Meta Goes Mask Off

0:04Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the 404 Media co-founders, Sam Cole. Hello. Emmanuel Mayberg. Hey, what's up? And Jason Kebler. Hello, hello. If you're watching this video on YouTube, I'm wearing a knockoff 404 Media horse t-shirt.

0:48Please don't pirate our shirts. This is for an article in the future. However, our merch is now in stock. I'm shipping it actively. So you can check that out on our website. you're talking about the real mergers in stock as in we have new designs we mentioned uh last year people will start getting them soon as he says arrive but the shirt you're wearing is well whenever you tweet a t-shirt design all of those bots jump in and it's like oh my god here's the here's the here's the designer copied or whatever um you said you're going to write about that so i'll leave it there but hey it's a good shirt you know it seems so yeah it's pirated though don't do it don't do it yeah please just get the actual merch from us that's actually good um happy new year to all of our listeners this is the first real sort of new podcast of the year it has been an exceptionally busy day um a location data company was hacked jason did a bunch of stuff um on meta uh emmanuel did stuff about ai and minions honestly there is almost too much to talk about.

1:57So maybe we'll even revisit some of those stories in future episodes. But let's start with some of those meta stories. And Jason, this is one you wrote just basically a minute ago. Facebook deletes internal employee criticism of new board member Dana White. So what's this new appointment. Yeah, it's been a really, really busy day, busy week for Meta and controversies and Mark Zuckerberg, etc, etc. But basically, on Monday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Dana White, who is the president of UFC and also appeared at the Republican National Convention with Donald Trump would become a board member of Meta alongside some folks also who like the CEO Ferrari is going to be on the board for some reason.

2:56I didn't know that. Yeah. Reasons that I couldn't possibly explain to you, nor will I try. But Dana White is a very controversial figure because one, he slapped his wife at a nightclub on video on New Year's Eve 2023. and was not really punished for it in any way, shape, or form. He's very much aligned with Donald Trump. Joel Kaplan also was promoted to be head of global policy. Nick Clegg is out. And if those words mean anything to you, then your brain is slightly poisoned. But basically, they got rid of this guy who I thought was quite bad. Nick Clegg oversaw some really bad policies at Meta over the years and replaced him with someone who seemingly is going to be even worse.

3:52Joel Kaplan was in the George W. Bush White House. and all this sort of coincides with Mark Zuckerberg announcing that they are going to do a return to quote free expression and what free expression in Mark Zuckerberg's world means no more fact checking for one you will be allowed to essentially do hate speech against gay and trans people more or less explicitly is going to be allowed now on meta platforms. They're going to delete a lot less content in general, and they're going to show more political content, which is really interesting considering the New York Times did a gigantic story literally like three months ago saying Mark Zuckerberg is done with politics.

4:46Since then, he's gone to Mar-a-Lago. He's donated a million dollars to Donald Trump. and now they're sort of explicitly turning to this right-wing-ish world. And I know that's a lot of setup, but essentially we got leaked internal communications comments from all of these announcements that they were doing where pretty much any criticism of Dana White, of this decision, was being deleted by this internal... these internal content moderators, which are essentially an arm of Facebook HR. So where's this conversation taking place? It's like an internal message board, basically, inside Facebook, just so people can visualize it.

5:33Yeah, it looks exactly like Facebook. It's a clone of Facebook, but only Facebook employees can see it. And so Mark Zuckerberg does a post there, and then there's a bunch of comments beneath the post. and sort of like beneath the post announcing Dana White, there were comments from people who are employees of Facebook saying things like, quote, kind of disheartening to see people in the comments celebrating a man who is on video assaulting his wife and another who was recently convicted of rape, which was referring to Conor McGregor, who is like a really big UFC fighter who was forced to pay$250 ,000 by a court after being accused of rape.

6:18Another person said, we have completely lost the plot. And then another person said, quote, I can kind of excuse individuals for being unaware, but Meta surely did their due diligence on White and concluded that what he did is fine. I feel like I'm on another planet. All of these posts were deleted. Right, that's what I was going to get to. because it's not just people are making these comments, these employees, and they're saying internally, look, we're not happy with this person being appointed to the board. That's already an interesting and important story and one that will be worth covering.

6:57It shows discontent inside one of the most important tech companies, even if its relevance somewhat is kind of going off the rails. And I think we'll get into that with some of the AI stuff as well. But that would already be a story. But as you say, there's all of this context around meta shifting to the right or even to zoom out even further, they're going from like a hands on approach to basically a hands off approach where they're saying, I don't know, do whatever you want. Community notes will sort it out, blah, blah, blah. We're not going to fact check stuff. while Zuckerberg is saying all that, these comments by employees are being moderated and are being censored.

7:38So what's the deal with them being deleted? Why are they being deleted? Yeah, so Facebook has this team called the Internal Community Relations Team, which is essentially like content moderators for what you say to other people within Facebook, like what Facebook employees say to each other. And they have to abide by these rules called the community engagement expectations, which are like rules for how you talk to your co-workers. and basically a member of that HR team comes in and says, hey, we've deleted a lot of stuff. And the thing that the HR team says essentially is, these violated the CEE, which is the Community Engagement Expectations.

8:27And they said, quote, we need to keep in mind that the CEE applies to how we communicate with and about members of our community, including members of our board. Insulting, criticizing, or antagonizing our colleagues or board members is not aligned with the CEE. But you can say... A lot of these things are very respectful. Very respectful. Just like, hey, why did we appoint someone who slapped his wife to our board? Why are we doing these sorts of things? They were very run-of-the-mill criticisms. And these were getting deleted and saying And they didn't apply to... They didn't follow the CEE, like these internal rules.

9:12And so there's been people beefing. And then meanwhile, publicly, Mark Zuckerberg is saying, we're rededicating ourselves to free speech. We're going to moderate less. So rules for the public are gone. Internal rules, when they cause problems for Facebook or when they cause any sort of strife because these decisions are very unpopular within the company. I don't know. It's just like, it's a mess. So in Meta, you can't insult or even mildly criticize a new board member, but you can say that gay or trans people are mentally unwell. And that's literally in the policy now, right? We didn't write this.

9:56There was a Wired piece that just came out, and you sent it to me, Jason, as well. But just very, very briefly, what's that in that along with this announcement from Zuckerberg, there's also changes to the actual code of conduct. And it's something along the lines of, well, you know, this is part of the national conversation now in America. So you should be allowed to say that trans or gay people have mental health issues. Is that basically the sum of it? Yeah, I mean, Zuckerberg recorded a video explaining these, sort of like wearing a giant chain with his new look, saying that they're trying to simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.

10:39And so what this means in practice, which was reported by Wired, as you said, there's been specific changes to Facebook's community guidelines, which are the outward facing rules for using meta platforms. So Instagram and Facebook primarily and threads. And now you can essentially do what you just said. You can call gay people mentally ill, which is something that you could not do previously on meta platforms. It sounds like politics is out of Facebook to me, for sure. yeah uh it's interesting how they say out you know immigration and gender and that the conversation of that has changed sort of in the mainstream yeah because trump got a slight you know a slight percentage point over or whatever it's just the point is that these companies will shift with different administrations and this time it's been basically mask off and that it's not just um sort of going along with the administration but like actively sort of pandering to it um so you wrote this other meta story that i think we'll just talk about briefly um and this sort of happened over the holiday break but it's called i think it was over the holiday break meta's ai profiles are indistinguishable from terrible spam that took over Facebook.

12:07It's a great headline. What are these or were these AI profiles exactly? Yeah, so in September 2023, Meta announced that it was going to have these AI profiles where they were quote-unquote like people, like profiles on Meta, but the people were not real. They were AI generated. All the content that they made was AI generated. And you could also chat with these AI-generated people. And when they announced it, there were 28 of them, and 15 of them were based on celebrities. The most memorable one to me is that Snoop Dogg was a dungeon master, like a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master. And you could talk to Snoop Dogg about Dungeons & Dragons.

12:55Mr. Beast also had one. There was a handful of other ones. And they announced this, and this was a big deal for a moment. and then no one used them at all. And Facebook, well, Meta deleted all of the profiles belonging to celebrities. So of the 28, they deleted 15 celebrity-focused ones, presumably because they didn't want to keep paying the celebrities because they were on top of it. For their likeness or whatever. Yeah, it just wasn't working. That was pretty embarrassing. They left up 13 other profiles that were not based on real people that were just like these, I don't know, like themed stereotypes of people.

13:36So there was Carter, who was a Latino relationship coach. There was Izzy, who was like an independent singer-songwriter. There was Alvin the alien, who was like a blue alien that talked about how Earth was weird. And they were all like using metas imagined by meta AI to post images that were like engagement bait, more or less. And they did this for a few... As if they were real users. Like, oh, hey, I'm the alien. Here's my Facebook profile. And I'm posting funny little pictures. Like, obviously, they're not misrepresenting themselves. Like, they are saying they're AI. But they're trying to act like a normal user, basically.

14:21Yeah, so like Izzy, for example, the singer-songwriter, posted an image of a concert. Like, an AI-generated image of a concert. and said, still reeling from last week's show. What's your favorite show you've ever seen? That's the type of thing that they were posting. So these were launched in September 2023. They existed for a few months, and then they all stopped posting. Then a lot of time passes. No one really talks about it. None of these profiles were popular in any way. A lot of the posts had six likes, two comments. things like that. And then over Christmas, the Financial Times does an interview with this meta executive named Connor Hayes, who tells the Financial Times that meta is going to allow people to create their own AI profiles.

15:17Meaning you'll be able to create an AI profile, like a create a character type thing and then set it up with its own instagram profile or its own facebook profile and let it loose on the world more or less which is very similar to other products like uh character ai and and some that sam have written about uh this interview gets a lot of attention people get very mad about it because it's a dumb idea first and like i think the consciousness around the types of like ai that meta is shoving down people's throats is is a lot more well understood now. But in the aftermath of that, people find these old AI profiles that Meta set up.

16:03And there were two in particular that were very ridiculous. One was Liv, who was, quote, a Black queer mama, who is just offensive on its face because she's a caricature of diversity. at a company that notoriously doesn't have a lot of diversity. Yeah, they bundled all the diversity into one AI. And they thought that would be good enough. And then, I mean, you'll get to it. But who knows if that was even trained on dates that came from diverse people, whatever. Yeah, who knows? It's a joke, yeah. But then you look through Liv's posts or people start looking through Liv's posts. And there's one about, it's quote, kicking off the new year in service of our community, leading this season's coat dry was an honor, especially because it provided my little ones a tangible example for helping others.

16:54And then the AI generated image is of coats being donated to homeless people. And it's just like, this didn't happen. You didn't donate coats to homeless people. It's very offensive. And then there's another one about her hanging out with her daughters at her house. And it's a slideshow of three images. And in the first image, the children are black. In the second image, the children are much darker black. They're definitely different children with a different skin tone. And then in the third image, the children are white, just straight up white. And they're different children in each image, and their hands are fucked up, their faces are fucked up, they're obviously AI generated.

17:42And it's just like, what are we doing here? This is crazy. So it's just bad. It's not even offensive for what it's doing. It's also just really shit at what it's doing as well. Yeah, all of the above. And so people get really mad that this was happening and thought that this was the new AI profiles that Meta was announcing. and so I wrote a story kind of explaining like actually these profiles are old still bad that Facebook tried this and that seemingly there's more to come even though this was a horrible failure and no one liked it and then people pointed out that you couldn't actually block these AIs and so Meta then goes and like deletes all of them um so they're all gone now and And there's been a lot of people who've been talking to these AI characters as in chatting with them and trying to expose more about how they were trained or whatever, interviewing them.

18:48I don't want to talk too much about that because these are like hallucinations. You cannot take what these things are saying seriously. but it's very obvious that these are like deeply broken tools that were just sort of like rolled out onto the platform said a bunch of like really caricatured stereotypical stuff and uh yeah big mess big big mess yeah so i mean you say they're kind of haphazardly just rolled out and i think sort of the main question just before i ask about sort of the other spam that you've covered but what does this show us about meta the company they have this where they're they're rolling this out kind of like stepping on a rake multiple times as they're doing it they have this other story you did that we don't need to get into but basically where instagram was showing a user's own face back at them in some sort of AI experiment.

19:52We had Meta and the Metaverse, obviously, and that was a gigantic flop. What the fuck is Meta doing? What does this show us about this company? Is it just flailing around trying to figure out what to do? Yeah, I mean, I don't think Mark Zuckerberg has any idea what he's doing, to be totally honest. It's like he had the one great idea with Facebook. They bought a bunch of other companies. They're desperately trying to find the next big thing with the metaverse and then now with ai and it's not working really like it doesn't seem like users want this but at the same time the company is so large and so powerful that it's able to experiment on with these like really fucked up ai things change its algorithm to promote ai get rid of various content moderation rules, change them all the time.

