 Daily Tech News show is made possible by you listening right now. Thank you so much, John Atwood, Pat, Mike Cortez, Neil Wilson, and all of you. On this episode of DTNS, why social media speech restrictions are stopping Molly Wood from doing her job. Plus, why you should care about the Supreme Court hearing about online speech this Monday and the things you need to know about Reddit's IPO. That's my little poll. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, February 23rd, 2024. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. And from Oakland, I'm Molly Wood. Drawing the top tech stories in Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Ah, the bad luck of the calendar, Sarah. I'm so sorry that we don't get to do a show on 224-24. I mean, we could. I mean, I guess we could. I don't want anything else to do. We make the rules. Too shay. Too shay, Sarah. Tune in and find out. Maybe we will. Yeah, I have to go to a film premiere tomorrow. Ah, well. And see life. As a friend of mine, her name's Molly. She's in a little short film in the Hollywoods. I'm in a little short film. Yeah, that's exciting. Coming in town for my screening. I thought Tom was kidding. No, it never gets less weird to say out loud or be true. But there you go. That's exciting. More on that soon. But let's start with the quick hits. Microsoft has a new tool that adds generative erasing. So you can take out that broom in the background of your engagement photo. You didn't want it to be there or unwanted objects in general with AI generated content in the windows photos app in windows 10 and later generative Erase is the successor to spot fix that helped retouch photos and remove blemishes and other flawed image regions. The new tool produces a more realistic result. That's what the company is hoping anyway, erasing objects from photos and is now rolling out to windows insiders in all channels. Did you say broom or groom? Oh, dirty groom. Yeah, I mean, it depends on the engagement. Yeah. Well, we got AT&T's explanation for the widespread outage in the US Thursday. The statement says, and I quote, we believe that today's outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack. That's all in one sentence. So a lot of people were jumping to conclusions about cyber attack and never looked like a cyber attack AT&T going out of its way to confirm it was not a fact a cyber attack. It was a bad software upgrade. ABC News got a source to tell them it was a software update gone wrong. That seems to fit the facts, which depending on how you look at it is even more vague than an incorrect process. So who knows if we'll ever find out more details. Well, when it comes to social media, not that many people actually ever post a slightly larger percentage engage on posts, but the majority just consume the content and don't engage at all. A new study by Pew Research Center highlights this trend, noting that on TikTok, the top 25% of active posters make up 98% of all public videos. Around the same as Twitter where Pew previously found the top 25% of active posters wrote 97% of tweets. 48% of people who are on TikTok have never posted a video there or say they haven't. Around the same percentage that posted on Twitter, five or fewer times per month when Pew released a study back in 2021 that was similar to this. Adults between 18 and 34 were more likely to use TikTok in the first place, although 60% of 35-49 year olds have posted at least one video compared to 52% of those 18-34. Yahoo laid off Engadgets editor-in-chief Dana Wolman as well as managing editor Terrence O'Brien and eight other of their top editors and said they don't have plans to replace Wolman or O'Brien. In fact, they're splitting Engadgets editorial team into two. The new news and features team will focus on traffic growth, so think Jason SEO and clicks to drive up ad impressions, and the reviews and buying advice team will report to leaders of the commerce team at Yahoo, so likely focusing on growing referral revenue, affiliate links, things like that. Former Red Ventures VP of digital marketing operations Sarah Priestley is now listed as Engadgets general manager. Priestley wrote that collaboration with sales and SEO teams is key moving forward. After its public launch earlier this month, decentralized social network Blue Sky is opening up self-hosting of data a step towards federation. That will let anybody run their own server that connects to Blue Sky's network and host their own data and manage their own account and more or less make their own rules. The decentralized model is similar to what Mastodon is already doing using the activity pub protocol. Blue Sky uses the AT protocol, meaning that the two networks will stay separate at least for now. For the time being, interesting to be like, you can have one person on your personal server and if you prove you're responsible, we might increase it in the future, so play by the rules. This Monday the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the cases of Moody versus NetChoice and NetChoice versus Paxton. If those don't ring a bell, one is a case in Florida, the other is a case in Texas about whether a law can limit what content online content platforms can either curate or ban. In Florida, a court found that Florida's SB 7072 law was unconstitutional. In Texas, a similar law, HB 20, was upheld. Hence the Supreme Court starting to weigh in here. The court will consider two aspects of both laws. The must carry provisions around lawful speech. Basically, if it's not against the law, you can't ban it, you can't remove it. And the transparency requirements, which put rules around publishing moderation guidelines and sticking to them. Okay, so Tom, I know you've been following this closely. What arguments are we expecting to hear from these two sides? Yeah, a lot of the times when people talk about Supreme Court hearings and stuff, they talk about them as if it's somebody trying to convince the court what's right and then the court having their own opinions. And really what it comes down to are precedents. And this is a great example of why your ideology and court precedents don't necessarily match up. It's very interesting. The states are going to argue that platforms are public forums, and therefore the state may regulate them accordingly like a public square, and they've got some precedents on their side. The platforms are going to argue, no, we're more like a newspaper or a parade, and we get to decide who joins our parade or what we publish in our newsletter, and they've got precedents on their side. So let's go through some of these for the platforms. There was a 1974 case Miami Herald versus Torneo that held that you can't force a newspaper to publish a reply. It seems obvious now, right? But there was a court case that said, no, you don't have to publish a reply from somebody to one of your op-eds or anything. The more interesting precedents, 303 Creative versus Elenus is probably famous as the website designer that wanted to make sure they wouldn't be forced to make wedding websites for gay couples because of their personal religious beliefs. The court said, yeah, you're a web designer, you get to choose your clients. Hurley versus Irish American gay, lesbian and bisexual group of Boston in the 90s held that a St. Patrick's Day parade organizer was protected by the First Amendment from being required to let a gay, lesbian and bisexual group march in its event. They were like, their parade, they can decide who comes and who doesn't. So they are being used as precedents of, hey, if I have a thing, a parade, a website design company, a newspaper, I get to decide who joins it and who doesn't. And so I can ban users and I can moderate them. The state's side of this is trying to say, it's like a public square. And there's examples of private spaces being ruled to be public interest. Prune yard shopping center in San Jose, California. Actually, I think it's in a suburb but it's right there near San Jose prune yard shopping center versus Robbins ruled that a shopping center could not prohibit students from collecting signatures from a petition. They said, you're acting very much like a public square. This is in the public interest. You have to let them do it even though it's on your private property. Holmesfeld versus forum for academic and institutional rights allowed Congress to tie education funding to a requirement to allow military recruiters on campus, even if universities were against the idea of military recruiters or or had maybe even a religious objection to military. If it was like, say a Quaker University, they said, no, the Congress can tie the tie the funding to that. It is public interest. And therefore, even in a private setting, you can have you can have public interest have sway. So those are the precedents you might not have guessed will be used by these two sides. Okay, so we're talking about moderation here but what about the question of transparency and what has to has to be done. Yeah, there will be some interesting arguments about that. It's a little more straightforward. Also, the two, the two laws are more different. In this case, Florida requires a thorough rationale for each removal or ban. That's a much more burdensome provision. Whereas the Texas law just says you have to post the reason if you remove a post you have to post why. And that seems to be a little more mechanical. It's possible that the court might rule that the Texas provision meets its standard but the Florida one goes too far. So, okay, so in Texas, you could say, yeah, we don't like it for this reason. Florida says you have to give us more than one sentence reason. Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, people in Florida or Texas probably care very much about these. Why do the rest of us care? How does it affect us? Yeah, so depending on how the court rules could affect others besides just the social media platforms that are targeted by these laws, these laws are obviously targeted at Facebook and Twitter. But Wikipedia filed a friend of the court brief because it says, look, if I have to give a thorough explanation for every edit that is proved or disapproved on Wikipedia because that's moderation, that might cause us to post less stuff. It would reduce the amount of information on Wikipedia. A lot of redditors have expressed worry that if the law saying, okay, you can't ban for viewpoint, you can't moderate for viewpoint is carried out. They might become liable if they make a mistake personally liable because Reddit doesn't provide the moderation individuals do. And if court rules against laws that reduce the ability for states to regulate the big platforms at all in either of these cases, it might reduce the ability to regulate other kinds of tech companies. It might be seen as a precedent for that. So there's a lot of different angles on this that could affect other things. All right, Molly, hearing all of this, what is your take? Oh, boy. It's a lot. It's a lot. And one sentence. You don't have to do a thorough explanation, right? Yeah, I mean, we're not in Florida. Exactly. I'm just going to give you a simple reason for, no, I mean, look, this is like, here we are this many years later, I'm going to say 25 years of just my own personal experience, right? Dealing with how the internet and online platforms are or are not different from every other sort of publishing system that has come before. This Supreme Court in particular has been a little bit all over the place on these issues and has dodged the kind of fundamental question of Section 230 altogether. So I would say like, no matter what we get here, it's not going to be comprehensive or the end of this content moderation question. Yeah, I think the court is going to feel a little more comfortable in this case because it's First Amendment stuff versus Section 230, because you're right. They basically were like, we're not, we're no good. We're no good at 230 in that Google versus Gonzalez case. But here's the thing, like it is First Amendment stuff, but it's also algorithm stuff. And so to take that, to continue to take that part out of all of these conversations and sort of behave as though it is a pure First Amendment question because they're talking about shadow banning. They're talking about algorithm, you know, deamplification. Like those are all things that are separate from the sort of overall question of speech. And until we have a way to deal with that, this sort of deal with the freedom of speech versus freedom of reach part of what actually happens on online platforms. Any solution that is billed as a purely First Amendment solution is just incomplete and it's going to be gained. It's going to be interesting where they draw the line on this. Section 230 doesn't really get affected directly by these laws because all Section 230 does is shield you from liability if you make moderation decisions. This is saying what those moderation decisions can or cannot be separate from Section 230. But that, like you say, doesn't leave the Supreme Court off the hook as far as having to draw the line in a world of technology, which they previously have shown that they are uncomfortable dealing with. Yeah. It's a mess. Well, we mentioned Reddit. Right as our show started yesterday, we mentioned Reddit filed to list its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. We have a few more details about a day into the news. So Reddit is reporting revenue up 20% year over year to 804 million in 2023. The company also says it's losing less money each year. That's a good thing. And now claims 73 million daily active users and a $3.42 global average revenue per user. Reddit's also a big tech initial public offering, you know, certainly one of the year. And really the first social media IPO since Pinterest went public back in 2019. We had a bit of a dearth of social media IPOs for a variety of reasons over the last few years. Well, of Reddit's revenue, the vast majority came from advertising. And that's not a huge surprise, although it also noted in its filing that that average revenue per user is declining. So that makes a company have to do something. On Thursday, Google announced an expanded partnership with Reddit, giving Google access to the Reddit data API for efficient and structured access to fresher information, as well as enhanced signals that will help us better understand Reddit content. Public posts, comments being among them. That data can then train large language models more efficiently. Google says it's also developing ways to make it even easier to access information from Reddit across its products. Bloomberg reports this partnership will net Reddit about $60 million per year. So it's not a huge deal in the grand scheme of a company that just went public. But I think it does point to how Reddit might shift a little bit now that it's publicly available. Molly, you're at ground zero for these kinds of things in Silicon Valley these days. Do you have any thoughts on the Reddit IPO and the monetization strategy? I mean, there isn't one. So, you know, this is not, we have had, there have been companies that have gone public before when they were not profitable. And in fact, when they were very far from profitable, you know, probably the best known example in recent years is Uber, which went public and people bought it shares and it continued to lose like a billion dollars a quarter on its way to eventual profitability. Because people believed there was in fact a user base and a growth strategy that would make this company profitable, right? It's a long game type thing. So it is not unheard of, especially in the last decade or so for companies to go public when they have never been profitable. Now Reddit has never been profitable for 20 years and is attempting to convince sophisticated investors that there is an either an advertising or a data strategy that will make it back multiple times. It's revenue, right? And I just, I say this as someone who actually, I like, I love Reddit. I think it's gotten a huge Twitter bump from people who were sort of like, well, I used to go to Twitter to get boots on the ground understanding of things that were really happening. Now I don't go there. I go to Reddit instead. I think that Reddit can actually be a phenomenal source of information. It's ultimately an advertising based social network. And so far, only one of those is really performing monetarily. And I just don't know. This is not like, let's just say this is not a stock I would ever buy. That is not investment advice. It's a personal opinion. That's just vibes. Yeah, this is just vibes. You do, you do you. But what they're trying to do is raise money, right? Like as you pointed out, they need to raise money. And going to the public markets, they hope is going to be a way to do this. I don't think this is going to be the biggest pop IPO we see. Yeah, I like that analysis because I think a lot of people go, oh, another company that loses money trying to go public. And like you said, that's fine if you've got a path to profitability, right? Netflix was losing money when it IPO'd. Facebook was losing money when it IPO'd. Twitter was using money when it IPO'd and probably is still losing money. But so maybe not the best example there. But if you've got a path to profitability that's reasonable, it's fine to be losing money when you IPO because investors go, oh, well, of course you're losing money right now because that's the way business works. You have to lose money in the early days to build up the business, to make the money. And when then we all make the money back, which is what happened with Facebook. But I'm glad you brought up Twitter because that's the one-to-one comparison here. Yeah, I think the fact that Reddit has been around since 2005. And has had some iteration since. I mean, this is not just sort of like, hey, new company, hot, let's bet on the stock type thing. No, Reddit has been around for a while. People know what Reddit is. Advertising on Reddit, if there's another strategy, then okay, good for you. But I think the whole idea that other companies want to have a better treasure trove of data from Reddit, I mean, you already have that. People, Google search, Reddit specifically these days because they want actual answers. That does count for something. I don't know exactly what kinds of partnerships Reddit can make besides the Google one that I mentioned that is going to get it over the hump as far as profitability goes. But I think the Reddit strategy may change sooner than later. Yeah, I mean, I think Molly explained it really well. Like they're trying to show a path to profitability and your mileage may vary, whether you believe that path is to profitability or not. I mean, if they can license more to Google in the future, if they can license to open AI, if they can license to anthropic and all of that. There might be some revenue there, how much? The training data. Yeah, but the training data is publicly available. I mean, at some point, there's only so much you're going to be able to provide for posts that aren't right. What is likely to have, if you're going to have a path to profitability that's advertising based like a Facebook or a Meta, whatever we're calling them now, it's going to be a very different site. Reddit becomes a very different site. And the biggest problem to becoming that kind of site is all its users. Which are perfectly happy right now. Right, and they are not. Right, exactly. They're already mad. And if you try to make Reddit into Facebook or Instagram, which is heavily sanitized and algorithmically oriented and full of targeted ads, those users are going to leave. Well, you decide in March whether you want to buy some Reddit or not. Meanwhile, I got something for you right now. Tom's top five and it only takes you 60 seconds. This time I'm breaking down five ways that I fight online misinformation. A quick way to just get a few interesting things in your life if you're wanting to try to fight misinformation yourself or maybe something you can share with somebody because it's only 60 seconds. You can catch it at Daily Tech News Show on TikTok, DTNSPIX on Instagram and youtube.com slash Daily Tech News Show. All right, last week, Adam Masseri, the head of Instagram and therefore Threads said that both platforms are going to clamp down on political content, right? And added the company wants to avoid recommended political content. And we're all like, yeah, that's a good idea. I don't want to get involved in that misinformation that I was just talking about. In that episode last Thursday, Rob Dunwood brought up a very salient point. What counts as political content? Molly, you have some firsthand experience with what counts as political content, don't you? I do. Just as one example, content related to climate change has been deemed since, I think, about 2022 by Metta to be political content. So that means that it is likely one to be de-emphasized. It's going to be harder to find assuming that the Threads algorithm is de-emphasizing what it considers to be. Again, decided by the cloud here, the blob that is Metta, political content. It'll be harder to see information about climate change. They've already had policies in place and I encountered this firsthand when I tried to buy, literally just buy ads as a lady making a podcast about climate change. All my ads are rejected on Facebook. I think at some point I would just have to hire someone. You have to massage them, you have to set them up as a special interest category, and then it can only be promoted in certain ways. When they announced this, a bunch of activist groups said, you're basically just de-emphasizing messages about climate change and giving free reign to Exxon, which sponsors everything these days. The big oil companies are sponsoring everything. But it's based on this determination that this empirically scientific consensus is somehow political because there has been a concerted disinformation effort to make it political, so that we won't stop using fossil fuels. This is one example and climate scientists are very worried about it, but we're already seeing a de-emphasis on what usually happens is that when a social media platform determines something to be political, that means they think it is about LGBTQ rights, it's about climate change, it's about race. Not understanding that by preserving a status quo that doesn't let you talk about those things, you never actually have real conversations or make any progress really. Well, and there's so many, I don't know, categories like, if I want to talk about my favorite apple, and it turns into like, oh, it's a GMO thing, you know, it's like, well, that could be politicized content also. I mean, kind of anything could be. The personal is political, right? Yeah. And climate change is a political topic amongst political candidates. I think this is the problem is making topics political versus perspectives political. A perspective which there are plenty of Republicans in favor of climate regulation and believe climate change are real, and there are climate conservatives out there who also would run into this problem. So it's not even just a left-right thing anymore. This is something that has wider and wider acceptance. Whether you're talking about, as a Republican, I believe the solution to climate change should be X, that's political. If you're like Molly, who's like, I'm interviewing someone who's working on something that will remove carbon from the atmosphere, that's not political, that's just science. And business. And business, right? And science. Yeah. I mean, I think you make a really good point, which is that topic-based determination of what is and isn't. I mean, first of all, and this gets fraught so fast because I think that the conversations about free speech on social media are very often red herrings. And also, it is and always has been problematic for these platforms to be deciding what is appropriate, what is not appropriate, like the extent to which Apple has created this Disneyland-esque experience on all of its platforms, the extent to which Facebook has never shown a period, has always been problematic. Those are real issues of speech that they're now making this sort of blanket decision like, oh, our users just don't want news and politics. And so we'll just make it more pleasant for them, even though the world around them is pretty profoundly not pleasant, and it's what we're all talking about anyway. Yeah. And granted, it's their right, right? They get to do that. I think I won't speak for anyone else on the panel, but for me, it's important for us to tell you, hey, these platforms are doing this. You should know that. Maybe we can put pressure on them to change, or maybe you just use a different platform that isn't doing that, although there aren't as many choices as we would like. But it's something that I don't think a lot of people realize is happening, because when you're regulating topics as political, every topic becomes political, more now so more than ever, you know, freaking, you know, what sport you like has become political. So are we going to start removing all sports podcast advertising from Facebook? Because, you know, well, if I like NASCAR, what does that say? Because it gets ridiculous at some point. You should not be regulating political speech by topic. You should be regulating it by perspective. And if you're going to make a semantic decision anyway about topics, you can make a semantic decision about perspectives. Well, and I think sometimes people will say, this platform, everybody's just fighting about politics all day. Not the place for me. This other one, way better. I never see any of that stuff. Well, is it because of the user base or because of the platform? And in many cases, it's a combination of both. But yeah, what's going on behind the scenes to Molly's point is, yeah, if you don't see any climate change conversations on a particular platform, there's probably more to it than the fact that people just don't care about that conversation. Right. And it gets, I mean, to bring it right back to that Supreme Court conversation, right? Fundamentally, what it comes down to is that I am a user who is interested in topics and I want to choose what I see. And this just keeps coming back to, you know, implementation of algorithms that determine what I see. And that is not, we need a different framework to put that in other than speech because it's algorithmic control of information. And it's, and we're not in charge of that. And we don't have enough say over it. So to me, that's the problem. It's not a like, I just, I need a different word for it than speech. Yeah, yeah. Because it is censorship, but censorship is a tool of governments. And so it's not really censorship. And you see what I'm saying. It's problematic. Put me in charge of what I want to see. Finally. And that's what, you know, the promise of federation that we're talking about with blue sky and mastodon earlier could be. It's just not there yet. It's just not massive enough yet. Well, you know, something that is massive. The talent of Len Peralta in the artistic world. Len, what have you been drawing today? Oh, you know, you talked earlier about perspective, Tom. And I guess this is my take on it. I'm not really a big fan of election year social media. But I usually think it turns into an S show, if you get what I mean. This is called Threads S Show. This is my take on stuff. Yeah, this is how I feel about it. It's, you know, it's there are a lot of things that become political. I think this is overly political here. And on all sides. Yeah. This is how I feel about things. So yes, if you are, you know, of either persuasion, red or blue, you can get this right now at my Patreon, Patreon.com forward slash Len or my online story. You can pick it up on your own at LenPeraltaStore.com. And while you're there, you should try to commission me as well because I'm open for commissions. So he dares you. I dare you. Do it. I'm going to buy the S out of that one. Oh, God. They do. Buy all the S. Once you do that, Molly, let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. Yes. Please find me at everybody in the pool.com. You can subscribe to the podcast on all your platforms and the website has a building to subscribe to the newsletter as well. This is, this is my jam and you won't find it on threads. Go, go do it. Find it now. You will find it on threads. If you've found today's topics to be a little weighty, you're probably not alone. So stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We're going to lighten things up with the great GDI debates. Which streaming service would you want on a deserted island? Should you get a Disney pass or an Apple vision pro? The great debates continue. Just a reminder, you can catch our show live Monday through Friday when we do it at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. Everybody will be back on Monday talking about one plus's Renaissance with Ron Richards joining us. Talk to you then. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people. Host producer and writer, Tom Merritt. Host producer and writer, Sarah Lane. Executive producer and booker, Roger Chang. Producer, writer and co-host, Rob Dunwood. Video producer and Twitch producer, Joe Coots. Technical producer, Anthony Lamos. Spanish language host, writer and producer, Dan Campos. Science correspondent, Dr. Nikki Ackermanns. Social media producer and moderator, Zoe Dutterding. Mods! Beatmaster, W's Goddess One. BioCow, Captain Kipper, Steve Guadarrama, Paul Reese. Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso and J.D. Galloway. Mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen. Music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, A-Cast and Len Peralta. And live art performed by Len Peralta. A-Cast ad support from Tatiana Matias. Patreon support from Tom McNeil. Contributors for this week's shows included Lamar Wilson and Molly Wood. And our guest this week was Charlotte Henry. Thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand.