Hey everyone, and welcome to Mini Scroll, the daily Internet
culture podcast bringing you the biggest stories from social
media, the creator economy and the digital space every Monday
through Thursday. My name is Annabelle, and I'm
the deputy editor of youth digital media brand Centennial
World, and I am now your Mini Scroll host every Wednesday.
So as you can obviously hear or see, I am not Lauren.
This year Lauren has decided to take a step back from Mini
Scroll just one day a week to kind of lessen her workload and
also manage her work flow better.
Because as much as we all love Mini Scroll, Lauren pretty much
does everything herself and it is a lot of work to find
stories, record, edit, and upload an episode each day.
With that being said, I am now jumping on the pod every
Wednesday to keep the daily content coming but also keep
Lauren's mental health in check. If I sound familiar, I have been
on the podcast before. If you listen to the final
Infinite Scroll deep dive of 2024, you would have heard from
me. But if you didn't get around to
listening to it, you definitely should.
But I also thought I would introduce myself a little bit
here. For context, I was brought on to
Centennial as an intern in 2021 while I was still in uni, and
Lauren has been kind enough to keep me around since then.
A lot of the work that I do now is around the infinite scroll
deep dive episodes that come out every week, so I spend most of
my time preparing, researching, and scripting those episodes.
So if you like those, please send your support because we
just need the reassurance sometimes.
Aside from that, I also write Centennial's weekly Sub Stack
new newsletter, which is also called Infinite Scroll.
It covers the five biggest think pieces on the Internet each
week. And I know a lot of you aren't
subscribed, so if that sounds like you would be up your alley,
please go subscribe. It would be much appreciated by
me. Thank you in advance.
As far as Internet culture goes, I have always been seriously
invested in pop culture and the digital space.
I think it's a really important area to take seriously because I
feel like you can tell a lot about the general mood of
society based on the content that is trending and the content
that's popular. Even though this area is kind of
seen stereotypically as an unimportant and frivolous
interest, I think we need to treat it and analyze it with the
gravity it deserves. So I'm definitely happy to be
contributing to this through many every week on my episodes.
We did think we would mix things up a bit.
We will be keeping the structure that you guys have all come to
love over the past year. But since we got such positive
feedback last year, whenever we covered specific trends, we
thought that my episode would focus a little bit more on the
techie side of things and maybe a bit more industry and trend
based stuff. I'm not opposed to venturing
into political territory, Tory, if that is interesting to you
guys, definitely let us know because the crossover between
politics and pop culture is probably one of my favorite
things. So I would definitely be down.
Now that that is all out of the way, I am super excited to be
here, but please bear with me as I'm getting used to the front of
camera and on the mic experience.
This isn't something that I've done before, but I'm really
excited and I know I have big shoes to fill, so I hope I can
do Lauren justice with all that. I do have a couple of stories to
share, some of which that happened over our break, so
let's just get in into it. The first story is that Mehta is
making changes to its moderation process.
So last week, Mark Zuckerberg took to social media to share
some updates to Mehta's moderation policies.
In a video posted to Instagram, Zuckerberg shared why he got
into social media, what it means to him, and how he plans to move
forward in a new political environment in the US.
He began the video by saying that he started building social
media platforms in order to give people a voice.
But with the increasingly complex systems that have been
put into place to moderate dangerous content, Zuckerberg
claims that things have been taken too far.
There's been widespread debate about potential harms from
online content. Governments and legacy media
have pushed to censor more and more.
A lot of this is clearly political, but there's also a
lot of legitimately bad stuff out there.
Drugs, terrorism, Child Exploitation.
These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to
make sure that we handle responsibly.
So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content.
But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes.
Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's
millions of people. And we've reached a point where
it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship.
So he did share a couple of the changes that Meta is
introducing. I took this from a threads post
so I'll just read it to you now. The first change is that Meta
will be replacing fact checkers with community notes starting in
the US, and this is obviously following the approach of X.
The next change is that Meta will be simplifying content
policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and
gender that are quote out of touch with mainstream discourse.
The next change is that the company will be changing how
they enforce policies to remove the vast majority of censorship
mistakes by focusing filters on tackling illegal and high
severity violations. Next Meta will be bringing back
civic content. Over the past few years, there's
been a lot of discourse around Meta scaling back its political
content, specifically around Threads.
The next one is that Meta will be moving their trust and safety
and content moderation teams out of California and our US Content
review to Texas quote. This will help remove the
concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.
Interestingly, Mehta's choice to relocate its content moderation
team to Texas actually comes off the heel of Elon Musk moving X's
team to the state. It is worth noting that his move
was partially due to laws passed by California, in particular one
that prevented schools from forcing staff to tell anyone,
including parents, information about a child's gender identity.
These changes are quite interesting because obviously
freedom of expression is definitely a huge issue on
social media. I'm sure we've all seen cases
where certain topics tend to get suppressed online.
Even though that might be the case, moderation is really
important, especially when you have adults sharing spaces with
children. Honestly, this tends to fall on
the platform because the legal system is super behind the
digital space and government agencies often move slowly, so
it makes sense that the platform themselves have to institute
these moderation policies. These changes are obviously
super timely given that the US is about to enter a second Trump
presidency. During his first term, there was
quite a big focus on censorship and free speech in the digital
world, even if that did mean protecting hate speech.
I mean, Trump even made his own social media platform and I
think signed an executive order about preventing online
censorship from memory. But it feels like Meta's changes
are all about aligning with the current political zeitgeist in
the US, Whether they're opportunistic or the genuine
beliefs of the company, I think it's too early to tell.
But either way, with Meta following in the footsteps of X
in terms of moderation, which has become a bit of a haven for
discriminatory rhetoric, I'm not sure these changes are a good
sign for where things are heading, to be honest.
In other news coming out of Meta this week, news broke that the
company is scaling back its DEI, which is diversity, equity,
inclusion policies from what I could find.
This story was first reported by Axios after they obtained a memo
written by Janelle GAIL, the vice president of human
resources. The memo noted the changing
legal and policy landscape in the United States around
diversity, equity and inclusion, essentially noting that Meta is
following suit. Over the past few years, DEI has
really become a hot button issue, especially in the US.
What has typically been used as schemes to ensure that
minorities and marginalised groups have the same
opportunities as others has kind of become perceived by many as
favouring certain groups over others in the hiring process and
also in the workplace more generally.
Now, every DEI initiative is run differently, but the overall
goal is to make companies and leaders examine the way their
company treats or serves marginalised groups.
Even though Meta is scaling back on these practices, The memo
also said that they will quote continue to source candidates
from different background. But with that, obviously the
process is changing where the company will focus on quote,
fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all.
And I really hope that is the case.
Now what we have all been waiting for, we can't talk about
anything tech without talking about the TikTok ban in the US
first. I'll start with a little bit of
context in case you have missed it.
TikTok is facing a nationwide ban in the United States after a
bill was signed into law in April last year, which
essentially requires fired Byte Dance, Tik Tok's Chinese owned
parent company, to divest from the platform or face a ban.
The deadline for the sale is January 19.
So we are really getting close to that.
And it is also just one day before President Biden's term
ends. We did touch on this in our
final Infinite Scroll episode last year.
But since then, there have been a couple of updates, one of
which is that the Supreme Court heard oral arguments about the
case on January 10. And much of the reporting around
it has characterized the Supreme Court's reception to TikTok as
quote, UN, quote, Frosty. We definitely don't need to get
into the nitty gritty of the hearing, but the Supreme Court
justices heard from representatives from TikTok
creators and, of course, the federal Justice Department.
But I'll give you a little bit of a summary of each side's
arguments. The company and TikTok users and
creators are essentially arguing that the ban violates Americans
First Amendment rights and free speech.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration contends that the
law is essential for national security due to bite dances
Chinese ownership. Trump has also jumped in on the
situation, as he so often does, and he filed a brief at the end
of last year saying that the court should hold off on the
decision, claiming that he could maybe broker a deal once he's in
office. As for where it's going to go,
many experts and journalists seem to be heading in the
direction that the Supreme Court justices will side with the ban.
But obviously this is all super unprecedented and no one really
knows what's going to happen. I wouldn't be surprised if the
Supreme Court kind of holds off from issuing an opinion on the
ban itself and maybe just prolongs the whole process.
It is kind of insane that this is all happening right before a
new presidential administration enters the White House, but who
knows. I am definitely keeping tabs on
this and we will keep you updated as Mini Scroll does.
Obviously with the concern around the ban that has left
users and creators on TikTok spiralling, including many of
whom aren't even based in the United States.
I don't know about you, but over the past few days, my whole
TikTok for you page has been filled with creators making
videos, almost issuing eulogies for the platform and of course,
encouraging their viewers to follow them to other platforms
like Instagram. I think this is all super
interesting because like we've said before, if the ban does end
up happening, it's unlikely to affect Internet culture and how
information is circulated online immediately.
It will probably impact creators quicker because brands are not
going to be willing to sink money into a platform that has
been banned. That all being said, users are
now talking about which app to migrate to and a few popular
ones have started circulating. The most frequent one I have
seen on my For You page is Red Note, which is ironically also a
Chinese owned app. I kind of think this is
intentional because users seem to be joining in spite of the US
government's decisions. I've been seeing it like into
Instagram given that it was reportedly made with a lifestyle
focus. And honestly, every video I've
seen of people using Red Note, they seem to be having a great
time. Apart from Red Note, Neptune
seems to be another popular suggestion.
It's currently in beta, but according to videos on TikTok,
it does seem to have a similar function to the For You page
where there are options to toggle the algorithm that you
see. As far as whether people will
actually move to these apps, I'm kind of expecting users to stay
on TikTok as long as they can, much like what we have seen with
X and the push to move to Blue Sky.
While there may be bursts of users moving across, it is so
hard to cultivate the same feeling on another app.
As for what we can expect in a post TikTok era, I think India
is a really interesting example to look to here because they ban
the app in 2020. Now obviously India and the US
are completely different political and cultural
environments, but I did see a creator on TikTok.
I didn't write down her name, but I will insert the video talk
about how Internet culture operates in India ever since the
ban was instituted. And she said that YouTube and
podcasts have become the major source of discourse and
discussion. Nobody is making videos longer
than like a minute, 30 seconds or two minutes Max in India.
People aren't really even on Instagram here either.
Everyone spends all their time on YouTube with Amazon India's
content creator lead, and she said that they pour most of
their money into Youtubers and podcasters.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's what we'll see because of
course that isn't exactly new, but that might be what makes it
successful because it isn't foreign to us and we're used to
it. Anyway, that is everything from
me today. I really hope you enjoyed this
weeks episode and you don't miss Lauren too much.
She will be back tomorrow. I am sure I will get better at
this, but I will see you next Wednesday.
Thanks. Bye.