protection.And how is that changing under Andrew Ferguson, and specifically in relation to this idea of, like, woke AI?

I mean, he's definitely just trying to figure out any way to, to use the power of the office, not unlike the FCC, which, you know, handles broadband and television regulation and things like that, to put his thumb on the scale in some way or another.

And, and there have been all sorts of accusations, but this latest one is that they put out a proposed policy.

This, like, gets deep into the weeds of how the FTC works.

There are things like rulemaking, which is a big official deal where they're presenting a rule that then be- effectively becomes a regulation.

There has to be a comment period for that, and the FTC has to adopt the rule.

This is not a rulemaking.

Yeah, what would be an example of that? I'm trying to think.

[laughs]

... you know, erase the data and all of this other stuff.

Um, and there were rumors for a while that that was not really happening, and there were hints, and in particular, Senator Ron Wyden was very vocal about, you know, going on the floor of the Senate and saying, you know, "Something is not right here, and I can't quite tell you what." [laughs] Uh, or in hearings he would ask intelligence officials, "Are you or are you not collecting mass data on Americans?" And they would either deflect or in some cases outright lie, and I believe it was one hearing in, like, 2012 with James Clapper, who was the director of national intelligence at the time.

He was asked directly on this point, and he basically said, "No, we don't collect data on Americans." And that was a big part of what inspired Ed Snowden to leak the data, the, the, the reports that he leaked to Glenn Greenwald and, uh, Bart Gellman, and Laur- Laura Poitras as well.

So from all of that, what we began to discover was that the NSA has its own dictionary that is somewhat different than the dictionary that you and I use, such that they can interpret words in ways that are different than the plain English meaning of them, including words like target, which [laughs] feels like kind of a key word.

But so, you know, a, a sort of broad understanding of what this is, in theory they're only supposed to target people who are not US persons, I think is the phrase.

Um, but w- the way it had been interpreted over time was that, uh, anything that mentions that person, any- anything that is about a foreign person is now fair game, even if that is the communications of a US person.

Is there any coming back from that?

Do you think that Section 230 needs to be updated? And if so, uh, how? And if not, why?

Sure.

So I would argue, I mean, there's a few different things.

One is what is it that you're actually trying to accomplish? And, and Brian laid out a few different things that he's concerned about.

Um, and we can go through them one by one.

I don't think Section 230 r- either repealing or reforming it actually helps with any of the things that were laid out.

So I, I, I think that Section 230, you know, I would keep it.

Yes, exactly.

So what was the place from which you were writing that piece? What were you responding to in the world?

Yeah, so it actually started probably about four or five years earlier when, right, so, you know, sort of early social media, I mean, it depends on where you want to date early social media to, but sort of, you know, if you think sort of 2000, 2012, 13 timeframe, you know, there was a lot of talk about how, you know, social media was this sort of You know, wonderful things, enabling free speech around the world.

It was connecting people.

There was this period of optimism around that, and in particular, how it was going to enable more speech.

And there was this sort of conflation, I think, of a few different ideas around speech and technology.

In some ways that were good, in some ways that were problematic.

And then around 2014, 2015, people began to realize there are some limitations on that.

What is it that's going on like underneath the hood if we were going to kind of, you know, explain it to my mom or whoever, right? Like what is this like protocol decentralized thing and why is it actually important in this context?

And all of these things are of a piece and lead to these hollow products.

Yeah, I think there's a concept that has come up a few times in the conversations in the various meetings that we had.

And I don't remember if it originated from you, Alex, or from someone else, but the difference between what you want and what you want to want.

which may take a second.

You think through and you begin to like, oh, right.

Like there is this belief within certain companies that like revealed preference is law, right? If people love doom scrolling because they keep doing it, then we're just giving them what they want.

Like, shut up.

I was

Back in 2014, he was observing how Twitter and Reddit were struggling with their own respective content moderation challenges.

And I was thinking about the earlier internet and earlier forms of the internet where there wasn't so much centralized power.

You know, there wasn't some billionaire sitting in Menlo Park deciding who could say what and do what.

At the same time, I recognized that you didn't want a free-for-all because there were horrible people who would do horrible things and that would scare away other people.

So I started to try and think through like, is there a different approach?

His idea? What if social media ran on a protocol similar to the HTTP that the internet runs on, letting users access any website from any browser? He used the example of the protocol that email runs on.

If you don't like what Google is doing with Gmail, you can switch to Proton Mail or Yahoo Mail or Outlook and you can still email the people at the other places.

You don't lose all of your contacts.

But, you know, my grandma doesn't care.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think that is the right discussion to have and the right concerns to raise, right? So there are...

a few reasons why we went from that original promise to this world that we're at now.

And one huge part of it was certainly the convenience factor, right? The reason why these few companies have become so successful and so big was mainly that they took the annoying parts of the internet and made them so easy that your grandmother could use them.

That's wonderful.

Right.

Yeah.

So you say that these jobs are not... like what people expect them to be, how are they different?

Well, I think, you know, there is a sense.

So there are a few different things that we've discovered specifically around like content moderation, trust and safety kind of questions, which is that there is an assumption that, you know, one, it's easy to do.

And generally when people think that it's an easy job for people to do is that they think, well, if... you know, if companies just moderated the way I would, then everything would be okay.

And there's a lack of recognition of how complex humanity is and society is, and especially at scale.

You know, and there is obviously a lot of people believe that there should be no content moderation at all.

There should be no trust and safety necessary.

Walk me through what that was like in the early days.

So why don't you actually lay this out for us?

So there are a couple of different ways to attack that argument or discuss that.

And so first, I think on the point about the antitrust argument, about this idea that if there is content moderation is because someone has monopoly power.

I think the opposite of that is true in some ways in that The content moderation is part of what differentiates the different services.

If no one can do any content moderation and everybody has to be in everything goes platform, then you have only sort of one kind of place to speak because they're all the same.

They're all going to have the same kinds of speech.

It's the differentiation that allows for different communities to form.

What kind of... approach might we see from the FTC that is just jawboning on steroids to get maximum mileage out of this without actually tripping into court and losing?

Back in 2014, he was observing how Twitter and Reddit were struggling with their own respective content moderation challenges.

And I was thinking about the earlier internet and earlier forms of the internet where there wasn't so much centralized power.

You know, there wasn't some billionaire sitting in Menlo Park deciding who could say what and do what.

At the same time, I recognized that you didn't want a free-for-all because there were horrible people who would do horrible things and that would scare away other people, so I started to try and think through like, is there a different approach?

His idea? What if social media ran on a protocol similar to the HTTP that the internet runs on, letting users access any website from any browser? He used the example of the protocol that email runs on.

If you don't like what Google is doing with Gmail, you can switch to Proton Mail or Yahoo Mail or Outlook and you can still email the people at the other places, you don't lose all of your contacts.

You can also put in place all different kinds of spam filters or other tools where the power is in the hands of the actual user and they can determine what it is that they want to do and how they want to experience email.