20:53And people are sort of limited in what they can do to fight back because a lot of people feel like they have to be on these platforms because their friends are there because they feel locked in. That's kind of my takeaway. But actually, I'm curious what Emmanuel and Sam think is going on here because it's all I've been thinking about for the last several months. Um, and it's just, to me, it seems like a super messy company that is just so powerful that it can do these things. But I do wonder if at some point there'll be an actual backlash. I mean, just the fact that they have to have a moderation team for their own internal employees is crazy to me.

21:35That just shows how fucking huge this company is. Um, and how many different moving parts of it there are. Like, we know this. Obviously, you can see the numbers everywhere. But just in practice, how do you even get one good idea launched in an environment like that where you're collaborating with thousands of other people potentially? I don't know it sounds like a nightmare it's also it's hard to imagine like Facebook and this is me just talking as someone who's like not a Facebook reporter like it's there are people much harder people doing this but like it's hard to imagine Facebook being as big as it is having the issues of like growth pressure which I assume is what this is like it's got to be just like investor pressure and the need to grow in order to stay alive and going they have to keep growing and they have to or growing you know quote-unquote growing like they have to keep launching new bullshit and see what works and then if stuff doesn't work they just trash it and move on um which i think of as a problem of like startups or like new you know accelerator companies or something it's not like facebook's been around for what like 15 20 years or something so how do they still have that problem is crazy to me i don't know I think a couple of years ago, they stopped reporting monthly active users or one of those metrics because that's what companies do when that number slows down.

23:08But probably for advertisers, they keep having to juice the numbers. And I think that's just like ultimately what is going on. It seems like it is inevitable that at some point it will collapse because advertisers will figure out that all the engagement around their ads is bots talking to bots. But that seems to me pretty clearly what is going on. I feel like we've mentioned it a couple of times and we'll probably keep talking about it until either... I don't know, that just becomes the new normal or it blows up in their face. But it seems across the board that is what they're doing with all of these AI features.

23:47I just can't get over the low quality of it. And just very briefly to touch on the headline, it says this stuff is indistinguishable from terrible spam that took over Facebook. That's referring to the stuff that Jason's led everybody's coverage on around shrimp Jesus, and there's an artist uploads this thing, and then AI rips it off and posts it, blah, blah, blah, and it's spamming all over the place. People are commenting on it sometimes as if it's real, sometimes the comments are bots, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. To be honest, the spam sounds like it's better than some of these meta AI profiles, which are kind of inconsistent and they can't even have the children, you know, remaining identifiable from photo to photo.

24:32What do you make of that, Jason? The spam is better. The spam that people are making is more engaging and people are engaging. It's like shows in the numbers. It's more successful. what I think is happening is that Facebook well meta has been trying to incentivize people to post on its platforms and I think that the overall appetite Facebook's goal is to have people on its site forever and for there to be an endless stream of new content and for people to engage with that content endlessly. And even though you have literally billions of people posting on Instagram and Facebook, there is... You're going to run out of content at some point for specific niches.

25:22And what Facebook has learned over the years is that if you can hyper-target ads to people based on their interests, their behavior, blah, blah, blah, that is a lot more effective for advertisers. And therefore, you can charge more money and more people are going to advertise, so on and so forth. And so what I think they're banking on is that they will be able to create an endless supply of hyper-specific, artificially intelligent generated content that will be hyper-specific to each individual person eventually, and that it can then sell ads that are really, really well targeted based on that behavior.

26:06And that that is a more sustainable model for endless content creation than it is relying on user-generated content forever. That's what I think their big bet is. I don't think it's going to work, but that is why I think they're leaning into this so hard. I mean, I don't know, but it sounds like you hit the nail on the head. So we'll leave that there and we'll come back to Mesa when it continues to burn to the ground. We'll be right back and we will talk about a story from Sam, which, you know, has been several stories leading up to this point, about how Pornhub is now basically blocked in the majority of the US South.

26:49We'll be right back after this.

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31:41All right, and we are back. Sam, as mentioned, this is one you wrote. The headline is Pornhub is now blocked in almost all of the U.S. South. So when did this come into effect? December 31st, January 1st, like when did this become reality? Yeah, so it's been, like you said, a long time coming. It's been something that's been in the process for, oh, I would say two years now, almost two years, where these states are kind of slowly, we're seeing this creep of age verification laws being passed and enacted in all these states, mostly in the South, also some in the Midwest. and I can list the states in a second, but this is news now because three more states passed age replication laws as of, or they passed them, but then they're enacted as of January 1st.