AI generated Joe Rogan conspiracy theories are all over TikTok

Published Jun 21, 2024, 11:48 PM

Friend of the show Abbie Richards explains why low effort AI generated conspiracy theory content is all over TikTok right now and who is profiting from it. 

With TikTok creator program, AI-sped misinformation pays: https://www.axios.com/2024/03/26/tik-tok-creator-program-ai-misinformation

Follow Abbie Richards on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tofology

I don't want to see us in a position where like we're just flooded by low quality, inaccurate misinformation. That's just like brain candy.

There are no girls on the Internet. As a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative, I'm brigitad and this is there are no girls on the Internet. So recently, I've been deeply fascinated by this noticeable uptick in AI generated low effort content all over social media. On Facebook, maybe you saw the picture of the elderly twins who are celebrating their one hundred and twentieth birthday, posted alongside the caption prompting you to leave them a little birthday love, or that bizarre image of Jesus made entirely out of shrimp asking for an amen. Now, on Facebook, it does tend to trend a little bit more Sacraine. But over on TikTok, creators are flooding the platform with low effort videos that push truly ridiculous conspiracy theories, things like the government is holding a vampire hostage. And not only that, but because of the way TikTok's creativity program works, spreading these ridiculous lies equals a payday. It sounds really silly and maybe even kind of harmless but disinformation. Researcher and friend of the show, Abby Richards, who has been tracking the spread of this kind of content for Media Matters, says, if garbage like this is incentivized, it makes our entire Internet ecosystem worse. I usually start by asking my guests to like introduce themselves, give us their title, all of that, But I feel like by now people know you. You are a certified friend of the show, Abby Richards, Welcome back. We're so happy you are here.

Oh my god, Bridget you know I would do absolutely anything for you. And do you need a kidney, You can have one.

I feel the last time I saw you, I was pretty drunk in.

Berlin and we had a great time.

So the reason I wanted to talk to you today is because you're sort of my I don't know, resident TikTok expert. I feel like nobody knows the platform better than you. And what I say, knowing the platform, I mean the good, the way that it can connect people, educate people, bring people together, give people access to community they didn't know they had, and also the bad because as much as I know you like TikTok. I don't know that I know many people that are as honest about the platform and as critical of the platform as you.

Yeah, you know. I really approach TikTok from two angles, which are the two hats that I always wear. My first hat is as a researcher and like studying misinformation extremism on the platform. But then my other hat is a content creator and like a user of TikTok, someone who was found great joy there at times, and there's I like situations where there's complexity, you know, like we can understand that things can be simultaneously amazing and also terrible, and we can hold space for both of those things at the same time.

I'm glad that you were doing that because I feel so often when we're talking about technology, it's either this technology is harming everybody and it should be made like it's it's I think there's a temptation to talk about it in a binary either like all good or all bad. And I'm happy that people like you can really bring the nuance of like, well, here's all the good things. I want to be honest about all the good things it's brought to me, but let's also be honest about the places that are not so good and the things that need to be fixed on the platform.

Yeah, because also, how are we going to move forward and create better digital spaces if we can't pinpoint what's working, what's good, what do we like, and also what's not working what's harmful? Like, I'm all for creating healthy digital spaces where people can thrive and like evolve and learn and grow and laugh and build community love like, yeah, amazing, but I want to avoid creating spaces that like are exclusively prioritizing profit right and in doing that, creating some like really toxic spaces.

Well, to that end, let's talk about some of the reporting that you did around something happening on TikTok. So you initially pointed this out with Media Matters back in February. We're talking months later. But it's really that folks had been exploiting TikTok's creativity program by pumping out viral conspiracy theory content using AI generated images and voices for profit. So I want to start with what exactly is TikTok's creativity program for folks who aren't familiar with that.

Yeah, So TikTok's Creativity Program actually was TikTok. It was technically was called or TikTok Creativity Program Beta because it was in beta, and it was a program designed to compensate creators for the content that they produce, which is amazing, that's great. We do want to be paying people for their labor on those platforms. And the criteria for eligibility for the Creativity Program Beta was that you had an account based in countries where it was available. You had to be at least eighteen years old, you had to have at least ten thousand followers, you had to have at least one hundred thousand video views in the last thirty days, and the videos that you could monetize that could be monetized had to be at least sixty seconds long. So that was replaced. In March, they ended the Creativity Program Beta and officially launched the Creator Forwards program, which is very very similar in structure, essentially same requirements, but is no longer in beta.

So because of this program, these tiktoks can rack up millions and millions and millions of views, which makes woever post that probably a pretty good bit of money. What kind of conspiracy theories are you seeing in these tiktoks.

Oh. We had the seemingly AI Joe Rogan predicting Texas will seceed starting a civil war, which had eight hundred thousand views. Simpson's predicted that the Baltimore Bridge would collapse. That has two point seven million views. It is also a minute in one second seemingly Ai j o'rogan saying about three weeks ago, a man named Blake Dawson embarked on a mission to uncover the hidden depths of the Denver International Airport. He discovered a vast laboratory underneath, et cetera, et cetera. Now he's missing. That had just under four hundred thousand views. I had an Ai seemingly Ai Joe Rogan and seemingly AI Matt Rife talking about SeaWorld hiding the world's last megaladon, Oh my God, that had jos under nine hundred thousand views. And I had a seemingly AI Elon Musk talking about flat Earth and I have one eight million views, and it was one minute in one second long.

Something that strikes me about this, like there's that undercurrent of like the kind of guy who likes Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and Matt Rich. It's like, if you're if that guy is you, you should be offended that they're like, oh, stupid dumbasses who will believe absolutely anything. That is who we're targeting. That is you, Like they're almost insulting you to your face in a kind of way.

Again, I think you have different read on the situation than.

They do, Like are you a gullible sucker? So with the current iteration of this program, are you still seeing these the kind of conspiracy theory tiktoks that you saw on the platform when the program was in beta.

Yeah, So let's walk back and I'll explain, like what was even showing up on the platform at the time. What we were seeing was this entire niche of AI generated conspiracy theory content on TikTok. And so it used seemingly AI generated images sometimes mixed with like non AI generated images and AI generated speech to text to like pump out conspiracy theory content really high volumes. Uh, and it performed really well in TikTok's algorithm. Right, We've been seeing that for years. We know that that conspiracy theories often perform well in these algorithms. That are engagement driven. They're driven by watch time, and so these videos were pretty formulaic a lot of the time. So they started with some sort of unhinged statement at the top to hook you in. So they'd be like the US government discovered a vampire and they're keeping it a secret, or scientists just discovered the last megaladon and they're keeping it a secret. And they would use like, uh, they would use AI generated images fast paced like super you know, they would use like AI generated images like this very fast paced editing style captions the speed to text, and like spooky background music that really like hook you in and like they stimulate like all of your senses at once, and then they'd create this background story just essentially to take up the remaining sixty seconds of the video, presumably so that they could qualify for TikTok's creativity program at the time. And so yeah, like I said, like they were very unhinged statements at the top oftentimes, and I really liked this bit. They would use like a fictional researcher slash explorer character who had just discovered something, and it was always a guy. It was never a woman, because why would it be a woman. Women can't be explorers, and they'd be like, I don't know. Like Eric Smith was on an expedition to Antarctica just three weeks ago, and somehow he'd always ended up dead at the end. So we were like, how do we know this?

Then they're really you're you're really bringing a lot of like logical questions to this of like, then how do we get this? How do we get the story out?

Yeah? How did we get the story out if he died on the expedition? I just want to know. I'm just asking questions. So I spent a lot of time deep diving into these. Uh. And there were also content creator gurus who were creating videos like teaching people how to make these too, So I was watching their videos learning how to make them.

Why do you think there are so many of them? Are like about Godzilla or asteroids, almost sort of science fiction y.

Well, I think to some extent they're a little bit Again this is purely speculation. I think they're slightly safer to play with, of like, mythical creatures are probably less likely to get you in trouble with TikTok moderations, and like a conspiracy theory about the Rothchild. I do sometimes see ones that are, you know, more explicitly harmful, Like we saw like a lot of like space is fake, histories has been rewritten, history is fake, Flat Earth kind of stuff, and that stuff definitely is harmful. But I do think that a lot of like the mythical creature stuff is kind of in that gray area where it's it's not some super nefarious, clearly anti Semitic conspiracy theory, right Like we're talking more about like mythical creatures. A lot of the time the stories seem to reflect like horror more than even like conspiracy theories. At times, they use a lot of like horror tropes and trying to evoke that like eerie feeling.

And even though we're talking about wacky horror stuff, usually there is some undercurrent of like, oh, the government is lying to you. You're not being told the full truth. They know something they're not telling us, but I'm telling you.

And that's so appealing to us, right Like we want to feel like we're in on some special knowledge. We there's nothing we love more than feeling like we know something that other people don't. So it's it's again, it's very appealing to sorry, I think my cat just screamed. Did you hear that the girls are fighting?

The girls are fighting? Maybe they maybe they're like chiming in. They know something we don't.

They do, they're always planning. Conspiracy theories against me are conspiracies. We love feeling like we're in on some special knowledge. And that's, you know, one of many many reasons why conspiracy theories continue to be popular time and time again.

Let's take a quick break eder back.

I should say a common tactic of these low effort AI generated conspiracy theory tiktoks is making the content look as if Joe Rogan is discussing it on his podcast. They'll actually use AI generated content of Joe Rogan to make it seem as if Rogan actually did discuss the government covering up that they found an alien or a vampire or whatever. But even Joe Rogan has not actually entertained these conspiracy theories, and it's just another way to credential whatever outlandish claim their content is making by visually associating it with Joe Rogan. I did notice something else about a couple of these videos that I don't know if you have thoughts about what's going on but where they have been designed to make it look like they are specifically being discussed on Joe Rogan's podcast. So it's like an image of Joe Rogan and it's like him being like, oh, did you know that we're all gonna die because scientists found an asteroid? Pull this up, and then it makes it seem as though they've discussed this on the podcast even though they have it as far as I know.

Uh yeah, and quite cleverly, the captions are always put right over his mouth so that you can't tell easily how dubbed it is and how bad that dubbing is. Yeah, that was a really interesting part of this research that I wasn't necessarily expecting, but so much of this content was especially I got a lot of videos using Joe Rogan where Joe Rogan did the exact same formula, right, he'd be Like three weeks ago, a man called Blake Dawson embarked on a mission to uncover hidden depths of the Denver International Airport and he discovered a vast laboratory underneath. That's like YadA, YadA, YadA, literally verbatim. I wrote that down. Yeah, Like I got another one of Joe Rogan predicting that that Texas was going to secede from the US starting a civil war on May fourteenth. It is now May twenty first, and that hasn't happened.

Date is come and gone. As far as I know, Texas is still part of the United States last.

Time I checked. And one thing I also do I want to stress too, because I didn't save this up at the top, but like does provide some context, is that these videos are going mega viral, like very very viral. Like. We were seeing these types of videos with like, you know, twenty thirty million views at times, you know, ten million views on some just millions and millions of views. We found one account that, yeah, there was one account that actually only say this. So we identified a network of seemingly affiliated accounts that we're all posting these exact same type of AI generated conspiracy theory content, a lot of megaladon content on this account for whatever, on these accounts, and they were posting these videos in English, Spanish and French, using like a translated version of the same user name and the same profile picture, which also seemed AI generated. It's hard to say for sure, but and so they had received at the time that we looked at it, over three hundred and forty two million views on this account just posting this sort of content, and then the Spanish language the Spanish language account had received three hundred and twenty nine million views.

Those numbers are shocking, but also what I know about Spanish language content, I feel like people who are interested in flooding digital spaces with junk, they are definitely going to translate that junk into Spanish because they know we don't have as many, you know, really good Spanish language content platforms as we should, and so it's like there's a gap of that and they're like, oh, we can fill that gap with nonsense and make a clickbook.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Why do you think these videos are going viral?

Like they are?

Where to start? First of all, we love a good story, and we love a good conspiracy story, like these are candy for our brains. We love mythical creatures. We love to think that, you know, the government's hiding some sort of knowledge from us, like there's a reason why Men in Black is still a classic movie. Like, we fundamentally love these stories. And then you combine it with like this, this kind of attention hijacking approach to creating content where we know that that sort of content plays really well on these algorithms where you're just trying to get watch time, and the more people watch it, the more that that video will be recommended to other people and it'll then go viral. And then on top of that, you're able to just create such a high volume of this content. It's really easy to pump this content out because you don't need to go create your own art. You can just get like an AI to do it. You don't need to read your own text, like do you know how long it takes me when I film one of my videos to get all the words right like and get my delivery right Like. That's time that you don't need to do, Like you know, No, you don't need to spend that anymore. You can just plug it into a speak you're a text to speech software, so you can really crank this stuff out quite quickly. And I think that then you can just put a lot out and see what hits.

When it comes to AI, we talk a lot about the obvious dangerous examples of the ways that AI can disrupt our democracy, but there's also a real danger to the seemingly more benign AI generated content too, because it just makes our Internet landscape worse, more stupid, and less trustworthy. And when it's financially incentivized, not to mention easy and fast to crank out at scale, it's not really that difficult to see how it gets us away from the kind of Internet we actually want, which is not one full of low effort AI generated lives, scams and garbage. Yeah, part of me wonders if that's really the role that we're seeing AI being utilized for here. It's just you know, the speed at which you can crank these out, the ease at which you can crank these out, and you can just really just flood the space and see what happens to hit that virality.

Mark, I'm definitely nervous about it. I'm very concerned about the role of AI here in just its ability to create volume, and I'm concerned about the combination of AI plus algorithms that prioritize watch time over the actual originality and like high quality sure of the content. I don't want to see us in a position where like we're just flooded by low quality, inaccurate misinformation. That's just like brain candy. That makes me. That makes me nervous because a lot of the times, like I get asked why this sort of content is concerning, Like why is it bad if like you know, the US like has vampires and like it's clearly silly. But I am worried about more so at scale, what it means to be in digital spaces that are fundamentally prioritizing, like not just prioritizing, incentivizing, financially incentivizing content that is low quality and easy to pump out.

In what ways do you feel that TikTok's Uh, this program is incentivizing junk like this, Well, so.

If you're paying creators, if you're if you're financially rewarding people for content based on how viral it is, Uh, the end result, it makes sense, is that you're going to get a lot of people just trying to pump out as much content that will go as viral as possible, rather than like actually funding the creators who do their own, you know, their own original, high quality work, because I do want to see them funded, of course, I do, Like I want the platforms to pay the creators who are the backbone of the of the platforms like TikTok would not be good if it weren't for all the creators out there making that content. I would like to see them, to see them compensated, but I want to make sure that we are we have systems in place so that they are the ones being compensated and not people that are just flooding the feeds with sabertooth tiger conspiracy theories.

The reason why I liked TikTok to begin with is that I felt like they were my people, and that the people it was people who wanted to go deep on an issue, and it's like everything you ever wanted to know about this specific thing. If that is your dam rock with me and I'll tell you we'll get into than nitty gritty minutia. But getting into the nitty gritty minutia. If something takes research, it takes time. You can't just plug it into an AI system and have it poof create create that kind of content. It really takes, As you know, it takes a lot of time, and I worry that it's so much easier to rather than reward that person who's putting so much time and effort into making the thoughtful, deep dive content that we all love. It's so much easier to just throw money at people who have completely gamified this via AI just flogging the space with junk And I don't know, I like you, I worry about the what the what that says about our larger information ecosystem.

Yeah, it is concerning. I think it's also presenting like a good challenge that we could potentially, you know, figure out how to climb together. Like I'm trying to be inspirational here. I think that there is an opportunity here to figure out what it looks like to create a better system, Like we know what the end result is of just like simply prioritizing just engagement over all else, and so like what are we going to do to try to also incentivize accurate, high quality information.

One question I do have is is this against TikTok's terms of service or rules in some way? Like I my understanding is that TikTok has rules that prohibit misleading or inaccurate content, But it seems like they're allowing not just allowing this kind of content on their platform, but allowing creators to be be profiting off of it.

