Ben Whitelaw 0:00

Mike, I've been looking forward to telling you, my funny internet content that I've been watching all this week. I found out about it on Monday, and I've been storing it up. But

Mike Masnick 0:09

Ooh

Ben Whitelaw 0:12

tell me what you've been enjoying online. What's what's been keeping you entertained?

Mike Masnick 0:15

Yeah, I had a bunch of things to pick from this week 'cause I was like, I kept finding cool things. but I am going to point out, the Flushes app, which has been relaunched this week. it originally showed up about a, a year and a half ago, and I actually spoke about it on stage at South by Southwest when I was interviewing Jay Graber a year and a half ago. but it has been relaunched this week in a very cool way. But, the app itself is built on the At Protocol. and so we can ring the bell because that is the u- the underlying protocol that powers Blue Sky and now many, many other apps. But one of the, first ones that ever showed up was, the Flushes app, and it is silly and stupid in all the good ways that, fun internet projects are. It serves no purpose other than to indicate whether or not you have used the bathroom. All, all it does is, indicate to the internet that you have flushed.

Ben Whitelaw 1:22

Interesting. And h- how does it know this?

Mike Masnick 1:24

it is permanently stored on the At Protocol. so you can set it up in all different ways. The, person who created the app originally put a NFC tag on their bathroom door, and they could tap their phone as they entered or left the bathroom and indicate to the app that, that they had flushed their, toilet.

Ben Whitelaw 1:46

And are we, are we, are we wanting people to flush their toilet? Are we saying that bad because we want them to

Mike Masnick 1:51

flushing a toilet is, always a, a useful thing. But the thing that got me about it and the reason I want to talk about it is just because it is the sort of fun, silly app, right? This is the kind of thing that I remember from the early days of the internet. Like, you could build anything for no reason at all, and this is what this was. This was just a fun project to see, like, what could I do if, you know, we have this, protocol. We could build anything. It doesn't have to be serious. It doesn't have to be a business. It doesn't have to make sense. And a whole bunch of people just, ran to it and have been using it and it's been relaunched in a nice way, including a fundraiser for The Trevor Project, which I think you and I know, and many of our listeners know, is a very important, charity that's out there. And so beyond being able to indicate whether or not you have made use of your bathroom or anyone else's bathroom, I guess, uh, you can also contribute to, uh, a very important, charity out there.

Ben Whitelaw 2:46

That's great and very creative use of, of the open web, I would say

Mike Masnick 2:50

Yes.

Ben Whitelaw 2:51

Um, m-my, my fun internet, content that I'm offering you up, that I'm bringing to the altar this week is, it kind of reflects the beauty of the internet as an archive, I would say. It's a video that has resurfaced from 1987 showing Nintendo's gameplay counselors answering a phone hotline to people who couldn't complete the level of the game they were playing Apparently, for like, I think almost 20 years between the late '80s and, and the kind of mid-2000s, there were four- 400 people within Nintendo's organization at one point, who would wait for the phone to ring, would answer it, and would talk people through how they, got through whatever challenge they were facing. And so this video is, pictures of a man with a, a beard who's kind of laying back on a, chair in front of a massive PC, with a headset who answers the phone and who then talks this very nice, very kind person on the other, other end of the line through how to get a white sword on "Zelda." And it is wicked.

Mike Masnick 3:58

That's amazing.

Ben Whitelaw 3:59

It's so good. It's so good.

Mike Masnick 4:01

I was gonna say, that's all been replaced by YouTube videos now, but

Ben Whitelaw 4:04

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That kind of very, you know, customer support style function, the idea of, of ringing somebody up in order to, fix a problem that you had with a game has been completely kind of eradicated. but it was very nice because not only do these videos exist still, but they kind of resurface in lots of ways. I found it on LinkedIn, but it's also appeared on Instagram, you know. So it's the way that these things never die because the internet kind of acts as a repository for them. I

Mike Masnick 4:28

Absolutely. Absolutely. That's very cool

Ben Whitelaw 4:30

Yeah. Let's get going. 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 August the 6th, 2026, and this week we're discussing an Indian summer of content moderation takedowns, Pavel and the Extortionists, which isn't the name of Mike and I's new band, and for

Mike Masnick 5:01

It's a good band name though

Ben Whitelaw 5:03

Right? I like it. Um, and for Patreon supporters, a major Bloomberg story that looks at TikTok's safety testing operations. Ctrl Alt Speech is the deliciously refreshing summer cocktail of internet speech stories brought to you by Mike Masnick, founder and editor of Techdirt, and me, Ben Whitelaw, founder and editor of Everything in Moderation. Mike, have you ever wanted to be a games counselor? did you ever grow up wanting to, you know, be on the end of a hotline?

Mike Masnick 5:28

well, not quite, but, the thing that was close was when I was in high school and I was looking for summer jobs, and then again in college as well. right near where I lived was, Activision's headquarters, and they offered jobs where you were video game testers, and all you had to do was sit there and play through video games over and over again, which I understand would probably be mind-numbing. But as a high school kid looking for a summer job, that sounded pretty sweet. and I was never able to get that job. But I-- that was, that was my dream job in high school was testing video games. So

Ben Whitelaw 6:05

Yeah, I can imagine

Mike Masnick 6:06

I, I never, I was never able to do it

Ben Whitelaw 6:08

was it you, you weren't good enough at the game or ever so oversubscribed? How did it

Mike Masnick 6:13

I I think there must've been so many applications, I never got past the application process. So, you know, instead I just ended up working at a bagel shop serving bagels, so

Ben Whitelaw 6:23

not bad at all, you know? I'm guessing you got to take bagels home at the end of a shift

Mike Masnick 6:27

Well, so, that's a whole other story. Technically, no, the, the store owner refused to allow you to do that, because was, was afraid of, of other things that, you know, s- people would not sell bagels on purpose to try and save them for the end of the shift. But if you were the one closing up the store at the end of the day, as I often was, because I was a fairly trusted employee, you could take some bagels home.

Ben Whitelaw 6:52

I'm, I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm not, I'm, I'm not surprised at all that you're a trusted employee of the bagel shop. Makes total sense based upon what I know about you. Um, yeah, I mean, I, uh, the games counselor stuff just blew my mind, and it... But it kinda speaks, it speaks to this idea of, which I think trust and safety fits into, of people making sure that others are, helped thr- through their, online safety issues. that they're kind of shepherded through how they use the internet and, various digital platforms. and so I, I thought it spoke to Ctrl-Alt-Speech listeners, and I'm, I'm gonna share it in the show notes. I think people will love it.

Mike Masnick 7:26

I wonder if, other platforms should have counselors now. Don't know how to use Facebook right? Call up.

Ben Whitelaw 7:33

Yeah.

Mike Masnick 7:34

We'll walk you through it.

