The Real Election Threat with Casey Newton and Renée DiResta

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Only Indeed can get that stuff done efficiently. Trust me, you know, you got to, you got to kiss a lot of frogs unless you use one of these services there like Indeed. So spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job to premium status it deserves at Indeed.com/podcast. Just go to Indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast, Indeed.com/podcast, terms and conditions apply. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is Jon Stewart and I will be your. Your audio guide to this week's podcast. It is Tuesday, it is March 17th. It is St. Patrick's day and I am, oh, that's I, it's all blue, blue and gray. I'm in blue and gray. Does that signify anything on today? It probably doesn't. Uh, we are still, I guess, entering week three of our war with Iran, but I want to talk about a different threat, uh, to the country. The Senate this week, I believe is going to be trying to figure out bureaucratic loopholes to try and get their save America act through, even though they don't really have the votes for it because they could never pass the thresholds of filibuster and certainly not passage, but they want to get it done because they want to introduce, uh, the safeguards to the American electorate because so many undocumented, uh, people, so many non-Americans skew our elections so brutally, even though they don't, even though there's no evidence of it, other than that, this is an incredibly crucial, uh, piece of legislation that must be passed. So today, what I would like this episode to be focused on is the real threat, ironically, to American democracy and our election. And that is the algorithms and social media platforms that push this bullshit and get it out into the electorate so that it becomes canon, even though it lacks the evidence for that. And so to get into that topic, uh, we bring in, uh, experts. In this field. So let's get to them now. Very excited. Uh, as we talk about the real threats to the American electoral system, to the American democratic system, we're delighted with our two guests today. We've got Renee DiResta. She's the associate research professor at Georgetown McCourt school of public policy. You always know how good something is by how long its name is, and that's the longest name. There is, uh, also the author of invisible rulers, the people who have turned lies into reality and Casey Newton, who's the editor of platformer. And of course you all know him as a co-host, a hard fork, which is, uh, the New York times podcast about technology and future. And hello. Hello. Hey John, what is happening with the both of you? Listen, the reason why we're doing this now. So I don't know if you're familiar with the save act, it's the save America act. And as you know, we all, that's. Where we live, uh, America, and they're going to save it by, by voting on it. And, uh, what it's going to do is it's going to protect our electoral system and our democracy from the scourge scourge scourge of non-citizen voting, which as you know, is in the, I think billions. Uh, or either of you and, and, and let's just start by sort of defining what this save act is, is seeking to accomplish. Basically the idea is it's an idea that most people can, can get behind voting is for American citizens. Yes. Let me ask you both now, uh, generally are our elections decided by American citizens? Absolutely. Yeah. So we have an agreement we have, you and I are, we are all in agreement. So why is it, and this gets maybe to the heart of the issue. Uh, 70% of Americans support the save act because it's going to make sure that citizens vote, but generally citizens vote. But 50%, I think somewhere along that line, believe that undocumented voting is an enormous problem and is done in by the thousands and millions. It is. Why is that? And I'll start with Renee. Yeah. So there's been rumors about that for ages and, uh, you can look back to. I mean, we can, we can go back to the 2016 election. You can go prior to that. You basically see these stories. We call them tropes in election, uh, rumor research. Um, and I use the word rumor on purpose, right? A rumor is something where it sounds like it could be true. Um, it resonates with people. They think, oh, this might be something that is happening. They heard it from a friend who heard it from her friend who saw it on the internet, right? There's a sort of trace back to, uh, to a claim that some guy said somewhere. And with this rumor of non-citizens voting, what you hear is this theory that, um, your vote is going to be stolen from you. Your candidate might lose because somebody who is not supposed to be doing a thing is doing that thing. So there's a sense that you might be wronged and that's why it lands so hard emotionally. And if you look back, you see the same types of stories, the same types of tropes landing over and over and over again. You have the bust in voter. You have the person voting with their maiden name. You have the person who is here illegally voting. These are stories that recur over and over and over again. And the reason they recur is because they're not supposed to be doing a thing. They're supposed to be doing a thing because they seem plausible. They seem believable. And most people are not persuaded by statistics. They don't go and say, oh, you know, Cato says that this is a small problem. Heritage says this is a small problem. Brennan Center. Too conservative. Exactly. Cato's libertarian heritage is absolutely right-wing. I mentioned this on purpose. Exactly. Exactly. Yes. So when you go and you look at even the libertarian and the right-wing studies of, uh, voter fraud, you find repeatedly that when, when you are looking at honest statistics, when you're trying to figure out the problem, it is infinitesimally small. But when you go and you look at social media and you hear people who are sharing these stories that they relate to, that they, that feel true, that's why these, that's why these rumors continue to propagate. When we're talking about social media and those kinds of things and they, and they propagate along that way, is that happenstance? Is that because the rumor mill or how does it propagate? Why does it propagate? How does a video of an election worker in Georgia? Reaching under the table to pull out a bucket of votes that is not in any way nefarious become the centerpiece of these larger conspiracies, et cetera. Sure. Well, you know, as Renee just pointed out, there's something really emotional about seeing something like that on social media, right? Somebody's just pulling out a bucket of votes and, um, seems like something nefarious is happening here. And depending on, you know, what caption the sort of, you know, aggrieved user might put underneath it, all of a sudden it's going to start getting that engagement, right? The algorithm. It's going to say, Hey, this seems like it's pretty interesting. We're going to show this to a lot more people. And over time, the elites of the sort of the Republican party, whoever can sort of use this to their advantage is going to say, aha, this is something that I can use to sort of make my case. And so that's that kind of, you know, the algorithms and the elites are kind of working hand in hand to spread whatever kind of emotional rumor might serve their cause. And, and these causes, I mean, ultimately the aim genuine or disingenuous of protect of the world. electoral system you would consider it to be you know an honorable one you you don't want and and there are times that it does it i think uh there was a study done since 1982 uh that there were almost 1500 people right total now you could say like well in small elections even one vote two votes three votes can make a difference and and and which is true but it's very clear that the irony of this is that the larger threat to our electoral system and our american democracy is the manner in which social media can spread these tropes and these inaccuracies to a really much wider group of people and light these fires and is that the type of thing we're utterly ignoring the actual threat to our democracy would that be accurate renee well yes um the challenge is that there's not a lot you can do about that because the way that as casey this is the problem i thought we were fixing this today son of a so the um you know i worked on a project called the election integrity partnership where we just traced uh rumor after rumor after rumor and we wrote in real time what was happening how it started where it started what to the best of our knowledge what the truth was and you're doing this this was at stanford university this was when i was at stanford this was in 2020 we did this in 2020 which was of course the year of stop the steel right remember and so as we would we would trace these stories and what casey's describing is true you have the influencers and the algorithms but the third piece of that is the crowd right the online community that surrounds the influencer that believes it that amplifies it and that moves it from platform to platform right people are the glue between the online platforms just because one platform maybe has a policy that says we're going to moderate this content doesn't mean that all platforms have that first of all and second of all again like i said you can't fact check your way out of this stuff when you try to do that people just feel that their voices are being suppressed if you try to silence the rumor right if you if you kind of nuke it and stop it from trending as happened occasionally in 2020 then they believe that there is you know they are trying to prevent you from knowing the truth and then that becomes kind of a second order you know we call it the streisand effect right there's like a lot of idea that you are actually uh amplifying the theory by trying to suppress it so one of the things that you have to try to do then is counter speak against it but the problem is oftentimes election officials they are not influencers right they are they do not have very i mean let's be honest they are sometimes just male people and nurses and things and shame on them they have other jobs they have they have jobs they have they have elections to run there you know they haven't been weaponized by dark money that goes into the the system but they've got small followings and all seriousness they have small followings right they're out there again they're they're trying to put out facts facts do not land against an emotional story and the way that that rumor mill works one influencer says it another one boosts it big if true have you heard you know it's viral by the time the guy with 200 followers is like actually let me tell you about how those ballots actually work let me tell you why this rumor isn't true that guy's not going to get amplification so unless the platform is actively trying to uprank and surface good information which is something they were trying to do in 2020 and no longer are we can talk about why that is unless they are trying to actively uprank good information the good information is not making it out there and then the other piece of that is that the deeply distrustful crowds that have been taught to that the election is going to be stolen right they have heard this over and over and over again are not inclined to believe the fact check or the information that the election worker is going to put out right well we see that casey and you know look 2020 was was stopped the steel and there was all this fraud and the democrats had rigged the election and we're going to have we're going to have to get the cyber ninjas in there to figure out exactly what went wrong and it routed through venezuela and china sent in elections and then suddenly in 2024 uh nope that one that one actually was pretty good that that one everybody forgot to do that that one worked pretty well yeah and so it really does seem to be an argument of convenience yes absolutely it's an argument of convenience i also think that another thing that's important to highlight here is just the demand for these narratives right in a moment in 2020 when donald trump had clearly lost there was a huge demand on the right for that not to be true once he won in 2024 that demand sort of went away right and so that energy was able to go elsewhere but i think it's really important to talk about the demand side because the algorithms the elite the they're super important but as renee said the people are what's gluing that together and they just sort of want certain things to be true and in the immediate environment that we have now they can just kind of go out and pick their own reality based on what they want talk about that for a moment so yeah if we want to think about this in sort of economic theory you're saying that there is supply side i'll say misinformation people get it wrong that just happens sometimes out of good faith but the more nefarious one that's been weaponized is disinformation so what are the elements of supply side disinformation and then we'll talk about demand side but supply side disinformation what would be considered the elements of that that's where you start to see people who again are incentivized to seed content to try to put out plausible theories to keep hope alive but but really more importantly to to to cast doubt on the integrity of the election and that's what you saw a lot in 2020 um the idea that you could just offer yet one more justification one more reason one more um one more variant on a uh on a theory one more the reason we use rumor actually is because you don't even have to know what the intent is it's just a story that is passed from person to person that resonates emotionally um with disinformation we talk a lot about foreign actors who are in the mix too right you have these agitators these people who are in there because they see an opportunity to advance their own cause donald trump is talking about iran that blew me away because you know of course disinformation was a word that we couldn't say for a period of about you know three four years there but um now now we're talking about it again because it was a thing that did in fact happen um it was not particularly uh major or significant in 2020 or in 2024 far less than what we saw in 2016 um but you know you do have foreign actors in the mix and these are bots and so are they're they're seeding the narrative with paid bots or is this the kind of thing where they talked about you know there's a 16 year old in uzbekistan and he's being given money to invent stories that sound like he's been given money to invent stories that sound like plausible and then seeding the turf you know maria resa talks about this often the idea that a lie spreads seven times faster than the truth so these are people absolutely with intention and purpose sowing the seeds of confusion and misinformation that that would be the supply side actor in league with the paid influencers whose profiles are boosted by algorithms would that be accurate that's pretty accurate so again you have um you have a different the accounts that are content creators and the accounts that are amplifiers are not the same the amplifiers are this is where you see bots usually right and an amplifier would be um the the sorts of accounts that just click the like button or click the retweet button on twitter click the share button and the reason is you need to have engagement in order to trigger the algorithm to share it out to more real people so the reason that you have uh automated accounts the reason that you can use fakes or rent network of accounts that are used in commercial spam the reason you see those accounts come into the on the supply side is that you need to have engagement some something has to get those like counts up and that's where you see those automated accounts and then the as you're describing accounts that are actually writing the content or saying the thing you do want to have some sort of legitimacy or trust there and that's where again you'll see sometimes they'll be paid and sometimes they'll be an account that's where the uh the cat turds of the world will step in and help i mean i i think that people sometimes underestimate with some of those folks just how ideologically motivated they actually are oh i don't know i don't underestimate that at all i think i think they are absolutely purely ideological warriors uh but are sometimes shaped by the financial incentives that go in there they've become that it becomes their identity they start to earn money on it which which brings us to the point in case you know this will i think be kind of in your wheelhouse yeah let's talk about the artist formerly known as twitter so and this gets us to the crux of the irony uh elon musk for a long time and really uh incredibly consistently and vehemently has pushed this idea that undocumented non-citizen voting is rampant it is sowing the seeds of our destruction and we cannot do it he's he's tweeted about it i think he's tweeted about it and he's i think thirteen hundred times or interacted with stories about it the irony of it all is that this guy's platform this guy's algorithm which he is in charge of i see his shit on my feed all the time i don't ever interact with it there's no reason for it to be there that he is a far more relevant actor in the warping of our democracy through his money money and his algorithm, then any measure of undocumented non-citizen voting will ever be. Absolutely. I mean, there was a paper published in Nature in February, and they did a study where they had two groups and they showed one, the sort of ranked algorithmic feed, and then they showed one group, just sort of a chronological feed. And they found that people that saw the algorithmic feed on X moved further to the right than the control group by like a very significant measure, right? So if you're actively using X, you are probably subconsciously moving a little bit to the right over time. And as you point out, John, that is just a far greater effect than what are essentially these mythical cases of an undocumented immigrant voting in one election somewhere. Mm-hmm. Let's break that down because it's very easy to cast aspersions. What his argument, and I think his people's argument would be is, well, now that we're getting uncensored material, now that the First Amendment has primacy, you can't- People move to the right because they learn the truth. But the truth is that algorithm incentivizes the misinformation from the right, and he designs it. Absolutely. And like at Platformer, my newsletter, we broke the story a couple of years ago that after one of his tweets did not get as much engagement as Joe Biden's during the Super Bowl, he went back to his engineers and he said, you need to re-engineer this so that my tweets are getting more prominence. And so they did. And so that is the reason why even if you don't follow the guy in your videos, you're using X all the time, you're going to see his views, which contain so many just various right-wing ideas and conspiracies. He built the algorithm this way. And if you're like me and Rene, and you've been covering this stuff for a decade, in 2020, conservatives were holding hearings saying platforms must be ideologically neutral. You must never suppress any sort of speech. The right and the left should be equal on these platforms. Fast forward to today, X is just a right-wing political project full stop. Look, the algorithm is killing us. The algorithm, the way that it incentivizes the hostility and weaponizes ideology and all these, it just, it's not right. But the antidote, the antidote is information. And that's where Ground News comes in. Ground News, it's this website and app. It's designed to give readers a better way, an easier way to navigate the news. It pulls together every article about the same news story from the same time. And it's designed to give readers a better from all outlets all over the world and puts them in one place and not, not incentivized for like the worst, most hostile, most partisan take. It tells you where it's coming from. You can see starkly in black and white, how these different organizations and algorithms are manipulating the information that we get. They show you how reliable the source is and who's funding it. Who's funding it? Follow the money. Know who's behind the headline. Oh, who is this? Uh, Rupert Murdoch fella. He seems delightful. Hmm. He seems to have a, a somewhat pointed view of the world. I'm telling you, man, the Nobel Peace Center has even mentioned that Ground News is an excellent way to stay informed. Nobel Peace Center. That's, I think the one that Trump started. I think it's the 3D prints, Nobel Peace Prizes. It just hands them out. The platform's independently operated. It's supported by its subscribers. So they stay independent and they stay mission driven. They don't get sucked into this slop. If you want to see the full picture, go to Ground News. They can help you through the noise and get to the heart of the news. Go to groundnews.com slash steward. Subscribe for 40% off the unlimited access vantage subscription discount available only for a limited time. And this brings the price down to like $5 a month. That's groundnews.com. slash steward or scan the QR code on the screen. Now, Renee, they actually came after your group pretty hard. What? Yeah. Tell the story of that. So your group is studying how these things work. And by the way, later on, we'll get into the balance between, because I do think there are first amendment concerns with a lot of these different things. And that's maybe why it makes it more difficult to do that. But Renee, what happened with the Stanford research group that you were a part of? Yeah, so we ran that project in 2020. And what we did in 2020 was we were tracking these election rumors. And we worked, we had, we set up a tip line, right? And we sent an email to the RNC, we sent an email to the DNC, we sent it to NAACP, AARP, a bunch of these civil society groups saying, hey, we want to help because one of the things we can do is we can trace where rumors come from, where they're going, and we can try to get fact checks out. And per the point about the election they have an election to run, their job is not to be sitting on social media, trying to triage and figure out if rumors are disinformation. You know, this was the first major election since Russia in 2016. We thought we were going to see a lot of state actor stuff. That was one of the reasons why we did the project. It turned out that most of the rumors about election theft, most of the rumors about delegitimization, most of the stuff trying to suppress the vote came from the sitting president of the United States, which we wrote about. That's reality. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, right? So we write about that. And as we go through this project, there's four different research centers that are participating in this, 120 undergraduate and graduate students that are the main analysts on this project. And we have a JIRA ticketing system. If you've ever called in with a customer service hotline, somebody makes a ticket for you and that ticket kind of goes around the organization, the building, and different people vote on your ticket. That's how we traced these things. So what is the attempt that you're trying to map? What are you mapping? Yeah. So we're tracking rumors as they go viral, and then we're trying to get them to people who can respond to them. So that might be the platform. Sometimes we would tag a platform in and say, hey, Facebook, hey, Twitter, you have this thing that's going viral on your platform. It violates your policy. Go have a look at it. Right? Right. And then the platform, you'd see this in the little ticketing tags. They would say, thank you very much. We're looking. And about 60% of the time, actually, they would do nothing. 30% of the time, they would slap a label on it saying this content is disputed. Donald Trump would say something about mail-in ballots being fraudulent. They would say this content is disputed. Get the facts about mail-in ballots, and they would link you out to an information site. About 10% of the time, they would take something down. They would decide that it rose to the threshold of actually actioning it with a takedown. So in the course of the full period of the election, we sent about 3,000 URLs in total. So 3,000, that's actually very important, that number. So we also communicated with state and local election officials. They had access to our tip line. So a local election official in Kentucky, for example, sent in a tip saying there is an account pretending to be an election worker. I don't know who this person is. They're claiming that they're destroying ballots. That was the kind of thing that we could then go and look at, see, hey, does this look like it's foreign? Does this look domestic? Is this something that a platform should be tagging? Just like a triage center. You're like an election observer, but rather than existing kind of in the practical world, you're doing this in the online world. And virtually and trying to point out inconsistencies and things that may be troublesome to be investigated. Correct. Seems above board. And so fast forward to so we did this project, by the way, there was a 200 page report that sat on the Internet after it was all done. We wrote about it and we we made a table where after the election was over, we did a data poll on Twitter and we pulled in the total number of tweets of the most viral election rumors, things that. Everybody has heard of Dominion, right? That Dominion machines were flipping votes, that there were Italian, you know, these Italian space laser theories, right? That that Sharpie markers in Arizona had changed ballots. So the top 10 most viral rumors that everybody saw, we added up the number of tweets. It was 22 million tweets. Jim Jordan. Twenty two million. Twenty two million viral tweets. And this was the number that we put out there, just showing the scope and the scale of how much stuff had been making the rounds. On these very, very viral stories. Right. Jim Jordan. Jim Jordan is a congressman from Ohio. Very respected. Extremely honest man. Extremely honest. Legendary. There's not a piece of legislation that has passed in America in the last 20 years that does not bear that man's name as a co-sponsor. Couldn't have a grander reputation. Sports coach. Sports coach really, really cares. Cares about the youth. Some issues about his time as a wrestling coach that may be slightly on it, but but has completely turned. Turned it around and is now a paragon of American sensibility and legislation. Continue. Also happened to be an election denier. Wait, what? Son of a. So. All right. So then he goes. So the election deniers, you know, the House flips and Jim Jordan gets his gavel and starts this committee called the I forget the proper name. We just shorthand is the Weaponization Committee, but it's the subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee to investigate the weaponization of the federal government. He decides there has been. A Biden censorship regime. And even though the agencies that we engaged with during the 2020 election were run by Trump appointees, again, run by Trump appointees, that despite the fact that we were talking to state and local election officials and occasionally when we did speak to federal government agencies, like when the Iranians ran an influence operation pretending to be the Proud Boys, we did talk to the FBI about that because our team saw that early on. We did speak to the FBI. Trump appointees. But these are real. These are real. These are real things that are happening. The Iranians literally tried to 10. They actually did that. Yes. And yes. And Trump was very upset about this like a week ago. That was one of the justifications, apparently, for why we just bombed her on. But as we're doing all this work, as we're doing all this work, we're talking to DHS CISA occasionally also. As this is all happening, Jim Jordan gets his gavel two years later and accuses us of censoring 22 million tweets, that we were part of a vast plot by the Biden regime to steal the election by censoring 22 million tweets. So again, they claim that that number that we added up after the fact of the things that everybody saw, they claim was really the stuff that we censored. They're saying that, and forgive me if this is, but I'm just going to try and think of their theory of the case. Is their theory of the case, and Casey, weigh in on this as well, that by pointing that out, that you are in the league, that you are intimidating the social. Social media platforms to go through and cull things you consider misinformation or disinformation. And by doing so, you are unleveling the playing field. Would that be their theory? And where does the 3,000 come in? So the 3,000 would have been the thing to actually have that conversation about. The 22 million number was published in March of 2021. So long after January 6th, even, right? So long after that would have had an impact. The way that platforms engage with researchers, which I think is worth the public understanding, is that platforms will reach out and they will periodically say, hey, we're considering doing a policy about this. What do you think? And then you can weigh in on that policy as an academic researcher who works in a particular field. This is not a secret, right? Twitter had a council of 60 different civil society organizations. We were not on that council, by the way. But Twitter had its civil society organizations council. And so whenever they were writing a policy about hate speech or about harassment or whatever that issue that those councils dealt with, they would reach out to those entities and they would say, hey, we're going to launch a new policy about this. You guys have an opportunity to provide some feedback. And the reason for this is because back in 2016, 2015 timeframe, nobody on the outside was engaging with them at all, right? All of their policies were developed entirely internally. And that didn't make people happy either, because then it was just one guy, basically the CEO of the company, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, whoever it was at the time, making that determination. And so the idea behind coming up with councils or reaching out to academics is that you have an opportunity to say your piece. And again, as I mentioned, just because you say something doesn't mean that they listen to you, which is why when we published that report and we said we sent in 3,000 tweets, we were absolutely transparent about this. Again, it's sitting up there on the internet for two years. And we also said they ignored, they did not act on 60% of those 3,000 tweets, right? So what you see from that, again, is they did not feel pressured to do anything in response to what we were saying or what we were suggesting. They took things under advisement and they occasionally acted, but more often than not, they did nothing. Only when it rose to a certain standard. Right. And most of the time they put a label on things. And that, I think, is also important to understand. So we were essentially scapegoated because Jim Jordan and the election deniers needed to come up with some justification after the fact for how the 2020 election was stolen. Yes. The irony of investigating you for weaponization was weaponization. So that goes. But Casey. Yeah. Well, I mean, it absolutely was. You know, they wound up shutting down the center at Stanford where Rene worked, or at least, you know, prevented them from doing the kind of research that they were doing. You know, they're from a different country. They're from a different country. They're filing lawsuits against undergraduates who, like, dared to study what was happening during the 2020 election. So the weaponization was truly coming from inside the House. But also, like, I really do not want to give these guys too much credit and say, like, you know, there was some, like, principle that they had to defend. Like, if you've watched these hearings, it truly is just about creating a spectacle and manufacturing this sense of grievance that will then enable Republicans to take further steps to disenfranchise American voters. Like, it really is that simple. Well, let's see, though, if we can play devil's advocate and try and figure out, in the interest of fairness, what is the glimmer of truth within whatever it is that they're using to do the weaponization. So let's go back to, I don't think you would say that the culture of the social media platforms had a liberal slant to it. I think we all probably agree it did. If you think about Facebook and Twitter and those companies, they are steeped in probably, at least, an aesthetic amongst the workers that leans maybe liberal. Would that be fair? I think so. Or did. I mean, I think, like, the most liberal that they got was, like, if you looked at the content policies they had, they were, like, steeped in a tradition of human rights. You know, like, they believed that hate speech was bad and that you should try to stop people from seeing that if they were part of a protected group. But also, in part of, in the culture when much more people were on the ramparts about the usage of certain words or various things. I'm just trying to get at, like, the psychology of where this is. So Elon, they recognize that these are powerful tools. So we're going to walk back a little bit just to get to kind of the genesis of this. Mark Zuckerberg does his Zuckerbucks, spends $400 million, ostensibly, to beef up resources. This is during COVID. So maybe they're putting up plexiglass on things. They're getting people more access. But he has the misfortune of spending $400 million on an election Donald Trump lost. Right. Right. So that also becomes part of the narrative. Yeah. So I'm just trying to walk through so that the culture is, maybe you consider it liberal. Zuckerberg spends all this money. He doesn't do it ideologically. Combine that with, then, Musk, who is having, during COVID, an ideological rebirth, getting in touch with his South African roots, if you will. And we get into this idea of the Twitter files. He buys it because he's so disgusted by their censorship. And to be fair, during COVID, there was information that the they asked to be removed did not necessarily turn out to be wrong. Yeah. Would that be fair? Yeah, there was definitely pressure and just sort of like, you know, things the government said related to like, you know, masking and how's the virus transmitted? There were things that the government said that turned out not to be true. I think it's also one thing I'll note on that on that front. There's the reality. And then again, there's the exaggeration. Yes. I'm trying to get to the reality as well. But but go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. So there is there is. So there's a court case that you're possibly familiar with, right? The Murthy v. Missouri case, Missouri v. Biden, where you see this litigated and it goes all the way up to the Supreme Court. Explain very briefly just the genesis of the case in the background. So two election deniers, the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana filed. No, I think it's really important, again, to get the underlying motivation. It's just so wild to like two election deniers, the attorney generals of Missouri and Louisiana, one of whom is now the sitting senator of Missouri, Eric Schmidt. Right. So let's let's let's be look, I think it's really again, I think getting at the motivation is something that I feel like mainstream media dropped the ball on candidly. And I'm going to be angry about that for a long time. Understood, as you should be. But so they file this lawsuit alleging that, again, there is a Biden censorship regime, which somehow started in the Trump administration. But holding that aside, that that they they eventually stop focusing on the election because they have to deal with the inconvenient reality. That at the time, these appointees were Trump appointees. So what they do to get around that inconvenient reality is they allege the deep state, right, the unfalsifiable claim of the deep state. If you worked there at the time and something went inconveniently for Trump, it was the deep state. But then holding that aside, we're just going to jump ahead into the future. And now it's Biden during covid. And so you do see again, you do see the government reaching out and communicating with the platforms. Now, the government has First Amendment rights and the government communicates with the platform as well. Now, very clearly. Right. Did the government under Trump also reach out to the. Yes. In other words, still is. Is that something that happened? A hundred percent across the board. Exactly. So that's an important thing to remember. Right. Yeah. And they're still doing it right. They're still reaching out today, complaining about platform moderation of ICE related content. Right. So, again, platforms and governments have had back and forth. This tension. For since since platforms have existed. Right. And not to put too fine a point on it is, but in all the complaints about Zuckerberg being intimidated by Biden, Donald Trump threatened to jail Mark Zuckerberg if he ever did anything like that again. So if we're ever going to be talking about government intervention and intimidation to a social platform, let's be fair that it's one thing for the government to reach out. It's another thing for the president of the United States to say. And I will put you in jail. Imagine if Joe Biden had said, I'm going to jail Elon Musk if I lose the election. Right. Like, you know, conservatives. They should have lost their minds. So and in 2018, you also saw threats by. Trump, an executive order even, to try to revoke platform liability protection, right? So platforms have liability protection. That's that rule 230? CDA 230, yeah. 230, yes, yes. Yes. So what happens in this lawsuit is that the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana sue with a judge. I'm currently being sued in front of that judge, so. What? Why? Well, Stephen Miller sued me in front of that judge. We can talk about that after. No. Yes. Wait. Because this is a machine, you understand. Ghoul Stephen Miller? That Stephen Miller? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes. Dead-eye Stephen Miller. Yes. Stephen Miller that walks by plants and they die. That's Stephen Miller. Yes. It's an honor, but yes. Wow. Wow. All right. We'll get into that later. Yes. So he- Don't let me forget that. They pick this judge, right? They pick this judge, and they file this lawsuit, and they allege that the Biden administration did what's called jawboning. So again, because the government has First Amendment rights, the government can communicate with the platforms. The question is, does it rise to the level of coercion? Does it rise to the level of the government saying, for example, nice platform you've got there, shame if anything happened to it, if you don't do this? Or if I'd have to jail you if you do this again. Hypothetically. Hypothetically. Hypothetically. And so they do all these depositions, right? And they're deposing Fauci. They're deposing FBI agents. They're deposing security agents. Because what they're trying to find is evidence that the government was secretly demanding that platforms take down content. And what they see, what they do encounter are they have these emails from, for example, Rob Flaherty, the White House digital director, where he is sending emails saying like, what the hell happened here? You need to explain yourself. If you actually dig in, a lot of those emails that become very notorious are Rob Flaherty asking about the White House's own Instagram account. So again, you can see that the White House is So again, you have the grain of truth where the White House is occasionally communicating with the platforms using strong language. But the stuff that they really blow up, the stuff that they really make, you know, these huge media moments. This is the Twitter files in the whole thing. Right. If you actually kind of delve down into it, what you find is that it's like the Twitter files, literally they were taking emails and cutting them in half and pretending the top half of the email said something it didn't. So it's just the most incredibly dishonest misrepresentation of individual evidence as they walk through these these cases. And this is reflected then in the Supreme Court finding, which is that the judge that they kind of cherry pick in Louisiana says this is the biggest censorship effort the world has ever seen. Issues and injunction, actually issues and injunction, you know, this very broad spectrum injunction saying the government can't possibly talk to platforms. This becomes a problem. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is very conservative, actually walks back that injunction, which is a remarkable thing to see. It eventually makes it up to SCOTUS. Amy Coney Barrett writes the opinion and she says there are clearly erroneous findings by the lower court. The evidence just doesn't stand up here. And she tosses it for standing because what she says is that none of the plaintiffs in the case, for example, Jay Bhattacharya, right, who is now the CDC head at the moment. Yes, CDC head. Yes. It's like musical chairs with these guys and the health officials these days. But so the so NIH head, CDC head, whatever his current role is, both. He is then he is he, you know, he accuses the administration of censoring him. But there's not a single email in which the White House so much as mentions him. And so Amy Coney Barrett tosses this back, tosses this back, tosses it for standing and says the lower courts have these erroneous findings. And and so it's basically kind of, you know, kicked back down. But that's the kind of thing you get from these soy latte drinking justices. This Amy Coney Barrett, if I see her anymore with the little kitten ear hat and the resist signs, I'll lose my mind. Casey, this points to a really interesting dichotomy. Yeah. The difference between the court of social media and the court. Yeah. And you find often that a lot of these weaponized complaints and all these things don't bear. Let's let's go back to the 2020 election. None of their complaints withstood the scrutiny of courts, withstood the scrutiny of bodies that have evidentiary standards. But in many respects, that's not really what matters here, is it? No. I mean, when you are just, you know, browsing your social media feed, your evidentiary standard is this is does this feel true to me? Does this justify whatever I thought before I opened the feed? If so, I'm going to share it. And I think what's really scary about that is that the particular kinds of things that we're talking about today are being used as pretext to disenfranchise American voters. Right. Like, that's the ballgame. Do we get to pick our leaders or not? We'll talk about that for a moment, because the idea is so this is not benign. No. The idea of just saying, like, oh, people need to present ID on its surface sounds wildly reasonable. But underneath it. Are a lot of issues like women who did not change their maiden name to their married name would have to then somehow find their birth certificate and go get a passport. Like, there's a lot of hoops to this. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Like, I saw one study that said that there may be as many as 69 million women who took their spouse's name and don't have a birth certificate matching their current legal name. You know, women. Maybe likelier on balance to vote for Democrats than Republicans. And so if you're a Republican and you're pushing this, like, you probably don't care that married women may be less likely to vote in the next election. Right. We also know this is probably going to affect a lot of trans voters. If you're Republican, you'd be happy if probably if no trans voters voted in the next election. Right. So when you look at the groups that are affected here, it is just generally people that Republicans could stand to live without ever voting again. And let's just to put a fine point on it. The reason why we're talking about this today is the Republicans. The Republicans are considering blowing up the filibuster, which I really don't give that much of a shit about to begin with, and doing all kinds of things to pass this act that's going to raise identification standards so that only American citizens vote, which does not appear to be a problem of any substance, while protecting the actual mechanism that seems to be distorting American democracy. And I want to get into, and Renee, I'll ask you this, because when you could say, like, well, what's the game for them? The game is, let's look at Elon Musk's net worth by creating this algorithm on this platform, by donating $350 million to Donald Trump and Republicans. His net worth has skyrocketed, and the AI tech guys, they've all benefited in a wildly disproportionate manner. And I want to get into, and Renee, I'll ask you this, because when you could say, like, let's look at Elon Musk's net worth by creating this algorithm on this platform, by donating $350 million to Donald Trump and Republicans. Was that shouldn't we have been complaining about their algorithms and their influence and their money then? I think like going back, there were a lot of complaints about algorithms, that these places were increasingly becoming these centralized centers of speech that did not have a lot of democratic oversight or control. Like Mark Zuckerberg has total control over meta. Even his own board doesn't get a say. Right. And so all these guys give a lot of money to democratic presidents and democratic causes. And in the end, they just don't get that much for it. Right. Joe Biden tries to break up meta. He tries to break up Amazon. He creates various regulatory problems for Elon Musk. And at the end of the day, these guys are transactional. Right. They hire Lena Kahn. Yes. The audacity of that. Right. Then Trump comes along and you can just agree to build part of his ballroom and he gives you whatever you want. That's a very recognizable character to a business person. Right. It's like we can just kind of strike a deal. So that is what you're seeing across American politics. Now, it's just a bunch of oligarchs who've grown impossibly rich and powerful who are just able to buy what they want and protecting the turf. Where do you put Sam Altman and all this? He's another one that he just seems to be kind of this weird character that shapeshifts for whatever the moment calls. You know, he'll stand up and say Anthropic is doing the right thing and then vacuum up their contracts when DOD cuts them loose. He is a shapeshifter. Like when you talk to the people who have worked with him, they will tell you that one of their biggest issues with him is that he is always telling you what you want to hear. It's why he's actually like quite charming in person. Politically, he has probably been a little bit more like liberally aligned, like like me. He's a gay guy. And I think that's where his natural sympathies are. But if you ask him about Trump today, he's incredibly careful. You know, I asked him on stage about Trump last year and he said, well, you know, I think he's really, really thoughtful about AI. It was news to me, John. But that's what that's what he told me. I'm a serial guy, but I got to tell you, when you're a little older and not so easy to find, you know, it's not as cute when you're going through the whatever they call them. They're the stars, clovers and mushrooms and being like, oh, right. But my cholesterol is one eighty seven. 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You'll find vegan options at Whole Foods or get five dollars off your next order at magic spoon dot com slash TWS. That's magic spoon dot com slash TWS for five dollars off. As you speak to these folks, their sense of Donald Trump, you know, look, Elon Musk said and I asked him about this once. He said, I'm a free speech absolutist. So I said to him, so how do you support Donald Trump, who clearly has said he wants to censor content he disagrees with? He threatens to throw Mark Zuckerberg in jail. And he said to me flat out, oh, that's just bluster. But now you see they're weaponizing that censorship. For FCC approval and all kinds of other things. Is he just utterly full of shit? I mean, he himself has said he himself has said, oh, that those people are treasonous and should be thrown in jail for saying things he disagrees with. So he's just utterly full of shit. Yeah, this is a man who when he took over Twitter, he started banning journalists because they put their Instagram bio in there in their like Twitter bio. You know, he rewrote an algorithm to privilege his own speech over that of others. He banned. He banned people from Twitter for publishing the whereabouts of his private jet. Like the list goes on and on. The guy has never cared about free speech, except insofar as that benefits him. His own speech. Yeah. Renee, you were going to say something. I was going to say, I think it's really important to understand the word censorship, not as something that free speech activists on the Web have cared about this for a very, very long time. Right. I mean, we saw the freedom of speech, not freedom of reach thing that sits on top of his content moderation policy was something is a Raskin and I came up with. In 2018, right, that that argument that you should be able to maximize content, you should want as much to stay up as possible. And then at that point, you think about, like, how do you how do you decide what to curate? How do you decide what to preferentially amplify when you have a crisis like covid? It is not bad for a platform to decide, hey, maybe we should, in response to search queries, have a little knowledge panel up at the top that returns something from the CDC. Right. Because people are looking for accurate information. They need perfectly reasonable. Reasonable decisions to uprank stuff. Did they take too much down? Yes. You can make the argument that they absolutely did. No, I think that's fair. I think they did. I mean, and I think they would even maybe cop to that now. I think that they would say that. I think that they would say that, too. Again, when you get to certain types of content moderation policies like the lab leak hypothesis that became such a thing. I thought that was a stupid policy. Right. I thought that was a very dumb policy. But I also want to say I also want to say because I think people don't realize it. That was a meta only policy. Twitter didn't do that. YouTube didn't do that. Only meta had that policy and they had it for three months. Right. So it sounds like a thing that was, you know, in place for two years and it actually wasn't. So when you actually look at and I encourage anybody to do this because the one thing is the the policy documents are there. You can go look at them right there. That that aspect of the transparency thing is there. What you see from Elon, though, is that he borrows the moral weight of the word censorship while emptying it of moral content. And that's why I think bars. Oh, my Renee, lay it down. That's exactly right. No, but what killed me, Casey and I were on Kara's pod together when Elon started arguing that his A.I. had the right to nudify children. Right. And that if you said that his A.I. didn't have the right to nudify children, I just want to say that again, that you were censoring him, that that was an act of censorship. And at the same time, he in Turkey. Just took down the opposition completely under the guise of like, hey, that's the law that they have. So I just have to follow that. Like, what are you going to do? Yeah, it's all nonsense. So it becomes a shield, right? It becomes a mental stop word where the minute you say that word, people hear it and they stop thinking about what is it he's actually justifying with that word. He used it to justify the nudification of children, the nudification, the nonconsensual nudification of women. Now, that that's based on his. A.I. or something, right? Yes. A.I. model that. Yes. And so if if that kind of, you know, if we say that moderation of that kind of content is censorship, then that concept has just lost all meaning. Right. And that's where you can't you can't cry free speech absolutism and and make that claim, in my opinion. I also want to get into there's a distinction here, and I think it's a really important one. There's a difference between free speech and algorithmic speech. Algorithmic speech is ultra processed. And I. Generally do the distinction of, you know, Twitter speech is free speech in the way that Doritos or food like it's not really it's processed, you know, that free speech isn't we let everybody know when you're tweet and we incentivize them to hostility and outrage and we monetize their ability to argue. And the algorithm is not free speech. It's just not. It puts it through an opaque process. That elevates certain speech, speech that you deem more important or speech that your business model deems more monetarily beneficial. And so how do we draw the distinction between this idea of free speech and. The algorithmic speech, which is a perversion of speech. Well, I think it's also important for people to understand that on a social media platform, the First Amendment right. Is the platforms it is not the users it is the platforms First Amendment right to decide what it editorially curates that's what algorithmic curation is this has been reinforced legally over and over and over again this is why ironically the conservatives lose their must carry law cases right that is why platforms are allowed to take things down and on the flip side it is why you know again it allows platforms to leave everything up or take everything down it allows them to pendulum swing in accordance with. New leadership coming in right because the First Amendment right on a private platform belongs to the platform that is to the company that is making the editorial curation decision it doesn't belong to the user and this is the thing that frustrates a lot of people this is where you you know you hear the complaints that the platform is censoring me in reality the platform is deciding what to up rank what to down rank and how to set the policies and by the way if if Elon Musk if if you know if somebody came after him for you know whatever it is down voting something. thing or constricting their thing or making those decisions. The Republicans would be the first one to say, hey, that's his platform. That's his First Amendment right. This was why they started to avoid regulation, to have these self-regulatory mechanisms. That's what all those councils and the periodic outreach to academics, the periodic outreach to government, that's what all of those things were. It was the, hey, you guys, you can weigh in, you can give us some feedback so that it doesn't look like we're making these decisions unilaterally. And then in a way, you could argue that for a time, I think that they were trying to be good citizens, maybe. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit. No, they've been unleashed with what they consider animal spirits now, I would assume. Casey, what were you going to say? You know, the thing that I just want people to remember whenever they're looking at a feed, whether it is X, Instagram, anything that is ranked in this way, you are staring at something that has been engineered to hypnotize. You know what I mean? And what hypnotizes you? Conflict, outrage, weird stuff, sexy stuff, stuff that's going to produce a really strong emotional response. So what I try to train myself to do, and I struggle with this too, is when I see something online that makes me feel a very strong emotion, that is the moment that I'm trying to be the most skeptical. That is what I'm saying, wait, who is posting this? Why are they posting it? What are they trying to get me to feel? And that is the kind of core tension that you're just always going to experience when you're looking at an app like this. So as we sort of break it down there, the Republican focus is on this so-called Save America Act, which is going to safeguard our elections. But our premise is that the real threat comes from this algorithmic manipulation of our speech combined with the unceasing amount of money that can be thrown into the pot by these new gilded age, whatever they are, you know, robber barons. How do we find our way? Is it, you know, if we take the analogy of algorithms to processed food, is there an ingredients list of speech? How do we label that? You know, community notes, I think, does a very nice job. I actually agree with that. But I also think community notes is still weaponized politically. I like community notes. I would like to see a community note for good faith and bad faith. I'd like to see some kind of good faith, bad faith, like the way they do in restaurants in New York City. If you see a C in the window, you are not eating their soup. What are some of the, are there tools that can be in this arena for us? I mean, to me, I think the sort of fast food analogy is a really good one. But like the solution to McDonald's is not like be really careful inside the McDonald's. I think the sort of fast food analogy is a really good one. But like the McDonald's and always try to order the salad. It's don't go to McDonald's too much. And I think we need a slow food movement for the media. The good news is I think we already have one. I think podcasts are actually a pillar of this slow food movement. When you hear, you know, three people talking about something for an hour, you're probably going to get a richer and more nuanced picture. You really haven't listened to this podcast much, have you? Because that's, that is, that is not my milieu. Well, I think you're doing a lot of good here, John. But newsletters are also part of this, right? Not every newsletter, but I think there's a lot of like really smart people that are just kind of like sharing their thoughts in this like very long form way. So I just think we need to find other strategies like that. The strategy is not what will make Instagram better, because I just think that's like probably a losing game. Oh, that's interesting. Renee, do you agree that that's, you know, the idea of kind of urging them to become better citizens is not going to be bear any fruit? I think people have been trying to do it for a decade now. I feel a little bit discouraged on that front too. You know, I have kids. My oldest is 12. And you're right there, man. Yeah, no, no, we really are. I mean, it's not I feel like the cusp is like fourth grade now. It's like nine. He's not he's not on social media. But you know, you see these kids, they realize that like they can turn Google Docs into a chat app because everybody's on a Chromebook. And then they can take a YouTube link, throw it into Google Docs, and it'll play embedded in Google Docs. And you're like fighting with your to not watch so far ahead of us. Like trying to make your kid like maybe you should pay attention in math instead of watching some degenerate streamer, right? You know, with kids, you always feel like you're the Iranian regime, and they're a VPN. And they're just, they just get around everything. But I mean, the reason I the reason I was thinking about this as Casey was talking, though, is I just, you know, you try to emphasize like, make good decisions, right? The, you know, look, I'm not gonna I can't I can't, I can't keep him off it. Right? I can say like, I'm not going to let you have a social media account. I understand you're going to watch YouTube, let me explain to you where some of this stuff comes from. Because a lot of a lot of what's really interesting with with middle schoolers is like meme culture for us in 2016 is so normalized for them. A lot of the stuff, even like manosphere content, it's just so in the water at this point, it's just there. Does that help it lose its its effect in some respects, like when it first comes out, it's novel. Like, look, this is a relatively new form of communication. And television and radio created disruption. Hell, the printing press created disruption. Everybody thinks, oh, the printing press happened. And that ushered in the Enlightenment. It really didn't. It ushered in 200 years of war, killing, killing people, and going, you know, burning witches. Are we in a period of adjustment where your kids won't be affected in the same way, because it's native to them? I think they I think that they know that it's not good. I think that, you know, for a lot of them, they don't want social media. They're not looking for it. I used to hear this. We would have high school students over to Stanford, actually a fair bit. And there would actually be a lot of high school students who are like, I just don't want to be on it. I just don't see the point. I just I don't feel good about myself when I spend hours scrolling a feed. And so I don't do it anymore. Right. And so you do hear a little bit of that, you know, and nothing is more humbling than having your five year old say, is that a no, mom? Or is that a you're distracted on your phone? No. Right. How is it that they always see right through us? How is it? I hate that about them. Right. Yeah. My kids are 12, nine and five, you know, and the five year old recognizes that sometimes she's getting a distraction response as opposed to an actual response. And they and they will they will absolutely say it to you because, you know, they they recognize what's happening. And it's very humbling moment, you know, realizing that you are just as addicted, probably more so than they are. So I think that is it is it normalized? I think I struggle with how do I knowing what I know? I mean, this is, you know, this is my job is to look at the worst stuff on the Internet. But how do you keep your kids away from it? Or at least keep it from from penetrating. But I think and I want to ask you, you know, Casey, you talk about sort of that relating it to the slow food movement. And I've seen things like that are farm to table and they always become New York Times style section columns, but they never actually become ubiquitous within the culture. And I wonder, are we thinking about it the wrong way? Because in some respect, this is a battle. And what I see a lot on the left is, we got that guy's given misinformation. So we've got to stop that. Or we've got to take that guy out. And I always view it very differently, which is no, you fight information with information and you have to fight it as tenaciously. You know, I've I've been locked in battles with the you know, I remember when we were trying to do pact act for it was a burn pit bill for veterans, you would think, you know, who's going to be against that. But there was a very strong group of weaponized right wing influencers who spread misinformation about that bill. And we could have gone the route of, you've got to take this down. You've got to put a community note. But we did what we did is we went right at them as tenaciously as we could. And is there a model in that, you know, it's been shocking to me that it's malpractice in terms of social media companies, that nobody has created a viable competitor yet for Twitter, like that blows my mind. And people are trying right, like blue skies trying threads is trying, I think these networks get really entrenched, and they're difficult to disrupt. You know, what you just said, it made me think of like, what Gavin Newsom is doing. I thought that's been very effective. Yeah, I mean, I think people have like, like, a lot of different feelings about it. But you cannot deny that the guy is like down in the trenches. And he's fighting the fight on the terms that Trump has created. And I do think it is worth, you know, someone doing that to kind of see what happens. I wrote this article, I think it was, I wrote it actually, I mean, candidly, it was after Stanford shut down the Internet Observatory, and I was pissed. But it was, it was an article basically saying, like, you have to fight. I mean, per the point, right? It was there was such a capitulation on that front. What happened when Stephen Miller sued us and all the subpoenas came down? Yeah, right. I forgot about that. In all the hubbub, I forgot that the undead has filed a lawsuit against Renee. Talk to us a little bit about what? Why? Well, it's pending litigation. So I can't go into the details. But it's I mean, I mean, the basics I can cover, which basically, it's the same lawsuit, it alleges that we so they found a plaintiff, somebody we'd never heard of never, you know, never talked about, but she lives in that district. So that's how that's how they get their judge, right? But we, that's how they get their judge. So that's how they get their judge. So that's how they get their gateway pundit wrote a false story, or if we tagged it, a gateway pundit wrote a lot of false stories in the 2020 election. And I'm just going to say that again. Kind of gateway pundits thing. Yeah. But as they said that that was us acting as like, you know, basically de facto agents of the government, right? That we were, they alleged that DHS was secretly puppet mastering us to do it. And so we were violating the civil rights of the people that we talked about, or that we wrote about, or that we flagged, or that we talked to platforms about. I mean, this is going to get dismissed eventually. This is such a stupid theory that it makes no sense at all. But the point is to tie you up in legal bills for three years and to shut you up. Because again, like I said, I can't really go into the details of it. Just out of curiosity though, I guarantee you Stephen Miller and DHS are in touch with those platforms directly. 100%. Yes, absolutely. They are. They don't even hide it. So wouldn't that be somewhat of a defense? Well, John, you're assuming that hypocrisy matters. You have to, I mean, again, like, like you said before, right, eventually the courts come down in the realm of reality. But in the meantime, the way that the, the way that the institutions, this is the point I'm trying to make, the way that the institutions decide whether to persist is in the court of public opinion. Do they feel pressure? Do they feel like you're going to constantly get, you know, are they going to be constantly sued? Are they going to be constantly harassed? Are people going to be constantly complaining about the university? Is there going to be reputational harm? Is there going to be reputational damage? And that is what ultimately makes a lot of these institutions decide that the best thing for them to do is to shut up and say nothing. It is the wrong approach. It has been the wrong approach for several years now, but making them understand that you have to fight in the arena is a foundationally different shift because they're hearing from their PR people who were trained in the 1990s era of crisis comms or comms that you shut up and you let the media cycle move past. And they don't understand that there's no such thing as like the media cycle. And they don't understand that there's no such thing as like the media cycle in the age of social media when they can just, you know, kick it back up again once they've made you a character in a cinematic universe. And there's no such thing as a frictionless existence. This idea that they think if they just make themselves small enough, they can live in a frictionless existence is ridiculous because what you end up making yourself is a tasteless pablum so inoffensive that it serves no one and does nothing. Casey, maybe you have a sense of this. How is it that, and I don't think there's any question that this is a bioengineered product that is designed to escape whatever it is that is self-protective within the human brain to continue. It is monetizing your attention and your life. They care about nothing. It is a parasite. While it can be viable and good, it is nefarious in its intent and monetize in its intent. How the hell is that possible? How the hell is a product that powerful, that dangerous, go utterly unregulated for any of its effects? And how do these companies escape any liability? It's a great question. And I think there has been a lot of progress lately, actually, in trying to shift that discussion. I would say that prior to 2020, we didn't really think of these products in the same way that you would think about other regulated goods like alcohol or tobacco. And people tried to pressure them to make different sort of content moderation decisions. And well, maybe if the algorithm worked a little bit differently, we would all be happy again. But you fast forward to today and what people are saying is like, actually, your product is just broken. Actually, it's not safe for anyone to use if they're under 16. It's probably not safe for us either, but let's at least start with the children. And so you look around the world and country after country is now saying, we're actually just going to ban this stuff until we get to the end of the year until you turn 16. Because again, while it's probably like very bad for adults, we are increasingly confident that it's bad for children. And so I just think that's like kind of the start. And, you know, maybe like maybe this is just cope. But part of me wants to think that in the same way that like banning children from smoking eventually led a lot of adults to stop smoking, too. I wonder if we're not going to see something similar for social media. Right? No, I think that's that's quite possible. Is there a warning label, Renee, that we could possibly come up with? This is your brain. On Facebook, the Surgeon General advocated for trying that. This was actually an idea that was that was making the rounds for a while, because again, like what are the I feel like Center for Humane Tech had some ideas around like switching your phone to grayscale. So it was less appealing. A lot of these. I mean, I think there's actually studies that show that people, you know, will I think that there's actually some advocacy, you know, scientific basis to that. Yeah. Like it's just less appealing. Well, Renee, I switched my face to grayscale. And it's clearly less appealing. Well, guys, I very much appreciate you taking the time. This has been absolutely fascinating and really helpful in understanding it. Renee DiRessa, associate research professor at Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy and also the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. And Casey Newton, he's got platformer and of course, co-host of Hard Fork. So, guys, thank you so much for for joining us. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having us. Thank you, John. It's great to be here. Man, I enjoy a nice expert panel. Those guys know their shit. I must apologize to all of you. Our wonderful panel, Lauren Walker, Brittany Mametovic, Jillian Speer will not be joining me today. We had what can only be described as a technical malfunction, which, as many of you know, is also my nickname. So we weren't. We're quite able to work it all through, I'm going to say, the cloud, even though I know I'm pulling that out of my ass, but really appreciate it. And they will obviously be back next week. And I want to shout them out again because of their work, giving me the information to allow me to have a cogent, coherent conversation with people who are expert in their field. So lead producer Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mametovic, producer Jillian Speer, video editor and engineer Rob Vitola. Rob Vitola, who did yeoman's work, even getting this thing done. Audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce. They're, I don't know, I think they're pulling all-nighters just to get this thing out by Wednesday. And our executive producers, Chris McShane and Katie Gray. We will see you guys next week. Bye-bye. The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio. And Busboy Productions. And it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans.