We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Drshinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on exit fdr ls T.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to
the premium version of our website as well. I'm joined today by John Matza.
He is the CEO right now of Hedgehog. You may know him formerly
is the CEO of Parlor. John. Welcome to the show. Hey,
thanks for having me on, Emily. Did I bought your last name?
John? Oh? Yeah, totally. That's all right, give me the
better pronunciation. It's mates, like I think, like Australian friends mates.
Okay, So that was like probably the worst botch I've ever done, So
thank you for the correction, John, No worries. I mean people have
done all sorts of stuff. Sometimes they just call me like Matza ball or
something and they just totally go off and like just give up. I mean,
Manza balls are great, So it's not the worst comparison. Yeah,
I could. It works. Okay. So let's say before we started recording,
we were talking a little bit about how you're You're back in California,
and there's all kinds of things we can talk about with California, with your
industry, the tech industry, and I know you have a lot of thoughts
basically on what's going on with regulation and AI and everything. So I want
to get into that first though. Could you tell us a little bit about
Hedgehog and what you're doing with it? Yeah, that'd be great. So
Yeah, basically at the end of my last project, so I founded and
kind of led Parlor from nothing to the big success that it was. It
was number one in the App Store and we had fifteen million active accounts,
and so that was kind of one of my biggest projects that I started.
And then after that kind of collapsed down the wake of January sixth, and
I was no longer affiliate with the company. I went on and decided to
take a few years to step back get out of the media. At that
time, I was on television like at least once or twice a week,
and I was all over the place where on social media I had over a
million followers and was engaging. I took a step back. Now I met
like four hundred followers it's pretty great, And I just disappeared from the media
for a while and took a step back and said, hey, what's going
on with social media and what is it that everyone's doing and why does it
suck? And if you take a look at what basically every social platform was
doing, it's a highly centralized platform where all the moderation and all of the
big decisions come from a central authority of like maybe five people, and they
always get their decisions wrong, and so they have to make these really tough
calls on the fly. Tons of social pressure, business interests all coming in
there, and they just consistently, especially in the last few years, make
the wrong decision, and that hurts our discussion online. And it not only
hurts our discussion because people are unable to talk about certain things, it also
hurts the discussion because this central authority has all sorts of interests. So social
platforms have to worry about advertisers, they have to worry about how the algorithms
are bringing people back to the platforms. They want engagement, engagement to scrape
out even a twenty percent boost of engagement, they'll make judgment calls that are
not good for the conversation. So when I took a look at that and
had stepped away from social media for a couple of years, they said,
well, how do we change what we're doing to make social media productive?
How do we make it so that people are having these good conversations with one
another. How do we make it so that people are able to express themselves.
What we've designed with Hedgehog is a platform where you can sign in and
get your news of the day, and it's a curated news feed amongst a
handful of publishers, and you talk with other community members about it in a
way where the community's in charge. So the idea is those tough decisions that
the social platforms typically have in these central committees where they're like, well,
socially is this acceptable or not? We tay, the community has the ability
to moderate that that And so when you're on Hedgehog, the more you engage,
the more respect you earn, and the more respect you have on the
platform, the more say you have about the community itself. It's really kind
of giving the community that. Now. You know, it's funny because I
remember when Parlor was going through actually really one of the low points or one
of the most telling sort of moments in big the history of big tech.
Frankly, after January sixth with the app Store, I remember talking to somebody
from Parlor actually on this podcast. I think it was one of your attorneys
something like that, and asking, you know, but I get it,
I you know, I this the censorship is outrageous, The suppression is outrageous.
What are Parlor's plans to be, you know, an app that is
less addictive and less you know, painful for people to be on than Twitter
is now? And it sounds John like you Actually, you guys really learned
from watching the mistakes of other social networks, and I guess I wanted to
see if you could talk to us just a little bit about how, you
know, the arc of social media like Twitter actually used to not be a
terrible place, and have you taken any lessons from kind of what it looked
Twitter, other apps looked like before the turn towards what they are now?
What? I Yeah, what I've had kind of seen with Twitter in particular
in that I really don't like is every action that you take on Twitter is
super public, and it discourages people from being themselves because if you go,
hey, I actually like this post, or at least maybe I disagree with
this person, but I respect them, So I'm going to give them a
like. You can't do that on Twitter because if you do, it's going
to be broadcast to all your followers and it's going to say, hey,
John liked this controversial thing, and you're like, hey, John's a jerk.
Why did he like that? It's like, well, I didn't actually
like the content, I just like that. I respect the person who said
it. I wanted to acknowledge that I engage with them. You can't do
that on Twitter. It's not a place for them. And because everything's so
public, and the reason they do it they want everything that public is because
you get incremental boost of engagement by throwing more junk in people's feeds. And
the number something around thirty percent is the increase in engagement on a feed that's
really highly algorithmic then basically chronological. So if we want to be doing the
right thing, which is what we're doing, we have a chronological feed.
So what you follow, what you subscribe to, that's what you get in
your feed in chronological order. By doing that, we do acknowledge making a
sacrifice in some potential engagement. But what we are doing is making sure people
see exactly what they want and they're getting it, and they've opted into everything
that they're seeing on Twitter. It does increase engagement. People get a little
bit more outraged. You get a lot of just content getting thrown at you
and you're like, how did this end up in my feed? Why is
it here? And it's like nobody knows, the engineers who built the algorithm.
No, no, but hey, it's more content engage go And I
think that has a profoundly negative effect on society, getting all this junk in
there that you just you don't need. And it also makes it so that
people are not really authentic when they are engaging with other people because they're worried
what actions am I going to take if I make a comment here? Is
that comic going to get thrown in someone's feed? Is this? Like?
I don't know? And addressing that's really important. I like how you made
the point about opting into the content that you receive, because obviously you'll know
this better than me. Maybe you can speak to it. But the advertising
models have changed the way you keep people on the app to see more advertisements
on different apps has changed, and so I guess that means bringing in more
content that the algorithm thinks you might engage with, even if you don't want
to engage with Is that sort of the psychological effect of that is, if
you put something outrageous in front of our face, you'll spend more time on
the app because you engage with it, even if you don't really want to
be engaging with it, even if you think, maybe this isn't healthy for
me in the long term, and you wouldn't make the conscious decision to click
follow. So you know, what is the is that the business. Can
you speak a little bit to how the business is different with hedgehog versus what
they've done to optimize people's time on the other platforms. Yeah, and it's
also taking into context too what has changed in the industry in the last few
years. So a few years ago, ads were a lot more powerful in
terms of generating revenue for these platforms than they are now. So off the
shelf ads if you were to work with like Google ad Sense or one of
these other companies that sells you ads and then you can resell on your platform.
It's been going down in value tremendously especially on Apple Devicespple devices are paying
very little now because Apple is actually making it so that it's harder to track
people, which sounds nice, right, and Google in Apple's intention with that
is anything but nice. They tried to launch an AD network and it wasn't
very successful. And so Apple makes thirty percent commission off of developers and apps
that sell things on their platforms, specifically premium subscriptions. And so if Apple
can't make money off of ads, well let's make it so that nobody can
make money out of ads and change the entire tech industry model to move toward
subscriptions and force people to pay subscriptions where Apple gets thirty percent of the subscription
fee. So that's why you're seeing AD income going down. And the reason
that's relevant here is if ad income is going down, other business models need
to come into play. And what Hedgehog has is a premium subscription model for
our highest tier, which is our contributor tier, so people who post videos
and images, and we work for the people who are on our platform.
So rather than going on a social platform whe where the social media works or
the advertisers, the people on our platform are our clients. So we want
to protect their interests. We want to make sure they're happy, and we
want to make sure they're seeing what's what they want to see. So that's
why when you go to our feed, you get what you wanted, what
you opt into. You're not going to see ads if you're a contributor.
If you are on our free tier, you will see ads. The income
for platform for people who are in the free tier for us, is going
to be far less at scale than those who are paying the subscription. So
we're really incentivized to work for those people who are paying the subscription, and
that's really important to make sure they're happy. And that's ultimately also why the
scraping every little piece of engagement out of people isn't as important for us if
we know the subscription fees the same whether you use it twenty million times a
day in an unhealthy faction, you know, obsessing over every piece of reactionary
content, or you're there, you know, perionically to get the news and
have good conversation. That's why it's different. Does that make sense? Absolutely?
Absolutely, And you know you've weighed in. Actually, and some of
these other tech companies Troubles recently had a good piece for Newsweek that I wanted
to talk about because a it sort of brings us back to what you experienced
after January sixth with Parlor, which I think is always worth revisiting. I
think people don't understand exactly how serious that case study is and was at the
time. But also because Apple is currently facing an anti trustitute from the FTC
from Lina Khan, and it's very high profile. It sends shivers down the
spines of people who work in murders and acquisitions and in the tech companies.
So could you tell us a little bit about your perspective looking now at the
FTC going after Apple. Yeah, well, today, the I think,
with how bad inflation has been for the last few years, the FTC and
a lot of these companies are looking at, Okay, now, we're going
to take this monopoly stuff a lot more seriously because we need to get consumer
costs down, and so that's what they're I think part of the reason why
they're so motivated. Now. That being said, if we take a look
back at the end of my time at Parlor, which is right after January
sixth, what happened was collectively, for those who aren't aware basically at the
peak of our success at the end of the election year in twenty twenty.
In the beginning of twenty twenty one, Parlor became the skateegoat for January sixth,
claiming that somehow it was all organized on Parlor, which is like such
a fallacy. It's ridiculous. I mean, it is insane for a number
of reasons. And the more you know, the more it's like, this
is ludicrous. We it actually alerted the FBI that there are these bought accounts
and these like really weird actors about a couple weeks in advance of January sixth,
maybe it was a week. It was in advance, well in advance
for them to notice. We said, there are these accounts. They're trying
to draw people into these sketchy Facebook groups about some event, and it is
happening on January sixth. And I think the quote from the employee who worked
for me to the FBI was something along the lines of we're really concerned about
this behavior. We've gotten rid of all these accounts, and we just wanted
to let you know these are the fake you know, they're going to Facebook
groups essentially, So we shut that down because we don't want people organizing on
the platform, and there's no way to organize on our platform, at least
at the time where there was no groups, there was none anything. All
there was the ability to share a link and to take you to Facebook or
like. We don't want that, so we shut that down well in advance
and notified the FBI. Then after January sixth, when it's all occurring,
you know, I'm sitting here going, well, that's horrible. We did
kind of tell them in advance that that was going to happen. We don't
have any features to do that on our platform ourselves. And then anyway,
it was just convenient because Parlor was seen as being conservative or right leaning.
That Facebook CEO came out made some statement about how it's those crazy old platforms,
and then Tim Cook came out and said something about how we're you know,
not regulated enough or something. And then overnight, Apple, Google,
Amazon, Are legal firms, other hosting companies, pr firms, everybody all
within like twenty four hours of each other, terminated their contracts with us.
So we just didn't exist anymore online and then had you know, quite a
few vendors drop us too after they saw it happen with Amazon. So it's
just like you just disappear overnight, and that's a scary amount of power.
It's in a handful of companies to do that, and the fact that Apple
is really the one that kicked it off. When Apple says something, the
entire app like, the entire industry moves because Apple, in my opinion,
is more powerful than any government out there. They have more control over the
tech industry than about any any other company because if your app doesn't exist on
Apple, it doesn't exist in the world. And yeah, okay, John,
there's Android. But if there's no Apple users, which make up most
of the the wealthier demographic of people who are on apps too, if you
get rid of that, they're like, if you can't talk to your Apple
friends, there's no reason to be on phone app talking to somebody, right,
So it's devastating. And they make a hefty profit off of the apps
from the developers, which is a thirty percent, which is where I get
to this FTC piece. Right, if you have a company that is extremely
powerful and controls manipulates the entire tech industry where they can say, hey,
we're going to make it so that your your app can no longer make money
off of advertising on Apple because we want you to pay our thirty percent subscription
fee. If they can do something like that, that's probably going to get
the eye of the FTC, who's sitting here going wait, that's going to
drive up consumer costs. They can't get apps for free or are they going
to start paying for apps? Or you go over to the EU, where
the EU has even said, hey, Apple, your app store monopoly is
illegal. According to European law, you need to allow competition, and so
you need to allow sideloading. So if I own my phone, I should
be able to put whatever apps I want on it. And Apple said,
oh, I will try to humor you. You can have a competitive app
store, but if you try to install apps on it, we're going to
charge you a fortune to do it, and we're going to make it incredibly
difficult. And ultimately you just use our app store anyway. And so they've
exhibited this behavior, which is really bad faith, in an effort to keep
that income coming from their app store, which is tremendous. I mean,
you're talking and I don't have the numbers in front of you, but you're
talking like tens of billions of dollars a year in revenue. It's a lot
of money, and all of that's coming from consumers and developers. And that's
why I think the FDC is so interested in all this anti trustuff. Right
now, don't ever let anyone tell you that having a national debt isn't a
problem. The Watchdout on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day Chris
helps unpack the connection between politics and me and how it affects your wallet.
What portion of your dollar that you sent to Uncle Sam is just paying down
our national debt? Forty percent? Forty cents of every dollar is just interest
on our spending. Whether it's happening in DC or down on Wall Street,
it's affecting you financially. Be informed. Check out the Watchdot on Wall Street
podcast with Chris Markowski on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting from the perspective of an entrepreneur to
look at what the FTC is doing because so many like Ted Cruz, for
example, is somebody who basically wrote in his book that big tech is too
consolidated, but is a bitter opponent of Lena kh and actually spends a lot
of time opposing Lina Khan, and I think, you know, Lina Khan
probably has engaged in some almost Wilsonian government excess of the you know, just
within the administrative state. The FTC itself is problematic obviously, but from the
perspective of an entrepreneur and somebody who's been in the business community to look at
what Lenakon is doing, I guess my question John is you know, is
there an argument that actually, really it's a net benefit to the cause of
free markets in this case because of the consolidation in big tech. Yeah,
I mean big tech is incredibly consolidated, and a handful of companies Amazon,
Apple, Google, Microsoft, those to name the biggest players. In terms
of Apple, they are by far the biggest of the group. And so
my philosophy, generally speaking, is I like the most competition possible. Well,
I love free markets. I love the idea that companies can go out
and if you don't like something, you can compete with it. In fact,
that's kind of the basis of the last company that I started, as
ideas I didn't like what the tech companies were doing and I wanted to compete
with It's what I'm doing now again today, right is I don't like how
social media is designed. I'm going to compete with it. We're going to
change everything, and we're going to go out and do it. Apple is
the biggest thing standing in the way of free market competition in the tech space.
If Apple doesn't like what you're doing, they can shut your business down.
That's bigger than any government, and it's completely unchecked. It's basically like
having a dictator or a king in the middle of the tech industry, pulling
the streams and saying I don't like you, and they can shut you off
tomorrow. They cannot only remove your app from the app store, they can
delete that app off of the device of everybody who's downloaded it and make sure
that you don't exist. And that's an insane amount of power. And you've
also been talking a little bit about how this is infecting or maybe affecting the
artificial intelligence space, the generative artificial intelligence space. Can you just give us
this a super broad question, but I'm curious at how you describe it in
broad terms, what you make of the landscape of generative AI right now,
because obviously there's a push among it's almost like a crony capitalist arrangement between some
of the big companies and the regulators. The Biden administration wants to be seen
as being very tough on these companies, but they're actually kind of working hand
in glove with these companies in a way that I think some of us would
say, Yeah, there should be a little bit of communication between the government
and the companies on this, but it also is it's starting to look way
too cozy. So John, what is your perspective on all of that.
Well, I'm always weary when government says that they're here to do something to
either like help the industry or get involved to help you against an industry.
Generally speaking, they tend to make everything worse, especially when it comes to
technology, because I think the knowledge of the lawmakers, especially on these issues
is so out of date and out of touch that it's typically just a lobbyist
who are informing them on what to do, or the people that are around
conveniently at the time that decisions are being made, and that's not okay.
With regards to AI, I think generative AI is a lot of fun,
to be honest. I mean, we had a lot of cool tools that
we tried to do with our app with generative AI. In Hedgehog, we
had an AI image generator, which was a lot of fun, and so
you could type in post and hit and generate AI, like, generate an
image for this post, so you don't have to go out and find a
gift or whatever. You can just hit generate and it gives you a couple
options and you selected it. We had to delete it. We had to
get rid of it. Although it was a lot of fun and people loved
it, in some weird fringe cases, the AI would actually violate our terms
of service to the point where like it was generating nudity even though we told
it not to. We had checks and everything on it. You can't control
it. So tying that back into the conversation we just had earlier, if
we can't, if we had a tool that sometimes violates our own terms of
service, If we can't hold our own terms of service, Apple will bannas
from the app store. Google will banness from the app store. So we
can't have a tool in there that might sometimes inadvertently and even if you disclose,
hey, just warnings of beta product. If this happens, I'm very
sorry, you know, use it your own risk. Whatever. You can't
have that kind of stuff in there, because if you have a tool in
your app that violates your own terms of service, off the stores. So
we're like, well, is it worth the risk of this fun tool?
No, so we deleted the tool. You know, the AI did a
few other things that are really sketchy too, that were kind of offensive at
times. If you typed in something like, hey, I need a group
of kids smoking pot to talk about how pot has a bad influence on children.
Right, the images of the children smoking pot were all of one race,
and they were all, you know, always in the kind of same
scenarios, and I'm like, why did the AI do that? Why?
And how are you supposed to stop it from doing something like that? And
then you got a bunch of fans or yeah, exactly right, Yeah that's
and then you go over to like Gemini, which was Google's approach to it,
right with the image generation, and then it's got like a woke George
Washington and you're like geez like, So, so you either get one extreme
or the other where it's like completely unfiltered and sometimes has some crazy bias,
or you just have this completely woke AI. So I'm like, it's a
fun tool, it's just not there yet. Is there anything that really scares
you about this? In the same way that kind of what you witnessed with
Parlor and what you're trying to combat right now at Hedgehog, there was something
very scary, this like anti or this pro suppression instinct among regulators, among
the left very broadly, and also among some members of the public. I
don't think it's what consumers generally want, but some of them definitely do,
and I find that disturbing. But is there anything about the AI landscape right
now that actually really scares you? Some people speak in very alarmist terms about
it, even some people who have been, you know, part of that
industry. Other people that are part of the industry say this is great,
the sort of the Mark Andresen's the e acts of the world. Where do
you land? Where do you land on that? John? I mean,
yeah, it's like where's reality right now? With it? It's it's it's
a good tool to help make people's work a little bit easier, but it's
still it's just a tool. So think of it like the car was an
improvement from the horse. Well, the AI is a slight improvement from where
we were before, Right, That's that's really what it is. You can't
let AI go out on its own. It's completely unpredictable, and we experienced
that firsthand. Like I said, with the image generation, the funniest part
is when it would stereotype your names. So you type in John, would
give you a stereotypical John image out. It was always some like bland white
dude, who was it, like in a suits or something, and I
was like, wow, my name sucks, that's great. Or you put
in like Conrad and it was like some Nordic like Viking, but like a
little bit obese and completely naked every time, and you're like why, like
why is that the stereotyper comes out? Okay, fine, So like AI
is, it's capable of producing results, it's just it needs to be babysat.
You can't let it go off on its own. And I think the
alarmist people will calm down when the rest of the community starts realizing that too,
and hopefully no one decides to put AI and charge of renuclear arsenal or
something because it's not capable of doing that. Fingers crossed, Yeah, Gary,
Yeah, I know it's funny talking about some of this because I mentioned
earlier that you mentioned you're back in California. You're from California, And I
know our listeners have heard me talk about this before, but I'm sort of
fascinated and just find it so the arc of California to be so tragic because
I'll watch, you know, the intro to La Confidential, and it shows
these ads from like the fifties about how California is this destination for the middle
class. Not come here and make it big in Hollywood, but come here.
It's gorgeous and you're free. It's sort of like the pinnacle of American
freedom. And we actually really started to see that rolled back, kind of
specifically because of the way the tech industry has a special interest. I shouldn't
say it's only because of that, and you'll know more about this when I
ask it to you, John, but teeing it up still that there result
so much control as a special by the tech industry. They started as you
know, the original kind of pirate ship, and then wanted to be the
regulators themselves, or wanted to be best friends with the regulators themselves, and
none of the Obama White House, et cetera. What happened to California?
Why did you go back to California, John, It seems like such a
miserable place these days. Well, I yeah, I escaped after I graduated
high school. So I went out. I went and moved to Denver.
I moved all over the place i'd lived in Denver. I lived in Washington
State, New York, Hawaii, some international locations like. I pounced around
a lot. Then I landed in Las Vegas. That's where I lived for
quite some time. It was an awesome place because it was about half as
much money to live there. The food was like three times as good.
Like, if you think about it, if you're in the suburbs in Las
Vegas, you have the best chefs in the world competing on the strip,
and so who are the chefs that are going to be making the food for
the people who live next to it? Like the second best chefs in the
world are the ones that are making your local sushi place in the hole in
the wall diner. You're like, that's awesome. Uh. And So I
loved being out there, and I still love going out there as much as
I can. And this year I made the move out to California because my
daughter is going to school and she's you know, I want her to grow
up where I grew up. It was awesome and and I want to give
her that same, you know, childhood experience. You can be by her
cousins, your family, and you know, I've I'm kind of you know,
I'm a single dad, so I want to have my family around to
support the whole thing. So it made sense for me to go back to
California. It was more of an emotional and family decision rather than a financial
or sane one, to be honest, because it's not financially sane. And
uh, luckily I'm in an area which I would call pretty middle of the
road, so it's not it's not these the places that you hear about when
you're talking about all the political extremists that are in California. So it's southern
California. It's amazing how many like red pockets of California there are, you
know, especially like in more rural areas. But obviously there's Orange County,
and then there's big military communities and parts of the state too, where it's
they just put up with all of it because there's really no other option.
It's such a one party state. Yeah. Yeah. And the area that
i'm is a lot of military, so at least in the vicinity, not
the people living here, because you know, it's impossible to afford to live
out here for most, like ninety percent of people I got. I got
very lucky. The last couple of years after Parlor, I got to build
up my consulting company again. We made apps for people, so any kind
of software, apps and infrastructure required, and it was I was far more
successful running that company than I was with the income I was receiving from Parlor,
because every dollar we made it Parlor we were making. At one point
we had a couple of million dollars a month we were making, and I
was like, let's just throw it right back in the company, keep investing.
We're gonna build this thing. It's gonna be the biggest, the best
thing ever. And I think I had a salary of like one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars a year, which might sound like a lot for some people,
but for the tech industry, that is like junior software engineering caliber.
And I was the CEO. No profit distribution, Let's go all in.
We're going to make this great and so afterwards, you know, starting my
own business again allowed me, I guess, to come back out here,
which was great, and I've gotten to pick up some cool hobbies too,
So I started doing flight lessons, so I'm kind of I'm almost got my
pilot's license, so I've been doing that a lot, got a lot of
time with my daughter and family out here, so it made it worthwhile coming
out to California. I just don't recommend it for most people, you know,
and your dad. So I'm also curious what you've made of the recent
debate that Jonathan Hite has sparked about smartphones and specifically though the smartphones with social
media apps on them. His theory is that with Gene Twenji and zach Raush
somewhere around like twenty twelve, you just see this massive spike in for example,
suicidal ideation, anxiety, depression across multiple countries, not just here in
the United States, but across multiple countries, and you know that it's time
for corporate America, the tech industry to start taking this really seriously. It's
time for the government start taking this really seriously, and for educators to start
taking this really seriously, and so as somebody who's actually involved in designing these
technologies, where do you land on that? John, Yeah, it's really
we're right in the middle of this debate too, especially with what's going on
with TikTok right now. So if we take a look at it all.
Instagram, for example, they did a study. I can't remember who did
the study. I read it recently, and maybe we can fact check this,
or anyone who's listening can fact check it, but that essentially one in
three teen girls who're using Instagram are developing more depression and suicidal thoughts as a
result of their activity with Instagram. And uh, of course that's you know,
Facebook's going to try to say, oh, no, we're going to
build kids to Graham now, it's going to be great, We're gonna get
more kids on it. It's like, no, you guys are the problem.
I mean, if you in my household, my daughter is not going
to be able to see social media until she's eighteen plus, and I will
teach her, you know, exactly what it means to be online, that
this isn't real life. You know the impacts of what people might say in
there, that they may say things that are not true, That are just
you know, a reflection of what that person may actually be feeling about themselves.
And they throw that onto other people on the internet and say, you
know, awful things. That all has an impact on kids who are not
prepared for it. You know, we limit we limit tobacco for children.
They can't purchase tobacco. We limit alcohol, even driving to a certain extent.
They got to at least be sixteen. Why would we limit something that's
so psyched. Why wouldn't we have some sort of rules about something that's so
psychologically difficult for kids to grasp. We're not prepared, even the adults aren't
necessarily prepared for the impacts of social media. It's all an experiment and we're
we're the test subjects in real life. It's crazy. And on Hedgehog,
for example, everything's eighteen plus, we're not. We don't have any we
don't allow not safe for work content to the extent where you're you're not seeing
nudity or pornography or anything. It's all conversations, news and impact. But
that should be reserved for people who kind of are adults, I think.
And how do you deal with moderation because I think basically everybody believes there should
be you know, minimal some minimal you know, the scale is a different
question, but some minimal moderation on these platforms. So how do you deal
with that now? I mean, nobody wants them to be four chan,
right, they don't want this mass thing to be four chan. That's for
a very niche slice of the public. John, So how do you deal
with it? And how do you think about it? Yeah? I mean
any major social media platform that's out there today that I've seen, like prefaces
social media platforms are there today, they are saying that they're a free speech
absolute platform. They're probably lying. Like when you take a look at Twitter
at what they're doing, obviously they're not free speech platform. You might say
that, but if you post about Elon's jet, you're gonna get booted.
And if you post about statistics on h Listen, there was a nonprofit that
recently posted a bunch of statistics. They ran a content analysis on Twitter and
they wanted to post statistics about how much of the engagement was hateful on Twitter,
and Elon sued them and you know didn't want that on Twitter. It's
like, Okay, that's obviously not pre speech absolutism, right, and it's
it doesn't make sense if you think about it too. Nobody wants to go
on a social media where everyone is posting dick pics, streaming about advertising and
spamming about awful curse words and obscenities like, no one wants that. So
you have to design some kind of safeguards. On Hedgehog, everything that we
have goes through an AI that gets flagged to some moderators and they make sure
that it follows a basic terms of service. And what I mean by that
is these are black and white decisions. These are clear. Is this an
incitement to violence? Yes, out done. That's that we can draw the
line there. We all agree. Is this nudity? Yes? Out It
gets a little bit difficult with nudity and wanting to make sure that people can
actually express themselves to some examples I'll provide, or like breastfeeding. It's really
that's like a timeless debate on social media is do you allow breastfeeding even though
it's nudity. Well, if you're an advocacy group for women, you might
want to consider allowing some of that. So there are some caveats there at
which we have a not Safe for work filter for but for the most part,
everything's pretty clear cut. Then you get the complex decisions that have been
plaguing social media, which have always, it seems in the last few years,
completely overstep boundaries. And so you're talking during COVID, for example,
are you allowed to question the vaccine? Well, that's not in anyone's terms
of service. If someone tries to claim it is, then they're full of
it because it's not. And so you have a central group of people at
all these other social platforms that then make the decision that, oh, today
the vaccine works. Tomorrow, okay, you can question it tomorrow, but
if you question it in two weeks now, we're going to ban you again.
So that's what tip typical social media does. What we do is we
say that's for the community decide. You vote on what you think is socially
acceptable on the platform. If you think it cross the boundary, then go
for it. You can delete it from your comment section on your posts.
You guys in the community can choose to not have it. But ultimately we're
not the ones making that decision. You are. You own it, and
I think that's the most freedom you can get on social media today, I
don't see any situation working out better. Back to the TikTok thinks, I'm
glad you brought that up. Obviously, TikTok was just the bill pass was
signed forcing a sale of TikTok. And what I mean is it is genuinely
a tough question. I won't pretend it's an easy questions when I sort of
go back and forth on myself, But as someone who's been in the position
to collect you know, when you sign up for an app, you have
to give over your email address, for example, which is obviously a piece
of you know, it can be commodified by companies when they decide to commodify
it, et cetera, et cetera. So, as someone who's sort of
been in the position of developing this kind of technology, how scared are you
by TikTok's current ownership And what did you make of the bill of forcing the
sale? Yeah, well it was It was really interesting. I watched the
reaction video of TikTok's CEO when they got banned, and he was talking about
American values. In his video, he was saying about how in America free
speech is so important and TikTok gives free speech. Bah So I agree in
part with him, not completely. So first I place, the reason that
this bill is happening is quite simply because the government has been unable to protect
kids from social media. They're still unable to and this bill passing does not
protect kids anymore tomorrow from social media than it did the day before. It's
patching a hole and doing it in a way that is more akin to the
CCP than the USA. If you go about banning companies, and by the
way, the mechanism that they're going to use, if TikTok does not sell,
the government's not going to say TikTok's illegal. The government's going to put
their arm on Amazon, on Google, and on Apple to do exactly what
they did to Parlor. They're putting their arm on these company needs to do
it to TikTok. In essence, the government is weaponizing private companies to ban
an app. And that is the scariest thing. They're picking and choosing favorites
and banning people. That is awful, and that is scarier than anything else.
And I don't care if TikTok is in the hands of the CCP.
That's a different question and a different problem that we need to solve. That
problem is solved by creating proper rules for kids. If we can protect kids
from social media, not just the CCP. We need to protect them from
Mark Zuckerberg. We got to protect them from Twitter, we got to protect
them from TikTok and whatever new apps are coming out that we don't yet know
the impact of on kids. That's a completely different problem because right now all
the government is saying China bad. We're going to sacrifice our own free market,
our own free competition. We're sacrificing our principles here in order to put
down TikTok, while ignoring the fact that everybody else in this industry is still
a bad actor when it comes to kids, and we're doing nothing about that.
John, before we wrap, can you tell everyone where to get on
hedgehog. Sure, yeah, it's hedgehog dot com, hedgehog Social. If
you go to the app stores and you download it and you'll sign in,
make an account. And really, if you're going to go on hedgehog,
you start on the top stories page, read the comments, engage with people.
If you find a headline article on there you like or dislike, leave
a little reaction, have fun with it. It's hedgehog dot com and I'll
be in there talking with you. There you go. Well, John,
thank you so much for sabby my Federalist Radio Hour and sharing some of your
thoughts from all of this perspective. That's incredibly helpful. Yeah. Thanks,
Emily, that's nice. Of course you've been listening to another edition of the
Federalist Radio Hour. I'm I'm Alagishinski, culture editor here at The Federalist.
We'll be back soon with more. Until then, Be the Lover is a
freedom, and it's just more a frame, right,