Meta Goes Mask Off

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I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the 404 Media co-founders, Sam Cole.

Hello, Emmanuel Mayberg.

Hey, what's up?

And Jason Kebler.

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Happy New Year to all of our listeners.

This is the first real sort of new podcast of the year.

It has been an exceptionally busy day.

A location data company was hacked.

Jason did a bunch of stuff

on meta.

Emmanuel did stuff about AI and minions.

Honestly, there is almost too much to talk about.

So maybe we'll even revisit some of those stories stories in future episodes.

But let's start with some of those meta stories.

And Jason, this is one you wrote just

basically a minute ago.

Facebook deletes internal employee criticism of new board member Dana White.

So what's this new appointment?

Yeah, it's been a really, really busy day, busy week for Meta and controversies and Mark Zuckerberg, et cetera, et cetera.

But basically, on Monday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Dana White, who is the president of UFC

and also appeared at the Republican National Convention with Donald Trump, would become a board member of Meta alongside some folks also who, like the CEO Ferrari, is going to be on the board for some reason.

I didn't know that.

Yeah.

Reasons that I couldn't possibly explain to you, nor will I try.

But Dana White is a very controversial figure because one, he slapped his wife at a nightclub on video on New Year's Eve 2023

and was not really punished for it in any way, shape, or form.

You know, he's very much aligned with Donald Trump.

Joel Kaplan also is like, was promoted to be head of global policy.

Nick Clegg is out.

And if those words mean anything to you, then your brain is slightly poisoned.

But basically, they got rid of this guy who I thought was quite bad.

Nick Clegg oversaw like some really bad policies at Meta over the years and replaced him with someone who seemingly is going to be even worse.

Joel Kaplan was in the George W.

Bush White House.

And all this sort of coincides with Mark Zuckerberg announcing that they are going to do a return to, quote, free expression and what free expression in Mark Zuckerberg's

world

means.

No more fact checking, for one.

You will be allowed to

essentially do hate speech against gay and trans people, more or less.

explicitly is going to be allowed now on meta platforms.

They're going to delete a lot less content in general and they're going to show more political content, which is really interesting considering the New York Times did a gigantic story literally like three months ago saying Mark Zuckerberg is done with politics.

Since then, he's gone to Mar-a-Lago, he's donated a million dollars to Donald Trump.

And now they're sort of explicitly turning to this right-wing-ish

like

world.

And I know that's a lot of setup, but essentially, like we got leaked internal communications, comments from all of these announcements that they were doing where pretty much any criticism of Dana White, of this decision was being deleted by this internal, these like internal content moderators, which are essentially like an arm of Facebook.

HR.

Where's this conversation taking place?

It's like an internal message pause basically inside Facebook, just so people can visualize it.

Yeah, it looks exactly like Facebook.

Like it's a clone of Facebook, but only Facebook employees can see it.

And so Mark Zuckerberg does a post there, and then there's a bunch of comments beneath the post.

And

sort of like beneath the post announcing Dana White, there were comments from people who are employees of Facebook saying things like, quote, kind of disheartening to see people in the comments celebrating a man who is on video assaulting his wife and another who was recently convicted of rape, which was referring to Conor McGregor, who's like a really big UFC fighter who was forced to pay $250,000 by a court after being accused of rape.

Another person said, we have completely lost the plot.

And then another person said, quote, I can kind of excuse individuals for being unaware, but Meta surely did their due diligence on white white and concluded that what he did is fine.

I feel like I'm on another planet.

All of these posts were deleted.

Right.

That's what I was going to get to.

Because

it's not just people are making these comments, these employees, and they're saying internally, look, we're not happy with this person being appointed to the board.

That's already.

an interesting and important story and one that would be worth covering.

You know, it shows discontent inside

one of the most important tech companies, even if it's relevance somewhat, it's kind of going off the rails.

And I think we'll get into that with some of the AI stuff as well.

But that would already be a story.

But as you say, there's all of this context around

meta shifting to the right or even to zoom out even further, they're going from like a hands-on approach to basically a hands-off approach where they're saying, I don't know, do whatever you want.

Community notes will sort it out, blah, blah, blah.

We're not going to fact check stuff.

While Zuckerberg is saying all that, these comments by employees are being moderated and are being censored.

So what's the deal with them being deleted?

Why are they being deleted?

Yeah, so Facebook has this team called the Internal Community Relations Team, which is essentially like content moderators for what you say to other people within Facebook, like what Facebook employees say to each other.

And they

have to abide by these rules called the community engagement expectations, which are like rules for how you talk to your coworkers.

And basically, like a member of that HR team comes in and says, hey, like we've deleted a lot of

a lot of stuff.

And the

thing that the HR team says essentially is

you know, these violated the CEE, which is the community engagement expectations.

And they said, quote, we need to keep in mind that the CEE applies to how we communicate with and about members of our community, including members of our board.

Insulting, criticizing, or antagonizing our colleagues or board members is not aligned with the CEE.

So

a lot of these things are like very respectful, like very respectful, just like, hey, like, why did we appoint someone who slapped his wife to our board?

Like, why are we doing these sorts of things?

They were like very run-of-the-mill criticisms, and these were getting deleted and saying, you know, it they

didn't apply to this,

they didn't follow the CEE, like these internal rules.

And so there's been people beefing.

And then meanwhile, publicly, Mark Zuckerberg is saying, like, we're rededicating ourselves to free speech.

We're going to moderate less.

So rules for the public are gone.

Internal rules, when they like cause problems for Facebook or when they cause any sort of like strife because these decisions are very unpopular within the company, I don't know.

It's just like, it's a mess.

So in Meta, you can't insult or even mildly criticize a new board member, but you can

say that gay or trans people are mentally unwell.

And like that's literally in the policy now, right?

Like we didn't write this.

There was a wired piece that just came out and you sent it to me, Jason, as well.

But just very, very briefly, what's that in that along with this announcement from Zuckerberg, there's also changes to the actual code of conduct.

And it's something along the lines of, well, you know, this is part of the national conversation now in America.

So you should be allowed to say that trans or gay people have mental health issues.

Is that basically the sum of it?

Yeah, I mean, Zuckerberg recorded a video, like, explaining these, sort of like wearing a giant chain and with his new look, saying that

they're trying to simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.

And so

what this means in practice, which was reported by Wired, as you said, there's been specific changes to Facebook's community guidelines, which are the internal, the outward-facing rules for using meta platforms.

So Instagram and Facebook primarily and threads.

And now you can essentially do what you just said.

You can call gay people mentally ill, which is something that you like could not do previously on meta platforms.

It sounds like, sounds like politics is out of Facebook to me, for sure.

Yeah.

It's interesting how they say out, you know, immigration and gender and that, the conversation of that has changed sort of in the mainstream.

Yeah, because Trump got a slight,

you know, a slight percentage point over or whatever.

It's just the point is that these companies will shift with different administrations.

And this time, it's been basically mask off in that it's not just sort of going along with the administration, but like actively sort of pandering to it.

So you wrote this other meta story that I think we'll just talk about briefly.

And this sort of happened over the holiday break.

But it's called, I think it was over the holiday break, Meta's AI profiles are indistinguishable from terrible spam that took over Facebook.

It's a great headline.

What are these or were these AI profiles exactly?

Yeah, so in September 2023, Meta announced that it was going to have these AI profiles where they were quote unquote like people, like profiles on Meta, but the people were not real.

They were AI generated.

All the content that they made was AI generated.

And you could also chat with these AI generated people.

And when they announced it, there were 28 of them and 15 of them were based on celebrities.

The most memorable one to me is that Snoop Dogg was a dungeon master, like a dungeons and dragons dungeon master.

And you could like talk to Snoop Dogg about Dungeons and Dragons.

Mr.

Beast also had one.

There was like a handful of other ones.

And they announced this, and this was a big deal for a moment.

And then no one used them at all.

And Facebook, well, Meta deleted all of the profiles belonging to celebrities.

So of the 28, they deleted 15 celebrity-focused ones, presumably because they didn't want to keep paying the celebrities because they were on

links or whatever.

Yeah, it just wasn't working.

But

they left up 13 other profiles that were not based on real people, that were just like these, I don't know, like themed stereotypes of people.

So there was Carter, who was a Latino relationship coach.

There was Izzy, who was like an independent singer-songwriter.

There was Alvin the Alien, who was like a blue alien that talked about how Earth was weird.

