Social Disconnect

Panellist %
Marc Fennell 26
Tristan Harris 17
Julie Inman Grant 16
Jocelyn Brewer 14
Sally Rugg 14
The Inspired Unemployed 13

HAMISH MACDONALD

OK, it’s time to be honest. How much of your day to you spend on your phone and on the apps? How much time are you actually scrolling and swiping and liking? Are you addicted? And if you’re being really honest with yourself, is it impacting your mental health too? As misinformation and hate pollute the world’s information streams like never before, tonight we’ll ask if that’s just part of the business model of big tech. You’ll hear from the insiders speaking out, influencers, online campaigners and those who claim the digital world can be made safer. Put down your phones for just a few minutes – we’ll get you some answers. Welcome to Q+A.

Hi there. Welcome to the program. Joining me on the panel tonight: eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who worked for Twitter and Microsoft, but now fights to protect us from online harm; you may know him as the host of The Feed and Download This Show – it’s Marc Fennell; in Melbourne, activist Sally Rugg, who played a leading role in the campaign for marriage equality; tradies who packed in their jobs to become Instagram heroes – they called themselves The Inspired Unemployed – they are Matt Ford and Jack Steele; cyberpsychologist Jocelyn Brewer is with us tonight; and also answering some of your questions, Tristan Harris, from the hugely popular Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. He worked at Google as a design ethicist and is now blowing the whistle on how the platforms lure you in and won’t let you go. Please make all of them feel welcome.

Remember, as always, you can stream us on iview and on the very thing we’re talking about tonight – your socials. #QandA is the hashtag. We welcome you to join the debate, respectfully, from home. Our first question tonight comes from Peter Strohkorb in the studio.

PETER STROHKORB

Alright. Presidents, politicians, sports stars, celebrities, and even business leaders, who should all be role models, have shown the world that you can now say almost anything on social media without significant repercussions. Lies, misrepres...misrepresentations, disinformation, vicious rumours, foul language, racial hate and other discriminating propaganda, innuendos and false news on social media are now a daily occurrence. Even state-owned enterprises are now influencing public opinion by bending or even inventing the truth. What impact will that have on the next generation who will be growing up in a world full of lies?

HAMISH MACDONALD

Marc Fennell.

MARC FENNELL, TECH REPORTER AND AUTHOR

(LAUGHS) Great! Awesome. Oh, look, I mean, to some extent, that stuff has always existed, and let’s not pretend like it hasn’t. What is interesting, though, is social media has meant that we now have a fire hose of it, and that means it’s very hard for things to be called out in real time. The other component to it, I think, it’s the fact that, certainly, things like Twitter – and I know this is a ludicrous thing to say on the most Twitterised show on Australian television – there is something built into the very DNA of Twitter. You know, the fastest, snarkiest, funniest response is the thing that gets the most retweets, the most engagements, and I think it would be silly to pretend like there isn’t something about the mechanic of that that is changing how we communicate. So I think there is a responsibility that these different tech companies have. Now, certainly, over the years, they have done certain things to try and minimise or manage that – clearly not enough. I think you’d agree, right, that clearly there’s not been enough that’s been done. But I think only now we are really starting to recognise that it’s a symbiotic relationship between the tech companies and us – how we’re changing and how they need to change as well.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Jocelyn, is it built into the model?

JOCELYN BREWER, CYBERPSYCHOLOGIST

In terms of the actual, you know, social media platforms, there’s something about engaging and I guess having that interaction that makes us fire up. But when we talk about young people and the skills that they actually need to navigate that world, a lot of this is actually built into the Australian curriculum, believe it or not, in the capabilities – things like the ethical understanding, the ICT capability, which actually includes ethical use of technology as a part of that. And I think, without, you know...putting more on teachers to actually have to teach in the curriculum, that’s all there and, in fact, we as adults probably need those lessons just as much as the ‘screenagers’ do.

HAMISH MACDONALD

But do we even understand the world that exists now? I mean, we are sort of struggling as a society, I think, to even describe what’s happening, this sort of proliferation of false information, fakes, lies, harassment. If we can’t really get a handle of it, how can we teach children how to live in it?

JOCELYN BREWER

Sure, and I think the thinking skills that underpin the...the, you know, literally, barrage of information and that tsunami of information that is coming at us each day…so, part of that is the capabilities, the cognitive skills that I think... Sometimes we forget that the technology in our skull is just as kind of...

MARC FENNELL

(LAUGHS) Yeah, totally.

JOCELYN BREWER

..you know, powerful as what’s been created here, and we need to take back control of that, I guess, which is the whole point of this documentary.

HAMISH MACDONALD

So, the question’s about fake news, the misinformation. Jack, have you got friends, family that buy into this stuff, believe the conspiracy theories?

JACK STEELE, THE INSPIRED UNEMPLOYED

Oh, definitely. Yeah, I’ve got... I’m not gonna name anyone... Just like to shout-out...

HAMISH MACDONALD

Not on television. Don’t... (LAUGHS)

JACK STEELE

Yeah. Nah, definitely, you know. A few people that have been misled so heavily that they’ve just completely changed the way they go about even...everything, like...

MATT FORD, THE INSPIRED UNEMPLOYED

Everyday life.

JACK STEELE

Everyday life.

HAMISH MACDONALD

What are we talking about? Like, QAnon...

JACK STEELE

Conspiracies. Conspiracies.

HAMISH MACDONALD

..or anti-COVID stuff?

JACK STEELE

Yeah, everything.

MATT FORD

All of it.

JACK STEELE

God, I don’t want... If I say things, my mates are gonna know who I’m talking about, but...

HAMISH MACDONALD

Yeah, right.

JACK STEELE

Yeah, no, heavily, for sure.

HAMISH MACDONALD

And how do you find interacting with them? Do you say, “This stuff’s nonsense”? Like, what’s the exchange?

JACK STEELE

It’s just...it’s heavy, because I feel like the people I know, it’s...they’ve got so caught up in it, but it hasn’t...they don’t do anything to help or to speak out. They just get so invested in it and it actually kills them, but...

MATT FORD

They believe it so much that...

JACK STEELE

They believe it, yeah.

MATT FORD

..they can’t, like...you can’t tell them anything different.

JACK STEELE

Nuh.

MATT FORD

They just... It’s what they believe now.

JACK STEELE

And they smash you with conspiracies and you’re just like, “Oh, my God. Stop.”

MARC FENNELL

And it’s hard to get into those conversations, right?

JACK STEELE

Yeah, ‘cause...

MARC FENNELL

‘Cause once you start, then you’re like, “I don’t want to be the friend that has to tell you all the things you believe are kind of bullshit.”

JACK STEELE

Yeah.

MARC FENNELL

No-one wants to be that guy.

JACK STEELE

And you’re just, like, sitting there going, “Yep. Yeah, nah, for sure. Yep. Yep. Definitely. No, I agree.”

MARC FENNELL

(CHUCKLES) There’s the problem.

JACK STEELE

Yeah.

MATT FORD

“The Earth is flat, yes.”

MARC FENNELL

(LAUGHS)

JOCELYN BREWER

When somebody’s dating a terrible person, you know, you don’t want to be the person that says you’re dating a Daryl.

MATT FORD

Exactly.

MARC FENNELL

(LAUGHS)

JOCELYN BREWER

You know, like, you don’t want to kind of come in there...

MATT FORD

A Daryl!

JOCELYN BREWER

..’cause they’re not gonna listen necessarily. It’s later that they’re like, “Oh, why didn’t anyone tell me?” So there’s that kind of sense of, like, not knowing how to navigate some of those spaces, where they’re...you know, they’re your mates and you kind of want to go, “Well, what happened that you started to kind of take that on?”

JACK STEELE

Yeah.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Julie, we’re living through a pandemic right now. This is more than just people believing stuff on the internet – this is a genuine safety issue, isn’t it?

JULIE INMAN GRANT, eSAFETY COMMISSIONER

It absolutely is. And having worked within Twitter, I have to say there is a real ethos and a real deep belief within the company that it is a platform for free expression, that, you know, the internet has become the new town agora. And when things go viral... It’s great when things go viral, when it’s an advertising or marketing campaign, but when it’s a trolling attack, it’s a conspiracy theory, or it’s state actors engaging in disinformation, it can be detrimental to democracy and the social fabric that we’re living in. And for our kids, back to Peter’s point, we all have a role to play here. We need to be role modelling for our kids. You know, we can’t tell them to get off Fortnite while we’re scrolling through our Twitter feed at the table.

MARC FENNELL

Mm.

JULIE INMAN GRANT

Nor can... If we treat people with disrespect, we don’t set limitations, we’re not setting them up for success. So we talk a lot about the four Rs of the digital age – respect, responsibility, building digital resilience – because it’s not if something is going to go wrong online, it’s when – and critical reasoning skills, so that we can help kids discern fact from fiction, and find that oasis of truth in this desert of misinformation.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Sally, you’re in Melbourne tonight. You can’t travel out of Victoria because of this pandemic. All of these issues around fake news, misinformation and conspiracy theories, it must feel particularly acute to you sitting there?

SALLY RUGG, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CHANGE.ORG

Yeah, it does. And there was a lot in that question. It was great. I think the harm that misinformation does goes way beyond, like, being embarrassed of our political leaders or, you know, feeling anguish at their terrible behaviour online. Misinformation has terrible material harm in our communities, whether it is, you know, many, many people dying of a virus that shouldn’t...that shouldn’t have...or, you know, Chinese Australians getting attacked in the streets, or all sorts of people sort of, like, not wearing masks or, you know, going against health advice. Yeah, it’s... Misinformation and terrible behaviour online has such serious material impacts that sometimes I feel like it’s easy to forget that while we’re watching this sort of sideshow of bad behaviour online that it, you know, has real impact in the real world.

HAMISH MACDONALD

OK, let me take our next question. It’s a video from Joshua Swingler, in Pambula, New South Wales.

JOSH SWINGLER, PAMBULA BEACH, NSW

Increasing and retaining the amount of daily active users is a key success measure for most social media platforms, as it represents more people online, more often. However, this has led to the creation of the echo chamber, where we are continually served content and concepts that only reinforce our existing beliefs and biases. Now that the social media genie is out of the bottle, my question is, who is accountable for mitigating these unintended consequences and, more importantly, how they might go about doing it?

HAMISH MACDONALD

So, we put that question to Tristan Harris earlier.

TRISTAN HARRIS, THE SOCIAL DILEMMA

It’s a great question. I think the technology platforms are ultimately responsible, and part of the reason they have to be responsible is we have to recognise what’s happened. We’re about 10 years now into this sort of mass shredding apart of reality. ‘Cause this experiment, run by the business model of harvesting human attention, has systemically shredded our shared truth into two...three billion, excuse me, different Truman Shows. The reason for that is very clear. If I’m Facebook or TikTok or YouTube, and when you flick your finger, I have a choice between showing you something that confirms your view of reality, that, “Yes, you’re right. The other side is wrong. Here’s even more evidence of that,” so, every time you confirm...you flick, you get more confirmation, versus another newsfeed that, every time you flick your finger, it shows you a more nuanced view, it challenges your views, which one of those two is gonna be better at harvesting your attention? Well, the one that confirms your view of reality. And so, what that means is that each of us get a different confirmation of reality, and it takes our shared truth, our shared facts, and it shreds it into different echo chambers, as your listener and guest has said.

So, I think we have to first realise that this has happened to our society. Almost like Pearl Harbor was an attack on sort of American soil, we have to realise that we, as a civilisation, have been bombed by a business model. But that bomb wasn’t kinetic – it was a kind of cultural sort of shredding kind of impact on our society. We can’t solve this problem if we don’t collectively realise that that’s what’s happened to us. And the film gives us a common language, a new common ground about the breakdown of our common ground. And then, from there, we have to say, how can the technology platforms up-regulate where we... where there’s unlikely agreement from different sides, and have that rise to the top of the way that we see our reality, as opposed to the ways that we individually confirm our reality?

HAMISH MACDONALD

But, Tristan, the tech platforms say that they do take these things seriously. If you listen to Jack Dorsey from Twitter, if you talk to someone from Facebook, they say that they are dealing with this stuff. Are they not to be believed?

TRISTAN HARRIS

Well, sure, I think, to varying degrees, after many, many years of public attention and, you know... (CHUCKLES) ..yelling and screaming by people in the community that I come from, who’ve been trying to say this is an enormous problem. That has not been taken seriously until recently – I’d say the last couple of years in some cases. I think Jack Dorsey has been stronger on this than others, potentially. But I don’t think that... You know, while they’re making efforts, they can’t change the DNA of what they are. Their business model is for things to be able to go viral and pop to billions of people overnight, right? That’s the whole business model. I can post something and, next thing you know it, I can reach a billion people, because it went viral. That unchecked virality model is at the root of why fake news can spread six times faster than true news, and why conspiracy theories can dominate our public discourse. We have 10 years of damage to sort of...to repair.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Alright, our next question is from Ranjith Ramachandran in the studio.

RANJITH RAMACHANDRAN

Thanks, Hamish. After watching The Social Dilemma on Netflix, I was finally convinced to remove all the social media apps from my phone. And even though it’s been quite a recent move, I’m already seeing massive benefits from staying away from what I call social bookies. My partner has also started doing the same, and we would like to thank people like Tristan Harris for educating us about this addiction crisis. However, when I was on social media, I was aware of what’s happening in the world, you know, currently, and I also followed groups that discussed subjects that were of relevance to my field of work and my interests. And now I feel disconnected from that world. And it’s hard to strike the balance because the apps are designed to be so manipulative when you go back. So, my question would be, the move which I made, and, you know, my partner’s making, is that going to be a disadvantage for us in the longer term, and is deleting social media apps a drastic measure, or is it an immediate necessity?

HAMISH MACDONALD

OK, let me first put that to Tristan Harris.

TRISTAN HARRIS

I really love hearing that the film has had that effect for this couple, and I’m really glad to hear it. You know, the message of the film is not expecting that everyone, when they see it, will delete social media apps. We know that that’s not sustainable, and we know that that’s what makes these technology platforms inhumane. It is that we are actually forced to use platforms that are contaminated or toxic for the public sphere, and for our mental health – the fact that we don’t really have a choice, including if you’re a kid and you actually get off the social platform, like Instagram or TikTok, you still go to a school where all your friends are still talking about, you know, gossip and who’s dating who, and you’ll be socially excluded if you leave by yourself. So, that’s what really makes these platforms inhumane.

But on the question of how do we get access to those same sort of social conversations to make sense of the world, to make sense of what’s true, I think what we really need are non-extractive, non-privately held companies to help us do that. I think Wikipedia is a really good example because, you know, it’s kind of a miracle that Wikipedia even works at all, that it becomes this sort of collective intelligence for bottom-up sense-making, that lots of people can be actually identifying shared facts, doing talking behind the scenes, and starting to put together articles that piece together what we need to know in a more efficient fashion. What I’m really hoping is that the film actually creates a new ecosystem of alternative platforms, where we can have new kinds of conversations. One of the most exciting trends for me is the fact that many people thought, until the film, that you couldn’t ever start a new kind of social media network to do better sense-making of the world, and we’re now seeing many more of those than we’ve ever seen before, and that’s an inspiring trend.

HAMISH MACDONALD

So, do you think big tech – Facebook, Google, Twitter – are willing to make sufficient changes so that they’re not having this big detrimental impact on society? Because it seems they won’t even, for example, participate in a conversation about this.

TRISTAN HARRIS

Ultimately, the business model of unchecked virality, of engagement at all costs, of attention harvesting, that is the thing that fundamentally has to change. And I think, when you have that DNA, it’s very hard to change that mid-flight, unless... You know, from organisational theory, they say you have to fire about 70% of the employees and restart the culture of the company. And until they change that, everything else they do are like bandaids on broken elbows. You know, it’s great that they’re starting to look at bandaids. I think, you know, they’re trying to do the best they can, but often, listening to tech leadership is like listening to a hostage in a hostage video. You know, you see a hostage, and they say these things that don’t quite make sense, until you see the gun that’s held to them from offstage, which is their business model that’s making it seem as if they can’t say the actual true thing, which is that their business model is incompatible with the good of society. But that’s where governments can really step in and say, “How do we change these financial incentives for the best of the people?”

HAMISH MACDONALD

Sally Rugg, do you see it that way – “incompatible with the good of society”?

SALLY RUGG

No. Absolutely not. You know, I think there’s obviously a lot of truth to elements of what Tristan is saying, but I think this sort of, like, unchecked virality and the need to grow and grow your revenue model based on, like, conflict and juicy entertainment and false information – like, media empires have been doing that for a really long time. That’s how newspapers sell. That’s how people get you to click on to all sorts of stories, tune in to the nightly news.

HAMISH MACDONALD

But you don’t know many young people addicted to newspapers, do you?

MARC FENNELL

I mean, that you’re aware of. They might be out there.

SALLY RUGG

I mean, like, can I count myself?

HAMISH MACDONALD

But I mean, seriously, there are generations of people now that are finding it hard to actually put the phones down because of these apps. I mean, what you’re describing with newspapers just didn’t really exist in the same way. We are talking about something different, aren’t we?

SALLY RUGG

Sure. Yeah, the addictive element of social media platforms is a massive time-suck, and it displaces other activities, like face-to-face engagement with friends and going out in nature and all the rest of it. But on your initial sort of prompt there – is social media incompatible with good in the world? Absolutely not. Social media creates so much good in the world, whether it’s through connecting family and friends, whether it’s through, you know, providing safe places, and communities for minority groups, or, like, in my line of work, which is digital campaigning and online activism, you know, letting ordinary people organise together so that they can participate in the decisions made about their lives.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Why, then, Julie, does it do so much harm?

JULIE INMAN GRANT

Well, first, I’d say that the internet has become an essential utility, particularly during COVID. And, you know, we work, we learn, and we entertain and we connect, and this is fundamental to our humanity during lockdown. It has become a much more hostile, much more toxic place because, I think, people can hurl abuse, and it’s mostly targeted abuse, targeting women, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, those that identify as LGBTQ, and other vulnerable entities, and they can do so with relative impunity. And so, just having your Twitter or Facebook account taken down is really not a deterrent.

Now, I also don’t think we’re going to regulate our way out of this, or arrest our way out of this problem. Social media holds a magnifying glass up to society, so the societal ills of misogyny and prejudice and racism are surfaced, and then are amplified. I absolutely agree with Tristan that we have to shift the responsibility back on the platforms. The way I see it, we call this Safety by Design. So, if you build the road...

HAMISH MACDONALD

But how...how do you that? I mean, you can’t really even get these platforms to engage in a public conversation about these sorts of issues, Marc.

MARC FENNELL

No, they tend to not talk. They tend to send you to a blog post, which is really useless. I mean, look, just to come back to what you were saying, I don’t necess... I think you’ve been put in a really shitty position. You should never have had to delete yourself off these accounts. All that would have been required is they make a series of changes that make the transaction that you have with them more transparent. And that’s how I like to think about social networks, right? It is a transaction. OK, you get something, and then, they get something in return. And there’s a few different tools they have that are already available to them that they could roll out.

So, if we want to sort of tackle something like misinformation, right, every time you get serviced a piece of content on the Facebook rank, it should tell you why you’re seeing it – you’re seeing this because of the following reasons. Now, you can click through and see all that stuff, but nobody ever does it, right? I reckon it should be on everything – you’re seeing this because your ex-girlfriend did this on this thing here. Like, that would give you some understanding of what’s going on inside you, what decisions they’re making for you.

And look, The Social Dilemma is far from a perfect movie – it’s a polemic, they don’t, you know, go to the other side, they don’t look at the people who are actually working at Facebook and Google today – but what it does really effectively is it visualises a sense of what they have on you. And currently, the terms of the deal that all of us have with social media services is unfair. It’s unfair because the terms of the deal are opaque, because you don’t really know what they really have on you. And all I’m saying is, if we had a little bit more clarity in the day-by-day, you know, interactions with it, if we had a little bit more clarity about why we’re being served what we’re being served, we would at least have clarity over, you know, the way we’re being manipulated.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Jack and Matt, you’re sort of feeding this beast.

JACK STEELE

Yeah.

HAMISH MACDONALD

You’ve made a business for yourselves out of it.

JACK STEELE

It’s like, getting egged in a second. (LAUGHS)

MATT FORD

Yeah.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Are you addicted? I mean, are you addicted to the likes?

MATT FORD

I’ve deleted the app off my phone a couple of times, just ‘cause, like, there’s this period of time where I’d just get home from work, I’d just be scrolling on it, and, like, think it’s 15 minutes – two hours later, you’re just like...

JACK STEELE

Yeah.

MATT FORD

..“What the hell? Where’d the time go?”

JACK STEELE

Yeah, and you get no good out of it.

MATT FORD

Nothing good came out of it, so I was just like... You know, you’re watching someone you don’t even know, just what they’re having for dinner, and you’re like, “What the hell?” So I just deleted the app for like two weeks, and it’s good, it’s kind of like you just live in the present. And you just kind of like...

JACK STEELE

You don’t change, nothing changes. Like, you feel way better mentally, but nothing changes. But, as you were saying, your friends are hanging out and you don’t know, you know, all the message chats and all that. That’s the hardest part.

HAMISH MACDONALD

So what is it that draws you back in? Your friends on the chats?

JACK STEELE

Oh...

HAMISH MACDONALD

People sliding into your DMs?

MATT FORD

Yeah. I guess you feel like you’re missing out.

JACK STEELE

Your whole...

MATT FORD

Like, everyone’s on it so, like…

JACK STEELE

Everyone’s life.

MATT FORD

..I guess it’s the fear of missing out – like, you don’t know what’s happening, you feel like you’re a bit, yeah, disconnected from everything.

JULIE INMAN GRANT

What about the JOMO – the joy of missing out?

JACK STEELE

What is it?

JULIE INMAN GRANT

The JOMO.

JACK STEELE

JOMO?

MATT FORD

(LAUGHS) JOMO?

MARC FENNELL

It’s the opposite of FOMO.

JACK STEELE

Oh!

MATT FORD

FOMO!

JULIE INMAN GRANT

Oh, yeah!

MATT FORD

(LAUGHS) Oh, yeah!

JACK STEELE

We’re learning.

JULIE INMAN GRANT

I’ll leave the jokes to you.

MATT FORD

The joy of missing out. I like that.

JACK STEELE

We’re learning.

MATT FORD

That’s good.

HAMISH MACDONALD

But what does it say, Jocelyn, about the world that’s been created if these guys are saying, “Well, we take a break from it to sort of be in the moment, be present, we’re quite happy, but then we feel like we then need to get back onto it to be part of what’s going on”?

JOCELYN BREWER

Well, what it says is we have a...we’re completely wired to need to connect and to belong to something and be a part of something, and I guess what many people don’t realise is that you can, to some degree, curate your feed and, you know, mute the person who all they do is post photos of their kids or their food or whatever, and actually follow, you know, hashtags and movements and activate some of the things that you really care about. And research that was done by The Female Lead has actually shown that when young women populate their feed with things that are inspiring and have that kind of, I guess, more nutritious feed of what they’re actually consuming with their eyeballs, they have much more positive mental health outcomes.

HAMISH MACDONALD

So, hang on – what are you telling these boys? They should replace the things they currently look at online with what?

JOCELYN BREWER

I don’t know. We’ll have a little chat about that later. You know, I think that...

HAMISH MACDONALD

But what’s a nutritious digital diet? What does it actually look like?

JOCELYN BREWER

Yeah, look, it’s complex.

HAMISH MACDONALD

It sounds pretty boring.

JOCELYN BREWER

But imagine...

MATT FORD

Vegetables.

JOCELYN BREWER

..apps and games came with nutritional labels. So, you know, what we’re asking here really for is ethical design and to call out the principles that are used to manipulate us. So, how much narcissism versus empathy is actually gonna be generated? So while I can’t, you know, attempt to do that in this lifetime, there’s lots of organisations that are doing that, and Julie, with Safety by Design, is absolutely, you know, a big part of that international movement, where we... You know, I was a Year 9 commerce teacher – the first lesson that we used to have was caveat emptor – let the buyer beware. So we as consumers have to be conscious and we have to make bigger demands, which is, again, part of what’s happening here...

HAMISH MACDONALD

OK.

JOCELYN BREWER

..and know that we can curate our digital diet.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Just for context, boys, how many followers do you have?

JACK STEELE

Six hundred and...

JOCELYN BREWER

17,000 on Instagram, when I checked.

HAMISH MACDONALD

OK.

JACK STEELE

I don’t know. We...

MATT FORD

It’s something like that.

JACK STEELE

Something like six hundred and something thousand.

HAMISH MACDONALD

And how many likes would you get on a post?

JACK STEELE

Oh, God...

MATT FORD

Not sure.

JACK STEELE

100,000, maybe.

JOCELYN BREWER

Do you keep track of that?

MATT FORD

Not really. We kind of look at comments.

JACK STEELE

We look at... You put a video up and you just get obsessed with it for 10 to 20 minutes and then you never look at it again ‘cause you cringe so hard.

MATT FORD

Yeah.

JACK STEELE

Seriously, though.

MARC FENNELL

How long did it take you to work out that that was healthy for you, though? Because... Was there a period of time, you know, when you first started posting stuff, you’re like, “I have to look at every comment,” and you had to step back?

JACK STEELE

Yeah. At the start, a little bit.

MATT FORD

At the start, yeah, a lot more.

JACK STEELE

The best answer to your question, I reckon, is to find a balance, like, to just have a good balance. I mean, and you can actually put limits on your apps, which I do myself.

RANJITH RAMACHANDRAN

I tried that.

MATT FORD

Yeah.

JACK STEELE

It doesn’t work that well, does it?

RANJITH RAMACHANDRAN

No.

MATT FORD

It goes, “Just like one minute longer?” And you go, “Yep,” and then 15 minutes and then...

JACK STEELE

15-minute addition you can put onto it.

JOCELYN BREWER

I guess the nature of a digital detox is it’s kind of like a juice fast – you get really hangry on about the third day and eat a burger. So, you know, we have to find a better way to do this, which is actually tune into our emotions and, again, using this technology to notice, “How’s this making me feel? Am I missing my community but I’m not really missing, you know, this part of things?” And there are some kind of things that we can tweak within those platforms already to some degree – there’s much further to go.

MARC FENNELL

I still think it’s putting too much responsibility on us as users. Like, we’re not the ones making gazillions of dollars, enough money to, like, buy Guam. You know what I mean?

HAMISH MACDONALD

These guys might be.

MARC FENNELL

You guys can buy Guam.

SALLY RUGG

Hamish, can I...?

HAMISH MACDONALD

Just before that, Sally, I just want to show everyone what these boys do.

JACK STEELE

Oh, God.

HAMISH MACDONALD

This is Matt and Jack. They may cringe.

MATT FORD

Everyone close your eyes.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Here they are.

MATT FORD

Ah.

JACK STEELE

Put the head down.

DAÐI FREYR

# Though I know I love you

# I find it hard to see how you feel about me... #

HAMISH MACDONALD

Would you care to explain what you actually do?

MATT FORD

Yeah... We don’t even know. People ask us that and we still don’t even know. We don’t know how to answer it.

JACK STEELE

This is relevant, this bindi video.

JOCELYN BREWER

Oh!

HAMISH MACDONALD

But you make...you do skits...

JACK STEELE

Yeah.

HAMISH MACDONALD

..you do dances...

MATT FORD

We do...

JACK STEELE

Yeah, just stupid things, really, and film it.

JOCELYN BREWER

Can I translate young people into kind of my generation? It’s kind of like the Hey Hey It’s Saturday. It’s kind of like the...you know? It’s entertainment, it’s bloody good fun.

HAMISH MACDONALD

I hope you’re not comparing these fine young men with Red Faces.

JOCELYN BREWER

Well, you know... There was some cool things that came out of Red Faces back in the day.

JACK STEELE

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Alright, let’s take our next question. It’s a video from Carly Findlay in Melbourne.

CARLY FINDLAY, MELBOURNE, VIC

Hi, I’m Carly Findlay from Melbourne. I’m a writer, and most of my work is done online. Over the years, I’ve endured an enormous amount of online abuse from disability and race hate speech to death threats and also threats to hack my website. When I have reported it to the eSafety Commissioner, to the social media platforms and to police, the response has mostly been compassionate. However, the eSafety Commissioner and the police don’t seem to have any way to act on this. When will the eSafety Commissioner and the police get more power to act on online abuse?

HAMISH MACDONALD

Julie?

JULIE INMAN GRANT

Yeah, thank you, and thank you, Carly. And Carly has endured a lot, as do 70% of the women that come to our office reporting cyber abuse. When we were set up five years ago, it was as the Children’s eSafety Commissioner, and we’re the only government agency in the world that provides a service or serves as a safety net so that we can compel takedown of harmful content for cyberbullying directed at a child, and we have 100% compliance rate in terms of doing that. For image-based abuse for all Australians, so that’s taking down nude images or videos from hundreds of sites overseas, and we have about a 90% success rate. Where we weren’t given powers initially is in dealing with adult cyber abuse. So, the gov...

HAMISH MACDONALD

So why don’t you have the power to enforce takedowns?

JULIE INMAN GRANT

Only for serious adult cyber abuse. The government is updating our legislation, reforming the Online Safety Act right now, and it’s expected – it’s been in consultation for about 10 months – that serious cyber abuse, modelled on the cyberbullying and image-based abuse schemes, will be introduced, so we will be able to compel takedowns.

HAMISH MACDONALD

So what would that mean in practice? If someone was harassing or abusing Carly, you would be able to go to the platform and force them to remove it?

JULIE INMAN GRANT

Yes. If it was reported to the platform and it didn’t come down and it was considered serious cyber abuse with the intent to cause harm, then we could compel them to take it down. We have that same power right now for youth-based cyberbullying and, working with the platforms, they have taken down every single piece. We’ve helped about 2,000 young people, we’ve helped about 5,000 Australians get their intimate images and content taken down.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Sally, have you had to report abuse or harassment online?

SALLY RUGG

Yeah, I have. I’ve been to the police twice. Well, I, like, did a police report twice, and I don’t really like doing that. I don’t think that...sort of like abusive messages should be criminalised. Both instances, there was...there were reasons why I had to report it. So, yeah, I have, but I think the...the reality is is that…social media does allow for, like, anonymised abuse to be sent, which is really terrible. But I think, for me, personally, and I know this doesn’t speak directly to Carly’s question, but just on the topic of abuse on social media, for me, like, if I ever receive a really nasty anonymous message or a nasty message from a stranger, like, that hurts a little bit but, like, that’s fine. It’s when it’s, like, criticism or nasty words from people who you really respect or you kind of know, or just sort of acquaintances whose opinions you hold in really high esteem – like, that hurts way more.

And the reason why I mention that is because there was this big piece of research that the Pew Centre did a couple of years ago, two years ago, and it found that, for young people in particular, those who say that they have negative experiences of social media, it’s not for, you know, body image stuff or the time-suck addiction scrolling thing – it’s because they report experiences of bullying and rumour-spreading. And so it’s this same... It’s the ability for, like, a wider social network – pardon the reference – to gossip, spread rumours, say nasty things behind the protection of a keyboard. So I think abuse from strangers is...you know, is really bad, but it’s...it’s the sort of facilitation of mass critique, bullying, shaming that I think is worse.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Marc, what about when it’s threats? What about if it’s more serious stuff?

MARC FENNELL

Look, it’s funny, listening to you talk about the new legislation and the bar being ‘with intent to cause harm’, and my instant reaction is that bar is too high to clear. The bar should be much lower, and...

JULIE INMAN GRANT

Well, we can’t go to war with the internet. And first of all, I think...we think the companies need to start enforcing their policies.

MARC FENNELL

And that’s really what I want to get at…

JULIE INMAN GRANT

Yeah.

MARC FENNELL

..which is that I’m not sure that...I’m not sure that it should necessarily fall under government remit, because there are plenty of governments round the world, not so much ours but other ones, where you don’t really want a government to be the arbiter of that. And I think... Look, what a threat... I’ve had death threats at various different points over the years, and it does something to your sense of safety in an offline space that is hard to describe. And I know... Sally has experienced it as well. It’s... It does something that... It does something on the inside and you can’t... Just saying to somebody, “Put the phone down, put it away,” doesn’t work anymore. And you have to acknowledge that that’s something that you don’t lose easily. You know, a couple of years ago...

HAMISH MACDONALD

Genuine fear?

MARC FENNELL

Sorry?

HAMISH MACDONALD

Genuine physical fear?

MARC FENNELL

It’s... Yes, but I actually think what’s about it is it’s like... It’s a sense that you don’t...you’re not allowed to exist comfortably like other people are. You look at other people around you and you go, “You don’t know what’s going on inside my head.” The example I’m thinking of is a couple of years ago I did a show with bunch of white supremacists on SBS and, as I got home, there was all this white supremacist stuff, like, filling up my inboxes, and... And I’d just had a son at that point. And your whole sense of mortality is caught up in this moment. And the weird thing is, if you were to look at me on the outside, you’d have no concept of what was going on. So, you know, there are reporting functions that do exist, they are out there, they are imperfect, but I think maybe when we interact with people online – and I know this is such a terrible cliché – but recognise you are still talking to a human being. Maybe that person’s messed up, maybe that person’s done something wrong, but recognise it is still a person and that, like, if you can connect with that humanity, we might just be a little bit better off.

HAMISH MACDONALD

This, again, though, is about the individual, isn’t it, rather than the platform...

MARC FENNELL

Yeah.

HAMISH MACDONALD

..taking responsibility? Do you think it is possible to actually make these platforms take this responsibility seriously?

JULIE INMAN GRANT

I do. And with this new legislation, we will have...we’ll have the ability to name and shame, to fine them. My experience, being both with inside and then regulating the social media sites, is they’ll respond when there are revenue threats, there are reputational threats and there are more serious regulatory threats. But, um...

HAMISH MACDONALD

But then don’t they just threaten to leave those countries, like they’re doing now?

JULIE INMAN GRANT

Yes, and they did that five years ago when Paul Fletcher and Malcolm Turnbull established the eSafety office. They said, “We’re leaving the country.” They threw a tanty and said, “You’re going to quash freedom of expression. Innovation is going to be undermined.” Well, none of those things have happened.

HAMISH MACDONALD

So is that what they’re doing now – throwing a tantrum?

MARC FENNELL

Literally, that is exactly what they are doing now.

JULIE INMAN GRANT

They’re throwing a tanty.

MARC FENNELL

Yeah. It’s a gigantic tantrum. And anybody that tells you otherwise is just lying.

HAMISH MACDONALD

OK. Let’s take our next question. It’s from Lizzy Liersch in the studio.

LIZZY LIERSCH

Thanks. For many, Instagram is a positive experience and increases opportunity for connection and inspiration. Why do you think there are more studies against social media than highlighting the benefits of it?

HAMISH MACDONALD

Jocelyn?

JOCELYN BREWER

Oh, the research question is a tricky one. So, when we talk about the risks and benefits or the correlation data sometimes showing that using things like Instagram correlate with poor mental health outcomes, they are correlations and they’re not causative. So part of what drives, I guess, sometimes, research is a whole ‘nother question. One of the responses to this would be to get people and researchers to actually preregister what they’re looking for, so we can’t have researchers kind of cherry-picking bits of data. And a famous example, I guess, of that is a piece of data where they show that the correlation or the negative effect size between using social media and young people’s mental health is, you know...it’s actually 0.04%. So, very, very little if you’re talking about statistics. If we compared listening to music with kids’ mental health, there’s actually a bigger negative effect size there, but we’re not talking about listening to music and having these sorts of negative impacts. So there’s lots of tricky things and nerdy stat stuff that we could talk about in terms of that. Instagram is obviously a really visual platform, and so there’s lots of, you know, digital diet stuff happening there, in terms of the values and attitudes to things like body image and food.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Is it harder to be anonymous on Instagram than it is on other platforms?

SALLY RUGG

No.

JOCELYN BREWER

No, not really. They can... You might not have a little egg on Twitter, you might, you know, put some sort of inspo kind of picture or call yourself something different. But it doesn’t make it any harder.

HAMISH MACDONALD

So, Jack and Matt, we’ve heard a lot about the negative side of all of this. Do you see the positives? I mean, do people come and tell you what they get out of it?

JACK STEELE

Honestly, we’re so lucky on our page. Like, our experiences are 99% positive, always.

MATT FORD

Yeah.

JACK STEELE

We get...

MATT FORD

A lot of nice messages.

JACK STEELE

So many messages a day, like, of mums to kids that are dealing with huge mental health problems that open up completely to us – it’s insane – just saying we’ve helped their day or life, or they’ve quit their job because of us. It’s actually insane, hey.

MATT FORD

Yeah.

JACK STEELE

It’s wild. And we’re just like, “What? We’re just two tradesmen that don’t even know what we’re doing.”

MATT FORD

Yeah, it’s really funny. Like, we didn’t really set out to do that, and then it kind of happened.

JACK STEELE

Yeah.

MATT FORD

But it’s pretty cool.

JACK STEELE

But we can see… Like, we’re not blind – we can see the bad that does happen. But, for us, we are so lucky, like, fortunate.

HAMISH MACDONALD

And do you think about that with the content that you make?

SALLY RUGG

If I could jump...

HAMISH MACDONALD

Do you...? ‘Cause I know, obviously, humour is a big part of it.

MATT FORD

Mm.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Some humour makes fun of people, others more...is more inclusive. Do you...? Are you conscious of that when you’re putting your stuff out there?

MATT FORD

Yeah, definitely.

JACK STEELE

Super.

MATT FORD

We’re very conscious of what we’re putting out. We try and... I mean, we’re pretty, like, respectful.

JACK STEELE

Yeah.

MATT FORD

We both got brought up well, so we just, I don’t know, like, try and respect people.

HAMISH MACDONALD

I mean, you’re in your underpants in the pictures. I’m not sure exactly what’s respectful about that.

MATT FORD

Yeah!

JACK STEELE

When we started, we were so close with our family.

MATT FORD

Mm.

JACK STEELE

And we were kind of at the age where we’re old enough to know better. So we never, like, swore too much, or no racism, nothing like that.

MATT FORD

When you’re posting something, you’re kind of thinking about your parents watching it, and you’re like, “Ooh, would they think that’s good?” Yeah, your aunties and uncles are watching it, so you’re like, “They probably wouldn’t like that, tone it down a little bit.”

JACK STEELE

Which is harder to be funny sometimes, but... I don’t know. It somehow works.

MATT FORD

Try and find the balance.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Sally, I can hear you’re trying to get in.

SALLY RUGG

Oh, thanks. I was just going to say, like, I’m really pleased for Matt and Jack that their experience has been one of, like, really positive messages and no abuse or harassment or anything like that, but the reality is that if you’re a kid who is LGBTIQ, if you come from a marginalised background, if you speak a language other than English at home, if you’re poor, like, any of these sort of marginalising factors mean that you are more likely to receive bullying and nasty messages on social media.

And just to reiterate my last point, it doesn’t have to be from strangers that require, like, a criminalisation process and legislation in parliament. I think if we’re trying to go to the government to answer our problems for people receiving abuse online, we’re going to miss the mark. This is about, I think, like, educating people to be kinder to each other and helping to explain, particularly to young people, the impact that they can have when they’re hidden behind keyboards and feeling a little braver than they might when they’re speaking to someone’s face.

HAMISH MACDONALD

But, Sally, all of these platforms say they have policies in place that are designed to prevent a lot of this stuff happening. But there is a question about genuine enforcement. Don’t you think that they actually have to live up to the promises that they make? I mean, it’s unclear to me why, for example, they might be throwing QAnon pages off their platforms now whereas a few months ago they weren’t, and other things they allow to live and flourish there. There’s a fair amount of inconsistency, wouldn’t you acknowledge?

SALLY RUGG

I don’t think so. I think platforms like Facebook care about their brand and their revenue – like, their revenue, ultimately. And so, if something is going to affect their revenue, they will look at changing it. And so, with QAnon, the backlash against that really harmful right-wing conspiracy had reached a certain level that it was affecting advertisers’ willingness to come to the platform. And it was getting Facebook a lot of bad press, and so they quickly acted on it. Even though they said for a very long time that it was...they couldn’t possibly act on it, it was going to be too hard.

MARC FENNELL

Then it really wasn’t that quick then, was it, Sally?

JULIE INMAN GRANT

No, I mean, it’s a little too late, and that’s the problem. It’s reactive or in response to current events. Now, let’s think about this pivotal US election. You know, we’ve known about disinformation and misinformation and gaming of the system since the 2016 election. It’s a month out. Twitter was actually the first mover, they started with banning political ads, and then labelling Trump’s tweets, and then moving to QAnon. It was Facebook and Google that followed. So, in the industry, we talk about ‘coopetition’. So, sometimes we’re com... We’re working together to tackle these issues, but other times they’re competing to be the safer, less toxic platform. So, there are really some interesting drivers, but it’s too little, too late, and the changes have been incremental rather than monumental.

MARC FENNELL

And they have to be dragged every single time. I mean...

HAMISH MACDONALD

So, Sally’s giving them a bit of a free kick...a free pass on this, isn’t she?

MARC FENNELL

Oh, look, I wouldn’t be that harsh, I think Sally makes some good points. Sally, do you care for a right of reply on that one, before I weigh in?

SALLY RUGG

I couldn’t hear it. I’m sorry. What did you say?

MARC FENNELL

He was... He was saying he gave you...you were giving Facebook a free kick.

SALLY RUGG

Oh, absolutely not. The thing with Facebook, though, is you can read the terms of conditions of Facebook, and you can opt out of it. And so, like, I love Facebook, I think it’s really fun, and I’m far less worried about the overreach and surveillance and manipulation of Facebook than I am of the overreach and surveillance of our government and the police. I think social media is fun and does a lot of good in the world.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Alright. Well, if you are interested in hearing what the platforms have to say, Twitter has given us a statement, that’s up on our website right now. We did invite Twitter to participate in this, we also invited Google and Facebook, none of them could make anyone available. We’ve tried them lots of times during the year, and we will continue to invite them on this program. We know that you have loads of questions for them. The next question tonight comes from Trish Dawson-Kermode in the studio.

TRISH DAWSON-KERMODE

Hi. We seem to be one of a diminishing number of parents who’ve held off allowing our kids to have social...their own social media before about 13 or 14 – like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat – as the experts seem to recommend. We discuss with our kids why we follow the guidelines, and they tell us that, for most of their friends, who are about 11-14, social media dominates their day-to-day conversations and their day-to-day activities, actually. This sees them sometimes feeling left out socially, and...’cause they aren’t always in the know or have something to show. And, at the same time, they understand the unhealthy side, where there can be bullying, there can be superficiality and judgement that occurs. So, is there still a case for parental responsibility? Or should we just all give in to let them fit in?

JULIE INMAN GRANT

Absolutely. Parents are the front line of defence. We need to set the limitations. We need to be engaged in their online lives, the way we are their everyday lives. And I’d say keep doing what you’re doing, hold out. I want to go back to one of Sally’s points. And it’s interesting, because adult cyber abuse is different in character – it tends to be strangers – versus youth-based cyberbullying, which is almost always peer-to-peer, an extension of social conflict happening within the school gates. So, sometimes it’s social exclusion, it’s creating drama, creating rumours. But what makes it so insidious is it doesn’t stop at the school gates, it’s pervasive and invasive, and it follows children into their pockets. We’ve got supercomputers into our pockets now, to all hours of the day. And only 50% of young people will talk to a trusted adult when something goes wrong. So, parents, this is a preeminent parenting challenge. Our parents didn’t have to deal with this type of thing. If you go to eSafety.gov.au, we’ve got tons of information for parents, because prevention through education and awareness is the first cornerstone to solving some of these issues.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Jack and Matt, were you having these conversations with your parents during your teenage years?

MATT FORD

No. I think I was about 17 or 18 before I got Instagram.

JACK STEELE

Yeah. Year 11.

MATT FORD

And back then, Instagram was nothing. It was, like, you couldn’t message anyone. It was just, like, you’d post a photo and then maybe check, like, a month later.

JACK STEELE

Yeah.

MATT FORD

It was nothing to what it is now.

JACK STEELE

I don’t... Yeah, I agree, I think it’s horrible. Like, even parents give an iPad, you see it out for dinner. They give their kid an iPad, and they’re, like, six years old, to shut them up and you’re like...

MARC FENNELL

OK, I’m feeling very attacked as a parent! I mean, when you have children, come back to me.

JULIE INMAN GRANT

81% of Australian four-year-olds have access to a connected device. But what we have to remember is that, you know, the digital babysitters, the TV that our parents used to put us in front of, were passive entertainment mechanisms. These are interactive devices where kids can come across terrorist content and, you know, really scary things.

HAMISH MACDONALD

So, Marc, you’ve got two kids...

MARC FENNELL

Yes.

HAMISH MACDONALD

..what was the conversation at home when they were born about putting them on social media?

MARC FENNELL

Oh!

HAMISH MACDONALD

You take a lot of selfies...

JACK STEELE

Just texted them.

MARC FENNELL

Yeah...

HAMISH MACDONALD

..your kids are in them a lot.

JULIE INMAN GRANT

It was in the womb.

MARC FENNELL

Yeah, it’s interesting that, ‘cause we have some friends who…and I respect them for doing this, they’ve kept all their kids offline, and they want to have a clean slate for when they launch. And I must confess, we joked about it – you know, we hadn’t slept for half a decade, so if the least we can do is get good content out of it, we’re going to put them on the internet! But we’re very careful about the way we do it. And, look, I think there’s generally too much judgement with parenting anyway. But I think, you know, we had some basic rules about, you know, never posting while we’re at a location, never posting location details, you can’t see school uniforms, stuff like that. There’s no... This is about us posting pictures of our kids, right? In terms of actually them getting a device, literally, my six-year-old’s like, “When am I getting a phone?” And I’m like, “OK, back up, buddy, that’s not happening for a while.” And I leant on the ‘you have to be 13, wait for the terms and conditions’ stuff. But I think it’s going to get harder and, you know, not a day goes by where I’m incredibly grateful that social media did not exist when I was in Year 10, 11, 12.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Why?

MARC FENNELL

‘Cause I would have posted some incredibly terrible things that I would be scrubbing from the internet as we speak. And that’s a hard thing to live with. You know, there was a movement a few years ago, a couple of commercial services that would basically offer you a service – they would go in and scrub your digital identity clean. Now, I reckon some of them would have been shysters, but if you can come up with an effective tool that would scrub your footprint clean at age 18, or when you want to go get that job and become a cop, or run for parliament, there’d be some money in that, I reckon.

HAMISH MACDONALD

I want to bring Peter Strohkorb back in. You asked the first question tonight. I think you’ve got three kids?

PETER STROHKORB

Sadly, yes.

MARC FENNELL

Do they know you feel that way?

HAMISH MACDONALD

How concerned are you about their use of devices and apps and addiction even?

PETER STROHKORB

OK, so, I’ve got three kids between 18 and 13, and we were debating a lot about what’s the right amount of time. We used to say two hours a day. Well, that went like that. And the incredibly difficult thing for parents to do is to judge between how much social interaction goes on online, that is really useful and helpful, versus how much distraction and influence goes on, right? And, as a parent, from the outside, you can’t really judge that unless you look over their shoulder all the time.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Do you go into their phones?

PETER STROHKORB

No, not me. I wouldn’t even know how.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Are there big arguments about this stuff?

PETER STROHKORB

Yes, not so much with this one, ‘cause she’s 13 and she’s not getting a phone until... Well, she’s getting one now. But as puberty progresses the debates get quite robust, yeah.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Jocelyn, clearly no simple answer here, but this seems to be something that most families experience.

JOCELYN BREWER

Absolutely. The screen-time debate. And I’ve talked for several years that we need to get beyond kind of counting digital calories, in terms of just tracking time online, and really thinking about the content and the quality of the content that’s being consumed and the interactions that are happening, as well as the context. So, obviously, this year, the context has been we’re in a pandemic and we are on screens more. We needed to then focus on that, you know, more nutritious, like, interactive kind of stuff. So, I mean, look, they’re big issues that I deal with all the time in terms of feeling left out because you’re not having that. I never got a Dolly magazine, so I was…you know, never was a part of that, but we used to crowd around that one person who did have that magazine. We would crowd around and consume that together and go through that together as opposed to our own feeds of information. And I guess, as the doco points out, there’s, you know... We can’t dose kids with the same kind of nutritious virtual vitamins. They are going to create their own algorithms that serve them different things and the conversations that you can have with them now are probably the most important educational pieces…you know, conversations that you’ll have in terms of the critical thinking that goes into even how they argue with you about why they need Triller – which you can go home and Google.

HAMISH MACDONALD

The next question tonight comes from Taofiq Huq in the studio.

TAOFIQ HUQ

What worries me most about social media is how it’s polarising people to such an extent that we’re almost starting to live in different realities. This has implications with politics and the rise of conspiracy theories. What regulations, whether from government or industry, should be considered to counter this trend towards polarisation?

HAMISH MACDONALD

Alright. Well, We’ve put this question to Tristan Harris.

TRISTAN HARRIS

It’s a very challenging area because it obviously hits on a…you know, a value that many societies hold of free speech. But I think what we have to distinguish is the difference between free speech and free reach. No-one is saying that we cannot say what we believe. I think the question we have to ask is, does everyone have a God-given right to reach hundreds of millions or billions of people without any of the corresponding responsibility? As an example, Alex Jones, who is the conspiracy theory video guy who does InfoWars, he was recommended by YouTube 15 billion times. This is someone who said that the Sandy Hook parents, whose kids were killed at the school, that that was just…they were just crisis actors. That’s the kind of stuff that’s getting recommended billions and billions of times. Flat Earth conspiracy theories were recommended hundreds of millions of times. I think in COVID times when you set your children in front of YouTube because you have to walk away and do something, and cook or go to work, and then you come back and your kids are saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, you have to ask, is this by accident or is this because of a business model that rewards these conspiracy theories?

HAMISH MACDONALD

So, are you saying then, hold these platforms to the same standards as publishers?

TRISTAN HARRIS

That, and also, in a decentralised sense, each of us are now publishers and broadcasters. So we have the power as individuals to broadcast to millions and billions of people without any of the corresponding responsibility. So if I wanted to lie and make something up right now and I had my own podcast or my own video channel, nothing is going to stop me. There’s no accountability for that. I can just make up facts. In fact, the least ethical actors win in the attention economy because those are the ones who are least constrained. The more willing you are to say anything, the better you are at getting away with anything, which is exactly why fake news spreads six times faster than true news, because it’s an unconstrained space of speech. As opposed to, if I only say true things, I’m limited in saying only things that grammatically line up with the truth. So that’s just a smaller set of items. So the unethical actor wins, basically, in this circumstance.

HAMISH MACDONALD

So, I’m interested in that argument, Marc, because what you guys have been saying is you’ve got to get the platforms to take more responsibility. He’s saying actually the individuals maybe taking responsibility might solve this problem.

MARC FENNELL

Just on a very practical level, just to take his slightly straw-man-y argument about you put your kids in front of YouTube and they come back saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. I mean, there are literally things like YouTube Kids and ABC Kids and things like that you can put your kids in front of. So, just on a practical level, it doesn’t have to be that bad, right? In terms of... Maybe the best way to think about it is as a symbiotic relationship, right? No-one’s saying that we shouldn’t change our behaviours and we shouldn’t be better informed about what’s happening to us, I just don’t want to take that responsibility away from the gazillion-dollar companies, right? So I think it’s important to understand that there is a measure of shared responsibility shared between the two. And then, yes, government does come into it as well, but just historically speaking, governments don’t tend to be that great at regulating some of this stuff, generally speaking. I mean, I’m sure you’ve probably landed on a different conclusion to me but, you know, there have been various different points both here in Australia and the US and the UK where different kinds of regulation have been brought in and often they have unintended consequences.

HAMISH MACDONALD

So, if the platforms were to take responsibility, are we talking about changes, tweaks to the algorithms to ensure that people aren’t seeing different versions of reality?

MARC FENNELL

Well, I would say... I mean, the thing I was saying earlier about just a little tool to tell you why you’re seeing something, to me is just a relatively simple, actionable start, right? The other thing to think about is the fact that... Just to take Facebook as an example, ‘cause I think Facebook is probably, like, more central to this than things like Google. They can only pull from an inventory of content to fill stuff up in your feed. They can get better about deciding what even gets into the list of inventory in the first place. And so, when you see them...

HAMISH MACDONALD

What do you mean by that?

MARC FENNELL

I think there are some things they should have banned outright a really long time ago. And they always wait for somebody to criticise them publicly before they do it. And they are big enough and rich enough and probably fast enough at this point to stop it before it gets to a stage where gazillions of people – I’m going to stop saying ‘gazillions’ – where lots of people believe that the Holocaust didn’t happen or the world is flat. They have the power and they should have done it a long time ago.

JULIE INMAN GRANT

They banned Holocaust denial tweets last week. People have been denying the Holocaust since the 1940s. Obviously, the platforms weren’t around, but again, the whole idea of Safety by Design is that if you build the digital roads you also need to erect the guard rails, you need to police the roads for dangerous drivers, so that other users don’t end up being the casualties. But I strongly believe it takes cultural change in the ethos of moving fast and breaking things and profits at all costs to actually building platforms and designing them with safety and human dignity at the core. I think that’s an easier proposition and something that they can do, and a journey we have been going on with the companies through Safety by Design, versus what Tristan is recommending and changing wildly successful revenue models. What government is going to take the economic engine of the US economy during the midst of the worst global depression and tell them you’ve got to change the way you make money? You know, they are businesses looking for profit and they answer to shareholders.

HAMISH MACDONALD

OK, let’s take our next question tonight. It’s from Christopher Ojala in the studio.

CHRISTOPHER OJALA

Thanks, Hamish. How do you explain a recent visit I made to a car dealership to have my car serviced where I was asked if I wanted windshield wipers replaced, to which I declined their offer? Within an hour of leaving the dealership I’d started getting ads for windshield wipers on my phone. I have never searched for wipers on my phone and it’s not something that comes up in my daily conversation. So, if my phone is not always listening, how the hell did I end up getting these windshield wiper ads on my phone?

HAMISH MACDONALD

Jack and Matt.

MATT FORD

I want to know this question as well. This happens to us all the time. We’re always talking about this.

JACK STEELE

Every day. I was looking up back braces for some weird reason – no, not looking them up, I was talking about them with you – and then the next day they were just popping up everywhere.

HAMISH MACDONALD

So, did you buy any?

JACK STEELE

No. I probably should have.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Do you actually investigate it? Do you go that next step and try and figure out why this stuff is happening?

MATT FORD

No.

JACK STEELE

I asked someone, I think it was someone from Instagram, why it happened, but I swear they said, “It was because you searched it.” ‘Cause I thought it was from just speaking – like, Siri or something. I have no idea.

MARC FENNELL

They are adamant that they don’t use... Like, Facebook, in particular – and this has come up a lot over the years, and we’ve covered it on Download – they are adamant that they are not using your microphone, and it’s very hard to believe them sometimes...

JACK STEELE

They have to.

MARC FENNELL

..but they are adamant about it.

JACK STEELE

How can they not, though? That example right there.

MARC FENNELL

I mean, just to take your example, without knowing the complete ins and outs of the algorithm – which, by the way, we should know, because it’s marketing to us – I would say they probably gathered your location data, that you were at a place and they probably concluded that you didn’t buy a car, so you were probably interested in accessories. But that’s…I mean, that is at a guess. And part of my issue with why I would like a thing underneath saying, “This is why you’re being advertised this,” is so it doesn’t feel creepy. I actually think it’s better for the platforms if you take the creepiness out of it, and you have some transparency under why they’re selling you stuff. I actually think it’s better for trust. And that’s the biggest issue facing…from a monetary standpoint, the biggest issue that’s facing Facebook and Google now, particularly YouTube – they’re considered to be unsafe places to advertise because people don’t trust them. And if they were a little bit more transparent, I don’t think they’d make any less money and I think we would probably trust them a lot more.

HAMISH MACDONALD

Sally, do you get this stuff popping up on your feed?

SALLY RUGG

Yeah, I do, all the time. I think it’s probably a location thing. Yeah. It is pretty creepy when it happens. I am just going to be really cheeky, I just want to go back to the last question that I wanted to jump in on about regulation changes that we could make to a social media platform like Facebook, because I think it is really simple. I think there are three things we can do. I think, obviously, we cannot track every single person who ever tells a lie and stop everybody from telling a lie. But Facebook can make sure that verified accounts, media accounts and lobby groups do not spread fake news. They can implement that level of checks on those posters. They can crack down on bot farms that can give the impression of support for an idea or endorsement en masse, and they can also de-platform really bad faith actors. Alex Jones was mentioned by Tristan. Facebook removed Pete Evans, which was fantastic. So there are three things that Facebook can do straightaway. And the way we make them do it is by organising together online, taking collective action and hitting Facebook where it hurts. We have the power as the users of this platform to see the changes that we want to make, but we’ve just got to work together.

HAMISH MACDONALD

I thought we were going to get through a whole show without a mention of Pete Evans, but it wasn’t to be. That is all we’ve got time for tonight. Would you please thank our wonderful panel, Julie Inman Grant, Marc Fennell, Sally Rugg, The Inspired Unemployed, Jack Steele and Matt Ford, and Jocelyn Brewer. Thank you to all of them.

Next week on the program, trust, ethics, accountability – are the standards of our political leaders slipping as we grapple with this national crisis? Thanks to you for all of your questions tonight. Have a very good night.