Check in the mail: our analysis of Epstein’s correspondence

0:03Rosie Blau: The Economist.

0:10Rosie Blau: Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blau. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

0:25Rosie Blau: Since December, under-16s in Australia have been banned from social media. Other countries are getting ready to follow. But does such legislation actually work? And for this recording, I was taken into the studio blindfold, then asked to guess what I was tasting. It turned out to be part exercise in ritual humiliation, part education about a new phenomenon coming to a supermarket near you.

1:01Rosie Blau: First up, though.

1:09Rosie Blau: The recent release of documents relating to paedophile and rapist Jeffrey Epstein has revealed an astonishing network. An unknown number of powerful men and some women trafficked and abused a much larger number of vulnerable women and girls. The emails also reveal a broader trade in influence and favors, a network peddling patronage, secrets and access. But making sense of the more than three million documents comes with incredible challenges, one journalists all over the world are tackling. Our data team has just published its analysis of what the trove contains.

1:47Tom Wainwright: Fortunately, there was this volunteer group of software engineers who extracted all of the text from these PDFs.

1:57Rosie Blau: Dan Rosenheck is The Economist's data editor.

2:01Tom Wainwright: And transformed them into a big fat database that anyone can search on the internet via a website that looks just like Gmail and that we were able to train our analysis on.

2:16Rosie Blau: What were you actually looking for as you combed through the releases?

2:20Tom Wainwright: These emails, which are concentrated between 2008 and 2019, span a range from the mundane to the explicit to, in some cases, the potentially criminal. We were looking for two things. First, just straight counts of who Epstein was in touch with. And second, what evidence was there of Epstein's crimes in these files? For the first portion, we identified each message by sender and recipients and then tried to group them all together despite misspellings and different names and email addresses and stuff. And for the second, we trained a large language model to search through and score all 1.4 million emails on how disturbing they would be to an average reader to find the needles in a high stack that were at least explicit and potentially evidence of criminal activity.

3:22Rosie Blau: So what did you find?

3:23Tom Wainwright: Most of the correspondence was with his team, secretary, accountant, pilot, lawyer, all of the various staff at all of his properties. Then if you exclude them and look at his external contacts, one of the main things that struck me was Epstein's network was unbelievably broad and balanced. He was messaging directly with very high level or top end or elite people of the non-staff contacts fully a quarter have their own Wikipedia page in like lots of different industries. 19 % finance, which makes sense because he was a financier, but 10 % science and technology and I think 6 % in law and 6 % other types of business.

4:16Tom Wainwright: You name the field, he had at least a handful of very influential and well-connected people in that industry. Really broad.

4:26Rosie Blau: And what did you find out about the individual correspondents?

4:31Tom Wainwright: There were a handful of people who were in touch with him all the time. The one that leapt out really in a class by herself was Katherine Rumler, who was Barack Obama's White House counsel for a number of years. She actually just resigned from Goldman after this came out. But she exchanged over 11 ,000 emails with him between 2014 and 19. And I like broke down the frequency and it was on 70 percent of days. So out of every seven days of the week on five of them, they exchanged at least one email. Other people who were always in his inbox, Ariane de Rothschild of the Rothschild banking family, a billionaire, 5 ,500 emails with her.

5:27Tom Wainwright: He was in touch with Larry Summers all the time, the former Treasury Secretary. He was in touch with Tom Pritzker all the time, the Hyatt Hotels billionaire. A lot of these relationships were extremely consistent and intense. Emailing with Jeffrey Epstein is not a crime. And many of the people who did email with him say that they had no knowledge either of his crimes or of the scale of his crimes. and the only person on our tree map who has been even charged with a crime, not to mention convicted, is Ghislaine Maxwell, who was his longtime accomplice. And then there was a long tail of rich and powerful people who were there less often, but enough to show up.

6:15Tom Wainwright: And one way you can really tell you're kind of getting only the tip of the iceberg here is some of the rich and famous people who appear less often, when you look at those messages, a lot of them are messages to and from secretaries and assistants just being like, can we schedule a phone call?

6:36Rosie Blau: And do you have an example of that?

6:38Tom Wainwright: One in particular that leapt out, Steve Tisch, who's a billionaire who's the owner of the New York Giants American football team, they had an exchange where they were discussing women to whom Epstein could introduce Tisch and Epstein says in a message, can you give me a number to call? I don't like having written records of this stuff. Steve Tisch, for his part, has issued a statement saying that he regrets his relationship with Epstein and that all discussions he had with Epstein regarding women were regarding adult women.

7:14Rosie Blau: Dan, you've spent far more time with these emails than is probably healthy. What have you found out about how Epstein spoke with the people he was involved with? There are some very worrisome needles in haystacks.

7:30Tom Wainwright: To find them, we fed the entire archive into a large language model and had it score every message based on how disturbing it would be to an average reader. And that filtered out 1 ,500 email threads that were, at least in the bot's estimation, very much not mundane. And the vast majority of those disturbing messages were not with people with big public profiles. A small handful of individual messages with people with public profiles that were flagged as alarming, but not a ton.

8:14Rosie Blau: And Dan, there's so much information here, and yet we know there's also a lot more. So what's not here?

8:21Tom Wainwright: The Justice Department said that it did not publish everything it dug up. Three million of the six million total documents that they unearthed on a first pass, they determined not to release. The second thing is that we were only able to analyze the email portion of the files. There are lots and lots of other types of documents that are also in the files that may reveal a lot more. And analysis of that is trickling out, but that will take longer. The final thing is that I think the biggest remaining questions about Epstein are not answered and probably cannot be answered by this type of information, which are, number one, how exactly did he get that sweetheart plea deal in 2008?

9:14Tom Wainwright: How did he manage to kill himself in a jail cell when he was supposed to be under constant surveillance? And who else was involved in his sex trafficking ring and potentially might be being protected to some degree with all the redactions. There's one example that we cited in the story of a message from a redacted sender that says, and I quote, your littlest girl was a little naughty to Epstein. So we don't know if that is from somebody who abused the littlest girl, somebody who provided the littlest girl, but the name's blacked out.

10:00Rosie Blau: Dan, thank you very much.

10:02Tom Wainwright: Thank you.

10:05Rosie Blau: And you can find much more by digging through the Digital Teams Project online. Find it in the Economist app.

10:25Rosie Blau: People don't agree on much these days. But whatever their politics, one thing does bring them together. the belief that social media is harming children and teenagers.

10:35Tom Standage: All right, kids are ended up in the hospital with burns all over their hands. Other places too. Why, you asked, but they're lighting themselves on fire for TikTok trend. A teenager has been remembered by his family as gifted after taking his own life following blackmail over nudes he sent on Snap. Dr. Vivek Murphy says social media is contributing to the ongoing mental health crisis in young people.

10:58Rosie Blau: Many people reckon they should be banned from using it altogether. And in December, Australia did just that, stopping under-16s from using Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other platforms.

11:10Tom Standage: So I was kicked off off my YouTube and my Snapchat platforms.

11:15Rosie Blau: So far, that has had mixed success.

11:18Tom Standage: I wasn't kicked off any of my social media accounts except for YouTube. Yeah, same here. Only YouTube has denied my access to it. I've only known a few people that have been banned only on TikTok and Snapchat. And really, there was no huge difference. They would easily fix the situation, make another account, get another device.

11:40Rosie Blau: But other countries are considering similar regulation. Spain recently proposed a ban to protect children from the digital Wild West. A dozen countries from Britain to Malaysia are also toying with the idea, as are several American states. Question is, does a ban actually help kids?

11:59Dan Rosenheck: These proposals come from a totally understandable desire to keep young people safe online.

12:05Rosie Blau: Tom Wainwright is our media editor.

12:08Dan Rosenheck: They come after years in which governments have been probably too relaxed about some of the risks that people face there. But these blanket bans for younger teenagers may be unlikely to achieve the aims that policymakers hope they will achieve.

12:22Rosie Blau: Tom aren't we all worried about what our kids are looking at online there seems to be a problem here

12:29Dan Rosenheck: that does need solving yeah I think it's one of those things that every parent worries about and I think probably quite a few children worry about as well we're at this interesting moment where today's parents of teenagers for the first time are of an age where they themselves might have used social media in their own teenage years or in their 20s we've seen a thankfully small number but significant number nonetheless of really serious tragedies involving children who've hurt themselves or even killed themselves, partly as a result of things that they've seen online. And at a bigger population level, I think many people are trying to figure out what is behind a worldwide decline in the mental health of young people.

13:08Dan Rosenheck: There's been a statistically significant increase in depressive episodes across many countries over the last 15 years or so, which roughly coincides with the period in which smartphones and social media have become much more popular. And so people are wondering what, if anything, can be done to try and solve this problem.

13:26Rosie Blau: So what's the general perception of those bans? What do people in different countries actually think about the idea of social media bans?

13:33Dan Rosenheck: Well, I'm not sure I've ever seen a more popular policy than this. I mean, it's just extraordinary. There's huge support for this among adults pretty much all over the world. I saw one series of polls done by Ipsos last year they did questioning in something like 40 countries and in every single one there was a majority in favour of banning under 16s from using social media. I looked down in a bit more detail at one of the polls here in the UK and it's a policy which has support among people of all ages of both sexes people who lean left people who lean right I think it's one of those policies where there's kind of something for everyone the left-wingers I think maybe like the idea of holding to account these sinister global corporations that want to monetise your children and right-wingers for their part maybe want to get back to a conservative traditional childhood where kids are outdoors building dens in the woods and that kind of stuff.

14:25Dan Rosenheck: So it seems to be something that really everybody likes the sound of.

14:30Rosie Blau: And yet you said at the top that those bans might not have the impact that politicians and the general population wants them to.

14:37Dan Rosenheck: Yeah I mean it's early days but I think there's reason to be sceptical about how much good these outright bans are going to do. One reason that is worth saying that people sometimes forget is that social media aren't all bad for children, just as they're not all bad for adults. If children are cut out of social media, it cuts them off from one of their sources of news about the world, in particular children who feel a little bit isolated, maybe because of where they live or something about themselves, their sexuality, for example. Going online can make them realise that they're part of a bigger community worldwide.

15:08Dan Rosenheck: There's a lot of worry about what the ban might to them and what they might be missing out on. And we spoke to a number of Australian parents about what they thought about this.

15:18Tom Standage: As a social worker, I'm really concerned about the socially isolated kids. Those young people, I think the threat to their well-being and lives, that outweighs their benefit of a poorly implemented ban. That's my feeling about it.

15:36Dan Rosenheck: One of the things that really struck me when I was doing this reporting was that these bans have been largely opposed by child protection groups, as I discovered when I spoke to Andy Burrows, the chief executive of the Molly Rose Foundation.

15:47Tom Standage: The problems of bad actors and criminality won't disappear. They will simply migrate to where children go. There's a real risk that if we say that we're proceeding with a ban, that immediately drains the energy away from regulating the services that are still in scope.

16:07Dan Rosenheck: I think many parents have in their mind a sort of idealised idea that as soon as they take away Instagram, their child is instantly going to get back to the Latin poetry or learning the piano or something like that. But the reality is that the kind of childhood that people perhaps had in the past has been pretty severely curtailed in recent decades. And that's what we heard from some of the parents that we spoke to.

16:30Tom Standage: We can't go back to the 80s. That's not realistic either. We can't recreate times from years ago because we have fond memories of it. I'm pretty sure my teenage behaviour was extremely risky. I think I'd rather Charlotte's in her bedroom on Instagram, to be honest.

16:48Rosie Blau: Tom, we've got a concrete situation, which is Australia, where under-16s have been banned from going on social media since December. How's that ban going?

16:58Dan Rosenheck: Well, we thought we'd ask the real experts, meaning teenagers themselves in Australia. And the first thing they pointed out was that they're finding lots of ways to get around this ban. They're faking their age, they're recreating accounts using other people's identities, or they're using obscure news sites like Lemonade, for example, which had a burst of popularity when the ban first came in.

17:18Tom Standage: A lot of kids have found ways around it. And now that so-called harmful content is easier for them to access because parents don't have control over their accounts anymore.

17:27Dan Rosenheck: Australia hasn't banned young teenagers from messaging apps or from multiplayer online games, so cyberbullying may continue on those.

17:35Tom Standage: I do not like the ban because it's just purely isolating the people who are banned from the other people. And I feel like we were born around it, our generation, and them just taking away from us is not good for our mental health.

17:51Dan Rosenheck: And then there's the worry that higher age limits may just delay problems until youngsters are 16. then they'll suddenly gain full access to social sites that they don't have much experience using.

18:00Tom Standage: 16 is such a high number. People are thinking about their jobs, thinking about university, getting their learner's permit and getting ready for the real world, their future. And not having social media is honestly kind of harmful.

18:12Dan Rosenheck: It'll be a long time until we know exactly how the Australian plan has gone. But so far, it seems as if implementation isn't without its problems.

18:19Rosie Blau: So then what can be done, Tom? How can social media be made a more suitable place for teens to spend their time?

18:27Dan Rosenheck: I think there's a lot of appetite for reform here. And one thing that interests me is that whereas in the last decade or so, all the focus has been on the content on social media, it seems as if now people are moving more towards thinking about how the platforms themselves might change the design of how they operate. And we're seeing a pincer movement here where in the US there are legal challenges which have just got underway, which could have some very big impacts. There's a case going on in California against Meta and against YouTube by an individual who believes that those platforms harmed her mental health when she was a child.

19:03Dan Rosenheck: And at the same time in the European Union, the European Commission has preliminarily found TikTok guilty of breaking its laws on creating an addictive platform. And it has cited features like TikTok's infinite scroll, its auto-playing videos, its personalised algorithm. And these are things which are completely core to how TikTok and apps like it operate and what makes them so popular. So if these design features of the apps are now in the crosshairs, the result could be that these apps turn out to be quite different things, not just for teenagers, but for adults too going forward.

19:40Rosie Blau: Tom, thank you very much.

19:42Dan Rosenheck: Thank you.

19:57Rosie Blau: This is hilarious.

19:59Dan Rosenheck: I see you've got the... I do, I do. Wait a minute, where are all my bits and bobs? You've got them here.

20:05Rosie Blau: I may have my blindfold on, but my excellent sense of perception tells me I'm hearing the voice of Tom Standage, one of the Economist deputy editors.

20:16Rosie Blau: What are you going to feed me?

20:18Dan Rosenheck: Yeah, you're going to find out. Right, here comes a pop. One of them.

20:24Rosie Blau: It's a good sound.

20:26Dan Rosenheck: It is. Happy sound. So what can you tell me about that wine? What does it strike you as?

20:33Rosie Blau: Not very sweet.

20:34Dan Rosenheck: Okay, what colour would you say that wine was?

20:37Rosie Blau: Oh, good question. I was assuming it was white. Ooh, maybe this is, hang on.

20:42Dan Rosenheck: I'm going to have this one.

20:44Rosie Blau: This one is a different temperature.

20:46Dan Rosenheck: Yes.

20:46Rosie Blau: Look at those skills of perception. Yeah, this does smell like red wine.

20:52Dan Rosenheck: Okay, so now we have another wine here.

20:56Rosie Blau: It's cold. I would say it is white. It's not fragrant. It's quite clear. Now I've tried it again. I think it's red. But I wouldn't be sure about that.

21:09Dan Rosenheck: Well, the answer is yes, because it's both. The third wine is this one here. And this is a wine called a blouge wine. That is a combination of blanc, white and rouge because it's both. And what's happening there is that...

21:27Rosie Blau: I thought that was rosé.

21:28Dan Rosenheck: No, it's different from rosé. So basically with white wine, you take white wine grapes and you crush them and you have very little skin contact. You take the skins away and that's how you make white wine. With red wine, you take your red grapes, you crush them. and you have a long period of skin contact and that puts all of the structure and the colour into the wine. If you take white grapes and you treat them like a red grape, so in other words, you crush them and you leave the skins in there for a long time, you get orange wine. So that's white grapes put through a red wine process. And if you take red grapes and put them through basically a white wine process, you get rosé, almost your namesake.

22:06Dan Rosenheck: You get a wine that is much lighter than a red wine. What's happening with this wine, with Bluge, is that white and red grapes are being fermented together, essentially like a red. So it's like a red where you've lobbed in some white. Winemakers are deliberately splitting the difference between white and red. So you've got a wine that initially, when you first tasted it, tasted like a white. It had the freshness and the clarity of a white, but then it has the kind of depth and the structure of a red. And this makes it very, very versatile for food pairing. And these wines are generally being marketed in quite a funky way.

22:39Dan Rosenheck: They're not being aimed at old wine nerds like me. They are being marketed rather more like craft beer. So with names like Boogie Woogie and Superbloom, it's fantastic for, you know, a barbecue on a Sunday. Do you want red or white? Well, you don't have to choose. You can kind of have both. But the other thing that's really good about it is it turns out to be for winemakers grappling with climate change, a really, really good hedge. And why is that? The trouble with red wines right now is that in many parts of the world that make red wine, if there's a heat wave or there's just a lot of very hot days, the red grapes are over-ripening.

23:11Dan Rosenheck: So when you come to harvest them, you get a very alcoholic wine, 15 % or 16 % sometimes. If you harvest them early to avoid that problem, then the tannins basically in the skin and in the pips haven't ripened. And then you get a very kind of stalky taste. It just doesn't taste right. So what you can do if you throw some white grapes in is you can leave the red grapes to ripen, you can harvest them, and then you can co-ferment them with white grapes. And the white grapes reduce the alcohol content and they also add back the freshness and the acidity that's lost when you have these very flabby alcoholic wines.

23:42Rosie Blau: And how much of this is happening? I've not heard about it.

23:45Dan Rosenheck: The problem is that there isn't a way of tracking the sales of this wine. There isn't an agreed on definition here. In some ways it's not new because there have been wines in the past. I mean some champagnes use mixtures of red and white grapes and so on. So there isn't a sort of market category for this. And in fact, even the word bluige is quite controversial. Some American and Australian winemakers think that even though they're doing this style, their customers won't know what it means. Instead, they prefer to call this a chillable red or a light red. But the trouble is, we don't actually have a category of bluige that we can track.

24:15Dan Rosenheck: So you can't measure how much of this is selling. But the makers I've spoken to who are selling it say that they're seeing sales of this style going up every year.

24:22Rosie Blau: And why do you have to drink it chilled?

24:24Dan Rosenheck: Because then you get the freshness of the white. And just, I mean, people like to chill red wines as well, actually, to make them less flabby, give them a bit more definition. So this is a wine style that is designed to be consumed just out of the fridge.

24:38Rosie Blau: And people are actually buying it?

24:39Dan Rosenheck: Yeah. This is something that the wine press has latched onto, that the sellers of these wines are seeing their sales go up. You're starting to see wine lists in restaurants and wine shops specifically saying that they have these chillable light reds of this style.

24:53Rosie Blau: Cheers.

24:54Dan Rosenheck: Cheers.

24:56Rosie Blau: Thanks, Tom. Thank you.

25:12Rosie Blau: That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. See you back here tomorrow.

25:26Thank you.