And they were all like using metas imagined by Meta AI to post images that were like engagement bait more or less and they did like as if they were real as if they were real users like oh hey I'm the alien and here's my Facebook profile and I'm posting funny little pictures like like obviously they're not misrepresenting themselves like they are saying they they're AI but they're trying to act like a normal user basically yeah so like Izzy for example the singer-songwriter posted an image of a concert like an AI generated image of a concert and said Still reeling from last week's show, what's your favorite show you've ever seen?

Like, that's the type of thing that they were posting.

Um,

so these were like launched in September 2023.

They existed for a few months, and then they all stopped posting.

Then a lot of time passes, no one really talks about it.

None of these uh profiles were like popular in any way.

A lot of the posts had like six likes, two comments, things like that.

And then

over Christmas,

the Financial Times does an interview with this meta executive named Connor Hayes, who tells the Financial Times that meta is going to allow people to create their own AI profiles, meaning you'll be able to like create

an AI profile.

like a create a character type thing and then set it up with its own Instagram profile or its own Facebook profile and let it loose on the world, more or less, which is very similar to other products like character AI and some that Sam have written about.

This interview gets a lot of attention.

People get very mad about it because it's a dumb idea, first of all.

And like, I think the consciousness around the types of like AI that Meta is shoving down people's throats is a lot more well understood now.

But in the aftermath of that, people find

these old AI profiles that Meta set up.

And there were two in particular that were very ridiculous.

One was Liv, who was, quote, a black queer mama

who

is just like offensive on its face because she's a caricature of

diversity at a company that notoriously doesn't have a lot of diversity.

Yeah, they bundled them all, they bundled all the diversity into one AI and like they thought that would be like good enough.

And then, I mean, you'll get to it, but like, who knows if that was even trained on dates that came from diverse people, whatever.

Yeah.

But then, like, you look through Liv's posts, or people start looking through Liv's posts.

And, like, there's one about it's quote, kicking off the new year in service of our community, leading this season's coat drive was an honor, especially because it provided my little ones a tangible example for helping others.

And then the AI-generated image is of like

coats being donated to homeless people.

And it's just like, this didn't happen.

Like you didn't donate coats to homeless people.

Like it's very offensive.

And then there's another one about, you know, her hanging out with her daughters

at her house.

And it's a slideshow of three images.

And in the first image, the children are black.

In the second image, the children are much darker black.

Like they're definitely different children with a different skin tone.

And then in the third image, the children are white, just like straight up white.

And they're different children in each image and their hands are fucked up.

Their faces are fucked up.

They're obviously AI generated.

And it's just like, what?

What are we doing here?

Like, this is crazy.

So it's just bad.

It's just, it's not, it's not even offensive for what it's doing.

It's also just really shit at what it's doing as well.

Yeah, all of the above.

And so people get really mad that this sort of like was happening and thought that this was like the new AI profiles that Meta was

like announcing.

And so

I wrote a story kind of explaining like, actually, these profiles are old.

Still bad that Facebook tried this and that seemingly there's more to come, even though this was a horrible failure and no one liked it.

And then people pointed out that you couldn't actually block these AIs.

And so Meta then goes and like deletes all of them.

So they're all gone now.

And there's been a lot of people who've like been talking to these AI characters as in like chatting with them and trying to

expose more about how they were trained or, you know,

whatever, like interviewing them.

I don't want to talk too much about that because

these are like hallucinations.

These are not, you cannot take what these things are saying seriously, but

it's very obvious that these are like deeply broken tools that were just sort of like rolled out onto the platform,

said a bunch of like really caricatured, stereotypical stuff.

And

yeah, big mess, big, big mess.

Yeah.

So, I mean, you say they're kind of haphazardly just rolled out.

And I think sort of the main question, just before I ask about sort of the other spam that you've covered, but does this show us about Meta, the company?

They have this where they're rolling this out, kind of like stepping on a rake multiple times as they're doing it.

They have this other story you did that we don't need to get into, but basically where Instagram was showing a user's own face back at them in some sort of AI experiment.

We had Meta and the Metaverse, obviously, and that was a gigantic flop.

Like, what the fuck is Meta doing?

Like, what does this show us about this company?

Is it just flailing around trying to figure out what to do?

Or,

yeah, I mean, I don't think Mark Zuckerberg has any idea what he's doing, to be totally honest.

