Hamas vs. Israel Rewrites Social Media Norms, Live At The SBF Trial, OpenAI's New Values

0:00Is the Israel-Hamas war rewriting some of the norms of social media? Will Apple build a search engine to compete with Google? We have the latest from the SBF trial and a big new change from OpenAI that's focusing on achieving human-level intelligence. All that and more coming up right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We're here on Friday to break down the news in our traditional format. And joining us is a special guest all the way from Semaphore. Reid Alvogardi is here. Reid, welcome. Thank you so much for having me.

0:35Thanks for being here. So you're the technology editor at Semaphore. We quote your work all the time in the big technology newsletter. It's great to have you here to talk about a very eventful week of news. Ranjan Roy is out this week. And so let's start with the big story, which is, of course, a terrible conflict between Israel and Hamas right now. You know, if you're listening, I'm sure you know the details. Any civilian life is a disaster when it's lost, especially in the name of political ends. and what we're seeing play out on social media is quite fascinating. This has first been a moment where people are starting to point to what's going on on Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it, and saying that it's a disaster and filled with misinformation that's coming from every angle and basically there's nothing that you can trust.

1:25I do want to put out an alternative perspective on that, which is that, yes, Twitter or X is a mess. it's always been a mess i think people are getting hip to the idea that it's filled with misinformation and i i personally think that they can sift out decently well what is actually happening by going into this stuff with a better bs filter than we give the average person credit for to me it seems like you go onto these platforms you know you're going to see chaos and then you go to secondary sources that you trust, places like the Times or the Journal or whatever, the BBC, whatever you read, and then people end up putting a more broad picture of what's going on as opposed to just saying, oh, I saw that on social media and I just believe it.

2:12And so to me, this concept of the fact that they're filled with misinformation and poisoning the discourse is starting to become outdated. Reid, I'm curious. I mean, it's kind of a controversial position, but I'm curious what you think about that. I actually it's funny I wish I could debate you on this but I actually have very similar views I mean I I said in my I mean I basically said the same thing in our newsletter this week which is I think it's sort of ironic that you see a lot of the sort of opinion leaders in in the media and the tech media who are sort of lamenting the fact that Twitter is not the same old Twitter and that they would sort of be glued to Twitter normally during a big world event like this and They're not.

2:52And why can't threads become that? Right. I think we saw some commentary like that. And I think it's really ironic to me. I mean, the same people who were sort of raking Facebook over the coals for how they handled news and this public information are now asking the same company to come back and and replace Twitter and become this this place for news. I think it would be great if the technology industry got out of the news business and really focused on actual technology and not just user-generated content. Yeah, I agree. Another controversial. No, I mean we're going to talk about that too because I'm getting raked over the coals about that for a controversial thread that I posted.

3:36And I promised that I was going to cover it on the podcast today. So we're going to get to that. But just to keep, you know, peeling this thread apart, I mean, oh, God, that was a pun. I was on Twitter really, you know, in the primary source information. And there were things that I saw that were, you know, videos taken from video games, for instance. And I think that, like, you know, you can take a look at what's going on on social media. Take a look at the reports. Like, nobody's just on Twitter. and they're not you know if you're just on twitter of course you're you're gonna be going to places like the wall street journal the times seven four and and actually checking what happened and so to think that like people are just convinced of one narrative or the other because they saw one thing on social media that was fake to me it's just it's almost disrespectful to the users themselves and it really has a small it doesn't mean that social media can't shift an opinion but this idea that you know one fake video or a few fake videos is going to really change you know a person's mind to me, it sounds ridiculous.

4:36No, that's totally right. And apologies for getting ahead of you here on this. But yeah, I think that's right, too. We've seen so many studies that have come out since Cambridge Analytica that have basically backed up that point of view, which is like, even though there's tons of information, disinformation on social media, people are not really ultimately swayed by that, or elections are not really swayed. What really happens is people go on social media and some people look for information that supports their worldview and they don't really care if it's accurate or not. They kind of just want to read the most salacious content.

5:14And, you know, I think the Pizzagate controversy was like a good example of that. Do we really think that, you know, that independent voters went on and read about Pizzagate and were swayed to vote Republican? it ultimately doesn't have as big of an impact as I think people fear. And I think, you know, you're right. I mean, people can ultimately like, you know, the people who sort of, I think are the ones that we want to reach, right? Those like conscientious voters, they can sort of tell the difference. And I read an interesting column in Haaretz this week that sort of lamented the fact that, the television news, like the broadcast news was sort of too slow to get information out.

6:03And then Twitter was doing it quickly, but there was tons of information. And it just sort of made me think, I mean, this is, when you're trying to get real-time information about a situation like this, whether it's this or Ukraine or whatever, the faster the information comes out, the more flawed it's going to be. And I think people just need to sort of accept that. If you want to read only information, only articles that have been fully reported and every single fact is nailed down, then you kind of just need to wait and not be on the socials 24-7. Exactly. And I personally, if you feel like you have even a modicum of news literacy and the ability to make sense of these ideas, maybe I'm overestimating this because I am a professional journalist.

6:48But I found X to be extremely useful, actually, in the early hours just to figure out what's going on. however horrible it was. Now, there has been an interesting shifting of norms, which I want to talk to you about, which is that the right has long come after the left for cancel culture, basically holding up things that people might have said at one time and contacting their employer or making it public and making sure that there's enough scorn that these people's lives are ruined. And now there's actually been a almost, I think Marshall Kosloff, who's a host of the realignment calls this, you know, a reverse or cancel culture or a cancel culture flip-a-roo, switch-a-roo.

7:30And what we've seen actually is there have been members of the left that have come out and they have praised Hamas's actions on this last weekend, right, where they killed all the innocent civilians. I mean, we're talking about a death toll of like around 1 ,300, maybe 200 of them were military. And what's happened is the right has basically elevated the people who have, you know, came out in praise of Hamas and caused the same situation to happen to them. So there is this, for instance, this NYU Law Bar Association president, her name was, sorry, their name is Reina Workman, who said that the attack was necessary, sort of a necessary outcome and a need for resistance.

8:18And they were working, they were had a job offer from this firm, Winston and Strawn, and was raked over the coals to the point where Winston and Strawn canceled her letter of employment, their letter of employment. So I'm curious what you make of this. Is this sort of like the end of this, like, sort of debate over cancel culture? I mean, To me, it seems like this whole thing might have been silly. Basically, if you say dumb things and do dumb things, there's going to be consequences no matter who you are or what side of the aisle you sit on. Yeah. It's a really interesting way of putting it, the cancel culture, flip a roo.

8:59There's so much hypocrisy on every side of that, right, as you pointed out. I mean, it's the same thing with the free speech debate, right? Everybody wants free speech until there's speech they don't like, and then they want to silence it. I think we should take a step back and look at this and say, look, I think it's horrible that people would come out and praise Hamas. I could not disagree more. I think there's probably a lot of anti-Semitism behind that. Just also a certain level of callousness. after you see so many families murdered together. And the context notwithstanding, no matter what happens, your family gets murdered together, whether they're in Israel or Gaza or wherever, to come out and praise the people who did that is craven and it's sick.

9:47Yeah, I completely agree with that. I mean, it's horrible. And I am Jewish, and it's very painful to watch. I mean, I think we're still sort of all in the grieving period right now. But I think, you know, I still sort of, it still kind of makes me uncomfortable that this person would lose their job. Or that the thing that really was bad, I thought was that, I think it was Ackman, right? Bill Ackman, who was calling for like a list of names of people to, you know, who like signed on to these letters at universities. And I don't know. I mean, people do dumb things. They say dumb things when they're in college.

10:29their views change I think I think you know we should be like somewhat understanding about words and and that goes I think across the the political spectrum I think they can't the early cancel culture which was which came from the left where you know we were people were being like sort of having their lives ruined for for callous or you know kind of dumb things they said on Twitter I mean, that made me uncomfortable. You know, I think people just need to sometimes have a little more, just be a little more understanding, give people a little bit more leeway and maybe try to persuade them or like change their worldview if you don't agree with it rather than just try to silence it.

11:12Yeah, it's a good point. So I personally saw there's a truck that was driving around Harvard this week, which had like the names and faces, I believe, of some of the people in these student organizations that had signed on a letter condemning Israel in the face of the Hamas attacks. That, to me, felt overboard. The Rhino-Workman thing is a little bit more complicated. I mean, to have somebody come out full-throated in support of a terror group that just lit up 1 ,400 people and took a bunch of hostages, I mean, to me, I think it's well within the rights of an employer to say, listen, you're going to be working next to people.

11:48And I don't think the people in our law firm are going to want someone that supports a terrorist group with them. You made a mistake. There's a consequence for a mistake. I don't think this has anything to do with cancel culture or whatever it is. Simply a matter of fact that you have to have values in a company. And when it comes down to it, if they don't want to have that person working at their firm, I think they're within their rights. Yeah, and I'm sure they have policies about social media and sort of saying things that could embarrass the firm. I mean, every company does. You can only imagine their mentions and the voicemails of the partners after they.

12:23I mean, they saw that. Oh, yeah. And of course, I mean, you're talking about, you know, a firm in New York who probably has many, many Jews working there. And, you know, we're still, I mean, it actually kind of shows a real lack of judgment to do that. And I think that may be the bigger issue or the more pertinent issue, right, where you're talking about employing someone at a, you know, very prestigious law firm like that. Yeah. Do you, I mean, it's kind of this thing bubbled up on social media this week. It's worth bringing up. I'm curious what you think about these folks that are like all into like social activism all throughout college.

13:01And then they just go ahead and take a job at a corporate law firm. It's like, it feels so incongruous to me, but. Right. Well, I think everybody's a little bit hypocritical. That's my, that's my, my worldview as I, as I, as I get older. I mean, we all are hypocritical. I talk about climate change and drive an SUV around the Bay Area, and you can't escape that. So I've tried not to judge people as much these days, but I do agree it's ironic. Sometimes it's hard. So one more thing about this, which is you mentioned it, but the free speech debate. So we heard so much from the right, especially about the right to free speech, And it's sort of interesting because this whole free speech movement started on the left.

13:50Like if you think about like the big protests in Berkeley back in the 70s, this was all about free speech and the right to say anything on campus. And obviously it seems like things have shifted. But one thing I am particularly uncomfortable with is the prevention of even supporters of Hamas to be able to go and march and show their support. Now, obviously, I don't agree with it, but I do think that the right to free expression is fundamental. And you're not going to win a debate by shutting down speech. You'll win a debate by allowing the marketplace of ideas to end up. I mean, if you can't win a debate against the idea of killing civilians, then you really need to reshape not only your ideas, but your actions.

14:36So let's talk about this because there have so France has banned pro-Palestine protests and other countries have have done similar things. There's videos of riot police in France trying to break this stuff up. Obviously, Germany has plenty of rules against anti-Semitism as well. And you have Dave Rubin, you know, who does the Rubin Report, conservative voices. Maybe the West has a chance. And to me, it's just like, I mean, again, I can't state about how fundamentally I disagree with everything that Hamas has said about this situation and in general, their existence. But to prevent free speech of anybody in the West, to me, is just going to sound counterproductive.

15:17Maybe I'm missing something. they say uh what do they say two jews three opinions we have two jews here and yeah but i wish i i wish i could disagree with you i actually think you're right i mean that that is the fundamental i mean some of the the most important you know free speech cases in the u.s right revolved around the rights of of neo-nazis to go to go march um and just the the people saying the absolute most abhorrent things have a right to to do that and that's something in this country that, you know, we hold so dear. I think we all do, you know, fundamentally. What happens on social media is maybe a slightly more complicated question.

15:58But yeah, I mean, I agree. And other countries have different values, you know, around that, right? I mean, Germany has obviously a different situation. And France, you know, they have maybe their reasons for doing this. But yeah, I mean, I particularly feel a lot of pride living in a country that allows people to kind of just say whatever they want, even if it's insane. There was an amazing post from Ben Sasse, who is the former senator, president of Florida University. He basically said, listen, we believe in free speech in this country. We're going to allow anybody, I think his words were, to make an idiot of themselves in public.

16:42However, the second that crosses from speech to something else, speech to violence, we will be prepared to respond in the fullest degree. And I think that personally, that's the right approach. Yeah, I completely agree with that. And I sense that the pendulum is kind of swinging back from, I think, a place where I think people were maybe a little bit hysterical. And I think everyone's... And we had the election of Donald Trump, we had the pandemic, all of these things kind of really were a test of all of these norms and ideology that we have around speech. And I think we're coming back. I hear more and more people kind of expressing these sentiments on both sides of the political spectrum.

17:30It's not just people on the right calling for, you know, a bit of a more level-headed view on speech, right? It's also people on the left. And I think, you know, and you and I sort of agreeing on this, you know, and feeling comfortable talking about it is, I think, a sign of that as well. Yeah. Okay. So I said last thing, but I have one more part of this that I think we really should dig into, which is, as I've been watching this unfold, I'm curious whether, I mean, social media, no doubt, is a place where extreme viewpoints are posted to get a reaction. And one of the things I've been curious about as I've seen this unfold is whether social media is actually a moderating force or a force that's making things more extreme.

18:13I'll give you two examples. So there was a tweet from BLM Chicago that had a caption on it that says, that is all, that is it. And there was a photo that said something like free Palestine that was lionizing with an image of somebody coming in on a parachute, which is how Hamas attacked the festival in southern Israel. So then there were also messages from the Israeli side that were dehumanizing people in Gaza and saying that they were animals, human animals. And in each of those instances, I saw loads of people, quote, tweeting those messages and talking about how awful they were. And I felt shifting the conversation more towards the moderation and more towards the center, I suppose.

19:10I mean, this is kind of a crazy thing to say because I'm not sure it's true. Maybe it's easier to be moderate when extreme involves killing people. But I did find some optimism there. Yeah, I mean, I think it's the latter. I think in this kind of a situation, when people post things that are so incendiary like that, the natural reaction is for people to kind of like pull back and say, wait a minute, that's going too far. I think if you take a step back and you look at social media, its influence on society over the last 20 years, 15 years, I don't think you can say it's had a moderating effect.

19:52But I do think it's less important than people think. I think people put so much emphasis on what is said by anonymous trolls on Twitter. you know they you know it's if you make people anonymous and give them a platform to say things on social media they will just say the craziest things and you see like you know companies reacting to these sort of like mobs on social media and I really think that's a mistake I mean I think you know I view Twitter and social media as not the real world as a sort of alternate world it's almost like society's kind of like the back of their mind or like a really dark part of society's mind that you know it's like it's like that part of your brain that you sort of sometimes these thoughts bubble up that you wish you didn't have and you sort of push them push them back and sort of move on i think i'm gonna tweet that right i think that is the kind of that is how people should view social media.

20:56And I think that's also changing. I think people are actually sort of discounting a little bit more, rightly so, what is said on these platforms. Okay. So that brings us to our real second segment, which is a perfect lead and read. So thank you for that, which is... I'm getting absolutely destroyed on threads today, which seems like that happens to me often. It's so funny. People on threads are very sensitive about threads but um i am being uh lambasted for a thread i put up there talking about hey maybe we shouldn't have news and social media so blended and the context of this is that adam oseri who runs threads has said that they're not gonna you know ban news but they're not going to do anything to promote it and there's been this movement of journalists that has really puzzles me that have been like we need news on threads it's the best thing that you can do and And look, it certainly would be good for the engagement of Threads.

21:55The fact that Threads doesn't have news, I'm sure, is actually hurting its adoption. And that meta is being careful to bring news on the platform to me is good. It seems to me that when we bring news onto social media, nothing good happens, right? We end up giving every bit of news legitimacy on there. And of course, the more extreme views are elevated, diminishing the mainstream. and so much of the conversation happens on the social platforms. And so you end up having the businesses of these actual news organizations suffer because people are hanging out, consuming their stuff on Twitter or Facebook and not on their sites and not on their streams.

22:36And so I said, news and social don't mix. Thread would have much better engagement if it promoted news, but there would be consequences. Meta isn't falling into that trap and the news industry shouldn't encourage it. And then came the backlash. So you're welcome to disagree here, but I'm curious what you think. I mean, I wish I could. I would love to hear a debate on this. My view is every single journalist knows that Twitter has never driven traffic to stories. It is so much about just ego. Right. And the fact that, you know, journalists or important people are reading your work and certainly like it's it's influential.

23:17But like it like journalists on Twitter was a niche on a niche platform. Like Twitter was never a huge platform to begin with. Right. I mean, Facebook always drove more traffic. That's obviously, you know, changed now. Now it's like Apple News. Apple News is like really a huge driver of traffic for the big news sites like, you know, Washington Post. Right. So, again, I think this is where like we are all in our media bubble. And we think it's so important to have these platforms where every news story is shared and we can just keep track of this up to the minute. It's like our own private newswire.

23:59And ultimately, it really doesn't matter outside of this bubble all that much what is said. And I agree, I don't like the fact, I never liked the fact from day one, the fact that news organizations and reporters really more specifically were so willing to basically take their work, their hard work, and sort of give it away for free and move everything onto these social media platforms really for the benefit of these huge companies or what eventually became these huge companies. I think it was a bad idea and it weakened journalistic institutions that, you know, I think if we could turn back the clock, we would probably do things differently.

24:45I mean, that's been my view on this. Yeah. Not only that, it warps the incentives and the pursuit of stories in journalists' minds. They begin to write for the Twitter audience. And the things that do well on Twitter are outrageous. Same with threads. And here's an interesting story. So the Neiman Lab, which comes out of Harvard, just wrote this story about how NPR left Twitter because of a dispute with Elon Musk. And it says, the headline is, six months ago, NPR left Twitter. The effects have been negligible. Numbers confirm what many of us have long suspected, that Twitter wasn't worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic.

25:24and to see what happened i mean it's an obvious situation to see what happened that npr is basically unharmed by leaving what many of you as the most important platform for news you know and this this push to try to get all the news organizations on threads and to have threads incentivize news to me it's just like what are we doing here people like what what possible uh motive do you have and i think maybe ego is it maybe it's ego i i totally agree there's There's a lot of ego when it comes to Twitter, not discounting its importance in terms of just like influencing the opinion leaders like the elite and things like that.

26:04I mean, I agree that it's kind of like it does serve that function. But I remember like when I worked at the Wall Street Journal before Twitter, this is now I sound like super old. But like before Twitter, the thing that like drove so much traffic was Yahoo News. and that was because like so many computers like the default home page was yahoo news and that's sort of what's happening with apple news now like people just get it and those are the stories they see like that's how people consume news it's like this sort of like passive thing i wish they sat down and like opened up the paper and read it you know but it's it's not it's not that like people are not most people are not like glued to to twitter i also want to make this point i mean i thought um if you if you've ever read amusing ourselves to death um by uh neil postman he's written in 1984 and he talks about like how television and you could just substitute television for social media but he's talking about how television has kind of become this dumbing down the fact you know it's had this dumbing down effect and his i thought this is such a good point he's like the problem is not like mindless entertainment like it's not the gong show or whatever the show of the time was it's 60 minutes it's like because he and at the time there was like the iran hostage crisis was was going on and he was like everyone all of a sudden had an opinion a very strong opinion about this country they had never heard of before you know and i think that's like that was so smart and and poignant like everyone is not an expert on Ukraine.

27:51Everyone is not an expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict. And they don't really, like for their daily lives, it's nice to be sort of informed, but like for your daily lives, like you do not need to know what's happening like every minute of these conflicts. Absolutely. And so first of all, no need to apologize about the Yahoo reference. We're big Yahoo fans here. And we're going to have our Yahoo episode coming out. It was more than before Twitter. Right, exactly. Well, Yahoo lives. read that's my i know they're still there it's still important yeah and then there's like a couple of good counter arguments to me i mean for the sake of nuance one is that there's going to be news anywhere anyway on these platforms might as well have some level-headed and good well-reported stuff but it's to me i would say my rebuttal of that is it's a balance because the more you enable the conversation to be there versus building your audience and having you know your own properties that people go to the more power you're actually going to lose in aggregate and the other thing that i heard is that you know it's you know you could it's easy to say if you're like a built-up news ecosystem but if you're like you know an insurgent trying to get an audience then you know don't tell me i can't use social media and that sounds reasonable to me you can don't you can totally use it but you're not going to gain that much traffic from twitter that's right that's all yeah news industry social media it turns out email is pretty good codependent email's amazing We both love email.

29:17Don't be codependent. You know, appreciate each other, participate, whatever. But this whole reliance on news and even public infrastructure, like to have like the Canadian, you know, parks associations not be able to get wildfire information out because they're blocked on Facebook. It's like you double you didn't need to double down on Facebook. You did. And you made that a behavior. And every this is a two sided thing here, folks. It's two sided. All right, let's take a break. and we're going to talk about some real technology stuff when we come back. We're here with Rita Albergatti. He's the technology editor at Semifor.

29:51On the other side of this break, we're going to talk about Apple potentially building a search engine. Oh, God, we have so much to get to. So a little time at the SPF trial. Well, maybe we'll skip that. And then, of course, a little bit more about OpenAI back right after this. Did you know your credit card points and miles can lose value to inflation? Credit card companies often reduce the redemption value of your points and miles. Now, imagine a credit card with rewards that can grow in value. With the Gemini credit card, you can earn Bitcoin or one of over 50 other cryptos instantly with no annual fee.

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