Ben Whitelaw 0:00

So Cory, we, start every podcast on Ctrl-Alt-Speech with a little bit of fun, a little bit of frivolity. So I'm gonna ask you the question I always ask Mike, when he's here, and also our guest host. What fun have you seen or had on the internet this week?

Cori Crider 0:14

Unbelievably, it's an ad. So like, the, the thing, I'm about to talk about a company, and they should clearly pay for this podcast. So even though this hasn't been brought to you by Polaroid, it damn well should've been. So anyway, I don't know if you've seen it, but Polaroid have done this like hyper-viral ad campaign about summer. and it's basically just trolling big tech and trolling the big tech companies. And it says, it's got these, you know, cute little Polaroids, and then they say things like, "Go jump in some water before the data centers drink it all up," right? Like, and, and, like, you know, and a, a Polaroid doesn't connect to the cloud, does connect you to each other, you know. Or, you know, in the tube it's like, "What a beautiful day to go and like scroll through some screens at random," basically. I don't know, but there's some... Yeah, anyhow, but just like it's an absolutely epic ad campaign, I have to admit. And I, particularly what I say... 'Cause it's on like, I don't know, a beach, Coney Island Beach or something, and it's like, "Jump in the water before the data centers drink it all." And I was just like, do it. Drag them. Drag them. Yeah. So there you go. Polaroid, brought to you by Polaroid, who really should pay for this podcast but probably won't.

Ben Whitelaw 1:17

Yeah, like it, like it. we used to actually take a, platform prompt as the opening of our podcast, but we stopped doing it because people thought they were sponsoring the podcast and they, there was this confusion. So yeah, I'm glad to bring that confusion back. Polaroid, you know, you know where we are. My bank account details are available. Um,

Cori Crider 1:34

Just Venmo. Just, just hit, hit him with a Venmo. Yeah, 100%.

Ben Whitelaw 1:38

my one's not dissimilar to one. It's, it's a little bit more curious as to whether it's fun or not, but there's this new trend for dopamine sites that has emerged out of Korea, and, the dopamine sites are basically these quite sad websites that look and feel like apps that Gen Z consumers in Korea are going to so that they don't spend their actual cash. these are kind of sites that essentially act like food delivery services, that act like taxi services, but they don't take your money, so you just kind of randomly click around them ordering food that actually never comes. you can watch this food be delivered to a random house. It, it's, very obscure. It's a bit like Sims, but

Cori Crider 2:20

I was about to say, it's like what if Uber were in fact a video game, right? Like, or DoorD- God. Uh, yours and mine are almost in like total silhouette images of one another. Mine's like, "Look, the world's actually not so bad." You're like, "Isn't this terrible?" Like, people, you know, pl- they're playing like they're using Uber.

Ben Whitelaw 2:39

Yeah, I know, I

Cori Crider 2:40

I don't see it taking off. I'm just gonna say, I don't see it taking off. Hmm. Uh, but you're now gonna tell me it has 300 million users, right?

Ben Whitelaw 2:47

Yeah. Coming, coming to a, a new, uh,

Cori Crider 2:50

Oh, God. Oh, incredible. There we go. I thought there was shrimp Jesus. All right. Anyway, amazing

Ben Whitelaw 2:57

Great. Hello, and welcome to Ctrl Alt Speech, the podcast where we make sense of the major debates shaping online speech, platform power, content moderation, and the future of the internet. It's July the 2nd, 2026, and this week we're talking about what a better social media ban might look like, whether the Eurosky tech is gonna take off, and for our Patreon subscribers, are we seeing the last hurrah of human moderators? Ctrl Alt Speech is usually the weekly musings of Mike Masnick, the founder and editor of Techdirt, and me, Ben Whitelaw, from Everything in Moderation. But this week I'm joined by Cory Kridel as guest host. Welcome to the podcast, Cory.

Cori Crider 3:39

Hey

Ben Whitelaw 3:39

Cory is a lawyer, advocate, and senior fellow at Open Markets and Future of Tech. she has a, a very illustrious career that I'm gonna run through briefly. She was previously co-founder of the nonprofit Foxglove, which was founded to make the use of technology fair, and she was involved in a number of cases that we've talked about on the podcast, including Kenyan moderators working for Meta, uh, unfairly, losing their jobs after trying to form a union. Before that, she led national security litigation at Reprieve, and she now leads the Future of Tech Institute, an independent nonprofit focusing on technology that serves the public. quite the list, Cory.

Cori Crider 4:14

Thank you. Um, yeah, I think, yeah, pff. I suppose one... I, I know that the, Just imagining that a lot of your listeners are, you know, kind of work in tech or around tech. I'm a, I'm a relatively recent kind of convert to working on tech. I worked, I mean, my very first work was with detainees, you know, men in boxes, about as analog as it could get. But over the course of my time doing these national security cases, and indeed some surveillance cases, we started to feel like the way that power was exercised was changing. So we would interview people who had lost loved ones in drone attacks, for example. And that was the first time I got onto the idea that, like, an algorithm could be used to do someone harm, right? People would literally have their loved ones blown up as a result. I don't know if you remember this, but back in the day, Michael Hayden, the then head of the CIA and NSA said we used to kill, "We kill people based on metadata," right? And then, you know, myself and Martha Dark and Rosa Curling set up Foxglove because we're like, "Hang on a minute. That sounds big." and you s- you see that these kind of algorithmic decisions are being used to make incredibly important decisions about people's lives, whether it's whether they get a, a grade that is fair or, you know, a they get a loan or they get hired for a job or what have you. And so, so yeah, for several years we took these cases against either tech companies or, governments when they use tech to oppress or exclude. But then I guess, what was my kind of come to Jesus moment? I think in terms of what we're trying to do at Foti, and why I moved into this, I now don't litigate. I don't actually sue anymore. I think we kind of work with challenger companies and also with governments to try and, like, basically reduce the overall power of a handful of tech companies over our society and our economy. And I guess I got to the point, looking at the content moderator cases that we did with Foxglove, you know, like watching the way that people were treated by some of these companies. I, I, I was very, very skeptical of state power for a very long time, and I still am. but I also watched like a handful of corporations Meta, Google, Microsoft, if we wanna be retro about it, Amazon and so forth, obtain a level of information about us, a level of economic power that would honestly be the envy of almost any government. And it felt like almost, not nobody was doing anything about it, I mean, there is a tech lash, but people weren't really addressing themselves to this question of like concentration of power. And so I think when we, when we think about what Foti's now aiming to achieve, it's really just rebalancing public power against private power. We think that no company, wherever it is, however kind of beneficent its supposed CEO is, should really have that level of control over public discourse, over our economy, o- over the direction of innovation. and so we wanna rebalance that out against and clear some space so that kind of public challengers can emerge, whether that's, you know, kind of Euro sky and alternative social media infrastructure, or maybe cloud that do- like data centers that don't drink all the water, uh, you know, stuff like that. So just basically imagining that if we don't let those handful of companies decide, then we can have a completely different internet again, and therefore a different economy and a different society. And I suppose it's that vision that we're trying to defend and pursue.

Ben Whitelaw 7:14

And, and an interesting time to be obviously starting Foti. It's, you know, an independent kind of think tank, as I mentioned. How, do you think we're at in terms of those three areas that it covers? you know, this focus on, cloud defense, this idea of having a kind of greater choice, consumer choice for social media, and then social media bans. Like, how would you characterize the, the current state of play?

Cori Crider 7:34

So I think how would I put this? I think that the, like, long 1990s is over. I read sometimes, a bit more tech-focused publications with people who are really, you know, who've been kind of around since the beginning, right? I mean, with love to him, and I know he's not here, so we won't talk t- about Mike, Mike, who's done incredible work in many ways, very much. But there's a feeling sometimes that, like, it's still 1997, and we're still at Burning Man, and like, the promise of the internet is still there. It's just there. If we could just get back to it, and like, it'll be cool again. Like, it will... Like, guys, it'll be cool again. And it's like, y'all, y'all, that era has passed. It has been absolutely occupied by corporate power. I think, with love to that part of the movement and, you know, and the, uh, EFFs of the world and the rest of it, like, it has been totally dominated by corporate power for quite a long time. I think we slept at the wheel while that corporate power consolidated. And now, when you look at these, let's say, belated, sometimes ham-fisted, sometimes complicated efforts to, like, regulate one or another part of the internet, which I would just say is another part of the political economy, what you see is a society trying to flex a muscle that we let atrophy for, like, 20 years, right? So, so when we think about what we work on, right, like, we're trying to move away. We wanna see, Europe, because we mostly work in Europe, diversify away from big tech's cloud and AI. Because, at the moment, it's just, it's a lever that the US can use to geostrategically bully Europe. Like, I don't know if, how many of your users know what happened with the ICC, for example,

Ben Whitelaw 9:12

Yeah, I think probably quite a few

Cori Crider 9:14

basically Donald Trump gets mad at some of the judges, and he presses a button, and they are sanctioned, and then they get a phone call, and basically they're chucked out of their Microsoft 365. Like, that grinds the work of a supposedly sovereign international criminal court to a halt in, like, a 24 to 48-hour notice. That's bad, right? It's bad. Whatever it is you think about the merits of the case, Donald Trump and those companies should not be able to do that. So we wanna see diversification. and then on interop, like, again, this is where I think I overlap with your, co-host and where I really, really share the view. What I don't wanna see is us in five or you know, six or seven years, like, having the same fights about, how the same handful of companies behave, right? And to constantly be chasing after Mark Zuckerberg for his bad behavior or to be wagging our finger at Elon Musk, who, surprise, will still be a member of the far right, right? he will still be an anti-democratic, frankly slightly racist person. and, you know, I would just like to see us help people move, to something else through interoperability so that the people who are building something better, more interesting, including the incredible work being done to build on top of the AT protocol. I wanna see that stuff survive, get users, get scale, get investment, right? that's the world we wanna see, and the question is kind of how you then get there. And then as you, you mentioned the bans. I mean, do you wanna talk about the bans, or do you, what do we think the status, or should we move into that when we talk about, like, the main news story, right? 'Cause that's a, you know, that one is about... I think the other thing, just very briefly about why we exist and why we position ourselves the way that we do, you do have to meet society where it is. and I think for a very, very long time, tech policy debates were too narrow, and they sat in too rarefied a space. and now what has happened is that, my fellow parents at the school gate recognize that this stuff affects them, their family, and so they see there's a kitchen table issue. And so there is incredible public demand and hunger to try and regain a, a grip on this stuff, right? Anyway, so, so it's engaging with the society where it is, is how I would put it

Ben Whitelaw 11:09

And we're gonna come on to talk about that. I, you know, ironically, perfectly, the stories in, in the news this week coincide neatly with, expertise and the way-- the work that Foti's doing, which is always nice. I wanted just to kind of ask about whether you think there's a demand for the interoperability piece, and I guess to a lesser extent, the cloud defense piece. Because, is Foti about kind of creating that demand or, educating users so that they can advocate for themselves in the way that they have done with the social media bans? Or do you think there is this latent desire that you're, trying to kind of unplug? What's your thoughts?

