TikTok, Time's Up on Facebook's Content Moderation Sites

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I have huge news for you, everybody.

There's a new thinner iPhone.

It's not that much thinner, but it's a little thinner, and that's something.

This week on the VergeCast, we're talking about Apple's fall event, where every year it launches new iPhones, new Apple watches.

This year we got new AirPods, a whole bunch of other stuff.

It is one of the biggest product weeks of the year.

And we have all the details, all the feelings, and a lot of questions about why it's also orange.

All that and more on The VergeCast, wherever you get podcasts.

Hi, everyone.

This is Pivot from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Casey Newton, filling in for Scott Galloway this week.

Such a difference.

Yeah.

You are not like Scott Galloway in any way whatsoever.

I'm a fresh face on this podcast.

Are you?

Do we need a fresh face?

I think so.

And you have hair.

That's one of the key parts of why we brought you here.

It's a whole new look, which is so important on podcasts.

Yeah, it is.

Absolutely.

Casey Newton.

So, Casey, you're in New York.

You live in San Francisco, actually, at my house.

I do, and it is lovely.

I now have to fly like 2,500 miles just to see you.

Well, I'm a very busy lady.

That's apparently

worth the trip.

Yeah, yeah.

So you're in New York this week, but

you just got back because you broke a big story this week.

I saw you at the code conference, and then you were going right to Tampa.

That's right.

So for the past four months, I had been talking to current and former moderators for Facebook who worked at a site in Tampa, Florida.

And toward the end of the reporting process, three of them agreed to break their non-disclosure agreements and go on the record.

And they were currently working there.

They've formerly worked there.

And they were willing to come forward and kind of describe the working conditions there.

So we flew there with a video crew and we made a video and the story published yesterday on The Verge.

All right, now it's about Facebook moderators at Tampa, but you had previously written about in Phoenix.

And they broke their non-disclosure agreements about working conditions at a company called Cognizant.

It is not Facebook, but it's a Facebook contractor.

That's right.

And so this is follow-up reporting.

So talk about the old story and then how you found the new story.

Yeah, so in February, I wrote a story called The Trauma Floor, which was about the secret lives of Facebook moderators in America.

I reported that they make about $28,000 a year.

They often leave the job with post-traumatic stress and just the working conditions on the job can be really rough.

There's a lot of fears about personal safety in the office.

The physical conditions can be kind of gross.

And after I wrote my story, I heard from moderators all around the world, but I heard more from people in Tampa than anywhere else.

And so I thought I've got to go out there and see what's going on.

They both work for the same contractor.

Facebook uses a handful of these big professional services firms.

They also use Accenture and Genpact, but I just happen to hear from a lot of people who work for Cognizant, and so I thought I've got to get out to Florida and see what's happening.

And explain.

Cognizant is a contractor.

It is hired by Facebook to

moderate content.

So if you've ever seen something on Facebook or Instagram that you don't like, you can click a button to report it.

And once you do, a human being has to review it to see whether it should stay up or come down.

Facebook writes the policies, but these moderators have to decide moment to moment, does this fit the policy or not?

And how many of them are there?

There are about 15,000 of them around the world working at about 20 sites.

All right.

And how many clips are reported?

These are just what's reported, what is flagged, not what it could be bad and never flagged.

That's right.

And a lot of the content that gets flagged is totally benign.

But I don't know how many posts get reported a day, but I know that they want moderators to be taking action on at least 250 posts a day.

And the really high performers will look at like 400 jobs

a day.

So this is, this is, they vary in length, they vary in, they could be pictures, they could be videos.

That's right.

And in Phoenix, it tended to be a sort of random hodgepodge of things.

But one of the people who went on the record told me that he was put in a queue where he almost exclusively saw hate speech and graphic violence for eight hours a day.

And he is a sensitive guy.

He's an animal lover.

He volunteered at animal shelters.

And every day he would come to work and he would watch human beings and animals die just in the worst way imaginable.

So he was ultimately diagnosed with PTSD.

And they have to watch it and then flag it.

And it takes, they have to watch the whole thing.

Is that correct?

For most videos, they have to watch at least 15 seconds and sometimes 30 seconds, sort of enough to know.

And Facebook will try to highlight the section of the video that might be problematic.

But one of the things that moderators have told me that they're frustrated about is that the same videos will get posted over and over and over again.

So even something that they've seen and they know is horrible, they're going to have to watch 30 seconds of it.

Again.

Again.

Because Facebook can't, for some reason.

Maybe it was modified in some way.

And that's the problem, is people can trick the system.

Game the system.

That's what they do.

Alec Jones is doing it all the time on all the platforms right info wars is everywhere on these platforms even though he's been banned yes they play this game of cat and mouse and they're very good at creating new accounts and evading these bans but yeah these modified videos really give facebook a lot of trouble all right and so when say the thing in new zealand the murders in new zealand happened those facebook pulled down themselves correct they did a mix of automatic and manual review of those videos they were under enormous pressure i mean australia was like passing laws uh basically holding them criminally liable for not pulling these videos down.

So they were hugely incentivized to take down these videos as fast as they could, but their AI systems would just get tricked.

And so Facebook really rapidly built up new technology to, for example, detect if the audio is the same, maybe even if the video has been modified, you take it down.

So as much as they like to say that, you know, AI will solve all of these problems, like in this day and age, like they're just not there.

And there's a lot of people who are having to do the manual work of the future.

And what's super interesting is that they then put it off on people they don't pay very well.

Because people cut you, like like there's an ad, like, what does it say, moderate Facebook videos?

It generally says like social media analyst, which appeals to a lot of like journalism students, honestly, will like apply for this job because they'll think, oh, like it could be kind of cool to work for Facebook.

Right.

And so they start doing this job and they realize it's mean and maybe different than they do.

Does Twitter and the others have the same thing?

Yep, Twitter and Google and YouTube all use similar systems.

With those companies, though, a lot of the labor is offshore.

So one reason why I have made less progress in, for example, figuring out what is the situation at YouTube is because the work is being done in India and other places.

Right, right.

Which is, of course, exactly what they're going to do here.

Well, so Facebook brought moderators to America because they thought American moderators would do a better job understanding our slang, understanding our culture, so they would kind of have the context needed to moderate our posts.

But it's funny because you talk to some of these moderators and they'll tell you actually not that that's not the case and that there will be people sitting on the floor just asking like, who is Malcolm X, you know, or who is Joe Biden?

Who is Ted Cruz?

Right.

So they don't always have that.

Ted Cruz.

Great question.

Later in the podcast, we'll answer that question.

Yeah.

So let's hear some of these moderators tell us about their working conditions.

Because one of the things you wrote about was working conditions, which some of the stuff was like fingernail clips and blood.

It's really gross stuff.

So they don't have nice offices to do this dirty work in.

So they've decided to have a dirty office to create dirty work.

That's one way of putting it.

Yeah.

Yes.

I mean, the Phoenix office is currently dealing with a bed bug infestation at the Tampa site.

The bathroom is routinely found like smeared with feces or menstrual blood.

You don't get your own desk at this office.

You sort of just go pick a new workstation every day based on what's available.

And so, you know, people don't treat the desks well.

So I talk to moderators who come to their desk and they find fingernails or they find boogers on their desk.

And, you know, this job is hard enough to begin with.

And then you're just working in an office that is filthy.

Okay.

All right.

Let's hear the first clip.

In this first clip, the moderator describes a site with policies and restrictions that sound very similar to the Phoenix site.

You sat at your desk, you put on your headphones, and you worked all day.

No one came to comfort you if you were upset.

No one came to talk to you throughout the day.

If you turned around to talk to a friend, you were being screamed at for not looking at your content and doing your work.

They say all the time, okay, we have these counselors here to help you, but we've got nine minutes of wellness every day.

So I'm supposed to go talk to this counselor about the 500 videos I've looked at today in nine minutes, and I'm supposed to be okay.

It doesn't make any sense.

It doesn't make any sense.

That's a great way of putting it.

So they have night.

Explain how much time they have off.