It's like he had that, he had the one great idea with Facebook.

They bought a bunch of other companies.

They're desperately trying to find the next big thing with the metaverse, and then now with AI.

And

it's not working really.

Like, it doesn't seem like users want this,

but at the same time,

the company is so large and so powerful that it's able to experiment on with these like really fucked up AI things, change its algorithm to promote AI,

you know, get rid of various content moderation rules, change them all the time.

And

people are sort of limited in what they can do to fight back because a lot of people feel like they have to be on these platforms because their friends are there because they've, they feel like locked in.

Like, that's kind of my takeaway.

But I actually am curious what Emmanuel and Sam think is going on here because it's like all I've been thinking about for the last several months.

Um,

and it's just to me, it seems like a super messy company that is just so powerful that it can do these things.

But I do wonder if at some point there'll be an actual backlash.

I mean, just the fact that they have to have a moderation team for their own internal employees is crazy to me.

That just shows how fucking huge this company is

and how many different moving parts of it there are.

Like, we know this, like, obviously, you see the numbers everywhere.

Um, but

just in practice,

that's how do you even get like one good idea launched in an environment like that where you're collaborating with like thousands of other people potentially.

I don't know.

It sounds like a nightmare.

It's also, it's hard to imagine like

Facebook.

And this is me just talking as someone who's like not a Facebook reporter.

Like it's, there are people much smarter people doing this, but like, it's hard to imagine Facebook being as big as it is,

having the issues of like growth pressure, which I assume is what this is.

Like, it's got to be just like investor pressure and the need to grow.

in order to stay

alive and going.

They have to keep growing and they have to, or growing, you know, quote unquote, growing.

Like, they have to keep launching new bullshit and see what works.

And then, if stuff doesn't work, they just trash it and move on.

Um,

which I think of as a problem of like

startups or like new,

you know, accelerator companies or something.

It's not like Facebook's been around for what, like 15, 20 years or something.

So, how do they still have that problem?

It's crazy to me.

I don't know.

I think a couple of years ago, they stopped reporting monthly active users or one of those metrics because that's what companies do when that number slows down.

But probably for advertisers, they keep having to juice the numbers.

And I think that's just like ultimately what is going on.

It seems like it is inevitable that at some point it will collapse because advertisers will figure out that all the engagement around their ads is bots talking to bots.

But like that seems to me pretty clearly what is going on.

I feel like we've mentioned it a couple of times and we'll probably keep talking about it until either,

I don't know, that just becomes the new normal or it blows up in their face.

But

it seems across the board that is, that is what they're doing with all of these AI features.

I just can't get over the low quality of it.

And just very briefly to touch on the headline, it says, this stuff is indistinguishable from terrible spam that took over Facebook.

That's referring to the stuff that Jason's like led everybody's coverage on around, you know, shrimp Jesus and there's an artist uploads this thing and then AI rips it off and posts it, blah, blah, blah, and it's spamming all over the place and people are commenting on it sometimes

as if it's real, sometimes the comments are bots, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

To be honest, the spam sounds like it's better than some of these meta-ai profiles, which

are kind of inconsistent and they can't even have the children, you know, remaining identifiable from photo to photo.

What do you make of that just?

The spam is better.

The spam that people are making is more engaging, and people are engaging.

It's like shows in the numbers, it's more successful.

What I think is happening is that Facebook, well, Meta has been trying to incentivize people to post on its platforms.

And I think that the

overall appetite,

Facebook's goal is to have people on its site forever and for there to be an endless stream of new content and for people to engage with that content endlessly.

And even though you have literally billions of people posting on Instagram and Facebook,

there is

you're going to run out of content at some point for specific niches.

And what Facebook has learned over the years is that if you can hyper-target ads to people based on their interest, their behavior, blah, blah, blah, that is a lot more effective for advertisers.

And therefore, you can charge more money and more people are going to advertise, so on and so forth.

And so, what I think they're banking on is that they will be able to create like an endless supply of hyper-specific, artificially intelligent generated content that will be hyper, hyper-specific to each individual person eventually, eventually, and that it can then sell ads that are really, really well targeted based on that behavior.

And that, and that that is a more like sustainable model for endless content creation than it is like relying on user generated content forever.

Like that is where I, that's what I think their big bet is.

I don't think it's going to work, but that is like why I think they're leaning into this so, so hard.

I mean, I don't know, but it sounds like you hit the nail on the head.

So we'll leave leave that there and we'll come back to Meta when it continues to burn to the ground.

We'll be right back, and we will talk about a story from Sam, which, you know, has been several stories leading up to this point, about how Pornhub is now basically blocked in the majority of the US South.

We'll be right back after

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All right, and we are back.

Sam, as mentioned, this is one you wrote.

The headline is: Pornhub is now blocked in almost all of the US South.

So, when did this come into effect?

December 31st, January 1st?

Like, when did this become reality?

Yeah, so it's been, like you said, a long time coming.

It's been something that's been in the process for,

oh, I'm going to say two years now, almost two years,

where these states are kind of slowly, we're seeing this creep of age verification laws being passed and enacted in all these states, mostly in the South.

Also, some in the Midwest.

And I can list the states in a second, but this is news now because three more states

passed age revocation laws as of, or they passed them, but then they're enacted as of January 1st.

Although I will say, and this isn't in the blog, which I should probably update the blog,

Tennessee, a judge in Tennessee blocked the age revocation law in that state as of January 1st.

So you can still get to Bornhub in Tennessee, God bless.

But a couple other states joined the list.

So it was Florida and South Carolina were the other two.

And that kind of,

you know, if you look at a map and I made a little map, I made a map

on a website, on a website called mapchart.net.

Dude, the map roll.

The map, the map roll.

The map is good, right?

Yeah.

It felt very,

I don't know, like color by numbers, but we're doing data journalism.

Yeah, that's the vibe.

But yeah, so if you look at this on a map, it's like, holy shit, like it's all of this, almost all of the South and then a huge chunk of the Midwest.

And,

you know, it's just, it's like a really stunning thing to look at because it's like,

it's most of the states at this point.

So, or it's not most of the states, but it's like this huge chunk of the United States.

So,

yeah.

Shall I just list the

17 states?

Yeah.

And sorry if it's boring to listen to, but I think it's worth hearing.

Yeah, well, you do that.

And then I have a question about why this stays here.

Okay, so it's Pornhub is right now as of January 1st, Pornhub is blocked in Virginia, Montana, North Carolina, Arkansas, Utah, Mississippi, Texas, Nebraska, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Indiana, Alabama, Oklahoma, Florida, and South Carolina.

And in Georgia, there is a bill that has passed and is set to go into effect in July, which we can assume

the same effect will happen.

Pornhub and all of its sister sites will be blocked, or what they will pull out of the site at the state.

And then

in Louisiana, which kicked all this off,

they passed a law in 2022

where it became like the blueprint.

But they are, Louisiana actually has

an ID, like a digital ID, like it's called LA Wallet or something, but it's

this digital ID verification that's run by the state.

So

Pornhub is using that on its network of sites, or ALO, which is the company that owns Pornhub, is using that on its network of sites

to verify age because it's more secure.

They don't have to roll their own age verification, things like that.

So Pornhub is in Louisiana, but you have to jump through those age verification hoops.

Whereas the other states, Pornhub is like, we're not even going to engage because we have to build this age verification system.

Very, very,

pretty stupid question.

Why is it these states?

You know, like, why is there a trend there?

I mean, so

the trend is that, like, if, I mean, like, obviously, if we're talking about like the South and the Midwest, we're talking about a lot of red states.

Virginia is not a red state.

So we can, it's like not a perfect analogy.

Right.

But,

you know, it's, and, you know, at the same time, it's like Arizona blocked

this law from going into effect very strongly.

And that's a red state

and Tennessee, obviously.

So

it's not a perfect one-to-one kind of comparison, but

what we're seeing is the people who are pushing these laws to pass are always or almost always conservative politicians who

are equating porn with harmful material.

It's like these are the same thing in the rhetoric that they're using.

So it's not just we want to keep kids from accessing porn until they're old enough and then they they can, you know, then they're adults and they can do what they want.

It's that porn is harmful as

a product, as content, and it's bad for society.

And that's kind of the,

that's the messaging that they're using.

And they're starting with, well, porn shouldn't be accessed by anyone without showing an ID.

And they use this analogy that's like, well, you, you have to show an ID to buy.

cigarettes and alcohol.