Cori Crider 11:42

Yeah. I mean, I think what's the role of a small think tank in a, in a discussion like this? I suppose it's to help people imagine and also to connect with where they are and and to say, "Well, thi- things could maybe be different," right? Do I say the word interoperability, which has eight syllables, like in a mass mark? No, obviously I don't. But do I ask people, like, would they like to leave? are they interested in an escape slide or click to switch? Like, people can understand, for example, they understand things like th- used to not be able to take their phone number when they left. Like, they have, they have certain ideas about how services, like people should be able to plug services on top or like, should have more control over it, even if they don't understand technical words or technical legal words like portability or interoperability. That part doesn't matter, I don't think. What matters is, do you like what you've got? Would you like to move? And you know, for example, we, there was a poll last year, I don't remember exactly the figure, but it's like, for Europeans, would you rather use a social media service based in Europe? And that got around, if I remember, 60% support. people would like, in principle, to move. But you know, y- think about something like the Grok scandal breaking on X, in January, where 23,000 CSAM child abuse images are created in the course of about eight days, according to researchers. And like, you know, I've phoned politicians, I've phoned reporters who were still on the dumpster fire that is X and said, "Well, if we didn't wanna move when it was the far right platform with the guy who literally did the Sieg Heil, like then maybe we wanna move when it's the child abuse platform." And you know, the lock-in is real. People say, "Yeah, well, but still, I don't wanna start over with my friends and my followers. I don't wanna, you know, I don't wanna lose my posts. I don't wanna lose my network. I don't wanna lose my content." That's what interoperability is supposed to fix. That's what the whole point of the AT protocol and all these open protocol services is, right? It's like, let's never let any of these guys buy something and get us stuck ever again, right? And if you put it to people like that, then I think actually you do find that there's support. And then on this question of like, do people care about cloud? I mean, nobody cares about infrastructure until it falls over, is one answer, right? Like, people don't care about... People don't think about the road until there's a sinkhole or, you know, or until their access to the infrastructure that they depend on every day is in some way threatened or cut off. But what this dependency has done is lead to some kinds of vulnerabilities. So we talked about the ICC, but also like outages. Th- there was a huge cloud outage like in October, like AWS was it east? It's always AWS east isn't it? Anyway, something goes down. The one in Virginia. It went down, like takes like a, I don't know, a third of the internet off with it, does billions of dollars in damage, flight chaos, hospital chaos, all that stuff. People notice that. I mean, that gets onto the evening news and they think, "Gosh, that seems bad. What needs to happen there?" and also, I guess I just think- In Europe, there's also like, a hope, I think, that we could maybe invest and construct. And, you know, I'm aware that there's this kind of debate which says, "Oh, well, yeah, but you have, you've spent too much time kind of passing all of these laws." Like, I guess the other thing I would say is, as somebody who lives in Spain, the thing that's holding us back i-in terms of the kind of tech and economic development is not the Digital Markets Act or the Digital Services Act or quite frankly, the AI Act. It isn't. It is a whole bunch of other like deeper economic stuff that is generic across the business world that is totally unrelated to... It's like, it's how hard it is to start even a restaurant, much less to start you know, a tech company. It's, uh, like the joke I tell now that I live in Spain is that I now know why there's a notary in every opera, right? you know, like there's just like people who are involved in a process and that's like weirdly arcane and complicated, and that slows people's roll in my view, way more than... It's just like deeper, deeper kind of bureaucratic business problems, much more than the DSA or the DMA, quite frankly. Anyhow, so is there demand? Like, kind of, but of course, if you're talking about it to a mass audience, then you need not to use kind of fiddly technocratic language, always,

Ben Whitelaw 15:30

Yeah. Okay. Well, that's interesting. I mean, you don't have to be worried about language on this podcast. People, you know, our listeners are mostly, familiar with the ones that you use, so all good there. and we're gonna talk about the social media ban and a kind of plethora of news this week about it from Australia to, some new public polling in the US as well. So we'll get into that. Before we do, just wanted to kind of, greet and welcome our Patreon subscribers who support Ctrl Alt Speech with their hard-earned cash, our supporters who pay $10 a month to get extended and early episodes every single week, and our founders and insiders for whom they get, both the early and extended episodes, plus, the unique opportunity to recommend stories for us to talk about on the podcast. Not enough people make use of that, Corey, I'll be honest. It's a very, very powerful, responsibility they have. But, those that do have, used it wisely. if you want to become a Patreon supporter, go to patreon/ctrlaltspeech. And if you want to sponsor us and you aren't from Palantir, get in touch. We are more than open to working with you, Polaroid in particular. Find out more at ctrlaltspeech.com.

Cori Crider 16:31

Spain checked Palantir the, today apparently, by the way, just while

Ben Whitelaw 16:34

oh, really?

Cori Crider 16:35

Palantir. Yeah, they ju- they apparently they announced today, following the lead of I think France, that they were gonna basically bar them from all public contracting, so it can

Ben Whitelaw 16:44

Interesting. Interesting. I think, yeah. leading by example. okay. So let's get into the, social media ban stuff this week. there's a whole range of stories. I think we should start with kind of where we are. the ban that everyone knows about in Australia, that continues to be a kind of giant live experiment, I think, for, the rest of the world. there was news this week that the Australian government is going to extend new legislation, pass new legislation to double the fines that platforms can receive for not following, the social media ban. And they're going to give the regulator there, the eSafety Commission, more powers to enforce the ban. And so this is a doubling down of the existing ban. you shared an article, Cory, about, from the conversation about how we might need to rethink how we, measure the ban. Just give me your sense of like ban generally. When you look at it, do you see it as a kind of serious piece of policy? Is it political posturing? How would you characterize it?

Cori Crider 17:42

Well, I mean, first of all to go back to something that I said earlier, what we're doing now is trying to flex a muscle that we let go for 20 years. So, you know, we're taking our first baby steps in the idea that, the way these corporations behave should be a uniquely law-free zone. but I think, look, it, it's definitely the case that this has been a tricky area to legislate in, and kids be getting round stuff, right? I mean, they absolutely do. there was a article in the British Medical Journal last week as well that actually showed that this, particular one has been even more circumvented than it was originally thought. Like, kids do get around it. Although there has been some research suggesting that if you weren't already using it, you might have been less likely to start. So there's a kind of a k- there's a bit of an equivocal outcome. But the, what's interesting about the report there, what's missing from it is something that happened this spring. Because the fight to pass this law was so contentious and just got into its usual kind of culture war space, they don't say very much about the fact that they did this. But they actually refined their own law kind of through rulemaking, you know. So they didn't go back to the full parliament and have the whole hoo-ha, but they have the ability to just through rulemaking, like sharpen the law or change the law slightly. And so what they did is move more towards targeting features by basically adjusting the definition of a social media service. So now basically, like to be swept within the law, if you go and you look at the amended version from the spring, to be swept within the law, you've gotta have things like a certain kind of algorithmic feed, some of the other kinds of features that have tended to lay behind, the kind of addictive nature that, you know, lots of people, have had problems with and are the reason that there is so much overwhelming democratic demand. And again, I just wanna say that again, the polling on this is clear, especially in Europe, right? Like you poll Europeans about whether they want social media banned for their kids, and it's over 70% in every single member state. In fact, if you poll kids, if you poll kids, like kids answer that they would like it banned. Like, people know that something is broken, and I know, again, you're saying this is quite an expert tech audience, you know, I, there will be an inherent suspicion in this. But I think, I would offer that in some ways, as imperfect as this is, this is kind of democracy in action, and this is democracy working out what we want the balance of power between us and let's say Mark Zuckerberg to be. Anyway. Well, I mean, what we would like to see at Foti, I think, is something that is like... 'Cause these are imperfect policies that will be circumvented. We can all, put our hand on our heart and say that that's clear. what we would like to see is something that works with this momentum, meets families where they are, and says ultimately what we need to do is open up space for something better. there are different ways you can do that. One is that you try and structure the market, and you make it more condition- like make this a conditionality. So let's say that you actually play by the rules, and you don't tend to run, let's say, an engagement maximizing super addictive algorithm them. or you, don't have kind of infinite scroll autoplay, some of the other features that taken together do tend to add up to a bit of an attention trap. then you can be exempted in some way from it. and that means that you don't then necessarily have to age gate either, by the way. And I know that age gating pisses everybody off because it's a very complicated, difficult piece of technology to develop in a way that, A, works, and B, isn't hideously invasive, right? We're, you know, that's a developing area. We're not there yet, you know, but it, but people are working on it with these kind of zero knowledge proofs, et cetera. But, but, uh, th- let's hand on heart say that the- that we are engaged in a, in a bit of a social trade-off at the moment. but that feels like at least a slightly more tailored version of it. and then we, we'd really like to see, is to use this wave and to say, "You need to make these services talk to one another." you need to see interoperability, not simply as like a market opening play, although it is that, but also a safety play. So to give you a specific example of what I mean by that, 'cause there's different kinds of interoperability, of course. We went and we did a little bit of research just seeing what kinds of apps were out there already in the Android Play Store. It's easier to look at the download numbers in Android than it is for Apple. and there were apps like OneSec or No Scroll, not specifically targeted to kids, but very specifically targeted to helping people, like, deal with their addiction, which have actually millions of downloads already, for which people seem to be prepared to pay, right? I mean, you know, these are the, like, it's, people are basically, "Please, you know, help me." Uh, you know, not a lot, but, uh, but there's some, some latent market demand there. But all of those apps at the moment exist totally at the whim of the dominant player, right? Like, they could be shut down just like, you know, TweetDeck got shut down or CrowdTangle got shut down, right? And because they don't have the right in law, at least here in Europe, to plug in, right? So our version of like the tailored ban, the smarter ban, and again, the democratic pressure for banning is absolutely overwhelming, you know? And so you've gotta, you do have to kind of meet democracy where it is, is some combination of those two. Target toxic features, try and clear some space in the market for something better to emerge, but also build users a bridge out to something better via interoperability. Now, Australia's not doing that. but they have targeted features

Ben Whitelaw 22:36

Yeah. And, and just on the point of kind of algorithm, I'm trying to think what Mike would say at this point. We know, gotta make it interesting. So he, he, he would say that, you know, a- algorithmic feeds are designed to surface the best content to the user based upon their preferences of some kind. and again, I'm not necessarily always in agreement with Mike, so I am trying my best to represent his views. and he actually wrote a piece this week on Tector about, kind of EU's muddied thinking about algorithms. what is a kind of toxic algorithm to you, and what is a useful algorithm? Because I think there is a, a distinction a lot of the time, and sometimes we forget that, like, purely chronological I isn't, isn't a great place to be

Cori Crider 23:12

or it's also an algorithm, right? Chronological plus followers isn't, like there's no, like, Let me acknowledge for your users, I know that there's no such thing as a non-algorithmic feed. Like, you know, the, somebody has to write a computer program that determines in what order the material will appear. Yes, we all know that. but the question is, And, and this is where I would, and I feel bad 'cause I feel like I'm having an argument with a dude who's not in the room, right? But, like, I think where I would quarrel with the way that Mike characterizes it is that he says, Nothing in this is what we think you should look at next is by definition a full-throated endorsement of the content. It's literally based on other stuff you've looked at and our own weights and priorities," a phrase that I would argue is doing a lot of work there. Here's what you should look at next." Okay. Now, let's pause and let's think about the world that we have, the economy that we have, and what that in fact means, right? Because I think he's like, "Well, that's totally different from a newspaper." And I'm like, "Mate, I'm not so sure that I agree," because I think that's like a, a newspaper maybe isn't endorsing the contents of the things that it's producing. It's producing information in a certain order, right? According to, sure, maybe a judgment about newsworthiness or whatever. Maybe a judgment about, what you will engage with, what you will click on, what will keep your attention, and therefore, what is economically valuable to the publisher of the newspaper. Um, there's a beautiful old movie, uh, His Girl Friday, I think, about, uh, newspaper publishers and just the kind of venal way in which they, promote this stuff. But, you know, the idea that they were doing something other than like trying to keep you there and sell and shift goods and shift paper, I think it, like, maybe posits a slight naivety about the way that frankly the news business works. but the fact that the, it's like, "Oh, well, we're just, you know, we're prioritizing stuff that you yourself engaged with, so what's the problem here? That's in no way editorial." And I'm like, "No, that is. that's a value judgment and a weighted decision," and I, you know, absolute common ground that a lot of times it's been done simply so that you're there, so that your eyeball is on the screen for longer, so that you s- click on the ad for longer. But we also all know, and indeed, the documents that have come out in discovery from Meta's various trials show that Meta damn well knows, that that leads to all kinds of pretty unsavory outcomes, right? Like, it tends to be polarizing. Lies travel. People engage with it, right? and it's incredibly profitable. So is that, like, is that editorial? I mean, I actually think it probably is a form of editorial judgment at this point, right? Like the l- like, the fact of the matter is at this point that like the kind of granularity idea that like, algorithmic kind of control and knobs and whistles is such that if you are down ranked, you don't get seen. You just don't get seen. And you know, what's interesting about this particular point is that act hasn't tended to be partisan, right? Like in other words, you know, first it was the Republicans who were all mad because they thought that Twitter was woke and was shadow banning them and now, let's be honest, why did Elon Musk spend $43 billion of Morgan Stanley's money on a loss-making social media enterprise? Why did he do that? Did he do that because he thought that he could turn a profit with it? I don't think so. I'm gonna, I'm gonna offer that he did that because he thought that he would be able to do some knobs and whistles and promote what he would describe as free speech, and I would describe as white nationalism, uh, and anti-democratic sentiment, and he understood implicitly that with $43 billion of Morgan Stanley's money, he could go and exercise some form of editorial-like control over what had at one point been kind of the bar where journalists hang out.

Ben Whitelaw 26:32

Yeah. he showed a very, um, very obvious dislike of, journalists and media in the get-go. You remember he actually called out some of the CBS "60 Minute" journalists, I don't know if you remember that, and said that they should be thrown in jail for characterizing Donald Trump in a particular way in one of the documentaries that came out soon after he bought it. He, He got rid of accounts from "The New York Times," from CNN. You know, it was pretty flagrant. so yeah, I don't think he cares much for, media.

Cori Crider 26:56

No, indeed. And so I think, look, I, Because I did grow... I'm originally from Texas. I grew up in the United States. I do share the American skepticism for, um, incredibly granular forms of, let's say, speech regulations. But it is true that the democratic norms on that in Europe are different from the United States, so there's that. But there's another point, which is that I think that gets missed, with love in the pages of TechDirt all the time, which is it kind of imagines that there's like... I, I don't know. It's almost like they think that everybody's like that dude in "The Matrix," like, that's the G-Man and, right, he's controlling the state. And that otherwise, like, the information would just be flowing freely according to what you clicked on, and that's no form of control. And I think that's... Like, at best, it's naive. At best, it's naive, right? Because this, the prioritization has been, it is serving aims. Some of them are merely profit-making aims, and some of them, I would say at this point, are pretty nakedly ideological

Ben Whitelaw 27:49

Yeah, think that's fair. I would like to see a podcast with you and Mike at some point in the future.

Cori Crider 27:54

if, if he'll do it, if it, if he'll do it, I'll go on. I mean, I appreciate the work. Again, there's so much common ground, right? Like, protocols not platforms, absolutely correct. Totally incredibly important paper. Like, I think that what's happening on the AT protocol, as I believe he does, is the most exciting thing happening in internet development right now. So there's loads of common ground, and then there are these other parts where I'm just like, "Nobody. No, it is just not 1997 anymore." Anyway, and you've lost people. And, and, and I just wanna say, like, to all of y'all who feel this way, By sitting here saying, "Look, there's no problem here. The answer to speech is more speech," you have lost the public. by denying that there's a problem here, by basically saying that everybody who wants to see something a little bit more, I dunno what I would, what I'd like... To see a little bit less kind of polarized, algorithmically slopified discourse is Tipper Gore, if we were about like, you know, or Hillary Clinton, whomever, like one of these other kind of hopeless people. I think, you know, actually just look at the numbers, guys. Like, look at the numbers

Ben Whitelaw 28:56

It's shifted. It's definitely shifted. I mean, we, so we talked a bit about their, like, social media bans in, in Aus and where things are at, and there is this sense that, you know, if it's not working now, it might work for the next generation, the kids who are six, seven, eight years old now who aren't quite at the cusp of joining social media platforms. We should judge it on a kind of long-term basis. that's one way of going about it. there's also a suggestion of, of a better type of ban, and we saw last week in G- Germany a commission, an independent commission of experts there come out and posit a few ideas for what their, national kind of social media ban might look like. And it's different to what's, emerged in-- Well, there's elements of it that are different to what's emerged in, in Australia and the UK. one of them, one of the big kind of recommendations is it should be for, there should be a strict ban on under 13s only with tiered, feature access to 13-year-olds and upwards up until the age of 18. And then there's ano- an alternative view that says actually it should be a, a kind of feature-specific ban, or a platform-specific ban. So much more like the kind of Canada model that we've talked about recently. you've been privy to some of the kind of conversations in Spain as well, Cory, about what their ban looks like. Are, are we seeing a kind of evolution of what a, ban looks like particularly in Europe?

