Name: Signal Founder on Shadowbanning, Social Media Companies "Curating" Information
Uploaded: 2020-12-01T20:22:43.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Signal Founder on Shadowbanning, Social Media Companies "Curating" Information' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-12-01. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Signal Founder on Shadowbanning, Social Media Companies "Curating" Information' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-12-01. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience I remember the first day that I was at Twitter the at
the time the most popular person on Twitter was Justin Bieber you had more
followers than any other person you know was that when you guys were trying to
rig it so that he wasn't trending number one always because they did do that
right
I don't remember that no I was I don't remember conveniently Jamie and I were
talking about that one day because they had to do something because if they
didn't do something Justin Bieber would be the number one topic every day no
matter what was happening in the world I can believe that they wanted to change
that because the pro the problem was at the time Twitter was held together with
like you know bubblegum and like dental floss or whatever you know so it's like
every time Bieber would tweet like you know the lights would dim and like the
building I kind of shake a little bit you know it goes mm-hmm so they blocked
me
from trending this is 2010 I'm actually honored not even Matt he's also 12 then
I get on and see yet again my fans are unstoppable love you okay but okay so
there's you know people talk about like invisible labor like the invisible
labor
behind that tweet it was just kind of comical because it's like when he did
that
you know people like you know it's like my first day there you know it's like
he
he tweeted something and you know the building's like kind of shaking and like
alarms are going off people are like scrambling around you know and it was just
this you know it's like this realization where you're just like never in my
life
did I think that anything Justin Bieber did would like really affect me in any
like
deep way you know and then here I am just like scrambling around to like
facility what are your thoughts on curating what trends and what doesn't trend
and
whether or not social media should have any sort of obligation in terms of how
things whether or not people see things like shadow banning and things along
those
lines like I'm very torn on this stuff because I I think that things should
just be
and if you have a situation where Justin Bieber is the most popular thing on
the internet that's
just what it is it is what it is but I also get it I get how you would say well
this is gonna
fuck up our whole program like what we're trying to do with this thing what do
you mean fuck up a
whole program well what you're trying to do with Twitter I mean I would assume
what
you're trying to do is give people a place where they could share important
information and
you know have people you know I mean Twitter has been used successfully to
overturn
governments I mean there's there's Twitter has been used to break news on very
important events
and alert people to danger and there's there's so many positive things about
Twitter and if
if it's overwhelmed by Justin Bieber and Justin Bieber fan accounts and Justin
Bieber if it's
overwhelmed then the top 10 things that are trending are all nonsense I could
see how someone would think
we're gonna do a good thing by suppressing that yeah I see what you're saying
well why do you think they
did suppress that what do you think you work there why do you think they kept
him from trending
um well I mean I don't know about that specific situation I mean I think I
think you know looking
at the larger picture right like um in a way you know it's like if you think
about like 20 years ago
whenever anybody talked about like society you know um everyone would always
say like the problem is the
media it's like the media man yeah if only we could change the media and a lot
of people in who
were interested in like a better and brighter future were really focused on
self-publishing
their whole conference is about underground underground publishing conference
now the allied media conference
people were writing zines uh people were you know getting their own printing
presses uh people you
know we were convinced that if we um made publishing more equitable if
everybody had the equal ability
to like produce and consume content that the world would change and in some
ways like what we have today
is like the fantasy of you know those dreams from 20 years ago um but in a
couple ways you know like uh
one you know it was it was it was the dream that if you know a cop kills some
random person in the
suburbs of saint louis that like everyone would know about it you know um just
you know everyone knows um
and also that anybody could share their weird ideas about the world you know
and i think in some ways um we were wrong you know that we thought uh like you
know the what we got
today is like yeah like if a cop kills somebody in the suburbs of st louis like
everybody knows about
it i think we overestimated how much that would matter uh and i think we also
believed that the
things that everyone would be sharing were like our weird ideas about the world
and instead we got like
you know flat earth and uh like you know uh anti-vax and like you know all this
stuff right
uh and so it's like in a sense like i'm glad that those things exist because
they're like
they're sort of what we wanted you know uh but i think what we did what we
underestimated is like
how uh important the medium is like the medium is the message kind of thing and
that like
what we were doing at the time of like you know writing zines and sharing
information we i don't
think we understood how much that was predicated on like actually building
community and like
relationships with each other and that like just um like what we didn't want
was just like more
channels on the television and that's sort of what we got you know and so i
think you know it's like
everyone is like on youtube trying to monetize their content whatever you know
and that it's the same
thing like bad business models produce like bad technology and bad outcomes and
so i think there's
concern about that but i think um i think like you know now that there's there's
like you know these
two simultaneous truths that everyone seems to believe that are in
contradiction with each other
you know like one is that like um everything is relative uh everyone is
entitled to their own opinion
all opinions equally valid and two like um our democracy is impossible without
a shared understanding
of what is true and what is false the information that we share needs to be
verified by our most trusted
institutions like people seem to simultaneously believe both of these things
and yeah um they're in
direct contradiction with each other um and so in some ways i think most of the
questions about you know
social media in our time are about like trying to resolve those contradictions
and but i think you
know um i think it's way more complicated than the way uh that the social media
companies are trying to
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