Reddit Revolts + MrBeast’s YouTube Empire + Peak Trust and Safety?

24:03This was super controversial. I feel like this actually might have been the first time a lot of people heard about Mr. Beast just because everyone had an opinion about this one. Before we even start, I feel like we should describe what the thumbnail to this video looks like, because I do think, for me at least, this is a key reason that people kind of flipped out about this video and found it so weird. So if I can just describe it, you know, every YouTube video has a thumbnail. That's the image that the video shows when you click on the sidebar or whatever. And Mr. Beast has these unbelievably sort of uncanny valley Photoshop thumbnails.

24:32And in this one, the thumbnail is what I assume is a stock photo of a kid who does not appear in the video with a bandage raised up over his eyes. He's got a shocked face on. It's not clear whether he's shocked happy or shocked because he's been like forced to watch something he never should have seen. And then just over his shoulder to his right is Mr. Beast grinning. Like the gravity of, you know, people who haven't been able to see receiving surgery that gives them eyesight that they hadn't had before is not reflected in the kind of cheesiness of this weird thumbnail. Yeah. And I also remember hearing an interview with Mr.

25:11Beast once where he said that he has like a full-time thumbnail team, that there are people whose entire job is just to like test out, you know, many, many different iterations of all of the thumbnails for all of his videos and like see what gets watched the most. So this is not an accident that his thumbnails are so weird and seemingly uncanny. Yeah. All right. Let's watch this video. We'll do the intro, and I feel like it's worth noting, Mr. Beast is really good at grabbing your attention and explaining what's going to happen in the first 10 seconds of a video, because that's so important to getting people to stick around instead of click away.

25:44All right. In this video, we're curing a thousand people's blindness. It's going to be crazy. Most of us see the world like this. But here's the thing. 200 million people see the world like this. but I just made it one less. Oh. Wow. She's just one of a thousand blind people we help from around the world. They can't see, but we have all the technology to fix it. Yep. Half of all the blindness in the world is people who need a 10 minute surgery. Crazy. Can we pause there? I just want to say that when you meet the surgeon in this video, it says in giant font surgeon and there's a red arrow pointing to it.

26:26This man does not have a name. What are his credentials? we'll never know. For our purposes, he is simply surgeon. And we should say, speaking of chyrons, so in the video, the first person who's cured, whose blindness is cured, that we see a little counter pops up at the bottom that says one out of 1 ,000 that to me is reminiscent of like a video game where you have to collect as many blind people as possible, I suppose, and cure them. And Mr. Beast is going to plat it. You know, so this is his like really fast intro. I think he talks basically like a 12-year-old. I don't mean that demeaningly, as demeaningly as maybe it sounds, but he has the kind of overexcited, enthusiastic, sort of running over himself, the attitude of an adolescent doing something really cool, which I think is one really obvious reason why he connects so much with his adolescent viewers.

27:14Yeah. And to your point, Max, there is not one wasted frame in anything that we want. Like, every single frame served a purpose, and they start playing with your emotions instantaneously in this video. Right. All right. Let's skip ahead a little bit and see when he actually gives someone$10 ,000. You pay for my surgery? Yes. Seriously? You know what? Here's$10 ,000. She's falling on the floor. Okay. So he gives this woman a briefcase filled with$10 ,000 that's going to pay for her cataract surgery. She falls on the floor in hysterics and celebration. She's actually getting$10 ,000 on top of the cataract surgery.

27:54When we see her in the video, she's presumably just gotten the surgery. And then Mr. Beast opens the suitcase of cash. That was her beast bonus. Yeah. The other thing that I always find interesting about these, you know, a lot of queer eye or whatever would focus on the person who's receiving the money. You get the sob story. You get whether it's going to change. Mr. Beast is just in. You get the reaction. You don't need to know much else. There's a couple more in-depth stories that I'm sure that we'll see in a sec. But for the most part, the video can't go over, what is it, eight minutes long?

28:21Something like that? It's eight minutes long. You don't necessarily need to get the full story. You want to just get the quick hit of the extreme emotional reaction and get out. Yeah, so here in our next clip, this is Jimmy, Mr. Beast, talking with Jeremiah, who gets not only surgery to correct his eyesight, but also a big check for college. How's it going? Okay. Yeah, I've been subscribed to you for like 11 years. Really? Oh my gosh. Jeremiah has been blind in his right eye since he was born, and it's affected his vision his entire life. Are you excited to be able to see out of both? Hopefully if the surgery goes that way.

29:00Because Jeremiah was born with cataracts, his right eye never received light. And that means that this surgery only has a 50 % chance of working. I think we go ahead and get it underway, and then we'll just talk post-op. Okay, so this video was sort of central in your piece about Mr. Beast and his relationship with his audience. So why did you decide to focus on this particular video and the controversy it generated? Well, like Casey said, I think this was for a lot of people in our age, the Crypt Keeper age bracket. This was sort of the first time Mr. Beast really entered our media environment, so to speak.

29:37It exited the YouTube sphere and entered other media outlets. And part of the reason for that, and part of the reason I was interested in writing about it, is that it sort of presented a moral or an ethical dilemma about what Mr. Beast is doing. There are many questions you could sort of ask, but maybe the central one is, is it exploitative to, like, do something unquestionably good, like pay for cataract surgery in service of audience growth? Are you exploiting these people? Are you helping them? You know, so I interviewed Jeremiah Howard, who's the first kid we heard there. And Jeremiah's story is incredibly fascinating.