Cori Crider 30:09

I think so. I think that's right. I think that the original iteration of this, you know, be- and maybe because it comes out from a conversation from, let's say, the political class who are meeting the demand of their constituents, it's like, "Well, we need to do something. People want a big, visible, headline-grabbing policy. Let's ban some shit." and so it'll be a blanket knee-jerk ban. We want a bright line so that I can go back to the public and say something. And then what happens is, like, they go down and they talk to, you know, civil servants and technologists and others, they're like, "Wow Actually, it's a bit more complicated. People tend to get around it. Also, like, that actually just leaves the toxic business model intact. So maybe, maybe we should look at, like, actually targeting certain kinds of functionalities, like ways in which something would behave. And then if they dial that stuff down, then maybe we don't have to age gate. B- And, and, just to engage another point, which is, well, still there'd be some age gating, and doesn't that mean the kids are gonna get around it anyway? Which is what somebody might still say. I think if there's more room for something better to persist, that if kids are still able to, like, connect in something that is a bit less toxic, then you start to reduce the incentive for circumvention, if you know what I mean, right? Like, it's one thing to just say you can't have it all together, and then, you know... I mean, I, m- kid is eight, so I don't have a teenager yet, but, you know, I was one once, and I've kind of observed their behavior. And the, the vibe that I get off of teen behavior is that the harder that you, you know, the harder you push, like, the more likely they are to kind of try and resist and get round. But if there's a measured thing where you have a conversation with people that says, like, "This is quite bad, but we know that you need, one, you, you wanna hang out, you wanna gossip, you wanna share a stupid meme. Like, here's a way in doing it that's actually fine," then maybe you m- maybe... I don't think we know. I think we have to have the humility to acknowledge that this is a democratic experiment that we're gonna have to learn from and iterate, then maybe the kids have less of an incentive to try and run round, right? So, what we understand that German proposal from the commission to do is, uh, the, the German expert commission to do, and what we understand actually even Sanchez, who came out of the gate real strong, right? But who have refined now, today in a, in an amended proposal with the legislation, is to zoom in and, to target features and to offer things like in the Spanish case, maybe to offer an exemption. Which is to say, "Well, actually, if you can show that you've dialed down some of the most problematic aspects of Monopoly Social, then seems to us like probably you're okay." And what will be interesting to observe, assuming that goes through, I mean, there's a whole other thing that I don't know if your users are interested in about, like, the tension between, like, member state law and EU law, and whether ultimately this is all gonna be sucked into the commission with a kind of, one-size-fits-all approach, which is, I think, where we're actually ultimately gonna get, end up. And we, we can have a conversation about the tension between the member states and Brussels at some point if you want. But like, what these guys are doing is like, think of it as like a Spanish cattle prod, right? It's like, "Well, if y'all Brussels are not gonna do this, then my constituents are demanding that I do something. Here's what we're doing." But even within, let's say, the most agro provo of the legislative m- moments, which I would say is Spain, France, actually they're... I would say that they're more, like, out front than Germany. But even there, you're starting, like at least in Spain as of today, you're starting to see a refinement and a sharpening of the position towards targeting features rather than just this blanket kind of cliff edge age ban.

Ben Whitelaw 33:15

Yeah. Yeah, let's talk about the, tension between national and kind of block-wide legislation then, because, we know that there's an independent EU-wide commission who's gonna be reporting back actually in, in about 10 days' time their views on what the, Europe-wide approach should be. And it actually came out today, in a story from Euractiv that the announcement from, President Ursula von der Leyen is gonna happen on the 16th of September. So they've already kind of set a date for the announcement. They still don't know what, what options are,

Cori Crider 33:44

Back to school, right? Back to school. I mean, let's be clear about the political calendar here, right? It's like we want something for families for back to school

Ben Whitelaw 33:51

Yeah. And, and also the fact that they're announcing the, that they're trailing the announcement date ahead of actually knowing the options also shows the pressure that they're under. The, the, prod is working, right? who's gonna be the winners and losers in that kind of fallout between national and, bloc-wide, legislation? Like, is it gonna make sense to have a kind of blanket approach, is Macron gonna be furious because he hasn't got his own approach? Like, how do you see that shaping up?

Cori Crider 34:17

So For those of your listeners who do not live in the European Union and who are American, the way that I think of the European Union is a bit like our civics class from American high school. Like, before the United States, was the United States, we existed under the sta- the, colonies existed under something called the Articles of Confederation. And the thing that we're always taught in like American high school is like, "Ah, it didn't work," 'cause like everybody had their own kind of... I mean, at the moment we have a euro, so this is not true. But they had their own currency, and like there's too much power that was delegated and like, you know, supposedly it was gonna centralize, but they, they just couldn't agree on all this stuff, and like the central part didn't have enough power. So eventually they said, "Screw it. Screw it. We need a, we need a mulligan, we need a do-over, and we just need to be a country." Anyway, Europe is that, right? Like, so you've got this, the, you've got this constant tension between people who wanna see something consistent for the sake of economic unity and because, let's be honest, a union of 450 million relatively affluent citizens is a hell of a lot harder to bully, and it has a hell... Like, that's a very serious market, uh, as compared to, you know, like an individual nation of even 50 or 60 million. but then at the risk of sounding like, I don't know, Nigel Farage or something, like the democratic levers within Brussels are weak enough. Like those guys are not directly elected. General- Well, the MEPs are, but like the Commission isn't. they don't quite have the democratic touchpoint that the national leaders of Spain or France or Germany or the Netherlands have. And so, so you get this constant power struggle, not just in tech policy, but just in kinda anything, right? Where stuff that is maybe gonna have an EU-wide effect, which obviously tech policy issues do, is supposed to be harmonized and supposed to be consistent. And so there's a kind of, at best, an open question about whether the member states even have the legal authority to do what they're doing. but what you, what you can see them doing is testing it. They're, they're pushing it right up to the limit because frankly, they are responding, I would say rightly in some sense, to unbelievable democratic demand, right? And so you've got your s- your, as I say, the Spanish cattle prod or whatever, and I would say it's clearly more desirable to have like a rational, EU-wide response to this. Do I think that Brussels would be moving as they now are moving without that member state pressure? Absolutely not. I really don't think that they would be. So I think although this, I, you know, and I've seen exchanges, like pretty heated exchanges between senior off- I won't say who, but between senior officials at European, member states and people who are like in the legal part of the Commission being, you know. And the people in the Commission are like, "If you fragment this, it's very dangerous for the union." And people from the individual member state will be like, "Well, look, you move or we're gonna." that's the nature of the debate right now, basically. It's like we understand that you'd quite like a very perfect European consistent, harmonized process, like it's your purview or whatever But ultimately, like, I've got constituents. We serve our voters, and if you don't move, we're gonna... And so that has created this overwhelming pressure. and you can see von der Leyen, I think von der Leyen is well as that, which is as well as, like, wanting to make sure people don't steal the march, and she doesn't have this kind of mess on her hands 'cause it's well over a dozen states that are now looking at legislating on their own steam, regardless of whether they in fact have the authority to do so. I think she is genuinely moved by this issue. She's got s- I, I kinda didn't know this rec- until quite recently. She's actually got seven kids of her own, you

Ben Whitelaw 37:34

Wow.

Cori Crider 37:34

Yeah. Like sh- you know, I

Ben Whitelaw 37:36

She's more affected than anybody.

Cori Crider 37:38

Yeah. Well, they're all adults now. I guess some of them worked for Google or at some point, by the way. Anyway, that's a whole other deal. But anyway, but like, she's been pretty visibly, I think, and sincerely moved by this as a policy issue. She's chosen to stake some reputation on it. but so have some of the European leaders. You mentioned Macron. So has Macron, so has Sanchez, you know. And so,

Ben Whitelaw 38:00

Stammer as well

Cori Crider 38:01

get... Yeah. Uh, well, I mean, yeah, the artist formerly known as the prime minister. No, but Burnham or whomever will pick it up, right? I mean, like, people... because again, people believe, I think rightly, that they will harvest some political benefit from being seen to stand up to the platforms on behalf of families. And so how that plays out in European power, like, for example, do they set aside and let kind of these European member states go first so that they, you know, announce their solution? And then say, "Ah, yes, and now we will have a harmonized European solution, so nobody needs to worry." I dunno. I mean, you can imagine a sequencing like that, and it may well be that, like, why announce this, right? Exactly as you say. Like, somehow we're waiting on the recommendations of the commission, but we're saying that we're gonna say what the policy is by the 16th of September. What's that about? Maybe it's about a clear signal to the member states that lets them do whatever positioning they're gonna do in two and a half months. it's like, "Here's your window. Go."

Ben Whitelaw 38:50

have fun then will come in. Yeah. Um, so we're in for an, an interesting couple of months. I mean, and oh, if, if you, you're an MEP or a politician generally hoping to have a break over the summer, yeah, good luck with that. Uh, I think you've probably got a lot on your hands. I wanted to kind of move on, to, a story that we'll, we'll touch on before we go into our Patreon only section, Corey. we talked about kind of building a bridge to something better. you talked about the need to create, platforms that people want to move to. I think an element of that is, the incentives to move there and the reasoning, the network, the social graph, the content as well is also a thing. And you, you picked up on a story from, I guess work that you've been closely aligned with, with Eurosky and a German public broadcaster working more closely together. just give us a kind of overview of that and why you think it's important.

Cori Crider 39:35

Yeah. So basically just to explain what EuroSky is. EuroSky isn't an app itself. I mean, they have just put out one called Mew with some kind of cute cat memes and things for those of you who wanna check it out, I would recommend it. It's a kind of Bluesky-esque. but it's the infrastructure, it's the roads, it's the rails, it's basically host your data completely in Europe, govern it completely in Europe. So the, it's, it's the basis on which fully European social media could be generated, and it is open protocol, so it's all on the AT Protocol. And yes, full disclosure, we know the people, who are developing it. Sharif El-Sayed Ali was one of-- was the original ED of Foti. I mean, we even helped behind the scenes a little bit with like a crowdfunder to try to get them like, we're not talking about big money on this space here. Like, we're trying to help them get like 100K or something. I mean, really, this is really kind of granola, knit your own muesli level of funding at this point. It's very DIY. but anyway, so but they do have a partnership with this, content network which is a kind of German broadcasters basically. Because if you think about of the entities who have an interest in there being a better kind of social media, it's definitely journalists and news publishers, right? Like first Google ate their lunch because it took all the ad revenue, and Facebook did the same. And then as we all know, like all of the social media, algorithmically service, services suppress outlinks, because again, bad for your ad revenue, right? So if you're a journalist and you want people to go and read your content, and you try to put a link, if you put it in the first post, I mean, tons of reporters know this, like it's like it didn't exist. It's like it didn't happen. It's just you screaming into the wind. and that's sad, right? Because actually one of the things that used to be great about Twitter before it turned into the bin fire that now is, like I said, it was the bar where journalists hang out. It was places where news would break and people would debate the news and, ac-actually very senior reporters would engage with it. Subject matter experts were all there. It was a really, you know, it was a very interesting public square. So anyway, so the partnership with, Funk, I guess is about saying look, we as broadcasters, we as, journalists, we as news, we need to recognize that just hanging out on the old platforms is not gonna serve us anymore. It's not gonna serve news consumers anymore. It's not-- It doesn't serve from, like, a journalism and informing the public standpoint on the one hand, and it actually doesn't serve us from a business side anymore, right? So, and I think there's lots of other cool stuff like SIL There are lots of really, really interesting groups and experiments being developed on the AT protocol basically to try to plug this gap, to say that like, look, journalism on the monopoly internet, just is dying. It's absolutely dying. But people still have a need to both get real fact as it is happening and to debate that fact. and that, that discussion is moving. I don't think that it's coalesced around any given site. People still argue about the news on Twitter, of course they do. Excuse me, X. Um, but, in my mind, I just want-- It just... Twitter won't go out. Like it will just always be Twitter.

Ben Whitelaw 42:29

I'm the same. I'm the same

Cori Crider 42:30

I just can't. I just can't. Anyway, so like I said, so I guess what's exciting, what's really exciting about kind of EuroSky, but also just the whole family of apps, BlackSky, you know, like as I say, SIL, all these others, is that there is true experimentation going on, with what social media can be, how we can connect, how we can present content to one another. rather than just assuming that Well, we can just have the same kinds of websites that we've had before, but maybe slightly less evil." Like, people will experiment with form and shape, and I think that'll be great. and if you want to move to EuroSky, you don't even have to be in Europe. You know, you might well be an American who wants to host your data in Europe, so you know. it does take a few minutes. I would be lying if I said it was, you know... But it only takes a couple of minutes, right? Like if you're a tech-savvy audience, you ought to be able to do it, frankly. I, I could do it and I'm let's say a relatively unsophisticated user of digital technology

Ben Whitelaw 43:21

I'm, I plan to do it after this recording, don't worry. Um,

Cori Crider 43:24

minute, any day now. Good, good, good. You should. And try Mew as well. The... Yeah. Anyway

Ben Whitelaw 43:30

Love a cat meme. Um, so I think that's an interesting, development. I th- To be honest, I think there's, there's a broader discussion which we won't have time for today about how institutions that are beyond media interact with AT Protocol and, and other, protocols because I think there's not been enough, interest in them, there's not been enough commitment to them, and I think that will start to shift behaviors over time. so I'd, I'd love to kind of have you back on in a, few months or so to see how that changes 'cause I think that's a big lever that's still yet to be pulled.

Cori Crider 43:57

I'd love to talk, I mean, if we ever had time another time, I'd love to talk about just kind of business models, and why we don't see it, right? Because again, I think I, you know, God love Mike, but like this kind of we can just build things. It's like, well, you can, but you can also build things a hell of a lot better if people will pay to do it. And people will pay you to do it if they can see that there's a space for their investment to grow, and if they believe that it is in a kill zone because market regulators who have allowed the kill zone to develop, then the investment dries up, right? I mean, you don't, you don't need to take that from me. You take it from somebody like Y Combinator, right? Not a noted kind of lefty statist. I mean, even Y Combinator wrote a letter to Donald Trump being like, "I know, I know, I know Europe, they're very annoying, but hands off the Digital Markets Act. It's the best that we've got." That would... You don't, you know, don't take that from me. Take that from Y actual Combinator, right? Like they

Ben Whitelaw 44:41

breeding ground for many startups, US

Cori Crider 44:44

Yeah, exactly. It, uh, exactly. And you know, and the whole point is like we can't make as many bets because too much of the playing field is foreclosed. That's the basic point. And look, have the like 80 people who enforce the DMA right now managed to like create paradise and overnight? absolutely not. Of course they haven't. it is difficult, and there aren't enough of them, and they need more technologists, quite frankly. But should we try to push that law to meet its promise for the sake of clearing space for the people trying to build other stuff? Absolutely, we should. We absolutely should. But yeah, we need more of them. I phoned the, just as a kind of gag, I phoned the, Brussels parking enforcement agency the other day, and I said, "How many people you got giving out parking tickets in Brussels basically?" I think they said it took a, maybe three weeks to get back to me. And they came back and they said, We have 79, parking enforcers," if I remember correctly. which is like basically the size of the DMA enforcement team. So like parking tickets, the opening up of the digital market for Europe's 450 million citizens have roughly the same number of enforcers, in Brussels.

Ben Whitelaw 45:43

I wonder which the public care more about, though. I'd hate to say. okay, great. So that's That's a good point I think to draw a line this week on our free episode, Cory. I think we've, covered, all the major social ban stories, and also a little bit more. there is more to say. We're on this week's Ctrl Alt Speech Plus we're gonna be talking about, a story that's very close to your heart actually, I think. moderators who are having, their jobs cut at major platforms, as a result of a move to AI moderation. This is a story that I've been following very closely for Everything in Moderation, and we touched on in Ctrl Alt Speech. it's a story that I don't think will, be stopping anytime soon. We see AI moderation become increasingly the norm for platforms nowadays. And so I think it's a really important one to delve into, particularly with Cory with us on the podcast. so we're gonna wrap up there, and we'll see our Patreon listeners on the other side. Thanks everyone. Take care.

Announcer 46:33

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