Ben Whitelaw 0:00

So Mike, there is nothing worse in my mind than reconnecting with my graduating class. I, I honestly couldn't care less what most of the people, almost all of them are doing right now,

Mike Masnick 0:13

Yeah, I, I, recognize that feeling.

Ben Whitelaw 0:17

glad it's not just me. but there used to be. social network, one of the very early ones that you're gonna tell us a bit about today, that actually was designed for that very purpose. So Classmates, was a kind of nineties network and we've gone back through the archives, dusted off some of the marketing material, and we found that classmates used to kind of, sell the idea of, of its network by saying that every yearbook was a window into the past,

Mike Masnick 0:45

Oh,

Ben Whitelaw 0:46

sounds like a kind of reason to not use the, the platform to be honest.

Mike Masnick 0:50

It's poetic.

Ben Whitelaw 0:52

So, let's use that as our starting point for control or speech today. what yearbook would you most like to look through the window of? Or, or, or, or not, frankly.

Mike Masnick 1:04

Yeah. There, there's probably a few that I, I would not want to revisit Everett when you phrase it that way, but No, I, I, what I was going to say is that I do think that in the world of tech, it often feels that. We are so focused on like the now and then the future, right? That is the nature of tech innovation is, is always changing and everyone is either trying to explain what is happening now or looking towards the future. What is this all going to mean? And because of that, we very rarely actually look at the past and an understanding of how did we get here? And I actually think that's really important because many of the discussions that we have about today and the future. If you don't understand the past and how we got here, that's really problematic. And, and hopefully today we're gonna do a little bit of, uh, looking backwards through that window into the past. What about you? What, uh, what year are you looking at?

Ben Whitelaw 1:59

Well, I'm primarily interested in 2003 onwards. not because that was when, you know, I just about started secondary school and was straightening my hair and gen generally being very emo. But, um, that's the kind of point at which I think the relationship between media organizations and. Platforms started to get really interesting and so hopefully we're gonna use that as a point in time to, to yeah, go back and revisit some of those dynamics in ways that I think is important for not only where we are now, but but where we're going, in the future. Hello and welcome to Control Alt Speech, your weekly roundup of the major stories about online speech, content moderation, and internet regulation. This episode is coming out on the 5th of March, 2026. Due to some scheduling gymnastics. This is actually a prerecorded edition of Control Alt Speech timed for the upcoming release of a exciting new book that we're gonna be talking about today. My name is Ben Mike Law. I'm the founder and editor of Everything and Moderation, and I've dragged Mike Masnick, founder, an editor of Tech up back into the virtual Control Al Speech Studio. Where he's, been AWOL for some time. Um, my listeners, listeners are gonna have forgotten what you sound like.

Mike Masnick 3:17

I know, I know. I've been gone. I've been, I am constantly traveling. And I was gonna say since this is a prerecorded episode, and we are focused on the past, this is us coming from the past to, to, to March 5th. Uh, hopefully nothing. Crazy happens between us recording this and when this episode comes out. But yeah, no, I, I've been, constantly on the road traveling, pretty much nonstop, which has been a little bit tiring. and as we're recording this, I still have more travel coming up. Literally, very, very soon. I have to get on an airplane. So,

Ben Whitelaw 3:52

are you leaving shortly? Is it, is it that, are you going today?

Mike Masnick 3:55

it's tomorrow morning. Uh, so we're, we're, but I, I need to pack as soon as.

Ben Whitelaw 4:02

The, unglamorous realities of being a podcast host. Hey,

Mike Masnick 4:06

Yeah.

Ben Whitelaw 4:07

have somebody who can pack for you. That's, that's terrible. well, I'm glad you're still here. I'm glad we, we managed to pen you down to this conversation because, you and Teta have been around for the whole of the kind of. Eras we're gonna talk about today. You've really charted the dynamics of, platforms and being one of the media. I think that has been a kind of cornerstone of some of what we've seen, which is important that you're here, this is why we've, we've done it in at such a time where you can, participate between flights. yeah, just give you a bit of background to listeners. this book that we're gonna talk about today is a book called Trust, safety, and the Internet. We share. It's a, an academic book of sorts. It's being published by Routledge in, the coming months, and it's bringing together a lot of really interesting insights from people who worked in trust and safety, who are charting how the kind of Internet has evolved over time and how trust and safety decisions have been made. And I think, it's been pulled together by the Trust and Safety Foundation, which is the kind of foundation arm of the TSPA, the Trust and Safety Professional Association, which is a industry body that, has been kind of creators to bring together people who work in trust and safety. they run the, the famous trust con. Which we met at, and which we go back to every year and do our live episode. So there's been a kind of effort by the TSPA and and the Trust and Safety Foundation to. in this moment, I guess, with everything that's going on and the chaos that's happening, in internet safety to kinda mark this moment and capture some, stories and narratives encapsulate, I guess what's been going on in the last 20, 25 years of the internet. and so the book is, from the bits I've read, as I've been part of the process, been, it's a really great encapsulation of all of that. And we're gonna talk a bit more about that today.

Mike Masnick 5:56

it really looks, wonderful. I mean, just looking, you can look through the, the table of contents on the website about it, and everything that's gonna be in there. There'll be a, if you work at all in trust and safety, there should be a whole bunch of really familiar names, including. One of the co-host of this podcast, which is you, Ben, contributed a chapter to this particular book. and I think that is what we're going to explore today. I think the idea is that we're gonna, have a discussion specifically about your chapter, because I found it absolutely fascinating. but again, it's a big book. I saw somewhere it said how many pages they're expecting 368 pages. This is, this is, you know. You put this on your coffee table, you, you, you show off this book. This is, this is not something you hide somewhere else. Right? This is a, a big weighty book. but, it, it looks like it's, it's really gonna be fantastic. But we wanted to talk today about the particular chapter That you contributed, which is specifically about the three eras of content moderation in the media, and then what comes next. And as you noted in the intro, you start this paper in around 2003, and I, you know, there's, there's, you know, but also as we talked about right there, were. Sort of proto social media before that. and there's an interesting aspect to this that, that I've been trying to think about, which is how I think everyone sort of judges the. evolution of the internet from the sort of era where they got into, onto the internet, right? And, or even like, you look back a little bit, right? Because, so like I really got on the internet for the first time in 1993. Um. And yeah,'cause I'm old. Uh, you know, but at that time when I got on, I thought I had missed all the excitement, of the, the internet of the late eighties and early nineties. I was late to the party, and worried about missing stuff and, note that I got on the internet before the worldwide web was really there and existed. And in fact, I remember, A year or two after I first got on the internet, I had met a bunch of people through the internet, through IRC and Usenet, which were sort of two of the early communications protocols, and met some people who were at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne, which happened to also be where Mark Andreessen was and where he created the first graphical. Web browser, which was Mosaic. And so they were telling me, Hey, there's this project that people that we work with are working on.

Ben Whitelaw 8:34

Wow.

Mike Masnick 8:35

and Mark was not a part of the, group of folks that I was talking to. but these other people were, some of whom I'm actually still friends with now, many, many years later. and I set up to download the original Mosaic.

Ben Whitelaw 8:48

Whoa.

Mike Masnick 8:50

You know, soon after it first came out based on that, and that was like, beginning to get into the worldwide web.

Ben Whitelaw 8:56

You know, you know that what this kinda reminds me of, it's like, it reminds me of how you could have stopped Voldemort. It feels like you had it. It feels like, like how Harry could have prevented Voldemort from kind of becoming an evil. Being like, it feels like you had the chance to make that stop, Mike, and you, you missed the opportunity. Or like the, the kind of timings didn't kind of line up. And, and now we, we have kind of Mark Andresen

Mike Masnick 9:26

as Vold, as EU shall not be named.

Ben Whitelaw 9:30

I see. Quite right. Quite right.

Mike Masnick 9:34

Uh, yeah. I mean, I, who knows, but, um, I mean, it's interesting. it is interesting to me to like look at the, past through you know, and this even comes up with, with all the stuff, because I just did another interview on a, on a different podcast about, the whole like decentralization stuff that obviously I've been focused on the protocols, not platforms, paper, and how much of that actually came out of. My early experiences with the internet and Usenet and IRC and these things that were protocol based before these sort of more centralized services came up. And it, it is interesting to me and I wonder how much our brains anchor in like, the internet that you first joined as being that's the real internet

Ben Whitelaw 10:19

Yeah.

Mike Masnick 10:19

and everything after that is a distortion.

Ben Whitelaw 10:22

Yeah, yeah. No, I, I, I probably am guilty of that. but I think the nature of the platforms that kind of arose in the early. 20 zeros. you know, that that does kind of constitute the internet for a lot of people now.

Mike Masnick 10:32

Yeah. Yeah,

Ben Whitelaw 10:34

and they've spawned to, to such a kind of degree that it's almost impossible not to think of them as cornerstone of the internet

Mike Masnick 10:40

I actually think that's exactly right and that is really important. Where, the internet that I grew up with was mostly small companies and everything was constantly changing. I think that started to change right around where you start this paper in 2003. just as an example of this, I will say, you know, I talked about IRC and Usenet, which were two of the protocols that I used when I first got online. A third one that I used was, Gopher. and I don't know if you're familiar with Gopher at all, but Gopher was sort of an earlier kind of web-like protocol, but it was basically all texts. So I remember. I would log into a gopher server, like you would sort of like a URL, but you would log into a server, and there would be different things that you could get on that server. So I would log into a new server and a weather server. And get, you know, the news and weather. It was all text-based at the time, and when the web came along, I saw it as, okay, this is an obvious progression from Gopher, which was text-based. And then when I downloaded Mosaic, I suddenly had graphical stuff and I just figured that, okay, this is the nature of the internet. We start with Gopher and then we'll have the worldwide web that'll last a few years, and then the next thing will come along and the web will fade away, just like Gopher will fade away and then the next thing will come along. And so in my head I, I sort of like was expecting that sort of progression, like we're always going to get like the new thing and instead starting somewhere in the two thousands as you sort of detailed a little bit in the paper, suddenly you had these big giant internet companies that took over and it wasn't. You know, the, the nature of the innovation changed. And so for most people, you know, certainly people who are younger than me now, that is the internet for better or for worse. And I think some of what you describe is, is getting into that. So let's, let's, jump into your, your paper here and, talk about like, why, why did you decide, well, why did you decide to write it, I guess, and frame it this way?

Ben Whitelaw 12:38

Yeah. I mean, I suppose, I am interested in the way that media and platforms interrelate and, how they've worked. Together and, and increasingly kind of work against each other. I think that's because I started my career in a big newsroom as I worked in the Times of London have to say that for our US user, for us listeners. and one of my jobs was actually to, liaise with. Facebook X, Twitter as was, and YouTube about how we as a newsroom could utilize these kind of emerging tools. And so an example of what, what I did was, give a list of journalists who should be verified on Twitter. so before, kind of just as verification was being launched. a re, you know, an outreach from the company and they said, we want to verify journalist. Who would you like to be verified? And so there was this clamor in the newsroom to have this verification. It was, it was supposedly you had to have your Times email address on your Twitter account as part of the verification process. So there was kind of some manual work being done by everyone in the newsroom to kinda change the email addresses that they'd set up their Twitter account with two a times email address. Some people actually created Twitter accounts because they wanted to be verified weirdly. So they, they weren't on the platform, but they wanted the status and that was like one of a number of different kind of, I guess, ways that, the newsroom that I worked in tried to work with platforms to spread the journalism that we were producing to find new audiences. And that was really the ethos in that first era, I would say, that started in kind of 2003 and, The idea was that Newsom could gain a lot from being on these platforms, that they could find new audiences, that they could, spread their journalism in ways that wasn't possible before. And there was this kinda excitement and, potentially a bit of naivety about that. Um. But there was lots of ways that it kind of tried to, it it manifested itself. There was the verification, but there was also, instant articles. I dunno if you remember that, where Facebook would pull content created by platforms that were partners with the goal of trying to surface that journalism to a wider group of people whilst also serving the platform's goals of engaging people in the newsfeed. there was the famous pivot to video, which everyone

Mike Masnick 14:54

The

Ben Whitelaw 14:55

refers to. Yeah. It's people. People still have the scars of that where again, news organizations were incentivized to create video that would keep users engaged. On the platforms, but would also, you know, serve the purpose of kind of monetizing the journalism that the, kind of news organizations were creating. And there was all these different ways that, The, of platforms sought to ingratiate themselves with, with traditional legacy news media, and I think tried to kind of capitalize off the back of the brand and the heritage of a lot of these big companies. you know, there was a legitimacy that comes from having journalists on the platform. the journalists tended to use the platforms a lot. you know, you'll know this very well, but, you know, journalists, used it for sourcing. They used it for, for sharing content. It was, that's what made. Twitter at the time, the place to go for, for news, it was the kind of, the town square was in part'cause people, cause journalists were there and they were, they attracted a lot of, users who potentially wouldn't have otherwise been on the platforms. So kind of relationship really got me interested.'cause I saw it firsthand and I saw that it wasn't always equitable or even, and. you know, it obviously changed subsequently, which we can talk about, but, you think back to that time, Mike, how do you characterize it? What was kind of tech dirt's role in that phase? Really?

Mike Masnick 16:15

Yeah, I mean it's, it's interesting and part of what I, I try and break apart too is, is I think that I, I was talking a little bit about the sort of pre 2003 era, and I do think that there is an element of that, that, matters to this discussion too, which was not so much the, like classmates.com or, or the early. Social media things or Usenet or whatever. But actually the rise of blogs, I think predates a bunch of this stuff. Right? and Tech Dirt before the word blog even existed. And, and actually there was a period of time where people would refer to it as the Tech Dirt blog. And I would resist that and say, no, no, no, we're not a blog. Blog is those. There's other things that other people do. and so there was this period of time where suddenly people discovered that you could publish yourself in some way. Right. in the, the early days there was, you know, a few early versions of blogging, software and blogger being probably the, the biggest one at the time. And then there were a few others, that showed up. And so suddenly you had these independent voices and I think. That there was discussion about that, but that really took off post nine 11, when you had suddenly this rise of like political bloggers that the mainstream media actually started to pay attention to, and a lot of them got absorbed into the mainstream media. So, you know, the Washington Post and the New York Times sort of picked off these different. Bloggers and so there was this element of, like the legitimization of the internet as a medium for publishing, but still at that time, even the act of blogging was somewhat tricky. You had to set it up, you had to, get a server somewhere and you had to do all these things. And even as some of the services made it. Easier. there was a lot of work involved, and I think where social media kind of stepped into the fray was they made it super, super easy to express yourself in some form or another, though you were doing it on somebody else's system. And then they added in this one simple element that the blogging revolution had mostly missed, which was the concept of the follower. Right. And, and. connecting a, a feed and a follower and all of this kind of stuff together so that you had a more. Their audience. In the blog era we had RSS feeds and those still exist and they're still important. They're still useful and I still make use of them. But it was a different sort of thing. There was a really interesting, I think mostly forgotten company and had this terrible name called my blog log. Um, and it basically tried to create a social media. Element to blogs and that it allowed you to create like blogs you followed and it created like follower lists and it added that sort of, social graph element to blogs. I don't even remember what happened to'em. I think maybe they got sold at some point, but disappeared. But there were all these elements and it really came together with. Twitter in particular, and obviously Facebook much larger, but Facebook initially, like they didn't have that, the newsfeed concept and, Twitter sort of, I think really got across, especially to the media, this idea that news happens there. And like my own story of like where Twitter hit for me, I think. was really important to me. Like I, I got on Twitter in 2007 and I, I didn't fully get it at first, and I sort of played around with it and I was like, I don't, I don't know, I don't quite see the point. I, like, my first two tweets were something silly and I think the second one was basically like, yeah, I don't get this. which is interesting in retrospect. Um, but I remember in January of 2008. The thing that convinced me that Twitter was two things convinced me that Twitter was, was fascinating. One was that I was actually, I was traveling, I was actually over in your fair country. and I went on Twitter and I just got into this random conversation with someone who I didn't even really kind of know. I sort of, you know, knew through Twitter, but I didn't know him well or something. When we were talking, it turned out that like, we both really liked this. Very small, but really good restaurant in New York City that I'm a huge fan of. and somehow that came out in a conversation and I remember I was in the UK and I mentioned like, oh, you know, I'm gonna be in New York in two weeks. And he was like, well, let's meet for lunch at this place. And I was like, oh, that's fascinating. Like making this connection. We actually did meet for lunch and it was very nice lunch. Um, but Then that same month, January of 2008 was the, beginning of the 2008 presidential election in the US and the beginning of the presidential election process is the Iowa caucuses. And, I was trying to find out what was going on with the Iowa caucuses, again, these are things that are lost to history, but at the time, Hillary Clinton was basically considered the leading candidate. and probably the, the second candidate that people were talking about was John Edwards, and the third candidate was this upstart Barack Obama. People didn't really think he could, he could win. so I was like, I opened up CNN and CNN was giving these like, you know, exit poll interview kinds of things from the caucus. The caucus process is really weird'cause it's not voting. It's like this group. Agreement process, it's not worth getting into. but CNN was reporting like, oh, it's a, it's a dead heat. Hillary's probably gonna win. but it's really a dead heat between Hillary and John Edwards and this Barack Obama guy is getting some, some notice or whatever. so I had that on CNN and then I went on Twitter and somebody had set up. this is like before there were retweets or whatever and before there were like lists and feeds. I don't know how this person did it, whatever, but they just said like, basically we're just going to like repost or highlight everything from people talking about Iowa caucuses. So I just started following that feed and it was reporting, it was people in the rooms, in the caucus rooms. Over and over again saying Barack Obama is winning. Like everybody loves him. Barack Obama is winning. They're win. He's winning, he's winning, he's winning. And like, so I'm watching CNN say, ah, you know, Hillary's probably gonna win dead heat. You know, it's not really clear. And then Twitter, people like in the rooms saying, people love this Obama guy.

Ben Whitelaw 22:38

Wow.

Mike Masnick 22:39

Then you watch across the night, it was like later in the night where CNN finally was like, oh, actually it looks like Obama is actually gonna win the Iowa caucuses, which we didn't. It was a surprise,

Ben Whitelaw 22:49

Right.

Mike Masnick 22:50

and like that was the moment where I was like, oh wait, this is powerful, more powerful than CNN, which was like, the top of the heap in terms of like powerful media at the time.

Ben Whitelaw 23:01

Yeah.

Mike Masnick 23:02

I was like, oh, this, there's news here. Like there's real news here.

Ben Whitelaw 23:07

yeah. that for me was really interesting.'cause then you still, you saw news media then try to hop on the back of this phenomenon. Right. and there's a really interesting, I mean, when I was kind of leaving university in 2010. Around that time, I'd just done a kind of master's in journalism. I dunno why that was. It was a stupid idea. Um, particularly'cause it was newspaper journalism. Who the hell is doing a newspaper journalism masters in 2010? Like, come on. Um, but the, but the, but the people who were really interesting were these journalists who were using, who were texting from the ground via text message, but sending those out via Twitter. you know, that was kind of before many people had smartphones or before they were a ubiquitous. And there's some guys from Sky and The Guardian and NPR and Reuters, and they were doing some really cool kind of experiments on breaking news and building really large followings. Like we, we see similar things now. You know, many mean it's is a kind of playbook for creating a large social media following. It's almost like a kind of 10 step process. People, people will sell you a PDF for$50 to do it.

Mike Masnick 24:14

Yeah, that's right.

Ben Whitelaw 24:16

but back in the day, like it was, it was very, very new and. I was having conversations in my newsroom that was like, you know, why should I be on Twitter? You know, I write for one of the foremost newspapers in the uk. gets sent to all corners of the globe. Like, I don't need to be spending time on my, on my phone or texting or whatever it is you're telling me to do. Stupid upstart, graduate. as I was. so there was a kind of really interesting dynamic there. Playing out in the newsroom was like people wanted to be using these tools. In one hand to kind of reach new audiences. And at the same time, a whole bunch of people were saying, this is, this is pointless. And then in the background, I dunno if you remember, Rupert Murdoch tried to buy MySpace,

Mike Masnick 24:56

Yeah, he did buy MySpace.

Ben Whitelaw 24:58

He did buy MySpace. Yeah. I mean, he,

Mike Masnick 24:59

and a bunch of other internet properties too. He had, there was this period of time where he had like a pretty large internet empire. that I, somewhere I should dig it out on Tech Turt. I have an article where at one point where I was like, it actually seemed like he had a real strategy around the time that he bought MySpace. And I had written something that was kind of like, this is surprising, but it felt like, because other people were trying to build internet empires, but they were all doing a really bad job of it and just like screwing it up. Whereas initially. This changed pretty quickly, but initially it did look like Murdoch had a, a very like internet savvy approach to building out internet services and buying MySpace. Was part of that.

Ben Whitelaw 25:43

Yeah. and I think in this time as well, if we think about the way that platforms did content moderation, you know, the focus from a platform's point of view was on illegal harms. You know? Right. In the early days, it was terrorist content, CS a.

Mike Masnick 25:59

Well, I, I, I would go back before that even, which was, it was all copyright. I mean, before the terrorist content. I mean, CSAM is, has always been an issue, but like before the terrorist content issue came up, copyright was the bigger thing. And if you talk to like the old school trust and safety folks, almost all of them, started in the like, copyright enforcement side of it. And that's what the, you were getting take downs. You had the DMCA and, in the US obviously, and, The terrorist stuff actually came later.

Ben Whitelaw 26:26

Yeah, but when it. The way that the media thought about platforms though, they were very happy for platforms just to concentrate on those, on copyright and on terrorist content and CSA, right? Because the idea of hate speech was not a firmly. Understood thing. you know, a lot of the publishers probably spouted a lot of hate speech themselves. but they were, they were kind of happy to let the platforms do their thing because they were gaining from it in terms of eyeballs and, and reach. And then I think everything kind of changed around 2016. I think that's when the kind of

Mike Masnick 27:03

happened in 2016, Ben?

Ben Whitelaw 27:06

everything went to pot. Disintegrated,

Mike Masnick 27:11

Well, as, as, American baseball fans know, that's the year that the Cubs finally broke their curse and won the World Series, uh, after nearly a hundred years. and I think that fractured the rest of the universe.

Ben Whitelaw 27:24

that was like a kind of, uh, a chasm in the kind of, in the ecosystem. Everything kind of shifted as a result of

Mike Masnick 27:31

I, I think, I think there's a very strong argument that the Chicago Cubs are to blame for everything and not social media, but that's, that's a separate discussion.

Ben Whitelaw 27:40

Yeah. I mean that as well as the Cubs. you had Brexit, you had Donald Trump's election. There was the kind of Cambridge Analytica, scandal that emerged in the kind of years afterwards. And I think that started to, awaken. Media organizations to the power of these platforms. and I kind of argue in the paper that this the fascination of the first, let's say 10 or 15 years kind of turned into fury. all of a sudden you had publishers who were pushing platforms to, focus on misinformation and hate speech, not just those illegal harms that, of characterize the first period. they saw not only that the platforms were kind of acting irresponsibly in their eyes, but they were kind of taking business away from them. They were taking ad revenue in ways that obviously we've seen Grow and, and perpetuate since. And so they kind of turned on the platforms in that time and, did a lot of investigations into the way the platforms worked. There was a famous one in the uk, at the times where I was at the time. an investigation was done into terrorist content appearing, next to ads of kind of very large advertisers. This idea that you couldn't, you didn't have any kind of brand safety as an advertiser on the platform. You, you didn't know where you were showing up. And so, you know, that was a really potentially damaging problem, if you were an advertiser, that that led to a big change in the way that brand safety was viewed. And YouTube and other platforms gave a lot more control to advertisers about what they could and couldn't kind of, uh, show up against. But there were other investigations into platforms at that time. And I, I'm thinking about in the years afterwards, some of the work that Casey Newton did, uh, when he was at The Verge and the work that Jeff Horowitz did for the Wall Street Journal. famously the Facebook files, uh, which fundamentally kind of changed the way we think about Facebook and actually changed the company's name. You know, there was, they, they were all kind of characteristic of, media. Turning on on platforms, I think, and using the weapons, you know, using what they have, the ability to investigate institutions and power to, try and address what they saw as I think these platforms becoming too powerful.

Mike Masnick 29:47

Yeah, and I think, I think there are bunch of different stories in there. And I wanna go back a little bit before 2016 too, because I think it's an important part of the story is the Arab Spring, which, became this big news story. And even, I mean, I sort of mentioned a little bit, but The election of Barack Obama in 2008 was seen as, oh, he embraced social media and in particular Facebook and Facebook, sort of helped his campaign, reach different voters. And, and so there was this period from like 2008 then, the Arab Spring, sort of 2012 ish. timeframe, 2010, 11, where people are like, oh, the, this internet is this powerful force for free speech and democracy. that got a lot of attention. And then you mixed into it the fact that yeah, some of the more traditional media properties began to suddenly realize like, oh wait, the internet is. Causing problems for our business. and the blame game would shift. You know, there was this period of time where it was like, oh, it's all Craigslist's fault that the news media is dying. And then it shifted to, oh, it's all Google's fault. And then it shifted to it's all Facebook's fault. and you know, there are bits and pieces that I think are maybe accurate, but I think sort of overplayed. And then you're right that you had these big moments of Brexit and Trump being elected a few months separated from one another. And a lot of people, especially in the media, wanted someone to blame for those two things, and it was very easy. To blame social media for both of those things. And like, you know, if you looked, so obviously like Cambridge Analytica stuff, which came out, really the details of that came out a couple years later but started to leak out. But you could find people on social media saying obviously false stuff and spreading disinformation. so it was easy to blame though the actual. Causal relationship I don't think was ever really shown. I don't think it could have been shown,'cause I still don't think it had that big of an impact. But that's editorializing on my part. but suddenly, yeah, it really did feel that the media completely shifted and a lot of that, it's tough to separate, like how much of that was driven by. professional jealousy versus actual concern about these things. And there could be elements of both of those at play, but it felt that, there was this immediate shift from, oh, the internet is this force for good and free speech to the internet is this force for disinformation and evil and must be stomped out.

Ben Whitelaw 32:24

Yeah. And, and I think my sense, from writing the chapter is that there was, that in the kind of first phase in the, in the phase where. Media was using platforms to reach new audiences. was a kind of, a pact that they were prepared to make. Um, but I think the, from academia that I've written, I've read around it, the idea of basically the kind of structural dependency of the. platforms became too, too great. I think that's kind of what happened is that they became not something that you kind of experimented on or innovated on, or, you know, texted from the ground as a fun way to gain followers and try to kind of reach new people. It actually became a core part of the business of these media organizations and, and they kind of, maybe they woke up from the fact that actually. Not only were they key for their businesses, but they had a massive role in society, um, in a way that they didn't recognize in those early years because they were kind of too busy having fun with it. And, generating loads of page views. And, you know, a lot of media businesses were built on the back of Facebook traffic. You know, you Buzzfeed is the, perfect example. you could almost kind of create a media from scratch and if, if you play by Facebook's rules, and there's a reason why all of those. types of publishers have died out now because Facebook and other platforms move the goalposts. So rose tinted spectacles kind of came off. I think around that time

Mike Masnick 33:42

Yeah. And I think, there were a few of'em there. And now I've, for very long time have argued that news organizations lost track of what business they were really in. and in in particular that, if you look at the history of. news organizations is that they've always been in the business of building community, but they thought that they were in the business of distributing news and mistaking that led to some really bad situations, one of which you've written about separately and which we discussed not that long ago about comment sections where I always thought the common sections on news for news orgs was an area where they could build real community and build loyalty. Instead, they, a lot of news organizations either shut those down or, or worse outsource them to Facebook

Ben Whitelaw 34:29

Yeah.

Mike Masnick 34:30

and became really reliant on this other platform and really lost control over the one thing that they had that was unique. And then they were so reliant on traffic from Facebook. they had no loyalty. Like you, you had a, you know, then eventually we get to the algorithmic stage where then you need them to, to get into the algorithm. I remember, I had a conversation in 2015. I'm working backwards to where the conversation was to figure out the year, but it was definitely in 2015, had a conversation with someone who told me that well. We've all sort of referring to the media, we've all figured out how to get that free 1 million visits from Facebook every month. And I was sitting there thinking, I haven't, like, what are you talking about? Like we, you know, for better or for worse and probably for worse in some situations, but maybe in the long run for better Teter never focused on. Chasing any of these fads. I do remember when the whole like pivot to video thing happened. I did have a conversation with like, I, I spoke to, I can't remember which platform it was. I spoke to one of the platforms where it was like, you know, would you, would you fund us to do video stuff? And it went nowhere. And I was like, okay, it's probably, probably a good thing.

Ben Whitelaw 35:47

You escaped.

Mike Masnick 35:48

yeah. Yeah, though now everything is coming back around to video. but. we never really play that game. And I always focus on like keeping a loyal community. And I always, you know, every year I do a report at the beginning of each year, about the previous year, about where traffic comes from. And the thing that is most important to me is, is how much of it is direct, because that is, that is a sign of loyal, as opposed to relying on some sort of algorithm or some, some other sites to send you traffic. But so many other people just, they outsourced all of the important stuff. They outsourced the community, they outsourced that, and then they lost the loyalty. And so when these companies began to change their focus or their business model or, realize that, you know, they had faked their video numbers or whatever it was, they lost all that and they had nothing else to rely on. And so I think that definitely then contributed to the general. Dislike, the media organizations had for social media. Obviously there's a lot of other stuff going on in the world, but it's very easy to just sort of see these two things and say, oh, that must be connected and therefore we can, we can blame it. That said, like there was. Really some bad stuff happening as well and some of the reporting, and you mentioned like Casey Newton at the Verge and like his original reporting on, trust and safety workers, I think was really eye-opening for a lot of people who, even as they were saying like, oh, we want these platforms to clean up, you know, there's bad content that needs to be cleaned up. They didn't realize what that actually means, which is like hiring a bunch of people and exposing them to nonstop terrible content. to block it from you, and is that, is that worth it? to, put people in that position, I think was sort of a, a real reckoning moment as well.

Ben Whitelaw 37:30

Yeah. And, and not only were kind of journalists acting in their traditional role as, reporting on and, and investigating these platforms, but they, in this period there's this also this kind of interesting role that they played in basically working as unpaid content moderators. Um, and, and

Mike Masnick 37:47

is a huge point. Yeah.

Ben Whitelaw 37:49

Yeah, this is, this has really got me what got me interested in the relationship between media and platforms in the first place.'cause we still see this now in a story about a platform doing something egregious or leaving up some harm. the journalists will go to the platform and ask for a comment and. The platform will, having not taken down that content through all of the kind of human or automated means so far, would then take down the content because they've been asked, they've been contacted by the journalist about it, and this still happens. I, I make a running list of, of examples when I see this and it's, it's fascinating, right? Because. platforms have very advanced trust and safety functions. They have, like I say, human and automated, systems in place. Like if it gets to the place where a journalist is contacting you about some content, you probably just wanna kind of stand by your decision or justify it in some way. Taking it down suggests some sort of, you know, that something has gone wrong. And the guys who, who've now founded 4 0 4 Media, which we refer to a lot in the podcast, Jason Coler and, and Joseph Cox. They used to work for Vice and this used to happen to them a lot. and so there's this kind of secondary role that journalists played in this era.

Mike Masnick 39:00

It's the moderator of last resort.

Ben Whitelaw 39:02

yeah, basically the kind of last, last line of defense,

Mike Masnick 39:06

I have a slightly different perspective on that, which is like, I do think that, that, like, it's a really sort of, it's a good story. but I do question how accurate a story it is. I do think like, yes, journalists find stuff that is bad and then the companies take action. And the question that people always ask is like, well, look, okay, if, Joseph Cox can find this terrible stuff, why didn't the company find that terrible stuff? And. There is an answer to that, which is like, yes, the company has a large trust and safety team in all these processes, and they're looking for a very large set of really terrible things and trying to deal with it, and they're catching an awful lot of it, which I think, you know, the companies and the trust and safety teams never got enough respect or or credit for.

Ben Whitelaw 39:51

true.

Mike Masnick 39:51

Yes, they're going to miss some of that because you have malicious actors who are trying to get around these systems and are doing all sorts of things. and so yes, it feels not great that journalists had to call these things out and make the companies take action. But I think that downplays how much effort. Had it already gone into the trust and safety, function and how much content they had caught and had pulled down and how much work they were doing, because it's always easy to say, but all we did was this search for this one keyword. And it's like, yeah, but there's like 50,000 other keywords that other people are searching on and that they're catching a whole bunch of this stuff. And yes, some stuff gets through because you can't always get all of it. but I do think that is, it is a really interesting element. How much. even like trust and safety policy later got driven by reporting. So like, if this makes us look bad, suddenly like, okay, now we have to change the policy that we didn't think through all the implications or we play down the implications of this policy.

Ben Whitelaw 40:53

And, and I spoke to, I, I did a piece of work a couple of years ago. That's when I interviewed about a dozen trust and safety workers, and they talked consistently amongst all of them about how media. Played a role in how policies were developed and also then what happened in specific cases. You know, they would share articles that, probably you wrote and the others wrote about how they did trust and safety and it would act as a lever. sometimes they'd use it to get their bosses, to give them more resources, right. It's not a bad thing necessarily. Sometimes they would use it to kind of change the way that they approach a, particular harm. so media has always been one of the kind of ways that platforms address how they work. nowadays, obviously we have. Regulation playing a really key role. we've always had advertisers, playing a really important role. the rivals of that, of, of any platform is another factor in that process. But media is almost the kind of fourth pillar in that. and I think the work that was done by a lot of journalists in this time showed that you could shape platforms, By alerting not only politicians, but also the general public to the ways that these companies were working internally. And I think that directly, to be honest, Mike led to a lot of the regulation that we, have seen since. Right. You know, there's this phase where the kind of media outlets went really hard, going really deep, doing really solid investigative journalism. And that in turn has led to the kinds of, I guess, the number of eyes that are now on these platforms and, and the regulation that has since emerged. And that's kind of the, the third phase, the third era. I would say the, the Musk era, unfortunately named.

Mike Masnick 42:32

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I think, the sort of impact of the sort of, you know, 2016 post, 2016 era where suddenly it went from, happy promoting innovation, free speech, whatever, to, oh wait, there are consequences to all of this, and we need to think through this to the modern era, which turned into sort of the, the regulatory era. the thing I'm curious and, and. Love your take on this. so you frame your, third era, as that sort of regulatory era of 2021 to the present. Do you think, and I know you wrote most of this last year, perhaps early-ish last year, um, do you think. there's a new era going on in the post-Trump second term where, you know, I mean, you mentioned this in your, your piece, but like Mark Zuckerberg. doing his video basically saying we got trust and safety wrong. We're going back to this like more laissez-faire, freewheeling, which was is nonsense. And we've talked about how it's nonsense. and you have the Elon Musk sort of full mask off kind of thing. I mean, you described this as the mask off era, but I'm sort of wondering if the mask off era really started in 2025 as opposed to 2021. To me, there's an argument that the 2021 to 2024 era is the like, let's just try to regulate stuff and all these bills come out. A few of them make it through, but not that many. And now the 2025 era. Becomes the like purely transactional, give me what I want or I'm gonna do bad things to you, kind of era, which we're seeing sort of on a global stage, not just in the us. In the US it's just so blatantly explicit. But I think a lot of the regulations that have come about, now are like, well, we're gonna punish you do this, or we're gonna punish you. kind of regulations.

Ben Whitelaw 44:30

Yeah, I mean I think, I think certainly in terms of the way that platforms. Think about the media or think about journalism. I think we're in a, we're in a kind of continuation of, of that era. but it's got so much more worse than I could have expected, to be honest. Like if you think about when, Elon Musk took over Twitter, he not only, you know, this was the journalist platform of choice. He got rid of trust and safety. do you remember he took down the accounts of, journalists working for the New York Times? The Washington Post and CNN and Voice of America.

Mike Masnick 45:02

the night, the night that he did that where he started banning all these journalists was the night that I turned my account to private and has never come back from That

Ben Whitelaw 45:10

Really?

Mike Masnick 45:11

the night that I, because I thought he was going after anyone who was mentioning this stuff and I was like, oh, I'm probably next. and I just switched my account to private and that

Ben Whitelaw 45:19

Oh, interesting.

Mike Masnick 45:20

the end for me on Twitter.

Ben Whitelaw 45:22

Okay. never looked back.

Mike Masnick 45:24

Nope,

Ben Whitelaw 45:25

No. but you know, he, he did that. He did. there was A-A-C-B-S show, 60 Minutes, which did a piece on Donald Trump, that featured a source who kind of refuted Trump's idea that the election was interfered with. And Musk called for the people who produced that show to receive a long jail sentence.

Mike Masnick 45:46

Yeah.

Ben Whitelaw 45:46

Like he, he, he was like anti-media, anti journalism from the get go, and I think that allowed other platforms to do similar things. Meta removed a lot of its funding of journalistic and media programs that, did a lot of actually quite good work in previous years. They took out, you know, a lot of politics and news content from newsfeeds, which obviously. The famous Mark Zuckerberg video last year, actually kind of somewhat readdressed under the guise of civic content, inverted commas. Um, and so that led to a big tanking in Facebook traffic, which saw the demise of some of those traffic focused new sites, and which a lot of new sites haven't really, resolved from. But then, you know, to now have, I guess the kind of friends of the, president being installed in prominent positions of. Big us media companies, like no one could have really foreseen that, I don't think. and some of the issues that kind of Stephen Colbert has had and, and some of these other, individuals who do really strong journalism, we've talked about on the podcast, it is almost impossible to have that on the Bingo card. it's almost beyond belief.

Mike Masnick 46:51

Yeah. And, you know, I mean, it's funny, you know, we started out early on, I, I talked about like Mark Andreessen, and I think back to an interview that he gave last year, which was, to me somewhat disconnected from reality where he discussed that there was this deal. That basically if you worked in tech, the media praised you and said really nice things about you and built you up and only said good things and talked about how wonderful all this innovation was, and this was the deal. And then because of that, you got really, really rich. And then when you got old, you gave away the money. And then they celebrated you for being a philanthropist. And, and he was furious that the media had supposedly broken this deal that never existed and was always a lie. and how much of his sort of reactionary. stance today is a result of like the media criticizing him at one point, and it was such a eye-opening, openingly bizarre situation where like, he seemed to think that, he was owed praise from the media. And the second the media took a critical look at things that he did, and admittedly, some of it was unfair. Absolutely. And I've called out unfair journalism over and over again because I think a lot of it is unfair, but to completely like blow up democracy because of that and to embrace, sort of fascism seems bad,

Ben Whitelaw 48:08

Yeah. Yeah. And it's, I'm, I'm putting that at your door now that I know that you had the chance to change the course of history back in 1993 or whatever it was.

Mike Masnick 48:17

you know, but I do think it is, it is a noble moment in sort of showing how much. The position of the media coverage impacted some of the people who were building these technologies and how absolutely offended they were that they didn't get universal praise and adoration from the media. you know, and you can argue that both sides of that equation went too far. Like the praise and adoration was maybe too much, and the backlash was probably too much. And, you know, lost nuance and, and miss things. But like to then reorient your worldview that the most evil thing in the world is the media, I think is also a huge mistake and really problematic and leads to a lot of the problems that we're in where Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Andreessen and Peter Thiel have all decided that the media is, is so evil and must be destroyed. That that has completely reoriented their worldview and taken it away from like. What these technologies were actually supposed to be enabling, which was, you know, more speech, which should mean more press, which was that sort of early story that we were talking about in the earlier eras. And so it is sort of weird how like enabling the media to do more than cause them to flip out. And yeah, they now frame it as in like, oh, but we're enabling like, individuals to be the media to replace the evil mainstream media or whatever. But like, I mean, there's always nonsense. I mean there's always, Wanting people to praise them and wanting to punish those who didn't.

Ben Whitelaw 49:39

Yeah, and I, and I think, um, that is the way. The media should work, right? It's kind of how it's designed. It's just that, some of these billionaires haven't been, been told that. And, and, and that's, that's, that's really the kind of point of this, of the paper, I think, is to show that, there is this relationship between media coverage and the way that platforms work in lots of different ways. It's not kind of like, for like, it's not necessarily kind of causal, but I think that. Good coverage, good nuanced coverage of what platforms are doing broadly, but also regards to user safety is important and that's, that's to bring it back to kind of what we do every week. that's what's important about control alt speech and about tech there and about everything in moderation as well, is that, You need to be able to dish out criticism or critique or analysis when it merits it. But you also need to reflect the fact that this is a very difficult industry to be in, particularly if you're in trust and safety, these are not easily solved challenges, particularly at the scale that these platforms work. And I think we, we do a fairly good job, at least our listeners tell us, Mike, that we do a fairly good job of, of

Mike Masnick 50:46

Speaking of which review the podcast.

Ben Whitelaw 50:49

Yeah, review the podcast. Um, so I think that kind of, if I just wanted to kinda sum up, I guess, what the paper is designed to do and, how that reflects in our work. I think that would be, that would be the takeaways, that good nuanced media coverage of what platforms are doing, matters. And yes, more media I think could do that. we're not perfect either and we are constantly trying to improve, so. do rate and review us if you like the work we do, do sponsor the podcasts. if you're an organization or an institution that wants to reach important decision makers in the tech industry. and yeah. keep listening, basically.

Mike Masnick 51:26

Yeah, I mean, I think the important thing here, the real point is that this is an ecosystem and that the internet and the media ecosystem impact each other and having a good understanding and a thoughtful understanding of what is happening and how these things work together is really important. And we go through phases and sometimes it's, they're, better, than others. And sometimes they're more nuanced than others, and sometimes they're, simplistic. And what we're really trying to do here is to, to cover that and that intersection of media and internet and innovation in a way that leads to, better understanding and a real understanding of like, the challenges and the safety questions that come up in all of this. And I think, understanding that history. That you laid out in this paper is really, really important.

Ben Whitelaw 52:07

Yeah. And um, that's a good point to, to kind of wrap up today, Mike. Um, great to be able to kind of talk off script in a way that is different to our usual episodes. I hope our listeners get a chance to have a read of the paper. We'd love to hear people's thoughts podcast@controlaltspeech.com. And yeah, keep listening. thanks for taking part today and we'll speak to you soon.

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