AI Slop Is Drowning Out Human YouTubers

Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast.

Joseph and Sam are out this week.

So, you get me, Jason Kebler, and I'm here with Emmanuel.

What's up, Emmanuel?

Hey,

how are we feeling about a full-on takeover of this

here show?

Finally,

the time has arrived for us to do a four-hour podcast of us just rambling about whatever not related to technology or our reporting at all.

That's what I wanted to do, but you seemed scared.

You seemed scared to do it.

You didn't want to upset the listeners.

So we're going to talk about our stories.

Speaking of, Joseph and Sam are both out reporting.

So

they're not gallivanting.

They're doing stuff that you'll hear about quite soon, I'm sure.

People might have seen Sam was in the courtroom for the sentencing of of Michael Pratt, who was the ringleader behind the Girls Do porn case, which he has covered for years.

And I think she was the first to post about the sentencing and some shocking statements from the Jane Does involved in the case, so people could check that out.

But yeah, that's why Sam is not here.

And Joe is on a secret mission in

unnamed parts of the world.

Unnamed parts of the world.

We can't even contact him, so hopefully he's okay.

But he'll be back, I think, next week.

In any case, yeah, check out Sam's Girl Super Horn reporting.

We are not going to talk about it on the podcast because we think it will be still relevant when Sam is back.

So

more to come there.

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So for the first story, we're going to talk about one that I wrote, which is called AI Generated Boring History Videos Are Flooding YouTube and Drowning Out Real History.

Okay.

So

should we do a confession?

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to get into here, but I wouldn't mind if we spent most of this podcast talking about how you stumble upon these videos because

they

we can't go into this without going into like your YouTube consumption habits.

Can you please explain to our audience

when you watched/slash listened to the videos we talk about in the story?

Yeah, so all of the videos that we're about to talk about, I discovered at 3 a.m.

or later

because

most nights, not all nights, but most nights I will put my AirPods in and I will turn on a YouTube video.

Whether that's, well, I go through phases of what I listen to.

And my most recent phase is listening to history videos.

So for a while, I was listening to history videos about indigenous cultures in the Western Hemisphere run by a guy called Ancient Americas.

who I actually talked to for this story.

He talks about like,

you know, the Mayans, the Aztecs, but then also like the Toltecs and other

indigenous societies that we don't hear about very much.

Incredibly interesting.

But also, he speaks at a cadence that puts me to sleep very quickly.

And so, for a few months, I would be listening to his hour-long videos, and I would make it like five minutes and fall asleep.

And then I would just leave it on,

and eventually, you know, the video would end, and YouTube would autoplay something else.

And,

like, one night, I guess, a couple of weeks ago, I uh

like woke up, like, I jolted awake listening to this.

And maybe we'll play the clip here.

In the end, Anne Boleyn won a kind of immortality, not through her survival, but through her indelible impact on history.

The

by the early

Before we move on, let's just like dwell on the fact that,

I mean,

this is probably a night where you're having trouble falling asleep.

So

you put in your AirPods, put on one of these videos, and try to lull yourself to sleep.

And I have done that before, but I feel like it's probably one of the least healthy things that I do to myself.

Like,

that can't feel good to fall asleep that way.

way.

That can't be like a restful, good night's sleep.

I mean,

I really don't know.

I really don't know.

I've done, I tried to do research on this topic once.

So, back at Vice, we had theme weeks occasionally.

And I think it was 2017, we did something called Sleep Week.

And so, everyone on staff would write an article about some aspect of sleep, you know, the techification of sleep, the science of sleep, whatever.

And mine was: I was trying to figure out if my falling asleep with a TV show on habit was bad for me.

Um,

because we hear quite a lot about,

um, like blue light, which is emitted from your cell phone, is emitted from like, you know, a laptop, a, um,

like a game console, whatever.

It's like not good.

It disrupts your sleep.

It messes with your like melatonin and circadian rhythm, et cetera.

And, but, but like, what was unclear to me was that I was watching these TV shows with like my laptop facing away from me at first because I was doing it on a laptop for a while.

And then that eventually morphed into

listening to YouTube videos.

So I would like

start the video

on YouTube and then put my phone face down because I didn't pay for YouTube Premium.

It's so funny that it's a premium feature, but yeah, go ahead.

Yeah.

I mean, I've now started paying for YouTube Premium because of this.

Like I was, I've been listening to these videos now for years.

And literally within the last like month, I want to say, you pretty much can't listen to, and I always say listen to things on YouTube because I so rarely like actually watch it.

I just am listening to it.

But like every five minutes, you're getting an ad and the ad is really loud.

And

that would be really jarring.

So I would be falling asleep listening to this stuff.

And then an ad would come on, and I'd be like, oh, that's probably not healthy.

And then sometimes you'd get a YouTube ad that was like 35 minutes long.

So I would like wake up and I would be in like minute 20 of some ad.

Anyways, I talked to sleep scientists and it's like, it's not studied that well.

It's not really studied that well what like audio does to your brain because your brain is nominally consuming these voices

but I feel like I'm not processing really any of it once I actually fall asleep.

And I find it to be like quite calming and soothing.

And I think a lot of people like fall asleep to a podcast.

There's like various boring history podcasts, there's like soothing, sleepy time stories podcasts.

Trust me, I've tried them all,

like ASMR stuff.

There's a thing that's happening on YouTube now, also, where it's like whatever YouTube

algorithm you're in, it will suggest

that, but in like you can sleep to this format.

So, I listen to like comedy podcasts, and I get offered via the recommendational algorithm, like four-hour

compilation videos of like, uh, like this comedy podcast to fall asleep to.

So, it's like, it's doing that for everything.

Sorry, like two more things quickly because Joe is not here to stop us, and then we can go back into the journalism.

Uh, one, I do this sometimes, but like when I do it, I definitely feel like shit.

Like, when I wake up in the morning, I'm like, that was bad.

That was like a bad choice.

And like the healthy thing to do is not watch anything and like read a book.

And whenever I do that, I'll read like half a page and fall asleep like a baby and have really good night's sleep.

But I don't know, for whatever reason that you understand, I'm sure it's like hard to do that.

And then the second thing, there's a really good episode of, you know, Dexter's laboratory, the cartoon.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Where he falls asleep trying to, he's trying to learn French in his sleep.

So he puts on like a learn French record when he goes to sleep, but the record skips.

And the only phrase he hears is ome la du fromage.

And then the I remember that one.

Yeah, yeah.

It's the only thing he can say, but somehow it's the best day of his life because it's like always appropriate for the situation.

Great episode.

Okay.

Wait, wait, but but so not to the journalism yet though, because

it's interesting though, because I agree with you entirely.

And I actually rarely use YouTube to fall asleep initially.

Like I will often fall asleep, but then, like, one hour later, I will wake up and it will be the middle of the night.

And I don't want to turn off, like, maybe I could get a Kindle or something, but I don't want to like turn something on to read from.

And I also don't want to have my eyes open staring at my phone.

And so, this is why I do it.

It's like, I'm like, I'll look at my phone for 30 seconds to put on one of these videos

and then

try to fall back asleep.

And it usually works and and at some point in the night i usually like toss my air pods away like unconsciously and so i mean i agree it's probably not the best but there's a huge market for this like there's a huge market for this because

of what we're about to talk about it's like um

yeah so so anyways like i i was listening to these human creators who spend a lot of time you're watching these history videos yeah let's talk about like

uh because it's it sounds like in the story you in the morning realized that you were listening to something that was AI generated, but like in order to illustrate that, can you describe like what a good one of these videos is like and then what this AI generated video sounded like?

Yeah, so I mean, interestingly, like a lot of the ones that I listen to are not designed to make people fall asleep.

They're just like

history podcasts, for lack of a better term, usually with visuals.

And sometimes they're more than that.

Like this one guy we're going to talk about, History Time, this man named Peter runs it.

A lot of Peters in this story, actually.

You know, he will read like four or five books on a topic, and then he will consult like academic journals.

And then he often does site visits.

And so like if he's talking about an ancient war or something like that, he will like go to the battlefield and will film there.

And so he's making documentaries that are often two, three hours long.

And

like any given one of these documentaries can take months, they can take years.

He told me some of them he worked on for over five years, um,

just in terms of like he was doing other things also.

Um, like other videos came out, but like he will be working on multiple of these at a time, and they're really popular.

Like, he became a quite a big YouTuber.

He has, I think, like 1.2 million followers.

And,

you know, he puts out like a video every month or two.

And

that is probably like the upper limit of what a human being who's trying to make really high quality, really well-researched videos can do.

If you're reading multiple books for each one, if you're reading multiple academic papers about like different perspectives perspectives on some ancient war, some ancient civilization, or the types of food that they ate in medieval times, like there's all sorts of different videos that I've become interested in.

I've become interested in this channel called Let's Talk Religion, and they will talk about like the

different perspectives on

like drinking alcohol in

Islam, for example.

And like, where did this come from?

Like, where did the idea that Muslims shouldn't drink alcohol come come from?

Like,

throughout, through a historical perspective.

Like, that's an example of one of the videos that I've watched.

There's another one that's like an entire history of Zoroastrianism, which is a religion I did a project on in eighth grade.

And I'm like, oh, now I've like, it's, it's a predecessor to Christianity and, and, um, Islam and Judaism.

And it's still practiced by, by some people, but I was like, oh, what's the deal with this?

And it's like a very academic look at these sorts of things.

It's a human being who's doing like a ton of research.

And then like, not only are they doing a ton of research, they're then also finding imagery to go with it, which I don't watch, but like a lot of people do.

And this imagery is often like Creative Commons license stuff.

It's stuff where they're getting permission from universities to use it.

Like a lot of the people I spoke to for this article said that they are doing.

a ton of legwork

just to script the video and then of course like edit the video, you know, add music to the video, record it with their own voices, like all of this stuff.

And they've made careers out of it.

Like, a lot of them have made careers out of it because

history stuff does really well on YouTube.

You know, a lot of the videos, like the most popular

videos, have millions of views.

And so they're collecting money.

A lot of them have Patreon, stuff like that.

But, anyways, like, along comes these new AI slop channels that I started getting auto-fed.

And,

you know, as like a journalist and someone who writes about AI slop, I did recognize them as slop pretty much immediately when I was coherent in the morning

and was scrolling through my YouTube watch history.

And it's funny because I had like, quote unquote, like watched.

like dozens of them right according to my watch history, but I didn't even realize it.

I was consuming them in my sleep.

Yeah, the good videos remind me of like a very popular early history podcast: Hardcore History, that maybe people have heard of.

And I would describe them as meticulous.

And then also

something that

I think it's Dan Carlin, the guy who makes it often jokes about, is that I think he'll go like two years without putting out a podcast because of like all the research.

And then, like you said, the editing, right?

It's like it's very carefully put together.

So that's like a good version.

How, like, describe one of these AI generated videos.

Because in theory, I don't know, you could go to ChatGPT, generate some text about Superior and history, feed that to an AI tool that has AI voice generation, and you basically have a video.

Like, why, what is that actually, what does that look like in practice?

Yeah, so I would say that the accounts are called like boring history for sleep, and then there's a bunch of different variations of it.

They have like clearly AI slop thumbnails, first of all, and all of the visuals are pretty clearly AI slop.

Although it's pretty hard to tell in some of them, because a lot of the visuals are like medieval paintings, and AI is pretty good at doing that.

And so, if you're not like up to date on like

historic oil paintings, you might not notice them as slop.

But here's some of the like video titles: Why it sucked to be an Aztec sacrifice Victim and more.

Totally Wrong Medieval Facts Everyone Still Believes, Medieval Irish Food, Peasant to King, The Queen Who Slept with Her Stepsons, Your Life as a Eunuch,

Crazy Facts About Queen Cleopatra, et cetera.

So it's a lot of stuff like that.

And then, you know, I watched some of these and there are facts in here.

You know, I think whoever is making them, I'm not exactly sure what tools they're using.

I was trying trying to reach out to them.

I would imagine they're probably using some combination of like ChatGPT for scripting, maybe like 11 labs to record the video.

It's always the same narrator.

The narrator has a British accent.

It's not really like

whispered.

It's like very soft spoken.

And one thing I noticed is that it uses a ton of adjectives.

Like it, it just is like,

imagine you are, you know, a peasant in 1400s England.

It was a cold and dreary night.

The willowy wisps, like, and it's like really a lot of filler stuff.

Um, and then it's like kind of a list of very basic facts.

And

the, so I basically like, I spoke to the guy who runs

Ancient Americas, which is a channel I really like.

I talked to History Time, which channel I really like.

And then another one called The French Whisperer, which is an ASM ASM artist from France who does a lot of research as well for his videos.

He does like science and history videos.

And pretty much all of them were like, yes, we are aware of these things.

The guy who does history time told me like, I think they may be modeled on my videos, which could be possible because a lot of the topics are the exact same.

And then the voice sounds really similar to his, which is concerning.

And then the videos are usually like two to three hours long, which is how long he's doing them.

But he's basically like, it's really, really, really, really surface level.

It's

like glossing over

like a lot of them are maybe

not totally wrong, but it's like

reading a Wikipedia article.

It's like reading a Wikipedia article, but not clicking any of the citations or anything like that.

I've read a lot of AI-generated books for some of our reporting.

And I would say two things

that the AI-generated content has in common almost always

is: A, yes, it's like it reads like a Wikipedia article.

It's very surface-level.

And then I wonder if you agree, if you've listened to enough of these to say, but like something that is good about like what I liked history as a subject in school and what I liked about like what I like about history podcasts and stuff is usually the person who is making it is not just listing facts about the time or the figure.

It's like there's some sort of point or narrative that they're trying to get.

There's some sort of thing that they're trying to say about this period of time.

And I imagine that these videos lack perspective, basically.

They definitely lack that.

And then, you know, I am not a historian.

I've watched a lot of these, but something I really appreciate is that history feels like it's a conversation with different perspectives.

And so a lot of these, the best human-made channels will be like, well,

this, this like academic study or this historian says this, but like this other person who is also a well-renowned expert in the field says that.

And it's not quite exactly the same.

So you need to like consider it from these different perspectives and then sort of decide, you know, what you believe to be the truth.

And I think that there's absolutely none of that in here.

And it definitely doesn't cite any of its sources.

It's so funny.

I'll be listening to one of these ancient Americas videos and it will be like,

oh, like

these Harvard anthropologists wrote a study

dating these ruins to a specific time.

But like...

these other historians say that's impossible because the migration patterns that are that were known during this time period don't line up or whatever.

That's obviously very vague, but it's a lot of that.

And I find that to be extremely interesting despite, well,

these AI ones market themselves as boring history.

None of the other ones say boring.

I don't think they're boring, but they put me to sleep nonetheless.

Because I'm tired, not because I think it's boring.

So you talked to this guy, P.

Kelly, who runs History Time, one of these more popular human

YouTube history channels.

You talked a little bit about how everyone thinks these videos are very surface-level.

But, what did I thought he had some very interesting things to say about how, like, what does this mean for the audience?

And what does this mean for how

we are

recording history or explaining history now on the internet?

Yeah, so I think that this one was a really tough one for me because obviously been writing tons and tons about AI slop, and I think that this is some of the most insidious stuff that I've seen.

And that is because

these real historians, again, spend months making a single video, and these AI slop factories

make videos that look and feel the same form, if not the actual information.

Like every,

you know, every day they're publishing one, and there's dozens and dozens and dozens of these channels.

And so there's tons of them out there.

And there's no way that even all of the world's historians, if they were making videos, like they're going to be drowned out by this very quickly.

And so

I think

like the discoverability aspect is a massive problem because if you search for, I don't know, what was life like in medieval times, like you're going to get a bunch of these.

Maybe you'll get a really high quality human-made video still like at the top right now.

But like that's, that's been changing really rapidly.

And so I think it's going to be like really, really hard to find these things.

Every creator that I talked to, every human creator, said that they've seen their YouTube views go down this year.

And they think think it's because they're now competing with this slop so it makes it like less tenable for them it makes it a lot harder for new people to break into this space because

you know if you have no following whatsoever like how are you going to build one if you're competing with with this stuff and then also it just it like again glazes over the intricacies of

of history and and what is like really complicated often really complicated often very contested

things.

So you're getting like a really surface level sort of thing.

And then, you know, that's to say nothing of the fact that a lot of the companies that make large language models are trying to

make them like more centrist and like less woke and whatever.

And so you can like see

Grok like changing its answers about historical events in real time according to what Elon Musk wants and things like that.

And so I think it is

really, really insidious.

And I think it's something very difficult for humans to fight back against because

there's just not enough time in the day to be making

to be competing with the AI on this, I think.

I'll do a slight tangent again because no one is here to stop us, but it's like, I agree that like across the board,

I think sometimes people wonder if we're like over focused on what we call AI slop.

And this is why

I don't think we are, because this is the most insidious and like terrifying outcome, in my opinion, where

AI companies hoover up all the human-made research, content, art, whatever it is.

And then we reach some sort of tipping point where we can't even find that stuff because we're flooded with all this fake bullshit.

And

we're already seeing it.

It's like, it's the same.

What you just said is true for news websites, for books, for academic research, for YouTube,

for

adult

entertainment content creators.

It's like, it's like everything is being drowned out.

by AI generated slop.

And it's easy to imagine a situation where we're not even able to find the human stuff.

And that's terrifying.

And I just had one of those weird weeks where it's like, I was looking at Blue Sky and Facebook.

And I feel like every other post with someone complaining about some AI generated slop, they sign a completely different category of life.

It's like, oh, I'm watching

TV and like clearly this art in this ad is AI generated and it looks like shit.

I'm scrolling Instagram and this influencer is AI generated.

I'm buying a book from Amazon and all these books are AI generated.

And people are like very fed up.

And like, that is why we focused on it and why we continue to focus on it.

And it's, it's not clear how it's going to shake out, and

it's a very, it's a very big problem.

Yeah, I mean, I think, like, as we've said,

it's also there, there's very, very little incentive for anyone enabling this to fix it.

It's like Google is pushing the tools to make this stuff.

And so, YouTube has said that it's going to like demonetize low effort content.

But it's not.

It's not demonetizing this.

It's like the, you know, Google has a lot writing on Gemini and VO and like all these other tools that they make that are AI tools.

And so

I don't think that it's going away.

And I think it's like

it still feels really

early days, even though things have changed so much since we started reporting on this.

it's like this is still, there's still probably only a handful of people actually making these videos right now.

And

they're so easy to make.

It's like there's going to be more and more people doing the same thing very soon.

And I don't know what the internet looks like after that happens.

I think it's like a very bleak.

situation.

And then the last thing I'll just mention is that a lot of these accounts are using like spam

and like

they're, they're basically like all commenting on each other's

YouTube videos in like a concerted way.

So they're like manipulating the algorithm in addition to flooding the

flooding the platform.

It's like I found dozens and dozens of these accounts.

I think they're probably all run by the same person because

they all like link to each other and they all comment on each other.

and you can tell that they're doing like bot type activity and so

you know add that on top of all all of the other problems we just said and it's like it just gets really difficult and then the other the only other thing I'll mention is that

History Time told me like he is making a lot of his videos by going to like

special academic libraries where you like check out like the old English book, like the old manuscript and stuff, and is like going through that sort of thing.

And, you know, these AI companies have tried to train their LLMs on like as much stuff as they can get a hold of, but they're still largely just scraping the internet and sometimes scraping like commercially available books.

Whereas like a lot of these history YouTubers and historians are like,

I don't know, they're going into like the archives in a basement somewhere and like reading the old scrolls.

And like, so he's like, I'm giving you like a real, like really diverse, interesting perspective.

Whereas these AI is just like taking what's on Wikipedia and like regurgitating it somehow.

Should we leave that there?

That was a, that was a real,

that was a real indulgent segment.

That's good.

Only only two and a half, four hours to go.

Only two and a half more hours to go.

All right, we'll leave that there.

And when we come back, we are going to talk about Instagram and a story that Emmanuel did

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Okay, we are back,

and the story is Instagram account promotes Holocaust denial t-shirts to 400,000 followers.

I feel like this is something where you woke up one day and were like,

I'm going to write about this account that I've known about for a long time,

even though I have become so like inured to this type of content on Instagram and the internet, I guess, what is the account, and like, how did you first find out about it?

So, I don't know what

is

the first time I pulled on this thread,

but

I got fed into an algorithm on Instagram that I think you're familiar with as well, where

I don't even know how I would define it other than like racist.

Like, it's not even MA, it's not even right-wing or Republican or conservative on

issues that are in the mainstream, even if you strongly disagree with them or think that they are racist, like Ice Raids or whatever it is.

It's not even that.

It's just like straight up:

this race is bad.

This, you know,

Jews control the world.

Black people are a burden on our society.

Just like a lot of mocking of Anne Frank and George Floyd, and just like very, very inflammatory

images and language and stereotypes of the most vile kind you can imagine.

And Jason, not you, you're familiar.

Jason is nodding.

Like, it's just like, it's this algorithm that you get into that is is awful.

And I've been looking at that stuff for, I don't know,

about a year now.

And I didn't really feel like it was worth covering because people know that that stuff exists on Instagram because other people get fed into this algorithm as well.

And

there's no effective way for us to like

encourage Instagram to ban thousands of accounts that are doing this or hundreds of accounts that are doing this.

