YouSaid · the spoken record

Kate Starbird

lines on the record: 60
first: 2025-01-06
most recent: 2025-01-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“People who maybe enjoy the debate or who feel like it's a challenge that they welcome actually should be doing it a lot more. I think that we need to have those kinds of cross-pollinated conversations.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How should we think about job owning? And so I went on Fires podcast to talk about that with them. And I really appreciated that opportunity because I also felt like they were on the wrong side of the issue and some of their amicus briefs. And I wanted an opportunity to like fight that fight. And when I did that podcast, I got some pushback from people on the left, like, why would you give them a platform? Why would you go on that platform? And I think that it's just the wrong question. It assumes that you get that people on the left get to legitimize or delegitimize media that speaks to other audiences and they just don't. You have to be there. You have to be engaging in the space in some way. I understand that it can be stressful. I understand that it can be hard, but it invites harassment, like I said, you know, 100 people emailing me about my cough drop. But I think that people who can.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think that for me, particularly as my work became a weird conspiracy theory, I had spent a lot of time going on podcasts where I want the challenge because I feel like it's really important for those audiences to hear the response. I can write op-eds in the New York Times and people who read the New York Times will read them, right? I can give quotes to the Washington Post. I can talk to mainstream media. And I do, or I can put my own stuff out. I at least have enough of a platform where people can find me and get the facts directly from me. But I thought it was really important to go on some of the more right-wing coded podcasts, again, with good faith hosts. I don't think there's, you don't want to set yourself up to be a punching bad where you're just going to have to be sitting there constantly like, no, but this is the reality. No, but you got that wrong. No, but here are the facts. I think that there's ways to do it where you're going to have a conversation about a particular issue. Like, how should content moderation work on the internet?”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a trend towards bringing on contrarians in part because of the sense that they had been censored, like that they'd been taken down or something along those lines or that they were really the sort of brave truth sellers. And it kind of continued in that direction. And the one thing that I do think podcasters and influencers don't reckon with enough is how influential they actually are, right? How trusted they actually are, how they are, in fact, the media now, right? And that comes with maybe a little bit more heading here, but it comes back to candidly a lot more, right? A lot more responsibility because one of the things that's very frustrating is that there is very little opportunity for correction in that format unless you go and edit your show notes and say things like.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a very open ended format, right? And I mean, I prepped a lot, right? And I think that it is important to go in with a very strong sense of like, you know, you're going to be talking for two to three hours. It's going to be very free-wheeling. A lot of complicated things might come up, unexpected questions, because it's just a conversation. And I think that it's less of an interview and more of a this is an interesting person and we're going to have a chat. I think that I wrote about some of Rogan's evolution during COVID in the book in that”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And this, again, like the word Russia gate means nothing. It's just a shivalth at this point. Like Russiagate hoaxer. And it was like, what the hell even is Russiagate? Like, here's a demonstrable data set. It happened. It's real. I'm not making any big, broad sweeping claims about it. I'm just stating facts that conversation was very nuanced, I think. And I appreciated it. I did also get a lot of shit because I got a cough on the plane there. He gave me a cough drop. This is so stupid. He gave me a cough drop. I, you know, was not like an old hand at podcasting and I was eating a cough drop close to the microphone and I cannot tell you. How many emails I got from Rando's screaming at me for like sucking on a cocktail? Well, one, don't do that”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That Well, I really enjoyed it. And he actually reached out to me a couple times asking me to go on. So this was again around the time I had done that work for the Senate Intelligence Committee on Russia. And because it was so politicized, he wanted, he'd heard me on Sam Harris discussing that report and he wanted someone to communicate those facts, right, that holding all the collusion and whatever molar stuff aside, the, you know, the sort of collection of theories about intersection between the Trump campaign and all that that I knew nothing about and didn't work on. But I did have this very clear evidence-based assessment of what had happened and who wanted his audience to hear it. And I appreciated the opportunity. We both knew that half his audience would hate me. And I think I was, I think I remember seeing”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As features became available and our friends were there and network effects happened. And what I think is really interesting about particularly Blue Sky is that you're starting to see that happen. You're actually starting to see threads copy Blue Sky features, right? And that's a pretty remarkable thing for a meta property. Well, let's be honest, Meta does it all the time. They rip off ideas constantly, that they're doing it in response to that engagement that's happening over on Blue Sky. And so I think that the time is, you know, we have a new technological potential combined with demand and those two things together, I think, are interesting and we might see continued momentum in this space as people actively look for alternatives.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They just want it to work No, no, no. My point is actually that you don't want them to have to do the work of curating the feed because the ecosystem of providers who can come and make those feeds is out there, right? What you're essentially doing is saying, I want to subscribe to a different type of curation. Like you see people saying, I really hate Twitter now because I go in the for you feed is a disaster. It's just showing me posts from Elon. It's just showing me posts. I want Sports Twitter back. Right, exactly. And then you have to go and you've got to kind of make your list or maybe, you know, it becomes a much more, it's a feeling of it being like an arduous process. So people aren't looking for that ease. And I think what Blue Sky is doing is trying to build that in from the ground up so it creates a positive experience. It shows people what's possible. We didn't all 20 years ago, you know, those norms and that question of like how should we use social media? What is social media for? That evolved over time.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know that there are some people who want that experience because I know them personally or they talk to me or they ask me to turn on fediver sharing for my threads post, so I do that. But my hunch is that's a very small minority of people who want to be that involved in any version of technology and definitely their social media. So they just want their social media to sort of make them happy. Yeah, they just want it to work. And they don't want to spend time curating the feed. But you think that this idea is important for the future social media.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, but you can also see the content from other servers, and so threads engages with the broader Mastodon community. Right now, your posts are pushed to them. You can see them reply. You can't reply back at the moment. So it's a little bit of a weird experience, but that dynamic, that dynamic of like you can actually go and join a place where you can get that preferred moderation environment you might want and you can go and join it and you can also kind of pick up your account and move it to another server if something goes wrong. But let me just mention one thing because the interesting dynamic on Blue Sky, which threads is beginning to copy, is that it also creates an opportunity for something that we kind of refer to as middleware, where users or companies, even a news organization maybe Vox decides, hey, we're going to create a particular type of feed and anybody can subscribe to our feed.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so you can, it's a kind of networked environment where the distinct instances called servers are connected because they all use the same protocol. In this particular case, that's called activity pub. So you can join a server that is run by either maybe one of your friends or somebody you feel ideologically aligned with. And the server administrator can kind of set the rules of moderation and things like that. So you can have a much more granular selection in this is the kind of environment I want to be in.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, here's the thing, and that's actually you want it to be seamless, you want it to not feel like a thing that people have to learn. And that's one of the areas where Mastodon, there was a kind of a small exodus there after Elon Musk bought Twitter and things began to change. But ultimately, it wasn't particularly sticky. It's grown slowly. There's still things happening there, but it didn't have the sort of algorithmic curation and dynamics that people were used to, that had become kind of the norm for them on social platforms. And Threads' creation is interesting because it brings together some of that, the sort of feed dynamics of the Instagram powerhouse team. This is what you want to see. Let us show you things. While also having that capacity to integrate into the Fediverse. So there's some interesting dynamics there.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ideologically diverse and interesting. I want to have arguments. Twitter kind of crossed a Rubicon for me personally. It became just a platform for just massive harassment. I had nutcases screaming at me all day long about supposed cavals that I ran and how I secretly worked for the CIA. And I was like, this is just not fun anymore. So people, again, people want to be on social media to enjoy themselves. They want to enjoy the argument, not feel like they're engaging with people who are going to become threatening in some way, right? There's a difference there. One is a debate, the other is harassment. And people want the debate and not the harassment. What's interesting to me, though, about Blue Sky and Mastodon is actually the technological underpinnings and what they make possible. So I think that the Fediverse is”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does not have much activity. And the thing that's interesting about that, when we try to get at why, one of the things we used to kind of joke around about, but I think there's actually a lot of truth to it, is that reactionary groups need something to react to. And sitting there saying like, you know, you can't own the libs if there are no libs. So they would constantly migrate back to places where the libs were. And actually, you do see now, you know, kind of groups, like right-wing groups kind of deliberately, you know, raiding blue sky, if you will, to try to trigger the lips, right? This is an old dynamic. Trolls do what trolls do. There's just more places for them to do it. But what's happening, the thing that I am interested in with Mastodon and Blue Sky and Threads is not their potential as, quote, like left-wing social networks. Like you said, I actually like I enjoy pushback. I find it like I want to follow people who are.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rumble is the most successful, and folks in that world tell me it's not actually that successful that you don't actually get a lot of engagement there. And in truth social as successful as a financial vehicle for Donald Trump, but doesn't seem to have many actual users.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think it's so much silos that you're unlikely to face pushback. I don't think that's what people are necessarily going for. I think that it's what's happening is really interesting. So first, the market solutions to dissatisfaction with content moderation and platform policies began on the right, right? There was an entire ecosystem parlor, getter, truth social gab, you know, these platforms that spun up explicitly to offer the right-wing audiences the content moderation styles and quote unquote free speech that they were looking for. And they weren't sticky. Like I cannot stress enough. They were not sticky. Yeah, Rumble.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we're not getting rid of social media technology. The idea that you brought up earlier that people are leaving Twitter or other platforms and going to the math, I don't think anyone, I mean, I know people are technically going to Mastodon, but the point is they're going to other platforms, and there's a whole constellation on the right that don't seem to have a lot of pickup, but they exist. And now you've got threads, and like you said, blue sky. Is that the future of social media that everyone sort of goes to the platform that sort of represents their ideology? Because one of the counters to that is actually there's no fun in doing that. You want to be around. You want to reach the most people. You like maybe you should be engaged with people who don't think the way you do. You want to persuade them? Or are we just going to head back to sort of head to silos where you're unlikely to face pushback?”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's distrust, right? It's looking for a way to, it's looking for scapegoats, looking for an easy answer. It's looking for a convenient answer. You know, more to foreign actors when other ways to look at technology or looking at the dynamics of, for example, content curation and follower networks and other things on who we engage with and how. And I try to get at that in the book, right? This idea of we really devolved down into niches and there's very little trust between them. And that is something that social media has exacerbated, but it's also, you know, the influencer and the participants, which I call the crowd, are actively involved. It is not something where if you eliminated technology tomorrow or eliminated social media tomorrow, everything would go back to being quote unquote normal, whatever that means to people.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I generally hate this kind of equivalence, but it seems to me there is some in that people on the left after 2016 were looking for a reason to explain why Hillary Clinton had lost and Facebook was sort of the easiest punching bag available to them. And you saw a version of it in 2020. How could the Republicans have lost? Well, it had to be an election interference. And again, I'm very wary of false equivalence, but it seems like there's something at play there.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In our head, that this is bad and we should be taking it down, we should be acting against it, and also that this is not the be all end-all in a very, very complicated information environment. So that was my personal feeling on it as a person who did some of that research firsthand.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, this was always sort of a, it became, again, a propaganda campaign. And what I mean by that is, you know, I did one of the outside investigations for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the data sets turned over by Facebook, Twitter, and Google, right? And the Russians, when they were undisturbed in the period of about, you know, two years before the platforms found them and took them down, they were actually effective at inserting themselves into targeted communities, growing large followings, you know, half a million followers on some of the Instagram accounts. They were effective on Twitter at getting influential people to retweet them. They were participants in the conversation. But again, as I was always, you know, very careful to articulate that did not indicate that they swayed people or that they made them vote or not vote in any particular way. So again, we have to hold the two things.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, there are these, you know, you can kind of hold two ideas in your head at once, right? It's bad for foreign governments to try to do this kind of interference. We need to be vigilant. We need to respond. Also, it's not the be-all, end-all, and we shouldn't over focus on it.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's nothing for the state, right? So again, we went into it thinking, will they be there possibly? Will they do something novel, possibly? I don't know that we ever heard a resolution or attribution on those bomb threats, right? That happened down in Georgia and places that did temporarily halt voting as people were evacuated and things like that. That was attributed to Russia, I believe, by Secretary Raffensberger. I don't know that there was ever any corroboration of that from ODNI or the FBI or CISA, the entities that normally would have released a statement. So again, that was kind of an alarming potential escalation, right? Actually, actively interfering. But it quite clearly also did not sway the election.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think a lot of us, well, let me try to caveat that. At Stanford anyway, at Stanford Internet Observatory, our feeling was always that state actors are present, their amplifiers, they're in the space, they are not as impactful as what's going to happen in domestic land. I lay this out in the book too, in the context of the understanding of 2020, right? The Iranians were doing things in the 2020 midterms. We had fake Chinese networks, fake Russian networks, fake Iranian networks. They're there. They get some lift. Sometimes their accounts manage to seed a conversation. We did see things like the DOJ releasing that indictment against tenant media, showing that Russia had actually moved into excessively hiring influencers, right? So we see the evolving strategies. They're there. There's no cost to them to being there, right? Like, why wouldn't you try? This is the information environment.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're back. Another theme that people were talking about a lot during the election was we're going to see a rerun of 2016 where you've got Russia, Iran, or China or all of them trying to interfere with the election. And then this time it was going to be supercharged by AI, deepfakes, all that stuff. Maybe we're missing something, but it doesn't seem like that was a major factor in the election. Again, Meta just put out a report saying, you know, AI didn't seem to be a big deal. And yes, there was an attempt by sovereign nations to interfere the election, but not that big a deal, at least not at Meta. Does that mean we got the threat wrong or that the platforms got really good at handling the threat somewhere in between?”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They maybe reckon with a mistake. That's not what happens here. It's a propaganda campaign to galvanize a political movement. And that political movement needs an outlet and needs to be redirected to something else. And it will be because it was not actually about the facts. The facts were not the problem. None of the people participating in Elon Musk going on about Dominion voting machines on stage at rallies, there was never any reckoning or apology or anything along those lines. It simply stopped happening.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That there's no accountability for any of the people who ginned up that outrage, who made those claims about the election being stolen. As you say, it all simply evaporated. And that's one of the things that I think really needs to be internalized and understood because I think one of the ways that people, even in research, even in media characterize this is they describe it as misinformation and it's just not. That word is so inadequate for what that dynamic actually is. Misinformation implies that like when the facts of the matter are revealed and the person learns that they were wrong, they say like, whoops, sorry, you know, they correct their priors and, you know, and then they.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's got to go somewhere. Yes. And it's very powerful. I think that rage and that feeling that we are doing the investigation and finding out the truth, right? That's why QAnon was so powerful. It was that sense of agency that members had were kind of co-discovering the facts of the world together, right? We're exposing the wrongdoers. And you're just going to see that pointed at something else. It's not totally clear what it's going to be.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we'll come back to the other platforms at the end of this conversation. I want to talk about the election people in your world and mine's spent so much time over the last few years talking about election interference, whether that happened in the last election, preparing for a world where Trump and his allies refused to accept election results. This is what your last book is about in a lot of many ways. It's called Rulers, sorry, invisible rulers. You should all buy it. Donald Trump on Election Day was saying, yeah, there's all kinds of interference happening in Pennsylvania. Obviously all of that went away as soon as the election was over. But what happens to all of that energy and effort that people were putting into either getting people alarmed about election interference or preparing for a world where election interference is a reality? What happens to all that energy? I guess I'm mostly thinking of sort of on the conservative side where they were using that as a tool to whip people up. But I'm thinking in general.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the biggest ones is actually that platforms are trying to create environments that align with the expectations of the users. And so you do see moderation shifting in one direction or another in accordance with the dominant voice on the platform. But the one thing I'll say, sorry for monologuing here, is that you are seeing an exodus of people on the left from Twitter, particularly after the election, because there are now other platforms for them to go to where they feel like the culture is going to be more aligned with their values. And that's going to be a very, very significant thing going forward. That's actually where a lot of my work is focused, is on that dynamic of when users have choice, what do they optimize for and where do they go? And I think that Blue Sky and Mastodon and Threads and some of these others are really interesting ways of seeing how users migrate in response to company policy decisions.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, people are not choosing to spend time on those platforms because they do want to have an experience of feeling that they're on a platform where when they post they're not going to be harassed, they're not going to be pushed out of conversations. They're not going to be engaging with, you know, spam bots, fake accounts, scammers, and Russian trolls, right? So what we see is the tension that the platforms face where it is a business decision to moderate. This has been well established since I think there's a great paper by Kate Klonik written in 2017 called The New Governors that looks at the ethics that go into or the ethos, maybe I should say that informs platform moderation and speech policies. And one of those criteria, the sort of”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. Well, if there are things like high profile state actor influence operations that happen as a result of inaction, you're going to see the public outcry and the pendulum spring back. So they're kind of between a rock and a hard place here. And I think that, of course, moderation is a cost fielding employees to do the work is a cost. building classifiers is a cost, you know, focusing developer attention is a cost. This is not a thing that they are happy to do. But the one thing I'll say is that the public wants moderated platforms. The public does not want to encounter certain types of what we sometimes refer to as lawful but awful content. The public does not want to be harassed. You see this come out in polling over and over and over again. If you want to be on a platform that does not moderate at all, ECHAN is right there for you. Telegram is right there for you.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To have transparency, I think it's reasonable if government is asking for a takedown or moderation action to make that transparent, right? To kind of put that out there, as Google and some other companies do. You don't want to have the entire, you know, you don't want companies to simply say, we're not going to do this anymore. We're not going to engage with researchers or the government anymore. Everybody is now back in their own silos because that's where we were prior to 2016. And we didn't like how that worked out either.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Weird theories of cabals and deliberate censorship made the rounds. Lawsuits were filed as well. There was one called Missouri v. Biden, then Marthy v. Missouri when it got up to Scotus that actually actively sought injunctions to prevent the governments from speaking to the platforms. And again, even though some of those injunctions had carve-outs for matters of national security, which one would assume would include state actor campaigns, the government's out of an abundance of caution really just ceased communicating entirely during that period, leaving Meta to say in November of 2023 the government doesn't talk to us anymore. And they were saying that in the context of releasing new information about Russian, Chinese and Iranian influence operations, where normally they might have engaged with government on those topics as well, now all of a sudden they weren't. So this is the environment that we find ourselves in, right?”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was our means of engaging. Now, a lot of that work is much more insular now. Those collaborations are largely done, or at least with Stanford, obviously, SIO had its own rather dramatic collapse. But I don't think that they're doing very much with other outside voices. And this, I think, is a problem because it does mean that those decisions are being made fully within the company, which is sort of a form of unaccountable private power, right? And I think you do want transparency. You do want data sets being released. You do want data sets evaluated by independent researchers who want those channels of communication to be open to make sure that the public can have an independent outside assessment of what is happening in those areas. The other thing that was a chilling effect was that as these sort of”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love that question. So, first, when we worked with Facebook and Twitter trust and safety teams, that was almost exclusively on two issues. One, child safety, so the presence of illegal child exploitation content, unfortunately, periodically, they would not catch it, and we would, and we would engage on that. The second area was state actor takedowns. So when we saw evidence of influence operations, we would engage with them around, hey, there are these accounts, they're, you know, pretending to be Libyans, they're posting Russian content.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, you spent a lot of your time working with people who worked at trust and safety or they were usually described that way at various platforms. Twitter famously has gotten rid of almost all those people. And in general, there's sort of been a de-emphasis on that work across the platforms. They've rolled back restrictions they've previously put in. The people you work with, I assume, are very committed to the idea of the moderation is important, but I'm wondering if you have a sense of how they're bosses, right? The CEOs of these companies and shareholders for that matter, think about moderation. Do they think it's important or were they rather say, look, we'd rather just not be in this business altogether if we could? And so whatever we're doing is grudging as possible.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Legitimacy of the very enterprise of moderation. And then, of course, there are the real mistakes that then are turned into propaganda campaigns that attempt to delegitimize the idea of moderation entirely, to reframe moderation as censorship, even if it is just something like a label. And that narrative was very effective on the right and it came kind of a centerpiece in the campaign.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Satisfaction. And I think that one of the issues here is that there's just not a lot of transparency around content moderation. When we did our work, we did try to understand of the narratives that we paid attention to, of the, you know, we focused explicitly in our work, we didn't work on the lab leak hypothesis, we didn't work on Hunter Biden's laptop. That was out of scope for us. We were looking very specifically at narratives related to voting. And when we went and looked, we noticed that even in posts that appeared to very clearly violate their policies, moderation was really not particularly uniform. Sometimes one account would post something and get moderated, oftentimes just via a label, overwhelmingly things were labeled way more than they were taken down. But the post would receive a label when one person said it, but not if another person said it. And that creates feelings of inequity, it creates feelings of unfairness, it undermines the”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, it was Exactly. And so in those particular cases, that apology was issued. They unthrottled it, I think, within somewhere between 24 and 48 hours, and they tried to kind of set things right. They had congressional hearings in which people, employees of Twitter at the time went and testified about that decision in the Twitter files, you can read them making that decision, how they decided to make these determinations. Moderation is a, it's challenging. It really is difficult. Somebody somewhere is going to be upset about every decision as the platforms have tried to cope with issues of scale. They use AI moderators oftentimes. I've seen a lot of people on threads complaining that they just suddenly all, you know, their posts are deleted, they're locked out of their account, you know, oftentimes these are journalists who are just sharing stories. It's sort of unclear why the moderator did the thing. And so there is a lot of dissent.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, because it's pretty extraordinary. Twitter suppressing links to a New York post story that turned out to be true. Lots of people had good reason to think it wasn't true, but they actually said, you can't read the story essentially via Twitter. Right. Which they then ejector. So he apologized for or said that was overreach. But it was sort of the worst case scenario you would hear a conservative dream up of online censorship. And they made it a reality.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then ultimately killing the feature altogether, right? So this dynamic of working the reps, of course, you also see this on the left, right? The left is lobbying for its particular preferred moderation and curation standards. It's been kind of a back and forth for a while. And they do respond to the concerns of the dominant party in power because they know that otherwise they're going to be hauled in for hearings and subpoenas and all sorts of other types of things. So there is a component of job owning in that dynamic. I think one thing, though, is that there were, I think, legitimately as they tried to, and Nick Clegg said this in the commentary, that you're referring to and that I read this morning, they did do things like throttle the lab leak hypothesis, right? And there were certain”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were like witch blogs that would show up in the science section every now and then. And so they had human curators who would just try to keep the weird sort of viral spam out of the kind of curated trending feed that was recast as anti-conservative bias and meta had to kind of host a whole bunch of right-wing media folks, Glenn Beck, I believe, went down and a couple of others. And this led to them really shifting, you know, trying to assuage concerns by simply eliminating human curation on that feature altogether, which then of course resulted in it going absolutely completely haywire.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Possibly a combination of the two, right? One of the things I think it's important to understand is that for a long time platforms shifted policy and response to public pressure, right? There's a phrase that we use for working the reps. And sometimes that was refs on the right, right? You may recall Facebook once had a trending topics feature kind of, you know, would periodically go haywire and recommend Macedonian content form nonsense. I remember in 2016 it was like Megan Kelly fired by Fox News, Pope endorses Donald Trump, all sorts of crazy stories.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I guess this is the part where we see how willing. DOJ and others are to spin off just front investigations. I think I'm less concerned about me again. It's been two years now, you know, the material that what we worked on has been turned over and made public. The public can see it. Jim Jordan released all of the tickets, you know, the sort of tracking tickets we use to study online rumors. They're out there. The public can see them. And what you see in those tickets actually refute the conspiracy theory. They're tickets created by undergraduate students, by researchers, by graduate students, by even people like me. They were not, you know, we were not like sent secret messages by DHS or CIA or whatever the, you know, whatever the DHS. Satan tells demanding censorship. The material is out there and the public is welcome.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I guess that is part of the question, right? Is how much of this is real and how much of it is performative? And in some cases, I guess it doesn't matter, right? If you're arguing, look, the whole point is to have a chilling effect. It doesn't matter if it's real or not. The threat of it is important for you specifically. It matters a lot whether it's real, whether you have to defend yourself against a criminal investigation.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mean, you know, ultimately the board members are also responsible, is my understanding of the law, but I guess we'll all wait and see. It seems like kind of performative saber rattling to gin up support and maximize clout on X. But what do I know? I guess we'll see.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When he's putting out a quote that says he puts out quotes like it's on Twitter, which she's blocked beyond, but I can see it, every participant in the orchestrated government university nonprofit company's censorship machine of the last decade can be charged criminally. And then he lists some federal laws. So presumably that'd be him as a board member.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think again it's important to note that what you actually do or don't do doesn't matter. So, you know, I have never been shy about my work. I've never been unwilling to turn over documentation about the research that we did because we stand by it fully. And even as you read the reports that Jim Jordan's committee put out, you can see how absolutely flimsy they are. There is no smoking gun email in there that I have written because the emails were so mundane. As for Mark Andreessen, one of the things that's remarkable about that is that Mark's been a board member of Meta for a very, very long time. So even as he's making comments about meta mass sensory, sorry, he says social media companies, which meta perhaps he mentally examined.”
2025-01-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Studying online bad behavior was hard. It's going to get harder in Trump 2.0 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT