Moderation vs Censorship & Helping Brands Safely Navigate Social Media w/ Matthew McGrory

If someone was to ask me, why did Elon buy Twitter?

One of the reasons, I think, is because he's got this kind of idea in his head of turning X into this kind of massive platform like they have in China with Weibo, where it's got a payment platform, it's got advertising in it, it's got the products in it, it's linked into Alibaba, all these different things all in one place. Yeah, that's the futuristic vision of social media.
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I'm excited. You know, we get to talk one of my favorite topics, social media.
And, you know, being a marketing guy, if you're not into social media, then you're probably not really into marketing because it is the way to market these days. But there's a lot of talk about what it is, what it isn't, about what flows through social media.
So no better person to come on than the CEO of Arwen.ai. He is Matthew McCrory.
What's up, Matthew? Hey, nice to be on the show. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, man. I was excited to have you guys reached out and we had to schedule a couple of little blips here and there.
But I was pumped. The news has been in your space, which I know marketing well enough with PR, hey, that's free rising to the top.
You want it to be top of mind, right? Yeah, absolutely. There's been lots of news in the social media space.
we were kind of the first inception of Irwin was as a moderation tool, so there's been lots of talk about moderation, free speech, censorship, both in the US since you had your great election in November, and your vice president was over in Germany last week talking about free speech, telling the leaders of Europe what they should be doing. So it's it's a very topical discussion point at the minute.
Yeah. I'm going to ask you, Matthew, I'm since you brought that up.
I'm just curious, you know, and this is less your opinion, but you can certainly share it more. What is the sentiment overseas? I know you're just south of London.
What is the sentiment overseas of what has both transpired with the election and, you know, the vice president was there? Like, is there a general sentiment or is it just like us? It's like 50 50. I think generally it's probably more 60 40 left leaning, I would have said, is the sentiment.
And I think that's partly driven by, you know, one of Trump's targets is kind of the media and the kind of traditional mass media, and that they tend to take traditional approaches. And if you look at employees in that space, they tend to be slightly left-leaning in their opinion.
So, yeah, I would say we're definitely leaning left. We've got a Labour government in here, which was probably elected more about the ineptitude of the right-leaning government that preceded it rather than Labour's good points.
But a lot of Germany is seeing kind of rise of right-leaning parties getting votes, very much on the topical points of immigration. Economy still comes out first.
Everyone wants a job. First and foremost, they want to make money.
They want a good platform for that. That's the same, I think, in the US and all across Europe.
But, yeah, immigration, massive topic here. It's just kind of the levels we've had over the last 15 years across Europe have meant that it's caused problems and I think you've had your share of those in the US and that's created some of the divide that I think politicians instead of closing their eyes or putting the blindfold on and running around and pretending it's not there they people need to start addressing it unfortunately me yeah yeah it's unavoidable at some point it's a i mean like i mean i always tell people like caution a little bit like you know we're we're a country of immigrants you know like um but at a certain we're at a scale now where you do have to uh have laws in place and measures it's been a little of the wild, wild west for sure in that regard.
But I do want to get right down the pike here, I think, with our audience. We've got that treadmill crowd.
I hope whoever is, if you're listening, wherever, whenever you are, I hope you get that heart level up. We've got to be about 85 right now, okay? Then I'm going to take you to 115 because we're going to, you know, talk about moderation.
And look, one of my favorite quotes, Matthew, is everything in moderation, especially moderation. Yeah.
And there's a well-known blog in the trust and safety sector called Everything in Moderation, which talks about everything in the space. And I think for me, this is about like brand safety.
We typically, our clients are brands. We like Formula One's a client, ATP tennis are a client.
And this is about individual choices of individuals to protect themselves in cases where they have to kind of be subjected to things that probably most of us wouldn't really like. I think the tipping point here is where people are removing content completely off social media channels.
The way Elon Musk has set up X means that if you want to say your opinion, that's fine. And if I choose not to listen to your opinion, I can shut you up.
You can carry on saying what you want to say. I just decided that I don't want to listen to it anymore.
And I don't want my followers to listen to it. So very often where it becomes a bit of a sensitive point is we have elite sports clients and them as individuals, they have tens of millions of followers that they would say, my hard work has brought me these followers.
So if I don't want my followers to hear what this person over here is going to say, I don't want them on my channel.