But

as I'm watching all these racist memes,

as I'm scrolling through reels,

I saw one that is an exact, the exact same aesthetic, saying the exact same type of stuff,

but it was then also showing off

t-shirts and hats and hoodies that had some of that same imagery on them and selling them.

And it looked like not high-end, but not

like not drop shipping.

Not drop shipping.

I would say now that I've clicked around Shein for an article that Sam was writing last week, it's like above Shein level of quality.

And I was like, okay, what's going on here?

And I'm not going to name the channel because unfortunately, Meta

decided that this channel didn't violate their terms to the point where it would ban it.

But it's a huge channel with a huge following, 400,000 followers, real people interacting with it, and it's selling merch with all this like vile stuff on it.

And then other people are sharing selfies of themselves wearing the merch.

So it is like a very real account that is just promoting and monetizing hate speech.

on Instagram.

And I mean,

we can talk about how we got there, but

despite sending Instagram clear evidence of all this happening, they were like, you know, they removed a couple of videos that have flagged, they've kept other videos that have flagged, and generally they just let it slide.

Yeah, I think,

I mean, you sort of touched on it, but I guess

a big thing for me is like, I could log on to Instagram right now and scroll like through reels, maybe

like one

thumb swipe and be like, that violates Instagram's rules.

Like, that is horrendous.

Like, I see such horrendous stuff on Instagram.

And, you know, we have reported extensively about the fact that

Meta has rolled back a lot of its restrictions on hate speech, a lot of its restrictions on racism and misogyny and

anti-Semitism and all sorts of just like awful, awful things, transphobia.

But

even given that it has rolled back a lot of these things, like if even if you sort of agree with the idea, which I don't really, that

social media should be more like anything goes spaces, a lot of the accounts that I see

are in blatant violation of the stated rules of meta.

And so I guess like the,

I don't really know what to take from that other than like they aren't doing content moderation like they used to.

They have,

you know, really gutted those teams and they just simply like don't care.

And I'm curious sort of what you think because I know you can log on.

I know, I know if I said like, hey, right now, go find like.

the worst Instagram account and you probably will find something like really, really bad in like two seconds.

Without even looking, it will be fed to you.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly

the thing and why

you have to write an article like this once in a while.

We all see this stuff.

We're desensitized to it.

And then I saw this channel.

And then it's also, I saw, honestly, like another reason I wanted to write it is The Verge wrote an article about this anti-Semitic anti-Semitic shirt that was advertised on a TikTok shop where it's like you can buy stuff directly from a TikTok account.

And I was like, that's totally fair.

And it's like good to call TikTok out on

this shirt.

And they reported it and TikTok took it down.

But that sort of snapped me out of it where I'm like, if this is a story, I'm swimming in like a totally

much more terrible level of garbage every day.

And there's more of it.

And they're also selling shirts.

You know what I mean?

So I was was like okay let me look into like let me look at the facts of this story and see if it's worth covering and it's like as i'm like you know writing notes about what this story would be i'm like this is this is crazy we're in such a crazy place with instagram that it's like you you just like you have to wonder what's going on there um

you know i'm I'm not even gonna like, I don't even know how I feel about like, what is the correct way to do this?

I'm not sure.

You know what I mean?

But

the fact is that Instagram has decided that it's not an everything goes space.

It doesn't allow pornography.

It doesn't allow various forms of hate speech.

And that is how it decided that it manages this huge influential platform.

And I go into this example in the story where a few years ago, in response to Trump's election and people being very, very upset about what was going on on Facebook and how extreme it was, and how,

as you and Joe exposed at a PC wrote from Otherboard, how ridiculous their moderation efforts were, they formed this

thing called the Facebook Oversight Board, which they frame as like the Supreme Court of Facebook moderation.

And essentially, the way that it's supposed to work is that it's like an independently run body with independent members who are like judges.

And when there's like a moderation dispute on Facebook, it gets elevated to the Supreme Court, the Facebook Oversight Board, and they then,

you know, very carefully look at the facts and make a recommendation to Meta about what to do, which, as far as I can see, usually they adopt.

And there's this case that started in 2020 where somebody posted like an anti-Semitic squid ward meme where it's like, you know, it suggests that Jews control the world or something like that.

And the history of it is that

people see the post, they see it's anti-Semitic, they flag it to

Instagram where it was posted, and Instagram repeatedly

decides to keep it up.

So it keeps getting reported.

Instagram keeps saying it doesn't violate the rules.

It keeps going like that until it's like elevated to the oversight board.

They deliberate it for a year and then they put out this ruling and they're like, We decided after much consideration that this should be removed.

And from now on, all types of content that suggests that Jews control the world or something should be removed.

And this whole process took four years.

Like this meme was posted in 2020 and the ruling came down late last year.

So Meta has spent so much time and so much effort to have this charade about rules and make decisions about what is and isn't allowed on the platform.

And then you scroll Instagram and it's just like, it's all of that stuff non-stop, right?

Like if you get fed into that algorithm, that is all you see.

And it's upsetting on the level where it's like, okay, well, like, what is the point of having a moderation team?

And what is the point of having an oversight board if you don't even attempt to

act on your own policies, right?

And again, it's like, it's not like I wrote this story and then published it and then I was like, haha, and I caught Meta

missing something.

I sent them the post.

I sent them the fucking post.

I showed them the account that was like, here's every single thing that it says.

And, you know, and it's violation of your policies.

And they're like, shrug, we don't care.

And I'm not some random user, right?

It's like, I have a relationship with these people to a degree.

We're not friends.

You know what I mean?

We're not, we don't

respond to your emails, though.

Yeah, it's like they know who I am.

and they're just like, whatever, man, we don't care about this.

And it just, yeah, I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to talk in circles, but it's like, well, they also know that you have a platform.

Like, like, they know you're writing an article about it.

It's not like, oh, this is going to be reported by like random user number 4273.

And,

you know, if we don't take down their report, they're going to.

like write a Yelp review about Facebook or something.

It's like they know you're writing an article and that people are probably going to like read the article and see what has been left up.

And like, what has been left up is heinous.

It's like heinous stuff.

Yeah, it's really bad.

And like, I'm sympathetic to the moderation challenge, as we always are, right?

Like, it's impossible to report on this stuff and not come away with the conclusion where it's like, wow, it's like really, really hard, if not impossible, to moderate all the bad content on these giant platforms.

And I think this one, I think, like right now, to be honest, it's, I think it's particularly challenging because like this account and other accounts, there's like this range of stuff you can say where, you know, there's a bunch of memes and shirts and posts from other accounts that are very critical of Israel and are anti-Israel.

And

I think by any definition of free speech and hate speech, like that's fine.

It's like you can totally criticize the government.

You You can say America is bad.

You can say that Donald Trump is bad.

You can accuse people of genocide.

And that's totally fine.

And then, you know, it slides into like,

you know, Jews control the media and

stuff like that.

And like in the Holocaust.

And caricature, like historically caricatured like depictions of Jewish people that have like we've like long decided are like

anti-Semitic, like classical anti-semitism

and and and again to the point of the piece and like holocaust denial which is like very clearly laid out in facebook's policies and very clearly something that this account is doing so it's like i recognize that there is a challenge there

but

if you if you step back for a minute and you're like if any human being looks at this stuff they can tell what like that this account is bad and has bad intentions and is is racist and anti-Semitic and all these things.

So, it's like,

I can, I can, I can, uh,

recognize that they have like a really big challenge in front of them.

And at the same time, be like, anyone with a modicum of humanity can look at this stuff and be like, fuck this, and get it off my platform.

And it's just like clearly not there, something they're interested in doing.

Yeah, I mean, I think we maybe talked about this.

I definitely thought about it quite a lot lot regarding the Meta Ray-Bans at Ice Raids story that I did a few weeks ago.

And it's like

a lot of the PR people at Meta who, you know, I don't know exactly what's going on behind the scenes there, but it's like

our experience is

when we want to talk to someone at Meta,

We send a request for comment.

And it has now been years since we were able to talk to anyone in like a kind of like, let's interview you sort of way on the record at Meta.

Like there was a period where I would be like, oh, I'm curious how your hate speech policy works or like why you're allowing this sort of thing.

And so I would send a request for comment.

And then I would get sent to like a policy expert there.

And I would do like an on-the-record interview with them, meaning I wasn't talking to like Meta's public facing people.

I was talking to the people who were like actually making the policies, actually making the decisions, whatever.

And I found a lot of those people to be quite

like,

like I didn't always agree with them, but it seemed like they were trying hard.

Like they were trying hard to like solve a difficult problem.

And now,

And it's been this way for years at this point, like the last couple years, but now it's like you talk to a PR person and then the PR person sends you a statement, or they say, like, we're not commenting.

And it's like, you have no idea whether that PR person like talked to anyone internally at Meta, whether it was actually escalated in any way.

Like, you have no insight into that process whatsoever.

And

that's fine.

Like, it's not fine.

It's not a deal, but it's just like, that's the way it is now.

But it's weird because the PR people that you deal with will act as though

everything is the same as it always has been in terms of like, oh, like we're trying hard to like to operate in good faith and sort of like make decisions that are good for society and so on and so forth.

And it's like the actual reality is that Mark Zuckerberg is like getting dinner with Trump like regularly.

He's like going to Mar-a-Lago.

He's like sitting in the Oval Office at these meetings.

He's like,

you know, I don't know if you saw this video the other day from when Zuckerberg was sitting next to Trump in the Oval Office, but Trump asks him, like, how much money are you investing in the United States?

And he like makes up a number.

And like, he was like, oh, like $9 billion, sir, or something like that.

And then, or no, I think it's like $600 billion.

I think that's what he said.

I don't remember.

It doesn't matter.

But then like a minute later, like

he's like on a hot mic.

Zuckerberg goes to Trump and is like, oh, you like put me on the spot.

Did I like say the right number, sir?

And it's like, they're not taking this stuff down because they don't want, like, this is what is happening, in my opinion.

They're not taking this stuff down because if it catches the attention of Donald Trump, it's going to cause problems for the company.

Like,

when they were moderating more,

like, better, when they were

actually doing like moderation,

like conservatives got mad, Trump got mad, Elon Musk got mad, everyone got mad at them and said that they were like being too woke and it there were like repercussions for them they used to also fear companies would stop advertising with them and it's like there's not that fear anymore because there's not that many other places for companies to put their money and so they don't care about brand safety that much anymore which is like you know your proctor and gamble ads showing up next to like instructions on how to drink bleach like proctor and gamble bleach to kill yourself or something like it that that that is like not of concern anymore in the way that it used to be.

I think that when they were doing moderation

very seriously and also making a show of it, they thought what a lot of people naively but understandably thought in 2016, where it's like

Trump was elected, that was kind of a fluke, and it's going to swing back.

And we're going to return to some like pro, not even progressive, like just like a liberal order of things.

And they were preparing for that.

And when it became apparent that that is not the case, they were like, fuck it.

And that's where we at.

And last thing I'll say to this, I said it again, but I just want to stress it.

Whatever the reason is, like, if we're totally wrong about why this is happening, it doesn't change the fact

that

it is, I think, impossible to overstate how bad it is for society for us to be awash in this imagery.

It's like, it's not normal.

It's not good.

It's, it's, I think a lot of us, because there's so much of it and we're used to it and we grew up on the internet and we saw a lot of this stuff.

We're like, you know, okay, whatever.

But it's like, it is, it is, it makes me kind of sick to think about

how much of this is out there and how it's being shoved in our faces constantly.

Dude, I also hate to say it, but it's like you could always find this stuff on the internet.

But like,

I don't know, when I found it on the the internet, I found it in the like, uh, like context of reporting or on, like,

how deep does the internet go?

Like, what is on like rotten.com?

And then, like, linked from like rotten.com or like some weird form to some like other weird form or whatever.

And, and so it was like

difficult to find, first of all.

And second of all, it was like, I came to it with the context of like, I know I'm in a deep, dark, bad part of the internet and I've like clicked too many times.

Whereas now it's like you have

the entire social media going populace of the entire world shown this stuff when they log on.

And so much of the like, so so many people consider like Instagram to be the main thing that they do on the internet and Facebook to be the main thing they do on the internet.

The moderate one, like the, like the, like the, the fairly normalish one.

But yeah, that's a great point.

It's like that used to be part of the sales pitch for our type of reporting, right?

It's like we're going to the dark corners of the internet.

And it's like the dark corners of the internet are the front page of Instagram.

It's like algorithmically being spoon-fed to you.

Yeah, it kind of makes me feel bad as a reporter because I'm like, oh, like, I need to find something to write about today.

Like, I don't, I don't need to go spelunking anymore.

It's like, I just need to click the Instagram app and like scroll for five seconds.

but, anyways, um,

anything else on this?

Should we leave it there?

Let's run, let's leave it there.

All right, so we're gonna leave that there.

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