Ben Whitelaw 7:36

there would be a lot of grandparents, I think, that would be calling up to ask questions. Some are very technically literate, I'm sure. but the ones that I know still, still struggle. Not, not unsurprisingly, given how often platforms change and features move around. Mike, we, we were going through today's stories just before we started. I don't know if we had a, have had a busier week for stories. It feels like everything is happening at once, and we've done our best to condense it down to a set of stories that, are interesting, that, differ from the last couple of weeks where we've been talking a lot about AI regulation. and so I'm really hopeful that listeners enjoy this week's episode. Before we get going, big thank you as ever to our Patreon subscribers, our, our supporters who pay $10 a month to get extended episodes and early access to the podcast. so people can listen well before the week is out. You're not forced to listen to it on the weekend. And our founder and insider supporters who get all of that and the chance to send us stories for us to cover. We've actually got one of those today from one of our, insider supporters, so, proof that it works. It's worth saying, Mike, that, you know, those free episodes are good. People might be listening on the free episodes, but there's a lot less of us. And yeah, you can't listen along on a Friday, which when, if you're me, you are kind of twiddling the mouse trying to or pretending to do work. So if you are like me and you want to have, Ctrl Alt Speech in the background while you do your work on a Friday, that's your call to sign up for our Patreon. Now is a great time to do it as well. We've got a special offer this month for the month of August. Use our discount code TRUSTCON, all caps, T-R-U-S-T-C-O-N, to get an almost free first month. And for our Federal Trade Commission listeners, we're very law-abiding here. It's only mostly free, not fully free. See what big discount. and if you are, an organization or an institution that wants to sponsor the podcast, you know where we are, get in touch. We have a, brilliant and growing audience of listeners, and we can help you reach that audience with whatever it is you're looking to do. So that option is always there. Mike, we're gonna start with a, a story that I think has, has been kind of rumbling for years really. the latest episode has taken off over the last few months, and that is India's relationship as a country with big tech platforms. And we've seen, a series of interesting kind of, milestones in relation to this story over the last few months. And I wanted to kind of map out that story today in this episode, because I think a lot of people would've either seen aspects of it and not really seen how it all fits together or just, perhaps, had that pass them by. So I wanted to kind of map out what that looks like and, uh, it has a lot of implications for how big tech works in, in India, and also with countries, of a certain kind of authoritarian nature, let's say. so we're gonna, gonna start with a story that we touched on briefly on "Control Speech" a couple of months back, which was a test, an exam that more than two million people sat in India called the NEET test. And this is a, the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, which many, many young people take, with the idea of becoming medical professionals and doctors. It's a big, big deal for a lot of people in India. A lot of people save up money, in order to do it. It's quite expensive for a lot of the country, and it's viewed as a kind of gateway to a more prosperous future. so people study for it for ages, and it's a massive deal. This year, not for the first time, but, there was some controversy around it because after the test was taken on May the 3rd, the results of that were canceled because the government found that there'd been exam test leaks and people were able to get the paper in advance, which led to huge anger, as you can expect. And, to make matters worse, the government actually banned Telegram, which is widely used in India and was one of the reasons why the, exam was leaked for a week in the lead up to the retake. So you had anger about the exam being retaken, and then you had anger about the fact that Telegram was, essentially banned for a week, not only for the students taking exams, but for everyone in the country, many of whom are kind of small business owners using Telegram to go about their work. So you have lots of disaffected youth at this point, people who are angry with the government, particularly the education department, and they kind of rally online under the guise of the Cockroach Janata Party. So this is a, kind of parody on, in terms of name on the ruling BJP party, and, takes the name, the kind of cockroach part of it takes the name from a comment by the chief justice who compared young people in India who were going into journalism and activism as cockroaches. So this youth movement kind of takes, that comment and, builds a kind of movement around it that not only, depicts Modi in, in less than favorable ways online, but then starts to gather in cities across India. the most notable of which was a, uh, big protest in New Delhi, actually, when we were in Trust Con on the 20th of July. So I- you might have seen stories around that time. That's all kind of, well and good. There's a, bit of a problem for the Indian government to face at that point. What happens afterwards is really where it comes into our sphere. Narendra Modi, who's the prime minister of India, the leader of the BJP, puts out a video on the 23rd of July, responding to the protests and the disenfranchised youth movement. It goes out on Instagram, it goes out on Meta, but only, only briefly. It gets taken down by Meta's automated content moderation system for a couple of hours. Understandably, the PM is not happy. you can imagine in that scenario, right, you know, you've got this, these protesters, in all of the major cities in India. You think, "I'm gonna do this video, try and quell things, try and make-- bring a bit of calm to proceedings," only for that video to kind of disappear for no, no apparent reason. Safe to say, government is not happy, and it, contacts Meta and calls its leaders to Delhi to basically have a, summons to discuss what happened and, to kind of thrash things out. That happened yesterday. Joel Kaplan, who is a senior global public policy person at Meta, took over from Nick Clegg, earlier this year. How-- W- Where are we in the year?

Mike Masnick 13:53

time has no meaning. But yes, he, he became the new Nick Clegg,

Ben Whitelaw 13:56

He became the new Nick Clegg. And, we've seen reports this week about Kaplan apologizing for an error in the AI-powered automated content filtering system, which is a bit of a mouthful. basically, why this happened. At the same time, the government in India have asked for a special system so that prominent users of Meta's products, such as the Prime Minister of India, don't have videos taken down like this in the future. and I'm hoping we can get into that conversation because it, it's an idea that is familiar to Meta and familiar to us. so a lot to discuss there. they were also pinned, the Meta leaders, on a story we discussed recently as well around Instagram ads being used to distribute CSAM, which is another big story that has dominated the kind of news cycle over the past couple of weeks. whether Meta does enough to vet ads, particularly when it comes to serious harms like CSAM, has been a, a real topic of discussion. And there is this kind of bubbling, sense online now which has been captured by the hashtag MetaCensorsIndia, that Meta is, doing too much in some areas and, and not enough in other areas related to content moderation. So I thought I'd just kind of try and lay out as much as possible. I'm sure there's things I've missed, Mike, and people who are listening to the podcast are very much invited to drop us a line, podcast@ctrl-alt-speech, if, if you have any further details or ideas about, that story. But I thought I'd just kind of, as best as I can, lay out what's been happening and, and 'cause I think it's a massive, story when added all together.

Mike Masnick 15:21

Yeah. And I think it's interesting and it's just sort of reflective of the impossibility of content moderation, which is that the same people who are upset about the company not doing enough in certain areas then complains that they're doing too much in certain other areas and never sort of considers the fact that, like, dialing it in to the point that is exactly right is an impossible task because this is the challenge all the time. if you wanna say, you know, you have to take down anything bad, you're going to lead to a situation where you've dialed up either the rules or the automated systems or both in some form or another to take down too much content, then you're going to take down something like the prime minister's own video, and then you're gonna freak out about how dare they do that. And so there's a sort of cognitive dissonance here, this idea that, like, if you're complaining both about the company taking down too much and taking down too little without recognizing that you yourself are describing the impossibility here. there are always going to be challenges here. And, you know, one of the things that strikes me as interesting having followed the situation in India and the regulatory, structure of India and how they've dealt with, intermediary liability laws over the years is that, going back a decade, a little bit more, India actually had very, very protective, laws that were similar in some sense to Section two thirty in that they were very protective of platforms and their, moderation choices and, and saying that you couldn't hold them liable for those moderation choices. It was not as much, you know, where in the US was sort of written into law in Section two thirty. You did have these IT acts in India, that were by the courts to effectively be very, very similar. But then in the last decade or so, those have changed very dramatically, and India has very much gone in the other direction, starting from saying, like, moderation choices are protected and you don't hold the companies liable, to now it's, very much flipped. And so I thought, you know, one of the things that I saw with the Joel Kaplan going, to India and apologizing is that, you know, he got dressed down by, a BJP MP, who complained, Deleting the Prime Minister's video was not the work of an intermediary, but that of a publisher," which is such a, classic line of people who don't understand these issues. Whereas you know, going straight to this, like, idea that there's a distinction between an intermediary and a publisher. the whole point of intermediary liability is that you want them to act as a publisher. You're giving them liability protections. You're giving them protections so that they can moderate freely. and so anyone who says like, "Oh, you're... It's a work of a, publisher, not an intermediary," you're misunderstanding the assignment. You're misunderstanding what is happening. And then he, the same MP demanded that Zuckerberg will have to apologize within three days. You know, which sort of highlights this other element of this, this idea that, the people who run these companies are sitting there deliberately checking. You know, Meta has however many billions of users. The idea that, Zuckerberg had anything to do with Modi's video being taken down when it's clearly an automated system is somewhat ridiculous. Now, the other element of this is that it goes right back to the issues of the Cross Check or X Check system that Meta set up, years ago to try to prevent the taking down of big accounts, like famous accounts, which it started with, Obama's account was accidentally taken down, showing in some sense these issues are the same. They keep coming back in some form or another. So his account was taken down. I forget the exact details of why, but it was accidental. They put it back up, and they created this Cross Check, X Check program, basically saying, "We don't take down these certain designated accounts until there's been a more careful review, so we avoid the automated takedown." But then they got in trouble with that when You know, that, program was secret. It was revealed by The Wall Street Journal, and then there was this big complaint like, "How dare they?" it was the way it was reported, again, showing like how the reporting takes something and spins it. It was reported as, oh, they're protecting big name VIP accounts and allowing them to violate the rules.

Ben Whitelaw 19:44

A two-tier, a two-tier class system kind of

Mike Masnick 19:46

Exactly. Exactly. And so it's like no good deed goes unpunished, right? You know, every one of these approaches has trade-offs, and every one, you can put some in place for good reasons, but then the end result is like it allows important accounts to, violate the rules for a certain period of time at least.

Ben Whitelaw 20:02

Yeah. And there was, examples of, I don't know how it happened, but, you know, big names on Meta's products like Neymar, I think having undue influence on content that definitely should have come down, but was allowed to kind of stay up, I guess, because of the relationship he had with people at Meta. I, I, I forget what it was now, but it was-- it basically it's, it was hard. It was a, a hard thing to solve for. and then I think the oversight board came out and said that the XCheck system should be, at least made more transparent, potentially actually disbanded as a result of that story. So you-- we're end up, ending up a little bit back at where we started, aren't we?

Mike Masnick 20:37

Right. 'Cause now, and now you have Modi saying effectively like, "Recreate XCheck for me, but maybe only for me," right? It's like, you know, everyone thinks that they're the exception, and sort of all of these things highlight, how impossible it is. You're going to make type one and type two errors. You're going to have false positives and false negatives, and the question is, you know, you can minimize one or the other, but you're going to increase the opposite one, and anyone who is criticizing these things has to recognize that those are part of the trade-offs

Ben Whitelaw 21:06

Yeah. And I think the, the point around, Meta being pinned on both sides, being accused of removing too much political speech or, under-removing ads is, is a fair one, and I think we know that as a kind of consistent theme of Ctrl-Alt-Speech. You could argue, though, that Meta has somewhat created this system in India though, right? they've not been a kind of passive victim in the last decade of which they have gone into India, got a large amount of its citizens to have Meta products. you know, it's a massive market for them. They have probably engaged on, in, in the political sense in a way that has enabled them to do that. And they haven't pushed back on some of the ways that the BJP in particular have decided to use platforms now to, control narrative to their ends. You know, I was thinking about how I think as was then, pushed back against, a state law. That sought to have Twitter take down, I think it was 39 posts that the government disagreed with. And I appealed. it kind of brought a case against the state. the Supreme Court in that state actually rejected the appeal, so they had to take the post down anyway. But at least they were kind of standing up for their version or, the platform's idea of what speech was. I don't think, to my knowledge, that Meta have ever done that. to what extent has that then led to a situation where you have Kaplan going kind of cap in hand, so to speak, with an apology and an attempt to kind of smooth things over?

Mike Masnick 22:31

Yeah. I mean, it's always tricky, right? Because you're always dealing with the geopolitical realities of, of each country that you operate in, and I think I saw that, and this would totally make sense if you just think of, the math, like India is Meta's largest market in terms of most users anywhere in the world. and so you could see why they might wanna tiptoe around it a little, little more carefully. You also just have, the different personalities between like Zuckerberg or Musk in terms of deciding who they're willing to push back on and who they're willing to agree with. and you know, Zuckerberg has a history of, I'm trying to think of the right, the right word here that is not too obnoxious, uh, in terms of, you know, being willing to say what a leader of any particular country needs to hear at that moment to kind of appease them, uh,

Ben Whitelaw 23:24

know exactly what you didn't say.

Mike Masnick 23:28

as opposed to maybe being a little bit more in your face and a little bit more aggressive as Elon Musk has, been known to do.

Ben Whitelaw 23:35

or principled, let's say. what- whatever, whether you agree with Musk's principles or not, I think principled is probably the thing that I'm looking for. But yeah, so I don't think this story's gonna go away. I think there's, we're seeing big names, people who have large followings on Instagram suddenly getting their content, taken down. journalists are sharing screenshots on Twitter in which it shows, y- photos are being removed from posts going as far back as two or three years. And there's a note that says, We've restricted this content through an automated system because of the IT rules in India." And, and there's actually a sense that the, Kaplan visit has coincided with a tightening of some of those rules. You know, people had photos and posts taken down previously, but it's happened all of a sudden in the last couple of days. and so people are putting two and two together, rightly or wrongly, and saying: Well, this is because Modi and, and the Meta leaders are in the same room, and they could, insist on things being a little bit more moderated. So I don't think this is going away. Obviously, the protests have been running for several months now, and so I thought it was an important point to check in and, and see, you know, what's going on.

Mike Masnick 24:44

Yeah, no, I, I mean, I think it is, it is an important story. It's a large market, and I think as we've, noted in this discussion, it sort of highlights a bunch of the different points that we're constantly raising about the real challenges and trade-offs that are involved in, in moderating any large platform

Ben Whitelaw 24:59

Yeah, for sure. let's go on to our kind of eye-catching stories now, Mike. We've got an absolute doozy to start with. my jaw dropped open when I read some of the coverage of this story that you're gonna talk about. it's, it's brilliant. us through it.

Mike Masnick 25:11

so this story actually started, in 2019 and sort of got a bunch of attention in 2020, which was eBay suddenly apparently deciding to terrorize a husband and wife journalism team, and trying to destroy their lives. it was a crazy story that was completely unbelievable in terms of the, eBay head of security apparently mailing a preserved fetal pig to the family.

