TFGL2021 - S1 - Ep4 - Birdwatch (Not a UK Nature Programme) - Show Transcript
Welcome to this episode of the Tech For Good Live podcast.
Harry Bailey takes on the hosting duties this week. He is joined by Ankur Asthana and our special guest Phyllida Swift, CEO of Face Equality International.
Transcript
Harry: Hello and welcome to another episode of Tech for Good Live podcast. If you're a new listener, come in, sit down, grab yourself a hot chocolate. If you're a regular, you may be wondering what we've done with Bex and where you send the ransom money to. Fear not, she's fine. She will be back without any doubt in the next couple of weeks to lighten the mood and improve the quality of these podcast intros. As always, there's been tons going on in the world of tech since we last got angry about people taking tech and doing bad things. So we have plenty to discuss. Ankur is back on the podcast today, hello.
Ankur: Hello.
Harry: And me, I'm Harry Bailey. And we have a guest. Woohoo. My guest today is Phyllida Swift, CEO of Face Equality International. Hello Phyllida.
Phyllida: Hello. Thanks for having me.
Harry: How are you today?
Phyllida: I'm good, thank you. That's the first time I've been announced publicly as CEO of something. I'm super super new into the role, like as of January 1st so not fully confident, or, like, yeah, it's a weird thing to have to step into it. I feel like the term has a lot of connotations behind it that I'm not fully comfortable with yet. I've been working for Face Equality International for a couple years now and before that I was working for another charity that was one of our members so it's literally what I live, eat and breathe. We are an organisation that ultimately supports people with facial differences, like myself and tech is something that both negatively and positively impacts upon the lives of people with facial differences. So I’m really excited to be here today. Thank you.
Harry: Oh yeah, I took a quick look at your bios and stuff and you are a classic fingers in pies. There's lots of interesting things you get up to which I’m sure we’ll touch on more in the podcast. This week’s topics. So we’ve got the stats of the week. So Whatsapp. If you're not aware of the WhatsApp story you’ve probably been living on a different planet. Whatsapp has lost millions of users because of their change of terms and conditions and the way that that was shared with the greater world. Tell us more Ankur.
Ankur: Yeah, you know, essentially I think most folks saw this on their phones in early January. Are you both on Whatsapp? I imagine so.
Harry: Yes
Phyllida: Yeah.
Ankur: And so, I mean, we all got this privacy policy at the start of the year. It was really poorly worded I thought, the privacy policy wording they were sharing. I guess in an effort to be transparent but essentially what they were trying to allow themselves to do is to be able to share more information across platforms. So from WhatsApp onto Facebook so that they could use that information for advertising and there was a ton of backlash. As you say, millions of users left WhatsApp for these other platforms. Whatsapp actually fell from the eighth most downloaded app in the UK at the start of the month to the 23rd by the 12th of January, which is kind of wild. Ad Signal wasn’t even in the top 1000 apps at the start of the month and by the end of the first week it was the most downloaded app in the country. There were some numbers from the UK’s Parliaments Home Affairs Committee and Signal gained something like 7.5 million users globally over the last two weeks. Telegram, 25 million and it really does seem to come at the expense of Whatsapp and this whole privacy policy debacle. And the interesting question for me is, is this backlash and migration of people switching platforms a sign of increased public awareness about privacy issues on forms. And is it a sign that this is kind of part of a shift that we've seen really over the last couple of years, towards more public will to do something about these issues and actually protect our privacy.
Harry: For me it feels a little bit like this one is more than people’s awareness and disgust at this change of terms, it feels a bit like a Me Too. Whereas, your friends are saying ‘oh I'm leaving because my friends are leaving’ and then everybody's friends say ‘oh I'm leaving too and going to a different place’. From what I read and I may be wrong, it doesn’t impact those in the UK at the moment because we’re still aligned with the EU regulations. So it's not that these terms and conditions are going to have any great difference for us but it does suggest it spreads as though they were going to and therefore people leave. I don’t know about you Phyllida. Are you now on three platforms like me or are you still just on Whatsapp?
Phyllida: I’m still very much on Whatsapp. I mean, I guess the limitus test of this being big news is that this ended up on my family Whatsapp group. It actually ended up on the Whatsapp group that was devoted to my grandpa’s 90th birthday, which has several family members in it. But the fact that we are talking about Whatsapp within Whatsapp clearly shows that people aren’t like moving desperately off of the platform. It was several articles from the Guardian that were basically saying that there might be a problem but actually not that big a problem because it’s end to end encrypted, is it not? And it's not necessarily the content of your discussions that is being shared, it's just your email and phone number. And to be honest, my email and phone number are everywhere anyway and it's already within Facebook so I'm not scared but I don't know whether that's just an indication of me not having read all the facts.
Harry: That kind of aligns with what all my friends have been saying and that is ‘why should I be bothered about it’. I think there's a mention of location data and people that you're in contact with. So if you're secretly messaging somebody on WhatsApp then it will be on Facebook, in terms of they will use that data and possibly try and connect you to that person on Facebook as well.
Ankur: Yeah.
Phyllida: That’s the thing that I did read. Was actually about when Facebook has gotten in trouble for revealing locations for putting people up as suggested friends of, who are people in potentially vulnerable positions. So that I guess is a concern but again I don’t think I fully grasp all of the ins and outs of the changes to be perfectly honest.
Ankur: And it’s interesting. They did a kind of a campaign after this all blew up where they put up a website of FAQs and have David Attenborough advertising it on Google, so it's the first search results that they're trying to make show up, to kind of clarify from their point of view some of these changes. To me, this also points towards the bigger conversations that we've been having for a while around these platforms, essentially, you know, having their tentacles in so many different platforms. Or these companies having their tentacles in so many different platforms. Ultimately Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram, they’re impetus to figure out for Facebook how they all connect the information across these platforms, and to me that’s where the worrying piece is another step in that direction, where all this information is being brought into one place. Or at least there's a move towards that potentially.
Phyllida: Yeah, I mean I just read the demonising space but another thing that I read was they were saying, I think when they originally bought Whatsapp is that they were never going to merge the two or share anything between the two and that just quickly changed. So Facebook's continuing to take over the world.
Harry: How's it gone down in the US Ankur?
Ankur: Yeah, I mean it's similar to what both of you were saying where on family groups, WhatsApp groups, it's ironic where the discussion is happening on WhatsApp because that's where people are, about ‘should we switch over, should we not’. There was a move, I think, and I don't have the numbers here but I think there was already a bit of a migration happening among some communities onto Signal, I'm not sure about Telegram as much, over the last couple of years. So I think this has helped push it, but then at the same time, people are continuing to use Whatsapp. I haven't really seen any major shift in that. And so I think there's also this other question that has come up or conversation that I've seen anecdotally of, well are these other platforms really any better. There's kind of this lack of trust in general and to some extent people are having to choose and say, well, what's the kind of least worst option essentially, that I could use. And for a lot of people it makes sense for WhatsApp to continue to be the place where they’re communicating with their family and friends and network. So I don't know. I think it'll be interesting to see how these other platforms also respond in the coming months and if they're able to take advantage of this or not, and what that looks like.
Harry: See I left Facebook maybe a couple years ago now, but one of the reasons I was able to leave Facebook is because I had all those networks already in WhatsApp. I feel like if I leave Whatsapp that I'm going to lose some of the people who I kept from leaving Facebook and if I end up on Signal or Telegram that really it’s only kind of niche groups that have moved over there and a few friends who are available on both. So although there's this huge thing and it’s blowing up quite a lot, I don't know whether it's a forever thing. It may just be a hint at Facebook and WhatsApp that people aren't happy about it but data wise, I’m not sure we'll see that much of a change. Installing an app is not the same as stopping using another app.
Ankur: Yup.
Phyllida: It's also basically like a cloud drive as well, like, I go back into old WhatsApp groups to find old photos and old conversations or even old documents for work and stuff. Like, that's quite reluctant to jump ship because actually the amount of stuff that is still of use to me that is in there.
Harry: Yeah. It's a repository of photos and videos and messages.
Phyllida: Most of it is just absolute junk, like not of any use to anyone but myself. Just a lot of memes and a lot of chat about food, and where we're going to meet up, pre-COVID time.
Harry: It’s forever data so you need to keep it just in case.
Phyllida: Yeah. A lot of Face Swap images as well, in family WhatsApp groups of family and we’ve swapped faces of grandparents and you never want to lose that
Harry: [laughs] Right, let's go. Let’s go to Charity news of the week. So the London Marathon has announced an overhaul of their controversial bond system. So I hadn't heard of the bond system, although I was kind of aware that charities were able to do this and they do it with other big events as well. Tell us a bit more about that Ankur.
Ankur: This is news to me as well being in the US, but essentially, the marathon has a golden bond system. It reminds me of Willy WOnka and the golden ticket or something but essentially, it gives charities who have this golden bond, five guaranteed running places each year in the marathon. And what’s interesting about it is these are or they were perpetually renewable every five years. And so there’s about 600 charities that own these golden bonds and it makes it very difficult for newer charities to actually access these. And so I think there’s been a bunch of conversation and a review of that process. From this year, the Marathon Organising Committee is going to be reducing the number and duration of these golden bonds and then phasing in shorter options for new charities to get involved. Where this ties to what we talk about on the podcast in terms of tech, is that the twelve months have been pretty difficult in terms of fundraising for a lot of charities, especially fundraising online, and so an option is that it is seen as very important for organisations to be able to fundraise and sustain their operations. But I guess the question for you Phyllida, as someone who is leading a charity and it sounds like a relatively newer organisation, how do you view something like this and these changes.
Phyllida: I mean, I think it’s brilliant. Having worked at several UK charities with some of our member organisations operating in the UK, I am fully aware of how vital a resource the London Marathon can be in terms of fundraising. And I think anything to level out the playing field so that more people are able to access, is brilliant. I've done it myself and it is very clear that there are some dominant charities, all of which seem to take up a significant chunk of Tower Bridge on the route and have big massive teams of support. I think one of the things is that in order to have entry into the marathon as a charity, you have to put forward a certain amount of fee I believe and I think the large charities are able to do that but they can set aside a larger amount on the basis that they’ll get that back. And I believe there tends to be a minimum fundraising effort from the participants of about £2000 to cover that. So it’s a major commitment and I think to enable smaller, lesser known charities to take part is brilliant. And it just means that there'll be a greater diversity of people that you'll see out there running in weird costumes and taking part. I mean it's an incredible thing to do and it’s a real moment in the year for charities and for fundraising in particular, so I think it's great that they’re going to open it up. And also great that they're going to allow more people to take place around the country as well. I think this year a lot of charities had to..I mean, the dominant term right now seems to be pivot doesn’t it. But I think a lot of people had to really pivot and say go out and run marathons in your garden or on the balcony and do the 22.6 challenge in a different way because it has so much potential for charities to really have that key moment in the year. So anything to make that more accessible, I think, is a brilliant initiative. Yeah, I think it's fab.
Ankur: And I think your point about the visibility that comes with participation in the race is also interesting. And I know in your organisation there are a number of campaigns focused on the way we think about portrayals in the media and online I guess, as well. It seems like this is also another avenue to essentially continue that campaign.
Phyllida: Absolutely. It is not just the day itself as well. It’s all of the media that surrounds it. So articles in runners magazines or third sector magazines about profiles on the individuals running, so it's incredibly important for visibility and actually seeing a diversity of runners in terms of shapes and size and abilities and seeing people who look different running, I think is really important and having profiles on people who you may not see in the public eye that often. And then it obviously all tracks back to the vital causes that people are running for and I think marathon day and watching all of the coverage that goes alongside it and the stories that goes alongside it as well, just meaning that the diversity of stories will increase again is brilliant and so I think it's a great initiative.
Harry: I hadn’t considered that. I mean I've watched the London Marathon lots of times but never ran it or considered running it but yeah, the stories that you hear as part of that whole event, not even just during the actual race, are so biased towards specific charities when I think about it, but it would be great for the media to be focusing on the breadth of different charities that are involved and different people that are involved.
Phyllida: I mean I don’t think you’ll ever get rid of, I mean everyone can remember the rhinos and the people that run in the rhino costumes and you always remember someone that does the underwater suit or. Yeah, I mean you'll always remember that but definitely making room for some of the smaller, lesser name charities is something that I will always be behind.
Harry: Yeah. I can't get my head around why they've had this system in place for so long and masses of friends of friends type of relationships where their expectation is, we’ll only raise a certain amount of money if you give us a certain amount of places. You don’t know whether their hand was twisted behind their back and what's happening in the world at the moment has given them an opportunity to say sorry, huge big changes need to happen and now's the time to do it. So I'd love to know the background, the fly on the wall story behind their decision as much as anything. I mean they're saying all the things that we’re saying, which is it would be beneficial to smaller charities and we haven't done it earlier, but you just don't know what the actual story behind that is and how long it's been going on and why. I’d love to know more about that.
Phyllida: Could be a simple case of admin. I mean the amount of planning that has to go into it, so it’s reducing the number of people that you bring in and organise might actually be right. As you said, it would be really interesting to kind of understand why that change has happened.
Harry: I suppose they do get to pass on the admin for however many thousands of runners to the charities who are organising them, so you're spot on with that. I think yeah it's probably a lot to do with it more than anything else. Should we move on to tech news for the week? So Twitter announced the launch of a new pilot programme called Birdwatch. Oh yeah, I saw a tweet about this and didn't really pay any notice. In the US to theoretically fight misinformation on the platform. I'm sceptical. Tell me more.
Ankur: Yeah. Theoretically is the operative word there I think. What they're saying is they want to have a place for community driven moderation. That's how they’re framing Birdwatch and the way this works is Birdwatch is really another part of the Twitter platform. It's a separate website you can go to where users can flag tweets that they believe are misleading and then Twitter's idea is you can write notes about these tweets. Trump’s not on there anymore but if Trump was on, you could flag that tweet and write a note saying this is part of the tweet is incorrect, here's some context about why that's wrong and then other users would be able to rate that note that's helpful or unhelpful, and Twitter's idea is once there's consensus on whether it was a helpful or unhelpful note, then that would be attached to the tweet and people will be more informed and misinformation would die down. It's interesting, if you want to kind of go down a rabbit hole, a bunch of information on the Twitter website about birdwatching. One of the things that stuck out to me was they have these three core values,it seems comically naive to me for them to have this after everything that's happened. But one of them is to act in good faith and do not attempt to game or manipulate the system, which just seems, I can't tell if there is a group of people within Twitter that truly believe that people will do this and they're just naive is the best way to say it or are they just evil. Because it just seems so out of touch with reality. But yeah, what do you all think? Will this stop misinformation on Twitter? Is this the solution?
Phyllida: Do you know what, I'm not like a native Tweeter. I definitely am more of like from a personal perspective, I definitely have more of an affinity with Instagram, just because I like pretty pictures basically. But for business purposes for kind of organisational purposes, Twitter's vital because it's just a way to be monitoring and engaging in relevant conversations but also just to see what other people are talking about right now. So great that there’s seemingly a crackdown on misinformation but still there’s a platform that is just a product of people's opinions isn't it? So how do you then move away from misinformation. I mean, I do appreciate and understand and have kind of a bit of respect for Twitter's efforts to crack down on some of the ways that the platform is abused. I mean I remember back when I was working at Changing Faces, which is one of our member organisations, a common experience for lots of people with facial differences is online abuse. And for that reason, Twitter took the initiative to put us down as a whitelisted organisation, so that if someone from our community came to us and said, ‘I've been subject to abuse on this platform’, we can then escalate that kind of report and make sure that it was handled appropriately and that it was seen. So I do appreciate that there are some initiatives to kind of take charge of the way that their platform is being used; this being one of them. But then all good intentions as you say by those kinds of values to stand by but how do you actually monitor and continue to track all this misinformation in an endless stream of stuff that's led by humans who are ultimately flawed and full of misinformation.
Harry: Yeah, the challenge is volume. They can’t cope with it themselves, no matter how much moderation they attempt to put in and so now they're reaching out to the community and saying, can you moderate other people's content for us, please.
Ankur: Exactly.
Harry: I mean that may be really successful. It may be that actually, in a Wikipedia style, mass moderation will work and some moderators, people who bother to do the moderation will potentially be marked a more genuine and more accurate and more useful than others and the system may work in that way but Twitter has always been about who gets to the tweet first. Like if it’s people who want to spread it, they will spread it and if it’s people who want to discredit it, they will discredit it but I don't know. The Trump tweets were still being shared broadly even with the flags on them. I don't know whether people care. Like this is the new world where facts are facts and there’s fake facts and false facts and there’s true facts. It’s who spreads it rather than whether somebody has marked it as accurate or not for a lot of people. Or at least I fear.
Phyllida: But also you can still use facts. You can still use data to actually serve whatever purpose you want it to. So I was talking to my boyfriend about preparing for today's discussion and was running through some of the topics that we were going to discuss and we were talking about Twitter and he was saying about when Trump had that infamous speech where he was talking about how we could potentially use like disinfectant to counteract the virus and then all of this data came out to say that, you know, Dettol had received an increase in calls of people misusing the product and trying to ingest it and whatever. But then at the same time, people were just generally using Dettol more often because of the pandemic and wanting to clean things. So that in itself was an example of how you can use data to serve whatever purpose you want it to.
Ankur: Yeah that's super interesting. And also the point you made earlier about the whitelisting of your organisation to be able to kind of escalate specific instances of abuse or harassment is actually interesting. I hadn't heard of that but it makes me think that if that is happening, or that continues to happen, where charities are empowered to have a platform, that could help. Not with all the misinformation but at least with the kind of some of the vitriol that maybe exists on Twitter. And that to me seems like an interesting shift, because it's ultimately about shifting power away from whoever is on Twitter to the community to an extent, to be empowered, to be able to raise these issues. So that to me feels like a potential path forward. And something like that or an initiative like that, if it was more public or they are doing it, it seems to me a potential direction to go to deal with some of this stuff.
Phyllida:Yeah, I mean, truth be told, I'm not sure whether that system is still in place, but I think handing over trusted authority to organisations that can support. I guess it's not just about shifting the blame. It's actually about kind of using the power of the community. And I also heard that Twitter are becoming less willy nilly about handing out blue ticks. So I don't know whether this is just me again making, you know, this is misinformation. This is me, making wild claims, but I did hear on some training around recently that they want to rethink the way that they hand out blue ticks. With this Trump situation as a case study for that because he had obviously far too much power and the way that the algorithm serves people who have blue ticked on all social media platforms, just means that actually why is it that we are seemingly evaluating the information of like an influencer or someone that was on Love
Island over the information that comes from someone who actually might be a professional or might have actually true information behind them, but just doesn't have the audience or the kind of influencer status.
Harry: I like the idea of authority. I think that word is spot on. It doesn’t necessarily just have to be an organisation’s Twitter accounts, it could be individuals’ Twitter accounts, where you look at people within certain sectors and allow them to have more control are more weight when they feedback on statements that relate to their own work or their own experience. It takes a lot of time to build up authority and therefore it’s less likely to be gamed. The amount of data that Twitter has now about the users who've been on board for years, is obviously enough for them to write some clever algorithm to start to look at that and allow, rather than saying ‘oh anybody can mark a tweet as being inaccurate and put some information on and then any old group of people can say yes that's right it's inaccurate and it’ll get marked. So it would be good for that to be weighted based on whether they know you to be trustworthy and whether they know you to be experienced in that sector.
Phyllida: Yeah, I mean that was the rationale behind the whitelisting at Changing Faces, was that, you know hateful content on the platform was fairly easy to identify when it's using words that are overtly racist or overtly anti certain religions or whatever. But when it comes to facial difference, calling someone ugly or using terms that are offensive to someone with a facial difference aren’t necessarily as widely recognised or actually taken out of context or used in relation to someone who doesn't have official differences is less hateful. And what was happening was that people were reporting misconduct on the platform and Twitter themselves were saying that it didn't violate their guidelines. So that was kind of the reason behind bringing us in because we could actually identify what was hateful and what was potentially online hate crime or what wasn’t.
Harry: Yeah, it’s micro moderation. They give very specific areas of moderation to very experienced or knowledgeable groups of people which I mean, for me, that sounds like an option. It's just whether they can find enough people who are willing to invest time in that and feel like they're involved enough, invested enough to do it.
Phyllida: I mean that is quite a big responsibility on a charity, for example. Can they offer a grant to a charity to enable them to bring on the resource because it's a big responsibility and should we have to resource it ourselves?
Ankur: Can Twitter afford to maybe help? Yeah exactly. If they're pushing it on a community.
Harry: There shouldn't be an expectation, which is what the current Birdwatch, Birdwatch?
Ankur: Birdwatch, yeah.
Harry: It makes me think of UK nature programmes. Right, let's move on. So, Rant of the Week. Well, I suppose it is almost a rant. I opened a terrifying piece in The Guardian this week about the frequency with which right-wing users are getting bombarded with ads for combat gear on Facebook. That sounds scary.
Ankur: Yeah, this is pretty terrifying and we'll drop it in the show notes and then folks can take a look but essentially there was this essay in The Guardian by this author who has been working as a researcher on films and needed to make a number of pro Trump, social media accounts. They were working on four for one of the films so they created these pro Trump social media accounts as part of their research and they started seeing over a period of months, the majority of the ads they were seeing on Facebook were selling tactical gear clearly intended for combat. So this is before the Capitol attacks that happened this month but things like tactical backpacks with a weapon holders, night vision sights, body armour, and they had examples of these ads in the article. And then when you look at them, the tone is really terrifying. It's all about survival, stockpiling weapons, the world is going to end kind of stuff. And so, you know, of course Facebook says that they don't allow advertising of guns and bombs but the ads themselves, there's clear examples where they can show weapons, even if they're not advertising them directly. And I thought what was interesting about this and what was scary is that the author who themselves wasn't really part of the pro Trump crowd, after spending a few months in this echo chamber, themselves started to feel that they needed to buy guns, even though they had no real need to or training or anything. And they talk about that shift for them and how they only imagine people who are buying into all the misinformation out there, seeing all these ads and what it might do to them. And so, yeah, we talk about echo chambers but it is really terrifying to think, especially in light of the Capitol attacks that happened, just how people are being whipped into a frenzy and divided in this way and driven to violence because of what they're seeing and how much people are shaped by this. It's pretty terrifying.
Harry: Yeah. The same thing in my personal experience, it isn't combat gear obviously but the same thing for me happened on Instagram which you were talking about earlier Phyllida, which is, I see adverts for things that obviously I'm interested in talk about either on other networks or search the internet for or whatever and Instagram is absolutely rife with ads. You get one every five or six posts sometimes when I'm on there and I do start to think, do I need this. I mean if you hit somebody with an idea enough times they'll be like, was that my idea? Did I want this? So yeah, I completely get that. I get the impact it can have.
Phyllida: Oh definitely and I mean, I see it in a consumer driven way. I haven't necessarily seen it in this kind of insidious way where it's causing me to go and think about buying a gun but I've definitely seen it and I've looked at one brand who sells sustainable activewear and then all of a sudden I'm fed ads for about a million others and I'm like well maybe I’ll buy this. It's just, it's just too much and it does feed into my kind of consumerist brain. But I don't know. I haven't seen it myself. I haven't fallen down that rabbit hole myself but I 100% know people, where it has particularly right now with the rise of conspiracy theories and like anti vaxxers and all of the kind of dialogue at the moment, that's kind of causing just the divisive nature of social media right now. And it's terrifying. I mean, this links back to the way that our data is used. From a personal perspective, I know lots of people who have kind of come off of using their phones or their watches to track their health and things like cycle tracker apps for women, if you then don't track your cycle for a month, then you get hit with ads for strollers or nappies because it assumes that you're now pregnant, and that kind of thing just absolutely terrifies me. But as I said I haven't personally seen anything that's kind of taking me down that rabbit hole of becoming a right wing extremist but then that might be absolutely that I'm being fed more stuff that's making me even more of a lefty.
Ankur: Yeah, I mean there's the echo chamber piece and what is scary about it is the interplay between the misinformation. Whether it's on Twitter or Facebook or wherever and then the opportunity to take action. So it's one thing to be fed all of these lies, or fear mongering or whatever, but then to say or imply that you can take action about it in a violent way through these ads, is pretty scary. And that kind of provides that bridge and I have to wonder. I mean obviously there's no way to really know this but I have to wonder how many of the people who were involved in the Capitol attacks in DC, you know, started out as folks who were maybe researching a question or were trying to figure something out that was being discussed in the public and then fell into this rabbit hole and then started seeing these ads and kind of built on each other. It’s not necessarily a one step process but it's pretty wild how much we’re shaped by what we see.
Harry: Where do you think the fault is here? Like obviously if you’re selling combat gear, this is a no brainer so is it the fault of advertising networks that should be policing this with policies?
Ankur: They talk a little bit about solutions in the article and the author says on one hand you could extend the ban on guns and bombs to this tactical gear but there's kind of a question of where do you draw the line right? It’s like, is a backpack just a backpack and when does it become totally cool to carry weapons. And so they actually make a case to, like what you’re saying Phyllida, which is to flip the script and to actually have more cross pollination of advertising and information. So for those of us on the left, maybe we do see maybe not the combat gear but we do see posts that we wouldn't normally see and folks on the right, they start to see posts they wouldn’t normally see or even products they wouldn’t normally see. Obviously there’s a question for advertisers and their whole kind of revenue model of whether they’d even go for that but that was an interesting point. Actually, enforcing some of that cross pollination to turn down the volume on the intensity of what you see.
Harry: Have you got any thoughts Phyllida?
Phyllida: Yeah. I think that would be brilliant. From an advertiser’s perspective, I don't know if that would be financially viable. For example, at the moment, I keep getting hit with farming ads. Like the UK British Farmers Alliance. I’m vegan so there's a lot of discussion at the moment. I mean there was the European fight for alternative meats not to be able to be called a burger and that kind of thing. And there’s swathes of campaigns being backed by the dairy industry, again, to push what in my eyes is misinformation about the dairy and the meat industry being environmentally friendly or good or actually supporting people's well being and that kind of thing. So, yeah, I mean, I’m obviously being hit by the counter narrative to the one that I’m aligned with personally but at the same time, I think that that’s making me stay more aligned with what I truly believe in and it’s having the negative effect. Like I said, I think it would be brilliant if we can start hitting right wing people who are getting these combat ads with something about peace and something about loving each other and something about being a pacifist but I just don’t know if that is actually going to serve the cutthroat organisation and businesses and brands and movements are actually sadly, where there’s a lot of support and financial support as well, I just don’t see think that it will. The cynical side of me thinks that it’s not a solution that is going to be financially viable or that people will get behind.
Harry: I love when Tech for Good Live goes dark.
Phyllida: [laughs]
Harry: Doom mongering. Any final thoughts Ankur before we move on?
Ankur: No, I think it’s well said. I’m in the same cynical boat.
Harry: Nice summarising. I would say the same. Okay. Flaming Lips. This is a great story. So the Flaming Lips staged a unique space bubble concert in Oklahoma. They did a test pilot of this a while ago but this is the one that really hit the news. Tell us about this Ankur.
Ankur: Yeah. If you’re familiar with the Flaming Lips, they’re kind of a psychedelic rock band. Is that how you all would describe them?
Harry: Yeah. I would go with that.
Ankur: They have some weird shows. I’ve never been to one but basically what they’ve done this past weekend is they held two shows with audience members with their own giant plastic bubbles to protect them from each other. So to essentially maintain social distancing of some type and each show had 100 bubbles that could hold up to three people each and every bubble also came with a speaker, a water bottle, a fan. They had little signs that people could put up in the bubble to show staff if they needed to be let out to go to the restroom or if it got too hot. Is this the future? Is this our new world? What do you all think?
Phyllida: Truth be told, I just want to be right there in a mosh pit, inside someone else’s armpit, covered in my own filth from the past three days at a festival. Definitely someone else’s piss all over me. I just want to be in there and I don’t think that a bubble is really...I think it’s a great means to an end right now and probably quite a lot of fun and environmentally non-friendly. And I think it's great as a gimmick. The reason I discovered this story was because it was on a meme, so great for right now but I don’t think it’s the future sadly. Not for me anyway.
Harry: I totally agree. I couldn’t agree more. This is not a replacement for concerts. This is a how-do-we-get-through-this and allow people to still experience live music with bigger bands who can afford to do this kind of thing and probably as much for the promotion as it was for either making money out of the concert or it being a long term thing. I mean if there’s 100 bubbles with up to three people, I mean, there weren't three people in many of those bubbles. It was like a 200 person gig. That’s really intimate, not something that you could scale up. They said it took them twenty minutes to get people into their bubbles and I guess another twenty minutes to get them out again but you couldn’t do it with 1000 or 5000 people. It would just be chaos.
Phyllida: I mean Glastonbury is not happening either way, is it? So that’s all I really care about to be perfectly honest. But I saw, I think it was a sub-focused concert in New Zealand recently, where there was this big crowd of people and honestly if there’s been one thing that has made me feel disheartened about this whole situation, it’s been seeing the footage of that concert going on right now.
Ankur: Yeah that’s the one where they had a huge number of people right? At that concert and they’re essentially in that mosh pit that you were describing?
Phyllida: Yeah, thousands. Jacinda Ardern, she’s just the best. She nailed it.
Harry: So we don’t have any more to add other than this is a gimmick, we don’t agree with it and it can’t have been that great.
Phyllida: [laughs]
Ankur: Yeah we’re all cynical about it. It’s a kids story. I agree it’s a nice gimmick but you can’t really replace what I think people are looking for, which is human connection again, this doesn’t quite cut it.
Harry: Yes please, I’d like some more of that. Let’s get back to doing these podcasts at least partially in the same room as other people. Right. Well that’s all we have time for. Thank you for listening. Phyllida, how was that for you? Where can we find you online? What other interesting things that we need to know?
Phyllida: Sure. Thank you so much for having me. So I’m Phyllida Swift. You can find me personally on Phyllida Swift. I am the only one but my work is Face Equality International. Find us across all the social media channels that are pumping us with misinformation but basically stay in touch with our work. We are an alliance of charities that are united by the cause for face equality. We want everyone with a facial difference to be treated fairly irrespective of the way that they look. So you can get involved with us, in particular around International Face Equality Week, which we have each year but go and follow us, go and follow our work and stay in touch.
Harry: Thank you. It’s a great cause and you’ve been a great guest. We love it when people join in the dark side of the table.
Phyllida: In the cynicism [laughs].
Harry: So listeners, what did you think? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Get in touch with us on Twitter, on Tech for Good Live or email on hello@techforgood.live. We’d love it if you could give us an Itunes review and tell your mates about this podcast. Thanks to podcast.co for hosting our podcast. Goodbye.