Ben Whitelaw 0:00

So Katie, I'm gonna ask you the same question I ask Mike every week, and that is what fun thing have you seen on the internet this week?

Katie Harbath 0:06

So this week was Fat Bear Week. I don't know if you're familiar with this in the States, but on Instagram, a conservatory, they've been doing it for years, and they identify different bears, and they're fattening up, right, to go hibernate. And so people vote on their favorite, and apparently this year was quite the nail-biter, where Backpack won against, a female bear that had won, I think, last year or something like that. But it's super fun on Instagram. You get to see all these bears, do all the voting. It brings me joy every year.

Ben Whitelaw 0:37

Wow. I'm surprised that's not, against platform policy for fat-shaming or something like that. It's

Katie Harbath 0:42

Oh, man. Do we have to ruin everything with trust and safety?

Ben Whitelaw 0:47

it's a natural phenomenon. It's a natural phenomenon.

Katie Harbath 0:50

I know. What's yours, Ben?

Ben Whitelaw 0:52

well, I have come across a website that I don't know if I'll ever need, but I, kind of love. It's called legalwalls.net, legal-walls.net, and it is a kind of community-maintained directory of legal graffiti walls across the world. And so folks across the web have, like, highlighted spots, I think it's, like, more than 2,500, that are mapped across 70 countries where people have made amazing graffiti. And obviously, obviously in a lot of places, that's not legal, and you have to kind of be careful where you do graffiti. But there's this, like, amazing catalog of, of fantastic graffiti that I just loved browsing through, and, it's a great thing if you're ever visiting a city and you wanna see some graffiti.

Katie Harbath 1:37

I mean, I remember it was a long time ago, but I was in Melbourne and I just loved the graffiti art in that city. And in fact, I think I got a piece of artwork that I still need to figure out where to hang. But that's good to know 'cause those also make good Instagram spots for if you need a nice backdrop or something like that.

Ben Whitelaw 1:52

Exactly, exactly. We've got a few in London that I'm gonna, I'm gonna add to the database as well. So, it's good to be contributing to these things.

Katie Harbath 1:58

Absolutely

Ben Whitelaw 1:59

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 October 1st, 2026, and this week we're talking about platform readiness for next week's Brazil elections, Trump's much heralded AI accord, and for our extended Patreon episode, a potential turning point for terrorism content on the internet. Ctrl Alt-Speech is the highly electable face of Mike Masnick, founder and editor of Techdirt, and me, Ben Whitelaw. But as you heard from our opening, Mike is away this week and we're joined by the brilliant Katie Harbath. Katie, welcome to the podcast.

Katie Harbath 2:35

Thanks for having me.

Ben Whitelaw 2:36

do a bit of an intro to you, Katie, and, and how we kind of met each other. I've been following Katie's work for a long time, writing everything in moderation for reasons that will become very clear. We've met at conferences a bunch of times, and I'm very excited to have her as a co-host on the podcast. She is, foremostly the founder and chief executive officer of her technology policy firm, Anchor Change. But as we'll get into, she's worked in political campaigning for a long time and spent a significant chunk of her career working at Facebook, where she was the company's director of public policy for global elections, and as we're gonna unpack, advising politicians on how to connect to voters and use the platform. Katie, you're the perfect co-host for Ctrl Alt-Speech, particularly at this moment, and particularly with the set of stories we're gonna talk about today.

Katie Harbath 3:22

Yeah, the timing worked out quite well

Ben Whitelaw 3:24

Yeah. Not least because you have a book out, in which you unpack all of this fantastic experience. It is called "Disrupting Politics," and I can see a copy of it behind you as we record, talk to me about, the kind of process of writing the book, why you felt the need to write the book in the first place, why now, basically?

Katie Harbath 3:42

So I first had the idea around writing a book around 2018 when, when we were at the height of Russian ads, Cambridge Analytica, all that stuff, and it was like, maybe I should write some of this stuff down. I've been a journaler since, uh, high school and all that, but it was like, this is the stuff books are made out of, right? But then it wasn't till I left, started thinking about leaving Facebook and what did I want to achieve in the next chapter of my career, and one of the pillars was voice, and I wanted to start a newsletter. I had a journalism background. That's what I went to school for. and the book was on my mind, too. But in talking to people, I realized a couple things in '21. One, I needed a little bit more time and distance from everything that had gone on at Facebook to have a, clearer-eyed view of it. Two, that all authors kinda need their own platform to sell books, and so I was like, "I should focus on the newsletter maybe first and building that, that up." And then it was like, okay, I want this out before the midterms- In 2026, as we go into the presidential, I knew that technology's always a big story in elections right now. I had no idea how big AI was going to, get at first in doing all of it. And I wanted to do this for a couple reasons. One, one is a selfish reason. I didn't want anyone else telling my story. There is a lot of reporting out there. There's a lot of conversations out there. There's a lot of other books out there about what happened during this timeframe, all valid. Like, everybody can have their own experiences, but I didn't want anybody else telling my experience. And when I talk to friends that are historians and stuff, and I've asked, like, "When you go back 50, 100 years, what do you wish you had?" And they were like, "More stories." I also was hoping that for those of us in the trust and safety field, telling our story can be very fraught. You and Mike have talked about this, Yoel Vaishnavhi and others about this. And through my newsletter and through the book, I wanted to show just another way that we might be able to tell our story. And yes, there's always that, chance that you're gonna have a target on your back. and that's always a, you know, a trade-off of doing this. But I do think telling our stories... And again, I wanted to bring people into the rooms of not what Mark was doing, not what Cheryl was doing, but those of us doing it day to day, how we were trying to make these decisions and how we were trying to navigate these times without a playbook. And I dedicate my book to those in the arena, which is a speech by, Teddy Roosevelt that I used a lot when I was at Facebook with our, teams because, you know, it talks about, being in the arena. And there's a lot of valor in that and being able to, to be working in this tough environment. And so I wanted, I wanted that story of not just mine, but as best as I could describe it to others, what trust and safety teams do inside of these companies, and that there are people who really care about getting this right, but there's also a lot of really hard trade-offs that come with it. And then lastly, if I can, and sorry in this long answer, as we go into this AI era, I think there's a lot of things we can learn from the social media era. we spent a lot of time with rose-colored glasses on the first 15 years of social media, not talking about the risks. Now we are. I think we're seeing some of that play out. We're gonna talk about that with some of the stories today. but I'm hoping that there's some lessons here to be learned from what we got wrong, what we got right, that we can think about as we go into this next stage.

Ben Whitelaw 7:02

Yeah. And I'm, I'm really glad that you've brought the stories you have today to the podcast and that you're gonna be able to kind of reflect on those with that experience in mind. But before we kind of dive into those, you touch on a lot of issues in the book that we talk about on the podcast, the importance of nuance, the trade-offs that happen, you know, in roles like yours, the personal toll that, you suffered as a result. you mentioned at one point, you know, you don't feel guilt about it. You often get asked how you reflect on, on that era. How do you look back on, on that time now?

Katie Harbath 7:32

I mean, it's mixed, right? And like you said, I struggle to find words for it because there's a lot of stuff I'm really proud of. There's a lot of stuff, like in the early d- you know, right after 2016, Facebook put a lot of time and money into building the civic integrity team, building the political ad transparency tools, building the election war rooms that we've now seen other companies adopt and, and do that have kind of become commonplace. And frankly, I think the political ad transparency tool is an example of self-regulation gone right. You know, we often talk about like, not necessarily trusting it, but that is something that, they could have just been like, "No political ads whatsoever, and we're not going to, to do that," and they didn't. and I'm really proud of, the teams we built and, like, you can see this Facebook diaspora and the civic integrity diaspora and other companies too, Twitter, et cetera, but, like, as they go out to other companies, you can really see that work. But then there's a lot of things too that, in hindsight, like I really think back to my early political campaigning days where we were doing gimmicks like dressing interns up in dolphin suits, like 'cause John Kerry, who was the nominee at the time in '04, was a flip-flopper. We just wanted more clicks. We thought more clicks were better, right? That means more people are watching. More is better, so let's keep doing whatever keeps getting us more clicks, not realizing there w- we're the proverbial frog in the boiling water, that over time... And I realized this in the book and writing it, like looking at this 25-year span from the 2000 election to the CEOs at the inauguration in '25, how when you only think short-term, you can't necessarily realize what's happening to you. And then when you think about long-term about where that sent us, there's a lot of things that I would potentially change, like how we think about measurement and, and all of that, that I'm like, "Okay, AI era, can we not just think about..." I know it's so hard to even know where the world's gonna be like in two days, let

Ben Whitelaw 9:26

Yeah

Katie Harbath 9:27

two, three years, but I'm trying to keep that long-term perspective in mind as well, so we can try to think through some of the unintended consequences.

Ben Whitelaw 9:35

For sure. For sure. I know, and we'll touch on that today. I've got to ask as well, you know, other former Meta employees have faced issues when writing books recently. Sarah Wynn-Williams is, the obvious example, and I wanted to just ask, like, what has been the reaction from the company? Have you had any, pushback? what's that looked like?

Katie Harbath 9:53

I've not heard anything from the company. I've not been quiet about the fact that I'm writing this book. I've been documenting it on my Substack for years now that I've been doing this. I think it is better for both of us that I can honestly say this is my account without company approval, et cetera. I also didn't have a non-disparagement like Sarah did. and one of the things, there's a nearly 350 citations in my book, and also I put all of those on my Substack as well. So if anybody, researchers listening, et cetera, you want links to all these things, I've put it all up on my Substack for you. with all the leaks and court cases and everything, a lot of the things I worked on have become public, and so I really wanted to make sure that any claims or things I was talking about had a public thing that I could point to around all of that. And I'm still getting reactions from people. The book is not out yet. It comes out on Tuesday, October 6th. so early reads I'm getting good feedback. and so, I'm, excited and a little terrified to be putting this out into the world, but I'm hoping that people can s- I'm hoping that my intentions are seen by people who are reading it.

Ben Whitelaw 11:03

Yeah, and, and I'm halfway through. I haven't, I haven't finished the book, but it's a fantastic read and it told me lots of stuff that I didn't know, having paid a fair bit of attention over the last 10 years. So I think that speaks to your experience and your, your ability to get it down on paper. So, we'll, we'll include links in the show notes to where you can get the book. It's out on Tuesday. listeners, go and buy it. for those people who, who also have some, spare change for us, you can become a Patreon supporter of Ctrl Alt Speech. you get both a extended episode and earlier episodes if you become either an insider supporter, or a regular supporter of the podcast. Uh, you can go and do that at patreon.com/ctrlaltspeech. We've had a handful of people over the last week and lots of great reactions to last week's episode. and if you just wanna support us in other ways, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. It's a big help to us. Katie, we're gonna jump into a, a story that has been very much on your radar, I know, with your, background in elections. that is the Brazilian election, and that's happening on Sunday. 214 million Brazilians are gonna go to the polls to vote for governors, senators, but also the president. And we're kind of, awaiting a very tight election once again between the incumbent President Lula and a Bolsonaro. This time it's not Jair Bolsonaro, it's his son Flavio. And, you know, I wanted to kind of get your thoughts on, generally the kind of election writ large, and then we can kind of dive into a couple of, you know, sub-threads that you've been paying close attention to, which I think are gonna potentially im- impact the outcome of the election. so yeah, what, are you thinking about, about it as a whole?

Katie Harbath 12:37

Well, one thing to just note for folks, is that, Sunday is the first round, and then there will likely be a second round, I think, on October 25th, if I remember correctly. polls are showing an incredibly close race between Lula and Bolsonaro, which doesn't surprise me. And thinking back to it was actually between the two rounds that we saw at Facebook some of the more hate speech and stuff pop up. And I'll be particularly interested to see in what the US does if the race is super close, 'cause they are-- the Trump administration obviously favors Bolsonaro, around all of this and are not shy in getting involved in, international campaigns. but I've a- I've been paying a lot of close attention to what they've been doing around AI, AI and the candidates, what the tech platforms can do, how those AI models are responding to this, but then also the role of, like, AI influencers and stuff in this too, because I think that we are seeing... You know, in the US, we're about to go through a midterms. A midterms is different than a presidential, so one of the reasons I'm watching the Brazil one closely is for many reasons, but another is as the US goes into a presidential and also as we go into French elections next year and all of that, I think we're gonna be seeing some glimmers of what we might be seeing spread across the internet

Ben Whitelaw 13:57

Yeah. And so talk us through some of those kind of threads then. The, the deepfakes one is particularly interesting, I think, because this is not a, a new phenomenon. You know, deepfakes and elections have gone hand in hand for a, a number of years now, and, but there is a kind of e- evolution of these AI models which make that even more potentially disruptive this time round, right?

Katie Harbath 14:16

Yeah, there's two things that I'm really watching. So on the deepfakes thing, what was interesting is that-- So Brazil has, a very strong electoral commission, one that is very trusted inside the country. They've done a fantastic job, and they do-- they've done memos of, um, MOUs with the tech companies. My first election there was 2014, but I think the first MOU was 2018 election. but they banned candidate deepfakes, or deepfakes, I think even on behalf of the candidate. Now, what was interesting though was that Flavio did a deepfake of his dad because Jair's in jail and can't show up to a party rally. And so that was the first, test of this new law, and the Superior Court decided that that was okay because they weren't putting money behind it and it was a party event. And I'm like, immediately they're, twisting themselves into pretzels. Like, how are-- Like, you're immediately giving folks a loophole around it all. So, like, they were gonna try to find it anyways, but what was the point? Like, everybody knew that that deepfake had happened and you're doing this law. It just sort of boggled my mind that, like, your first opportunity of trying to enforce this law and you didn't even get into that level of nuance when you were creating it.

Ben Whitelaw 15:30

Yeah, and, and that's kind of goes back to something that I often think about, which is that kind of disinformation comes from the top in, in a lot of situations. You know, people think that it's, Macedonian teenagers manufacturing this in, in their rooms, and, and that does happen, obviously. But you have political figures who are often responsible, as in this case, for, creating a narrative or a deepfake that actually, runs counter to regulation or, authority. So, that's really fascinating. what was the kind of outcome in that case? Or like where did that deepfake go?

Katie Harbath 16:00

I think they said it was allowed, so, and it had already happened, right? So I haven't seen more on that front. But the other thing that I thought was super interesting, so this happened before the deepfake law, which was that, I can't remember if it was the Superior Court or who, made this rule, but that it said that the AI platforms could not rank candidates. but they didn't clarify about what ranking meant. So my guess is their intention was don't tell people who to vote for, right? But if you search for something, just who are the candidates running for president, and if you do it in alphabetical order, is that a ranking? Is it not? And so a lot of the platforms have, and, the Free Systems, Substack just did a great post on this, like right before you and I started recording, kinda doing a deep dive of how the AI platforms are handling election questions in Brazil. And a lot of them, the newer models are not even helping them, voters understand who's gonna be on their ballot, where, when, and how to vote, because these platforms are so worried about running afoul of these rules. 'Cause another thing people might not know is Brazil's a very litigious country. People can bring suits very quickly. I remember we used to have to hire hundreds of lawyers to be on call to help us to handle all the cases people might be bringing, against Facebook during an election. so on one hand, it's understandable. The law was meant to try to prevent these AI systems from improperly influencing voters, but what it's actually had the effect of doing is actually disenfranchising them and making it harder for them to get information. 'Cause most people go to, like, Google. They still go to search to find information, and Google, when you search, is ranking things. That's the nature of search. And so these are some of the questions as we continue to see other countries looking at some of these laws of what folks are doing. Again, pay attention to the unintended consequences, and this is where I also oftentimes tell governments, others too, there are plenty of trust and safety people outside of the companies that can help you to think through is what you're creating a law, is your intention matching what the law is that you're passing, and is that how the companies are actually going to respond to it or not?

Ben Whitelaw 18:10

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's so often the case that governments are trying to do things for the right reasons and having these unintended consequences that only play out after the fact. the other kind of, I guess, subplot here is around ads, on platforms and, and the process by which, you know, Meta approves ads, both of the political candidates, but by other individuals who are looking to influence election. there was a period, I think, where President Lula was prevented from, from posting ads on the platform. it was reported by a few different outlets and I saw some research from a, nonprofit called Echo, who showed that there was AI-generated ads that was inciting violence and spreading election disinformation that were being posted by other individuals and they were being allowed through. this feels like something we kind of, we never get past, is that ability to

Katie Harbath 18:57

Yeah

Ben Whitelaw 18:57

political ads and, and ads that violate policy

Katie Harbath 19:00

defining it's really, really, really hard.

Ben Whitelaw 19:03

Right, right. talk about your experience in that regard and, and, you know, c- 'cause you would've, been in the room with politicians who wanted to set up campaigns to influence a set of voters on a particular issue or topic

Katie Harbath 19:15

I was writing the policy about what it meant to be a political ad. so first I want to remind folks, because this also came up with the Elon documentary, here in the States. But, people have to remember that when we were... Typically, uh, I'll start with America, so I know, forgive me that we started with America, but we did. at least with American campaign finance, and I think in most countries, you start with who you are. You are a candidate, you are a super PAC, thus your ads must follow these rules and have these disclaimers. I think people forget that part of the reason that we created the political ad transparency tools was to catch things like the Russian Internet Research Agency ads that were happening in 2016. Most of those were issue-based. They were not talking about the candidates themselves. So we had to flip it on its head, and we had to start with the advertisement. Is it political? Is it about an issue? And then, doesn't matter who's running it, then you need to go through all these hoops. So we had a ton of people who were like, "Wait, we're not political. why are you calling us political?" And I'm like, "But you're running an ad about environmental, issues or something like this. Like, that's a political..." You know, we've took a very broad definition and then we, we narrowed it down. But then we had to go, as we went country by country, every country has different rules. So, like in Brazil, they couldn't even do online advertising until the 2018 election, because they had to pass certain laws, in order to allow that. They have different rules about what those disclaimers and stuff look like. We had to think through the IDs, the verification system, all of that. And so, on one hand, these candidates were super excited to finally be able to use Facebook's targeting tools for elections, 'cause they had seen the success of it in, in a lot of other places. But on the flip side, they were really frustrated all the hoops they had to jump through in order to do that. And when these issues pop up, like you mentioned around Lula, my gut is that was a bug, that that was a mistake. It was not somebody at the company. A lot of times people think there's somebody at the company purposely looking of who can we s- you know, we don't like that politician, so we're gonna do this to them or make this harder for them. No. Like that is not what was happening at all. It was usually some sort of bug, some sort of automated system. We try to have We don't need to go into it, but that's what Cross Check was sort of created for, was to try to provide some of those extra, those extra layers. And then on the other hand too, when people are doing research and they're like, "These ads are getting through," that in their mind incite violence or hate speech. very well, they might be right, but oftentimes too, their definition of that versus what ours might be from a policy perspective and the people that we're reviewing it could very well be very different. I could show content to 10 different people, and I could get a very mixed bag of people saying if it's okay or not. And so that's one of the challenges when you see that sort of research, is that it is not a super clear definition of what falls under that or not.

Ben Whitelaw 22:08

Yeah, of course. And, and we talk about that on the podcast a lot, as you know. in hindsight, you know, that focus on policy rather than the kind of poster of the ad, do you think that that... I mean, has that changed at Meta? Do you think that focus should change? if you were doing it all again, how would you, how would you set it up?

Katie Harbath 22:25

Yeah. they've been able to narrow it down a bit more in terms of the definitions, particularly as the AI has gotten better, the machine learning algorithms have gotten better in sort of thinking about that, and also what people are okay with or not. I still like that because Well, frankly, I like it because I'm still in favor of more transparency versus less, and obviously there's a lot of different people that are influencing our politics beyond just the candidates and these super PACs, and so I would like to make sure that those are available for researchers, journalists, et cetera, to be able to see. if we could make it easier, like over time we made it easier. Like at first we were emailing peop- or snail mailing people postcards with a code so that we could prove that they lived in the United States or lived in that country. We eventually were able to institute thing like if you open a bank or something, it asks you various identifying terms. But, there's things around the edges that I would change around the political ad transparency tools, but I still think overall it's, the direction of it is correct because it helps as we continue to go forward and like we see how influencers and others are impacting this. It helps everyone get a sense of like, Okay, where's the money going?" Now, the thing that I think is challenging and would be very interesting to think about how would you create a database around this is the organic content, because the organic content and what's being recommended and stuff like that also plays a really big role in this, and I think we need to stop think, you know, kinda get outside of the old traditional way of thinking about campaigning, that it's all about where the money goes. Still super important, but also what are people pushing organically?

Ben Whitelaw 24:02

Right. and I guess who are the people behind those accounts as well, right? And what are their motivations and, and means of revenue that perhaps you don't see as a platform, and which again, we've seen lots of examples. Russians paying often kind of right-wing political figures and them posting content that ostensibly was independent, but wasn't

Katie Harbath 24:22

and the new version, you b- you brought up the Macedonian teenagers earlier. Like They were, in 2016, they were running content on Facebook to get clicks to their website where they were, had ads, right? And that's how they were making money. The new version of that in 2026 going into '27, '28, is gonna be AI influencers that are monetizing off of Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, et cetera. And so who's gonna be trying to capitalize on that and using political content in that way? And again, it's not paid advertising in the traditional way we think about it, but how we struggled even in 2020, how do you bring transparency to paid influencers when the money is exchanged off platform? If it's being monetized by the company, ideally that would be in a transparency database too.

Ben Whitelaw 25:11

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I wanted to ask before we kind of move on to, our eye-catching stories is the extent to which a platform like Meta is set up for a moment like an election in Brazil. You know, 'cause you talked about you know, these kind of war gaming scenarios, these, these rooms that were set up to prepare for an election. but a lot of trust and safety professionals have been laid off. Those teams have often become smaller. There is a focus on automated moderation increasingly. And so, some of the stories you, brought to us today, they also suggest that there's a, lack of readiness in some cases, even though Brazil is a massive market with a huge Facebook, you know, using population. What's your sense on how ready they are in, in Brazil, but also in some of those other markets that are having elections next year?

Katie Harbath 25:55

so like, there's a lot of my elections team that are still there, still doing a war room. Brazil is a huge election. I know from everyone from OpenAI to Microsoft to Anthropic, like it's one of the big ones that's on their radar with all of this. And so I do think there's still a lot of work happening. It's just not talked about as much because the companies don't necessarily want that target on their back and getting the criticism and stuff that comes with that. so I don't want people thinking like that there's nothing happening. The fact of the matter too is there's only so much you can be prepared for. Unfortunately, I used to make the joke like, "I can't stop elections from coming," and there's only so much we can do. Like it takes time to build these tools. It takes time to figure out how these models should respond to these answers, like what these policies should be, et cetera. and you don't always know how things are gonna play out, as part of all that, which is the whole reason we created the elections war room. So it's never gonna be perfect, when it has it. It's just like, do you have the policies and procedures in place so that when the unknown unknowns happen, you have a way of trying to respond to them quickly?

Ben Whitelaw 27:01

Okay. and so your, your sense just going back to the Brazil election, what is the most likely kind of digital story that's gonna come out of this election based upon how close it is and, and patterns we've seen so far?

Katie Harbath 27:14

I think we don't know yet, 'cause I think it's gonna happen between rounds.

Ben Whitelaw 27:17

Right

Katie Harbath 27:17

it's gonna happen between rounds 'cause I think if it is, Like, there are some that's showing it's, like, a half a percentage, So, like, if we are within that, it is gonna get real nasty, with influencers, with others, things that are happening. I imagine AI will be a big part of that story, but I don't think we necessarily know what that's gonna be yet, because I do think it'll be between Sunday and October 25th.

Ben Whitelaw 27:44

Yeah. Okay. Well, fingers crossed that the, you know, it all goes smoothly and fairly and that there isn't a repeat of what happened last time, with the, protests and, the putsch that there was, which led obviously to Bolsonaro's jailing. So fingers crossed for that. We'll be, keeping tabs on it here on Ctrl-Alt-Speech. let's go now to those eye-catching stories, Katie, where these are our stories that kind of are worth mentioning, have caught our eye, and are worth our listeners paying attention to as well. I wanted to flag a story that kind of happened over the weekend here in the UK, which is a little bit more detail on the UK social media ban, which has obviously been a, big story here in the UK, but has also filtered into this broader narrative of social media bans, across Europe and, and the world, a- actually, as, as we saw in Australia last year. the culture secretary here in the UK announced that it was gonna come into force in March 2027, which is a new date. That's something that we didn't, fully know. but also there's a kind of a bit more detail on the potential approach, which, I gleaned from a, an interview with her in The Guardian, which she said that a kind of strict social media ban for under 16s was a bit like deciding that your town center is dangerous and then making all children stay in their bedrooms, which I thought was a really interesting analogy and is a little bit of a shift from the previous prime minister, Keir Starmer, who, because of lots of parental campaigns, very much was in favor of this under 16s ban by the end. So I think we'll see a bit of a shift towards the European model of a feature-based tiered approach that, is more respecting of children's rights as they, graduate through their teens. what's your kind of view of, of the ban's wholesale? And, and where are you expecting that to go in the last part of this year going into 2027?

Katie Harbath 29:28

I think you're right about the feature-based stuff. I think as, you guys have talked about a ton, it is really hard to verify someone's age. it is very hard in which to, do that. And two, kids are really clever and they know how to get around bans. Like, they know how to, you know, if they're gonna wanna see it, they're gonna figure out a way to get around it. And so you're better off thinking about rather than just being like, "You can't be on it at all," how do we think about a way that you can do so in a responsible way, right? In a way that helps you to think about, like, "How much time should I be spending on these screens? What is it doing to my attention span? What is it doing?" Like, Is the stuff that I'm seeing the stuff I wanna be seeing? How do I curate my feed in a way that I want to? How do I limit my time?" Like, stuff like that. So I think that's the approach I prefer a lot more, than I do about just this wholesale ban because I just don't think it works.

Ben Whitelaw 30:24

Yeah. I think that's, uh, where a lot of people are landing actually in, in the kind of policy and political sphere right now. And, and to your point about kids being smart, people may have seen or been surfaced a video by This American Life this week, which actually talked about a s- a story that Mike and I flagged on the podcast best part of 12 months ago, where kids that have been banned from social media are going to Spotify and going to individual episodes of old NPR podcasts and using that as a forum.

Katie Harbath 30:55

Chat.

Ben Whitelaw 30:55

Incredible. Like, whoever's coordinating that is a genius.

Katie Harbath 31:00

I had a friend of mine, I will not say who, but, she was telling us how her son has been able to watch YouTube videos through Google Maps

Ben Whitelaw 31:08

No

Katie Harbath 31:09

and, like, figured out a workaround to

Ben Whitelaw 31:12

Wow,

Katie Harbath 31:13

to get around, like, the... Yeah. So again, super smart and can figure out another way

Ben Whitelaw 31:19

Yeah, totally. you know, these, American Life videos on Instagram and Blue Sky and Threads as well, I think all went viral, all got multiple millions of, of views, which suggests that people are understanding, the creativity of these kids and, and actually probably you know, having to think about social media bans in a new way, that they weren't having to think about six months ago when this was a, a fairly kind of dry policy-led debate.

Katie Harbath 31:43

Well, and it's been a challenge from-- I mean, I remember in 2011 when I first joined Facebook, there were questions from parents about how were they supposed to talk to their kids about social media. And it's always been a challenge for parents, A, to even know what the different tools are and, like, what they can be doing. But how do you even talk to your kid about that? What does that look like? And I think COVID made that even harder. I remember my sister kind of being like, "Okay, my nephew," her son, "only way he's able to socialize is playing Minecraft with his friends." So she's like, "I'm not wild at how much screen time he's having, but I also wanna make sure he's getting the socializing. So how do I, how do I think about that?" And so, I think the hope is by making it feature-based, can each family be able to make the decisions that are right for their family about what their use of not just social media, but the internet writ large looks like.

Ben Whitelaw 32:37

Yeah, I think that's fair. I think it's, it's still a tricky line to tread, but I think it's the, probably the best one we have now. wanna flip to another eye-catching story that you flagged, Katie. I'm quite glad not to be talking at length about AI regulation this week, frankly. Um, we had to me- we had to mention it and this is the, famous for lots of reasons, AI Accord that has been signed by some of the big tech CEOs.

Katie Harbath 33:02

The morally binding AI accord

Ben Whitelaw 33:05

yeah, who doesn't love a morally binding accord signed by a bunch of white blokes in suits? Um, so talk us through what you found interesting here and without trying to laugh.

Katie Harbath 33:17

Well, I think-- So the things they signed onto are fine and great, but per usual, the devil's gonna be in the details, right? I mean, I think we already knew this was all gonna be, there's gonna be a lot of self-regulation first. I still think a lot of this is gonna happen in the States, and we won't see anything at the federal level in the US till 2029 at the earliest. What I found interesting, and this is the politics/Facebook in me, is the role that Zuck had in this. So it started to come out yesterday afternoon that Mark started seeding this idea at the state dinner with President Xi and Jensen Yang, and then was a big part of like drafting a lot of it and like getting all the other CEOs together in which to sign this. And we all know Mark loves a good manifesto and that he lo- you know, around all this. But, you know, for somebody who after the '24 election going into the president's inauguration, Elon was the favored CEO du jour, and Mark was kind of seen as catch-up because Trump was mad at him for kicking him off the platform after 2020 and like for a variety of, a variety of other things that we don't have time to get into. but now it seems like Mark has brought that full circle, and that influence. And what's interesting for me on this is what does this look like as we go into the presidential in '28? And how will these CEOs, you know, they're spending a lot more money in super PACs and on campaigns and trying to like pick their candidates that they think are gonna be more favorable to them. Will we see tech CEOs starting to pick favorites as we're seeing different nominees on both the Democratic and Republican side? Will they keep their powder dry until we have the nomination? what is their long game gonna be in terms of influence? Because I think that we have seen with the Trump administration, these CEOs have been in DC more than I think I've ever seen them, i- in influencing that. and then how do the different ones start to jockey for, influence and what does that look like? So I'm, again, I'm watching a little bit more from the, political angle of all of this because I think that one of the things Mark talked about in a recent profile of him, I disagree with him on this a little bit. He, he still thinks the big problem after 2016 is we didn't communicate enough about our good intentions. And I write about this in the book about how good intentions are not safeguards and scale is not a strategy. And I feel like that's a little bit about what this AI accord is, is like, "We got good intentions. Look at us." Like, but it's your actions that are gonna follow that that is what's gonna build up trust with people, and that's what everybody's watching. They're like, "Fine. You guys can sign your little accord. You can't even spell United States right, um, at the bottom of it. Let's see what you guys actually do."

Ben Whitelaw 35:52

Yeah. Listen, so if you, if you haven't seen that, "Unites States" was the way that the, uh, it was kind of written, printed underneath Trump's signature, which, which I guess is, you know, maybe very telling. you know, I don't wanna think too much about the poor staffer who had to, had to do that. I mean, it's also, Katie, the kind of fact that this isn't the mid-2000s, right? This is-- There is a history that these companies are kind of building on. And to say right now that we are signing a morally binding accord and that you should trust us because we have good intentions, you know, feels naive at the least. do, you know, the CEOs really think that the public are gonna buy that or is it kind of theater?

Katie Harbath 36:29

I don't know. I really don't know. They're in such their own little bubble that sometimes I think they convince themselves that Oh, if we just..." Like the number of times I heard from headquarters, "Why aren't you just explaining it better to policymakers about what we're doing? Why aren't you just explaining it better?" And I'm like, "It's not a matter of just explaining it better. That's not the challenge." So there's a part of me that's like, maybe it's na- I think it's naive on their end that like this is enough, like maybe it'll be enough to like calm things down a little bit. I think part of it too is there's this game of hot potato, because the profile I was mentioning about Mark, he talked about like we just didn't communicate enough, but also that he thinks that he took on too much responsibility post-2016, which then allowed Facebook to be a political dumping ground for everyone about it was all Facebook's fault, it's all Facebook's fault, putting it all on them. And so you see these CEOs playing more hot potato with the government and others being like, not one of us wants to be entirely in charge in all of this, and so we're gonna try to make sure that we're spreading the responsibility around." Which is like I think what a lot of us want, but because we have low trust in our government, we have low trust in these tech CEOs, it's sort of like, is this the check and balances that we really want? what do we want that to look like? Like that's a conversation I would love for us to have if I could have a magic wand, but I don't know if we'll have it anytime soon.

Ben Whitelaw 37:48

No, no, me neither, unfortunately. political theater is a good segue onto our Patreon, segment now, where we're gonna talk a bit about a story that some folks might have seen. It's a great investigation by WIRED into changes happening at GIFCT, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. a really interesting cross-platform body that's been set up to, counter terrorism. gonna dive into that, and really what it means, some of these changes mean for not only kind of the platforms themselves and, and their jostling for position and power, but also the potential for terrorist content to, shift, in the next few years. And so I, I had a l- a few things to say on that, and I'd love to get your thoughts, Katie, so we'll dive in now

Announcer 38:30

That's the end of this week's free edition of Ctrl Alt Speech. To hear the extended episode with additional coverage, become a Patreon supporter at patreon.com/ctrlaltspeech. That's C-T-R-L Alt Speech. If your organization is interested in sponsoring the podcast, contact us via our website at ctrlaltspeech.com. Thanks for listening