Is Havana Syndrome really real?

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1:18Nicky Woolf:What they are ultimately trying to create is going to replace humans. What it's doing is parboiling the inside of your brain. This could be a turning point in the history of social media and of the internet. Welcome to The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. I'm Karen Howe. I'm Thomas Germain. And I'm Nicky Wolf. This week on The Interface, we will be discussing... Does the U.S. have access to a brain-melting device? Could one lawsuit change the future of social media? And fear and loathing at the world's biggest AI summit.

2:02Nicky Woolf:So we actually have an update on last week's episode where we talked about data centers in the UK and how it was potentially undermining climate goals in the UK. And right after that story, there was new reporting that came out from The Times that revealed that there's around 140 proposed AI data centers that have applied to the UK to connect to the grid. And all of the energy, all of the power, if you add all of that up, would be more than the power demand of the entire country. Wait, so they're going to add more electricity than the whole country is using right now? That's the plan. Whether or not it gets approved, who's to say.

2:48Nicky Woolf:But the UK is basically a floating island of data centers now. So for this to happen, the UK has to double its electricity output. Yes. Because that's never going to happen. Right. That's going to start taking... That is the thing. We have to take this with a grain of salt because 100 % there is probably going to be issues with getting that much power to these data centers. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah. Well, I have an update on my story from last week. So if you didn't listen, I did an experiment where I convinced ChatGPT and Google Gemini and like the AI answers you get at the top of Google search that I am a world champion competitive hot dog eater.

3:29The point being that these tools are being manipulated and this is happening on a massive scale. The story wasn't about, you know, me making the AI say dumb things. It was about how easy they are to trick. Interesting thing happened. And Gizmodo, where I used to work, wrote an article about my article. They reached out to Google and Google said, yes, we had a misinformation event, was the quote, where a reporter went and messed with our systems. Kind of downplaying it. It's like, oh, one guy did one thing and not a massive problem across the whole internet, which, you know, I guess there are two ways to look at it.

4:02Nicky Woolf:What does that even mean? The whole internet is a misinformation event. Yeah, that's, we'll all say it together. and we should also mention we got some really really interesting comments uh on last week's episode um a couple of questions that that run to your story tom which uh i thought were really really interesting yeah i saw this this is great you know like every single one of your comments or if you want to reach out to us we read every single one of these there was this great story where this person said that they were like metal detecting on a particular beach like looking for gold doubloons like old coins yeah so they didn't find anything but they were like making a video about it where they talked to some guy on the beach asking like are there gold coins here and then later this person said they went and they asked ai about it and the ai referenced their video in this weird like self-referential loop you're posting on the internet and then the ai spitting it out as though it's like established truth yeah it's information eating itself so a big part of the story we were talking about with chant gpt was like these ai overviews is what google calls Like, you know, when you get the AI at the top of Google search results, somebody asked if people just look at the AI stuff in Google and stop clicking on links, isn't that going to cause a problem for the websites that are producing the information that the AIs are pulling from?

5:26It is a huge problem. There's been some research that when Google's AI overviews show up, the traffic that Google sends to the other parts of the Internet can drop by as much as 70%. This is a great question, definitely something we're going to go in a lot more depth on in a future episode, so stay tuned. Okay, so I want to jump in with the first story because I've been waiting for this development for three and a half years now. So I'm a reporter who reports on conspiracy theories, right? I was brought in for what at the time was considered a massive conspiracy theory, which was called Havana syndrome.

6:04Back in 2017, a whole bunch of people at the US embassy in Havana started getting mysteriously sick. Some people said it was an attack with a weapon. Some people said it was just, you know, that they were essentially making it all up. I got brought in to debunk the conspiracy theory of it being an attack with a weapon. And against all expectation, I ended up concluding that it was an attack. And in the last couple of weeks, I've been proved right on that. And it all centered around, like, everybody there said they heard this, like, weird sound before they got sick, right? There was a weird buzzing noise, and then the cognitive symptoms would start.

6:44They were dizzy, they were nauseous, they were having trouble thinking. and nobody knew what this thing was. By the summer, there were 50 or 60 cases. By the time it went public, suddenly there were thousands of cases.

7:02Nicky Woolf:Wow. It was called Havana syndrome quite quickly by the press. The other name for it was the immaculate concussion because the symptoms were sort of like NFL players get. It's a long-term brain injury. and these brain injuries were in some cases showing up on scans we were talking to neuroscientists they were telling us that and at least the core number of cases we're experiencing was real but at the time everybody treated it like it was a big conspiracy at first yeah people were laughing at that people were like that's impossible there are still a lot of people who believe that this is psychogenic that the power of suggestion is causing people to have these symptoms to me it It seems perfectly likely that both of these things are true, right?

7:50Especially once it was in the news, people were, you know, you're very, very susceptible to suggestion once things are all over the media. It seems pretty likely that it's both. Among the investigations, the things we looked at, the one that was at first put forward was, if it was real, then it was some kind of sonic energy device. We know sonic energy devices exist. There's this thing called an LRAD, which is a long range acoustic device. These are truck-mounted things that they use for crowd control. One of them was deployed in Minneapolis in the past couple of months. During the immigration raid protests.

8:25Yeah. The problem with that is they're massive. They are the size of trucks, right?

8:30Nicky Woolf:Right. That quickly became clear that it wasn't likely to be the case because you can't really hide one of those. And also, it would have had to get through in the embassy concrete walls and bulletproof glass and all that kind of stuff. So what we finally landed on was that it was likely, if it was real, some kind of microwave energy device. And the way we landed on this was we built one. So my friend who's a physicist, we cannibalized a whole load of commercially available parts. We focused a bunch of microwaves into a big dish. Like actual microwaves like you'd have in your kitchen? Yeah, we cannibalized it out and pointed this thing at a microwave energy detector over a distance.

9:19And it worked. Wait, I'm sorry.

9:21Nicky Woolf:What do you mean it worked? Like someone started having an immaculate concussion? Well, we didn't. It's interesting you should ask that. So the thing that happened last week was that a story came out that a Norwegian government scientist had also built a test device or the Havana syndrome style device. they set out to debunk it as well but this scientist like a norwegian version of nikki right except he pretty unwisely pointed it at himself and the following day came down with all of the symptoms of havana syndrome he was having cognitive difficulties he was having nausea he was having dizziness i mean this is a serious condition and what that what it's doing is basically very slightly par-boiling the inside of your brain, which is horrifying, right?

10:11And it was being deployed against American diplomats and CIA.

10:17Nicky Woolf:So it's like literally sticking your head into a microwave. What was the government saying the whole time? It's interesting that you had to do this in the first place. What was the argument going on here? So each government department seems to have a different line on this. The DOD, which has some personnel who have also come down with this, is leaning more towards this is real. The FBI is following the CIA's lead. The CIA has been the strongest saying this isn't real. And nobody seems to be able to agree. So that means there has never been any official U.S. government confirmation of Havana syndrome, which means that the sufferers of which there's so there's about 100 cases that have been confirmed by the TOD.

11:05Now, being confirmed to have something that the U.S. government does not officially acknowledge exists puts them in a really, really unpleasant gray area. So these are people who are now unable to do their jobs. Wow. It's no joke. Like they are quite seriously and permanently kind of cognitively disabled. That means that they are not getting their medical care covered in some cases by the State Department, by the CIA. There's a couple of lawsuits going on where they are fighting to have all of that stuff that they really truly deserve, which is devastating for them and their families. And the other knock-on effect that it's having is that the State Department and CIA is struggling to fill overseas positions.

11:51Because in some cases, families were affected, children were affected. People with families now do not want to take overseas postings quite reasonably.

12:00Nicky Woolf:Is there like a reason that you think the CIA denies this? Is it because they secretly have a device? That is my hunch. Now, at the beginning of this year, so about a month ago, there was an announcement that the U.S. had purchased a Havana syndrome device and was testing it and had been testing it for about the last year. That was the previous news story to break before this Norwegian one. Didn't this happen, like, when the U.S. invaded Venezuela? Like, wasn't there, like, a security guard who said that this happened, that it seemed like one of these devices was deployed? Yeah, and I think it was Trump who said that there was a device called something like the Discombobulator.

12:43The Discombobulator. Which, in fairness, that's a sick name. That's pretty good. It's pretty good. That's like some 1940s comic book stuff. I kind of like that. The thing that was interesting about the announcement of the one that they've obtained is that they said that it fits into a backpack. That really changes the game in terms of how easily it can be deployed in this kind of situation.

13:05Nicky Woolf:Now that people are increasingly realizing this is a thing, do you think that it could spread to the point that it actually starts having a pretty significant effect on geopolitics. I mean, it's already had a serious effect on geopolitics in that this all happened after Cuba, after Obama opened up relations with Cuba. And this was then a really easy pretext for the Trump administration to roll back all of the Obama era opening up. And so that immediately tanked both with US-Cuba relations and the entire economy of Cuba, which has been in basically...

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15:36So the argument that is playing out here is whether or not social media apps are addictive and whether the companies are making them addictive on purpose. It all centers around this one particular case. It's in Los Angeles. There's a 20 year old woman and she says that she joined TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and Snapchat, all these other apps. She was like 10 years old. And her use of these apps, according to her, caused body dysmorphia and all kinds of like really horrible mental health problems. She settled with TikTok and Snapchat before the trial even started. But Meta and YouTube are fighting this in court, arguing whether or not their platforms are addictive.

16:22And what exactly, what methods are they saying that these companies used in order to addict people. So the argument that the plaintiff is making here is that the social media companies are operating digital casinos is the term that they use. So they're saying that features like, you know, infinite scroll, you know how you can go on one example, just scroll forever. It never stops. They're saying the way that notifications are designed, the way that, you know, videos just keep playing and playing automatically. What's really interesting here, though, is for the whole history of the internet, there's been this law called Section 230, or at least, you know, the modern internet the past, like, you know, 30 years or so.