Whereas, yeah, I think where Elon's going is Elon saying, but that person still should be allowed to shout out whatever they want to say on their channel. And I think this is where the Facebook, the meta U-turn that happened just after the election when Zuckerberg kind of realized that to get into good books, they were going to have to make some policy changes.
There's been some interesting stuff released about what the Biden administration was asking meta to do during the pandemic, which, again, I haven't seen. I've just seen kind of rumour and speculation.
I haven't seen kind of cold, hard facts yet. But if that was the case, then, yeah, that shouldn't be a place where we're going.
Things should be allowed to disseminate. We draw a line on what we call illegal stuff, which is kind of below the line which is child sexual sexual exploitation uh where we're we're people are doing like like death threats things like that things that are at the extreme end of the toxicity scale and then we draw the line at what we call the lawful but awful.
So lawful but awful should be absolutely fine. That stuff is allowed.
But it should be up to individuals in the community whether they want to listen to it. The analogy I generally use on demos with clients is Patrick Swayze in Roadhouse.
So he's the bouncer. He's brought in by the owner of the bar to clean it up because people are smashing the bar up and the owner wants a nice hospitable place he doesn't want the band to get smashed with beer bottles uh every night and and we're very much trying to create a world like that that it's based on choice there are bars that still exist like that and that's fine you can go in and you can throw beer bottles and the bar's protected with a cage and there are other bars that are they're suitable for your family and you come in and you have a nice polite conversation and we welcome everyone so um and it's kind of free choice and yeah i live near the home of the british army so around me there are loads of bars that are like what we would call swaddy bars whether where the the army army folk will go and you can go down there on a friday night and they'll be a bit fruity and they'll be it'll get a bit exciting uh or you can go the other way and you go to your bar where you have your sunday race now digital channels are exactly the same It's like you want to create spaces for your audiences where they want to come and have meaningful conversations.
And that's what we're really trying to do. And we're really policing that for the brands themselves.
We don't do that for the social media organizations. And so I do want to add one point.
You know, you mentioned the Biden administration and not, you know, you know, you're you're overseas. It's not your job to know the everything.
But I am going to quote exactly what they did, because Zuckerberg said it in front of Congress under testimony that he was pressured to censor and did censor, COVID information on Facebook, which is bullshit, and exactly what happened. And Zuckerberg's both, you know, had a coming to Jesus, so to speak, for his own platforms, and also, you know, gotten a little bit of chutzpah behind him, because the guy's like doing UFC now.
I don't know if it's all related. Some people would call that toxic masculinity.
I would just call it seeing the world as it should be, which is you can do what, look, 100% agree, no hate, threats of violence. that bullshit needs to be taken out.

And so I think we can all align on that stuff.

But political based, you know, pressuring on these platforms that's been taking place in the U.S.

And Zuckerberg is just the only one that got up there and admitted it has been happening.

And that's the stuff that just drives. And I think part of the reason Trump got elected, you know, people like or love him, hate him.
It's just that there's just not room for that kind of political, like not only censorship, but freaking, you know, they want to call everything disinformation, misinformation, you know, it's all truth is in the eye of the beholder. Yeah, it's a very convenient catch-all, disinformation, misinformation.
We've been very careful to try and avoid it. We do get rid of a lot of spam, but that's typically around the subject of it might be financial scamming, those types of things, or come to my dating site.
It's the stuff that like, if you're trying to read an article, you really don't want that in the way it kind of is, it's poor form for content. I think we can all agree with that.
Yeah. Yeah.
I, I think, I think there's another a hundred miles of this road to travel if I'm honest. Um And, you know, I wouldn't say I admire is probably too strong a word, but I would certainly respect Zuckerberg for doing what he did and almost U-turning it and actually shedding, you know, some light on the topic.
That is normally the best tonic for these these things uh shed some light on the truth um i think you're going to find that europe were not particularly well behaved during the pandemic and i think you're going to find that european governments are going to be held to account over the next five to ten years as we go through all our kind of our own little post-mortems of how people behaved during the pandemic and yeah there are a lot of things that should have shouldn't have happened and there are a lot of views that were pushed on us uh propaganda is what it would have been called sort of 60, 70 years ago, in my personal opinion.

So, got to be really careful.

We as Americans go through what's called audits with our taxes.

We get audited, you know.

I think there needs to be an accounting.

And look, I don't really want to drudge up this shit.

I'm a guy that doesn't have a rearview mirror, you know.

Like, let's go forward.

But I do think we got to make sure we learn from the past so we don't repeat it in the future is the biggest thing that I would take away. I will say that's what I love about what you're doing is it seems to be you guys are headed down the road of the right moderation with the stuff that we can all universally agree.
and as a brand and as a company that you don't want in your content and you don't want your customers, you know, get subjected to that. That's why I really like what you guys are doing with our work.
And the flip side of all this is the good stuff, right? So the whole point of social media is so that, I mean, is so that we can all have a conversation, but it's monetized by the brands who want to have a conversation with their clients, with their customers. So what we worked out is, as well as detecting the bad stuff, we call it your sort of golden tickets in your comment mountain.
because most brands have got a comment mountain of what people are saying to them.

And most of them aren't listening to it. They're not listening to their customers.
They're not listening to buying signals from their clients. And that's where the commercial imperative is.
That's where I use the example. I sort of name and shame brands when I talk to them and say, here are some comments that were on your social media channels in the last two weeks and you haven't replied to.
And they will be really obvious things like, where can I buy this? Can I get this in blue instead of red as it's shown on the Instagram channel? So really obvious things that people aren't responding to. So I think we're moving into a monetization phase on social media that isn't just as it is today, which is just kind of billboard advertising, which is kind of where we've been stuck in on this stuff for the last few years.
I think it's much more interactive. And I think that's, if someone was to ask me,

why did Elon buy Twitter?

One of the reasons I think is because he's got this kind of idea in his head of turning X into this kind of massive platform like they have in China with Weibo and the other ones where it's got a payment platform, it's got advertising in it, it's got the products in it, it's linked into Alibaba, all these different things all in one place. Yeah, that's the futuristic vision of social media, which I think is where Elon wants to take it.
I think he's being held up on the road of that journey at the minute yeah uh he's like any good entrepreneur distracted sometimes but uh he's uh uh it's interesting that you brought up the weeboat thing and it's funny i was walking around the mall on sunday and i don't go to the mall very often here and in these states it's but i was thinking in terms of social media, and when I think of what you're talking about with building, it's like this – there's a place that I'm now seeing more clearly than I did. I kind of panned the whole metaverse bullshit like five years ago because I thought we were ahead of it, and it was just so, I don't know, ethereal that it wasn't like real yet.
Hey, I'm going to get into space. And I'm yeah, I know that I care what my skin is and that my shirts are.
But it wasn't quite there. But now I can sort of see this inner interplay of transactional merchandise like what you're talking about meets digital meets social like the digital mall.
Because when you look around the mall, it's a bunch, it is like this combination of social, because people are having conversations or walking around in these courts and things. And I almost have this vision now that I see what you're saying with like, X becoming that digital place of social plus shopping plus interaction, right? I think that's where you're kind of painting, right? Yeah, absolutely.
I think there's this like meta release, this kind of metaverse world. And there's kind of this platform concept of everything being in the same place, making it really convenient.
I don't have to set up an account to check out. I don't have to put my credit card details because they're all kind of stored somewhere so the whole pain of selection and transaction and buying all that pain is very much taken care of um and yeah well i think i think we're headed for you know kind of these platforms getting even stronger than they are because they're going to eke onto the high street.
Certainly the high street here in the UK is becoming smaller and smaller. We've got less retail outlets and certainly more like restaurants.
We joke in the UK about the proliferation of charity shops. You know, all our kind of market towns are filled with, you know we joke in the uk about the proliferation of charity shops you know all our kind of market towns are filled with you know seven or eight charity shops where if we went back 10 15 years there might be one or two um yes great for the charities they're getting free retail store but it's it's i think it's a a product of the fact that a lot of this stuff is moving online.
A lot of the experience of how do I buy things, how do I interact, how do I ask questions, it's becoming a little bit more real. And certainly the AI revolution is playing into that because I can experience things with AI that I couldn't do before.
I can talk to an avatar in a way that I couldn't do before, and it will respond in a slightly more human-like way. I mean, we're still at base one, but hopefully we're going to get to base two and base three fairly quickly, it would appear.
Yeah. That train is moving fast.
I mean, you can see it with machine learning and everything like it. It's both exciting and scary sometimes.
Talking with Matthew McCrory, he is the CEO of Arwen.ai. Hi, Matthew.
I mean, it's interesting. I'm hearing you talk.
I'm sort of like looking at the R01 platform. And it makes me think of this world that we live in where you have all this content being pushed out, words, pictures, type, all that.
And like you said, you're helping brands engage because finding the nuggets that could be transactional opportunities or brand opportunities, which is what I'm hearing. And it goes to show that there's so much data and so many micro conversations happening on social media that there's power in the intelligence that can provide when it is rolled up for you and gives you these signals.
and at its core, I feel like that's what you guys are doing with Engage particularly, right? Yeah, that's exactly it. We've got a retail, like a hospitality chain here that owns about 2,400 bars across the UK.
And they want to do things like, we've just launched our new menu in one of our brands that might be 200 bars how did people feel about that what was the sentiment what was the most talked about thing did they like the burgers did they like the new ribs that we released did that we changed the chips did anyone complain about the the the the the fries sorry they're not chips fries in your world the french fries yeah yeah in america i'm in america yeah yeah so so like that's really where where people want they want that intelligence of what people are saying so they can react to it that could inform product decisions that they're making um and and help them respond to people in a more informed and grown-up way you've also got uh we work with some sports teams in formula one uh and one of them one of the teams came to us and said well we want to know what people are saying every 15 minutes throughout the race because we want to react to it as the race happens it's a two-hour race you know in hour three the story is dead but we want to react to it you know 30 minutes in something happens there's a pit stop the the lead changes there's a safety flag that type of stuff so that's really uh people want to um the creators want to react more quickly in a more authentic way to how what the audience is talking about um you know some of those channels get you know 200 250 000 comments over a race weekend uh so there's a lot of stuff so so bringing those boiling those things to the surface is really important so that they can authentically dive into the right conversations that kind of generate more excitement. They can use it to kind of think about how the press conference is good.
They can lead the drivers to say certain things at a press conference. That could be both to promote good stuff.
It could also be to stop bad things from happening. Yeah, so it's really interesting, really interesting how people are using the tech, the AI tech in lots of different ways to pick up different signals on social media.
What, Matthew, I mean, I worked on one of the first visualizations of social media for Verizon Wireless in 2010. We did a gigantic Twitter sentiment board.
It was live at like an NFL game, and it would light up and do things. It was based on sentiment, things like that.
It was

very rudimentary. This is 14 years ago.
But I want to just clearly for our audience, though, talk about specifically with the advancements and how you're using AI of how this isn't just a sentiment type thing, how it is actionable and really comes to life for people or in brands? Yeah. So the way we approach this is you've got to really understand your client, your customer, what they're looking for.
So it typically might be very often it's kind of a pr related message um i yeah a good example is i interviewed someone from a very well-known drinks global drinks brand and they're very sensitive about uh people talking about them polluting the oceans with plastic so you may or may not be able to guess who i'm talking about yeah um so uh and they spend an awful lot of money uh cleaning the oceans of very you know hundreds of tons of plastic they have a a whale preservation program and they want to tell people about that so so what we're what we're able to do is we're able to take the messages that they're looking for and with the advancements in AI specifically large language models we're able to create synthetic data sets so the client gives us 10 source comments and they kind of say we we're looking for stuff that sounds like this. And whenever that gets posted, we want to lean into that conversation.
And we want to tell them, look, we're not polluting the oceans. We're saving the whales.
We're saving the dolphins. And we remove this.
So PR and kind of crisis people are using these things to get to very specific content in very specific ways. More generalistic, people are using those large language models techniques.
So we use, it's a bit techie, and I'm not going to profess to be an expert on this, but there's a technique called RAG, which is developed by Facebook, which takes a customer's own data. So their own voice, their brand guidelines, their brand voice, their kind of the responses that they give to their call center to talk to their clients.
Pulls that all together. They couple that with the large language model to generate authentic on brand voice responses for clients.
So they use it inbound, how can we detect specific messages? And they're using it outbound for we want the suggested replies. Normally, it's suggested to a human agent, and they kind of have the last call and edit it of how we respond to that.
That's really come about in the last, I would say, 18 months to two years with where kind of open AI and the whole kind of large language model movement has gone and been able to take that. We can do lots more than we used to.
Yeah. I mean, it could just process so much more data quickly.
And then not only process it, it can interpret, right? It's the interpretation probably that's the stuff that'll blow your mind, it feels like. Yeah.
I mean, it's picking up on these, like for brands, it's picking up on specific messages normally that they're looking for, but they're also after the intelligence that they kind of don't know that's there. But I wouldn't say finding it is easy yet, but it's democratizing access to the data because we've got a development we're doing at the minute, and it's a bit cheesily named in its prototype.
It's called Ask Arwen. And Ask Arwen is really, it's aimed at the kind of the non-technical person within a marketing team or a social media team who wants to ask a question of their data.
So it might be, what was the most positive 10 comments made on my social media? What was the most talked about, top three talked about topics on my social media what was the most talked about top three talked about topics on my social media so the idea is you can use like have a conversation with your social media channel and ask it questions you know on TikTok what was my most talked about event which channel did the most so you're pulling all this data out in in the humans like to do it, which is I want to ask a question and I want to get an answer that isn't deeply technical. So bad news for some of the data analysts who spend their days kind of translating what a marketing director might give them and then turning it into like a SQL query to interrogate data.
So this will be really game-changing because it will allow businesses to make quick, rapid decisions like in the moment. I think that when we get to that point, yeah, we're going to see, it's going to make creativity within ad campaigns really, really exciting.

Is this a product and what the development that goes into this that's for large brands only? Like, is this, you know, how scalable is this? I mean, obviously I get that, you know, a mom and pop coffee shop doesn't need to scan million pieces of data.

But there's, I don't know, e-commerce brands that might be smaller, but they serve a large, wide audience, or they'd like to. And intent data would be very valuable to them.
But is this attainable or reachable or scalable? Where does that start and stop with Arwen? Yeah, well, I mean, our model is really to address that part of the market, to do it through partners. So there are a lot of organizations that already have partners that are helping them, they're doing these types of things.
So we partner with both kind of traditional outsourcers

that are providing kind of people services,

customer experience type services,

and also with marketing agencies.

So kind of there are two kind of go-to-markets from partners.

Most of those organizations are providing insights,

client intelligence, all these types of things. So what we're trying to do is our go-to-market.
We are going direct as well, but we're kind of layering that into the services that they're providing. So it becomes intrinsic when people are doing campaigns.
Further down than that, like you say, e, yeah, we're working with partners that go into the SME marketplace.