Yeah, So I'm a little bit confused on this one. So here's what I know. So I know that we published this in February, and a TikTok spokesperson told Axios in late March that conspiracy theories are not eligible to earn money or to be recommended in for you feeds on TikTok. I have gone since then and looked and found plenty of the exact same right formula of conspiracy theories that are just over a minute long, using that AI generated text to speech and the spooky music and the editing and the and the images like all of that, And I've seen videos that were posted since then that seems a little inconsistent. The way they've talked about their newest update to the community guidelines around conspiracy theories doesn't seem to reflect that. So they said that conspiracy theories that are unfounded and claim that certain events or situations are carried out by covert or powerful groups such as quote, the government or a secret society, are not eligible for for you page recommendation. I don't know where a lot of these fall on that. It's a pretty it's it's it's just unclear exactly what TikTok is enforcing and what they're allowing to be monetized.

And something we've seen time and time again is that the people who create this, especially if they're doing it for profit, are so good at creating content that really skirts that gray area and staying just on the other side of that line to keep them on the platform and to keep the money coming in.

Yeah. So the conspiracy theories about like the unfounded that are unfounded and claim about certain events being carried out by secret powerful groups, that's FYP ineligible. What's not allowed on TikTok are conspiracy theories that name and attack an individual.

Oh so it seems like it seems like it wouldn't be that hard to create content that would be eligible, but still does the same kind of thing in spirit, just not in specificity.

Yeah. Like, you know, because like the video that I talked about with an AI or seemingly AI Joe Rogan predicting that Texas will secede from the US, starting a second civil war on May fourteenth, which would then lead out lead to an all out nuclear war. That was uploaded on April fifth, and it has over eight hundred thousand views. It's a concerning video to be making a claim and to be using such a well known figure that a lot of people do get their information from to claim that you have like special knowledge from a time traveler, claiming that you're aware of imminent civil war? Like, where does that fall within these guidelines that we've set up? Where does that fall within the guidelines that TikTok is set up?

And I gotta say not for nothing. If I'm Joe Rogan, I would be so insulted that this is the kind of content that people think they can plausibly associate with me unrelated to this whole conversation. I would really be taking a step back if I were him and be like, wow, people think that I would be giving them content about cryptids and stuff, and like that's what people would associate with me, And people will be like, oh yeah, I buy that. I would be so insulted and I would be taking a step back to deeply reflect on the kind of content I'm known for.

I think you and Joe Rogan might be different in certain fundamental ways. Bridget.

I mean, like when the whole Joe Rogan the last time that we talked about Joe Rogan, one of the points I made was like we like I'm not saying I'm such a great podcaster, but like, come on that it does.

But Okay, the issue though of like taking a celebrity figure, especially someone that is like trusted by a bunch of people straight men across America, uh and you know, altering them with this AI voice and putting this information in their mouths. Like where I want to see more much more of a conversation happening from TikTok but also from other platforms about like where does this stand within policy? Because TikTok's community guidelines only prohibit this sort of like misleading AI generated content of a public figure who is being degraded or harassed, engaging in criminal or anti social behavior, taking a position on political issues, commercial products or a matter of public importance, or being politically endorsed or condemned. So the policy doesn't really seem to account for AI generated content of jer Rogan claiming that a time traveler predicted Civil war.

Yeah, and I think it really exposes some gaps in policies that these people are exploiting to make a quick book.

Yeah. And I mean the more that we're having these conversations around AI, right, we're learning more ways that it's going to be used that maybe we hadn't thought of before. And like a lot of the conversations that I saw, especially early on around AI and like deep fakes and deep fakes of celebrities or politicians, was like, oh my god, they're going to deep fake world leaders and say that like they're launching nuclear war and it's going to start nuclear war.

Right.

It was like this really high stakes kind of discussions about how deep fakes can affect us. It's like, okay, but what about like really low effort deep I'm using some deep fakes because it's using just regular video of him with an AI generated voice. What about that? And like how that affects regular people and not like high up politicians, Like how about that? Like I just want to see this this evolution in our conversations around AI.

Yeah, that's something that I really see a lot of where so often and I get it, like I don't think it's it's wrong, but so often we're talking about high level deep fakes, so we're not talking about things like low effort cheap fakes, which I think are arguably easier to make, and we're talking about like, oh, how will it disrupt this high life level system, which is important to talk about, but we also should be talking about how is how might it disrupt the thing that most people are coming into into contact with every day, which is the way our digital ecosystem or information ecosystem. And I don't know, I think the conversation needs to have both of like how it is impacting people at this high level and also the thing in their hands that they are most likely to be coming into contact with these kinds of of inaccurate content by Does that make sense?

Yeah? Of course. Do you have any idea how many people have fallen victim to those like cheap fake Taylor Swift is selling cooking were ads?

Yes, it's everywhere and like and I I don't think it should be just on the individual to have to figure out like, well, is Taylor Swift actually endorsing this cooking ad or whatever? Like like we it's clearly a bigger institutional problem that is not going to be solved by it just only individuals being more savvy.

Yeah, and that's an issue that we run into a lot of the time with conversations around media literacy, where like media literacy, digital literacy, they're amazing, They're great. I highly encourage them in you know, all aspects of education for all ages. But there are a lot of the time only going to reach some of the most privileged in society, and you're going to need to be constantly evolving as like digital spaces evolve too, so you're always in this game of ketchup. And it's also fundamentally just putting the burden on users who a lot of the time straight up don't have the time to go learn how to spot you know, gan like generated images, like they don't know how to do that, and that's fully okay. They have lives like that burden should not be on consumers. That burdens should be on the platforms that are hosting that content and a lot of time profiting off.

It more After a quick break, let's get right back into it.

Now. Like anything else, this is just a hustle. It's a grift. People are doing it because it makes them quick, easy money, and they can also make money from purporting to teach other people how to do the grift as well the grift within the grift. Do you see coordination with these accounts, Like I know that you in the piece you figured out that some of these accounts were sort of associated with each other. Do you think that these folks are like back channeling and trying to tell others like, well, here's how you do it, here's how you can make these kinds of videos, here's what works, here's the communities that you should be targeting that kind of thing.

Oh yeah, there's a whole cottage industry around this sort of content farming a little bit. It's what I was seeing was you would have these accounts going viral on TikTok with a decent number of followers, and they would have a link, oftentimes to a discord server in their TikTok bio. And so I started joining these discord servers and watching them talk about how they create this content. And typically the way I saw it be run was that there was like one dude running the discord server. Again, haven't seen a woman do it yet. I hope a girl boss gets in on it, but I haven't seen it yet. And so one dude's running the discord server, he'll maybe make like YouTube videos about how to make this content, and like weekly videos like on like the next hot niche to get in Like maybe it's conspiracy theories, Maybe it's horror, maybe it's history, maybe it's top three videos. Maybe it's like men's motivational workout content, or just like men with deep voices saying motivational quotes and their team seeing people how to do it. And they often have like a premium level of some sorts. You could pay them like seventy bucks a month or something to go and be their protege, and like they just give you one on one feedback a lot of the time, or like special access to courses and stuff. And then there's a back and forth in these communities where you have these discord servers of people sharing tips on like how to make content, like or what sort of content's performing well, what sort of rate of like how much money are you guys getting per million views for each type of content? How can I switch my content so that it targets a wealthier demographic. That sort of discourse I saw. I saw a lot of the time in these communities.

It's so interesting to me how there's a component of it that's like, oh, if you pay me, I'll teach you. Like there's always there's always a little bit of an overlap with like a life coaching scam or like an mL like there's always a little something of that in there, do you know what I mean. I mean, the grift just keeps on giving, the grift within the grift.

The grift on grift on grift on gript. There's like this affiliate marketing level to it, where it was like, use this AI service and then if you get people to use your affiliate code, you'll get X money. And so there are a lot of layers to it. I think that when we're dealing with communities that are susceptible to messaging about get rich quick, you're going to inevitably end up with a lot of different sorts of grifts that could emerge.

Throw some supplements in there, like throw some like ough. The grift is deep.

As you said, the grift runs deep.

So we were talking a bit about thinking about how this works in a high level way. But I guess I'm wondering, you know, twenty twenty four is a pretty big election year, not just in the United States globally. I think more countries than ever before in history have elections this year. I'm wondering, what do you see as at stake for all of this as we head into such an important global election year.

Proof Immediately my blood pressure spikes. Like see a lot of these videos weren't inherently what you would say, like political using airports, because you know everything's political, but like you know, government's hiding a vampire, isn't really taking a partisanside necessarily. I did see some that were overtly political, like one that was like Biden is you know, controlling the water or something, and stuff like that. I think what I'm worried about is the system at large, Like We're coming into this this election year, and now we have a whole group of people who were really skilled at cranking out AI generated content that is inaccurate, and we know what performs well, we know that you can like flood feeds with this stuff, and so I'm very worried about how easy it is to manufacture and this content and how easy it is to make it really engaging.

So for folks who are listening and are thinking, like, well, I use TikTok, but what the heck am I supposed to do about this? Is there anything that you would like? Is there a role for the regular TikTok user that they should be playing in combating this not falling for it just creating the kind of Internet ecosystem that we actually would want to live in.

I mean, I think that the best piece of advice I can give specifically for this sort of content is like a strict non engagement policy. If you see it, and you see Joe Rogan is there and it's bad dubbed and maybe he's having a conversation with another like badly dubbed Jordan Peterson or whatever, that's a good time to like report it as authentic content or you know, misinformation if it is misinformation, and like scroll class or like say you're not interested in it. I think that one of the best things that we can do is just show that we aren't engaging and go about your life and maybe maybe go outside, maybe touching your ass, maybe smell a flower, gives someone a hug.

So that is great advice for individuals. But what about institutions like TikTok, Like one thing I imagine they could do is provide a little more transparency around this content, Like why shouldn't we know whether or not the thing that we are being shown is making whoever posted it money.

I should say too, it's like impossible to know which of these are monetized. I don't have that insight from TikTok of like which accounts monetized versus which isn't. But they all, I mean, they're all still fitting all of the requirements that we described in that February article that indicate that they're being used by creators looking to monetize their content. But I would love from TikTok to potentially a way to know, you know, I would like some more transparency on that front, to know what's being monetized, how are they enforcing it? Right, Like what does that actually look like? Because they say that for the Creator Rewards program, all videos are before they're actually monetized, before they begin that process of being monetized, they are approved by somebody, And how strict is that? Like what does that actually look like? How many videos are being rejected? And like on what grounds? I want a lot more transparency from them around the entire system of monetization that they are creating.

And I think we deserve that, Like, wh when I am making a podcast, I legally have to say when I am being paid this up to say something and it's an ad and when not? Right, Like we deserve to know what does the financial situation. Look like from the person who is telling me something, are they just telling me because they're making that content and they like it. Are they telling me that because they've just been monetized in some way, Like, I don't know, I don't I don't think that that's a bridge too far to expect a little transparency behind.

No. I mean, I would argue that we deserve much more than that. I think that the bar is on the ground. But I do think that we deserve to know when there is a very clear financial incentive for certain types of content. You know, is this person making flat earth content because they are genuinely a flat earther and like they believe it with their full chest, or are they making it because they know that it'll get millions of views and then they'll get money. And like that's a big difference, And I do want to know where that where that line is, Like, I just I want to know more about because I mean, you can never know people's motivation. There are still lots of grifters even when financial motives are very clear. But I still think that that transparency is a very good starting.

Absolutely, Abby, thank you so much for being here. It is always a pleasure.

I literally love nothing more. Let's hang out.

I'll see you in Berlin. Hopefully a little more sober this time, absolutely not, hopefully more drunk.

Hopefully if we're doing it right, less sober.

If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our mark store at teangody dot com slash Store. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi, You can reach us at Hello at tegody dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at teng Goody dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Bridget cod It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative edited by Joey pat Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael was our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us.

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There Are No Girls on the Internet

Marginalized voices have always been at the forefront of the internet, yet our stories often go over 
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