17:05Section 230, you maybe you've heard about it before, if you're cursed, like I am with, you know, paying too much attention to computers. It's a law that basically says big online platforms are not responsible for the things that their users post, essentially, like there's they have to do their due diligence to make sure there isn't like illegal, horrible stuff happening. But aside from that, essentially, it's like, well, our users posted that. That's not our fault. We don't like it. We're not happy about it, but we can't be held legally responsible. This case is different because they're arguing it's not the content that causes the harm.

17:40Like, yes, there's harmful content on here, but they're saying it wouldn't be as much of an issue if they didn't design these tools to be addictive. Now, that's something that meta and YouTube and all these companies completely disagree with right there's like no we're not our platforms aren't addictive they basically argued that you know you can't get addicted to these things it's not like you know alcohol or cigarettes or something like that YouTube actually argued in their opening statement that they're not a social media platform they say we're entertainment like we're like HBO right you can't get addicted to HBO there's an argument that algorithmic social media the way TikTok and Instagram now run, but it's sort of by definition addictive.

18:21Well, and there's, you know, you could look at this multiple ways, right? Like what the companies will tell you is we're just trying to serve you content and videos and posts that you're going to love and you have fun looking at our platforms and then you do it for longer, right? And you could look at that and be like, yeah, that's a reasonable argument, I think. The other way to look at it is they are designing these algorithms in general. They're optimizing for engagement is what they call it, right? They're trying to build them to keep you staring at your phone, staring at your computer. They use notifications to bring you back throughout the history of social media.

19:00They brought in psychologists to help them design the way that their platforms work in order to, you know, latch on to like the inner machinations of the human mind. So I think that's a great point. Like that, that's kind of what they're trying to do is to build them in a way that keeps you looking at it, which is why they're, you know, they use this casino analogy, right? It's why they're, they're saying all these social media platforms are a digital casino because we all kind of accept you can become addicted to gambling, right? There's something about that process here that is different from other sorts of things.

19:31They're saying that social media is more like that. You go on, you scroll, you don't know what you're going to get. You see the next video, you get this dope and mean rush, but it's not satisfying enough. So you keep going. That's the argument they're laying out here.

19:41Nicky Woolf:I would imagine that most of our listeners and viewers would be like, well, obviously social media is addictive. And this is one of those cases where the law is trying to catch up to something that people already feel is true in our lives. And it's because of Section 230, as you said, that we have not been able to close the gap between the perception and people's lived experience and what we can actually say about these companies in like a legal sense. So if I'm understanding you correctly, Tom, you're saying that like they're trying to make an argument that basically would not change Section 230.

20:19Nicky Woolf:They're actually trying to get around Section 230. This case is finding another way in. They're saying, forget about Section 230. The problem isn't the content. People are always going to post harmful content on social media. They're saying the problem is that these platforms get you hooked and it's the design of the platforms that's the problem. And there is a lot of evidence backing up this argument. There have been all these document leaks over the years that shows that Meta in particular is well aware of the problems that users experience on its platform. There was a famous case years ago called the Facebook Papers where this employee named Francis Haugen leaked tens of thousands of pages of internal conversations where they knew, for example, that Instagram was causing these spirals among teenage girls where they would end up having really serious body dysmorphia issues and eating disorders.

21:19And they knew, Meta did, that there were things they could do to prevent this and they chose not to do it because they didn't want to harm engagement. The stakes of this are incredibly high Because presumably if the court fines against the big social media companies, that leaves them open to the mother of all class action lawsuits, right? Because this has affected everyone who's used that platform. There are more than 2 ,000 similar lawsuits going through the courts right now at like different stages of the process. And this case in Los Angeles is kind of seen as the bellwether, right? That depending on how this goes, this is probably going to set a precedent for how all those other cases will go.

22:05If, you know, the courts find that these platforms are legally addictive, that will open the floodgates for thousands of more lawsuits. And probably it would create a like new opportunity for lawmakers where they would say like, OK, we've all decided that these platforms are addictive. Now we're going to do something about it. But more broadly, I think this is part of a much bigger shift. Right. For years and years, like more than 10 years, we've been talking about like, you know, all these companies are causing so many problems. It's really reached a breaking point. Right. Australia passed a law that says social media essentially is illegal for young teenagers, that you can't get on these platforms.

22:51There's a similar law proposed in California. It's part of this broader push to try and bring these companies to heel.

22:59Nicky Woolf:One thing that interests me about this case when it comes to AI is whether or not this case will then define the way that the courts or the public or lawmakers start looking at AI companies and whether or not they're addictive as well. And one of the things that I've been reporting on recently is the fact that AI companies have really been trying to effectively get a version of Section 230 for them. Like Section 230 protected social media companies from liability for so long. And now AI companies are trying to also get a law that makes them completely unaccountable to any of the harms that they produce.

23:43Nicky Woolf:And if this case actually goes the way of the users, could that create a cascading effect where then it undermines the campaign of the AI companies as well? Absolutely. It's a really interesting moment because there's been this big shift because of AI just in the way that tech companies are operating. Right. So for the longest time, like all of the biggest digital like online companies in the world were just full of stuff that their users post. Right. AI is different, right? Because when you talk to chat GPT, you're not encountering user-generated content. The company itself is speaking to you.