Ben Whitelaw 25:37

That was a detail I had not

Mike Masnick 25:38

e- that was one of the thing... It escalated very quickly. it started with, like, scary messages over DMs, and then things just started showing up at the house. In the middle of the night, like, 20 pizzas showed up, and then a fetal pig, a box full of live cockroaches at one point, a box full of, like, live maggots,

Ben Whitelaw 26:00

All because of stuff that was written

Mike Masnick 26:01

Yeah. So the reporters, Ina or Ina Steiner and her husband David, they started this website, which was originally, It became EcommerceBytes, and it was all about auctions, and it was really designed initially for sellers on eBay as kind of a news, place to figure out how do you sell better and how do you, build up a business on eBay. It was launched around the time eBay launched. It was soon after eBay came around that they launched it, and it became very popular with eBay sellers. The site looks like it was created in the 1990s. It hasn't really been updated much, and I am not one to talk, having started a website in the 1990s that hasn't been updated very much. but it just became, like, the sort of place to go if you were an eBay seller and, and kept the news. and they just sud-suddenly started getting terrorized, and people, they would drive around town and suddenly notice that they were being followed. they had, people showing up in the middle of the night. I mean, the pig fetus was certainly scary. There was also... They sent, again, it's a married couple, and they sent a book called Surviving the Death of Your Spouse, and then the next day sent a funeral wreath. Uh, I mean, this is, like, absolutely terrifying. They sent, at one point to their next-door neighbor, they sent, pornography in the name of the husband. Um, just, like, all sorts of horrifying things. And the story came out was that, it was actually eBay employees, the eBay security, safety and security team that were doing this. and then later what came out, and there's now, and I just, like right about the same time that this latest story came out, I had just watched, there's a docu-documentary called Whatever It Takes all about this, which has all the video details. They had security camera footage. They got one of the eBay employees, who was actually a contractor not a full-time employee who went to jail for this to be a part of the documentary and tell the whole background story of what actually happened, which is really enlightening. Normally, those people don't show up on camera in these documentaries. just this, horrifying attack on these people, And the, a bunch of eBay security employees were eventually arrested. all of them ended up pleading guilty at some point and taking jail sentences or probation sentences of, of some form or another. And the whole story was crazy. But the people who weren't arrested were eBay's top executives: the CEO, the, head of communications, and the chief operating officer. And so the latest story, which just came out last week, was that eBay the company and those three top executives have all settled a civil lawsuit that the, Steiners had filed against them, paying out around $56 million, a little bit less than $56 million, with, uh... I forget the exact amounts. It's, it's a significant amount. 48 million or so, I think, went to the Steiners directly, and the rest going to various charities, including ones that support journalists and free speech and the First Amendment. but a pretty crazy story all around, and the, the title of that documentary, Whatever It Takes, comes from a message that the CEO, Devid Wenig, sent to the communications chief saying he wanted to take her down. The, the literal message was, "Take her down, whatever it takes," which then got passed along to the security chief, who, then, like, you know. The, i- in the movie, they talk about he, he was obsessed with all these, like, movies like Training Day and CIA films, and really thought of himself as, like, this, you know, action hero and, viewed the whole thing as cinematic. And the, the story which I hadn't realized was that the plan had been after they terrorized them for a few weeks, somebody officially was going to reach out from eBay claiming, "Oh, we saw that someone is trying to be mean to you, and we're going to protect you," to try and get on their good side. Which, like, is just ridiculous and makes no sense and, of course, only helped the case against these people. But to end up paying out, $56 million is, pretty crazy.

Ben Whitelaw 30:08

Yeah. What do we take from this then? And, and would it happen now? 'Cause my, my takeaway was that this was a big tech company doing whatever it wanted. It was a, it's a kind of sign of big tech culture in the 2000s and kind of early 2010s, you know, complete disregard for its users, any critics. some of the articles that they were writing was, fairly anodyne stuff. They're a very small outlet, even if they were read fairly well. Like, it's, it's almost like you being gone after in, in some way, right? How-- Could this happen nowadays, do you think?

Mike Masnick 30:42

I mean, you know, it, yes, but I mean, this was obviously extreme. Like, I don't think anyone that's part of what's so crazy about this story is just how far they took it and how ridiculous, and I don't think we've seen anything quite like that. But we are living in a time where, like, especially within the tech industry, their view of journalists is not good, and they view journalists negatively, and they certainly, you could see, you know, within these companies, there is often a sense of, like, the journalists, they don't get us, they're treating us unfairly, they're reporting on us in ways that make us look bad, and they're not willing to, give a fair shake to us. and we see that over and over again, and you could see where if you get into your head enough and, you sort of have this, like, group of people all sort of egging each other on, you could get to a point where you're saying, like, "Well, we gotta, we gotta do something to get back at them." Normally, we see that in the form of, like, a SLAPP suit, a defamation lawsuit of some kind, which, you know, is also designed to sort of ruin a reporter's life. and that certainly happens, and that's, I think, a big problem, and it's something that, that I talk about a lot and why we need laws to protect against those, those sorts of things. and certainly in the UK, libel lawsuits are pretty common, and you have things like super injunctions that, block reporters from talking about certain topics. so there have always been attacks on journalists. This was just an absolute extreme situation, and I think it's just sort of this, like, psychosis kind of feeling that, some companies feel like, "Oh, we're constantly under attack, and this is so unfair." So, I don't think it's likely that anyone was gonna go to this kind of extreme again, but it is sort of notable how, the reaction is rather than, like, maybe let's talk to these journalists, let's, you know, share our side of the story or whatever. It was immediately like, "We have to take them down." And you see that, certainly in, a certain class of tech executive these days.

Ben Whitelaw 32:39

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I, I would also say that we talk a lot about how some of the safety laws that we discuss often insist on there being a executive in a particular country that is named, right? And, and I think that know that that is problematic in some ways, and doesn't necessarily do a lot. But I think it-- in my head, I tie it back to some stories like this, where you, you see leaders of particular companies who over time we hear about how they've, completely, done whatever they want. That they've, acted with a complete disregard for users or journalists or, been kind of tyrannical in, in many ways. And I think that, in my head, that's partly why some of those, you would call them hostage clauses, uh, which I think makes sense, actually exist, right? Because we know that companies are are driven culturally by the leadership o-of their top brass, however you want to kind of describe it. And, and I think there's a link there that, probably actually ties the Facebook Meta story in India to this one, which is that leaders decide how companies behave. You can either go and, you know, kowtow to a, prime minister, or you can insist that journalists are chased down the road and sent pig fetuses, or you can do something different. I think that's kind of would be

Mike Masnick 33:56

Yeah. Th-there's definitely a large cultural element to this, and in fact, one of the people who was arrested and, pleaded guilty and went to jail a few years ago claimed that it was part of eBay's hard-drinking culture, was the way it was described, in that it was, you know, it was a culture that, that, What's funny related to that, the hard-drinking culture, was that one of the stories that particularly pissed off the CEO was that eBay had redone their headquarters at the behest of the CEO, and part of that, complete rebuild of the headquarters included a replica of a famous New York City pub, that they wanted inside the headquarters. So, speaking of hard-drinking culture, that, that seemed to be an element of it. And that documentary also details how the head of security who ran this operation, and I believe might still be in prison for it, was really focused on... He hired a bunch of very young women just out of school, to be his team, and he often got them very drunk as part of, bonding with the team. So there did seem to be an element of that. the cultural elements at eBay at the time at least certainly seemed pretty, pretty sketchy in lots of ways.

Ben Whitelaw 35:10

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's, it's a wild story. a number of folks contacted me, about it who listen to "Control or Speech." They wanted us to talk about it. I'm I'm glad we did. I think there's-- it's a, it's not directly about speech, I would say, but the kind of cultural element of these companies I think is a massive, massive factor. Mike, I'm gonna wrap up our free episode there. We have-- We're gonna do another eye-catching story in our Patreon episode. we've run a bit longer than we usually do. just talk about the TikTok A/B testing story and why it's worth, signing up with a TrustCon discount code to listen to that.

Mike Masnick 35:45

Yeah, so in the, Patreon part of this, we're gonna talk-- There was a big article in Bloomberg this week about, TikTok running a test, a sort of safety feature where they had a control group that didn't have access to the safety protections that the rest of the, users were having, and one of those users ended up, taking their own life. and so there's a big lawsuit about it related to, whether or not that was appropriate that TikTok, was willing to turn off the safety features as part of this test. I think there's a lot of interesting things to talk about. The story is obviously very heart-wrenching and very disturbing in many ways, but I also think missed some of the larger point about how these companies operate and how they handle safety. And so that-that's what we're gonna discuss in the, uh, Patreon portion of it.

Ben Whitelaw 36:34

Before we go, go and read one of our Patreon supporters, Emma's, legal case. she's, an artist who's been, working to get her Instagram account back. She is a really fascinating case, and we're gonna include the, that in the show notes. Um, we're gonna talk about not only TikTok, but a lot more in our special Patreon segment now

Announcer 36:55

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