So how's the say, how is this not the same thing?

And it's a totally, totally different thing from showing a card physically to someone in person

than it is uploading all of your personal information that's very sensitive to potentially some kind of database.

Or, you know, it's like it's, it opens up the sites themselves to a whole lot of security issues.

And

it's just, it's a totally different beast online than it is in person.

So

I mean, yeah, I covered that site

or Autotix or however it is.

They have a really, really weird written name, AU10TIX.

Anyway,

they were an identity, yes, an identity verification provider for TikTok and I think Uber and that sort of thing.

And, you know, they had exposed credentials and a researcher managed to get in and find a bunch of IDs.

So you're right in that.

There's a distinct difference between quickly flashing ID to somebody in a store to be able to buy beer or whatever to uploading an identifier which is stored on the server somewhere, which is then potentially depending on how it's implemented links to what you're viewing or something like that i mean i'm sure they they could design in a way where it's not actually linked to the viewing but you know it's still not um a nice feeling and obviously people don't want to do that um and sam i'll ask you about vpns in a second but emmanuel because you look a lot of like you know

When people go and they find pretty horrible stuff on Telegram or they go down rabbit holes and that sort of thing and you look at a lot of these sites as well along with Sam.

We have spoken about it before, but just to hear your thoughts on it, what happens, do you think, to at least some people when they can't access

Pornhub?

What are some of the sites that they may end up on?

Yeah, it's funny because

I listen to a lot of podcasts of comedians, a lot of whom moved to Texas to be near their king, Joe Rogan.

And it's funny to hear them all talk about how they're blocked from viewing Pornhub in Texas.

So, like, one.

Do they talk about that?

They do, yeah.

They joke about it.

And, like,

the not very harmful result is that people just go to other very popular, similar sites

that are not getting picked on as much

by these laws because people don't know about them.

They don't have the same brand recognition as Pornhub.

And that's not so bad.

But then, as we've said before,

because of Pornhub's brand recognition, because we've done a lot of reporting on it, it's like a pretty cleaned up site at this point after like much turmoil,

after the site, frankly, has done a lot of damage to a lot of people.

But now it's pretty good.

But a lot of the alternatives are not,

you know, have not been scrutinized as much and have a lot of like very harmful content on it, whether you're going to Telegram or sites that are dedicated to non-consensual porn or just like any other

tube site that's

fast and loose with the rules and is hosted in a different country where

they're not worried about what local law says in Texas.

So people are just being exposed to worse sites with worse content

as a result of these changes.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: So it's basically a harm reduction argument in a way, whereas in the same way,

know you don't want to or you can't tell people to stop doing xyz be that drugs or something else you just create the environment where they're less likely to hurt themselves you can't really stop people wanting to watch pornography in a moderate amount or whatever so why not allow them to view it on a site where there is moderation and they have removed non-consensual pornography and all that sort of thing and to be clear like porn hub was really bad it was really really bad and then manu and sam did a ton of reporting on how there was basically a sex well, there was literally a sex trafficking ring on Pornhub.

And then there were all these changes.

So it's not like Pornhub was magically this heavily and well moderated place.

That's only come after years of people getting very, very hurt and then lots of reporting and investigations.

But

some people will some people will be in Texas or one of these other states or whatever, and they will continue to access Pornhub, but but they'll probably use a VPN, you know, which of course routes your traffic through another country or another state.

Sam, have you seen anything specifically come this January 1st sort of deadline where now the majority of the South Pornhub is blocked in?

Have you seen like a spike in VPNs or anything like that?

I know it's sometimes hard to tell.

Yeah, I mean, it's hard to tell for sure.

Pornhub themselves told me that they when, I mean, you can see this happen all the time from Google Trends, where

suddenly because Google Trends breaks it down by state and location and things like that country even but

you can see searches for VPNs go up when these laws go into effect which is just like darkly funny because people are immediately like what's a VPN

but yeah and there's always a spike when these when these laws are enacted

But Pornhub said that they they could see from their end and you know I like I have no way of really checking this but um they told me that they could see that traffic was moving from their site.

And then I assume they're using a site like SimilarWeb or something like that to check this, but they could see where people were going, traffic was going down on their site and going up on other sites that are not, like Emmanuel mentioned, that are not moderated.