So we're able to give it to them and they're able to give it to their kind of sector. A lot of these insights are very often sector specific.
So once you understand the sector or work with a sector specialist partner, you can drive real good economies of scales and therefore make the products available to lots of people. So we're early stages, but I definitely think we're not far from this being very affordable very quickly.
You know, we're not talking five years. We're talking 12 months.
um. Lots of lots of startups are building this into their kind of their kind of strategy about how they target that mass market of businesses that, you know, that aren't enterprises.
you might have a target market in mind, but tools like this could help you pivot and or adapt target markets that are maybe larger or different than what you anticipated. Like if suddenly your product has a use case or is gaining steam with soccer moms for some reason, you know, like you could build, you know, niche target markets from this data that might not have been your first inclination.
Yeah, definitely. And the other thing that's coming in, again, in Europe, we're beholden to GDPR regulations in probably a slightly stricter way than in the US.
But some of those demographic overlays are quite important. And there's lots of businesses now kind of stepping into that fray.
So you can get alongside the insights you can get a demographic overlay so we were able to tell a sports governing body that uh we said 20 percent of your audience of your followers is women um but they provide 60 percent of the positive sentiment on your channels so go and recruit more women because they're good. They send a great message out.
So those types of nuggets, you have to think through how to write the reports. But yeah, I think the large language model kind of product is really changing that and allowing you to kind of discover exactly as you're talking about, different demographics, different target markets within what you're doing.
The key is you have to have a conversation to start with. So at the heart is the creativity around the storytelling, you've got to excite people with your ads or your message or your content.
So you kind of got to have a conversation to start with. Otherwise, no one's commenting on your socials and you've kind of got nothing to analyze in the first place.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, I mean, in theory, how does it work, Matthew? I mean, as far as like a just industry aggregation of data, like, okay, it's one thing for Coca-Cola that wants to know their billion customers, how they're talking about it. It's another for Coca-Cola startup that wants to, you know, want sentiment data for the industry.

So, I mean, I assume you might work with both, correct?

I mean, I know that going straight to brands or an agency or the brand might be, but you

can also roll up, I guess, categorically, right?

Yeah, you can do a bit of that, but a lot of that data is um a lot of that data is tied up certainly on uh meta so the way um because of the i don't know if it was big news in the u.s but the cambridge analytica scandal over here which was really the the uk company that was targeting individuals as part of the election campaigns, we're going back 10 years now, meant that Meta had to reapply all its data privacy policies and laws. So now getting any permissions to access data, for us to do that, we have to go through a complete app review process.

It takes at least two weeks every time we tweak and change it. It's a real kind of lengthy process.
So a lot of the data is tied up in those data pools. So it's actually only accessible to to the kind of base companies.

Some sell it, like X, you can sign up to their data, or you can sign up to one of the kind of big social listening platforms that are kind of, they're listening to the kind of 10% social media sentiment that's going around, the Sprinklr, Brandwatch, these are the kind of big players in those sectors uh but they're spending a lot of money to get hold of that data and put it in these vast data pools um the only way you can do it affordably is to know exactly where you're looking so um so you have to have a kind of use case in order to do that. Doing it generally is quite expensive at the moment.
Yeah. Interesting distinction.
And I can understand if you're wanting personalized data. I guess it's actually the roll up of that data and what it tells you, not necessarily so that I can target, you know, Jane Smith because I know she wants to buy it.
but more that the aggregation of that knowledge, because you would think, I mean, and I'm not suggesting anything nefarious here, Matthew, but scraping what is public information for posts that are public and not necessarily made to only specific people or whatever, that that information could be aggregated in a way that could tell you things. And I'm not saying that's what Arwen does, but I don't know where the line gets drawn with publicly available data versus, you know, your personal profile and then targeting you with, you know, leather shoes because, you know, we know you like that.
Yeah. Well, I mean, you can certainly do that within the ad platforms, within social media.
So we do do kind of retargeting lists for clients. So they run a meta ad.
We analyze who looked at it, who responded it within the meta ecosystem. And then we tell them the next time you run the ad, don't run it against this audience because they don't like you.
But run it against this audience because they do like you. So, yeah, we find that happens in lots of different micro communities.
So you can definitely do it within your own data set. Yeah.
But kind of aggregating up is more challenging. Yeah, there are definitely businesses out there that will do scraping.
They will – and there's nothing illegal to doing that. As you say, it's totally publicly available information.
Arwen doesn't do it because we signed a T's and C's agreement with Meta that says we won't do that. So we only do it on kind of information that's in the box.
But there are businesses that do that and they aggregate data up. And, yeah, I think that's useful.
We can access it and anyone can access it via X, but you have to pay to access the X API. But then you obviously only get an X view of the world.
Then you don't get an X Facebook kind of Instagram view of the world and TikTok, which a lot of marketing professionals will want that kind of full view of what's going on. Do you guys enrich, you know, that is that, you know, does Arwen enrich those, you know, again, the data that you have access to within the box of the brand? Are you enriching that data, you know, for targeting on digital channels? Well, we only only so far as like I i said before we'll partner with demographic type organizations we'll we'll take an audience that reacted positively to maybe an ad or to a an organic campaign uh we'll take all those people and then we'll say can you find me more people like this we'll do a demographic analysis exactly as you were saying they're soccer mums they're on the east coast uh they kind of look like this um so that the the client could then run another lookalike campaign to target more people that look like those people so um yeah so we can you can enrich it in that sense of the word.

But it's very difficult without doing it manually in this kind of data, data private world to kind of do that in an automated fashion anymore. Going back 10 years, you'd have great pools filled of people doing that data enrichment.
Matthew, as we close out

the episode here, where is it all headed for Arwen? And, you know, what's sort of your, you know, future vision where this world of moderation on social media, you know, is headed? Like, and what and how you see Arwen being a part of it? Well, with everything that's happened in the last sort of six months, we're definitely headed to a much, from our perspective, probably on the main channels, a much more kind of generally toxic environment. I think the pendulum swung oneung one way it went too far it's going to swing back the other way it'll swing past the middle and go to the other side yeah we know it will yeah that's what always happens in these cases uh uh which which is which is unfortunately good for us because uh we'll be standing there waiting help people, to protect people's brands.
So that's the sort of the kind of me too bit of the job, the moderation side. Where we hope things are heading is they're heading what we call our kind of insights, intelligence.
We think that's a little bit more exciting. It's about creating more engagement.
You know, that's where we think the future is on social media. It's kind of giving people exactly what they want, not hammering them with loads of ads that they don't really want to see, getting in the way of their kind of user journey that they want.
They're accessing news and leisure and all sorts of their hobbies, et cetera, on these social media channels. So don't get in their way.
Give them exactly what people want. And I think that giving people that intelligence as to how people behave online and what they respond to and what their interests are i think that that should help brands give people the content they want so i you know i see that becoming more affordable to more businesses and being able to do it much quicker and you don't need as big a skill set as you used to technically in order to deliver it i I love it.
Where can everyone keep up with everything that you're doing, Matthew, with Arwen? We are, you can look at our website, arwen.ai. We post all our news on there.
And that's kind of the main channel. I'm a LinkedIn, for the CEO of a social media company, I haven't got the biggest social media preference.
LinkedIn is my network of choice. That's what I kind of live and breathe and post stuff.
I'm on all the other social medias because I have teenage children and I have to check up on them occasionally. Yes, I live in that world myself.
And hey, if Arwen can help protect them from some of the bad guys, I'm all for it. I just want it to be done in a world where we're not moderating opinion.
Yeah, I totally agree with you. Totally agree with you.
Matthew, it's a pleasure having you on. I really appreciate it.
I appreciate it. Thanks, Ryan, for having me.
Hey, guys, you know how to find us, ryanisright.com. You'll find highlight clips from today's episode, the full YouTube video and audio, and, of course, all the links to social media for Arwen and myself and the show.
We appreciate you. We know you have a choice in podcasting.
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This has been Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production.

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