The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

Joseph: 00:03

Hello, and welcome to the four zero four media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. Four zero four media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co, as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co.

Joseph: 00:32

I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the four zero four media cofounders, the first being Sam Cole

Sam: 00:37

Hey.

Joseph: 00:38

Emmanuel Mayberg Hello. And Jason Kebler.

Jason: 00:41

Hello. Hello.

Joseph: 00:42

We are all back. Wow. This feels like it's like a rarity recently. Various people have been busy and and going holiday and stuff, but we're all here now. No housekeeping.

Joseph: 00:54

Right, Jason, before we go straight into sort of what we're gonna be talking about?

Jason: 00:59

I guess the only thing is if you're interested in four zero four media merch and wanna get it before Christmas, you need to order it in the next, like, day or two. I'll probably ship one more time next week Or this I'll ship this week and then also, like, early next week, and then everything after that, we'll have to wait till after Christmas. So I know that that was the thing that came up last year. So if you're interested in that, order now on our Shopify.

Joseph: 01:27

Yeah. Definitely. If you wanna get the green baseball cap that I have or the black one that Jason has or any of the other pieces of merch, I've been wearing the hoodie a lot recently, definitely get those in. Alright. Let's start with this first story, which is more of an announcement and then, you know, definitely something to chat about.

Joseph: 01:45

Four zero four Media is making a zine. Did I did I say that correctly? I've been so paranoid.

Jason: 01:52

Because Zine versus zine? Or Yes. No. Sometimes Zine is correct.

Joseph: 01:58

I sometimes say zine just because I'm like, it must be That's the

Emanuel: 02:02

the same.

Joseph: 02:02

The it must be the British zed z whatever. Okay.

Emanuel: 02:05

The British pronunciation of magazine. We all know magazine.

Jason: 02:09

That's how I have to do it.

Joseph: 02:12

I have to go on my head and go, wait. Maga zine. Okay. It's zine. Right.

Joseph: 02:16

Okay. Gotcha.

Sam: 02:17

We're not making a magazine, just to be clear.

Joseph: 02:19

That that's also a very good point of clarification. Yeah. It's kind of the opposite of, like, the complete opposite of that, and and we'll get into that. But we are making this, Jason. I guess before we talk about print media and how independent media is doing a lot more of it, just concretely, sort of what about what are our plans here?

Joseph: 02:42

What are we making exactly?

Jason: 02:44

Yeah. I think we wanna make this conversation relevant, not just like a product announcement. So I I think that we are doing a print zine. It's gonna be 16 pages. It's gonna be this size if you're on YouTube.

Jason: 02:57

So it's like five by 10, like a sheet of paper folded in half. And it's going to be about our reporting on ICE's surveillance tactics. So it's a mix of our best reporting and a couple new stories, reworked versions of of our older stories. We didn't, like, wholesale or reuse anything. But it is like, there's a few reasons that we're doing it.

Jason: 03:23

I think, first and foremost, we've wanted to do print in some format for a while, I think, just because it's cool. Honestly, you know, we're able to do things just because it's cool and because we like it, but I think there's something very tangible and physical about the printed word. And I think that, I don't know about y'all, but I grew up being like, oh, I'd like to write in a magazine.

Joseph: 03:48

I love to just read them, you know, when it's like I go away somewhere and then now I'm gonna really focus on reading. I don't wanna be distracted by the Apple News app or Blue Sky or whatever. I wanna sit down. I wanna read something cover to cover. And sometimes I'll do that, and it feels good.

Joseph: 04:03

You know?

Jason: 04:04

Yeah. It lets us play with design. It lets us play with, like, tangible things. And then I think critically and what a lot of this post is about is sort of about the fact that we we own this company. We've talked about the fact that we own this company 1,000,000 times.

Jason: 04:18

And part of that is we operate on the Internet, and we distribute our stuff through these algorithms that are controlled by big tech. You know, we distribute our stuff on well, not so much on Twitter anymore, but on YouTube, on Instagram, on Facebook, on Blue Sky. And on the these platforms, they are moderated by algorithms. Even Blue Sky has, a recommendation algorithm. And so so much of it is of whether someone sees something that we do is based on whether they are served it by the algorithm, whether it performs well in the algorithm.

Jason: 04:57

And you read it and, of course, you can share it with someone else in a group text and and things like that, but, you know, you sort of have to click it and and go go to that thing. Whereas with print media, I really like the fact that it's going directly to the people who buy it, you know, like, we will mail it directly to you. We're doing this as part of a benefit concert here in Los Angeles for CHIRLA, which is an an immigrant's rights organization. And we are going to be handing it out at the concert. So, you know, we could print out our blogs and hand it out there or we could have a QR code and say like, go to our website.

Jason: 05:39

But I think the fact that we're able to just like hand this tangible thing to people is is cool. It's a different distribution method. I mean, it's a distribution method that's been around for thousands and thousands of years, but it's one that works. And I think it's one that's not moderated by algorithms. I I think we wrote in the piece that, you know, you can read this zine if you get it, and then you can give it to a friend or you can give it to the library or you can throw it in the trash.

Jason: 06:07

You can light it on fire. Like, you can do all sorts of different things with it that you can't really do with a a thing on a screen. And I think that in an age where so much of what we do is moderated by algorithms and increasingly where everything is so automated, so AI focused, we wanted to create something else, like, really tangible and and really human, sort of as an experiment, but also because we thought it would be cool.

Joseph: 06:33

Yeah. We'll we'll get to some of the other experiments that you especially have done in motherboards and then what other outlets are doing around physical media. But before we get to that, just what has some of the process been in designing and building this? I should say it also I mean, it does exist because we've designed it, but it it isn't being printed yet. I think that's gonna start tomorrow.

Joseph: 06:57

So apart from that aspect of the process, which literally hasn't happened yet, what did it involve up until now?

Jason: 07:04

Yeah. So we'll make some, like, Instagram posts and YouTube videos and and maybe, like, a blog post about the actual physical production and distribution of this thing. But, basically, the way it works, we're doing a a riso print or a risograph printer, which I talked about in a previous episode of this podcast. But, basically, it's a type of Japanese printer that's been around since the early nineties, I believe. And it is a type of printer that was designed for mass production.

Jason: 07:35

And, basically, it's a it's a mechanism of screen printing on paper, more or less. And so you print one color at a time. You layer the colors, you have like different opacities for the colors, and you can create like these very cool effects because of that. And so basically, we picked three colors that we were going to use. You know, I commissioned an artist to do the cover.

Jason: 07:57

Their name is Veri Alores. They're based here in Los Angeles, and they they've been doing a lot of art about ice in general over the last few months. So I was drawn to their work and, you know, I talked to them and and it was a big process of like, well, which color should be used for the zine? Like, what you know, we have we have like a three color palette to play with. Like, what do you think works best here?

Jason: 08:21

And so there was like a lot of back and forth there. We also are working with our old friend Ernie Smith who runs a newsletter called tedium that is I believe their tagline is like searching for the long tail of the Internet, but he writes a lot about like, forgotten Internet things. So check him out. But, basically, he used to be a newspaper designer in a previous life, in a previous career many moons ago, and so he came out of retirement to help lay this out. So it was a lot of, like, we wrote the zine.

Jason: 08:55

Like, we wrote the articles on in Google Docs, and then we shared it with Ernie. And then Ernie did, some you know, we 'd I I did some like phone calls with Ernie being like, well, this is the vibe for this page. This is the vibe for that page, and he did a few different designs, sent it back and forth.

Joseph: 09:13

And he did some I think he's gonna write about it himself, and it'd be great to hear more later. But he did some, like, crazy stuff with Linux and VMs, which I don't I don't know the details, but I'm very, very curious to hear.

Jason: 09:27

Yeah. Very notably, he he did it all in Linux and, yeah, like, which is cool because a lot of a lot of this work is usually done in Adobe products, which have AI ified everything. So he did it in Affinity, which is now owned by Canva, but I don't think has been super AIified yet. And he did it on his Linux machine and it's notable just because of the the way that you have to do the file layouts and things for risograph printing is is sort of notable, and it was difficult to do on Linux. But I think he wanted to do give himself a challenge, and he succeeded at it.

Jason: 10:07

I would say the most stressful part of of any of this is, like, there's two things. One, it's print deadlines. So we were invited to partake in this concert a couple like, about a month ago now. And so in order to get copies in time for the concert, which is January 4, you can learn more about it probably in the YouTube description. We had to, like, get this to the printer very quickly.

Jason: 10:34

So we had to do the whole thing, like, relatively quickly because, you know, gotta gotta print it, and it takes time to do it and put it together and all that. And it's a very, like, DIY studio that we're using. It's called Punch Kiss Press here in Los Angeles. And, like, not only do you have to print the pages, but because of the way it works, you have to, like, let them dry because it's, like, wet ink that doesn't dry immediately, and then you they're being assembled by hand more or less. So it's very, like, labor intensive.

Jason: 11:03

And then also, it's, like, you can't have typos. I I don't think that we have typos, but it's, like, if you have a typo or, you know, say something a little bit like off on the Internet, you can go and you can fix it. You can't do that with print. And so

Joseph: 11:18

You you could, but it'd be very labor intensive. And you'd have to get all the copies back there. Sorry. We have

Jason: 11:23

to You have to request them be mailed back to you. I mean, I I did used to work at a print magazine. Like, my first job was at Washingtonian Magazine in DC, and every month, they would have a a corrections column, like, in the next issue of the magazine being, like, here's things we missed in the last one. And I was a fact checker there, so, like, if we missed something, it was, like, very horrible to have a correction, like, very embarrassing. But that's that's one of the things about the printed word.

Jason: 11:50

You all know this. It's not, like, shedding any light. But there's, like, a huge amount of stress associated with, like, is there a typo here? Is there extra spacing? Like, stuff like that.

Jason: 12:02

And I don't know. We we've, like, we caught things going up to the last second. I'll be going to the printer tomorrow, like, when you're listening to this to, like, watch the process and hopefully help out a little bit. But it is a very manual, very human process that we're doing. And it doesn't have to be this way.

Jason: 12:21

Like, we could have found a big company to print these for us and just sent them PDFs and, like, been done with it. But I think that for this first experiment, we wanted to try to have our hands on all aspects of it and and just do it in this, like, cool artistic fashion. And, hopefully, we'll do more at some point. No no specific plans on it yet, but this one has gone well so far. Like, people seem excited about it.