So people are just jumping to the next thing.

But with VPNs, yeah, it's like any teenager knows how to use a VPN at this point.

It's not like some elaborate

hacking

thing that I think people think it is.

Like it's just an app that you can install on your computer or your phone.

Commonly widely advertised everywhere.

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

And advertised a lot of the time as something that you can use for porn specifically a lot of the times.

But yeah, VPNs are, VPN advertisers are everywhere.

Yeah, they're definitely, I mean, people just get around it.

Like it doesn't, it doesn't work.

Like that's, that's kind of the thing.

And it's not just like, oh, this is

infringing on adults' rights.

It doesn't work to protect children from anything either.

If anything, it creates more harm for kids because they're going to sites that

are less moderated.

So,

yeah, it's like,

it's also like VPNs are a tool to evade government censorship in authoritarian nations.

Like, that is

what people use them for.

Like, I mean, they use them for other things as well, but it's like, this is some bleak shit, which

comes through, but it's like, this is how people like evade the great firewall in China, how they evade, you know, government blocks on content in places like Indonesia, Turkey, etc.

It's happening in the United States.

It's happening right now.

It's happening in 17 states.

Like, that's really crazy.

And Sam, I know you've been covering this for a long time.

I have a question very quickly, which is like, this is part of a concerted lobbying effort, correct?

Where like they're basically going like state by state by state, and they, in this case, is like a group of different lobbyists who are pushing essentially the exact same law, right?

Yeah, this I mentioned before this started in Louisiana.

So these laws are basically like copy paste almost in some cases of that original law.

And yeah, they're backed by groups that, like I said, want to see porn classified as harmful content across the board, not just bad for kids to see, but bad for everyone to see.

And in Louisiana, they wrote this law, and it was really strange to me, especially when it first came out.

It was so strange that I was like, maybe this is not going to work.

There's no way, right?

Like, there's no way our lawmakers are that fucking dumb.

But it was like a third of your site must be

adult material to fall under this law to be liable for this, to be liable for like the fines and the opening up to legal scrutiny and lawsuits from private individuals that

would put you under this law.

So you had to be, it was like 33.3% of your site or something

had to be adult material, which is a lot of sites, actually.

It's probably Twitter at this point.

It's like, it's just.

It's probably 404 media.

Probably.

Fuck.

Yeah, it's probably probably us

probably your inbox thanks to us

but yeah, it's like it's just so

pulled out of like their ass obviously that they're just like oh a third of a site must be it's not even like most of your site 100% of your site which would be like a porn site

It's a third, which is so strange.

And then the wording of the laws is like it.

I mean, I don't even know if I want to read it here, but it's like the wording of these laws themselves are pornographic.

It's like they list out like every little like sex act and genitalia and all these things very specifically.

That's in the law?

Yeah, it's in the

legislation.

I mean, don't read it now, but I'm going to go read the law.

Yeah, just because I just know that.

Cause that's, yeah, I just know that.

A third of the law, of the written law is probably

pornographic.

Like, it's a huge chunk of it.

It's just like a list.

It's like, this is somebody's like

kink list or something.

I don't know.

But yeah.

someone wrote that.

It was their job to write

that list.

Yeah, to figure out what classifies adult material.

But yeah, I mean, it's like with the Tennessee being Tennessee law being blocked.

And then in Texas, like Emmanuel mentioned, there's an ongoing

legal battle happening between Free Speech Coalition and a couple of other porn sites, including ALO versus

our bestie, Ken Paxton,

in Texas, where they're fighting these laws, filing challenges, challenge after challenge.

It's kind of wild how the process goes sometimes.

So there is like hope, I think.

And I think especially in this coming year, I think we'll see more and more legal challenges to this.

I think, again, it's like these laws kind of go through uncontested because legislators are literally just like, that sounds cool

signed, you know, like my constituency will like this.

Protecting children, nice.

We like that.

But I think as they go into effect and as people realize that they are actually not

useful for protecting anyone and also a huge pain in the ass for constituents,

I think we'll see more and more legal challenges and pushback against them, which will be really interesting to see.

And obviously we'll be tracking that.

as it happens.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The legal challenges will be interesting for sure because I don't know.

You think in a country with the First Amendment, the government would be able to push laws to be able to step on this sort of speech.

But look, we'll leave that there.

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