How the government became a student loan shark

0:00Thumbtack presents Uncertainty Strikes. I was surrounded. The aisle and the options were closing in. There were paint rollers, satin and matte finish, angle brushes and natural bristles. There were too many choices. What if I never got my living room painted? What if I couldn't figure out what type of paint to use? What if I just used Thumbtack? I can hire a top-rated pro that knows everything about interior paint, easily compare prices and read reviews. Thumbtack knows homes. Download the app today. This is a Global Player original podcast. Big news today. We are launching Threads, an open and friendly public space for conversations.

0:43It takes the best parts of the Instagram experience and creates a whole new app around text, ideas and sharing what's on your mind.

0:50Lewis Goodall:That was Mark Zuckerberg, Threads user number one, announcing his new platform designed to knock Twitter off its previously unassailable perch. This story is a parable of our age. Men of unbelievable wealth, unbelievable power, unbelievable influence, locking battle. These are men worth$350 billion between them. If these two men were an economy, a country, they'd be about the 40th biggest economy in the world. Whoever wins, if anyone wins, It will have reverberations on our culture, on our politics, on the tapestry of our lives. Can threads unpick Twitter? And if so, what does it mean? It's Lewis here.

1:37Lewis Goodall:Welcome to The News Agents. The News Agents. This content that will solicit a reaction, something that may include something that is slightly racist or slightly sexist, those kinds of things. So you think if something is slightly sexist, it should be banned? Can you name one example? I honestly don't. Honestly, I don't. You can't name a single example. I'll tell you why, because I don't actually use that for you feed anymore, because I just don't particularly like it. A lot of people are quite similar. I only look at my followers. Well, hang on a second. You said you've seen more hateful content, but you can't name a single example.

2:14Lewis Goodall:Not even one. That was Elon Musk talking to the BBC's James Clayton a few months ago. Musk was, I think it's fair to say, cocksure. Every dollar of his$250 billion net worth on psychological display. One wonders if he's quite so sure of himself now. Meta, the company which owns Facebook and Instagram, has launched Threads, a rival to Twitter which Musk bought for$44 billion. This hasn't come from nowhere. It's come from Twitter's perceived weakness. Last weekend, after a series of widely perceived missteps and misjudgments since Musk bought the company. There was this. If you're having trouble using Twitter, it's no accident.

2:57Elon Musk posted a short time ago that unverified accounts, which would include people not subscribed to Twitter Blue, are now limited to reading only 600 posts a day.

3:07Lewis Goodall:Twitter, a platform reliance on people endlessly, maybe sometimes even mindlessly, scrolling for content for reasons no one could understand, decided to limit the amount of content that you could see. Limit the number of tweets per day you could see. Add to that removing verification, thereby reducing the site's utility as a rolling news service. And the masses, the millions of its users, are stirring. So at the risk of sounding like Helen Lovejoy, in amongst all of this, will someone please think of the social media managers suddenly with endless new platforms to oversee and create content for?

3:43Lewis Goodall:Funnily enough, Charles Ubarg, the digital content director for Global, knows this territory. better than anyone. Do you think that Threads has the potential to supplant Twitter? Possibly, right? It definitely has more opportunities than what we have seen today with, say, Macedon or Blue Sky. Part of that is that, you know, it is built on the user base that Mark Zuckerberg has obviously also. You know, Meta on Instagram is about a billion people on there. Twitter, collectively, I think their monthly active user base is roughly 400 million, basically also. So it is considerably larger in the first place.

4:18So even if they get only a percentage of people on Insta to come over to threads, that's already a huge jump forward. And there clearly is some appetite amongst the hardcore Twitter users for a more stable environment, for a place where they feel like there's going to be a bit more longevity and you'll be able to see all your tweets and not be rate limited, for example. So it's got potential. I think the challenge right now is that the people on Twitter who are looking for something else are looking for a new news source, basically, also to operate in a similar way that where Twitter is very much a real-time news medium.

4:54Threads is not 100 % there yet, right? You can't search for news right now on the platform. You can only search for a person's handle, their username, and so on. So we're not quite at a place yet, I think, where reporters are going to be going on air talking about, you know, this amazing thing that's been happening on Threads and, you know, tracking a major event where... politicians announcing events on news on threads. You will probably start to see that, but still the functionality sort of evolves a bit more where you can actually search for keywords and hashtags and really sort of coordinate things around that.

5:27And that can obviously be a political event or statement and so on. I think that's the moment when you could really see that starting to switch obviously also. Apparently that is in the pipeline. It's coming obviously also. So I think the reality is threads has big potential. What they've launched this week is still a version one, basically. And they will keep working on that, obviously, also. But, you know, the fact that they've hit 50 million users in 24 hours cannot be ignored.

5:53Lewis Goodall:In a way, Elon Musk and his Twitter has become a living, breathing Rorschach test. One of those people or institutions or things who people respond to, conceive of, according to their own politics. And many on the liberal side resent what is done and who he favours, worry about the effect on the public square, and that's why this story matters. Like it or not, for a decade now, Twitter has been that public square, the arena in many ways of politics. How it operated, what we see, the news we consume, especially for political elites, is determined by this site. If that's about to change, it's big for all of us.

6:32Lewis Goodall:And never forget how much worse, how much bigger the impact on our democracy of all this stuff might yet be. how important these custodians of our discourse are and will be yet. Just listen to this. You might recognise the voice. It belongs to Martin Lewis, the personal finance expert. Elon Musk presented his new project in which he has already invested more than$3 billion. Musk's new project opens up great investment opportunities for British citizens. But it isn't Martin Lewis. It's a deep fake. It's almost imperceptible. And if you look at the video, it's even scarier. something the real Martin Lewis has talked about.

7:10My face and name have been the subject of scam adverts for the last six or seven years. I get countless reports every day. Now they have video and audio technology that is absolutely replicating my face and my voice. These people are trying to pervert and destroy my reputation in order to steal money off vulnerable people. And frankly, it is disgraceful. And people are going to lose money and people's mental health is going to be affected. It has a massive impact on well-being when people are scammed. It's devastating for people's lives and we still don't have any adequate regulation to deal with it.

7:47Lewis Goodall:This is destabilising and disturbing stuff. And Facebook and Meta is hardly a clean skin in all of it. We've already seen the effect their sites have on the discourse, on politics at the very highest level. And this is personal too. Zuckerberg and Musk apparently loathe each other. They've challenged each other to a cage fight. Musk wants to sue Zuckerberg for plagiarism. But whether we like it or not, these two men are maybe a bit uncharitably. Basically, the robber barons of our less than gilded age. Even the enmity, how it manifests itself, matters. So to unpick this, we're turning to a friend of the show, Bruce Daisley, a former vice president at Twitter and someone who knows Silicon Valley very well.

8:28Lewis Goodall:Most people who use Twitter and were heavy consumers of Twitter often had this conflicted relationship with it where they saw the benefit. They loved the fact that there was some major news story happening. It's electric, right? I mean, you can just exhilarate. You can see it second by second. Exactly. And actually, the challenge was finding someone to tell this revelation to that you just discovered. People loved that pop of revelation that it provided, but they often felt the toxicity of the discourse on there or the rudeness of the discourse on there was slightly wearing. Now, I do think there's the scope for Instagram and threads to maybe remove some of that.

9:09Lewis Goodall:You know, you can't swear at strangers on Instagram. You can't abuse people in the same way on Zuckerberg-owned products. And so there is a chance that they can come in and say new formulation cleaner than ever before and try and keep the benefits of the platform without some of these, the baggage, the toxins that it comes with. Although are we in danger? Maybe because, I mean, a lot of people, particularly maybe on the sort of liberal end of the political spectrum, I mean, they really hate Musk. I mean, they really dislike it. They dislike in particular what he's done to Twitter. I don't think there's any doubt that he's made it a much worse place to be, just a much worse kind of news platform as well for all sorts of different reasons.

9:46Lewis Goodall:but that we kind of slightly beatify Zuckerberg and we slightly make his company meta into something that's not. I mean, they've got their own problems, right, in terms of the way that Facebook has interacted with politics, the way it's interacted with the democratic process, the way that it's been used, the questions over whether it's a content creator or a publisher. Nasty things can happen on there as well. They're not exactly got a spotless or blemish-free record themselves. It's very difficult to find yourself in a position where you're thinking the hero of this discourse is Mark Zuckerberg Because, you know, the lessons of the last 10 years have not been that Facebook has been a meta, has been a company that has focused on the public good first and foremost.

10:27Lewis Goodall:But we're in a situation now where I think a lot of people would say to themselves, OK, aside from the issues that the corporate ownership of the majority of social media now will fall into one company. Aside from that, actually shifting the control from the capricious decision making of Elon Musk is probably a good thing. It's interesting as well, the way that this, essentially a tech battle, it's starting inevitably, or has already done so, to map on to politics and people's political preferences. The way that Musk has got a clear contingent of people particularly associated with the right and the libertarian wing of politics, the Republican Party in the US, coming out to defend him the whole time.

11:05Lewis Goodall:And then Zuckerberg, OK, an unlikely liberal champion in lots of ways, lots of people gravitating to him and his company in order to give Musk, who has become this persona non grata for them, a bloody nose. Yeah, and look, it's probably worth us trying to relate because I think there was a BBC interview a few months ago where Musk himself said, well, how has Twitter got worse? And the journalist actually at the time was unable to specify how it's got worse, but specifically how it's got worse is not only is it replatformed a lot of extremists who've maybe, you know, are not interested in racial or sexual freedoms that we've sort of taken for granted now, But also by selling verification to fringe voices on the platform, it's changed the way that the discourse is experienced.

11:50Lewis Goodall:If you go now, and I mentioned earlier the coup in Russia, but if you go now and you search any news item, the first results you'll see are people who are paying Elon Musk$8 a month. Who could be anybody. Absolutely. And what you find as a result of that is that people who are inclined to pay for verification are slightly more rabid Musk supporters. And by the very nature of that, they're slightly more fringe. And so what you're finding is you go and search for something related to news, something related to TV and politics. And what you've been assailed with very quickly is often quite spiky, intolerant views.

12:22Lewis Goodall:So that's what people mean by the discourse has got worse. And yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, it's critical consideration that a platform that is so influential as Twitter, so influential in setting the political agenda, It's so influential in shaping the experience of politics, both for participants of it and for people observing it. The fact it's been polluted is a cost to all of us. And Musk has said today that he'll, or is considering suing Zuckerberg and Meta, that he's copying their platform and the way that they do things. Do you think that's very credible? I don't think it's remotely credible.

12:58Lewis Goodall:Well, critically, the most important lessons that we've had here is the majority of the Instagram product we know today is inspired, borrowed, stolen from other products. So specifically, Instagram stories, probably the key aspect of that product was inspired by Snapchat stories. Reels was inspired by TikTok. now the idea that somehow a social media feed that looks like this that is currently being used by mastodon post blue sky the idea that that is a copyrightable format i think is pretty unlikely we've talked about the sort of personal enmity between the two men do you think it's real there's some people in silicon valley who know that each other well and there's some people who don't have any contact with each other so i know that elon musk knows the founders of google really well he He interacts with a lot of other people.

13:46Lewis Goodall:He knew Jack Dorsey when I worked there. Jack Dorsey was always talking about Elon Musk. And in fact, Jack Dorsey stayed as an investor of the new version of Twitter. I don't think probably he has a lot of face-to-face interactions with Mark Zuckerberg. And I think there's a few of them. There's quite a lot of enmity between Apple and Facebook. There's quite a lot of enmity, I think, between Musk and Zuckerberg. So it feels like the Reese probably founded on ego and toxic masculinity as much as anything. There's quite a lot of hostility and prickliness between them. It's amazing, isn't it, though, the extent to which our public discourse, our democracy, our culture is so underpinned by and dependent on these people.

14:30Lewis Goodall:Yeah, there was a really interesting thing that Mark Zuckerberg said overnight, saying that we are not going to introduce advertising on threads until we reach a billion users or we're close to it. A billion. Which is remarkable because that's sort of two or three times what Twitter's sitting on. But it's an illustration that this guy can magic up a product that has that sway over our lives, our political discourse, entertainment. And if they get a billion, I mean, they will put Twitter in the shade in terms of their impact on our politics. Meta will be the dominant force in how our digital politics is conducted.

15:04Lewis Goodall:And for every demographic, you know, TikTok aside for teenagers and for younger people, but absolutely formidable. Now, Lina Khan, who runs the FTC in the US, wouldn't allow Meta to buy a product that big. She wouldn't allow them to buy Twitter. And it's just an interesting illustration of the fact that they've got so much power invested in what they've already got. that potentially the questions of regulation are going to have to pose themselves even more on the agenda because the home screen of our phone, that's the way to think about it. How many of the apps on your home screen are going in the same direction?

15:37Lewis Goodall:And to control that amount, I think he's just a remarkable level of power, unprecedented in previous media eras. So the net result of all this, we're all focusing on Musk, but the net result of all this could be that Mark Zuckerberg is about to become even more powerful in our lives. Yeah, and I'm almost certain we're leading now into the US election campaign. I'm almost certain because this is broadly a bipartisan issue. This is going to impose itself as a bigger and bigger theme on, I think, both major parties in the US. Bruce, thanks so much. Thank you so much. Right, that is quite enough of the Musk Zuckerberg show for one week.

16:13Lewis Goodall:We're going to be back after this and we're going to return to the latest in a series of extended political interviews. And this one is another cracker. Stay with us.

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17:31Lewis Goodall:This is The News Agents. Welcome back. Right, as I was saying, the next now of our political makeup series, an extended conversation with an interesting politician about what powers their politics, their own personal story, what keeps them in the arena. This week is such an interesting one because it's with a politician who is actually pretty fresh on the political scene, but who has quickly become very senior as well. It's Stephen Flynn, the SNP MP for Aberdeen South and leader of the SNP group in Westminster. He took over from their former leader, Ian Blackford, last November in somewhat, I think it's fair to say, murky circumstances, something that we discuss.

18:11Lewis Goodall:But in what has been an extraordinary few months for the party and in a week where his own deputy, Murray Black, resigned on this very show. it couldn't be a more opportune conversation. You'll enjoy it.

18:31Lewis Goodall:So we're joined now as part of our series of extended conversations with, I think, our first SMP MP in this slot. I think I'm most certain in saying, anyway, I'll tell you who it is. Stephen Flynn, who's the Westminster SMP leader, MP for Aberdeen South since 2019. Yes, yes. And has been the leader of the SNP group in Westminster since December 2022, which feels like a bit of a political eon ago. Yeah, there's been a few things that have happened since December. Someone mentioned to me the other day, what's the last six or seven months been like? It's only six or seven months. Dog years. Yeah, it's been good though.

19:04I've enjoyed it. That's the main thing. Yeah.

19:06Lewis Goodall:And, you know, this is a conversation about you and your politics and where it comes from. But we should just say, given we're recording this on Wednesday and just yesterday, Murray Black, your deputy, was in this very studio talking to Emily and saying that she's not going to be standing again for Parliament. Yes. It must be a pretty sort of sad moment for you. What's your reaction about it? You must have known it was in the offing. Yeah, I mean, obviously I was aware of what Murray was intending to do, but I'm a wee bit conflicted because on a political level, Murray, when it comes to politics, is a rock star.

19:36And her ability to connect with the public, I think, is unmatched. She's phenomenal. But on a personal level, I'm actually really happy for her because she's been through a lot and I want the people that I like and know to be happy in life and I genuinely think she's going to be a happier person not being in Westminster. And that's the most important thing for me. It's the most important thing for Mary. And when we're all kind of talking about this, I think it's important to reflect on the fact that she's just a lovely person and I'm just fortunate enough to have spent a lot of time with her.

20:08Lewis Goodall:You've been in Parliament for slightly less time than she has but does what she says about Parliament the way they operate its culture does that resonate with you? Yeah I think so Westminster's, it's really hard to describe to people who don't work in that environment it's unlike anything I could possibly imagine I often say that I'd love to pick up all the people of Scotland and get them one by one to spend a week in Westminster to realise quite how dysfunctional a place it is and the nature of everything that happens there is just absurd But I guess it's more than that for Mary as well. I mean, Mary Black opens her mouth and says something.

20:43And no matter how good it is or how relevant it is, there's a cohort of the dregs of society who just attack her. And, you know, that takes its toll on individuals. And particularly women have to deal with the brunt of that. And it's not good enough. Society needs to reflect on that. And people need to be sitting up and thinking, why is one of the most popular faces in UK, not just Scottish politics, walking away from Westminster? And it's because Westminster is not the place that normal people want to spend their lives.

21:12Lewis Goodall:But you want to continue. So you're not normal. I want to continue for now because we've got a big challenge on our hands. You know, there's been well documented issues within the party. And, you know, where there's a challenge, there's an opportunity. and I see an opportunity for us to really drive home that journey to independence. And you know what attracts me to that, Lewis, is being the person who walks past the statues outside the chamber as we leave, as SNP MPs leave and depart Westminster for good. And that's a big motivating factor for me. But of course, the personal challenges we all face in that are tough and Mary's just decided it's better for her not to be there.

21:50Lewis Goodall:I mean, as I say, you were elected in 2019 and sort of connected to that, was Parliament what you thought it was going to be? Has it surprised you? What is it about the chamber and the building and the way that it operates? Is there anything that surprises you or continues to surprise you? Yes, I don't think it's a functional place for decision making to happen. You look at where there's huge pieces of legislation which are having a big impact on folks' lives and the government can ram it through in a day with people having little to no debate on it. you end up in this absurd situation where with some legislation it bangs back and forward between the House of Lords who want to make changes to something but ultimately are powerless in that process, rightly so probably, because you shouldn't have unelected folk making those decisions anyway.

22:37But you have this archaic process of big legislation which is going to change all of our rights on the likes of protest and so on, going between an elected chamber to an unelected chamber to an elected chamber and ultimately what the government wants wins and it's not a good way to make to make