30:13He's an incredibly bright and articulate kid. Um, his, uh, he's raised by a single father. Um, he spent a long time trying to get, uh, assistance for the surgery. He tried to raise money and he was sort of turned away at every opportunity. He couldn't make it work. And then Mr. B swooped in and paid for this. And to me, this is like, you could not write a dystopian science fiction story more on the nose than like, oh, well, the government couldn't help. The, the GoFundMe didn't fund enough. So luckily, the Willy Wonka of Greenville, North Carolina popped by, saw my GoFundMe and decided to pay for it.

30:49And you get none of this in the video. You get none of the sort of sense that, like, this was a long period of trials for somebody who's on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum who doesn't have access to the same kind of care that, you know, people at a higher end do. For Mr. Beast, it's sort of, we're going to pay for the surgery. Novelty checks have not gone away. They give him an enormous$50 ,000 check and say it's for college. and, you know, you get a little bit of weepiness with Jeremiah and his dad and that's that. And so trying to figure out, you know, how you feel about this kind of total mixture of genuine charity, of genuine philanthropy with abject, you know, YouTube view-mongering is really interesting and feels really sort of typical of the moment.

31:33For what it's worth, I have two nephews who are seven and ten and they love Mr. Beast and I was asking them last night what they like about him. And my seven-year-old nephew said, he's kind. And I don't know. I thought, well, if my nephew's gonna be taking any lessons from YouTube, kindness, I think, is about as good as I can hope for. So I don't know. Yeah, it's kindness or investing in crypto. So I think that kindness is probably your better. For seven-year-olds, at least, I think kindness is your better bet. So Mr. Beast is kind of this fascinating character right now. He's obviously a huge celebrity.

32:07He's also got all these brand extensions, right? He's got like, I was in Walmart a few months ago and just saw like this enormous display of his chocolate bars. So like in a very literal sense, like he is turning himself into a kind of Willy Wonka figure in the sense that he is selling chocolate and other food products under his name and brand. You know, the way I think about it is sort of the something that Jimmy is very good at, obviously, and something that he talks a lot about is his desire to sort of study and master what you might call a platform marketplace. What did the sorting and recommendation algorithms that YouTube has in place reward?

32:45And how can I make videos that push that? And I think he sees, and this is, I should be clear, speculation on my part, I think he sees other platform marketplaces that he can apply the same kinds of lessons or the same techniques of study to. So one of his most successful endeavors right now is something called Mr. Beast Burger. So parents of adolescents in New Jersey and New York will know that there is a physical Mr. Beast Burger location in the American Dream Mall in New Jersey. But for the most part, Mr. Beast Burger is, you know, one of these ghost kitchens where you can license the Mr. Beast Burger brand to restaurants around the country who can then offer it on DoorDash.

33:20And my sense is that Jimmy looks at something like DoorDash or, you know, an app that has certain similarities to the YouTube app and things like, how can I apply the lessons I've learned on YouTube and also master the DoorDash algorithm and also figure out how to how to own Seamless the way I own YouTube? How much do you think that his focus on philanthropy reflects his own interests? And how much of it is just, this is actually the most popular thing you can do on YouTube? This was sort of the central question of the article, and I don't want to spoil it, but I did not come up with an answer.

33:54I just kind of waved goodbye because I couldn't figure it out. What I would say is I think that there's sort of a generational divide, let's say, between people who grew up not on YouTube and people who grew up on YouTube, where I think the idea for maybe for people like us is that you do things sincerely or cynically. You are doing things out of the goodness of your heart or you are doing them with some kind of ulterior motive. And the young adults I talk to who are Mr. Beast fans, and based on things that Mr. Beast himself has said, I think that that divide doesn't work in quite the same way.

34:28That for many of them, they recognize the kind of cynicism at play in what Mr. Beast does, that they're not stupid themselves, They see that the thumbnails, the goofy, corny thumbnail, the sort of alienating thumbnail is a necessary component of what he needs to get his audience bigger. And for as far as they're concerned, that's kind of that's the table stakes. You're not even playing the game if you're not doing stuff like that. And so I think that for Mr. Beast, it's those two kind of questions. Does he actually want to do this or is this what the algorithm is sort of encouraging to do? I don't know that he would recognize the distinction between those two things.

35:04And I say this because I genuinely do think that he is a good-hearted kid, you know, that he is, he comes to philanthropy from an honest place that he wants to help people out. But I also, I don't know the answer to the question, would he still be doing this if it wasn't rewarding to him on YouTube? Because it wasn't like he started his YouTube channel giving out money. You know, this was something that he arrived at, and then he's seen how much success he can have with it. it's sort of confounding to confront somebody like this who is at once extraordinarily cynical about how the platform works and how he can game it.

35:34And on the other end, like utterly earnest about how he's going to make use of that cynicism. I mean, I will say for like all of us have spent time writing about our fears about the YouTube algorithm and what it incentivizes. There is something deeply relieving about the fact that the most successful individual YouTuber has gotten famous by giving away money and curing blindness. Yeah. I mean, I would be interested, Kevin, what you think about this because you've written some really good stuff about, you know, YouTube radicalization and sort of the sense that, like, you can follow a rabbit hole on YouTube and suddenly find yourself spouting insane anti-feminist nonsense.

36:08And so, you know, I had a reaction to Mr. Beast. It was like, well, God, compared with, you know, with whoever the worst of the worst is, compared with Stefan Molyneux or whatever, this guy seems fine. Like, please, let's get 50 more of him. Yeah, I mean, I had the same reaction. I remember a few years ago, I wrote a profile of PewDiePie, who was sort of the Mr. Beast of 2015. He was the biggest YouTuber in the world for many years. And he had kind of this classic YouTuber career arc where he got started playing video games and then got really popular, tens of millions of subscribers. And then he basically started making all of these edgy, offensive jokes on his channel.