Yeah, so in a given workday, they'll get two 15-minute breaks, a 30-minute lunch, and this nine minutes of what they call wellness time, which is the time that you're supposed to use to, you know, recenter yourself after you've just watched a murder or whatever.

Yeah.

Of wellness.

Yeah.

And, you know, as Melinda says in that video, it just doesn't feel like enough.

Like, you know, I've been to two of these sites now, and they love to point out, like, here's the ping pong table, here's the basketball table, you know, here's where we do yoga.

And it can even sound fun.

Like, what a a fun, you know, cool Silicon Valley startup to work at.

But then when you've got nine minutes to play ping pong, you're like, that's not very much ping pong, right?

Or if you want to talk to the counselor, it's like nine minutes, you know, isn't very much.

Did you talk to counselors?

I talked to counselors in Phoenix.

Yeah.

And, you know, the counselors get mixed reviews.

I have talked to moderators who say counselors do a great job.

They're very helpful.

I've talked to others who said, you know, the counselor did not help me.

Or, you know, the biggest problem that Facebook has had is that the counselors are not available on every shift.

So, you know, are you having a bad night?

Well, maybe the counselor doesn't work the night shift.

So that's just kind of tough for you.

Facebook has said they are eventually going to bring counselors to all shifts, which would be good.

But it's like it's a workplace.

Of course, that's arguably the traumatic thing about their jobs is the content.

And the moderates have to watch sometimes hundreds of videos a day.

And some of the content is truly disturbing.

And we should warn folks that this next clip has descriptions of child abuse.

I have seen videos of a babysitter choking a toddler to death and giving bloody noses to babies

and it stays and nobody does does anything and it just it's just there it's always there and you have to always look at it you always see death every single day you see pain and suffering

and it just makes you angry

because they're not doing anything and the stuff that does get deleted it winds up back there anyway

All right.

First of all, why aren't they giving these to the police?

Like, that's another, like, you're sort of like, why are they letting people do this?

Right.

So in what is their excuse at Facebook for letting people do this in the first place?

So I think if Facebook were here, they would say that we do escalate content to law enforcement when it is clearly breaking the law.

You know, what I think Sean is expressing in his frustration is that even if they escalate something to the authorities, the video is still going to get reposted.

Or some of the crimes that will be uploaded are videos of things that happened 15 years ago.

Right.

And so the authorities can't even really intervene anymore because it's like, you know, the point is moot.

But if you're in this job, I can understand why it would just come to feel pointless because it's like the Sisyphian task where, you know, you're trying to scrub and scrub the internet and keep it clean.

And, you know, the spots just kind of keep

coming back.

And why does Facebook want to have a platform where this stuff gets posted?

Well, Facebook wants to have a place where people can talk about whatever, and they don't want to have to have a lot to say about discussion, right?

And as we've seen, the more that they intervene, intervene, the more conservatives complain that censorship is happening and they've lost their constitutional right to free speech.

So I think Facebook sees it as a political problem.

And if the platform were really restrictive about speech, I think they worry that it would open up ground for a competitor to come along and say, well, we're, you know, we're a free speech party.

You know, we should also say that these companies are American companies.

They grew up with free speech values.

They wanted to create a kind of simulacrum of American society where they're not a public square.

Its owners are billionaires.

I just, I, I, I, okay, that's fine with the public square.

And by the way, you get arrested for some of the things.

Well, I agree with you.

Here's the problem.

It turns out that the rule that everybody wants is take down the stuff that I hate and leave up the stuff that I like.

And so it's fun to have those arguments, but like you can't build a company like that, right?

Like somebody has to write down what the rules are.

Babysitters choking children to death, precisely.

What group is for that?

I don't think anybody is, and I'm sure it's against Facebook's policy.

Right.

So I just, it's like that

it gets there.

And there's a lot of it more than they think.

They always use this 1% thing, and I think it's not true.

Right.

Well, or another thing you could, you know, ask yourself is, you know, should you maybe put more requirements on people before you allow them to upload a video, right?

Like maybe there are certain actions that you take on Facebook where we need to know you better and trust you better.

Well, how do you do that?

Well, I mean, for example, you know, maybe your account has to be a certain number of days old.

Maybe you have to have verified a phone number and email address, right?

There are just like certain things that you could do to get to know a person a little bit better in a way so you could hold them accountable if they're uploading uploading literal crimes onto Facebook.

Right.

And also just creating an atmosphere.

I can't even imagine thinking that's okay and making money off of it.

It's just.

And then also subjecting these people who you're paying very little money to.

And again, $28,000 would they?

Yeah, $28,800 is the starting salary.

Is the starting salary.

Yeah.

How do you go upwards in this terrible job?

Most of them don't.

Most of the people I talk to are there for six months or a year and then they're gone.

And that's the other issue is people.

Yeah, there's a lot of churn, which is like, of course there's a lot of churn because who would want to stay working in these working conditions?

You know, we should say Facebook has said they're going to give all these people a $3 an hour raise, but not until next summer.

So, most of the people I've talked to will not be at Facebook when those raises go into effect.

What else can they do to make it better?

Well, I mean, they could clean the bathrooms.

You know, I mean, like, what they could ultimately do to make it better is bring these people in-house.

Because you and I both know if these people were sitting next to Mark and Cheryl, they would have a clean bathroom.

Yeah.

Right.

They would have really good benefits.

There would be counselors there at all hours of the day.

They would be able to afford really good mental health.

They can move the kombucha stand money over to them.

This is a quick, almost tangential story, but I talked to a moderator who's, you know, working in these filthy conditions, and he goes to a Facebook off-site for training, and he sees this orange juice machine, and it's incredibly beautiful.

And someone at Facebook either tells him or he goes up and looks it up afterwards.

And the orange juice machine costs $16,000.

So it's like half the annual salary of one of these moderators has been spent on making orange juice.

But in no case, you have to have your fresh orange juice.

I mean, I do, certainly.

I mean, I can't work with it.

Whenever I go to those places, I'm always like, are you freaking kidding me?

Every time.

I think they're going to get me this time.

Well, but it's like, it is in that you see a company expressing its values, right?

It is very important for the full-time employees to have their $16,000 orange juice.

And if we just hired you through a contractor, well, you know, we're just going to leave it to the contractor to decide how to treat you.

Right, right.

So they have that.

This is a big issue in Silicon Valley, the contractor issue.

It is huge.

They're like dobbies.

They're like Google.

It's a caste system.

It is a caste system in America.

Right, at least in these companies.

And they use them quite a bit.

It's Both Facebook and Google, all of them.

At Google, more than half of Google employees are contractors now.

So they have separate badges and are treated separately.

You don't get the fancy food.

That's right.

If you're a red badge, you better get out of this cafeteria.

You know, I sneak into Google cafeterias all the time.

I'm too well on the bus.

Well, and you're often in the vents, just listening.

Exactly.

All right.

When we get back, we're going to talk about wins and fails.

This is a piece that Casey did.

It's very worth your time.

It's very disturbing.

You have to walk away from the piece itself.

It's about Facebook moderators in Tampa who broke their non-disclosure agreements to talk to Casey about working conditions of employees at Cognizant and Facebook contractor.

It's super disturbing stuff of what they have to face as a job and then the conditions they work in and the crappy pay they get.

And Casey is doing a public service by

revealing this.

What will happen to these people?

Nothing?

You know, we don't know.

There is pretty good law that people have an unequivocal right to discuss their workplace conditions and to attack people or sue them for discussing their workplace conditions as a violation of their first amendment rights so my strong hope here is that absolutely nothing happens other than more attention gets paid to these workplaces more attention gets paid and what's your where are you going next are you going to go abroad uh i very potentially could go abroad honestly what i want to do next is you know there are people inside facebook that think that i'm beating up too hard on facebook because the same system exists at other companies and well but what i will say is i do want to tell the story at youtube and i do want to tell the story at twitter so my

art that's their excuse it's i mean

they haven't said stop writing about it they have just said you know it's not just us and they're right about that so so i do want to go kind of see what the story is for you to do it and twitter yeah and and google also does like content moderation away from youtube twitter would be slightly different because there's not as much i mean cognizant moderates for twitter too like they have a site in budapest i've been hearing things that are not good so so there's a lot a lot to a lot to keep you only have 240 characters to do it in right and there's some videos right videos that people do upload videos and and you know i mean twitter is just so inept at so many things that a lot of horrible stuff gets through yeah yeah Oh, I know.

