Alex and Evelyn talk about what has been happening on social media, and the discourse about what has been happening on social media, in the run up to the 2024 US Election, how it compares to past US elections, and what to watch in the aftermath.
Evelyn Douek:
Okay, Alex, we are recording at 11:30-ish Pacific Time on November 1st. I am timestamping this because almost certainly anything we'll say will be sort of dated or overtaken by events by the time this publishes.
Alex Stamos:
From Earth 21877. For those of you coming in from a different reality.
Evelyn Douek:
Exactly.
Alex Stamos:
Yes.
Evelyn Douek:
How is it there? Can I come through your wormhole? That would be great.
Alex Stamos:
Right. Right. Right. In this reality it is Donald John Trump versus Kamala Harris in this election. It is not Nikki Haley versus Josh Shapiro or any of the other options that perhaps would've happened if say President Biden had realized that he was incredibly old, maybe a little earlier in the cycle.
Evelyn Douek:
Yeah.
Alex Stamos:
On Earth 1374, there's a totally different election that perhaps is going a lot better for reality. Yes.
Evelyn Douek:
That's right. If that butterfly had just flapped its wings slightly differently, we would not be here today, but this is where we are. Hello and welcome to Moderated Content stochastically released slightly random and not at all comprehensive news update from the world of trust and safety with myself, Evelyn Douek and Alex Stamos. Okay, so we thought it'd be useful to take stock of where we are in the run-up to the election, how 2024 has differed from 2020 and 2016 and sort of what to make of the landscape in these last few days. So let's start with our overall thoughts about the landscape. So Alex, in terms of the role of social media and perhaps as importantly the discourse around social media, what are you watching? What's your impression of 2024 compared to the last two elections?
Alex Stamos:
Oh my God. Okay.
Evelyn Douek:
Yeah.
Alex Stamos:
There's a lot of differences. Let's first talk about from a foreign interference perspective, let's talk about what's actually different about the foreign actors.
Evelyn Douek:
Great.
Alex Stamos:
So the big difference between 2024 and 2016, so in 2016 the only major foreign actor that was involved was Russia and the Russian campaign in 2016 was much smaller than the Russian campaign in 2024 and was much more diffuse. So in 2016, as we've talked about multiple times, people heard me at nauseam, there's really two online categories of Russian campaign. There's the troll farm activity, which is really privately run out of Yevgeny Prigozhin's private activities. Very diffuse, right? Not super targeted the election. Was predated the election by a significant amount. The number one topic was Black Lives Matter. It was really about getting Americans to fight with one another. It did not have anything close to a strategic purpose for Russia. There was the GRU activity, which was specifically targeted at hurting Hillary Clinton. That was the activity that was the hack and leak. It included hacking of the CCC of John Podesta and the specific leaking of emails to try to hurt Hillary Clinton.
Did that swing the election or not? Impossible to tell, but it did obviously change the conversation. It probably triggered Jim Comey's actions and so it did have an effect, but it was probably pretty small. From what I saw, you could probably pull that off with two, three people. Right. So you're not talking about some kind of massive GRU operation. You're talking about a couple people on a side project. In 2020, we did not see a lot and there was a lot of American reaction against it, so what little activity we saw was certainly effectively pushed back against. One of the most interesting campaigns in 2020 was by the Iranians and that was detected and dealt with and that was against Trump. 2024, Russia's activity is humongous and it is now under the direct command to control the Kremlin. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the man who ran much of the 2016 activity is dead because he turned against Vladimir Putin and he died, as we talked about multiple times tragically in a private plane crash. Once again,-
Evelyn Douek:
What are the odds.
Alex Stamos:
As we talked about the safety tip. If you are an enemy of Vladimir Putin, once again, I recommend not drinking tea, standing by an open window, or flying private, things that are dangerous for people who are not on the good side of Mr. Putin. And so Prigozhin is dead. The Russian activity is kind of under the direct command and control of the Kremlin now and is of a scope and scale of what we have never seen before and includes now direct payments to American influencers. This is one of the big differences this year. One of the reactions that the Russians have made to the actions of social media and other members of this ecosystem, of academia, of research groups, of law enforcement is they've realized, well, why run all these fake accounts when you could just pay real Americans who have big audiences to say the things you want them to say?
And so we've already, as we've covered on the show, had indictments of foreign agents who are paying American influencers to talk about the stuff they want to talk about, and that's for a couple of reasons. One, I believe the Russians, and they're probably accurate in this, believe that is more effective for the message to come from these real voices. We've covered this a number of times that this is something that has existed for a long time, but this is a change in how Russian influence operations have happened over the last several years, that you have kind of African voices, Spanish voices. All around the world you see the Russians trying to influence local influencers and have the words come out of their mouths. But the other reason is because Russia has a specific strategic purpose in 2024. Russia is in a massive war with Ukraine. The largest war Russia has fought since World War II, what they call the Great Patriotic War.
They have lost now officially approaching 100,000 men, probably unofficially in reality much more than that, lost billions of dollars, a significant portion of their tank reserves, of their airplane reserves, of their artillery reserves. They don't have a good strategy to outright win this war. It is a terrible stalemate. They're doing pretty well recently, but doing pretty well means they've gotten another dozen kilometers into Ukraine, right? It's not going great and the Ukrainians are still occupying sovereign Russian territory on the other side, which has not happened since again, World War II. So this is way more disastrous than Afghanistan. Afghanistan helped bring down the Soviet Union, and so as of 2024, unlike 2016, there was a real strategic need for them to have this propaganda activity and it is to one, support Trump in his campaign, but two, it is also to get a large chunk of the American populace to believe that supporting Ukraine is not in our best interest.
In fact that Ukraine is an enemy of the United States, and in that way they have been effective, that over the last several years pushing the idea that Ukraine is an enemy of the United States, that the Ukrainian war is the fault of Joe Biden, that supporting Ukraine is only something that Democrats should do, that no Republican should ever support Ukraine, to make this a partisan issue. They've been very effective in doing that and that is why they're making millions of dollars of payments to American influencers. That's why I expect we'll find they're making lots of payments to lots of people that we haven't heard about yet, and so that is one of the big differences.
The other second big difference is that everybody's involved now. That we have the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians. And China and Iran have very different strategic interests than Russia. As we've talked about, Iran has directly attacked the Trump campaign. China has been involved less at the presidential, but they've been caught spying. Something that has happened since our last show is we found out that Volt Typhoon, which hackers who either worked for the People's Liberation Army or the Ministry of State Security, but definitely the people's Republic of China broke into AT&T, Verizon, and other major telecom networks and were wiretapping Donald Trump, JD Vance and other members of the Trump campaign, as well as people who worked for Kamala Harris. It doesn't sound like they wiretapped the VP herself, which makes sense because she's probably on special government phones where Trump and Vance were perhaps on commercial devices, but nevertheless, they were accessing internal wiretap interfaces for major telecoms, and so they're at least doing significant spying around the campaign, if not massive propaganda. And so 2024 is the World Cup of spy agencies getting involved from China, Russia, and Iran.
Evelyn Douek:
Yeah, I mean it's interesting given that landscape. I don't know what your perception of this is, but the discourse around the role of social media and the role of foreign interference also seems very different this year to how it was four years ago. So 2016, there wasn't a lot of discourse around foreign interference on social media in the lead up to the election because that was the big sort of surprise, which I don't need to tell you about Alex. And then 2020 was a lot about the fears of foreign interference and I felt like in the lead up to the election that was what, news coverage around that was wall to wall all the time talking about the potential for foreign interference.
And I feel like there's been much less of that in the lead up to this election. It's just not as dominant a narrative and I don't know what's driving that. I wonder if it's sort of I guess a lack of transparency potentially much less sort of, I mean, part of it obviously has got to be also the lack of researchers drawing attention to this as much as they were in the lead up to 2020. And following these narratives is effectively in part because of that research community has been under attack and has stepped back in its role. But I'm curious why you think, if you share my perception of debates around this and why you think the narrative landscape is so different.
Alex Stamos:
Yeah, no, I share it. I mean, it's hard for me to calibrate because 2017 my entire life being CISO of Facebook was, well, my professional life was mostly protecting the company and our billions of users from actual cyber attack. From a public perspective, it was being personally blamed for Donald Trump being president. Right. That was just continuous of like, everybody who'd ever watched the West Wing believed that the reason Donald Trump was president was Facebook. Right.
And nobody in the media took any personal fault. Nobody in the Hillary campaign took any fault. Since then, there has been a little more navel-gazing, that perhaps other people had responsibility other than Facebook for Donald Trump being elected. And I think that those retrospectives have been a little better now, especially since now that we've seen how certain newspapers have acted in this cycle, that perhaps things like putting Hillary Clinton's emails in 72 point font on the front of The New York Times was not the kind of thing that should be done while also clearing Mr. Trump of any link to Russia at the exact same time based upon like an FBI agent whose friends are Rudy Giuliani leaking to The Times, that maybe some other people have some responsibility there. So anyway, it's hard to calibrate because that was my life for 18 months, of just taking that incoming continuously. But yeah, it is kind of amazing considering some of the largest influencers in the conservative sphere of populist conservative influencers were caught taking direct financial payments from the Russian government and that was a story for two days.
Evelyn Douek:
Right.
Alex Stamos:
I don't know what to say. If you went back in time and you told me some of the biggest figures, that they were just taking checks for $100,000 a week and then a week later everybody stopped talking about it and then they were just going on and doing their shows and still talking about Ukraine. It's not like they've stopped talking about this stuff. I mean apparently, I'm guessing they've stopped taking money from Russia, I hope, but it's kind of shocking how little discussion. And Iran again stole the email and has effectively blackmailed one of the major candidates, the former President of the United States, and we've stopped talking about it.
China has wiretapped the former President of the United States and the current candidate for Vice President of the United States, ascending senator of the United States, and it was a story for a day. So I mean, I know there's a lot of news, but if you turn on, it is kind of crazy because if you turn on CNN, you don't hear about the fact that China's listening to these guys and that Iran has blackmailed them and that Russia was paying the largest influencers. It's all back to let's zoom into a county in Pennsylvania and look at a poll and it is kind of amazing how much it's just horse race coverage and not talking about in fact that America's largest, most important adversaries in the world have their entire intelligence apparatuses targeted at trying to influence our election.
Evelyn Douek:
Yeah, I mean it is incredibly bizarre, just the sort of whiplash between the two news cycles or election cycles. But I will say I have somewhat conflicted feelings about this because I guess I always felt that the focus on foreign interference was outsized, it made foreign interference seem like it was more effective, more pervasive and sort of more manipulative, had more capacity to do harm than potentially it has. Now that's still an open question and there sort of, maybe there's been a shift in capacity over the last four years, but I mean there's also, the other thing that this election makes so clear is there's this bizarre thing of the foreign interference and being scared of foreign interference when the disinformation and the election meddling and is coming from inside the house. When you have the people with the biggest platforms laying the groundwork for some of the biggest narratives that are going to come out, and we should talk about post-election, about vote rigging, and sort of voter fraud, et cetera.
They are not the foreigners. You don't need foreigners to be doing all of this work when a lot of these narratives are coming from inside the house. And obviously one of the big differences here between 2024 and 2020 is the presence and influence of Elon Musk.
Alex Stamos:
Yes.
Evelyn Douek:
We are, unlike the last election where the platforms were doing everything they could to avoid looking partisan and they were being beaten around the head for looking, anything that looked remotely or felt remotely biased or even anything that wasn't remotely biased but could be spun that way. Here we have the owner of a platform conspicuously, boldly, unabashedly going all out for one candidate and using his platform, both literally the platform that he has as a person in public discourse and the platform X to push as much pro-Trump narratives and propaganda that he can. This feels like huge whiplash given sort of the amount of, I mean obviously the hypocrisy here about concerns about the bias of social media platforms is just stunning, but also, I mean in that context, is foreign information really the big thing that we should be focusing on or we have this other problem of the domestic narratives being seeded here that are going to come back in the days after the election?
Alex Stamos:
Yes, so that is a huge difference, is the Musk issue. So yeah, just to take a step back, in 2016, 2020, Twitter was trying to be neutral. Now, lots of conservatives argue that Twitter was not neutral. Decisions they made were not neutral. The big piece of evidence there was their decision to first block for a short period of time, the Hunter Biden and laptop story in 2020, which in the end had a massive Streisand effect and made it go much wider and larger than it otherwise would. A much larger number of people found out that Hunter Biden was a cokehead than they otherwise would, and I think in the end it obviously did not change anything in the election. If anything had a negative effect for Joe Biden, the fact that they blocked it turned out not to be Russian interference. As we've talked about multiple times here, I think they made a mistake blocking it because it was not from my perspective, their place to make that decision.
That was the place of the New York Post to verify whether or not the information was true and whether it was part of influence campaign or not. But nevertheless, that has become a humongous [inaudible 00:16:27] among conservatives leading to hearings and subpoenas and lots and lots of arguments, and now Elon Musk has blocked the JD Vance dossier. He has banned people who have criticized him and criticized Trump. He has down ranked content. The Wall Street Journal just found that if you create a totally neutral account that shows no interest in politics at all, you are pushed pro-Trump content and Musk's content, that you were told to follow Elon Musk and you're pushed lots of Trump content. So it is,-
Evelyn Douek:
Anyone that has used the platform for 20 seconds in the last,-
Alex Stamos:
Right. You don't need empirical evidence for that but,-
Evelyn Douek:
Verify that experience.
Alex Stamos:
But we do have empirical evidence, right?
Evelyn Douek:
Right.
Alex Stamos:
And Musk has made it impossible. He sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Media Matters, and he has threatened lots of other people. He has changed his terms of service and include liquidated damages if you scrape his content. So he's made it legally impossible to try to study any of this so good on The Journal for publishing stuff even though for a Rupert Murdoch paper for publishing the truth about this. Twitter has become straight up a, I won't even call it the Fox News of social media because it's way worse than that, right? It is absolutely positively, it is much closer, I mean, I'll get in trouble for saying this, but Elon Musk is becoming the Yevgeny Prigozhin to Trump's Putin.
His goal is to become an oligarch. He has basically said he's been promised a position in the government. His wealth is based upon government largesse. Tesla only exists because of humongous government subsidies, mostly under the Obama administration that made it possible for Tesla to compete against traditional internal combustion cars. I think that was fantastic. I think we needed the government to incentivize electric vehicles. I bought a Tesla in that era. I benefited from the tax credit that I got and the tax breaks I got, and that was great, and that's one of the reasons why it was cost-effective for me to buy a Tesla. And I think that was right.
SpaceX, their number one customer is the United States government. Spaceflight is one of those things that the government does on behalf of all of us as taxpayers. That's great, but Elon Musk makes a lot of money from the government, and he has been told that he will get benefits from the government, that he'll be part of the government and he wants to be an oligarch. And so he is using his platform to benefit one candidate for a clear financial benefit on the back end. I mean, it's kind of amazing considering what we've all had to put up with, some of us literally who have been subpoenaed and questioned and threatened and attacked over and over again by people who got super mad that I had nothing to do with the Hunter Biden laptop and I've been blamed for it over and over again. And that was nothing compared to a dozen things that Musk has done.
Evelyn Douek:
Yeah. Look, Alex, I know you suffered, but I sat through hours and hours of congressional hearings, watching them on my laptop at home, and that was torture. I know it was really hard. I watched these congressional hearings with these members of Congress, Ted Cruz screaming at Jack Dorsey. Who are you to decide for the American people what they should see and what they should hear?
Alex Stamos:
Well, next time I'll let you testify and I'll watch.
Evelyn Douek:
That's right. No, 100% I had the better end of the stick here, but I'm just saying the stunning hypocrisy, right?
Alex Stamos:
It's unbelievable. Yeah.
Evelyn Douek:
We all sat through these hours and hours and hours of these people screaming at these tech executives about their supposed political bias and now without shame, not a word, not a peep, the occasional concern that maybe some of the other platforms are still biased against conservatives. I saw the Attorney General of Missouri was concerned that Google was suppressing searches about Trump, things like that are still in the atmosphere. And I don't think for a second that any other platform could get away with anything that looked like anti-conservative bias. And everyone was just like, well, no, that's how platforms work these days. I do think that they would still hold that line against the other social media platforms, and yet here we have Elon Musk.
Alex Stamos:
Right. And the situation I think that really captures this just happened in the last couple of days. And so there was a video posted putatively by Haitian immigrants. So a man posts a video where he says, "I'm from Haiti. I came illegally to this country." This is a black man with an accent. Did not sound like a Haitian accent to me. And he's in a van,-
Evelyn Douek:
Details.
Alex Stamos:
With some other people.
Evelyn Douek:
Right.
Alex Stamos:
And he's like, "I was brought here six months ago and then I became a citizen and I have all these IDs," and he shows a bunch of things that he says are Georgia driver's licenses. "And I just voted in one county and I'm being driven right now to another county to vote six more times. Me and my friends, we're going to vote many, many times." And he posts this on Twitter and it gets huge play.
Evelyn Douek:
I mean, that's the first lesson of voter fraud, right, is when doing voter fraud post on Twitter.
Alex Stamos:
Yeah.
Evelyn Douek:
That's just a key step.
Alex Stamos:
Right. And so the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who was the Secretary of State in 2020, who famously was asked by President Trump to find 10,000 votes somewhere, I'm not sure in his couch. This discussion has been had multiple times and is going to be litigated of what he meant by find. I think we all know what he meant. Brad Raffensperger posted, tweeted, this is not happening. Right. People are not coming from Haiti getting a bunch of fake IDs or real, I mean, this guy was basically saying he was able to become a citizen in six months and then become a citizen six times.
I mean, it's very confusing what the actual thesis is. Is he a legal immigrant or not? Is he legally a citizen or not? I mean, he's basically saying he's a citizen, but he's able to vote six times, but he's claiming he's voting dozens of dozens of times in multiple counties in Georgia. Now, first off, if you're going to rig an election, the dumbest possible way to do it is to import tens of thousands of Haitians and then maybe make them citizens or not, which is not something you can just do. But then give them a bunch of fake IDs and have them vote actually physically and then of course,-
Evelyn Douek:
Film it.
Alex Stamos:
Have them make videos about it.
Evelyn Douek:
Yeah.
Alex Stamos:
And then go put it on TikTok. That's just probably not something that actually is going to happen. Right. So it's clearly, clearly fake. It's also very, very Russian. Right. This is exactly what you have seen over and over again from Russian actors, is the incredibly obvious video like this in that they pay somebody to say something like this. It has happened over and over and over again. So Brad Raffensperger tweets, "This is not happening. This is so incredibly fake. Of all the things that have not happened, this has not happened the most." This guy has never voted. He has not voted in Georgia. He is not in Georgia probably. If he's in a Georgia, it is Georgia, the country next to Russia. It is not Georgia, the state. Nothing demonstrated he was in Georgia, he was just in a van. Right. They didn't show the outside. It's not like they showed him outside of the [inaudible 00:23:22] place or like here I am next to a peach tree or something, or here I'm at the campus at the University of Georgia. Right. There's nothing that showed geographically that he was in Georgia.
And so Brad Raffensperger is like, please, Elon must take this down, which of course then everybody's like, ah, censorship. And what happened a couple hours ago? The DNI and the FBI traced it back and said, yep, we traced this. This is Russia. This is a Russian disinformation campaigned. Which of course, Elon Musk is saying is not true and he's refusing to take it down, so.
Evelyn Douek:
Yeah.
Alex Stamos:
Yeah. Which is, this is exactly, so this is the big difference between now and then is that, I mean, Musk has not just taken out the team that used to intentionally look for these things, but he is intentionally amplifying Russian disinformation that has tried to drive this. And so we're in a completely different world now when the most important platform on the right. Now, Twitter is not the most important social network overall, but what he has done, he has reassembled the fracturing of the MAGA universe that happened after January 6th on social media onto X. And so this kind of thing is incredibly dangerous. And he's created this kind of election integrity center where people are supposed to post these videos and what's more dangerous than this, because these guys are like, they're probably actually in Africa being paid by Russia to do this. So they're not in any physical danger.
What's much more dangerous is that you have people, because Kate Starbird's talked about participatory disinformation where Musk and Trump are telling people, hey, it's being stolen. Go look for it. So people were out there, anything they see, they're saying, oh, it's being stolen. And so people were out there videotaping postal workers in postal uniforms delivering boxes that say United States Postal Service on it with ballots. And like, oh, look, the ballots are being, it's the fake ballots. And so they're taking videos of postal workers and then those people are now, their lives are going to be in danger. Right. And I think that's what's really, really scary now, is the fact that people are being worked up into a froth and that Twitter used to be a place where they were trying to stop that, and now it's a place that's intentionally amplifying that. And I really am afraid that somebody's going to die in this election, that somebody is going to, an election worker or postal worker or a volunteer is going to die. And that's going to be tragic.
Evelyn Douek:
Yeah. In terms of practical impact and the sort of scary scenarios, I totally agree that the individualized sort of threats against people in this participatory action that happens based on these narratives is 100% one of the most concerning things happening in the lead up to the election just to be watching on Election Day. And then I guess in terms of practical impact, I mean one of the things that is obviously happening here and that we should talk about is what happens after the election. Right. Because part of this is all about seeding the ground for certain narratives to flourish and flower post-election, about voter fraud, or about a rigged election if Harris wins, that these narratives have been seeded in advance and what are the platforms going to do in that case?
And obviously this was the big question also in the last election. What did the platforms do about claims of voter fraud and election rigging post-election and then in the lead up to January 6th? And it is not at all surprising that Musk hasn't taken down this video. And I don't think we should expect that he will take down things like this in the post-election,-
Alex Stamos:
Not just that he won't take it down, I expect him to personally amplify it.
Evelyn Douek:
He will amplify it.
Alex Stamos:
Yeah.
Evelyn Douek:
Exactly. 100%. Both personally from his account and then who knows what the algorithms are amplifying on the platform itself. I don't know what we might expect other platforms to do. It seems to me, unlikely that they're going to take that course. I mean, it seems like they probably are going toe the line that they toed last time, which is to try and seem unbiased and so maybe not be totally aggressive but still take down the worst of it. And I guess the question is how much, like you said, Twitter is not the most important platform overall, but it is the most important platform for the right, is where the right is. So how much should we be worried in the aftermath of the election that these narratives are playing out on Twitter?
Alex Stamos:
I think extremely worried. I think there's two paths to be worried. Right. So there's the legal democracy path and the violence path. I think in the violence path we should be worried about X of radicalizing people and then driving them to... The place where I think operationally things are going to happen is probably Telegram, right? Telegram continues to be where you have kind of the post QAnon, Proud Boys and the other groups where people are saying really radical things, although after Durov's arrest, people will start to realize, oh wait, this isn't all magically encrypted and all of this is being archived somewhere.
So perhaps not so much on Telegram. Maybe there are some other platforms that some of those people have been moving to. But for the driving the radicalization message, I think X will be the biggest one. Telegram will be up there.
The other thing I think a lot of people are afraid of, and this is more of Rick Hasen and the other election law experts, is the difference between now and 2020 is that there are a bunch of MAGA people who are in positions of power, and you don't just have the worst lawyers in the world. You have actually reasonably good lawyers or at least educated lawyers who no longer care about democracy who are in a position to try to throw the election and who are... Trump was caught at his Madison Square Garden of like, Hey, Mike Johnson I have a secret. Ha, ha, ha, he, he, he. And people would try to figure out what that is. And one of the theories is that, one option is that it's unclear kind of constitutionally what happens if you try to decrease the number of electoral votes that are actually cast, right? There's some theories here that could Trump win with less than 270 electoral votes. What kind of trickery could be done before January 5th, January 6th? What could be done in December? How's the Electoral Count Act being interpreted?
So I think that's the kind of stuff that if you cause chaos using X, if Russia causes chaos in the vote counting, if you cause violence, if you're able to, we already have people burning ballot boxes. Right. So if you're able to get people to cause chaos on Election Day to make it hard for people to vote, violence on Election Day, and that causes a bunch of court cases, could you create a situation in which in some swing states it gets thrown, that you get Trump's allies in the legislature to say, we can't validate this vote. We cannot send electors and then get sent to the House, and you end up with a really sketchy constitutional outcome that is not supported. And I think that's the nightmare for American democracy, right?
Evelyn Douek:
Well, that's one nightmare for American democracy. Obviously in that world, I guess Harris has won on the legitimate count, and then there's all this concern about vote rigging. Obviously there's another possible future, and as we sit here today on November 1st where none of this is an issue brackets happily question mark because, not happily because Trump has won and then there's a completely different narrative. Where in a different,-
Alex Stamos:
Right. Trump might just win, and then all of a sudden everybody thinks the election was fine.
Evelyn Douek:
Right.
Alex Stamos:
Right. All these concerns like, oh, everything was great.
Evelyn Douek:
Right.
Alex Stamos:
Yeah.
Evelyn Douek:
But a lot more focus I imagine in that universe on the role of social media again, swing back into this discourse that we haven't been having about the role of social media in the run-up to the election, I think comes back with a vengeance in the aftermath of a Trump win where there's renewed focus.
Alex Stamos:
Although I think this time, I mean, I think you'll have that focus on social media, but it'll be in the larger context of Biden's decision not drop out, in the context of the two sightings of the media has been doing. Right. This week, Biden had a gaffe about Trump supporters in garbage, which is a gaffe, but it got as much play as Trump saying basically equivalent things every single day for the last two years. So that's the kind of thing that I think people are not going to put up with. They're not going to allow The New York Times set to blame it all on Facebook,-
Evelyn Douek:
No, bless Alex. That's such an optimistic take. That's so, so sweet that you think,-
Alex Stamos:
No, I really do think things are different this time. Right. I really do think things are different of like people have noticed that there's, among kind the journalistic class, there has been a pushback on the normalization of the MAGA part of the political right that is, just does not fit kind of the needs of the moment.
Evelyn Douek:
Right. Well, and Jeff Bezos gave us a handy helping hand to renew focus on the mainstream media again this week and the role that it plays in normalizing these claims and not calling them out.
Alex Stamos:
Yeah. I think the other part here too is this isn't like 2016 where people just didn't really know anything about Trump, right? 2016 was really about Hillary. It was like Trump was this weird mystery of like, oh, he's like this. People who are voting for Trump know what they're getting now. And so if Trump wins, Americans made that choice. And it's like, I think when a number of people have said, and I would feel the same way, it's like if Trump legitimately wins, if Americans legitimately choose him, it says something much more about the country than it says about Russia or the media or social media or anything. It's like Americans know what they want and they don't care about democracy and they don't care about the Constitution and they do care about these other things more than those things. Nobody should be surprised. I don't think it'll be about that. I think it'll be like we just, a lot of people, it turns out we were living in a different country than we thought we were.
Evelyn Douek:
Well, on that happy note, we will obviously have to reconvene after the election.
Alex Stamos:
So where do you keep that Australia passport?
Evelyn Douek:
That's right.
Alex Stamos:
Is that safely tucked away somewhere?
Evelyn Douek:
Safely tucked away on my body in my go-bag at all times. That's right.
Alex Stamos:
I mean, that is a nice thing that we still have November to January, right, but it'll be interesting to see if the Qantas flights, if the one-way tickets get quite expensive.
Evelyn Douek:
That's right. To that paradise. Okay. Let's finish with a short story to introduce some levity because this is a fun story and I just think it's worth mentioning. We've been talking a lot about Russia and so a story that caught my eye this week, which I think is fantastic, is apparently a Russian court has fined Google $20 decillion this week for taking down certain Russian state-sponsored channels and content providers, which is against Russian law. YouTube was doing this because of US sanctions on those entities. But this is a fine that has been compounding and is now up to a 20 with 33 zeros and bless The Times.
Alex Stamos:
It's really two undecillion rubles.
Evelyn Douek:
That's right. Exactly.
Alex Stamos:
Right. Because it's actually in rubles. So it actually is 37 digits when you do it in rubles.
Evelyn Douek:
Correct. And The Times UK did some great reporting putting this number in perspective for us. So this is a figure that vastly exceeds the world's combined GDP. It is more than the number of grains of sand on earth or stars visible in the sky, and it would take Google, which not a small or poor company, it would take it 56.65 septillion years, which is more than 4 trillion times the age of the universe to pay it off at current profitability. So I think that's fantastic. The press secretary for the Russian President Putin, Dmitry Peskov this week told reporters that the figure was symbolic and should be a reason for Google to pay attention to the Moscow arbitration court's order, which I think is charming because if anything, a fine of that size seems truly hilarious and not at all serious and a reason to not pay attention. But anyway, I thought that was quite hilarious and worth mentioning on the show.
Alex Stamos:
Right. So you know how they got to this number, right? So this is actually, it's a great add on to, so there's the old story of the king who was like, you put a grain of rice on every square of the chessboard.
Evelyn Douek:
Right.
Alex Stamos:
Well, that's exactly how they got here of they were ordered to restore an account, right, accounts that were banned after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. They had to restore the accounts and there's a fine of 100,000 rubles per day and the fine was to double every week,-
Evelyn Douek:
Right.
Alex Stamos:
But no limit.
Evelyn Douek:
Yeah.
Alex Stamos:
So it's a perfect, it's like this is great for teaching math.
Evelyn Douek:
Exactly. I was going to say financial literacy lesson about compounding interest kids, and this is why you should put your money in interest earning accounts. That's exactly right. So with that,-
Alex Stamos:
So yeah, this is what happens if something grows O of N squared, right? So this is, anyway. Anyway, because you do not want to pay a fine when something is exponential.
Evelyn Douek:
That's right.
Alex Stamos:
Always ask for a geometric fine, not exponential.
Evelyn Douek:
I can't wait for the fine to hit Google dollars so that we have the nice symmetry of a Google fine on Google.
Alex Stamos:
Yeah, we should actually calculate when it gets there. It shouldn't actually be that long from,-
Evelyn Douek:
That's right at current rates.
Alex Stamos:
At doubling every week.
Evelyn Douek:
Exactly. Yeah. All right, well we will reconvene, I suppose, on the other side of the election and see which of the many possible future universes we are in in this world 2468 or whatever it was. And with that, that has been your Moderated Content not-no-weekly update. This show is available in all the usual places and show notes and transcripts are available at Law.stanford.edu/moderatedcontent. It is produced by the wonderful Brian Pelletier. And special thanks also to Lily Cheng and Rob Huffman. And talk to you from the other side.