36:52and he did this like prank where he paid some guys on Fiverr to like hold up a sign that said, death to all Jews. That went horribly and he lost brand deals and kind of like blew up his career. And so I went to just ask him about that. And what he said was basically at the time, he was just kind of following the algorithm. Like he recognized that the edgier he acted on his channel, the more views he got. And so he described YouTube at the time as this kind of place where everyone, All the big YouTuber creators were kind of testing the limits, pushing the boundaries, like seeing what they could get away with, because that was what was good for their channel.

37:28So I guess for you, my question is like, does the fact that Mr. Beast is bigger than PewDiePie now, does the fact that he has kind of become the biggest YouTuber mean that YouTube has changed, that it's more wholesome, that it's rewarding different things than it used to? like what does it say to you about youtube and social media maybe as a whole that mr beast has taken over the internet in this way yeah this is maybe the sort of the the big unanswered question i have because the youtube algorithm is such a black box and by youtube algorithm i'm actually talking about you know thousands of different ways that the site recommends and rewards video creators that this sort of system of sorting and recommending we don't know what its prerogatives are.

38:13And so somebody like Jimmy or like PewDiePie can reverse engineer it to some extent and they can follow it and and sort of see what they can get out of it. One easy story would be, well, the kids are sick of drama. They're sick of, you know, edginess. They want niceness. They, you know, get get the Paul brothers out of here. Get get PewDiePie out of here. Let's let's bring on Mr. Beast. And I don't think that's wrong. I do think that there is sort of like some of the kids I talked to, I think there is fatigue with the kind of endlessness of the hype house dramas that sort of characterized YouTube in the late 2010s, say.

38:49But I also think it's hard not to come to the conclusion that YouTube is doing more to reward sort of wholesome, slightly more substantive, slightly higher production value content. To be clear, I also don't think that means that Jimmy is sort of lucky that he just happened to be the wholesome guy at the time when the wholesome stuff is being rewarded. I think that he is really attuned to what does well and how to make it do well. And so the fact that this is what he's doing suggests that the algorithm is telling him something not to not to, you know, anthropomorphize the algorithm too much, but the algorithm is telling him something that he needs to follow.

39:23So, you know, I think that I think that if I was in charge of YouTube, thank God I'm not. But if I was, I would be so happy that Mr. Beast is the biggest YouTuber. Like, I just can't imagine after having gone through half a decade of having to listen to, you know, Kevin appear on every news channel and say, this is this thought for us, maybe not the greatest thing to be to have Kevin be like, well, gosh, isn't it great that we have a guy who is just giving away money everywhere? Not that you said that, Kevin, but you could say it at the end. And I think you would make people at YouTube very happy.

39:54Well, for what it's worth, my channel of insult commentary is still growing very quickly. So I don't think they're totally out of the woods. You know, one question I have is whether Mr. Beast has inspired a lot of imitators, right? Because like one way that we might be able to tell whether the algorithm had truly changed was whether there were more of him. So like how influential has Mr. Beast been on the broader community, do you think? Extremely influential. So bracketing the sort of generosity aspect of what he does, the philanthropy charity aspect, he is the more or less the originator of a whole genre of YouTube called junk lord, which is so-called because it involves spending a huge amount of money on junk.

40:34junk and uh sort of showing off how much money you just spent so that's stuff like mr beast filled a big tub with slime and bathed in it for 24 hours or he bought 500 000 bouncy balls and threw them in his brother's backyard i'm i don't know if these are real videos or i'm just mad living the vibe here he bought like a hundred this one is really about like a hundred um leaf blowers and tried to make a hover field that he would go over so So there's a lot of people doing this kind of thing. And I think it's the sort of philanthropic aspect of what Jimmy does that separates him out from the kind of the mass of successful but not Mr.

41:10Beast level successful YouTubers. But there also are more and more people on TikTok and YouTube doing the kind of we're going to hand out$10 ,000. The most recent and worst one I saw, which is a stunt. I think everybody involved was acting. these two TikTokers filled the bed of their pickup truck with like 200 packets of instant ramen. And then they would drive up to, again, I'm pretty sure they were actors, like people pretending to be homeless on the side of the street and being like, do you want to have some instant ramen or something? Just some awful combination of like bait and, you know, whatever else.

41:44But I think that kind of video obviously owes an enormous amount to Jimmy and what Jimmy was doing and has been doing. and you know i think it's a credit to him that he's never made that kind of mistake that kind of i mean i can't believe it's a credit that he's never offered ramen out of the back of a pickup truck to a homeless guy but in the context of this stuff that that is frankly a credit to him it's also just crazy like the economics of this right like i i i find it hard to believe that these videos pay for themselves i imagine in many cases they don't actually pay for themselves and they sort of serve to like prop up the other mr beast businesses but my god like it must be expensive to cure blindness for a thousand people.

42:21Yeah. Where is he getting the money? I mean, I actually think as far as I can tell, and I had no deep throat handing over Mr. Beast financials to me in a parking garage in Greenville somewhere. But as far as I can tell, he actually is making enough money to fund his videos from his videos. You know, a very common criticism you see people assume that he's keeping most of that for himself, that it's mostly profit. I, you know, God help me, but I am I'm basically at this point a believer that he just pumps the money back into the videos that he doesn't like just we watch him often enough. Jimmy does not seem like a guy who really wants to live in a mansion and have a Lamborghini.

