 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell and I'm Trevor Burrs and joining us is Will Duffield He's a researcher with Kato's first amendment project. Welcome back to Free Thoughts Will. Good to be back What is Cambridge Analytica and what have they done with my data? So Cambridge Analytica is a political consulting firm and we aren't perfectly sure what they've done with your data Now to start This is a story full of unreliable narrators has some confusing twists and turns and a lot of those with access to privileged information in this story Have a whole host of incentives to misrepresent what they know The basic story of the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data scandal is that a researcher named Alexander Cove Logan, back in 2013, used Amazon's Mechanical Turk Service to hire individuals with Facebook accounts to take a personality test which Under Facebook's rules at that time Also allowed him access to a basic set of information about these test takers friends This is one of these tests that you sign into the test online with your Facebook account to answer silly questions And then it posts the results to your Facebook which which Harry Potter Hogwarts house. Are you kind of thing? Yes, that sort of thing exactly This data was then Contrary to Facebook's terms of service sold by Alexander Cogan to Cambridge Analytica They may have used some of this data both information from the test takers and information about the test takers friends to create psychographic profiles used to Potentially more effectively target political advertisements. So this as you've described it sounds like much Less of a big deal in terms of scope than the headlines have said so we're talking about some people Five years ago who took a personality test So how do we get from that to the like hundreds of millions of Facebook users? data has been exposed a couple hundred thousand people took the test and each of them had a few hundred friends so Initially, it was expected that 23 million Facebook users might have had that simpler set of data the friends data Pulled and incorporated in this data set There were a number of other tests that Cogan had run around the same time Which is how we get the revised number of potentially 87 million accounts and affected what kind of data do they have Was in this bundle that they managed to gather both on so there's data from the people who took the test And then there's data about the friends of the people who took the test, but what's in that data? So that will include who your friends are Your age employment status Some location data this is What you've chosen to post about your location your home town or not high school not Data gleaned from cell phone records things you like would that be in the data certainly yes So, I mean the theory is you've like yeah the theory here is that you could I mean this would be Advertisers in general you could use that to figure out that if you liked some page for I don't know buck hunting enthusiasts They might want to advertise some some shotgun shells Actually, you don't hunt deer with shotgun you will advertise some rifle re equipment But that's what it seems pretty innocuous in Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting firm And they used it for that purpose and Ted Cruz had used it before Donald Trump did correct. Yes Though I believe Ted Cruz's contract was originally with SCL group Which is a larger parent firm which has done Much more government and even military work in the past There's another firm in the mix under this SCL umbrella called aggregate IQ Which was more heavily involved in? Britain's Brexit vote leave campaign though so I mean my my first reaction is See so what that was my first when I heard about this I said okay, so what? Is that a good general reaction to have or is it? Okay, but or is it something that will opening up a discussion that is gonna be with us for a long time I would say when it comes to this specific instance how This data scraped by Kogan might have been used in elections. It is a sort of so what response I Think a lot more of this has been going on as well that we don't know about but this poked above the surface we've latched on to it and Because they're a global firm. They were involved in elections both in the US and in Europe It's been easy for all sorts of people to see a niche story that applies to them within this broader concern now it does presage a sort of concerning state of affairs when it comes to Data in general how and how it's used However, a lot of that contingent concern is also reliant upon your theory of political communication You said this was What was done here was against Facebook's terms of service so you can so Facebook would give this data to a third party in this case The the guy running the quiz, but you weren't allowed to then pass that data on to yet another party yes, and When we talk about Giving data for the most part it was it's the app itself. That's collecting that data It's not so much Facebook Facebook provides the platform for it Sets the rules governing apps in general what they can pull But the users are then authorizing the specific application. They're using To gather this data so when the user went to take the quiz they had to click through something that said Do you want to share all of your data with this third party and they said sure yes including the friends data so Zuckerberg goes to Congress who seemed to be quite upset about this slipped out about this and What were you you I think watched all that or more most of it? Mercifully, yes Well, I saw some of the highlight reels going around but but what would be the if you're having set through the whole thing What would be your description of that? Bizarre event ignorant The Most prominent misconception displayed in those hearings seem to be that when Facebook Advertises on someone else's behalf the advertiser is in the minds of many Congress people Gaining a tranche of data from Facebook to use for its own advertising purposes That's not the case When you seek to post an advertisement on Facebook pay them to spread a message You choose an audience within Facebook Sort of people who you would like to reach and then they Using the data that they have on us Serve that advertisement to these populations So it's not that it's it's again It's somewhat new in the sense that we have more data about people than ever before But it's also just Running at I mean while we've always run ads We tried to avoid showing ads to people who don't care about them. That's pretty difficult It's just a more sophisticated version of saying like this television show is popular in the 18 to 34 demographic of men with incomes of certain amounts, so I'm going to Target and quotes that audience by advertising in front of that TV show yeah, I remember I was a kid and watching Saturday morning cartoons and and Always going to my parents and being like have you seen that commercial for you know this new play set? I know we haven't seen that come right. I was like what how could you have seen it? It's on it's on every every time It's always on and if your parents were watching along with you The money spent to serve an ad to them was rather wasted. Yeah, there's an inefficiency there It's it's like it's like why I the NFL For some reason decides that the only thing that should be advertised in NFL games is pick up trucks and enlisting in the Navy and Rectile dysfunction. Yes, and buzzer none of which are necessarily anything I would consider buying Yeah, so what are we now if this is the nature of the modern world and people seem to understand that? I mean I think people understand that a lot of data Is kept on them by a bunch of corporations I think they don't actually care that much which we could talk about they should And they use that data and so will politics so so Is there more to this in terms of like well, I mean going forward There'll just be more data and more specific data and it could be you know Where were you at Thursday at 6 o 1 p.m. Or whatever? And so does he get creepy at some point well I think there is certainly a sort of civic Republican concern that accompanies the use of targeted advertising and politics if your neighbor is receiving different Cola commercials than you no real reason to care about that if advertisements are you political advertisements are used not just to convince but to inform and Increasingly our electorate lives in different information spaces We can see a concern there But that also comes along with the usual individual choices of people to consume different sorts of partisan media So it isn't a new concern, but it might be magnified by this and what about Russia? That's the other one way the other one that manipulated I'm putting that in scare quotes Manipulated our particular political processes with via Facebook. What did Russia do? Russia ran fewer political advertisements in doing this in Attempting to interfere They weren't necessarily what you would think of as an electioneering communication They were mostly instead designed to Provoke partisan or tribal fears Things like Sharia law coming to a community near you or on the other side Discussing police brutality against African Americans So they they don't fall within what we would think of as Political communications, but they were definitely designed to heighten tensions that already existed within the American electorate And they often aped the style of some of the most inflammatory voices in our polity Trying to understand the privacy concerns Here the I mean because clearly the response to this story It's clear that a lot of people think we've already gone way across the creepy line And in Congress thinks that we've gone across the line that upset them in a way that the Snowden revelations didn't but so bracket the question of When Facebook five years ago was allowing apps to scrape this data which it sounds like they They've restricted that then that in 2014 so that's not that's not a thing So so the data is being gathered and aggregated by Facebook and it's being kept in Facebook servers And so this is why that you know the hip thing a couple of weeks ago was to go to the Facebook page Where you could download all your data and then dig through it and be Astonished at how much you being on Facebook six hours a day generates But but Facebook as we said is not they're not sharing that data on an individual basis in any way like with With outside firms. They're just saying like if they know that you happen to be a certain age They know that you happen to like certain things and so if someone says I want someone of a certain It I want people of a certain age and people who like the following things to see this ad Facebook will just marry them up But but is the concern then that the data, you know from like a personal privacy issue That it could get off of Facebook servers that Facebook could get hacked or are people concerned by the very nature of this aggregating That's a concern, but it does go to the aggregating and it involves Facebook and even the internet Less than we might expect The fact of the matter is there a host of Interactions which create data Which prior to the past decade or so was very difficult to capture and organize you're having purchased something at Target or Buying a certain insurance policy Couldn't be brought together into some kind of cohesive whole picture of your life That's changed now So a host of things we do on a daily basis which previously couldn't be very well tracked Now contribute to a mosaic of our lives and I think that is Uncomfortable for many people. Do you think that that discomfort? So like as a libertarian I am uncomfortable with the notion that that kind of data Exists in a silo somewhere even if Facebook's not giving it away Facebook is still Exists within the territories of states that would love to get their hands on that data often to Do bad things to people who are not necessarily fans of that state And that makes me uncomfortable because this is you know access to something that looks very much like incredibly pervasive surveillance But from the the private end is there I mean Facebook's just using this to give us targeted ads and I think everyone would admit that On the whole More targeted ads are better than less targeted ads just from the user experience Yeah, I'm tired of that cars for kids commercial if we could you know target something more Salient to my interests that would be an improvement. So What's the what's the privacy concern? Outside of just like I feel this is feel like this is creepy is there like you know call it from our libertarian perspective Is there like a genuine privacy concern here beyond that states might get this data? I would say there still is particularly when one's expectations Concerning how this collected data can be used to discipline them are at odds with the extent of that reality if you used to have an Ashley Madison account But didn't think that that was the sort of thing that a Co-worker could find out about and use to push you into taking on some assignment at work Well finding out that it can and they will is Discomfiting It alters the ways in which we might comfortably interact with the world around us How much do you think the uproar about both Cambridge Analytica and Russia in this specific Facebook in Russia is related to Relitigating the 2016 election. Oh very much so Now I don't think that Either the Cambridge Analytica scandal or Russian involvement here or even work that a QI did on the Brexit campaign Altered the outcomes of those elections. However, the ability for Effectively marginalized groups within our polity to use social media writ large Probably had a very real impact on the election so Cambridge Analytica and Russia are used as a proxy for that broader concern that these voices are Coming out of the woodwork and there doesn't seem to be a very good way to hush them up again But what's the problem with that? I mean, what's the problem with more voices coming out of the woodwork? Is it that they might be Alex Jones? I think that's what they might be in this case They voted for Trump. Yes, right But but these are I mean we've always had candidates have bought ads all the time And we don't have a problem with that and political parties buy ads all the time and government officials campaign all the time And you've had organizations like what does that guy's name David Ike? Yes The lizard. I mean he's been putting that stuff forever about that, right? Right. So I Guess I just I have a hard time feeling the weight of the concern that Lots of prior Marginalized voices are getting their say I mean I get that a lot of these Marginalized voices are crazy But that just seems to be more a problem of like why are so many Americans? susceptible to believing crazy stuff But I don't I don't know that they're necessarily like these voices are more dangerous than hearing your local politician Tell you to do something. Yes, and there's certainly no just reason for depriving these people of access to contemporary telecommunications technology I think that the the issue is and I've talked about it before on free thoughts and episodes that we talk about campaign finance in particular that If you don't understand why people disagree with you And and there's something we can get we'll get into bubbles and stuff like that too And but if it is a case that if you have no good story for why someone disagrees with you except for they they must be duped by something and I think there's some of it as it says that we Misunderstand the other side more than we used to to some extent And so therefore you need to have an explanation for why this thing happened like Donald Trump's election And we were really explaining other people's political beliefs and trying to come up with some sort of reason why they believe these things and That's what's scary to me That's what I realized when I saw this Cambridge Analytica thing that this is the new campaign finance This is the new citizens united discussion the worry about the corporations was always that they would have so much political Power to run ads that they would convince people to vote against those people's interests I'm putting that in scare quotes and for the corporate interests. And so we're afraid of you know Any of these terms you're like someone's corrupting our democracy or we have Cambridge Analytica corrupting our democracy or corporations Corrupting our democracy and that always makes me just think interesting because I'm okay corrupting So how is speaking to people corrupting a democracy and there's so many implicit premises in that? And I think that's what we're getting into with this Facebook stuff Yeah Where you draw the line as to what is endogenous versus exogenous to one's democracy? Tells you a lot about their theory of political communication That's a legitimacy of different forms of messaging or messengers. There's some sort of line from Influenced to brainwash right and it runs through manipulation in the middle And so you say okay You're you're allowed to influence the electorate and you can get out there and make your voice heard and but you can't brainwash them and Manipulation is probably too far too And so I think that they would probably put the people who are afraid of Cambridge Analytica future of this They'd probably put it at manipulation and they're probably worried that if the data gets good enough It could go to brainwashing where they have some sort of algorithm that says if you wash your car every Tuesday And you buy kumquats and delight to play squash We just have to show you six things Like a quala bear video and then like a video of Donald Trump and then this and then you will now vote like we'll crack Your brain like some sort of you know Combination to a safe and I think that you know me that's very sci-fi But that's somewhat what people are also worried about I think it is but especially in the political realm I feel as though those fears are presently overblown When it comes to Cambridge Analytica in particular, there's very little evidence that Any of this worked or even was perceived to work by certain campaigns that hired Cambridge Analytica you look to Cruz's use of them He was doing it because they were the Mercer's data analytics firm Robert Mercer funded Cambridge Analytica. He also funded a number of GOP campaigns this past election cycle and One way in which you could signal goodwill towards him and ask for his money was by hiring Cambridge Analytica When it comes to their actual services, I was Supposed lucky enough to receive a sales pitch from them about a year and a half ago I'd been working for a cannabis policy magazine in the UK that was looking to begin a legalization campaign and One of the firms we had in to discuss Potentially working on this campaign was Cambridge Analytica They played up what they could do a sort of slick monorail salesman-esque pitch But at the end of the day it relied on a great many gimmicks Posting a bounty for or running a competition for whoever could correctly guess both the score and the two teams involved in the Premier League final If you want to find potential Brexit voters Seems like a pretty good way to go about it But it doesn't speak to the efficacy of your underlying algorithm or use of data It's just a clever idea to select for mid 40-something white men and get them to give you their email address and some other Is there any way that we could measure the efficacy of it? I mean if ultimately what you're trying to do is influence votes and votes are not Public You know, we don't have we don't have records that you can look at we know X number of people from this area voted And we know how the the totals came out, but we don't know that this guy voted this way unless he tells you Can is it always gonna be just kind of that monorail sales pitch or Would it be possible to say look we you know through what we've done We moved to the popular vote, you know 0.0 whatever percent I Think it's difficult Maybe not impossible in certain cases, but you rarely get the chance to rerun an election while only tweaking one variable and In order to really drill down into the efficacy of this you'd need to be able to do that. I want to get to the The government's Response to this and and the the proposals that have been put forward to fix this problem but before we do this has provoked a lot of soul searching in Silicon Valley and then And and a lot of you know talk about privacy and and I don't know if it's related to This stuff or if it's related to the the recent changes in European privacy Regs, but like just over the last several days. I've gotten notices about our privacy policy from basically every internet service that I Have signed up for So this stuff is in the air what What are people in Silicon Valley seeing as like well sort of first? To Silicon Valley recognize this as a problem or or think this is a problem It might not be a problem, but do they think it's a problem and then what are their kind of self? enforced solutions that they imagine So when it comes to Silicon Valley's perception of their role in this I think it's even broader than simply a data privacy issue but a growing recognition that They will be treated and must behave as a sort of political actor their power has been recognized and now they have a bunch of people lining up at the door asking for various dispensations and Threatening different sorts of regulations if they don't get what they want So this is an emerging awareness when it comes to what Firms have done in response to this It's been fairly robust Particularly when it comes to this Facebook Russia question Russia used Facebook groups in many cases very large pages to spread their messages trying to come off as American citizens of different political bents they're requiring in order to run both Explicitly political ads, but also just any kind of more general issue ad that falls within Laundry list of political categories Or to run one of these large pages. These are pages with X number of followers and these are all like they were there were those America great or Things like this patriotic sounding Yeah, vague make America wonderful now kind of thing But going forward and this is supposed to be rolled out before the 2018 midterms in order to do any of that You'll need to verify your identity that you are an American citizen or have some form of government issued ID and You'll actually receive a code in the physical mail That you then punch in online and then you've been verified. This is what Facebook has announced. Yeah Shouldn't we be kind of flattered and grateful that Russia wants to make America great again? I Mean they're just trying to help out. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, you know, we can we could use some help So this this is like how recently did they announce this Facebook? This was pretty recent pretty recently It had been in the works for a time They're also and this will be fascinating for all of the DC political wonks going to keep track keep a publicly accessible Database of all political advertisements run by all campaigns So you will know you'll be able to go on and look at Both what might have been run to you But also adds designed to target very different sorts of people from yourself But this will be open and accessible to everyone. It makes sort of sneaky AB ad testing much more difficult I'm sure some people be rather frustrated about that but This is an action the government certainly couldn't take but that Facebook as a private company has decided to do What about on the broader just Creepy data mining and aggregation Level I Mean so one one question I guess would be is that stuff is the you know We're just going to gather data like all of the data about everything that you do on on our platform And also on every website that's you know interfacing with our platform and whatever else is that like necessary to the kind of very business model of These free mega platform sites could we have Facebook without Creepy Facebook data gathering You could if you wanted to pay for it whether that market exists. I'm not so sure how Real is the threat of regulation. Do you think I mean maybe not even in the near term Regulating Facebook or Twitter or something like this, but but in the long term too real We're in the as you and I have discussed privately we're in the baby steps of the internet and of social media and The world in 50 years will I assume social media is not going away due to the sort of human element of it You know what we will will we have to be constantly aware of sort of calls for regulation Because I'm thinking about comparing it to something like the FCC right where we had a fairness doctrine until 1987 that on the theory that the limited airwaves and if you just put one side of the of the Conversation up you had to put the other one because that's how we sort of sculpted our political speech Framework so people could be informed of both sides Do you think that there's a possibility that something like that or totally something different could come with Facebook another Yet to be seen social media. I I'm certainly concerned about the threat of regulation going forward Um CD a 230 has created a pretty good and was that you did pretty strong CD a 230 is an element of the communications decency act and pretty much the only element that survived later judicial review It prevents platforms or content hosts from being held liable for content posted by others If you have a hand in making the content doesn't apply to you, but as long as you are just Up or down voting what others create You know someone libel someone in your comments section They can't go after you they can go after the person who posted the libel, but you as a host are insulated and It's really the Substrate on which the modern Internet has been built Without it you couldn't run a platform like Facebook because you'd be sued out of existence However, well that's created a pretty strong presumptive norm In favor of allowing platforms to govern themselves you are seeing it nibbled at around the edges particularly in areas in which There's an ugliness to what may be happening on the Internet. We saw foster past recently which carved out a little section cutting away at these 230 protections for Sites that are seen to knowingly promote sex trafficking or prostitution Hard to be against an anti sex trafficking bill, but in its effect You begin to expose platforms and particularly up-and-coming platforms to liability for things frankly beyond their control On the advertising front as well It looks as though Facebook's move and Twitter as well to privately Rane in their political advertising markets have at least immediately Forstalled regulation, but some form of the Honest Ads Act will probably move forward in the future simply in an attempt to standardize Advertising rules between Broadcast print and these digital mediums. What does that say the Honest Ads Act and I've been a nutshell it is an effective expansion of Existing broadcast regulation to the Internet Now whether the power to do that really exists is Somewhat questionable because you aren't talking about a limited broadcast spectrum anymore But it does seem as though the political will to put something like that through is there What would the effect of that be I mean so on the one hand we could say if if government cracks down It's going to it's going to cripple social media, you know or the the foster Regulations meant a lot of sites were shutting down Turning off sections that that sex workers used And so we might say well, this is gonna this is gonna destroy everything but I guess I could see it it could also push us in the right direction not not in terms of I mean It's good that these things are being shut down, but the response to them so like that the sex workers launched a Federation of Mastodon which is a Decentralized Basically Twitter clone that you can run on multiple servers that can talk to each other So it's a decentralized Twitter and moved their conversation there And that's something that you know You might be able to shut down one instance of it But it can pop up somewhere else and you could you could build it in such a way that it couldn't be shut down that It's fully distributed and they're now back people are back to talking and there's hundreds of thousands of people or hundreds of thousands of hosts on it So it might be that the response to the government going after all these centralized services and say we're gonna regulate you is that people Go back to Decentralized services that can't be regulated which I think would be a good thing potentially though I'm not sure those decentralized services are as robust as we might hope for them to be That SW list Was recently bumped off of cloud flares DDoS protection which took it down it may have gotten back up on its feet now It's back up. Yeah. Um, well, that's good. What is the SW list again? Is that a white supremacy thing or no, no This is a decentralized social network. This is the this is the Twitter for sex workers Oh, okay. I think so it's called mastodon mastodon is the name of the underlying technology So anyone can set up a mastodon instance Like a you know, it's like installing kind of wordpress on your own server, but then it can talk to other instances as well So, but they're more vulnerable as you said then we might initially expect There's a thought that well, it's decentralized. So it's censorship proof You still need the DDoS protection And I'm sure some of that will be worked out as we go forward however, the other concern is That this regulation will cement the status of current market dominant platforms Facebook YouTube They've got a lot of legal clout. They've got huge war chests They can afford to work under some of this proposed regulation. It'll be more costly for them But they can bear that costs a New startup cannot when you're at the three guys in a garage stage you can't afford a legal team and I'm concerned that as a result of some of this upcoming regulation The next Facebook may just be strangled in its crib It would be like being stuck with Myspace back when when Zuck was building a Facebook in the garage If Myspace could have had these regulations. We might all be still friends with Tom, was that his name my space Tom? Yeah my space Tom. Yeah, so yeah, it's somewhat Trite looking back to see proposals to nationalize Myspace But people made that case then and it was so important that it needed to be nationalized and had that happened We would still have it And then I have seen people saying about Facebook too I mentioned earlier that the disconnect between the way that Congress responds to the revelations of data gathering and mining by American intelligence agencies and Facebook doing it and a lot of people Who are you know, they rightly are upset about the NSA gathering all of our data, but they're they're upset about Facebook to Because they see there's a lot of like these basically the same thing They're they're widespread surveillance and widespread surveillance is bad Is that the right way to look at it? Like is it is it conceptually does it make sense to think of what Facebook is doing as? Massive surveillance and should we be worried about it in anything approaching the way that we worry about it when the NSA is doing it It depends upon what your imagined threat is If it's this sort of social discipline, you might be more concerned about Facebook However, as far as we know Facebook data is not used to in Snowden's words put warheads on foreheads The NSA's data is So there is a difference there However, when it comes to how this Facebook data could be used down the road Well, legally if the NSA wants it, they're likely to be able to get access to it So the mere fact that it has been collected and made legible Can be concerning Why is this all about Facebook? Like Facebook does this stuff and it gathers massive amounts of data about us in order to sell ads and that's its business model But the business model of Google is to gather massive amounts of data about us in order to sell ads Twitter's business model. They don't gather quite as much data, but they gather a ton of data about us in order to sell ads Is there something So on the one hand is like is there something technically different about Facebook that makes it creepier or is there something? Culturally different about Facebook that gets people more upset. I think it's the latter When you think about Google it's somewhat difficult to connect your use of search or YouTube to Google ad words or their other advertising properties When it comes to Facebook, it's all occurring within the same walled garden You're reading your friends posts on Facebook. You're also receiving Advertisements from Facebook right alongside them so it's easier to think about it as a data harvesting and advertising entity within a social media space Whereas when we look at Google The way in which they collect information and then use it to sell ads is More opaque and distributed Of course, we can't For the same reason we discuss with my space We can't presume that Facebook will be around forever and their networking effects and all these things But but there's also the the intergenerational element. It's true. Yeah kids don't use Facebook It's what old people do it's underappreciated that for the most part Many of us online today all came online at the same time regardless of our ages however as new generations of So-called digital natives I'm laughing is this there's this Going around the office everyone was using the term digital natives and some of our colleagues were like digital native What is that digital native so so are you your will is a digital native? Are you digital native? I guess so okay On the border at least but Analog native it's true Most young people don't want to hang out in the same spaces as their parents You don't want your parents to see what you're up to with your friends, and I think you will see much more A age cohort based segregation between platforms Youth just learn how to use Facebook's post-privacy tools so then they can share their posts only with their friends and their parents can't see it It's still and if you're on there your mom's gonna want to be friends with you Well, she'd be friends with you but you stick her in a group, and then you say share with just this group Which is my homies I think I mean I won't speak for 15 year olds But but they seem to like more destructive Meaning like snapchat right it goes and then goes away, and they like things that are sort of demonstrating their lives so they can Film them and send them out to people. That's what I don't know That's what the kids are doing, but they're shifting to messaging that too, but that but so this all brings up So I mean political communication in the next decades Is I mean we're not gonna be able to predict what it is But it will be the main way that people form their attitudes about almost everything I mean they're like even the news networks They're there, you know their median age is whatever 60 years old or something like that No, 23 year old is going to start watching 7 o'clock news You know what in 10 years they're gonna get it through all these other things So we're gonna this conversation about how political opinion is formed and the interesting thing is that more it Targets on my going back to my theory of not having a good theory of the other side The more you're effectively targeted with just things you already agree with the more the other side will look Completely insane to you and then this question. I do think that there's something like a fairness doctrine That will be seriously discussed for social media in the next 20 years. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that will I Really couldn't hope to effectively comment on the 20-year horizon of the fairness doctrine. I will however point to I think one of the most interesting facets of This claim that Facebook has been censoring conservatives or other marginalized viewpoints The fact that These two women diamond and silk Who are political? E-celebrities they've risen to prominence by streaming Themselves discussing Donald Trump Were enough of a political concern to The Republican establishment that today they were invited to the Hill as witnesses To discuss how they may have been impacted by certain changes to Facebook's algorithm That's a deeply bizarre development and Speaks to a digital culture and digital political life That is increasingly eating real-world politics That that conservatives thinking that they were being censored on Facebook thing. I Have wondered about that because so the the claim is that our pages with our posts on our our You know Patriot nation whatever page aren't getting anywhere near the reach that they used to so we must be censored But all of this was happening at the same time that Facebook announced that they were basically reducing the reach of all Pages and so this is this is like one of my pet peeves in this space is that people Routinely don't understand how the technology works have no idea how the platforms work stumble across Something and then think that it affects everyone right but they just noticed it for the first time It's been going on forever, but they just noticed it for the first time and they assume that it was like directed by some engineer at them And so then they blow up and it's like this grand conspiracy When in fact it's like no this was just we changed our policies for every one six months ago And you just weren't paying attention You think conservatives are particularly bad at that. I think that by and large given the demographics Conservatives especially of the the mega sort are probably conservatively less tech savvy They they skew older who tend to be less tech savvy They skew to other demographics that are not going to be as tech savvy. So I think that does they're probably not as Media or online literate as mother group. They also might have more of a persecution complex particularly in relation to Bay Area Liberals When the daily coasts sees that its traffic is tanked after this algorithmic shift There isn't really a perceived grievance against them on behalf of That those who run and operate these platforms When it comes to conservatives, there's already this culture war tribal distance So I think it's just easier to impute that animus Whereas it wouldn't occur to the operator of a liberal page So people who use Facebook they begin this discussion talking about you know, well, we talked about Congress They don't seem to understand it or these things if someone's gonna learn something from this scandal putting that in scare quotes to About maybe things they didn't know about Facebook or you know, what what you know, what should they realize? Is a lesson from this in terms of Facebook and social media general the lesson that I Frequently look to when these stories come out is that everything is permanent online And there if I can jump for a moment from the broader Facebook Cambridge analytical Political scandal to an incident in the past week involving some blog posts that Joy Reed may or may not have written about a decade ago They were dredged up on the internet archive the Library of Congress had some copies She's claimed that they've been were hacked or manipulated in some sense, but it seems as though they just she attempted to memory-hold this stuff and as much as We heard in the hearings with Zuckerberg that well when you delete your page, it's it's gone forever That may be the case within Facebook servers, but anyone you were friends with might have saved a copy of your page or saved screenshots of things you'd posted and the extent to which everything online is Permanent so long as someone out there could be the smallest actor in the world Who wants to retain it? I Think that's still underappreciated and will remain underappreciated for a while. I guess looking forward we're Sitting in April right now as we record this it may come out in May and At the end of the year we have a congressional election And then two years later We're gonna have a presidential election and all of this stuff that you know if people are still Relitigating the 2016 campaign They're gonna get pretty hysterical about this stuff when it's the control of Congress or the next president What do you think We being both the the American electorate and how we engage with Facebook and Twitter and other things online and then also policymakers Should do about these concerns before we get to November I think we ought to keep a very close eye on How these platforms are used Coming into the midterms because all of the incentives to either misuse them in the case of Russia or Play up that misuse when it comes to a host of domestic political actors None of that has changed between 2016 and this coming November Russia in particular will have every incentive to Metal just enough or even claim that it has metal just enough that The American government will continue to attempt to hobble its Vital tech sector those who want to see more regulation of Online advertising and even speech well again have every incentive to play up the impacts of bad speech so policing these sorts of claims and Even if it's the cleanest election in history, you'll see a lot of them becomes a vitally important democratic duty Free thoughts is produced by test terrible if you enjoyed today's show Please rate and review us on iTunes, and if you'd like to learn more about libertarianism find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org