platforms defer to power at all? Like another question that people are asking in the wake of all of this is why should a private company have the right to decide like who gets to speak? And a way that those companies have tried to answer that up until now is giving elected officials extremely broad latitude to say whatever they want, even in cases where they're inciting violence because they want to defer to state power in that case. So you can say that, no, no, no, they never should defer to state power. And the minute that, you know, one post, uh, you know, goes crossways, they should just pull the plug. Uh, you know, then you are inviting a world that is going to have a lot of negative consequences. And, you know, not just for elected officials, but for a lot of average users.
17:28 Nilay Patel? So Twitter and Facebook have been in the storm for a year. They finally took their actions and then a host of companies, what we haven't been paying as close attention to just came along for the ride. They got the cover and came along for the ride. So Addie mentioned Reddit banning the Donald Trump subreddit. Uh, there's a host of smaller Twitch to me is very funny. Um, there's just a host of other platforms that took the political moment to, to do the ban.
17:52 Speaker 03 Campaign Monitor, for example, the email service banned him.
17:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Stripe not processing, uh, payments anymore. Just a lot of companies that are, have not been in the center of the storm. Are they acting crassly? Are they just taking the shot when they, when they're not going to get? The focus of the attention? Or is it they have the same policies and they all just happen to hit the same thresholds?
18:15 Speaker 02 Well, some of them are banning Trump and some of them are banning Trump supporters who are doing stuff like posting "stop this deal." So like Peloton today banned like election like coup-related hashtags, which I feel like is a slightly different situation because there there are actual like concrete people posting things. It's not quite like Twitch banning Trump where like that's just not a major platform for him.
18:39 Speaker 03 I think it is fair to sort of cynically assume that everyone had just been waiting for some larger actor to move against the president to take this moment. But again, there was an attempted coup. It is only good and expected that in the aftermath of such a horrible event that other platforms and companies would throw up their hands and say enough is enough. Almost all these platforms do have in their terms of service some sort of prohibition against like violence and terrorism, right? And so, you know, if you want to sort of take the academic view, which is that all of this has to be deeply rooted in principle, almost all of these companies, in fact, you know, name a company that doesn't have something in their terms of service about using them to further exactly this sort of thing.
19:23 Speaker 03 So I just don't think that the cynical argument really holds water here.
19:26 Nilay Patel? Was there, and I suspect there isn't, but I think it's useful to make the compare, I cannot believe I'm saying this, but I feel it sincerely. It is useful to make the comparison to how the platforms handled ISIS, right? Which was using all these services to recruit, to organize, to issue propaganda, and the platforms just shut it down. It just went away and they took harsh measures. I doubt any Republican senator was criticizing Facebook or Twitter for shutting down ISIS. But there's a moment where it feels like a lot of the same thing is happening around QAnon specifically. And there's obviously the pushback here because.
20:08 Nilay Patel? For what it's worth, QAnon makes up a substantial portion of the base on the right wing of this country right now. Is it kind of the same move?
20:16 Speaker 03 Yes, because terrorism is illegal and so is trying to overthrow the government, right? You know, I mean, like, and here's where we sort of get into section 230 land, right? Of like, you know, platforms do take action when the law has actually been violated. And that is the one thing that they do not give cover to or provide protections for.
20:35 Speaker 02 I mean, just as a note, I think there are, there is actually a different legal situation because ISIS is an international terrorist group, which we have laws around. We don't have domestic terror laws. So like, it's literally illegal to give, like, make financial transactions with, say, ISIS or foreign terror groups. Like, QAnon's not illegal. There are people who are doing illegal stuff in it. But as a group or an organization, it's in a different situation than ISIS. Although I know that there are people who think that that law should be changed.
21:02 Nilay Patel? It's worth talking about QAnon now more specifically, right? Because it is identifiable as an avenue or a vector by which this illegal activity is happening, where there is a concentrated number of people who believe that the government should be overthrown. Again, it's a very, it's impossible that, this show started 10 years ago and it was about phones. Like, I'm just putting that out there into the world. Like, that's where we are with technology. It is crazy to think that we're even discussing some of these things. But QAnon is a malignant force in American culture. All the platforms are dealing with it in different ways. It doesn't seem to be stopping it, right? Like, is it having the impact that it should, Casey?
21:43 Speaker 03 No, I mean, the, I think until extremely recently, the thought has been that the way to solve this was by removing individual bad actors and individual posts. And what we have seen is that that is insufficient and that, you know, QAnon is just a current of thought that has swept across a huge part of the country. And it's sort of a tributary that is feeding into this larger raging river of the election was stolen. And I actually think that that is the overarching, extremely difficult to solve issue. Like-
22:18 Speaker 03 QAnon can at least be isolated in some ways. But what is going to happen when you have tens of millions of people on every platform saying over and over again that the election was stolen and that some of those people are elected members of Congress? This, I think, is the real nightmare for platforms and that's something we're just going to be talking about for the rest of the year.
22:40 Nilay Patel? Let me make another comparison that has just been on my mind. One of the formative moments, and I think all of our lives, if you're above a certain age, is 9/11. There was an immediate response, the government, you know, the country has to pull together, and then the immediate political response was the Patriot Act. And as a brown man who used to spend time in airports, I've spent 20 years being searched. I pay the government to surveil me extra tight, and I still get searched in airports. It's just like hilarious. There's a real risk that we'll overstep here, right? That we'll do even more surveillance, we'll do even more intense speech regulations. When you do that stuff, you disproportionately impact marginalized communities. Again, imagine the brown man in the airport, that man is me. It's real.
23:25 Nilay Patel? How much of that danger is being assessed right now, do you think?
23:28 Speaker 03 Probably not enough. Although, you know, it's funny, I'm putting together a platformer today and reading the stories over the weekend, a lot of them, there was, and I think this metaphor is really bad, I want to say, but there was a headline, I think in Politico, where some European politician said, "This is social networks 9/11." Right? Like, this is the thing that they are going to have to answer for. And I've seen another, a number of other stories in that vein. And yet, when you read through them, none of them propose specific regulations, right? Or if they do, they don't really say how this would address the particular harm that they have named.
24:08 Speaker 03 So, you know, like, maybe there is some really easy, terrifying thing that Congress could do to dramatically restrict our civil liberties on the internet here, but it doesn't seem to be being discussed or named. So maybe that actually makes it more dangerous, I don't know.
24:26 Speaker 02 I feel like that thing is mostly repealing Section 230.
24:29 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
24:29 Speaker 04 So there's repealing Section 230, but there's also the other strain. And I think, Neel, you brought this up on Twitter again. Angela Merkel from Germany expressed a little bit of concern about Twitter banning Donald Trump. And, Neel, you brought the point that like, well, yeah, but in Germany, they have specific laws against specific types of content, Nazi content. And in general, I think, here in the US, it's fair to say that we try to not specify the content of the thing when we're creating regulations. We try and have a, I don't know, abstract definition of it. And so are we going to move to a place where like, will the government say QAnon specifically is like a type of speech that we're going to regulate?
25:11 Speaker 04 Or will they try and create some sort of generic identification of the content and the rules, in which case it might, in fact, turn out to go after marginalized groups? And so is it better to like specifically censor specific speech? Or is it better to try and create a rule? And I just have no confidence that the US Congress is able to navigate that right now.
25:34 Speaker 02 I mean, Germany just has like a fundamentally different view of speech than like, we would have to throw out the entire First Amendment if we were going to do anything like.
25:43 Nilay Patel? So pesky that First Amendment.
25:46 Speaker 04 Well, so the point I was making about Merkel is, I think Germany and France today both said it's problematic that Twitter banned Trump. I think that is just some canny politicking on their part. Like, they hate him. They don't care about Donald Trump. But they are, the EU is on the cusp of passing a massive law called the Digital Services Act. It's paired with another law as well that takes what you know about the GDPR and turns like, it's everything. It's here's how digital services should operate. Here's how their moderation policy should work. There's a notice and takedown. There's a set of appeals. It is an entire system of regulating digital companies, platform companies. They're saying, yeah, the government should do it.
26:31 Speaker 04 By the way, look at what great politicians we are. We've foreseen this problem and we're about to regulate the entire internet. And yeah, that's an approach. Like, in many ways, the EU is always ahead of regulating the internet.
26:45 Nilay Patel? But I think here, the specific contrast to Twitter shouldn't have the power. The sublimated argument is, but I should. Right. And maybe that's fine. It's just, I think you have to see that whole context. Our problem, and I don't know if you would call, I'm calling it a problem because I was gonna say. Well, so I did a, you know, when this comes out, there will also be a decoder episode I did with Daphne Keller from Stanford. She focuses on platform regulation. And I asked her if we should think of, think of it as regulators in this country being hamstrung by the First Amendment, which is not how you ever think about the First Amendment. But the First Amendment, and she was like, yes, the, the First Amendment limits what
27:27 Nilay Patel? Congress can do unless they find a rationale, a policy rationale to go beyond it. So a good example, and there's lots of little bits and bobs here, and I can already, I can already think of the people who will tweet at me for getting this wrong, but just to make it blunt and simple, the reason that NBC and CBS and ABC are regulated by the FCC or radio is because they use public airwaves. And so the Congress has an interest in regulating the use of the airwaves, and they can make some set of rules about what you can and cannot broadcast. As time has gone on, they've come up with other reasons to make those rules, broadcast it a lot of children, we're going to do indecency regulations. But the heart of it is the public owns the airwaves, so Congress can go beyond the strict
28:12 Nilay Patel? boundaries of the First Amendment, make some rules. That is not true for the internet. So if Congress wants to say, here are the speech regulations for Facebook, here's the moderation standards Facebook should impose, they have to find a rationale to get there. I spent the weekend thinking about it and looking for it, I still have not seen one. I think the platforms, if they could identify one, they would be the first ones to show up. Like, Facebook is running ads on top of every political trade publication that say Facebook supports internet regulations, but even Facebook hasn't come up with a content moderation standard that goes above the First Amendment, at least not that I've seen. Out of your case of view?
28:50 Speaker 03 Well, I mean, what, what means above the First Amendment in this case?
28:54 Nilay Patel? Well, so if you want to say Facebook should delete all of the porn on Facebook, right, you would need to find some extra rationale for the government to make that rule, the way the government can make that rule about radio.
29:05 Speaker 03 Right. Well, I mean, you know, Facebook is open, for example, to a rule that would set a like time limit on how quickly they had to remove content that violates its own standards, you know, and they haven't said, you know, they haven't provided like a policy rationale for it, other than like, this would just be a good thing to do. And like, you know, by the way, we're already basically doing this already. So there's all sorts of things like that, that they are kind of open to doing that, you know, I don't think they even Facebook would demand some sort of radical rethinking of speech regulations to support.
29:40 Nilay Patel? But that's just, to me, the end of that road is that Terms of Service end up having the force of law, and that just sounds like a nightmare. Unless you can imagine a world where Twitter isn't your whole identity. Well. Right. I mean, there's like that problem, which is like people have subsumed themselves into this service that is somewhat poorly run. I mean, that's like the competition problem, right? If you hate Twitter, you should be able to go somewhere else, but there's nowhere else to go. That, to me, is, you know, we're going to talk about Parler in the second segment of this, but that, to me, is a real issue here, because we, we have given these companies so much power, and we don't know what the meaningful check is. And I think all of us feel that on all sides of the political spectrum. And the government,
30:23 Nilay Patel? as near as I can tell, is just more limited by the existence of the First Amendment in this country than almost anywhere else.
30:29 Speaker 03 I mean, this is what we in Silicon Valley call the innovator's dilemma, Eli, you know?
30:35 Nilay Patel? Look, I'm starting my own riff on Twitter. It is, it's gonna be great. It's just gonna be people talking about pickup trucks and HDMI cables. I predict that we will have 100 million users by the end of the year. Actually, there's like a part of me that's like, I can do it. Real quick, before we take a break and go into the next thing, there was another thing that happened really accelerated today, which is the big tech companies started saying, we're not donating to candidates who supported overthrowing the election. And that is another just accelerating political cover moment. Casey, you just like rolled your eyes.
31:07 Speaker 03 Well, okay, so what you said is true, but two of the big ones, Facebook and Google, said, we're going to stop all PAC donations, you know, basically while things settle down. So, you know, some others like Mastercard and Airbnb came along and said, if you oppose the certification of the Electoral College results, then we're not donating to you, which I think is good and appropriate. But others are sort of taking this as a moment to just like pause all donations, which is somewhat suspicious to me.
31:35 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And then one of the sort of recurring characters on our show is Josh Hawley. I would say he's a more, more like a more recurring character than Ted Cruz, but Hawley and Cruz have gotten themselves into just a real nightmare of a situation because everyone hates them now. Addy, Hawley was, I mean, we've spent more time talking about illogical Hawley tech regulation proposals than anyone, I think. He's the guy who wanted to ban infinite scrolling in apps.
32:02 Speaker 02 Yep. Yep, that was him.
32:04 Nilay Patel? Just a real cartoon. It seems like his arc is rapidly coming to a close.
32:11 Speaker 02 I'm not gonna, I don't want to jinx anything here. He did get a book canceled.
32:18 Nilay Patel? Well, Hawley was the, I mean, he was the leading proponent on the Republican side of tech regulation. And his mentor, his old law professor, the newspapers in his state, like just everyone down the line is saying this guy should resign. So I think that is just, it's something to pay attention to because I'm not sure who the next architect of conservative tech policy proposals is going to be.
32:40 Speaker 02 That's fair, but also Donald Trump was universally loathed until he became president.
32:43 Nilay Patel? The Ted Cruz story.
32:46 Speaker 02 So I'm not going to count Holly Holly down, but at least we don't have to read his book quite as soon.
32:51 Nilay Patel? That's true. I will say that Senator Senator Klobuchar, she's going to publish a book on Anna Trust now. So again, the canny political moves here have not stopped. But yeah, Holly to me is, there was a moment where I thought, oh, we're going to spend a year talking with this guy. And maybe we will, just in a radically different context. Okay, we're going to take a break. As Addie pointed out before we started the show, the timeline here was from Wednesday to Friday, the platforms took action against Trump. And then from Friday to Sunday, the Parler story really took off. So we're going to take a break, come back, talk about what happened with Parler and the platforms that host and distribute that app.
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34:34 Nilay Patel? We're back. Addie, Parler, gone from the internet as of now. What happened there?
34:41 Speaker 02 So yeah, Parler was a sort of central ground for the Stop the Steal campaign. It obviously had become more popular after the election, after there was this perception that since that Twitter and Facebook were censoring people by posting accurate information under their posts. And so it ended up being sort of a nexus for Organizers and for people who were involved in the coup. And then because of that, there was started sort of a, there was a pressure campaign against the places that allow Parler to operate, which is largely Apple and Google, which hosts its app and Amazon Web Services, which hosts the website itself.
35:23 Speaker 02 And so on Friday, Apple and Google were like, okay, we're going to give Parler a period of time. They have to show that they have some kind of plan in place for moderating content that's inciting violence. Then Google said, okay, never mind, we're just banning it. Apple followed up and banned it pretty shortly thereafter. And then after that, Amazon Web Services took what Parler itself has called the death blow and terminated its account. And then Parler sued Amazon.
35:52 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And along the way, same as everything else, a host of other services dropped their support for Parler. Twilio, which was their two factor provider. My favorite one is Okta.
36:04 Speaker 02 Which they weren't even provider. They were using a free trial.
36:07 Nilay Patel? Amazing. There's just a real part of this where you can have the very high minded abstract conversation about what platforms shouldn't, shouldn't do. And then you get down on the ground and it's like, yeah, but we're really talking about like a hacked together platform that barely made any sense that it was immediately hacked the second it became a target. So maybe not the thing that you need to protect. But Parler was a really interesting case, right? It was set up in opposition to Twitter. It, it, it claimed that it would only moderate inside of the boundaries of First Amendment law.
36:39 Speaker 02 Which it totally immediately threw out the window, like very vocally.
36:43 Nilay Patel? Yeah, like very quickly realized that that was not a workable plan. But it did keep sort of like advertising that it was, that's what it was doing. And it was overrun by calls to violence. And they were trying to moderate some of it. They tried to moderate. They had kicked off a Trump advisor after he had called for violence specifically. So they had already started to moderate more. There's an argument to be made that over time, if you are moderating in scale, you just end up at Twitter and Facebook's policies because they've spent the most time developing them. But Parler may or may not have been learning that lesson. What is really interesting to me is we're at a different part of the stack now. When you talk about Apple and Google and AWS and Shopify and Twilio and Okta, right? Like, those are
37:26 Nilay Patel? infrastructure providers. And sort of, Apple and Google sit above them, they distribute the apps. The thing that caught me was both Apple and Google said, "We have given you these notes. We've told you, you need to have a moderation system." The Apple letter specifically said, "We are holding you responsible for the content in your app," which if you just sort of abstract that a little bit, is what happens when 230 goes away, right? Apple's saying, "We don't have to abide by Section 230. We're not Congress. We're just your retail store, and we're holding you responsible for what's in your app. Show us a moderation system that's effective." I think they knew Parler wasn't going to be able to do it, and then they kicked them off. That's a pretty big choke point.
38:10 Speaker 03 Yeah. Also, particularly when you have 24 hours to do. I mean, it's a joke, right? Like, obviously, they...
38:17 Nilay Patel? And they kicked them off 24 hours on the dot. Like, I feel like anybody, it was Saturday, but anybody who was working in an attack newsroom on that Saturday was like, the clock was just ticking, and they were waiting for the Apple announcement to hit.
38:29 Speaker 03 Yeah. Now, of course, the flip side of that is if you have good evidence that an app on your App Store is fomenting a coup against the US government, how long do you give them? Do you say, "Well, we'll give you 48 hours, 72?" And it just speaks to, again, it's like, all of these questions about principle are incredibly valid, and they are worth talking about. Like, we need to have these conversations so that we can build a better internet. On the other hand, active coup attempt.
38:57 Speaker 02 One thing I keep trying to, like, sort of pin down is, so, like I mentioned, Parler sued Amazon. Its rationale is mostly dumb, but one of its defenses that I do think about is that it points to the inciting, the sort of content Apple pointed to and said, "Look, a lot of this stuff is also on Twitter, and you're not doing anything with Twitter. And you're saying that our moderation system is the problem." And the kind of thing that feels intuitively right with this and with Gab is that there's something, it's like a coup quotient, that it's like, what percent of your service? And like, how much is it baked into your service that you're going to have a lot of incitement to violence or hate speech versus there is going to be some kind of inevitable
39:40 Speaker 02 group of bad actors on your platform and you're making a good faith attempt to crack down on them? That's like, the best thing I've come up with.
39:46 Nilay Patel? But this is where the competition argument falls apart, right? Like, if you set yourself up, and I am all for the competition argument, that's who I am, but if you set yourself up as Twitter but with Nazis, and that's your marketing to the world, here's all the stuff that Twitter was gonna ban, then you have defined your coup quotient, it doesn't even matter what the real number is, your perceived number is always higher, because what you're selling is content that was banned on the other service. I don't know how you overcome that, right? The competition argument makes sense when it's like, we offer better parental controls, or our forum is more focused on the specific type of knitting that you do
40:30 Nilay Patel? than the other rival knitting forums, and I'm sure there are just hardcore knitting forum wars. I hope, I'd be very disappointed.
40:37 Speaker 02 There were, actually. There was Ravelry was banned Donald Trump. It was actually very famous.
40:42 Nilay Patel? It was a huge thing! No, I meant specific to knitting, not to Trump, unless Trump has like, very hardcore knitting views, which would be great.
40:49 Speaker 02 No, it's related to the Women's March, because knitting was an integral part of it, because people were knitting the hats.
40:54 Nilay Patel? Oh my god.
40:55 Speaker 02 It's like, actually related.
40:56 Nilay Patel? No one can escape Donald Trump, is the thing I just learned. I tried and I failed. Anyhow, but the competition works in that case, right? You're, you're, you want tighter controls, or you want a different content focus. It does not work when what Twitter is banning is racism and calls to violence, because anything you set up to market is competition for that.
41:17 Speaker 04 Is defined by the existence of hate speech and racism and calls to violence. Like, how could Parler ever be anything else?
41:25 Speaker 03 I mean, in theory, we could have spaces where conservatives could get together and talk about deregulation and charter schools and, you know, some of the various other issues they've pushed for over the years that don't have anything to do with this lie that the election was stolen and the arms that they're going to take up in response, right? Like, there's no reason why you couldn't have forums for conservative thought and for conservatives to gather. The issue that these platforms are having, though, as you point out, is that they are actively courting the most violent members of this community, and they're using that to organize events and do real-world harm.
42:08 Speaker 04 My Twitter feed does not lack for people who think my stance on network regulation is wrong.
42:13 Speaker 02 I mean, that's the problem, is that there's no reason to, like, leave Twitter if you're going to have content that is not banned, if you're just going to have conservative discussions that are within the purviews of what Twitter allows.
42:22 Speaker 03 According to my parents, with whom I spoke last night, a number of members of our extended family have left Facebook in protest of him, of Trump being suspended. They're going to apparently go somewhere else because they, you know, they don't want to be in a place that doesn't have Trump. So I think do not discount the idea that some people will self-deport, as they say, from these platforms in protest.
42:45 Speaker 02 Where are they going?
42:47 Speaker 03 To hell, for all I care. But, um, no, probably just some other web forums or, you know, group chats, like probably private spaces is the real answer. You know, WhatsApp groups, Telegram groups.
42:57 Speaker 02 Which is going to be its own moderation nightmare.
42:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, for sure.
43:01 Speaker 04 So we've been talking about competition at, like, one level of the stack, but I want to circle back to this point about infrastructure, because it's one thing is, will Twitter have some competitor? But then you move up the stack to app stores. Disclosure, my wife works for Facebook Reality Labs, and she works on the app store specifically for Oculus. That's out. Then there's AWS, and then you get all the way up, and there's the literal fiber lines and the actual internet run by telecom companies where... We tend to want to have some sort of neutrality principle for the network that doesn't bias certain types of content against others. And so where that stack does the moderation
43:46 Speaker 04 happen and like who gets to make those choices in that stack, it just gets like fractally more complicated. And if there's any sort of, oh, wait moment here for me, it's, well, yes, of course, there was a coup, we banned Nazis. But as you move up the chain of infrastructure, rather down the chain of infrastructure, you get to the point where it's like, well, do I want AT&T making decisions about content? With coup attempts, sure. But then after that, like, I don't know where to draw the line. It seems like it's, in a weird way, easier to feel like I know what to tell Twitter what to do than it is for me to know what to tell AWS or AT&T what to do.
44:27 Speaker 02 Oh, I mean, that makes total sense to me. And it's a thing that I had to think about a bunch because Charlottesville, that happened in 2017, and we faced kind of the same issues with mostly the Daily Stormer, but also Gab, to some extent. Yeah, it raised a bunch of questions about infrastructure. Cloudflare had a real sort of weird reckoning moment about whether it was going to kick off 8chan and the Daily Stormer.
44:50 Speaker 03 And I think a useful way of thinking about the Cloudflare situation is that, you know, its CEO was really forthright about saying that he did not believe that he should have the power to make that decision. But given what a terrible website that is, if its web host would not make the decision to deplatform the site, then Cloudflare would be the backstop. And so if you think of all of these things as a stack, I think, and my idea isn't fully formed, but basically, the idea is that each one of these things should backstop the other. And as you go sort of higher up the stack, you would hope that they would be exerting less and less pressure. And like, you want the pressure to be exerted
45:34 Speaker 03 closest to the level of the post, basically. And the higher up you go from that, the more justification that you need.
45:41 Speaker 04 It's the other way around. It's lower down.
45:43 Speaker 03 I guess it depends on which way you want to draw your stack.
45:46 Speaker 04 Well, you start with the metal and you build up. That's what I'm getting. So I agree with you, but.
45:53 Nilay Patel? The Cloudflare one to me is they took down the Daily Stormer because he was like, "I can do it and the web host isn't doing it." But there was nowhere else for the Daily Stormer to go after Cloudflare said, "You're gone." Right? And I would be sort of fine with it if what we were talking about was one provider in a universe of providers was making a business decision, "I don't want, I don't want to do business with this company." But the decision is really, and this is the heart of that post, I'm taking them off the internet. Right? And there's no, I mean, how many years have we spent talking about net neutrality? When there's no competition, you need a regulation to step in and say, "All these bits are equal."
46:31 Speaker 03 Okay. So here's another perspective. So this is Ifioma Azoma, who used to do content policy at Pinterest. And she had this tweet last night after Amazon booted Parler. And she said, "If white supremacists have the time to build pipe bombs and gallows, let them build their own cloud service." Like, what is actually wrong with that idea?
46:49 Nilay Patel? So I don't think there's anything wrong with that idea. I think the reality is, it's really hard.
46:55 Speaker 03 Yeah.
46:56 Nilay Patel? For Amazon to build AWS required them to have another functional profit driving business that they could then redirect the money into to make AWS. Microsoft was Microsoft before it made Azure. Google, the third provider, was Google before it made Google Cloud. There are very few 20-somethings in a garage who can spin up AWS.
47:20 Speaker 03 No, but you can, you can put some servers together, right? Like, we know how to do this stuff. The issue is that these people can't get funding or resources because they're horrible people. And there are actually, it turns out there are consequences to operating at the far fringes of polite society. And one of them is you will not have access to all the tools that you want to spread your ideology of hate. So I don't think we can comfortably frame that as a bad thing.
47:44 Speaker 02 I mean, the funny thing is that I think it was one of the creators of the Pirate Bay who was tweeting that the Pirate Bay has faced about a million times more pressure and resources than taking it offline, and they've managed to actually stay up because that's the weird thing about a bunch of far-right movements is that they are not willing to put in the work of actually being controversial and banned, unlike a bunch of other services that face lots of like, pressure and censorship, which is what makes this whole thing really hard, because a bunch of these agencies and like, human rights groups that are silenced in other countries actually do spend a bunch of time just making their own stuff. But I think that if we're gonna have the philosophical discussion, the problem is that we need to think of the world we want if there is a piece of content or a group that we believe
48:28 Speaker 02 actually is good, but that has widespread pressure against them, and there are as many people asking like, CloudFlare or whatever, to kick them off.
48:37 Speaker 03 Well, I'll name one. What about sex workers? They were booted off the internet after Fosta Sesta, and now they are in much more danger to the detriment of our entire society, right? Like, here we actually have, you know, what I would argue is a case of a really bad censorship with negative effects, and, you know, it was ushered into law, and, you know, I don't know what to do about it.
48:59 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it was ushered into law, and I don't think Facebook even got the political chip in return for it, right? Because the platform said, okay, we'll give you this one. Everyone can get behind this, and now you'll see that we'll work with you. And they did it, and it had the massively detrimental impact to sex workers.
49:16 Speaker 03 And the rest of the internet, right? Like, Craigslist doesn't have a personal section anymore because of this like, insane moral panic around sex work.
49:23 Nilay Patel? But who got the, but like, what I'm saying is like, Facebook didn't even get the credit.
49:26 Speaker 03 Agreed.
49:26 Nilay Patel? They like, made this bad trade.
49:29 Speaker 02 But this is kind of the complicated thing factor that I'm talking about, which is all of the terrible things we're talking about happening with Fosta Sesta, there is a reasonable chance that anything we do to try to deplatform the far-right is going to at some point have blowback for a group that we feel sympathy to.
49:43 Speaker 03 I totally agree with you. You're, yes, you're 100% right.
49:46 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I mean, that's when I, when I bring up the Patriot Act, that's the thing that I think of. Like, we, we took this massive action, and we ended up just surveilling Americans for no reason forever. Right? And that we, we still can't quite get rid of it, even though we all agree it's bad. And that has had all these just down the line repercussions. Like I just, there's like, there's that problem. But Casey, I am, I feel very strongly what you're saying that, well, if you're a horrible person, you, you just don't get to participate. The question for me is, because of the First Amendment, we're not making that decision, particularly democratically, right? There's just a handful of people we trust to be good
50:27 Nilay Patel? people. Andy Jassy, who runs AWS, I hope that's a good dude. Right? Like, that's it. That's the whole, that's the whole answer. Mark Zuckerberg, like, a morally conflicted human being, on balance, has shown that like, yeah, okay, he like, cares about some people, right?
50:44 Speaker 04 And from a strictly pragmatic point of view, how long have we been talking about, is Congress going to do something about 2:30? But it turns out that it's just a whole lot of rhetoric and very little action. Looking at what the state of the world is with COVID-19, with the divided Congress, just waving hands around, look around, what is the likelihood that we will get any kind of reasonable debate towards any kind of reasonable action? I think that the more likely thing is this concern, you just pointed out, Eli, that there's like five people, we have to worry that they're going to be good people. That's going to continue to be the situation for a while, because I don't think it's likely that we're going
51:27 Speaker 04 to have a reasonable discussion about creating a regulation in the next year.
51:32 Speaker 03 You know what I also think is just worth pointing out is, one thing that is often unstated in these conversations is what we really want, which I think is a healthy information sphere, where it feels like the fringiest voices aren't pulled into the center of the conversation every single day. And that is not a problem that can be solved at the platform level. If you want to live in a better information sphere, we need to fund the media. We probably need to create some sort of public version of social networks, like public online spaces with backing from the government, and a million of other things. And so, again, it's, it's important to talk about how we regulate Twitter and Facebook, but we can't do it in a vacuum if we want to get anywhere.
52:15 Nilay Patel? Yeah, the various attempts by the platform companies to fund the media always seem like like just they're covering their asses, right? Like it's never real enough and they never really want to be in competition. I want to just focus on AWS for for a second before we take a break. AWS had the same sort of policy rationale as Google and Facebook, right? We've given you this opportunity to moderate. We've shown you the bad stuff. We don't believe you can do it. That rationale is true for every AWS customer, right? If you want to be on AWS, there's a you have to have some sort of responsibility for your content and they will hold you to it. We obviously don't hear about it a lot. It seems like it's very hard to get AWS to kick you off. My favorite example is the National Enquirer
52:58 Nilay Patel? is hosted on AWS. National Enquirer famously published dick pics from Jeff Bezos. Like, it takes a lot to get AWS to kick you off, but that's like a level of content moderation that is nowhere in the 230 debate, right? AWS has a content in terms of acceptable use policy. Are we going to get to the point where we're having this huge holistic policy debate about what parts of the stack? Or are we just gonna, KCT, your point, like, just remain focused on Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and then expect that to export to everything else?
53:30 Speaker 03 So this is one of the things I'm writing about today is what this showed is that moderation exists at every level of the stack. That's not new. Like, basically name a part of the stack. It has deplatformed some entity at some point. But now that you're seeing it happen in concert simultaneously, I do think you're going to see broader attention to that. And maybe some of these players that have been on the fringe of this conversation will will come up more often. That said, you know, there's just so much political upside and bashing on Twitter and Facebook in public. And so I think they're going to be the the main characters of this story for a long while.
54:04 Nilay Patel? Can you give me a rigorous definition of deplatforming? Because to me, it implies all the services doing it once, not just one service kicking you off.
54:13 Speaker 03 So I tend to use it to describe any incident in which a person loses their account on a platform. But it is also used to describe like, you know, the Alex Jones case where a bunch of platforms acted eventually in concert to remove him. And so we now say that Alex Jones was deplatformed. But the truth is, even in our like low competition world, there are still so many platforms that I think even Alex Jones still finds his way to creep into my Twitter timeline sometimes, right? So, you know, deplatforming is a real thing. It has real side effects, but I tend to use it to describe like individual incidents.
54:53 Nilay Patel? Got it. Okay, let's take a break and then I want to spend just a couple of minutes talking about what might happen next.
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56:20 Nilay Patel? Okay, we're back. Addy, what, I mean, you have covered all these 230 proposals over time. It seems like something like the Pact Act, which was bipartisan and called for greater transparency, does not meet this moment. What do you think happens next?
56:36 Speaker 02 I mean, I think a lot of things that don't meet this moment probably go and get deployed anyway. Like, I think that the flip side to the platforms are banning Trump because they don't have power, he doesn't have that much power anymore comparatively, is that Joe Biden is really dislikes Section 230, and that there probably is going to be a bunch of debate over the next year about whether platforms have done enough. And if they haven't done enough, should we do something that will partially or fully repeal Section 230 that will increase their liability if they say let people foment a coup? Although I'm not totally clear on how well you would be able to do legal definitions of this, because that's what makes all of this so complicated. So I think we could see that.
57:19 Nilay Patel? Casey, what is the feeling from inside the platform companies, right? Like, this is the moment they were dreading it happened for real. You know, we keep hearing about workers, like, Amazon workers want to kick militia merchandise off the store now. Like, there's an Alphabet Workers Union, which Zoe just reported today, is at up to 700 people now, it's still very small, but they're growing. What is the sense from inside the companies?
57:43 Speaker 03 The sense that I get is a combination of relief, that they have pulled this lever, and that to the extent that there were active harms being caused by this one account, which I think we here agree that there were, that's not happening anymore. The anxiety, though, I think, is about what happens next, and that is across a lot of dimensions. It's about what happens to our conservative users who no longer feel welcome here. It's about what regulations are coming our way, either because of the actions we took, or because of the actions that we didn't take until now. And frankly, for some of these employees, there's actual fears for their safety.
58:28 Speaker 03 Given how violent this movement is and and you know how many threats I'm sure a lot of them are facing, which you have to assume are just, you know, much more intense today than they were a week ago. So, you know, this is, this is not a moment of triumph for these platforms. But it is a moment where I think a lot of them can feel glad that they did the right thing.
58:51 Nilay Patel? That sense of relief that they finally banned Trump. My response to it was they didn't do it on a whim, right? I mean, a horrible thing happened and they came up with some rationale. But to many, I mean, these companies are huge, hundreds of thousands of people work in these companies. To some of the people in the rank and file, the sense that the company was finally expressing its values that they feel internally had to be like a relief beyond just, I hate that guy.
59:20 Speaker 03 Yeah.
59:21 Nilay Patel? That feeling to me seems very powerful, right? We have this set of internal values at Facebook and Twitter and Google that, you know, there's an employee code of conduct. Shouldn't we just export that to the product that we make and hold everybody to that? Like, I can see that argument being made very clearly. But then you have to say, well, we're also a provider or a platform provider to all these other people who may not share values. Is that getting tenser?
59:46 Speaker 03 I guess, I don't know on that specific question, but you know, we published a story at The Verge last year, Mark in the Middle, which is all about this conflict, right? And about Mark Zuckerberg, understanding that his user base is much more conservative than his employee base. And squaring that circle has been an ongoing challenge. Last week's actions are only going to make that harder.
1:00:10 Nilay Patel? Do you think one of the criticisms of how Facebook in particular has behaved is there are the refs? There has been this, you know, Ted Cruz has led this charge to work the refs, right? Where you can say you do not think Medicare for All should exist. Anywhere you want on the internet and you can just, you can just be a conservative in that sense without restriction, but then you're like, I think black people should just comply with the cops and you like veer into territory that gets very dicey, very fast and maybe you'll get moderated. And the, you know, Ted Cruz has just used that to work the refs constantly to say Facebook is biased against you and Facebook has responded to that. Do you think they're done getting worked in that way?
1:00:55 Speaker 03 I think, I think it's gonna continue. I, I don't see a way to build an internet platform where the people running the platform aren't ultimately held accountable for all of the speech on it. Right? That just seems to be the way that these things work. Like AT&T doesn't face that, that problem, but Facebook I think always will. I think it's justified to the extent that these platforms provide amplification for a lot of these terrible ideas and recruit new followers into some really terrible movements. But there's also a part of me that, you know, I, I accept as a member of a liberal democracy that I'm constantly going to be surrounded by people who are saying awful things. You
1:01:35 Speaker 03 know, on net, I would rather live in a society where people do have a lot of speech rights. But no one seems to be extending any of the goodwill that like we generally have for the first amendment to Facebook. And, you know, that's maybe an interesting thing to think about and discuss.
1:01:51 Nilay Patel? I keep thinking about how during the early net neutrality debate, like literally the conservative position was Obama wants to regulate the internet and just how deeply full cer- like I think Trump himself called net neutrality Obamacare for the internet, which I've never understood. And if anyone could, that's fine. But like the sense that the Democrats were going to come in and regulate the internet in a remarkable way has completely flipped. Right? And now it's conservatives who are exerting pressure to control these companies directly in a way that maybe the Democrats want to do too, but.
1:02:25 Speaker 04 Before it was leave them all alone. And now it's, oh, we have to take a tighter control of it. I, I agree with you that, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is going to be in the middle of his user base. But I just, there's a part of me that says, well, one, he's very rich and very successful and he can deal with it. And two, if he was clearer about the values he wanted his company to profess, he would actually diffuse a lot of that.
1:02:49 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, but I, but I think, you know, if, if what you really do is want to run a civilization, like you don't really want to dictate what the values are, you know, beyond a few core principles. Because what you want is to have a bunch of people actively debating things and just, you know, talking about the issues of the day. And, you know, that's, anyway, it's a somewhat utopian view and I'm sympathetic to it. But, you know, the past five years have been, I think, coming around to understanding that at least as they're constructed today, it's just not feasible.
1:03:22 Speaker 04 I mean, to characterize it as running a civilization is kind of exactly right. And I'll just point out that the thing that we theoretically did, we have never fully lived up to it, was we established the United States of America on the basis of a bunch of ideals. And like, when, when you hear the cliche that we hold these truths to be self-evident, like, that was the, the goal was like, we are going to, these are going to be the ideals that we live up to instead of the people that we're going to be beholden to. And I just think that if these networks are going to be the networks and they're not going to have real competition, they need to be a lot less wishy-washy about what their ideals are.
1:04:03 Speaker 03 Well, another way of putting that, because I agree with you, Dieter, is one thing these networks could do is to be constructive, right? Like, all that they ask of you when you get on there is to just like, type in a box and post photos and engage and keep scrolling until you fall asleep. They could ask people to do things. You know, when you think about other public spaces out there, like libraries, for example, or even, you know, some town squares, they offer programming. They offer reasons for people to congregate. They give them positive things to discuss, right? And our networks today don't do that at all. They're these sort of very like industrial like warehouses that people just like off offload content into.
1:04:43 Speaker 03 And so I really do think that like 20 years from now, you know, on the Vergecast Senior Edition, like hopefully what America will still exist and we'll all just be talking about like how utterly primitive these networks are that we're using and how inhumane they were across so many dimensions.
1:05:01 Nilay Patel? First, I think it's amazing that Dieter referred to the preamble of the Declaration of Independence as a cliche.
1:05:05 Speaker 03 Well, I'm just saying that if I, well, no, I have to, because if I just, if I say it, I sound so like naive, right? It's like, we're in a moment where saying, anyway, never mind.
1:05:18 Nilay Patel? No, I know what you meant. That's where we are, right? It feels trite.
1:05:22 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:05:22 Nilay Patel? Addie, you, and by the way, Dieter, I think you're exactly right. Like, the United States, the, the American experiment is, can you build a country based on ideas, not, not identity? And like, here we are, here's, here's a major test of it. Addie, you said something to me earlier today that I want to end on. You said, "It's easy to hate on Facebook, but what if the thing I love is actually terrible and there's nothing technologically to do about the internet?" Right? Is the problem Facebook or is it the nature of the internet itself? Tell me why that is keeping you up at night, because I think that's the, the big question that everyone needs to grapple with. Like, is it Facebook is bad or is it connecting everyone at scale is bad?
1:06:01 Speaker 02 So if the problem is Facebook, and there are a lot of people who argue that it is, if the problem is, say, Facebook has algorithms that connect QAnon people to each other and drags people into this conspiracy, or it lets Trump post and it encourages sort of inflammatory accountability free posting and all of these things, or that Facebook is too big and so we just need competition. There are things I can do about that that don't absolutely cut at the heart of the, the internet. If the problem is that a bunch of people can talk to each other and if, say, we had a bunch of competition to Facebook and the problem then just became Trump gets an account on all of these networks and he pushes horrible hateful untrue stuff to billions of people.
1:06:47 Speaker 02 And millions of those people decide to go and Coup the White House, or wait, the Capitol. Anyway, they decide to go and do something terrible. If the problem is just connecting people at scale, what do you do with that? Because there is no way to square that with changing any individual platform or doing anything short of saying that an entire medium and really the possibility of people connecting to each other is detrimental to us. And I don't know what we do at that point.
1:07:19 Speaker 03 My, my thing I would like us to explore, slow the internet down, right? Like, I think the problems have less to do with free association and just how rapidly information travels. We sort of take it as a given that if I say something really funny, it should be able to get a million retweets within a day. But like, why? Like, why can't we just make everything slower? Introduce more friction? Introduce more avenues for people to verify their identities, at least optionally, right? There's just so many little speed bumps that we could put along these roads that I think would bring a sense of coherence to the internet. It would not solve all of our problems. But, you know, going back to my earlier point, just about how primitive everything feels, like, there's just still a lot of low hanging fruit out there.
1:07:59 Speaker 02 There is, but say, Facebook, for example. If you kick, um, one of the arguments I've seen against kicking people off Facebook is that then they just go and form echo chambers that are even more hateful. And maybe they're slow and maybe they fit the definition of a community, but they're horrible and toxic. What if letting people go on the internet at all ends up just dividing them and leading them to these sort of content fact-free bubbles? Like, I love these bubbles. I love the internet. I love all of these places. What happens if they're bad for us?
1:08:29 Speaker 03 Well, to that point, one time I was talking with a high-level platform executive and I was complaining about all these things. And he just looked at me and he said, you know, Casey, humans believe a lot of dumb stuff. Have you ever heard of religion?
1:08:40 Nilay Patel? That's rough. Uh, I will say that, uh, all of our careers exist because of the internet and because of our ability to, to go past gatekeepers. One of, right, that we didn't have, we just put up a website and then people could read it. And it was good. And like, we've grown our audience over time. And that's a feedback loop that I, I cherish. It literally has provided for us. It has let us build The Verge. One of the conversations we're having right now is where should we reimpose gatekeepers? And I, that to me, I think we can't end it on a podcast. We need to end this podcast. But the question of where do the gatekeepers live? Even though taking them away helped a lot of people, like I was Casey's gatekeeper.
1:09:22 Nilay Patel? And now he left us for Substack because he was like, get out of my way, Patel.
1:09:26 Speaker 03 I resigned in protest. I was, I was through with the tyranny of being copy edited.
1:09:32 Nilay Patel? But like, those are real questions that I don't think we've quite grappled with. And I, one of the most interesting calls I've seen is the reimposition of gatekeepers in the media in particular, and that's going to have just massive, I think, knock on effects over time. That said, we have, as always, gone over. I strongly suspect, Addy and Casey, that you'll be back on the show within weeks to talk about the next turn of events in platform regulation, but I really appreciate the time today. Okay. You can tweet at us. Casey is at Casey Newton. Addy is at the dextrarchy. Dieter's at Backlon. I'm at Reckless. We'll be back later this week with another episode focused on the things at CES. I will concoct some sort of abstract philosophical argument,
1:10:16 Nilay Patel? which is not that abstract, about how understanding how the things actually work helps us talk about policy. That's true. I feel that in my bones, but I gotta come up with a good way of saying it for the next show. So we'll be back later this week with CES. Rock and roll.
1:10:27 Speaker 03 Wear a mask.
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