42:57He doesn't have the Logan Paul, you know, sense of of extravagance in terms of personal wealth. He seems like a goofy 25 year old guy from North Carolina who really likes making YouTube videos and would rather just put more money into making really good YouTube videos than, you know, I don't know, putting it putting it away somewhere. That being said, anything is possible. And it's very hard on YouTube end or on the Mr. Beast end to actually see real numbers on any of these things. Right. Max, I was struck by an idea that you wrote about in your piece, which was that Mr. Beast's audience is just very conscious of his whole, not just his shtick, but just his business model.

43:36how he uses the ad revenue from his videos to like pay for philanthropic projects for his next video. And that these kids who are watching his videos, they almost feel transgressive by watching his videos. Like they're, you know, by clicking on a Mr. Beast video and watching it all the way to the end, they're not only like watching something entertaining, but they're kind of like taking money out of the pockets of Coca-Cola or whoever advertises on YouTube and like putting it into like cataract surgeries for blind people. So say more about this relationship between Mr. Beast and his young audience on YouTube.

44:11And like, what does that tell you about sort of where this creator economy may be going? Yeah, so I'm cribbing this idea a little bit from an academic named Vincent Miller who works out of the UK who wrote a paper recently about Mr. Beast. And I liked this paper because it helped crystallize the sort of sense I was getting from talking to Mr. Beast fans and watching the videos, which is that, you know, you have a sense, when you watch TV, you have a vague sense in the back of your head about how the people on TV make money, how the business makes money. You know, it's not like it's hidden from us, but you put on Mad Men, you're not thinking, well, that's 10 cents in Jon Hamm's pocket and 25 cents in Matthew Wiener's pocket and RJD2, who made the theme song, is going to get a little residual check in a little bit.

44:52And you're not thinking about how that overall works into the projects and ideas of the other people. To use the sort of academic language of it, maybe you're not necessarily thinking about yourself as a commodity or as a member of an audience that is a commodity against which advertising can be sold. And what makes Mr. Beast different is that he is very close to explicitly telling his viewers to think of themselves as a commodity. You know, he turns on the video, and especially on his philanthropy sub-channel called Beast Philanthropy, he starts almost every video by saying something like, every person who watches this is giving me five cents that I'm going to hand to somebody else, is putting five cents in the pocket of these people, is planting five trees or whatever it is.

45:32And I was struck by this idea because I think, one, it suggests to me that the people who are watching Mr. Beast, and this was reflected in conversations I had with people I talked to, have a much more sophisticated view of platforms and how they work than I think is often assumed about adolescence. And I think there's something quite powerful about having Jimmy treat them as sophisticated consumers of media. I don't want to overstate this. Obviously, the videos are the videos. We've heard some of what the videos are. They're not the most sophisticated things in the world. But I think it's not just that the kids are sort of watching this awed by the beauty of giving people sight.

46:11It's also they know that by watching it, they're getting cataract surgery for more people. And they like being part of that kind of movement. The other part that's powerful is when you're talking about people who are adolescents or teenagers who want to help in some way but maybe don't have money to donate themselves, obviously. they don't have control over their schedules to donate time or volunteer, to have somebody sit down and say, well, by actually by watching YouTube, which is something you probably were doing already, you are helping and you should feel powerful. You should feel like a member of the of the Mr.

46:42Beast movement, so to speak. I don't mean to like hold this up as, you know, a model for future philanthropy. I think there's all kinds of problems with it. But this really helped me see part of what makes Mr. Beast appealing beyond just the obvious appeal of feel good stories in his videos. Max, for people who don't inhabit the YouTube universe, who maybe saw this cataract surgery video going viral on Twitter and saw all of the heated commentary about it, is this cynical? Is it exploitative? It sounds like you basically came out of that question on the side of like, eh, this is fine. Of all the things that could be popular on YouTube, at least it's this guy and not some neo-Nazi.

47:20Is that a fair reflection of where you came out of this after spending so much time and energy reporting on Mr. Beast? God, you're asking me to endorse Mr. Beast live on air or taped on air. I, yeah, I think yes. I think, so I have, I feel hesitant about a lot of what he does. I remain extremely impressed with his ability to tow an ethical line that is maybe a little bit further than I would like, but doesn't ever cross into things like the ramen in the back of the pickup truck. Like, I don't want to overstate the extent to which that represents a true ethical commitment to non-exploitation or whatever.

48:03But I do think that kind of line is important. And I think the fact that he consistently stays on the right side of that line is worth something. And so I don't blame anybody who looks at those thumbnails and things that there's something sort of awful and or as a streamer put it very icky about this sense that we're watching inspiration porn, disability porn for the purpose of making Mr. Beast a bigger, more important figure with a reputation for niceness. But I came away feeling, you know, having done all this reporting, I mean, maybe I should even say this. One of the things I entered in this reporting doing was there's a there's a thriving community of Mr.

48:41Beast conspiracy theorists who are quite positive that he does not give the money away, that the people who receive the money are employees of his, that there's all kinds of like shenanigans on the back end. And I found nothing, you know, that the people I talked to who are on the videos, it's it's like reality TV. Producers maybe push a line or sort of suggest that you say something. But it's not it's not a total con job. And, you know, Jeremiah really did receive a fifty thousand dollar check and cataract surgery. The fact that I wasn't able to find anybody who was like, this is fake. He was a jerk.

49:15You know, this whole thing is a is a is a total put on probably sort of pushed me onto the onto the side of saying. could be worse. That's the official Max Reed line on Mr. Beast. Could be worse. And Max, that leads me to my last question I think today, which is, if you need$10 ,000, where does Mr. Beast usually hang out? Greenville, North Carolina. I would suggest just driving around Greenville as much as you possibly can. You never know. You never know. Maybe get a job at a deli. He likes to show up at businesses and offer people money to quit their jobs. So maybe go to Greenville, get a job at a deli, and just wait.

49:50It'll only be five or six years before you see him. Max, if we start a YouTube show, if Casey and I start a hard fork YouTube show, what should our shtick be? Oh, God. I don't want to... Maybe you guys can edit this out. You're much too old. You're just... It's just not going to happen. I think, you know what it could be? It could be like old guys react to young people stuff. I think that could be cool. Just have you guys watch Mr. V's videos. You know, when they get grandmas to listen to like trap music, that's kind of... I think that's where you're at right now. Well, you know, Max, we were going to offer you a Tesla full of dollars for coming onto the show today, but that's off the table now.

50:26Max, thank you so much for coming. This is great. Thanks, Max. Thank you guys for having me. This has been a blast.

50:38When we come back, how the big platforms decided to stop policing 2020 election lies.

50:54All right, Kevin. Now, from time to time on this show, we do have to raise alarms. You know, we like to talk about what is new and exciting in the world of tech, but sometimes there are things that concern us. Yeah. And this week, I am afraid I have one of those. Oh, boy. Okay, so I have a hypothesis for you, and the hypothesis is this. We may have passed peak trust and safety. What do you mean? Okay, so trust and safety in the tech world is the umbrella term for the people who try to keep the platforms clean. So if there's hate speech, bullying, nudity, anything bad that's happening on the platforms, like let's say a foreign country tried to interfere with our elections.

51:30Hypothetically. Hypothetically, if that happened, the platforms would all have their trust and safety teams who would work to solve that problem. And we saw an explosion of this industry after 2016, as platforms like Meta and Twitter and YouTube all invested heavily into this field, hiring tens of thousands of people. And on one hand, I think very few of us would say that the period from, let's call it 2017 to 2022, was a golden age. It was a golden age for something. It was a golden age for something, but I don't think people would say it was a golden age for how safe the platforms felt to use.

52:05Correct. And yet, halfway into 2023, I'm increasingly concerned that we are going to look back at it as the time when the platforms paid the most attention to this stuff. And why do you think that? Well, I can give you a handful of examples from recent weeks. And I want to start with Instagram. Have you heard of this character, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? I have, yes. Yeah. He was the son of the original Robert F. Kennedy, the one some have called the good Robert F. Kennedy. and uh the the new one the sun became uh one of the leading anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists in the entire world yes he's famously like very anti-vaccine pre-covid this was like way before covid he was making up crazy insane claims about like the vaccines that kids get to go to school yes exactly and then covid came along and gave him an opportunity to massively expand his platform to try to scare people away from getting these shots that very well may save their lives.

53:02So Kennedy starts doing this. He amasses 700 ,000 followers on Instagram. And in 2021, Instagram says, you know what, we've had enough of this. And so they get rid of his account. They get rid of the account of his organization that tries to advance the same sorts of conspiracy theories. And, you know, somebody like me says, okay, great, this guy has lost his reach. And if he wants to go stand on a soapbox in Central Park and yell about vaccines, that he can, and that's fine, but he can't get on Instagram and harness the reach of this platform in order to advance his views. But then Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

53:36has a brilliant idea. You know what this idea was? What is it? He decides to run for president. How I solve most problems in my life, yes. And I think it's safe to say that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has about as much chance of becoming the Democratic nominee as like Conor Roy had of winning the presidency in succession, okay? This is not a serious campaign. But, you know, sometimes these fringe candidates will run not because they think they can win, but because it gives them a platform to advance their views into the mainstream. Yes, and I remember like several years ago when people like Marjorie Taylor Greene were announcing their runs for office.

54:09This was sort of the loophole that people had discovered, that these platforms, they had one set of rules for normal users and another set of rules for public figures and politicians and candidates for office. Is that what you remember? That is absolutely right, and it's just what we're seeing here. A spokesperson for Meta told The Washington Post, quote, as he is now an active candidate for president of the United States, we have restored access to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Instagram account. This seems like basically a backwards system. Like, if I were running a social network, which let's all be glad I'm not, but, you know, one rational thing that you could do was apply stricter standards to bigger accounts and more prominent people, right?

54:50That's right. So Robert F. Kennedy Jr. getting his Instagram account back. That's thing one. Let's talk about thing two. After 2020, YouTube, Twitter, Meta, which was then Facebook, all say, you cannot come on our platforms and say that the 2020 election was stolen. And then Twitter quietly just stops enforcing the rule. It actually doesn't even get reported that they have stopped enforcing that rule until months later. And by the way, this even predated Elon Musk. This is not an Elon Musk thing, okay? Twitter just stopped enforcing the rule. Then Meta lets Donald Trump back onto the platform.

55:25And in the hubbub of that, I think a lot of people didn't notice something else that they did, which was they said, you know what? We're also not going to prevent people from lying about the 2020 election. And then along comes YouTube. Now, YouTube is the most cautious of the platforms. It operates by the sort of Jurassic Park policy, which is that if you don't make any movements, The dinosaurs can't see you. And so they're always moving very slowly when it comes to this sort of thing. But sure enough, on the Friday before Apple is going to unveil the Vision Pro, YouTube says, oh, by the way, you can lie about the 2020 election now on YouTube.

55:59We're not going to enforce that rule anymore. And their reasoning was, and this is a quote, In the current environment, we find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm. I sort of know what that statement means, and I also sort of don't. I think they're trying to say something like, look, there could be some valid political speech about whether the 2020 election was stolen, and we would hate to have a point of view on that. And so we're just going to throw up our arms and be done with it.

56:32And so now we are in this world where we're heading into an election, and one of the most contentious issues will be around what happened in 2020. And if you are a right-wing candidate who just takes it as an article of faith that the election was stolen, whether you believe it or you just think it's a useful thing to say to rally your base, you can now do that. And the platforms are going to stand down. They're laying down their arms. And if you're a Democratic candidate, you can go on and lie about vaccines and start your presidential campaign that way. Yeah, and now look, there are people out there who believe, and I'm sympathetic to this view, that when it comes to political speech, you want to allow for the maximum amount of discussion, right?

57:13Good ideas come from the fringes sometime. You don't want to take a heavy hand in saying this idea is good and this idea is bad, particularly in the context of Democratic debate, right? At the same time, one of the sort of core tenets of the whole trust and safety movement was these platforms can and do incubate violent movements. People see misleading information, hoaxes, they get riled up, and that spills over into real-world violence, and all of a sudden you have a January 6th on their hands. So look, I'm not saying it's as simple as because platforms existed January 6th happened. But I am saying as we head into 2024's election, I think we really have to be on guard for what kinds of conspiracies are spreading on these platforms, how many views they're getting, who is saying these things, and to what extent those movements are moving from the online world to the offline world.

58:05Right. And you and I have both spent a lot of the past five or six years writing about trust and safety, content moderation, et cetera, in the context of these platforms. And I'm curious why you think the platforms have shifted their policies. Is it just that they sort of are kind of admitting defeat, waving the white flag, saying like, you know, we're spending all this money, we're hiring all these people. And yet there is still a huge conspiracy theory contingent out there that wants to believe stuff that isn't true. and so nothing that we're doing seems to be kind of moving the needle on that.

58:35So why are we even trying? Or is it something else? I think there are a handful of plausible explanations. One is political pressure. The Republicans are in control of the House now. They're already pressuring disinformation researchers to turn over a bunch of documents, which in my view is essentially just harassing these researchers for trying to understand the spread of conspiracy theories. So if you're a platform, you're thinking, I don't want my CEO to be called before Jim Jordan to testify about this thing. And the less we moderate, the fewer questions we're going to have to answer. So I think that's one factor.

59:08The second factor, though, is that we are in a different economic world than we were in 2020, right? And a really sort of cynical one-sentence way of describing this would be that trust and safety was a zero-interest rates phenomenon. Totally, totally. You know, when these companies were printing money and their margins all looked great and the money was rolling in, they felt great about spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these huge apparatuses like the Meta Oversight Board, which is a multi-hundred million dollar project to essentially serve as the content moderator of Final Resort. It's basically impossible for me to imagine Meta deciding in 2023 that it would want to create an oversight board.

59:50Right, and spend that much money on it because they don't have as much money now and they're spending it on the Metaverse and all this other stuff. So I buy this hypothesis, actually, that trust and safety was in many ways a zero interest rate phenomenon. And I think it's possible that it's just broader than like that stuff costs a lot of money and we don't have the money anymore. I think one other thing that really changed in the last few years is that employees at these companies have lost a lot of leverage. And if you remember back during the days of the misinformation wars, when Alex Jones was on these platforms and they were trying to decide whether to kick him off or not, one major factor in that was that their own employees, these tech companies' own people, were telling them, you have to kick this person off our platform.

1:00:36I don't want to work at a platform where Alex Jones has one of the biggest and most influential megaphones. Totally. And these companies largely have kind of like liberal employee bases. They're all based in the Bay Area. They draw from a San Francisco tech crowd. And I think those employees had a lot of leverage because the labor market was very tight. Like these people had a lot of options. If they didn't like how their employer was handling trust and safety, they could go work somewhere else. And now that's totally changed. All these companies have laid off thousands of workers. the workers who are left feel very grateful to be there and have their jobs, and they're not trying to sort of upset the apple cart here.

1:01:16And so I think you probably don't hear as many protests from employees at these companies saying, you have to take this stuff seriously or we're going to walk. Yeah, I think the employee piece is huge. I want to say a third and final thing about all this, which is that so far, I think we could say that this has essentially been a vibes-based analysis of the situation. But recently, I took a look at a third issue where it seemed like maybe the trust and safety enforcement has receded a little bit. And it's a really serious issue that makes all of us uncomfortable, which is what folks in this field call CSAM, child sexual abuse material.

1:01:52It's the worst stuff that gets posted on any of these platforms. And there was a great report out of Stanford this month that took a look at these networks of buyers and sellers of CSAM. And without getting into all of the details, one of the implications of that report was that this stuff is proliferating in part because there has been a disinvestment in trust and safety teams among the big platforms. Twitter, of course, number one. I mean, they have lost almost their entire trust and safety division. Do they even have a trust and safety division anymore? Their head of trust and safety recently resigned.

1:02:26Their head of brand safety recently resigned. It's unclear to me in this moment who is running that division. Cat Turd 2 is running the— The trust and safety dimension of Twitter. Got a battlefield promotion. There was also a piece in March by this law professor, Kate Klonick, who wrote about the sort of past five years as a golden age of tech accountability. And she wrote about how counterintuitive that seemed, that in this era where Congress passed not one single new tech regulation, that we would think about that as the golden age. But then she also lays out some of the big investments that these companies made in making the platform safer.

1:03:01And she said, you know, I hate to say it, but we may look back at these as the good days. So I think the question now is, where do we go forward? And I really only have one idea, which is that a reason that this stuff started to get a lot of attention after the 2016 election was that there was a lot of pressure on these platforms from regulators, from lawmakers, from journalists, from activists. and I do think it may be the case that over the past year or so, after Trump left office, some of us, myself included probably, took our eye off the ball a little bit and we started to feel like, okay, the investments have been made, the platforms are now taking this seriously, we can no longer assume that the teams are adequately staffed, that they're paying attention to the right things and I think it's going to be incumbent on us as journalists who cover this world to start ringing these alarms when we see things going wrong.

1:03:55So I hear everything that you're saying, and I agree largely with a lot of it. I mean, just anecdotally, like, I used to spend a lot of my time covering disinformation on social media, and I don't anymore. Yeah, it was very annoying to me when you did this. I was trying to make that my thing, and I'm like, oh, it's got to be his thing, too? So now we're all writing about AI and all this stuff happening there, and it does seem like there's been sort of like a little bit of kind of outrage fatigue among some of the tech press about like, Like, oh, am I really going to write another story about a crazy conspiracy theory that's going viral on social media?

1:04:27And I think for a lot of reporters, the answer to that is like increasingly no. But I want to challenge you on this because I don't necessarily think that it's a bad thing if we have past peak trust and safety. And in part, that's because I think that what's happening in addition to all of the factors you mentioned is that social media is just becoming a lot less centralized, right? We don't have these kind of massive hubs where every conversation and every political discourse is flowing through them. So if the conversation is not all happening on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, if it is happening in Discord servers and group chats and all these other places where people are now talking amongst themselves on the Internet, maybe it's not that the sort of trolls won.

1:05:11Maybe it's that the trolls are just more diffuse now, and you really don't need these big centralized police forces of content moderators anymore because there just isn't that much political discourse happening on these platforms. What do you think of that? It is definitely the case that social media is not as monolithic as it once was. We've talked about some of the new upstarts on this very show. But just because there are more social platforms and the conversations are more diffuse doesn't mean that there aren't still risks here. You know, the QAnon movement did not start on Facebook. It started on 4chan, but it spread from there to every other network, right?

1:05:50So just because a network is smaller doesn't mean that the rest of us are going to be protected once that conspiracy theory moves off a small platform into, let's say, the mainstream of the Republican Party. So it's just something that I want us to keep an eye on because, of course, the platforms are going to tell us every step of the way. we continue to take trust and safety very seriously. We're not reducing our investment, but I'm less convinced and I'm nervous. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that it's certainly possible that as the 2024 election approaches, that these problems will get more salient.

1:06:28It makes a lot of sense to me that there isn't as much investment in trust and safety these days as there was a few years ago. I mean, the biggest reason is because Donald Trump is not the president right now. So when you did have Trump in the White House, there just was this kind of like urgency to content moderation because not only was he in the White House, but there was a whole sort of like pro-Trump media ecosystem that had revved up to support him and, you know, spread lies about his enemies and opponents. And that just really has all dissipated. I mean, some of it's happening on Truth Social, some of it's happening on Parler or Getter or wherever the hell these people are now.

1:07:06You know, Tucker Carlson is not at Fox News anymore. Like, the ecosystem has just really shifted in a way that means that maybe the same structures that we had after 2016 aren't going to work or aren't even necessary in 2023. Well, here's the one thing I would say about whether these things are necessary. I think we can all agree that Twitter has lost the most trust and safety employees as a percentage of the staff of any of the big social platforms over the past year. And as of the last reporting that I read, Twitter's ad revenue was down 59 % year over year. And there's a direct connection between the degree to which you set and enforce policies and the degree to which advertisers are going to want to spend money to be on your platform.

1:07:45I guess I'm curious what you think they think about that question. Like, these are companies. They are not, you know, humanitarian ventures. They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. And they want to make money. And so you would think that if there was such a clear connection between the amount you spend on trust and safety and the amount of money you make in advertising, that they would be pouring money into this stuff still. So do you think they have a different idea about that? Do they think that this connection between how much you moderate your content and how much you make in advertising are not as connected as you think they are?

1:08:19I think they're connected, but I think that it just leaves out the political piece. It leaves out the fears of being called to account for every single policy and every single decision in front of Congress. And it doesn't account for the fact that there are a lot of folks at these platforms who want to enable the maximum amount of speech they possibly can because that is a principle that they hold dear. And I respect that principle. I do. But the reason I want to talk about this on today's show is because it feels like every time I look up from my laptop over the past few weeks, I see a platform sort of retreating from a position that I thought was pretty good and that had kind of taken a long time to get to.

1:08:57And the platforms just are not going to talk about this in any honest way. And so I think we just kind of need to kick them with our spurs a little bit so that they know that we can't retreat to a pre-2016 view of the world. Right. I think that makes sense. I'm sorry I'm pushing you so hard on this, but I... No, I get it. You love bullying and hate speech, and you get mad when you don't see it on the internet. And I understand that. I just want to be free to use my ivermectin to treat my COVID in peace. No, but I want to float one other hypothesis here, which is that I think there's a sense among some people I've talked to with these platforms that the tactics that they tried over the past, call it six or seven years, to sort of combat misinformation and conspiracy theories and hate speech, they really just weren't that effective.

1:09:45So, for example, there's a poll that came out last year that found that 61 % of Republicans still believe that the 2020 presidential election was illegitimate. And that number hasn't moved, even as platforms have tried to combat this lie about the 2020 election. And so if you're an executive at one of these platforms, you might just say, well, look, we spent all this money, we hired all these people, Well, we tried our best to keep this type of misinformation off our services, and it didn't ultimately matter. It didn't change anyone's mind. And so why are we even doing this? Yeah, and people do feel that way at these platforms, but that is defeatism.

1:10:23That is just sort of saying from the jump that when you try and you fail, the response is to give up. Now, look, it is true that these social networks are only one piece of a broader media ecosystem. The idea that the 2020 election was stolen is an article of faith for many, if not most Republicans. It gets promoted across their entire media ecosystem, and that would be true whether or not the platforms enforce this sort of thing. But again, almost no one who works at these platforms believes that the 2020 election was stolen. And they are building a product that can advance that belief and has advanced that belief.

1:10:57And so part of what I'm making is just a moral appeal to say, is that the thing that you want to build? You personally, who knows that the election was not stolen, you want to go up and work every day and build a tool that helps to advance that lie and potentially rekindle the violent movement that resulted in January 6th? Like, that's how you want to spend your career. If so, great. But let's have an honest discussion. And like, say that to my face. Right. I mean, it does go back to this theory that I've had for a while now, which is that the most effective regulator of social media is actually shame.

1:11:25Congress, you know, it hasn't passed anything to regulate social media. But the thing that has actually made these platforms sort of like shape up and kind of take on the problems is that their executives and employees just do not want to be associated with the kind of garbage that is on their platforms. Like this is not what they want their legacies to be. They don't want to tell their grandkids someday. Like I worked at the social media platform that like got Donald Trump elected or got him reelected or led to a violent insurrection or COVID denial. So I think if for no other reason, then there's kind of keeping that pressure applied.

1:11:56I think it is good that we're talking about this, but I do want to just sound a note of caution, which is that I don't know that actually all the investments that they made had that much effect. And that's an area where I just don't know what to make because these companies invested billions of dollars, hired all these people, and yet there's still so much misinformation out there. And I just don't really know what to make of that, except that like maybe we need a new tactic. I mean, Kevin, just live for like 30 seconds in your mind in a world where they had not made those investments, where people were free to say whatever they wanted on these platforms, where the algorithms were promoting the wildest conspiracy theories the most aggressively, like, you never would have stopped covering it because there would have been a new crisis related to that, you know, every week.

1:12:40So, again, like, I understand the inclination to throw up your hands and say, well, it didn't work, but we can't know what it would be like to live in a world where these companies did not hire these people. That's true. That's true. And it's hard to play out the counterfactual there. So, let's say five years from now, if these platforms really do de-emphasize trust and safety and really just let anything go on the platforms, how do you think the platforms will look different five years from now? My fear is that it will become ever more difficult to tell what is true and what is false both on social media and off.

1:13:17You know, there's another dimension to this, Kevin, that we haven't brought into things yet, which is generative AI, right? We know that we are about to live in a world where bad actors or trolls can use these tools to generate infinite posts about infinite things, flood these social networks with them. And if there's not robust trust and safety teams in place to catch that stuff, prevent it from going viral, we're just going to live in a world that has even less of a shared sense of reality than it does today. And I'm somebody who believes that you need a shared sense of reality to have a functioning democracy.

1:13:54So my fear is you get five years down that road, you add in a bunch of AI, and you reduce the investment in trust and safety, and these platforms become more dangerous maybe than they have ever been. Well, so I think that's plausible, but let me just sketch out a kind of counter argument here, which is that, yes, these AI tools that we've talked so much about on the show, like they do make it very easy for people with bad intentions to kind of create misinformation and disseminate it. But they also allow these platforms to be more aggressive about policing the misinformation. So I heard about one project recently where some researchers at Stanford are trying to use GPT-4 to do content moderation, basically to use the AI tools for content moderation and maybe to actually replace some of those horrible jobs that you've written so much about where people just sit in an office building for eight hours a day just like viewing the worst stuff imaginable and deciding whether to take it down or leave it up.

1:14:52Like, maybe you can actually do a lot of that work with these new large language model-based AI systems and maybe scale trust and safety without having to, like, go out and hire thousands of people to sit there all day and look at horrible things. So you're saying the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a generative AI is a good guy with a generative AI? I'm very uncomfortable with that, but I think that actually is what I'm saying, and maybe that actually is true. So what do you think it would take to get the platforms to reverse course on this? Is there anything short of like another pandemic or a mass incident of violence that can make them eager to reinvest interest in safety?

1:15:28Well, there has been some legislation proposed that would require them to be more transparent about what's going on on their platforms. They would have to measure which posts were going viral. They would have to disclose that publicly. There's something called the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act that just got reintroduced this month that calls for some of those things. And the idea there is that if the platforms were legally required to measure and report on some of this stuff, it would probably set a floor on how far they could walk back some of these systems that they set up. And it would create a legal obligation and a sense that they had to take it seriously.

1:16:06Right, right. That makes a lot of sense to me. If you're legally required to, like, tell regulators this is the most popular content on our platform, you're probably going to want to make sure that list is relatively clean. And I also think that platform design and the choices that these companies are making about what to show their users has a big effect. I mean, one thing that Facebook did in the past couple of years that I think really has changed the media ecosystem is to just deemphasize politics and news in the news feed today. If you go on Facebook, you do not see, you know, a ton of links about political controversies.

1:16:39You do not see a ton of arguments about various policies, in part because they kind of realized, like, oh, one way to just slow the spread of misinformation on Facebook is to just deemphasize political news altogether. And so that's a choice that they made. So I actually think those kind of platform decisions will matter as much, if not more, than the specific investments that these companies are making in trust and safety. Did you guys see the new product that Meta showed off to its employees last week? No, it wasn't. It's a new social network for discussing news and politics. What could go wrong?

1:17:12Anyway, looking forward to the presidential election, everybody. It feels like one of the morals of this story is we should just announce that we are running for president so that we can say whatever we want to on social media. It's worth a shot. Who's president on our ticket and who's vice president? I want to be VP. I just want to fuck off. I want to go live in that admiral's mansion. you're taller and more commanding I think you have to be the president you

1:18:21Thank you.

1:18:30times.com. Yeah. If you've eaten a beast burger, we want to know how it tasted.

1:19:00Thank you.