Joseph: 12:51

Yeah. That's where the fun is, doing the supply chain stuff for yourselves, and it's the same that you've done with the merch, basically, where we got these designs and you found, like, a local printer to to do those as well. That's that's definitely part of it. But there's this sort of I I don't wanna I don't wanna exaggerate it or overemphasize it, but there has been some moves recently with independent media to go back to physical media, The Onion, you know, that was bought by Ben Collins and Co recently from from the previous owners, and then they've gone back to a physical newspaper. Do you see it in that sort of vein, Jason?

Joseph: 13:35

Are there any more examples I'm forgetting? Onion is the main one I I think.

Jason: 13:41

So one more thing. I also had to pick out the paper that it would be printed on, which was pretty wild because I, like, went to the printer, and they had a bunch of different types of paper that we could have printed on. And she was like, what weight of paper do you want and what type of like, what company and all of this? And so that was cool. Don't know a ton about paper, so I basically went with her recommendations.

Jason: 14:01

But, like, that's how granular these options were, which is is pretty neat. But, yeah, you're absolutely right. There has been, I think, in this moment of people getting fed up with social media and getting fed up with the Internet and staring at a screen all day, there has been a bit of a return to print media. I feel it myself. Like, I feel like I want to support human things made by human beings.

Jason: 14:27

And so there has been a handful of new magazines or magazines that have existed for a while that have, like, some newfound prominence and and things like that. I think the biggest one is The Onion because they were obviously bought last year or two years ago by Ben Collins and, you know, a consortium of people, and Ben Collins used to be a disinformation reporter, I believe at MSNBC.

Joseph: 14:54

And, yeah, and before that, I worked with him briefly at the Daily Beast.

Jason: 14:57

Yeah. And so he went to that and, like, one of the first things that they did was, like, we're bringing back the newspaper, the the Onion newspaper. And the The Onion used to be a newspaper that was handed out for free, like, for many, many years. But as part of, like, being purchased by other media conglomerates and, like, cutbacks and various things, they got rid of it years ago. And as I understand, the newspaper, like, Onions newspaper subscription has gone really well.

Jason: 15:28

Ben Collins actually posted on LinkedIn a couple weeks ago that their goal for 2026 is to have more print subscribers than the Washington Post, which

Joseph: 15:36

is funny.

Jason: 15:37

Shock like, that's a shocking thing to think about. And also Well,

Joseph: 15:42

because Washington Post sucks now in a lot of ways, whereas obviously, owners have changed, the editorial board is, like, just going batshit and people are mad and mass unsubscribing. Like, it seems possible. I don't know.

Jason: 15:54

It is possible. It's like they don't need that many more. That that that's what I was gonna say is The Onion, I believe, is now the eleventh largest newspaper in The United States, like, one year after relaunching, which is really good for The Onion and very scary. Depressing as well. Depressing.

Jason: 16:11

Yeah. For sort of like the state of newspapers in The US. And, yeah, on the on the Washington Post front, I mentioned this before, but my dad used to work there. He printed the paper there when I was growing up. And they had three printing presses, like three printing plants when I was growing up.

Jason: 16:31

There was one in College Park, Maryland. There was one in Springfield, Virginia, and there was one in Southeast DC. And each of them had, like, printing presses. And these printing presses were three stories tall and, like, the length of a football field. Like, they're huge.

Jason: 16:49

Absolutely huge. And, you know, they're printing, I don't know, like a million papers every day, something like that. Huge, huge number of papers. And, you know, over time, like, my dad had to go start working in Virginia when we lived in Maryland because the College Park plant closed. And then the then the one in DC closed.

Jason: 17:10

And then the one in Virginia still exists, but I think they've gone from, like, having four presses to having, I don't know, two or maybe even only one going. And so

Joseph: 17:21

And that's the one that still does it today.

Jason: 17:23

That's the one that still does it today, and that one's been around for a long time. But it's just like the the physical infrastructure to print these things is like I don't know. Manuel was sending me the other day, like, printing newspaper printing presses that are being auctioned off by, like, random companies at this point.

Joseph: 17:42

Well, similar with book publishing. Right? I mean, I didn't have full visibility into into it, but, like, I remember doing, like, my book, you have to schedule it somewhere very specific in the year because if you don't, print printer gonna be busy with something else. You know? There's such a tiny amount of infrastructure available for this sort of thing.

Joseph: 18:03

And, obviously, we're not mass producing things, but, you know, we started to find somewhere as well. And you want and I I I guess just briefly, why did you want that specific printer as well, Jason? Just because you've been into it for a while?

Jason: 18:16

Yeah. I think it's because risograph is traditionally used for zines. Like, it has a long history of being used for zines, like these, you know, smaller run, like, editions of of things and the aesthetic of layering the ink. Like, there's usually, like, minor imperfections in the registration, it's called, which is, like, how the colors layer and things like that. So each individual one feels a little bit more handmade versus like, I don't know, printing it off on an inkjet printer or printing it off, you know, in a commercial printing press.

Jason: 18:55

And then I think it's also it's become an art. It's become like a very artistic thing. And I'm not saying that we are artists, but it's like the printer the the risograph community considers themselves to be like doing quite a lot of art. And I think it just has led to a lot of artists who specialize in that type of printing that gave us like this, like, big pool of people to work with in that space. And there there's, like, a handful of different risograph printers, printing presses across The United States.

Jason: 19:27

There's, I think, like, two or three in Los Angeles, but almost all of them are run by, like, one or two people or they're, like, small collectives, and it just felt like it was kind of the right thing for us to do to start with. I I will say also, I mentioned The Onion, but there are a bunch of other, like, really small magazines that have either launched or relaunched in the last, like, year or two. One is called Savor Magazine, which is about food, and that's another one that went out of print and has come back recently. It, like, came back in 2024 and is apparently doing pretty well. There's, like, a mushroom enthusiast ones called mushroom people, which is pretty cool.

Jason: 20:11

There's one called wild eye that's like a photography one. And so I think it's it there is like a new wave of magazines and print media that has popped up in the last few years. And I think, theoretically, we wanna be part of it. I mean, we'll see how how this goes. Again, like, people seem excited about it, but we'll we'll see, like, how it goes once we start distributing it, if people actually like it, if it is like a huge logistical nightmare in terms of, like, actually mailing them and things like that.

Jason: 20:44

But, you know, all indications are that peep people, like, are interested in this, and so, hopefully, we will be able to do more of them.

Joseph: 20:54

Yeah. And you know what other small media company relaunched this magazine? Vice Media. I'm just checking.

Jason: 21:02

Oh, they did. They did. Yeah.

Joseph: 21:04

I don't be clear, not a small independent media company, but I know that's also part of the same conversation as well. Obviously, their their the circumstances that led to that was well, obviously, they went bankrupt, and we saw the writing on the wall. That's why we left and made for a full media. But, you know, they've relaunched the magazine. So

Jason: 21:22

I mean, that that's pretty interesting you bring that up because we were a part of Vice, like, when it went from being a monthly magazine to a quarterly magazine to a, like, we're gonna do this only every once in a while to a we're gonna shut this down.

Joseph: 21:37

Right.

Jason: 21:37

And I think, you know, we did take take part in a few of the magazines that came out. You know, like, there was a motherboard issue more or less where a lot of us ended up writing articles for it. And that was really rewarding and nice, but one thing that Vice did was they stopped they kind of stopped promoting the magazine and having like launch parties and big things around it and they'd started just giving it out at American Apparel. They had like some sponsorship deal with American Apparel and then American Apparel went bankrupt. And so then literally There was

Joseph: 22:10

a bunch of other issues.

Jason: 22:11

Well, yeah. Yeah. But then there was like a period of time where it was impossible to get the magazine. They had like no distribution mechanism for it. And so, I mean, that was like a bummer to see.

Jason: 22:23

And I think that's something that has happened for a lot of magazines over the years. And I I guess it's just like with us, you know, we're starting extremely small. This is extremely small, extremely, like, experimental. But that is that's obviously a reality is, like, it's expensive to do. It's slow.

Jason: 22:43

Like, you know, we wrote these articles and they will be relevant when they come out. But it's like we wrote these articles a week or two ago. They'll come out in January. That's like a long lead time between us writing it and people getting to read it. And so the types of things that we can do in a magazine or a zine or or any sort of printed product are different than what we can do on the Internet, but I think it's it's still it's still cool and still something that is, like, worth doing.

Joseph: 23:10

Yeah. Absolutely. Alright. We'll leave that there. When we come back after the break, we're gonna talk about one of Emmanuel's stories about some very weird stuff that's going on with Instagram and SEO headlines.

Joseph: 23:22

We'll be right back after this. Alright. And we are back. This one by Emmanuel. The headline is Instagram is generating inaccurate SEO baits for your posts.

Joseph: 23:45

I mean, there's a lot going on that headline, but it's also kind of kind of right there. How about we go to the first post you saw? Like, how did you first come across this, and what was the thing that you that you saw exactly?

Emanuel: 24:00

So as is often the case, a reader reached out, someone who is a cosplayer, or I think more accurate to say a cosplay photographer, reached out and flagged that the author, Jeff VanderMeer, who wrote Annihilation, which is a popular book, later a movie, noticed that when he was searching for himself on Google, his Instagram post would show up with headlines, as in in the style and format of headlines, the construction of headlines with capitalized, every word is capitalized, and that text is not something he wrote. It's not in a comment, it's not in a caption, it's not the alt text, importantly, which is an accessibility option which describes the content of an image to someone who is blind or vision impaired. Instagram generates those automatically. You can also create them or edit them manually, but this is not what we're seeing here. These are fully generated headlines for individual Instagram posts that are showing up on Google?

Joseph: 25:26

Yeah. So just to clarify, it's if you search for something in Google that's related to this Instagram post. You might even do the name and Instagram or subject or whatever, and it's the Google results that are having this weird, almost BuzzFeed like headline. Right? It's not on Instagram itself.

Joseph: 25:50

It's weird. It's it's almost a step removed. I'll read out one of these headlines, and maybe you can just tell us what the post is actually supposed to be. But the headline is, meets the bunny who loves eating bananas, a nutritious snack for your pet, I think it is. And so, again, what what was the actual video that Instagram is deciding to put some clickbait SEO headline?

Emanuel: 26:12

It's just a few seconds of a video that, again, Jeff Vandermeer posted to his personal Instagram, which is a video of a of a bunny eating a banana. Yeah. Yeah.

Joseph: 26:24

Very, very strange. I feel like when you first came across this, it was like something of a mystery that, like, well, what the hell is actually going on here? Because as far as I know, this is not a documented feature. I don't remember there being some sort of announcement from Instagram that, hey. We're gonna start doing this.

Joseph: 26:43

What were the next steps in figuring out what the hell is going on? Because you had to go to various different people.

Emanuel: 26:48

Yeah. So a few things. One is we wanted to be careful because alt text is a often bandied about or argued about thing on the Internet that's very important for for some people in order to use the Internet, and people get very heated up about that for good reason, and we wanted to make sure that it's not that. Right? We wanted to make sure that this isn't a accessibility feature that is misfiring or explained poorly to users.

Emanuel: 27:29

Again, Instagram does have what I think is probably a very useful good feature, which it will use computer vision and AI to kind of like look at your content and automatically generate alt text that then you can get you you can edit if you want. So like that was one part of it.

Joseph: 27:48

Well, and and if that was the case, that also would have been probably a story as well, to be clear, that Instagram's automatic alt text is being crazy. So you you know, like, that would

Emanuel: 27:58

Well, be it's strong. I mean, I can say that definitively, you know, I have a screenshot of this headline you just read in the story, and underneath the headline, there's what, you know, we would call in publishing a deck, right? It's like further detail about what the post is, and it says, photo by Jeff Van de Meer on 12/02/2025 may be an image of a lighthouse. It's not an image of a lighthouse, it's an image of a bunny eating a banana. So it's wrong, and that's, you know, funny and like not great, but at least it's coming from, you know, it's technology trying to do something very positive and like not working perfectly, which, you know, happens.

Emanuel: 28:35

But again, this is not what this is. Yeah. Another thing is that, like, the reason this caught my attention is, again, we are in publishing, so we're familiar with SEO, and specifically, something from our time advice that we talked about a lot and at times argued with our, like, SEO specialist at the company about is, you know, you write a story, you put it into the CMS, there is, again, the headline that you want people to see, there's the deck that gives a little, like, short snippy description of what the article is, and then, you know, the full copy of the article. Many years ago at this point, it became good practice to have a separate box on, like, in the CMS page for your article, where you would write a headline specifically for Google, right? So it's like there's the headline that you want human beings to read when they click on your page, that helps a human being understand and maybe want to read what the article is about, and there's a totally separate headline that you're writing for Google, you're writing for an algorithm, which has different preferences, right?

Emanuel: 29:49

It's like you're writing it in a way that makes people click it in search results, that makes Google want to include it in search results, and there's just different, sometimes contradictory criteria. And it seemed to me, by looking at the style of headline, like the reason that we all immediately recognize the style and make fun of it, and, you know, associate it with BuzzFeed, which was extremely viral in the early aughts and in the late aughts, is this is what works for SEO. And it seemed to me that Instagram was making some kind of SEO play on people's individual posts without disclosing that to them. So I did, like, the laziest thing you can do at that point, which is what I did, is you can view page source on

Joseph: 30:41

Dude, we're we're hacking that.

Emanuel: 30:42

Now we're hacking. Now we're in the mainframe, we're looking at view page source in order to see, like, all the code, HTML, CSS, all the stuff that it's like happening behind the scenes when you look at a web page. At that point, I discovered that there was hidden, as in not appearing on the actual post anywhere, like a pretty long and detailed description that also reads as if it's AI generated, automatically generated, and also is very SEO friendly. It's very long, it's very descriptive, and includes keywords. I checked with some people who had this text embedded on their posts, and they were like, nope, have no idea what this is, I didn't write it.

Emanuel: 31:25

But I couldn't find these headlines that are showing up at Google. So I contacted somebody who we actually consulted with a little bit about SEO before we launched four four Media, John, and I was like, hey, like, I can't find where these headlines are coming from. Can you help me out? He directed me to Google's rich result test tool, which is a Google tool that anybody can access, and basically, what you can do there is enter the URL, and then kind of get a dump of what Google's, you know, bot slash crawler, right, like the tool that Google uses to crawl websites, this is what the bot sees when it does that. And when I looked at that, you could see that Instagram does in fact generate these headlines.

Emanuel: 32:19

They're under the HTML title tags. They don't show up when you do view page source because they only show up for search engines. And I guess I should also add, the reason I went down this path is the person who initially flagged this for me, Brian, I think understandably wasn't clear where's the headline coming from. Is Google generating that, or is Instagram generating that? And I contacted both companies.

Emanuel: 32:46

Google immediately was like, this isn't us, we're getting this text from Instagram, you're to have to talk to them. Instagram responded to me, they were like, we're looking into it, I haven't heard back.

Joseph: 32:58

Oh, so they haven't fully acknowledged or addressed the fact that it's probably an Instagram thing. No. It it is an Instagram.

Emanuel: 33:05

It's definitely an Instagram thing. They haven't made any kind of statement. You know? Yeah.

Joseph: 33:09

Right. Right. And what did the just briefly, what did the people you spoke to said? Of course, you spoke to Van Der Beer. I think you spoke to a cosplayer as well.

Joseph: 33:19

How do they feel about this? Like, what do they think?

Emanuel: 33:24

Yeah. I think, you know, it's it's it's funny to me because it hasn't happened to me, but they're understandably upset. I understand why they're upset. I think specifically, Vandermeer, which tangent, but we we kind of happened to know because we had a thing called Terraform and Motherboard advice, where we published fiction, and we did publish him once, which was like a big get for us. But yeah, I talked to him, and he was like, yeah, I try to be very thoughtful and intentional in how I present myself on social media.

Emanuel: 34:05

Everybody's worried about social media, you don't want to waste your time, you don't want to, I don't know, be a bad influence, and then, you know, these automated tools make it so you might search for me, and you'll get this kind of like clickbaity, let's call it lowbrow way of presenting his content. Obviously, as a writer, as a published novelist, he's going be sensitive to how he's represented in writing, so he doesn't like that.

Joseph: 34:36

I mean, it looks it looks like because you had to get all of that context for a bunch of reporting, and honestly, it was like a pain to get. Someone's scrolling past and finding that, it's like, why is this author writing like that? Like Right. That's really bad. Like, it looks it looks bad.

Joseph: 34:52

Yeah.

Emanuel: 34:52

Yeah. And I I think that's that's mainly, you know, the the descriptions are not wrong in a way that will necessarily, like, injure someone, but people feel also, you know, the cosplayer I talk to feels misrepresented, and that's also a problem, right? It's like, you post something on social media, post you something to your Instagram account, you're trying to portray yourself in a certain way, and then Instagram just like processes it and automatically spits out a thing that you didn't want to to represent you. So, yeah, people obviously not not fans of this.

Joseph: 35:29

Yeah. I totally get that. Alright. We'll leave that there, and we'll see if Instagram slash meta gets back to you with an answer. If you're listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out.

Joseph: 35:41

But if you are a paying four zero four Media subscriber, we're gonna talk about how the creator of IceBlock, you know, the ice spotting app that you've probably heard of, is now suing the US government. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co. We'll be right back after this.

Sam: 36:09

And we're back in the subscribers only section, and the story that we're gonna talk about here is one of Joe's. The headline is IceBlock creator sues US government over apps removal. IceBlock is this kind of, like, much talked about app, which we're gonna get into why that is. But, basically, there was some big news, a couple weeks ago with it, and then this week, we see the creator, you know, fighting back against this lawsuit against it. So, yeah, Joe, do you wanna just kinda start us with, like, breaking down what like, bringing you up to speed, what it is, what's been going on with it since we last checked in, I guess?

Joseph: 36:51

Yeah. So IceBlock is one of these ice spotting apps. It was really the first one when it launched earlier this year, and it allows a user to anonymously report the location of officials or rather ones that they've seen. So they'll open the app. You'll be like, oh, I saw a group of ICE officials at this intersection or whatever, and it'll do that, you know, without apparently any identifying information, and it then sends out a push alert to people within something like a five mile radius.

Joseph: 37:26

Like, oh, hey. Ice was spotted nearby you. When you do the reporting, you can only do reports in your own local proximity. It needs location data. It needs your location data to make a report.

Joseph: 37:39

It really needs location data of you as a user to be effective and to receive push alerts. But the idea was that you know, it's to warn local communities of where ICE officials are, and Joshua Aaron, the creator of ICE Block, who we also spoke to for an interview podcast episode a couple of months ago at this point. He compares it to when you're in, I think, Apple Maps or Google Maps, you can report the location of speed cameras, and then office this obviously, when people drive by, they'll get a warning about it. They're like, hey. You're coming out to a speed camera.

Joseph: 38:18

Maybe you wanna slow down. And he points

Sam: 38:21

Waze does that too.

Joseph: 38:22

Yeah. He points Waze.

Sam: 38:23

Maybe it's pulling Waze at a I don't know what the hell they're doing it now.

Joseph: 38:26

Yeah. He points to Waze. I actually kinda remember that as a kid and being and, like, because this was before no. No. No.

Joseph: 38:33

Like, the idea of spotting speed cameras. Like, this was obviously years and years and years before even smartphones. And people, I think, would have a device on their dashboard, and it was, like, buzz or blink.

Sam: 38:44

The radar detectors or whatever.

Joseph: 38:45

Right. And that was mind blowing. As a kid, it's like, wow. You you can you can do that? Very quaint now.

Joseph: 38:53

But that's how the app works. It got pretty damn popular when CNN covered it in June, and eventually, it got removed from the App Store. And I'll get into that context in a bit, but that's basically where we are up to with this lawsuit. Yeah.

Sam: 39:12

Okay. Gotcha. And it was removed from Apple's App Store specifically. Did it get removed from Google also? I forgot.

Joseph: 39:20

Was only it was only on the Apple App Store.

Sam: 39:22

Yeah. Was only available on the App Store.

Joseph: 39:24

Because Joshua says and, you know, some people might disagree with this. I think it's a I think it's a fair point. He said he couldn't make the app in a way that would be privacy protecting the way it's designed on Android. And people have made copycats on Android, but, you know, I would broadly agree that stuff on a stock Android phone, just a normal ass Android app, yeah, may collect more data, obviously, depends on its design, but that's the reason. Yeah.

Joseph: 39:53

It was only on the Apple apps.

Sam: 39:54

Yeah. And the apps the the stores have different rules, and that's why you have some apps are only available on iPhone, some apps are only available on Android. But and especially, like, a small app like this, like a small independent dev more likely is gonna put stuff on Apple, so there's just there's I guess there's less barriers to entry, I assume.

Joseph: 40:12

But I think I think it's a Correct

Sam: 40:13

me if

Joseph: 40:14

that wrong. Yeah. I think it's a point around where it might be very easy to get onto Google, but I think just the privacy protections of the app Apple ecosystem probably benefit the development of this sort of app a little bit. Yeah.

Sam: 40:31

Yeah. For sure. So Apple removed it because the DOJ pressured it to remove it. Do you wanna get into that a little bit? Like, that's that in itself was a huge story and is very wild Yeah.

Sam: 40:44

That the DOJ was able to pressure a private company as big as Apple to take down to do, like, any kind of action, especially something like this where it wasn't really breaking any of Apple's terms of service or anything

Joseph: 40:59

Yeah.

Sam: 41:00

To take down an app like this. So, yeah, that was a huge moment, I think, kind of a watershed moment for these apps in general.

Joseph: 41:07

Yeah. I think so, and that's why I've been covering it so much. And, know, there are some people who have criticisms of Joshua Aaron about, you know, he allegedly didn't consult immigration rights groups before developing the app. Some people have issues with how he's handled bug reports from security research, that sort of thing. I hear all of those, and I and I think anybody covering the apps and that sort of thing hears those as well.

Joseph: 41:34

For me, this is a nuts story because the US government directly pressured Apple to remove this app, and they omit it. Like, this wasn't a big hidden revelation or anything like that. Pan Bombay came out and just said, yes. We directly did this. But to give that context before we get to the lawsuit, so the app gets popular.

Joseph: 41:56

A lot of people are downloading it. At one point in time, it's like number one on the App Store, which is obviously crazy. There is then a very horrible and unfortunate shooting at an ICE facility in September where a gunman, I think on a roof, shot at a van outside an ICE facility. Maybe they were targeting ICE officials. Maybe they were targeting Brandon Lee.

Joseph: 42:20

Don't don't really know. But they unfortunately killed three people sorry, two people and wounded another. All of them were detainees inside this van. In the investigation, law enforcement well, they say a couple of things. They say they find bullets with anti ICE messages written on them, like painted on them very much in the the vein of a lot of shooting incidents recently, but we've seen messages onto the bullet casings themselves.

Joseph: 42:47

There's that. Then the other component is that they go through it appears they go through his phone of the shooter, and they find that he was searching for ice spotting apps and specifically IceBlock, and that starts this chain of events where the DOJ now sees IceBlock as sort of a direct threat to the safety and the lives of ICE officials. That's how they would see it. I would also just stress that the shooter was going to an ICE facility, so it's obviously known that ICE people are gonna be there. We don't know if ICE Block or another app directly contributed to the event either, but that's the line of reasoning.

Joseph: 43:28

So then after that, Pam Bondi, the attorney general, you know, the head of the Department of Justice, directs the DOJ to go to Apple and say, you need to remove this app. Like, demands the removal of this Apple does that. It also removes a bunch of other ice spotting apps as well, like similar ones. And then shortly after, Fox reports this news with a statement from PanBondi, as I said, just admitting it, saying, yes, we've pressured Apple to take this down, and they've done it, and we're very glad, and IceBlock is an app that's used for the targeting of ICE officials, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. That then then starts with almost a second series of events where, as I said, Apple removes other apps, including one that we reported on called Eyes Up that was just for cataloging videos of ICE abuses.

Joseph: 44:21

It wasn't even about real time location data. Was just like, hey, here's a video of an ICE official dragging somebody out of a car in Louisiana or whatever. Apple removed that. Google did not. But then Google did go and remove other apps such as one called Red Dot, which was basically an Android copycat of IceBlock.

Joseph: 44:42

And Google told me at the time, oh, no. The DOJ didn't contact us. We just did this ourselves. And that is also the moment where Google calls ICE officials a vulnerable group that needs protecting. So you have all of this going on.

Joseph: 44:59

This, again, was a couple of months ago at this point, like October and onwards. Now we're in December, and then this is where the lawsuit or when the lawsuit is filed.

Sam: 45:10

Gotcha. Yeah. You kinda see all these, like, the App Store is basically falling in line voluntarily, it seems like in Google's case. Right.

Joseph: 45:19

And that's why we did the Google the Google shows a side piece as well. Like, they they made a choice here because they they removed that, and then they also keep the facial recognition app for DHS, which we reported, which stands you offline at the moment, but they made that choice.

Sam: 45:33

Right. Yeah. Yeah. You see these these private but very influential influential companies making these decisions based on the administration's whims, which is interesting, to put it mildly, scary to be more accurate. So, yeah, let's get into the lawsuit, I guess.

Sam: 45:49

What is the lawsuit that the ice block creator is bringing at this point? That is the news that we're talking about today.

Joseph: 45:58

Yeah. So it's it's actually pretty simple. The ultimate goal is to just get a judge to say, yes. What the US government did here violated Joshua Arons and his companies who, you know, published the app. It violated the First Amendment rights.

Joseph: 46:17

It's not, as far as I know, like, seeking damages. It's not like, oh, we're gonna sue the government for $50,000,000. No. It's nothing like that. It's just like we want a signed declaration from a judge saying this violated my First Amendment rights, my being Joshua, obviously.

Joseph: 46:35

And it kinda just lays out the context that I provided, but it does point to a couple of other things. So I mentioned Pam Bondi's statements. There's also ones from Christine Ohm in here, who's the head of DHS, made similar points. Todd Lyons I don't know ever say his name out loud. The acting acting director of ICE made similar points.

Joseph: 46:58

Tom Homan, who's sort of the White House board czar, they all around the same time made these similar points that this app is really, really bad, and we need to get rid of it, and it should be removed from the App Store, or we're glad it got removed from the App Store or something to that effect. So the lawsuit just runs through all of that and also does include, I think, some yeah. I'm looking at it now. A truth social post from president Trump that just says true and then three or four exclamation marks talking about how Biden has done something. I I I'm not entirely sure.

Joseph: 47:36

But it's a 40 page lawsuit. It just goes into detail on all of that and why the creator argues this car be used for violence, and it was never designed for that that sort of thing. And it seems pretty straightforward. I have no idea what judge has it. I know some reporters look into what district was it filed in, what judge has it landed with, and to be honest, I just haven't looked at that yet.

Joseph: 48:04

So I'll be curious to see how it progresses, but I don't know. Seems pretty straightforward to me. The government's orders to remove something that's protected speech, which is equivalent to filming the police, which is very uncontroversially first amendment protected speech. I don't know. Maybe they should just, get it over with.

Joseph: 48:27

Seems like a waste of seems like a waste of time.

Sam: 48:29

I mean, he's trying to, like, set a legal precedent. Right? Like, he's not trying to profit personally from this lawsuit. He's trying to prove a point slash set a precedent for future like, for this because this will happen again. I mean, it's, you know, it'll happen to anybody else who dares make an app like this, I guess, for the App Store or if AppLeavement approves it, which I thought was interesting that he had so many calls and back and forth with Apple on how to get it approved and, like, making sure it was, like, allowed to be on the App Store, and he was gonna develop it and write it in such a way that it was okay to be on the store, and then they finally approved it just for the DHA to say, actually, fuck you.

Joseph: 49:13

Yeah. I didn't so I hadn't heard about that, and I didn't know this really happened. My understanding of and I think this probably happens most of the time. When you make an app and you push it to the Apple App Store, it probably just gets reviewed by Apple. Maybe you exchange a couple of emails to clarify something, then it gets published.

Joseph: 49:32

I mean, again, I've never made an app, so maybe I'm wildly off base there, but it didn't seem to me to be this huge process because we've also gone through the app developer sign up process because you technically have to do that to get on Apple News. So, technically, we're an app developer. We just we've never published an app. But Aaron or rather, the lawsuit goes into some of these more specifics you said, and it said that he had several video calls with Apple. This is before the app's launch.

Joseph: 50:03

Several video calls with Apple about it, and multiple conversations involved Apple's legal department where they're asking, hey. You can clarify this. Blah blah blah. Clearly, Apple thought it was legal because they approved it, and then they published the app, and it was available in the App Store. Then they went to number one in the Apple App Store.

Joseph: 50:21

So there was no there were no legal issues found then. It was only when PanBondi and the DOJ explicitly said you need to remove this app that they removed it. And and you mentioned sort of the reason. I guess just to wrap up, I'll I'll I'll read a quote from Aaron about the reasoning behind this, but that is, quote, a lawsuit is the only mechanism that can bring transparency, accountability, and a binding judicial remedy when government officials cross constitutional lines. If we don't challenge this conduct in court, it'll become a playbook for future censorship.

Joseph: 50:56

I mean, that's basically what you said, Sam, that this might happen again. And I can't think of another case where the government leaned this directly to remove an app. Like, they remove apps all the time because they're shit or sketchy or malware or doing

Sam: 51:09

something with it.

Joseph: 51:10

Apple and Google as well. They they they right. And they removed them, but I can't remember the government well, apart from the TikTok case, but then TikTok didn't get removed. So, you know, whatever.

Sam: 51:24

That feels like a million years ago. We were talking about TikTok being removed from that.

Joseph: 51:28

It's still it's still technically illegal. Right? Like, he just keeps delaying it. Like, technically, TikTok should not be allowed.

Sam: 51:34

I have no idea.

Joseph: 51:35

Oh, Jason, the TikTok enjoy is logged on.

Sam: 51:37

No. Jason just saw it.

Jason: 51:38

It's just like that there was a deadline, and they keep pushing the deadline back. And Right. You know? We we we won't we won't get into it. But

Joseph: 51:48

It's fair. That's fair. It is I don't know. It's just funny that they keep pushing the deadline. Alright.

Joseph: 51:55

Should we leave that there? Alright. Yes. Okay. And with that, I'll play us out.

Joseph: 52:02

As a reminder, four zero four Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to four zero four media and directly support our work, please go to 404media.co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope.

Joseph: 52:27

Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really does help us out. This has been four zero four Media. We'll see you again.