Look at my Twitter feed.

You've seen it in your mentions.

Yes, exactly.

All right.

When we get back, we're going to talk about wins and fails with Casey Newton of The Verge.

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We've arrived at our wins and fails segments of the show, and usually Scott and I talk about stories from the news this week, who's screwing up and who's getting it right.

I thought we might switch it up a little bit this week with you here.

Let's talk about companies you covered in your newsletter, which is called

The Interface.

You can find it at theverge.com/slash interface, and I write it four days a week about the kind of the intersection of social networks and democracy.

It's an amazing newsletter.

It's really great.

It's very funny, too.

Parts of it are funny.

You have a lot of analysis.

There's a lot of analysizing

by Casey Newton.

So let's talk about the companies you've talked about.

Obviously, the fail for Facebook is this.

Yes.

They've had so many.

But what's a win for them this year or this week or whenever?

Yeah, so I think a win for them this year is that Instagram is having a really good year.

Like I predicted at the start of this year that this was going to be the Instagram reckoning, that now that the founders were gone,

now that Kevin and Mike were gone, people were going to sort of take a closer look.

And instead, all of that scrutiny has gone to YouTube.

And so instead, Instagram has thrived.

They've introduced some commerce features.

It is well on its way to becoming a kind of thriving social commerce site.

And yet people still use it.

People still like it.

It seems like it's growing really quickly.

So I think Adam Masseri has done a good job of just kind of being a steward of Instagram and something that could have been like a black eye for them this year.

Looks like it was a lot of fun.

What about the problems that Kevin and

Mike had?

Yeah, I mean, which was too much integration with Facebook, right?

Right.

So I think, you know, Kevin and Mike really wanted to lead that independently and kind of create almost a different version or different vision for social networking.

And Mark Zuckerberg had no interest in that.

So I do wish that I could take a peek into the alternate universe where Instagram is still an independent company and just see what the difference would be.

I think it would be great because we'd have so much more competition.

Do you think it will get spun off?

No, because I don't have any faith in the U.S.

government to take meaningful antitrust regulation, but do I think it would be great if it were spun out?

Yeah, I actually do.

It'd be interesting.

Yeah, I mean, look, competition is good.

Like, all of Facebook's best ideas from the past five years have come from Snapchat.

Imagine if there were five other Snapchats.

There'd probably be a lot more good ideas circulating.

Exactly.

Exactly.

All right.

So

let's go to Twitter.

Win, fail.

Which one do you want to do first?

Sure.

A Twitter win this year.

That I here, it's sort of abstract, but here's what I'll say.

Twitter as a company has long been just intro.

It's the company that can't tie its shoes straight, right?

But it feels more vital to me today than it did.

three years ago.

And that's really surprising, right?

Facebook, Instagram, YouTube either feel about as relevant or slightly less relevant than they did three years ago.

Twitter is vital.

Twitter is where absolutely everything is happening.

Obviously,

journalists are all glued to it, but so much of national politics is happening via Twitter.

Diplomacy is happening via Twitter.

So that is the bright spot for them: it is just, it is vital, and that will allow them to try to figure out how to tie their shoelaces.

Yeah.

Okay.

So that's an interesting choice.

What about their fails?

For me, their fail is that it was like the Jack Dorsey podcast tour.

So they decided that they really wanted to be transparent with everyone.

That's our favorite word.

We just want to be transparent.

And they start.

They're just transparent as a.

Nope, they're not.

Well, when they open their mouths, all they tell you is that they're thinking about it, right?

They're thinking about everything.

Hey, why don't you guys do that?

That's a great idea.

We'll do it.

They will concede at any point.

They will cop to every idea.

Everything is a good idea.

They should do everything.

They should try everything.

Right.

But so the long-term effect of listening to like, you know, 19 Jack Dorsey podcast for me has just been to undermine my faith in the company because they don't have a strong vision that they're presenting typically.

It's just like, yeah, you're right, that's bad.

We should fix that.

You're so right.

We should fix that.

We'll do better.

Yeah, so

to me, it's just not working.

Stop the podcasting, stop talking, and start shipping.

So what would you like to see from them?

Besides an edit button, which would solve most of their problems.

Most of our problems.

I would like to see them iterate the product as fast as Instagram does.

Look at Instagram and just how quickly they roll out new features.

Twitter should be exactly the same.

Give us new little widgets to play around with to to try, you know, keep refining the design.

I know they've been thinking about doing some stuff around like ephemeral posts, like, you know, kind of Twitter stories.

Would love to see them try that.

There are so many tweets that, you know, should disappear after 24 hours.

So I just like to see them keep like experimenting with the core product and see what else might be there, in addition to the obvious stuff like, you know, continuing to work on harassment and abuse.

Speaking of that, how are you liking Donald Trump's use of it or AOC's or other big names?

I mean, AOC is an absolutely incredible A-plus tweeter.

Fuego about Biden and Chuck Todd.

Oh, she's good at Twitter.

She's just mastered that medium in a way that I find, even if you don't agree with her politics,

and I probably mostly do, I just think she's an incredible tweeter.

Donald Trump, not good.

But still using it well.

Yeah, you know, uses it well.

But on the other hand, like has opened concentration camps in America.

So none of us.

Now, let us ask you, and I'm good with that word too, even though Chuck Todd isn't.

What would you say

about, well, you'll know my favorite is George Conway, as you know.

Oh, yeah.

He's a very good Twitter.

He's a very good Twitter.

I was, I'm thinking of doing a column for the Times about what would happen if Donald Trump didn't have Twitter.

What if they just suddenly kicked him off just and then whatever, took the heat.

Where would he go, Casey, who knows everything?

Well, I mean,

he could do Facebook.

Here's the thing, though, is like, here's what happened.

He would go on some other website or platform.

He He would do a post there, and then it would immediately be screenshotted, and someone would set up a bot on Twitter, and then that would get posted.

So people who think that if you ban Donald Trump, like we'll stop hearing from him, it's not true.

Like the man has tens of millions of followers, and wherever he goes, somebody is going to take that, and they're going to put it on Twitter.

Right.

So unless they just say that, like, you're not allowed to tweet about the president of the United States of America.

you know, Trump will be with us on Twitter.

Right.

You know, it would remove an interesting like immediacy to his kind.

Anyway, it's an idea.

Well, that's Jack Joyce's argument.

It's like better to hear what's on his mind.

I mean, I think it's actually up to the press to do a better job of kind of throttling down coverage when he's clearly just

talking off the top of his head with no information, which is frequently.

Yeah, okay.

Good point.

That's a very good point.

Thank you for that answer.

That is an excellent answer.

Thank you.

All right, YouTube.

Fail around the harassment of.

Yeah, YouTube,

you know, has a policy that says you're not allowed to say hurtful things and decided to leave up a series of videos by a guy saying really anti-gay things about one of our colleagues.

One particularly, one particularly, it was fairly quite targeted.

Yeah,

it was really bad.

So they need to start enforcing their own policies or change those policies to explain, you know, why that stuff is allowed.

Right.

And then any wins?

I mean,

what is a YouTube win this year?

So again, I think YouTube has had a really awful year,

you know, in a lot of ways.

I mean, the FTC is apparently getting ready to fine them.

There's all kinds of bad stuff with YouTube and kids, you know, in addition to the stuff going on with the LGBT community.

But the win for them is YouTube continues to just displace TV for a generation of people right my kid watches YouTube all the time I watch YouTube all the time right like my YouTube experience by the way is really great like

I am your kid yeah

but you know I go on YouTube I see cooking videos I see video games I see stuff that I like it's a great way to just like relax and pass time Alex watches news you're watching video games but isn't that so interesting it would never occur to me to watch news on YouTube he watches news all the time and documentaries and everything yeah like there's a lot of people.

All the time about Siri, he goes to YouTube.

Really?

That's where he goes.

And pretty good stuff.

I was watching some of the stuff he watched.

Yeah.

I track him, not you.

Well, yes, it would be weird if I was tracking him.

No, I don't mean I track you.

Oh, thank you for not doing that stuff.

No, I do.

Yeah.

I mean, I could make my YouTube channels.

I have a whole facial surveillance system in my house.

So that's exciting.

So there's good stuff on there.

There is so much more.

Susan was trying to make the point at code.

Susan was.

Yeah, and it's like, that's not a winning argument for her, but you know, you can't deny that YouTube continues to grow as the primary place where people are consuming video.

So,

you know, could there be a competitor?

What if they spun off?

It's the it's, I,

I, I would be interested to see what would happen if it did spin off as a public company, although that is one where I don't immediately see how it would help.

I think the cost of starting a new video platform is so enormous, right?

Don't forget that YouTube almost, you know, got torpedoed by Viacom lawsuits that went on for a decade, it seems like any new company starting up is going to have to figure out how do you identify copyrighted stuff, you know, how do you comply with the millions of laws that have been passed around the world, you know, to deal with this kind of stuff.

So YouTube is like, I think, the most powerful incumbent in the world.

At the same time, like Vimeo exists.

If you hate YouTube for some reason, you can just post all your stuff on Vimeo.

So there are alternatives that are legal and forthright and not sketchy Russian sites.

Okay.

So that's a fair point.

All right.

All right.

So last thing, predictions.

My

Casey Newton

prediction.

Here's my Scott's pretty good at predictions.

I don't want to put anything.

Yes.

Well, and so I was going to predict that Amazon will buy Whole Foods.

No, no, no, okay, new prediction.

All right.

Well, new prediction is I think TikTok, which is this fast-growing video social network.

It's a very fast-growing video-based social network, kind of like Vine, but with some really fun features that has just kind of taken America by storm.

It's owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance.

And I think TikTok in the next year is going to get caught up in the U.S.-China trade dispute.

Like, the U.S.

government has already started to take action against social networks that are popular in America, but owned by the Chinese government, such as Grindr.

I think TikTok is going to face the same thing.

Grindr is owned by

Grindr was owned by a Chinese company, and now the U.S.

government is making them unwind it because it's actually a national security issue.

Because you can, you know, if you know sort of who's gay in the U.S.

government, maybe you can blackmail them, right?

So, anyway, there's a lot, a lot going on there, but I just think that ultimately it will prove untenable, at least in this moment in time, for there to be a super popular China-owned social network in America.

The Chinese companies have not made incursions here in the same way.

No, but I mean, and TikTok has been the most successful.

Right.

But, you know, ultimately, I just think they're going to have very different policies around speech.

And, yeah, and they're collecting a lot of data.

I mean, you already see what the U.S.

government is sort of taking a really stern look at China-made drones.

um you know there was the grinder thing that I mentioned so TikTok the biggest maker of drones is a Chinese company that's right DGI and so there so TikTok has had a charmed life but you know given that everything I just explained about China and the fact that every social app is a fad anyway, I just think like a year from now, I would be surprised if TikTok were as vital or popular in America.

All right.

Okay, that's an excellent.

That's an excellent one.

Was the drone that Iran shot down a Chinese drone that we had up there?

I don't know.

Who knows?

All right, Casey, thank you so much.

Again, I urge you to read this story.

It's on the verge.

It is called Bodies in Seats.

Yes.

Which is, if I can just say real quick, the reason that it is called that is because a woman who worked there said to me, We were nothing at all to them.

We were just bodies and seats.

That is correct.

And it's a terrible job they're doing, an important, vital job, and also a terrible job.

They're doing a good job at a terrible job.

They are.

They really are.

And thank you for doing it.

And we'll see more from Casey Newton.

On the Verge.

Casey, thank you for coming in and replacing Scott.

I was happy to pivot, pivot.

Anyway, Camila Salazar produced this show.

Nishat Kirwa is Pivot's executive producer.

Thanks also to Eric Johnson.

Thanks for listening to Pivot from Vox Media.

We'll be back next week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.

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