The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

Joseph: 00:04

Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.c0, 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 4 0 4media.c0.

Joseph: 00:31

I'm your host, Joseph. And with me are 404 Media cofounders, Sam Cole. Hi. Emmanuel Mayberg. Hello.

Joseph: 00:39

And Jason Kebler.

Jason: 00:42

Hey. Good to be here.

Joseph: 00:44

Yeah. Good to

Jason: 00:45

be here.

Sam: 00:46

Jason, let's see the turnaround for the for the viewers at YouTube. I wouldn't see the merch. Actually, this is the first time I'm seeing it. It's beautiful.

Emanuel: 00:54

Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Emanuel: 00:55

Wow. Wow.

Joseph: 00:56

And for audio only listeners, Jason is wearing the the sort of the sweatshirt of our of our new merch, which, Jason, you wanted to give us an update on that briefly before we get to this week's stories?

Jason: 01:11

Yeah. So a few things. I guess, I've mentioned this a lot, but I mail out all of the merch from, my garage. And so because of that and because we're not like an ecommerce business, really, we've been ordering not that many of each size of thing that we bought. And very excitingly, like, we just got a lot of merchant in stock, and a lot of it is already sold out, which we were not expecting and we're very thankful for.

Jason: 01:46

So, I mailed, like, a 100 packages yesterday, which is a lot, but we're out of a lot of the sizes and things like that. We are going to try to restock as quickly as possible if you're interested in buying merch. And, again, like, one of the reasons why I don't keep a lot in stock is because it takes up a lot of space in my apartment. And now we have, like, hoodies and sweatshirts and 3 different types of t shirt, and keeping all the different sizes has been, like, really hard. So, I know a few people have asked, like, why don't you have x y z size?

Jason: 02:26

And that's because other people bought them, which is very, very thankful. But we we are gonna reorder, and I think that we're probably gonna look into just, like, a different solution that will allow us to keep different sizes in stock, for longer. So there's that.

Joseph: 02:45

Yeah. If you go to our website, for a 4media.c0, at the top, there should be a merch tab, and you just click there. It'll take us to take you to our Shopify, and you can, order there. And definitely looking forward to wearing the merch myself as well. Let's get to this week's stories.

Joseph: 03:04

The first one is one that Jason wrote. The headline is, it's total chaos internally at meta right now. Employees, protests, Zuckerberg's anti LGBTQ changes. This is sort of a follow-up to what we spoke about last week, what we covered last week. But, of course, well, essentially, every tech publication is covering because it's hugely important in that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta came out and they announced these sweeping, speech policy changes and content moderation changes.

Joseph: 03:39

In that, they are lifting restrictions, as they phrase it, on some topics which are out of touch with mainstream discourse, which is how Zuckerberg phrases it. I know that because I just watched the video because I'm writing my own article about meta, at the moment. And those include immigration, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sort of the the top line takeaway is that, yeah, sure. On Facebook and Instagram, you can now just go and say that, you're a you know, gay people are mentally unwell. Trans people are mentally unwell or whatsoever.

Joseph: 04:18

Obviously, it's not just the gender identity and the sexual orientation stuff. That's just more what sort of came up in this article. So that those changes will happen. Jason has been getting a ton of leaks from inside Meta pieces last week and then these more recent ones. But, Jason, how many Meta employees did you talk to for this one?

Joseph: 04:40

And, you know, what were they telling you about the reaction inside Meta to these policy changes?

Jason: 04:45

Yeah. You're right. We did talk about this last week, but it's continued to be, like, probably the biggest story in tech. So we're gonna talk about what's changed. For this story, I talked to 5 people who are current employees at Meta, but I also got tons of screenshots sort of, like, of the internal reaction to these changes.

Jason: 05:08

And so, you know, I I spoke to and interviewed 5 different people, but then I also had screenshots that represented, like, hundreds of different comments from from people who say that this change is going to make people less safe, that it is sort of well, it's very interesting because Mark Zuckerberg said that he's anyone who leaves the platforms because of these sorts of changes is virtue signaling, but this is part of, like, an entire, news cycle and shift at the company to virtue signal to the incoming Trump administration that Meta is going to, like, more closely align with, that company's policies.

Joseph: 05:49

And I'm allowed to leave a platform if I think people are gonna, like, give me shit. Why do I have to stay at your platform, if I'm gonna face that abuse myself, or if my friends, or my colleagues, or whoever? I I it's ridiculous to frame it like that, but sorry. Continue.

Jason: 06:05

Yeah. I mean, I think, there's a lot to it, which I think is why we wanted to talk about this again, which is the broader context that this is all happening in is, like, Mark Zuckerberg has been a punching bag for conservatives for a long time. We've written a lot about this over the years. Like, Ted Cruz, for example, was obsessed, just absolutely obsessed with the fact that, Facebook once deleted a Chick Fil A appreciation group as, like, hate speech or something, but to show that, you know, Meta was biased against conservatives. And, Joseph, you and I did a really big story about how content moderation used to work at Facebook, and it was clear that this was some sort of mistake.

Jason: 06:54

The company said it was a mistake, but, you know, there's, like, billions of users posting all sorts of stuff all the time. And so things get taken down by mistakes sometimes. And sort of, like, in the wake of Elon Musk saying, hey. There's no rules at all on Twitter, more or less. You know, he's become Trump's best friend, more or less, and there's a rivalry between Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

Jason: 07:21

They probably will never do an MMA fight, but they've discussed it at length.

Joseph: 07:26

Well, that's because that's something that Musk can't fake. He can fake all he wants in Path of Exile 2 or Diablo 4, but you can't fake throwing a punch in MMA. That's the size that's the size

Jason: 07:40

definitely win. Not that it matters, but it's like Zuck has spent the last, like, several years just, like, obsessively training MMA, whereas, like, Elon, I don't know what he does, but he, like, plays video games and tweets all day. Whereas But

Joseph: 07:51

he doesn't even play video games. He's a Q and A.

Jason: 07:54

Yeah. Yeah.

Joseph: 07:54

Yeah. That's a different story that I covered, which we're not gonna talk about because I'll get really mad about it. But that's the context.

Jason: 08:00

So there's that, but then there's also the TikTok ban, which is like TikTok is the biggest competitor to Meta right now. Like, you know, TikTok is destroying Instagram reels at least among a certain subset of users. It's a better platform. It has better algorithm. There's less, like, insane stuff on there.

Jason: 08:21

And Zuckerberg has been for years talking about how the US needs to beat China, blah blah blah. Meanwhile, Trump has signaled that he he's, like, not that interested in a TikTok ban. But meanwhile, Zuckerberg is, like, going to Mar a Lago twice. He is, like, sucking up to Trump. He's moving the entire company to the right.

Jason: 08:44

And we have written an article about this, but, like, I think that part of this is Zuckerberg thinks that he can possibly help get this TikTok ban over the line, like, get it get it banned. Therefore then one of his biggest competitors is no longer in the US, and he's, like, more closely allied with the Trump administration, blah blah blah. He went on Rogan. He talked all about, like, the US government and the Biden administration attacking him for years. He's just, like, doing full on, like, right wing talking points at this point.

Jason: 09:20

And

Joseph: 09:21

I mean, just on that, because you brought up the Rogan podcast, we have our resident Rogen whisperer, Emmanuel, who listens to all of the Rogen podcast, because I'm not gonna do that. And I appreciate that he sits through them and interprets them for me. Emmanuel, did you listen to the the Zuckerberg Rogen podcast and sort of what was your takeaway from that?

Emanuel: 09:41

I listened to most of it, and it was very frustrating because most of it was what Jason is describing and kind of very transparent appealing to the incoming administration and positioning of the company where I think Zuck sees the American mainstream, which is more to the right, obviously, because Trump won the election. And it's frustrating because, like, the Rogan style of interviewing is with the exception of people who are, like, anti marijuana, he will not push back on anything. He kind of just, like, flows with the views of whoever he has on. He's not a confrontational interviewer. I do think that it is worth listening to Zuckerberg when he talks about the Biden administration pressuring him to remove certain content from the platforms.

Emanuel: 10:38

Like, most of this stuff is referring to, like, COVID era misinformation or perceived misinformation, but, like, even putting the merit of those posts or the removing of those posts aside, I think it is and I and I'm asking the rest of you if you agree. But, like, the fact that the current administration would email a social media company and pressure them to remove this type of content or that type of content is notable and is kind of scary, and I totally understand him if he at first capitulated entirely to those pressures because of the panic around COVID and people weren't sure what is dangerous misinformation and what isn't. And then kind of having an awakening and being like, wow. That was a, like, a really scary moment for me for as a CEO of, like, a major social media company that has influence over billions of people. Like, I think that's a fair thing to, you know, bring up and and be upset about and and and wanna have better different policies around.

Emanuel: 11:51

I'm not saying that the current policies that he has are those policies, but kind of, pushing back on that, I think, is a legitimate thing. What do you guys

Jason: 12:02

Yeah. I mean, I guess what I was gonna say is it it's very interesting because I see this primarily as, like, literally virtue signaling. Some people have called it vice signaling. It's whatever. Doesn't matter.

Jason: 12:15

But it's like, as we've written millions of times, it's like, Meta's content moderation is horrible, and it has been horrible for a long time. There was a period many years ago where it was slightly better, but they have, like, laid off these content teams. We find horrifying shit on Facebook and Instagram all the time. They, like, very rarely remove this stuff. They take down stuff that they shouldn't be removing all the time, such as our articles and links to competitors' websites and, like, all this sort of thing.

Jason: 12:48

So I think that, like, in practice, like, the content moderation situation is a disaster and has been for a long time. And the administration, like, pressuring them to take stuff down, it's just like it feels like some sort of, like, self owned by the Biden administration, which is, like, not super shocking to me. But I think that this entire, like, host of changes, the, like, getting rid of fact checking, which is, like, a terrible program, should have never happened, should have never, like, existed because it was so shitty and, like, was checking the wrong things and was done by people who, like, I don't think did a very good job. I just think that, like, rolling all of them out at the exact same time immediately before Trump takes office in this broader context is, like, that that's the story. The story is, like, meta, mask off, meta goes MAGA, the topic of, like, 15 different podcasts that I've seen before and and things like that.

Jason: 13:46

But it's like, I don't think that I I don't think meta platforms were a safe place for LGBTQ plus people. I don't think it was a terribly, like, safe place for immigrants. I don't think it was a safe place for sex workers. We've written about it a lot. And I think that to some extent, them saying, like, we're not we're overtly not gonna care about this stuff anymore will have impacts and bad ones.

Jason: 14:13

But at the same time, it's not like they they were some bastion of, like, good policy before this. I don't know. Sam, what do you think?

Sam: 14:22

Yeah. I mean, the mask off thing is interesting because it's like, did you prefer the mask? Like, it was still the case in a lot of ways. Like, at least now, maybe they're being real about it. But, yeah, I mean, like, there's like you said, there's been a 1000000 different, pieces, like, tearing this apart as part of, like like, Zuckerberg's effort to, like, align himself with Trump.

Sam: 14:46

And it's not just like I mean, it is partially, like, big tech, owners want to be in bed with whatever's in power, whatever party's in power, whoever's in power. It's also, like, Zuckerberg's been, like, dragged in front of Congress several times in the last 4 years and, like, has a lot of, like, antitrust criticism against him and stuff like that. So, I think he's he's like, this is my actual, like, company on the line. Like, our like, it was a conversation for a while. I think it's not anymore.

Sam: 15:23

But, whether or not Facebook as a monopoly was gonna get broken up, I think now that's not only off the table. It's like he's making sure it's not just, like, my company is gonna be solid forever. It's, like, my company is gonna be, like, favored by the administration. And, also, I'm gonna have a lot of, like, lobbying leeway, and I'm gonna have a lot of, like, power in those rooms. So it makes sense.

Sam: 15:49

And, yeah, the MMA thing is really interesting because, like, he's been hanging out with those guys. And, like, obviously obviously, they have had some influence, like, was, radicalized by MMA. I don't know. But,

Jason: 16:01

Yeah. I believe it's, like, a degree of, like, self radicalization mixed with he's always been this way. He's like a Silicon Valley billionaire, but he was wearing that mask. And then one other thing he said on Rogan and he and there was a really good article in The Atlantic by Charlie Worzel about this with the title, we're all trying to find the guy who did this. It's like Zuckerberg has been professional victim player, acting like these things such as these fact checking programs, their content moderation policies, like, all sorts of other things are things that, like, somehow just happened to Meta that he had no role or decision over, and it's just like he did all of this stuff.

Jason: 16:45

Like, he's the CEO of the company. He's been the CEO since day 1. Meta, you know, oversaw, like, credibly accused of of sort of, like, overseeing a genocide in Myanmar. It's just like, this is not it's his fault. It's been his fault the whole time, and it will continue to be his fault.

Jason: 17:06

And the last thing I'll say on on that is, like, there's also Trump was also suing him over being banned in the aftermath of January, 6th, and there's some speculation, like, you know, Zuckerberg is groveling to him to drop that lawsuit or to settle that lawsuit or something. And so we have some corporate bribery occurring as well, possibly. It's just like the whole thing is crazy.

Joseph: 17:31

Well, Anne's saying that he could be in prison. It's like, I'm gonna put I'm gonna put Zach in prison for the rest of his life. Emmanouell, were you gonna say something

Sam: 17:41

about my prison prison? Involved in this.

Joseph: 17:43

Yeah. I know. They should

Sam: 17:44

be in there together.

Emanuel: 17:45

Yeah. The thing that I wanted to add is that it is more Mark's fault than it is anyone else's fault. But how bad Facebook is now, I guess you can also say, is a societal failure. Joe, you and Jason wrote this really deep dive into Facebook moderation. I think it was in 2019.

Emanuel: 18:12

We mentioned this piece a couple of times. And the point of that piece, in my opinion, correct me if you have a different different view on it, is that at the time, Facebook was trying really hard or at least pretending to try really hard to to be good moderators of its platforms, but it was an inherently impossible job, which I believe was the title of the piece. And that's because the platform is too big. It owns too much of the Internet. It's in too many parts of the world, and you can't have, like, concentrated power properly moderate all these different territories, all these different languages with different cultures, with different politics where things have contradictory meanings than they do in other locations, etcetera.

Emanuel: 18:55

And that's a really good point and good article, but that itself is a result of a failure of, I suppose, the FTC. Right? When in the 20 tens, Facebook was on this spree where it had challengers. And whenever it had a challenger, Facebook just bought it. Right?

Emanuel: 19:13

It bought Instagram. It bought WhatsApp. It copied and essentially killed a lot of the power that Snap had. And I agree with Jason that a lot of what we're seeing now is maneuvering against, like, actual competition that we're seeing from TikTok. Right?

Emanuel: 19:29

And that is this appeal to to to the right, as Sam said, is pushing against a solution to the inherent problem, which is, like, antitrust. Right? It's like for a few years now, we've heard kind of bipartisan support for antitrust moves against Facebook. You had it from the democrats who thought there was misinformation and abuse on the platform, and then you had it from conservatives who, you know, thought that their conservative opinions were being silenced. And when democrats are in power, he goes before congress and he pretends like they're trying to do a really good job moderating.

Emanuel: 20:09

And now that republicans are in power, he just is going to pretend like he's the most right wing MAGA social media CEO that ever was. And, I mean, I don't think it could be any more obvious than that. He's just trying to neutralize the lawmakers that who are now in power and previously said that they're going to, you know, break up his company. So so now he's saying the exact opposite of everything he said previously. And, you know, I've listened to his justifications on on Rogan and everything, and I I I think you can I don't know?

Emanuel: 20:41

You can find a way to believe that story, but but the actual reason is so obviously there on the table.

Jason: 20:47

Yeah. It's very interesting because they're they're also, like, a super imperialistic company, obviously. It's like they wanna be in every country. They wanna be all things to all people everywhere across the entire world, across every language, blah blah blah. And it's like, you know, you you don't have to do that, but they, like, are insistent upon being that.

Jason: 21:08

And they're they're, like, very bad at, like, despite all this, they are an American company. Their focus is in the United States. They make the vast majority of money in the United States because ad revenue is higher in the US for, like, fucked up, you know, economic reasons where the US is a richer market, and so they can charge more. And so you get these situations where, like, people in other countries especially are fucked because they don't have as good of protections and, like, Meta does whatever it wants. And I think that Zuckerberg here sees an opportunity for, like, you know, Trump who wants to buy Greenland or whatever and, like, you know, tariff everyone.

Jason: 21:52

He sees an opportunity for to use the United States government as a shield, and he specifically brought that up in Rogen where he was like, the EU has been finding all of these American tech companies and the Biden administration hasn't protected us. And in fact, the Biden administration was the tip of the spear attacking us, like, is a specific thing that he said. And I don't know the extent to which, like, the Trump administration can protect Meta from EU fines and EU regulations and things like that. But I think he sees an opportunity for, like, if I super align myself with this very, like, nationalistic president, Perhaps he can, like, beef with France or the or Switzerland or the EU or whatever, to prevent my company from getting fined in the future. Like, I think it's that simple.

Jason: 22:46

It's like, how can he protect his company and make the continue to make the most money with the least interference globally?

Joseph: 22:54

Yeah. I buy into that super cynical reading of it as well. It's it's just that simple, really. Speaking of gluing onto different administrations, I have a force on that, but we'll take a quick break. And then when we come back, we'll finish talking about this story and our other story as well, about location data.

Joseph: 23:14

We'll be right back after this. Alright. We're back. To bring it back to the story that Jason did, one thing that's bothering me is Mark Zuckerberg's quote where he says, you know, we're lifting these restrictions because the restrictions are just sort of out of touch with mainstream discourse around gender identity and immigration, sexual orientation, and that sort of thing. And as I think we've established all of that context, you all, very clearly laid out.

Joseph: 23:59

When he says mainstream discourse, he's talking about Trump won the presidency. But it's just a very, very easy, crutch that he can rely on. And, you know, there are some very, very horrible people in the world. There's very, very horrible people, on Facebook. I don't know if the majority of people participating in that discourse are, like, itching to get onto Facebook to call gay people mentally unwell.

Joseph: 24:29

I I don't think people are like, oh my god. Finally, I can do that. You know, like, the vast majority of people support gay marriage, and that number goes up and up. The idea that you can just say, oh, well, we're just reflecting mainstream discourse. No.

Joseph: 24:44

You are creating the environment for that discussion as well, for good and for bad. But bringing that up to bring us back to Jason's piece, He speaks to these measure employees. With all of that context happening and all of these changes, there's a real mix of things they tell you. Right? I mean, some are joking where they say on this internal message board, well, I'm LGBT and mentally mentally ill, so I'm gonna take the rest of the day off, if you don't mind.

Joseph: 25:15

What are some of the other things that people are saying? And I think there's one here that I've just highlighted in our Google doc, which is sort of that mainstream discourse bit I'm talking about where okay. These comments about trans people or whatever, they don't even reflect mainstream scientific consensus.

Jason: 25:36

Yeah. I mean, they don't. And, that what you're highlighting is people were very interested in how this policy was made. The New York Times had a a report that basically, like, Zuckerberg directed this, you know, decision alongside a couple, like, very few, like, maybe, like, 6 top executives, which is not how policy is normally made at meta. Like, I sat in on a policy making decision, where there were, like, 200 people on a call, and I was in a conference room listening to it.

Jason: 26:10

I reported on this for motherboard back in the day, and it was about the Tide Pod Challenge. And it was specific which is where, like, teens were allegedly eating Tide Pods. And literally, they were like, well, did we consult, like, eating disorder experts? Did we consult poison control? Did we consult, like, these teen safety organizations?

Jason: 26:30

What did they say? And this was, like, months after the Tide Pod Challenge had gone viral and then already wasn't viral anymore. It was, like, a very long process that was very considered. And so people were like, why didn't you do that for the LGBTQ changes here? It sort of didn't go through normal meta protocol.

Jason: 26:54

And then also, it's just like, I talked to to one person who said, quote, it's total chaos inside meta. People have been threatening to quit. Some people have quit. One person said I would resign in protest if I hadn't already resigned, meaning that they had recently, like, put in their 2 weeks notice and, you know, we're in that period. And then also, there were a few people who were team leaders who talked to me and and sort of said, like, my team is very, very, very upset about this.

Jason: 27:26

So, there's that. And then there's another story that that I did sort of immediately after this, about meta deleting trans and non binary messenger themes, which is like a public facing thing where in your DMs, with messenger, you can change the color scheme. And Meta announced these during pride month, a few years ago to, like, much I mean, people who pay attention to this sort of thing, like Meta product updates, like, there was a pretty big rollout. There was, like, a video, a livestream. There were, like, non binary employees talking to the Trevor Project, which is an LGBTQ rights organization.

Jason: 28:05

And they just kinda like deleted that. They got rid of tampons in the men's bathroom in their offices, for, you know, trans people who are using them. And this is it's just all part of, like, a concerted, like, timed shift right word. That's all happening at once. And I think part of it is, like, these are not gonna be popular changes for many of our employees, for many of our users.

Jason: 28:35

They also announced they're not gonna do, diverse they're not gonna consider diversity in hiring anymore, which is, like, a big thing.

Joseph: 28:42

Reports of that. Right?

Jason: 28:43

Yeah. They're just, like, rolling back all sorts of things that they have rolled out in the last few years. And I think they're trying to, like, do it all at once just to, 1, rip the Band Aid off and to signal to the incoming Trump administration, like, we're here to be we're here to support your cause.

Joseph: 29:01

Whatever you wanna do. Like so meta deletes this trans and non binary messenger theme, which is just, you know, a color theme in the messenger. In the same way, you could download stickers or whatever in in different apps. It's a purely cosmetic thing. But crucially, a way for people to express themselves, you know.

Joseph: 29:22

And I thought I thought Zuck said we're lifting restrictions because we want more free speech. And then, no, but not that free speech. We gotta delete this thing where people can express, their sexual orientation or gender identity. Anyway, as stupid as that is, did Meta because you you get details about this and you write it up and you obviously always ping Meta for comment. Did they tell you why they had removed this theme from Messenger?

Joseph: 29:52

Did they give you a reason?

Jason: 29:53

It's interesting. They didn't comment on this. They didn't respond to this. They usually respond to me, and they also didn't respond to the New York Times when the New York Times asked about this. So they haven't spoken about it specifically.

Joseph: 30:06

It's like literally, what would your response be? Right. Right. If I'm, like, gonna put on my sort of PR hand, just put myself in their shoes, it's like, yeah. We got rid of it because it's, I don't know, dangerous.

Joseph: 30:17

So it's like complete bullshit. So, So, yeah, they don't have a response. They don't have anything to stand on.

Jason: 30:21

Yeah. I did have an internal message from an employee who sort of, like, worked on this sort of thing and has been messaging this across the company, like, on these internal boards, and they were just, like, we're trying to, like, bring it more in line with it was some corporate speak where it was basically like, oh, we have too many themes, and so we're, like, consolidating them, blah blah blah. But it it was like, I wouldn't put much credence into it. We didn't say this before, and I promise I'll keep this quick, but, like, the cruelty of the specificity of these changes is the point. I think it's just like, they don't need to have We've talked about why they've had have to have or they think they have to have, like, specific content moderation guidelines, but, like, signaling the exact specific things that you can say about a trans person or that you can say about an immigrant or a gay person, like, they do not need to be so specific.

Jason: 31:19

And I think that by being so specific, they're causing, like, more harm than good, honestly. Being like, yes, you can, like, say this type of person is, quote, trash, but you can't call them, like, something else is, like it's not necessary. It's just not because they're not when they were trying to do a good job at content moderation, maybe that specificity anymore. And, therefore, it's just like, well, if you're not gonna moderate a lot of stuff, why do you need to say that?

Joseph: 31:52

Yeah. Since they didn't give you a response to that messenger themes one, I'll just read out a quick, quote from them, which was in your earlier story where there's always internal chaos and people are commenting on the internal threads. A member of the policy team told employees in the thread that quote, our core values have not changed, end quote. And then another quote was, the changes to our hateful conduct policy seek to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over enforcement. Reaffirming our core value of free expression means that we might see see content on our platforms that people find offensive.

Joseph: 32:29

Yes. Those changes not only open up conversation about these subjects, but allow for counterspeech on what matters to users. Yeah. Counterspeech. Because when somebody's yelling at a gay person, you're mentally well.

Joseph: 32:41

They go, oh, I'll stay here and have a a nice civil chat with this. No. It's fucking ridiculous. This isn't how speech works. Anyway, Jason, anything else you wanna add on that before we move to location data story?

Joseph: 32:53

Okay.

Jason: 32:54

No. No. No.

Emanuel: 32:55

I just wanna add that, I'm more adding.

Joseph: 32:58

Wow. Okay.

Emanuel: 33:00

During the Rogan interview, Rogan, says, I'm really happy you got into MMA because it seems to have really changed you. And he was like, yeah. For sure. And then Rogan says, you know, what's really good about MMA? It's that, you know, you can kill someone with your hands.

Emanuel: 33:17

And Zuck is like, yeah. So I

Joseph: 33:19

feel like we should've

Emanuel: 33:20

left with

Joseph: 33:21

that. Right?

Emanuel: 33:23

Yeah. Just imagine Zuckerberg killing you in a in a in a triangle hold.

Jason: 33:28

The first time he went on Rogen, Rogen asked him what his biggest life's regret was, and his answer was that he didn't wrestle in college because, blah blah blah. And this was, college because, blah blah blah. And this was, like, pretty soon after the Rohingya genocide incident. And it's like, that that's your biggest regret? That's your biggest regret?

Jason: 33:48

Good good one.

Joseph: 33:50

Yeah. Leaving some stuff on the table there. Alright. We'll we'll leave that there. This second story, we're gonna chat about.

Joseph: 33:58

It's one I wrote. The headline is Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal, see the thousands of apps hijacked to spy, on your location. I guess I'll just give a quick description of of where this data comes from. So Gravy Analytics is a pretty important company in the low the location data industry. And by that, I mean, they get lots of location data through various different means, from apps, from different companies, blah blah blah.

Joseph: 34:33

And then they'll do all sorts of stuff like, well, you can buy the data to see how many people went to this McDonald's or whatever or or this business. And they we call that footfall traffic, and that's very, very normal. That's sort of the commercial side. They also have a subsidiary called Ventel, which listeners may already be aware of, which I've reported many times and really great reporting in The Wall Street Journal as well and other places, is that Ventel sells that same den data essentially to the government. So that's the FBI, the d the DEA, DHS, including ICE and CBP, IRS is in there as well, I think.

Joseph: 35:13

Although, you know, they tried to do it for some things. It wasn't so successful. Blah blah blah. But anyway, that company got hacked, Gravy. And there was a bunch of data published online.

Joseph: 35:24

Not all of the data stolen. It was, basically an extortion effort saying, here are samples of the information. Please contact us, referring to Gravy. And then we will potentially negotiate. It's, you know, a ransom, a sort of a data dump and extortion, rare, rare comment, nowadays.

Joseph: 35:45

But, yeah, there was a ton of, different files in there. And I think, Jason, you wanna ask about, you know, I guess, more specifics on what it was really. Right?

Jason: 35:54

Yeah. So this is, like, pretty complicated story. Like you said, you've been reporting on this for a long time. But, I guess, first of all, what what specifically was hacked? Because it it there was, like, a big sample that came out, but there was also, allegedly, like, terabytes of data that may may exist, may or may not exist, but has not come out yet.

Jason: 36:19

Like, what what do you what what did you report on, and what do you have so far?

Joseph: 36:23

Yeah. So Gravy has now confirmed the hack, both through a statement. Not to me. They never respond to my emails. I think they gave it to our friend Lorenzo at the TechCrunch, but they they never get back to me.

Joseph: 36:34

And they've confirmed the breach that way. They also confirmed it, through regulatory means, with the Norwegian Data Protection Authority. I think it's partly a Norwegian company. And, you know, when you get hacked, you have to tell them under GDPR, that sort of thing. And in those disclosures, what they said is that hackers gained access to, you know, an AWS instance, Amazon Web Services, where presumably a ton of data was being stored.

Joseph: 37:01

Now the hackers said they had something like 17 terabytes of data, and that's what they were threatening to release. And a lot of that would be location data. We haven't seen that data because since then, the post on the underground Russian language forum called XSS, where I first learned about this through somebody who told me about it. That post was made private for about 24 hours, and then it was deleted. Don't know if Gravy paid the ransom, but security researchers are speculating, at least some of the ones I've spoken to, that, you know, it's potentially indicative of that.

Joseph: 37:43

What they did release and what I got a hold of and what research and other journalists are going through is I don't know. Maybe it's like 1.5 gigabytes, something like that. Definitely not the biggest thing in the world. But there's a lot of location data in there, which is simply coordinates of phones. I've seen ones in Russia in Russia, in Europe, and then the US, as well.

Joseph: 38:11

And you plot these on a map, and it's, you know, very damning, very, very scary, all of that sort of thing. But for me, it was a lot more interesting to look at the the apps that were also mentioned in there as well

Jason: 38:27

as Yeah. So it's this gigantic list of apps, like, really, really, really long. I I had several thousand, list of apps. It includes things like Tinder, MyFitnessPal, almost like Candy Crush, obviously, and almost anything you can think of. And then, like, zillions of apps that you would not think of because they're small mobile games or they're prayer apps or they're Bible apps.

Jason: 38:52

Like, there's all sorts of things. You know, in the past, when you've reported on location data, I feel like some of the apps were selling data to data brokers. They were collecting GPS data surreptitiously, and they were selling it. In this case, that that's not how this data was being harvested. You wanna explain that?

Jason: 39:22

Like, what yep.

Joseph: 39:23

Yeah. So when I've covered it before, say, in the case of an app called Muslim Pro, which was an Android of I think in an iOS, iOS app. And baked in there was something called an SDK, a software development kit. And this was code from a location data company. There was basically like, you give us your user's location, we'll give you a certain amount of money.

Joseph: 39:48

So you're basically selling your user's location data. That was pretty common back in the day. I think it's potentially less common now after there's been a lot of reporting about it. But you have all of these SDKs embedded embedded in all of these apps. And, of course, the app developer knows because they're not only just, putting codes into their apps from a location data company.

Joseph: 40:08

They're also presumably signing a contract where they're like, we're gonna get x amount of money, that sort of thing. So that's that's all well and good, and they all know about it and that sort of thing. And they get shut down. They get removed from the Google and the Apple App Stores, all of that stuff. This is different in that it seems to be related to real time bidding data.

Joseph: 40:27

And I will define that in a second. And I will define it in a way where I'm not just repeating myself from an earlier podcast. I'm gonna refer to EFS definition for a bit of variety. But, basically, that location data, which could be GPS, but is also a lot of its IP address, which is then transferred into approximate location as well. It's the adverts inside an app which are actually facilitating access to that data.

Joseph: 40:58

So, you know, when you're running an app and there are banner ads in it in between rounds of your game, or there's just an advert at the bottom or whatever. In a lot of cases, the developer's not really gonna have granular control over what ads are being delivered because it's basically outside parties doing it, all of the time. And I think pretty crucially, maybe the app developers are still responsible. But I would say that they may not even know that this data is actually being collected on users. And every single company, I contacted, or app developer or app company in here, they kept saying, we've never heard of Gravy.

Joseph: 41:37

We've never shared data with Gravy, etcetera, etcetera. And I feel like they missed the point in that. I know you're not doing it. It's the ads inside your app which is sharing your users' location data with a bunch of other companies that's eventually ending up on this, with this gravy company.

Jason: 41:55

Let Yeah. I mean, I would argue that, like, you know, a big company like Tinder or, I guess, King makes Candy Crush. Right?

Joseph: 42:03

So a

Jason: 42:03

comp yeah. Should know about this ecosystem. But a lot of these apps are probably just, like, somewhat, like, very small companies, random companies that are implementing some sort of, like, advertising, you know, SDK or something into their app and probably don't have any clue that this is happening. Like, I guess what I'm saying is that I believe it when these companies say they don't know what gravy is or they don't know what what's happening here.

Joseph: 42:32

Yeah. Yeah. And that was sort of the the nuance and some of the slight difficulty in reporting this story in that when you email all of these companies for comment and they say, we've never heard of Gravy, we never gave data to them. In a lot of cases, you'll be like, oh, okay. Well, maybe my understanding of this is wrong.

Joseph: 42:50

And it's like, no, I think it's the other way around. And one example is that when Grindr gave me a statement, they said, we're not doing this. Here's a here's a list on our website of all of the third parties that we give data to. Because, of course, they have their own location scandal a few years ago, where Grindr, user location data was being transferred or sold. And, you know, one case that led to the outing halting of a gay priest without his consent.

Joseph: 43:16

So they're very hot on the location data issue. They sent me a link to this web page, but that's not what I'm talking about. You go to another bit on Grindr's website, and you can see all of the ad networks plugged into it. And it just you keep scrolling keep scrolling forever and ever. Like, it's 100, if not 1,000 in there.

Joseph: 43:36

That's what we're talking about. So even when you get a statement from these companies, they may not fully understand the issue. I'm just gonna quickly read out this EFF definition of RTB, real time bidding data, just so people, can get a better grip on it. So this is how EFF says it works. The moment you visit a website or app with ad space, it asks a company that runs ad auctions to determine which ads it will display for you.

Joseph: 44:03

This involves sending information about you and the content you're viewing to the ad auction company. The ad auction company packages all of that information. They can gather about you into a bid request and then broadcast it to thousands of potential advertisers. There's like a bidding war going on here. That bundle of data could include your unique advertising ID, or your mobile advertising ID you made, your location data, your IP address, device details, and then, you know, demographic information or interest and that sort of thing.

Joseph: 44:33

This is midstream data. This is what we're talking about and what it looks like has appeared in the gravy hack. And advertisers use that to be like, well, I wanna I wanna deliver my ad to somebody in this city with these interests. But everybody participating in that process also gets that data, so they can basically use it to harvest all of this information as well. That EFS description was way better than anyone I've attempted.

Joseph: 45:00

So I guess I'll put a link to that, in the show notes as well. But I think just one of the last things I kinda wanna say on this is that well, first, I sent, snippets of the data I got to a couple of experts familiar with the location data and advertising industries. And they said, this does look like Bitstream data, in part because there was lots of IP stuff in there. In another, they were looking at the user agents, which sort of says where your phone is connected from or through what process. And there was a Google advertising SDK in there.

Joseph: 45:36

So it looks like the status coming through the advertising ecosystem, essentially. And base my main takeaway is not only the, wow, we got a rare insight into Bitstream data. It was just the sheer number of apps impacted really kinda blew me away. Where the way we built this list was in some of the location data, there's just an app attached to, each set of coordinates. I wrote well, I didn't write.

Joseph: 46:09

I used a command line tool to extract all of the app names, from there. Then we also got Wired to double check our work and do a cleaner list as well. And we published this with Wired. It's also available on their site as part of our partnership. It was around about the same, you know, between 112,000 that we included duplicates because the apps are sometimes named in slightly different ways.

Joseph: 46:32

And I want people to be able to go and search for whatever app is on the phone and see if it's in this list. But I was I found the list staggering, to be honest, as because I'm so used to digging through particular SDKs. And it's like, oh, I found 20 apps which have this API endpoint in or something. And this was just like a never ending list, essentially. And crucially, this isn't like the full list.

Joseph: 46:57

This is a a snapshot of data that these hackers happened to leak. You know? Who knows how many more apps are gonna be impacted as well?

Jason: 47:06

Yeah. I guess to end this, do you think that you're gonna do more stories on this? Like, what's the current state of what's been released? And I don't know. It's, like, it's a pretty major hack.

Jason: 47:17

But as you said, it looked like there was an extortion attempt. I'm not sure the current status of it.

Joseph: 47:23

I'm definitely gonna keep going through the data. I have some ideas that I haven't even told you all yet. So I guess I'll tell you on signal, in a bit, and I won't say it quite here. But, yeah, I'm still digging through the data. I know researchers who are as well.

Joseph: 47:38

I guess, like, maybe some people would do the usual, oh, look. We de anonymize people with location data. More power to them. I just I'm not interested in that super specifically because it has been done a fair bit. I am interested in sensitive locations.

Joseph: 47:53

Like, oh, are their phones at abortion clinics? Are their phones at, places of worship? All of that sort of thing. But I'm gonna keep focusing on the ad side, I think, especially. And I guess we'll see if Gravy paid a ransom or not.

Joseph: 48:13

I'll keep an eye on that story, and I will update, everybody if I do get anything. But we'll leave that there for the moment. If you are listening to the free version of the podcast, I will now play us out. But if you are a paying 4 zero four media subscriber, we're gonna also talk about various stories we had around the LA fires. There's AI images, Amazon drivers, Jason wrote sort of his own personal, story as well.

Joseph: 48:39

You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.ca. We'll be right back after this. Alright. We are back in the subscribers only section. I didn't even write what questions I wanna ask.

Joseph: 49:09

It says, leaving looser to have more chill convo. I'm just gonna go through the stories and then people can tell us about them, basically. Sam, I think this one is yours. People think AI images of Hollywood sign burning are real. Why are dipshits posting AI generated images of the LA fires when you could just, like, fucking look at the real fires because they're horrendous?

Sam: 49:35

I mean, I think there are several answers to that question. Probably the first one is the only impression most people, have of LA is the Hollywood sign, and that's, like, the most recognizable image. It would be like posting a picture of, like, the Statue of Liberty burning for New York. And to be clear, it hasn't burned. Right?

Sam: 49:55

The Hollywood sign. Yeah. Yeah. But it's like people are like, oh, LA is on fire, so the Hollywood sign is LA. So it must be on fire.

Sam: 50:03

Like, the more existential answer is these platforms pay them to go viral. So when these images go viral or when a post goes viral, Twitter pays you for that. So, you know, there's a big incentive to have a viral image on x, Twitter, whatever we wanna call it because I mean, just like it's like this with Facebook, and Jason's written about this extensively, but, there's these whole economies going on of people trying really hard to go mega viral on social media, like, at any cost. It doesn't matter if it's real or not. And, also, the platform doesn't give a shit if it's real or not.

Sam: 50:43

So, most of the a lot of the images I saw going around on Twitter of the Hollywood sign on fire, like the AI images, obviously, A lot of them were people posting like, normal people posting it and being like, holy shit or, like, this is crazy. Like, it seemed

Joseph: 51:02

like like they believed?

Sam: 51:03

It seemed like they believed it. And then and it seemed like that because they would post that, and then, like, in the replies, they would follow-up and say, I'm being told this is fake. And then when I went back to write the story, a lot of those posts were down. Like, they had deleted them because they realized that they were fake, And that's embarrassing to get tricked by an AI image like that. But, yeah, like you said, it's like a lot of these images are just so like, the real photos are so surreal and so crazy to see.

Sam: 51:34

It's like videos of, like, Malibu, totally ash, like, videos and images of just, like, whole neighborhoods totally destroyed and these planes putting out these huge fires. It's like it all looks very, unreal, and it's unbelievable what's happened. And the scope of it is just like something that I can't even really imagine before this. So it's easy to get tricked by something like that because it just looks so crazy to begin with, I think, and people are, like, capitalizing on that.

Joseph: 52:06

Yeah. I mean, there are some in here which are obviously fake. There's one of Gavin Newsom, like, in a Caesar Grove playing a fiddle by California bird.

Sam: 52:19

There's so many of those. Yeah. And, like, people were using, which I thought this was interesting. A lot of people were using Grok, just like Twitter, like, access That's the woke one. Right?

Joseph: 52:27

No. No. Not sorry. Not the woke. What is the opposite of woke?

Sam: 52:30

It's the it's the anti woke one.

Joseph: 52:32

The base the base one.

Jason: 52:33

It's the

Sam: 52:34

base one. Yeah. It's Elon's like, it's it's called grok because that's a word from the book Strangers in a Strange Land, which is, I would say, like, I almost threw the book at the end. I read the whole thing, and I hate read it. It's awful.

Sam: 52:49

It's incredibly misogynistic and I would say based in a bad way. So it's Grok. When people say Grok, Grok means, like, understand in the book. Okay. But Grok is the AI that's built into x now that Elon is very excited about.

Joseph: 53:06

And why do you think it's significant that a lot of these, AI images were generated through that?

Sam: 53:12

I think, usually, we see, like, them being generated third party. Right? And then they kind of they go to Telegram. Like, we saw this with, like, the Taylor Swift, like, deep fakes. It's like they started on where did they start, Emmanuel?

Sam: 53:26

Do you remember? It was, like, was it Bing or something? It was, like, a different image creator. Which generator or which platform? Which generator?

Sam: 53:33

It's like the It

Emanuel: 53:34

was called, Designer, which is an Microsoft tool. Yeah.

Sam: 53:38

Yeah. And it's like they people use, like, Midjourney. They use Designer, and then they, like, import them because they're good. They import them to they post them on Telegram or they put them on whatever social network, and then they make their way to Twitter. But these were starting on Twitter.

Sam: 53:52

Like, they're native to Twitter's AI, and then they post straight from there. And I thought that was interesting just because I hadn't really seen that happen at that scale before.

Joseph: 54:03

Yeah. I haven't I haven't

Sam: 54:04

I guess it's it's gotten really good. Like, it looks the images look really realistic. So

Joseph: 54:09

They do look realistic, but you know they're fake because they're still ridiculous. Like, where he's holding like a like a goldfish in a hole.

Sam: 54:18

Gavin in a little toga. Like Yeah. No. I don't think that's real.

Joseph: 54:22

Exactly. Anything else to just add on that?

Sam: 54:25

No. It was just like a blog about, like, this is happening. You know, it's like it's just adding, like, piles of bizarre shit going on all the time. And I think people were, like, trying to have a big argument about AI and climate change last week. You know, there was, like, this whole kind of push about, like, stop using Trygbt because it's, like, eating up all of our water.

Sam: 54:53

So he seeing that kind of dissension going on and then at the same time seeing people share, like, these politicized images of the wildfire, was just like a weird kind of dissonance that I noticed. But, yeah. But, you know, that's me writing from afar. And, obviously, Jason wrote a really good I I mean, I called it a scene report, but but it was, just kind of a description of, like, his week, his few days experiencing, like, evacuating and stuff like that.

Jason: 55:24

Yeah. So, I mean, it's been it's been a week. It's been literally, like, 1 week since this started. I'm in my house now. You live in LA, to be totally honest with you.

Jason: 55:39

To be clear. Yep. And the only thing that I can really compare it to was, like, the first few days of COVID in New York City, probably, or honestly, something like 911 where I was a kid. And I'm not comparing, like, the the incidents, but just sort of like what it feels like where there's, like, tons of unknown information. Things are changing very, very quickly, and you are trying very hard to, like, find out what is happening.

Jason: 56:11

And in this case, like, my best source of information in the first few hours of this was my own eyes walking down to the beach and, like, seeing the fire with my own eyes in the Pacific Palisades. And, like, obviously, I could tell that it was close to people's houses because I know the region. I, like, know the geography. I'm like, oh, that's, like, close to where people live. And I could also tell that it was getting worse.

Jason: 56:41

And it was interesting, like, with the sun going down, you're able to, like, see the fire more clearly because it it, you know, is on fire, and you can see it see that in the mountains. And that was very scary. The smoke was oppressive, like, really, really horrible in Venice. You know, went to sleep on Tuesday when it started and woke up, like, every hour with my eyes, like, basically on fire and not being able to breathe that well. And it was just like, okay, cool.

Jason: 57:16

Like, this is this is not good. I won't go through everything, but I think it's just like, it's been very interesting to see how what's happening in LA intersects with technology. Obviously, like, anytime there's any major event, we try to find the tech angle to it. And, like, one, the emergency alerts have been, like, all over the place. They've just been going off, to this day.

Jason: 57:47

Like, right now, we're still getting emergency evacuation alerts even though very clearly we're not in evacuation zone. The fire could get worse as we're talking, but, like, it's been trending in a good direction the last few days.

Joseph: 58:06

Are those alerts via SMS, or what's that?

Jason: 58:09

It's where your phone just goes like,

Joseph: 58:12

and, like, it's like an

Jason: 58:14

amber alert sort of, like, push notification. And, you know, we got one 20 minutes ago that just said, this is an emergency message from the Los Angeles County Fire Department. This area is under an evacuation warning. Remain vigilant for any threats and be ready for possible hazards. We're not in an evacuation zone.

Jason: 58:42

Like, we we just aren't. And we got that 20 minutes ago. And and

Sam: 58:47

It's like the third one. Right? Like, they keep doing this.

Jason: 58:49

I mean, it keeps happening. Yeah. It's happened over the course of a week. There's also, I mean, everyone in LA is, has been glued to this app called watch duty, which is run by a nonprofit. And I don't know the way it was described to me is it's like how firefighters monitor wildfires.

Jason: 59:04

I don't know if that's actually true, but it's been giving, like, incredibly constant in a good and bad way about, like, where the fires are and and how they're moving and spreading. It has, like, live cameras and things like that. You know, I bought an air purifier at Best Buy, and everything was, like, normal in the Best Buy, but then I would go outside and saw, like, a bunch of smoke. And it was very interesting. Like, I just found myself, like, bargain shopping and, like, searching on Google for reviews of of different air purifiers and being, like, pounded with, like, SEO nonsense.

Jason: 59:43

I couldn't, like, figure out, like, what what to buy and how to buy it. And then I was like, this is just crazy. Like, all of them are gonna be sold out in 5 minutes anyway. I just need to buy 1, and then they try to sell me the, like, extended warranty. And I I know it's just like, this is crazy.

Jason: 59:58

Like, even in dystopia, even in a crisis, like, these things persist, these, like, little banalities of day to day life. But, yeah, it's like I have friends whose apartments burned down, who ended up staying at our house. Like, if you know anyone in LA, like, they either they were affected by this or they know someone who was affected by it. I've never seen anything like it to that to that extent. It's like everyone that I know has had know someone or has been or has had their house burned down.

Jason: 01:00:34

It's it's like 1,000 and 1,000 and 1,000 of houses are gone. It will be very interesting to see, like, what happens in the aftermath of this with rents and, things like that. Like, there's been some early reporting where rent is being jacked up, like, 200, 300%, even though that's illegal, but, like, people don't care.

Joseph: 01:00:55

Yeah. Based on some Zillow, someone who was looking at Zillow listings. Right?

Jason: 01:01:00

Yeah. And I think the New York Times or LAS or both, they both had stories on this, talked to, like, one real estate broker, and they said, like, this house has been on the market for, like, to rent for, you know, couple weeks. And we had 3 applications for it, and now we have 1,000 applications for it at 3 x what it was supposed to be. Like, it's it's pretty crazy, and it's, like, obviously, a city that already has a housing crisis. So it will be very interesting to see kind of like the aftermath of this.

Jason: 01:01:32

I think that definitely it's been hardening to see how many people have donated their time, donated their money, donated their, like, volunteered, blah, blah, blah. Like, that's been very nice. But I don't know. I don't know. It's like, this is gonna keep happening because of climate change.

Jason: 01:01:55

It's it's gonna get worse. It's interesting because things have, like, at least where I live, they've, like, returned to, quote, unquote, normal. And that's, like, largely because the fire is just like there's still places that are that are threatened by it, but it's like, now the fire is burning in, like, largely uninhabited areas. And that's, like, really bad for air quality still, and it's it's not good, but it's I think everyone has taken, like, a sigh of relief to be like, oh, it's just burning down 1,000 and thousands of acres of nature now. Like, it's it's pretty crazy.

Jason: 01:02:32

The whole thing, it's like matter of degrees of horrificness, more or less. And then, yeah, like, Jules wrote an article about how, you know, this professional soccer player had her house burned down in Pacific Palisades. And the like, after she had evacuated, she got an Amazon notification showing that a package had been delivered there, and that was, like, the last she saw of her house. And so there's, like, all these workers and and delivery people who are still kind of working in this. And I don't know.

Jason: 01:03:06

During COVID, there there was this reporting and discussion about, you know, putting first line workers at risk. And there's tons and tons of like, the firefighters are working, you know, around the clock. It's crazy. It's very dangerous. There's delivery people working.

Jason: 01:03:25

And it's just like, in this case, it's it's I find it to be very difficult because some people need things delivered. Things like air purifiers are, like, sold out everywhere, and you can, like, get them from Amazon still from other states. Like, I guess they're I don't know. The supply chain is, like, working. You can buy them on Amazon, but you can't buy them in any store.

Jason: 01:03:47

And it's like, if you are, you know, in a bad situation, like, maybe maybe it's good that Amazon is still working, but it's, like, it's pretty it's just, like, a very bad situation.

Joseph: 01:04:00

Yeah. But you don't want an Amazon driver going into an evacuation zone.

Jason: 01:04:05

Yeah. Yeah.

Joseph: 01:04:06

Yeah. I mean, that article and we'll just end it here. But that article was called an Amazon delivery confirmation photo is the last time a Palisades resident saw her burnt down house. Yeah. As you said, that's not only just a labor story, because it shows the the Amazon drivers.

Joseph: 01:04:21

I think Amazon Flex drivers as well, there's always a little bit of confusion around that, working, at least near these evacuation zones. But then also when, like you said, you're trying to buy an air purifier, and it's like, hey, do you want the warranty? It's like, dude, fuck off. I'm just trying to get this thing so I can breathe. Sounds very similar to getting a dystopian delivery confirmation photo when your house is burnt down.

Joseph: 01:04:47

It's it's absolutely bizarre. Alright. Well, we will leave that there. I'm sure, unfortunately, there will be more to cover about it.

Jason: 01:04:58

Sorry. One more thing. Because I published this article and, like, 100 of people responded to my email. Like, we emailed the story. I haven't responded to any of those just because I'm, like, pretty overwhelmed.

Jason: 01:05:11

That's like family and friends have been checking on me just like it's been a crazy week. So if you did email me, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Jason: 01:05:18

If you said anything on social media, it's like, I've seen them. I'm very, very, very thankful for it. I will try to respond at some point, but I really appreciate it.

Joseph: 01:05:28

For sure.

Jason: 01:05:28

And we're good.

Joseph: 01:05:29

For sure. Yeah. Glad everyone, is safe. And, again, we'll keep an eye on it, and we'll we'll do anything else that comes up. But with that, I will play us out.

Joseph: 01:05:48

As a reminder, 4 zero four Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to 4 zero four Media and directly support our work, please go to 4 zero 4media.c0. 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: 01:06:13

Another way to support us is by leaving a 5 star rating and review on the podcast. Our stuff really does help us out. And, of course, just tell your friends about it too. This has been 404 Media. We will see you again next week.