Minneapolis Misinformation; TikTok’s New Owners; Moltbot Hype

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2:04I am trying and doing an actually pretty good job of keeping in mind that my anxious perceptions do not reflect reality and that they have to be looked at. Logically? That's a better coping mechanism than mine, which is that my kids have discovered Mario Kart, so I'm playing a lot of Mario Kart. Zoe? I'm doing fine. I would say that I think I have hit a bit of a mental, emotional wall with what is happening. And I'm really grateful to be doing the work that we do. Because if I was trying to pretend that my corporate job mattered as I was during the early days of the first Trump presidency when I worked in tech, I'm just so glad not to be back there.

2:49That was a tough time. But Zoe, is there anything you're looking forward to say in a day or so? Okay, yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Showing how well-rounded I am, I am going to be seeing the premiere of the Melania Trump movie, the movie that Amazon Studios poured millions and millions and millions of dollars into. The trailer, I thought - I have never been more jealous. I know, I know. Exceptional work. They made it so dramatic. That woman, as far as I can tell, sorry to say this, does not have any perceptible personality of any sort, but they tried everything to cover that up. Tim, in fairness, I think there's a safe bet you could still score a ticket.

3:30Yeah. Oh, yes. I have looked for tickets in the Philadelphia area and I appear to have my choice. The unfortunate part is that in the city itself, it does not appear to be showing. And so I would have to go to a large suburban mall. I just don't think I can commit to that. So I'm going to have have to wait to watch it on the big screen here at home with a big bucket of popcorn and some sarsaparilla. I can't wait. I'll be there. You know what? I will too. Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Wired's Director of Business and Industry. I'm Brian Barrett, Executive Editor. And I'm Tim Marchman, Director of Science, Politics, and Security.

4:10I'll be filling in for Leah Figer this week.

4:17Let's start with discussing the news that's held our attention this week, ICE activity, as it's been unfolding in Minnesota.

4:28This past weekend, tens of thousands of Minnesotans took to the streets to peacefully protest the increased activity of federal immigration agents in the state and to document their activities, which have included the fatal shooting of Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent and the arrest of a five-year-old child, Liam Conejo Ramos. Things escalated when federal agents shot and killed yet another person, Alex Preddy, a 37-year-old nurse who was participating in the protests. The Trump administration, in recent days, they've announced they're removing Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official who was styled as a commander-at-large.

5:09He's out of Minnesota and border czar Tom Homan will be taking over operations in the state. But things haven't really de-escalated on the ground. And just last night. Ice cannot be reformed. It cannot be rehabilitated. We must abolish ice for good. Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar was sprayed with an unknown substance while she was speaking with constituents at a town hall meeting. And DHS Secretary Kristi Noem must resign or face impeachment.

5:54So this is this is really scary. And this incident in particular brings in a big element of this, which is the role of far right wing influencers. The nominal pretext for the presence of immigration agents in the state is that the Trump administration decided it wanted to beef up the state's response to a fraud crisis in its Medicaid program. That crisis is real, but the claims that attracted the administration's attention to it were not. A right-wing influencer named Nick Shirley played a particular role here with a very influential YouTube video claiming, without proof, that daycare centers that were being operated by Somali residents in Minneapolis had misappropriated millions of dollars.

6:42And now we see violence against a member of Congress and, of course, a Somali-American by somebody who, going by his online profile, appears to have been very exercised by such claims. What do you two make of the role of the far right there? Tim, you take it even one step further, right? It's not just that he was seemingly inspired by all of these claims, but also as soon as this happened, there was an attempt in certain right-wing influencers' fears to spin even the attack on Ilhan Omar as staged, right? That became its own conspiracy vortex where they said, look, you can see her giving him a signal to stage the attack.

7:25And even the President Trump, speaking to ABC News on the phone soon after it happened, said she probably staged it herself knowing her. It is just sort of we are stuck in this vortex that we can't get out of where anytime anything happens, and we've seen it repeatedly throughout ICE's occupation of Minneapolis and Minnesota more broadly. anytime anything happens, there's this immediate attempt to spin, to smear, to slander that holds no basis in reality. It's just sort of the playbook right now. It's not, we're all just playing the playbook. And by we all, I mean, far right influencer ne 'er-do-wells.

8:01Can I say ne 'er-do-wells? Zoe, how do we spell out ne 'er-do-wells? You live in Alabama. I feel like you absolutely should say ne 'er-do-wells. Is that an Alabama? Is ne 'er-do-wells Alabama? I don't know. It feels kind of old school in a appealing way. I mean, I was, yeah, Yeah, I was really struck by the kind of instant smear campaign against Alex Preddy. I mean, I think what you're both saying is correct. Like, it really feels like our, you know, shared truth has completely degraded. And there's an opportunity for people to try and spin what's happening in these very wild ways. But just talking about the nurse who was shot and killed, at first, you know, they, right-wing influencers and the like, kind of blatantly lie.

8:42and say that he was trying to assassinate an ICE official who acted in self-defense. Then they kind of like walk that back and say he was maybe in the country illegally. And now it feels like they've settled on like, okay, he was a normal dude, but it was really irresponsible to carry a gun to this protest. I mean, it's been fascinating and horrifying to watch this play out in real time. And that's where you see where that runs into then Second Amendment rights, which is a big part, obviously, of the conservative platform, you are actually starting to see some pushback. I think this is one of the first moments that we've seen the administration have to backpedal in Trump 2.0 to this extent.

9:23I'm not sure that that gets us anywhere in the long run, but it is interesting to see that they have found, apparently, seemingly some limits that they're butting up against in terms of what they can say and how far they can spin things. I think that is significant because the operating theory of Donald Trump and of his advisor, Stephen Miller, have been that you never concede. You never retreat that to admit weakness is to invite attack. And there is something to that. So when you have, and when we're talking about far-right influencers here, we're not just talking about random people. We're talking about people at the highest levels of the administration who are instantly, as soon as this news comes out, calling them a terrorist, calling them an assassin, saying things that were easily disproved.

10:07They have been forced to walk that back. And there's an ongoing leak war among factions within the administration, people pointing fingers at each other. That is a bit of a new development. This White House has not been willing to say it's wrong, to walk anything back. And I think they're correct that ceding the power of public opinion, ceding the power of people they're hearing from, whether they be influential op-ed writers, elected Republican officials, as well as the broader public, that does show that they cannot impose their will on reality without having to account for reality. And that is something I think people can be optimistic or maybe a little less doomy about.

10:55Speaking of flip-flopping, let's take a look at what Silicon Valley leaders were saying and doing on all of this. So on Saturday, hours after federal agents killed Freddie, a group of CEOs opted to spend Saturday night at a private White House screening of the Amazon MGM Studios-produced Melania documentary about the First Lady. They included Apple's Tim Cook, Amazon's Andy Jassy, and AMD's Lisa Su. We have also had other news that Brett Ratner, the director of the project, who is somewhat notorious for many reasons, among them not being a gem to work for, was not a gem to work for in this production.

11:35What have you been hearing from sources about this, Zoe? I mean, so this is one of those moments where I do feel like the levity and gravity of the situation are both really apparent. You know, the very day that Alex Preddy is shot, we see this news that the CEOs are apparently gathering at the White House. And I think Brian and me were both like, surely Tim Cook is going to say that there was weather trouble and his plane couldn't make it. But in fact, we scour social media and there are like pictures of him there. There's pictures of Lisa Sue there. So they were very much present at the screening.

12:08I have been I've really felt like this moment was kind of fascinating because it's been pretty much since 2018 George Floyd protests that we've really seen a lot of tech worker activism across Silicon Valley. There have been bits and pieces that have popped up. But for the most part, I feel like Elon Musk's Twitter takeover marked this moment where people got kind of quiet after that and were less willing to speak up and speak out. I think people were really nervous about their jobs. the labor market was weak. Now we're in this moment where, you know, a lot of those same concerns are still present.

12:43But I feel like the people that I've been talking to who work at Apple and these other companies are like, this was a real tipping point. Like this was so upsetting. And they were sending just even internally messages to their leaders saying like, this is completely unacceptable. Why were you there? It took Tim Cook like a few days, Brian, if I'm not I'm not mistaken. Yeah, a little time. Yeah, a little bit of time to come up with a statement internally. And the statement was pretty tepid, to say the least. But he did say, like, this is a really trying moment. And essentially, he tried to spin his presence at the White House by saying that he had used the opportunity to talk to President Trump about his views.

13:22I mean, seemingly implying that he had spoken to him about immigration. I think he even—Zoey, I think—and we can go back and look. I think he even said, I've talked to President Trump this week. I think he even ducked the idea—like, I don't think he talked to him in person. I think he just sort of like gave him a follow-up call later after he'd had some time to think about or something. It's just like, it's all pretty ridiculous. Yeah. I mean, I hate to speculate, but I'm just going to say right now, I find that exceedingly difficult to believe. Tim Cook is known first and foremost as being a diplomat and using his position to further Apple and Apple's interests.

13:54I don't think many of these CEOs see it as in their interest or their company's interest to go head-to-head with President Trump in any meaningful way. But we have seen rank and file employees really use this moment to speak up, to post on X and say, like, this is not OK. We also had a scoop this week from Maxwell Zaf, one of our great AI reporters here at Wired, who was talking about Google DeepMind workers, saying that an agent, a federal agent, had showed up at Google's Cambridge office in the fall. And they were saying to their leadership, what are you doing to keep us safe? I think it's easy to look at a statement like that and kind of roll your eyes and be like, you know, these well-paid tech workers are centering themselves in this moment.

14:37At the same time, Silicon Valley is made up of a workforce that's heavily immigrants. It's, you know, highly skilled workers from foreign countries. And I think that people have legitimate concerns about their own safety, this feeling that maybe your wealth and power, your employment won't necessarily keep you safe in this moment. I mean, to put this into even sharper perspective, another scoop we had this week from McKenna Kelly was about Palantir. Palantir, which works so closely with the government in all things, has a$30 million contract with DHS and ICE to build a platform literally called Immigration OS, whose sole purpose is to gather data for deportations.

15:16even Palantir employees are asking in their public Slack, what can we do to stop this, to knock this off? And the fact that we're in a world where Palantir employees are way out ahead of, say, Tim Cook or these other CEOs is baffling. We're really in a bit of an upside down place. And I think notably, two Palantir executives said, well, no, this is what we do and they're going to keep doing what they do. And so is Apple and so are all these other companies. I think until it translates into something actionable, you know, it's all just PR. So a question I have for both of you is, do you think that these leaders understand the stakes here?

15:56Because one of the things that was really notable to me in the discussions that Palantir workers were having in this public slack is people asking about the long-term consequences. Does Palantir not foresee the possibility of a future democratic administration that might cancel their contracts or the consequences of public revulsion. And pretty universally among these barons of tech, they seem to be acting as if there's not going to be a moment after this one. And that's a thing I have a really hard time getting my head around. Yeah, I would say that the oligarchs in Russia have like a different view of how this has played out.

16:31When you like bend the knee and say like, you're going to absolutely fall in line, like you put yourself in a kind of precarious position where the second that you stray from the party line, you know, swift action will be taken against you and certainly your money won't protect you. But I think that's kind of the, I hate to say this, but the like genius of what Trump is doing. Because I think when you ask people to again and again move their moral line closer and closer to whatever his line is, then they're kind of like, well, we already, you know, showed up at the inauguration. We already praised Trump in XYZ way.

17:05We already did all of this stuff to kind of position, you know, our company to win in this moment. And so it feels like kind of like a sunk cost. Like, okay, if you're going to turn away in this moment, you've lost everything you did up to that point. I am not saying this to excuse what's going on. But at the end of the day, they do have like, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. Oh, how dare you bring that word into this space? No, I'm sorry, but they do. I'm sorry, but they do. ne 'er-do-wells with fiduciary responsibilities. But Donald Trump has proven, he has shown that he can tank a company overnight, or he can have the US demand that it take a big stake in it overnight, right?

17:45He can do so much to these companies in the short term that I understand why they feel the risk and the threat. But again, I don't agree with how they're handling it. Speaking of the US having a major impact on companies, can we switch it up? Can we talk a little bit about TikTok? We have to. Yes. Thank you. Good. Not that it's like lighter, but it's not as heavy. So TikTok, the US version of TikTok is here, right? We are officially as of last week on January 22nd, we are officially in the brave new world where TikTok is owned by various US-based shareholders, but also still ByteDance kind of, and the algorithm is the same.

18:26And it's all just kind of a lot for some for show and some for the benefit of friends of Donald Trump. But after the launch, it was a little bit rocky. All right, TikTok, what the hell is going on? There were some complaints from users that felt as though critical content of ICE and Donald Trump was being repressed. TikTok is now censoring our content a lot more now, especially since this switch over. My views on this app right now are trash and they have been ever since it was bought by Larry Ellison. Apparently my face and the news is against the community guidelines. And this was kind of fascinating because TikTok was having issues in the United States.

19:14Like the app was essentially down for a large swath of users, but that issue was being interpreted as censorship, which is an accusation that has plagued TikTok for years and years now. In fact, It's kind of partly why we're in the moment we are in, where it's been transferred, where TikTok U.S. has been transferred to majority U.S. owners. So we saw people, you know, speculating that the algorithm had been changed basically to please Donald Trump. It's a problem in its own right, whether or not people can be convinced that something that they say is due to a data center power outage due to the huge storm that hit the U.S.

19:51this week is in fact what's behind it. It seems a pretty glaring instance of the new ownership destroying credibility with a lot of the user base. We alluded a little bit to the ownership before, but here's who that is. It is Oracle owns 15 % of the TikTok USDS joint venture. Larry Ellison is Oracle's co-founder. He's a very close ally of Donald Trump. Larry Ellison's son, David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance, who installed Barry Weiss at the head of CBS News. CBS News trending in a more Trump-friendly direction. So the concern is that it's sort of part of this broader media capture and cultural capture by Donald Trump and adjacent interests.

20:36So people are quick to look out, look for, hey, any kind of change that seems like might be reflective of that, they're going to jump on that. And this is a web of interlocking interests. One of the things that Paramount, now controlled by Larry Ellison's son, David, did was spend billions and billions and billions of dollars on the exclusive rights to the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which will be hosting a cage match on the White House lawn to celebrate the nation's 250th birthday and is a cultural space where Donald Trump has attempted to dominate and reach out to young men. So it's totally reasonable to look at them all as an interlocking series of MAGA-friendly spaces owned by associates of the White House.

21:20God willing, that first cage match will be Elon Musk v. Mark Zuckerberg, because we've been waiting now years for that. We're due. We're due for that. I'm praying. I was told that was going to happen years ago. I know. I was ready. I was ready. So the other reason that this trust issue, I think, is a potential problem for TikTok is that the app is changing its terms of service, and it's actually asking for more permissions from U.S. users. So one thing that it's asking for specifically, Wired reported this week, is to add more granular location tracking. So before, the app didn't collect precise GPS-derived location on U.S.

21:56users. But now, if you give the app permission, it's going to do exactly that. Basically, it wants to know your exact whereabouts, presumably for advertising purposes. But that is something that requires a fair amount of trust between users and the company, which is something that TikTok seems to be lacking in this moment in particular. And also the kind of thing that people readily click through and don't realize is happening, right? TikTok also now tracking data. Anything you put into any of its AI tools, if you put in a prompt or any kind of info you give it there, it's going to track that data.

22:27It's going to use it. Again, all of this ultimately used to serve you ads, right? But it is the principle of it and it is the sort of lack of the opacity of it, the lack of clarity, just sort of, oh, all of a sudden this is happening. And I think it is a legitimate thing to sort of keep a close eye, even if it hasn't happened yet, on how TikTok's algorithm changes in more subtle ways. I don't think if there is going to be some kind of manipulation of TikTok, I don't think it would be as ham-fisted as you can't post about ICE. I do think you can see things changing in terms of what people encounter in their feeds and what gets promoted and what's not because that fits in the black box.

23:07That's something that you can't sort of quantify from the outside, but can sort of have an effect on user sentiment, which is, by the way, the exact thing they were trying to get around happening when they started this process in the first place of getting TikTok out of Chinese ownership. Another problem here is just that this is, with TikTok in particular, an infamously difficult thing to track. A few years ago, when researchers had API-level access to X, for instance, they were able to do a lot of really impressive sentiment analysis and just tracking how things worked. Without that kind of access to X now, that work is difficult unto impossible.

23:47And TikTok is much slipperier because it's such a personalized algorithm. So it's one thing to just be aware of is that we may not be able to track with a lot of confidence changes made to what it's serving users, even if we're anecdotally pretty sure it is changing. So it's not a fun thing to be thinking about. Now that we're talking about apps, I'm going to pull us to our lightest segment yet. I like how we're progressing. Yes. We're just sort of easing up as we go. Exactly. I think this one's genuinely fun. We'll leave here in a great mood. Yes. Have you guys heard of Clodbot, now known as Maltzbot?

24:28Zoe, I have, but I desperately need you to explain why I should or should not buy a Mac Mini and put it on it and use it. Same. This is in my peripheral vision, but I'll be learning as we go here. I think Tim will need to explain the immense security risks associated with letting this app run your life. But basically, the magic of this app, as I understand it, through Will Knight's great reporting on Wired.com, is that it's basically an AI assistant that connects a lot of different apps on your computer. It runs locally and, crucially, you can talk with it over a messaging app. So like send it commands and then it'll go figure out how to execute and like run your life for you.

25:12The caveat, as with all AI assistants, is that when you hear, wow, AI assistant is going to run your life, at least to me, I'm like, can it submit an expense report? Because I would give it any amount of information to make that happen. But while there are specific circumstances of people using it to execute really complex tasks like that, a lot of the time they're using it to like schedule meetings, send a note, kind of manage their day-to-day calendar almost. And it's a lot of work. Like it's a pretty complex setup for that level of assistance. it's so interesting that this seems to be the real breakthrough ai agent to me because it doesn't come from google or open ai or anthropic it comes from a guy named peter who just built it because he wanted to yes peter steinberger uh built it by himself just wanted to figure out if he could make something work not even like it was it was playing around with voice memo stuff i believe And then all of a sudden realized, wait, I've made the most useful AI agent yet.