Scam ads, AI hallucinations, and legal implications.

Dave Bittner: Hello everyone and welcome to "Caveat," N2K CyberWire's privacy surveillance law and policy podcast. I'm Dave Bittner and joining me is my co-host Ben Yelin from the University of Maryland Center for Cyber Health and Hazard Strategies. Hey there, Ben.

Ben Yelin: Hello, Dave.

Dave Bittner: On today's show, Ben discusses a lawsuit gone bad for a guy suing Facebook and some of its users. I've got the story of a California county suing Meta over scam ads. It's a Meta show today, Ben. While this show covers legal topics and Ben is a lawyer, the views expressed do not constitute legal advice or official legal advice on any of the topics we cover, please contact your attorney. [ Music ] All right, Ben, you and I both, without coordinating ahead of time, have come up with stories having to do with Meta. They got it coming, I guess.

Ben Yelin: They really do. Yeah. Dealing with a lot of lawsuits. I always love it when we have, there's some theme to our cases because we really do not coordinate them --

Dave Bittner: That's right.

Ben Yelin: -- ahead of time.

Dave Bittner: That's right. What do you got?

Ben Yelin: My story, it's frankly kind of fun, even though like some of it is not a laughing matter.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: I can't help but just being entertained by this.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: So there's a guy named Nico D'Ambrosio who seems like he was a pretty bad date.

Dave Bittner: Oh.

Ben Yelin: He went out with a woman on one date, and it didn't go very well. And she intimated to him that like she didn't want to spend the night. And he sent some very rude text messages with a lot of bad words on it. And she posted those text messages in a Facebook group. It's local to Chicago. It's called "Are We Dating the Same Guy?"

Dave Bittner: Oh no. Oh no.

Ben Yelin: So it's basically a forum in which women in Chicago take screenshots of terrible things that has happened to their dates.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: Instead of just taking the L here, which is what he probably should have done and changed his behavior.

Dave Bittner: Moved on.

Ben Yelin: This guy decided to instigate a lawsuit. But the lawsuit was not just against the individual woman, but it was also against her parents because she made the post from her parents' house, so she was using their network. It was also against Meta. Basically, the allegation was that Meta should be liable for amplifying the post for profit by boosting engagement. Now, why do you think engagement had been boosted here? It's because this thing was so vulgar.

Dave Bittner: Right. He kind of brought it on himself.

Ben Yelin: Yeah. And there are some details that might have helped his case, like somebody else in the replies posted a picture of somebody who actually had been convicted for sexual assault. The person wasn't him, and nobody really knows why that commenter who was anonymous posted that in there. But his allegation was like, you're ruining my reputation by posting me with a known convicted sexual criminal.

Dave Bittner: I see.

Ben Yelin: So basically, his claim is that this not only harmed his reputation, which is the basis for the defamation claim, but that this was a form of doxing. Even though while one commenter I think said like, where does this guy work. It was never really discussed after that. And nobody at any point mentioned his home address.

Dave Bittner: All right.

Ben Yelin: So he sues all these parties in court and it goes poorly. It's in a federal district court because for complicated reasons. He, the way he filed the suit against so many different parties, because a lot of them were out of state, it qualified for federal court. So it went to this federal district court. They dismissed it with prejudice, meaning like we're not, this isn't some technicality, like your case sucks. You have failed to make a valid legal claim.

Dave Bittner: Well, let me just pause you for a second here for clarification on the law. Isn't the ultimate defense against defamation the truth?

Ben Yelin: Yes, it is.

Dave Bittner: And so --

Ben Yelin: He never denied that he sent the text message in question.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: So yes, I mean, that's like problem one of 100 in his lawsuit here.

Dave Bittner: Is there any reasonable complaint that someone shares publicly what was intended to be a private correspondence?

Ben Yelin: I mean, the way the law is structured, that's just not really how it works.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: Like you give up your reasonable expectation of privacy and therefore any sort of Fourth Amendment and/or property interest in those communications when you send it to somebody else. Like that's just the risk you run.

Dave Bittner: I see.

Ben Yelin: It's not like you're sending it to a trusted company, a third party who's told you, like, we're going to keep your communication secret. Like --

Dave Bittner: Right. He didn't get her to sign a non-disclosure at the outside

Ben Yelin: Exactly.

Dave Bittner: Maybe he did.

Ben Yelin: That's the risk. Like you have to know that whatever text message you send to anyone, if they decided that it would be funny to publish it, there's really nothing that the legal system is going to do about it.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: But it gets worse because he appealed this case to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

Dave Bittner: So, wait, wait, wait, wait. He gets it dismissed with prejudice.

Ben Yelin: Yes.

Dave Bittner: And he thinks his next smart line of action is going to be to appeal.

Ben Yelin: Yeah, again, that would have been another great opportunity to take the L here.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: I mean, Look, sometimes you lose in district court. Now, he has the absolute right to appeal the dismissal of this case with prejudice. You know, if you have the requisite filing fees hanging around, then, you know, go for it. That's the way our legal system works.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: But it was a really stupid decision and it went very, very poorly because in drafting briefs, he relied on a law firm called Mark Trent AI.

Dave Bittner: Oh.

Ben Yelin: Which advertises heavy use of AI in legal work.

Dave Bittner: Oh.

Ben Yelin: The firm admitted that it used AI tools to draft the complaint and arguments.

Dave Bittner: I bet the judge loved that.

Ben Yelin: Oh, the judges were just thrilled. Just totally thrilled.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: And it claimed, like this company claims that AI can, is more talented than actual lawyers and like they can poke holes in the other party's arguments in ways that real lawyers can't.

Dave Bittner: Sure.

Ben Yelin: Like they can comb through their briefs and try and find new angles that humans can't do.

Dave Bittner: Sure, sure, sure.

Ben Yelin: Yeah, so this one very poorly goes up to a three-judge panel on Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. And the tone of this case is like, where do we even start with this guy? Like just, I can't even believe this.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: So the court found that the legal filings contained mistakes and fictitious quotations. It cited a whole bunch of cases that didn't exist, and it cited them with confidence. It showed, quote, hallmarks of the misuse of generative artificial intelligence, and it included errors that could have been caught with basic professional diligence. So the AI work basically invented fake legal authorities, produced questionable, unreliable legal reasoning and made mistakes that if there was just a single level of human review, like very, very basic stuff, then I think that human would have realized that this was a disaster and that they needed to go back to the drawing board. Maybe come up with a different prompt to put in your AI system.

Dave Bittner: Now, does this put the law firm in jeopardy?

Ben Yelin: Absolutely.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: So that's where this is going. The court went through the facts of the case, said like, we affirm the lower court's decision to dismiss this with prejudice. But that's not enough for this guy. You know, for most, if you have a reasonable case, but you're just, you lose out on the merits, you know, the court system is generally not going to punish you by issuing sanctions if you make a good faith argument.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: That's not what happened here. So there are going to be, probably going to be sanctions imposed on the attorneys who work for this AI law firm.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: Assuming there are real human beings there. I mean, I'm kind of just picturing like an empty office with computers doing all the work.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: But basically the judge admonished them and said, you can't submit filings with fake citations and that as lawyers, you have a professional responsibility to verify the things you submit regardless of whether you use AI or not. Like feel free to use AI. But it's your responsibility to review things, and you are responsible if something goes wrong.

Dave Bittner: I mean, this would be the same if, say, a law clerk made the mistake, right?

Ben Yelin: Exactly.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: Ultimately, you as the attorney, there's actually one really funny element to that I was going to say, you as the attorney, you sign off on this brief, but the AI forgot to sign off on the brief. The little slot where they're supposed to sign and affirm that they're representing their client, they just didn't do that.

Dave Bittner: Right. There's a little string of ones and zeros.

Ben Yelin: One of those little things you just got to remember. So --

Dave Bittner: Wow.

Ben Yelin: -- there might be sanctions. It's kind of unclear what the sanctions are. The court is giving the lawyers an opportunity to defend themselves by basically coming up with an excuses brief.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: Like, give us your best argument for why we shouldn't punish you with sanctions.

Dave Bittner: Right, right.

Ben Yelin: But assuming that doesn't go well, then they might be responsible for all of the attorney's fees for the other party, and there could be additional sanctions. And they might also get in trouble with the State of Illinois Bar Association --

Dave Bittner: Yeah, yeah.

Ben Yelin: -- where they could face ethical punishments. So long story short, yeah, AI is not going to take over the legal profession anytime soon because it's just not quite there yet.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: You know, there are things that are helpful. Like you can give it a 300-page chat log and say find incriminating conversations in here. And I think it might do a good job with something like that. But draft this brief and cite relevant citations is a recipe for disaster. And as long as that keeps happening, I don't think, there are all these AI optimists in Silicon Valley who are like, every white collar job is going to be eliminated in the next 12 months. It's like, well, you know, I'll believe it when I see it, because this keeps happening.

Dave Bittner: Yeah, I was at a trade show earlier this year down in Florida, and there was a company that had a booth. And their whole thing was the future of legal services, AI plus real lawyers.

Ben Yelin: I mean that, I think there is something to that.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: Yeah, yeah. You're showing me the logo here and it's just spectacular.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: I can put a link to that in our show notes. Yeah, I mean, I think there's something to that. I think if I were hiring attorneys to represent me, it would be my expectation that for certain tasks, certain good use cases, they would use AI. I mean, ultimately, they are billing me. So if you can cut down on my billable hours by having AI perform a task that would take humans three to four hours, AI does it in two minutes, sure.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: Like, I'll take that as an efficiency gain, but it just can't actually do the job. Like it's just not reliable enough at this point to submit briefs and make arguments in courtrooms.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: Judges are becoming even more skeptical than they were and more frustrated because they keep seeing this. People keep trying to cut corners, and it's really, really bad for our legal system.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: For one, like there are going to be some district court judges who themselves are overwhelmed or their clerks are overwhelmed, and maybe they miss something that's fake because generally you're supposed to be able to rely on competent lawyers to put together a legally valid brief. And we're going to get these instances where judges, maybe they don't do their due diligence, and then we're going to be formulating case law based on total BS. And it's just very bad for our legal system. What's funny about this is like using AI in his legal filings was bad, but even if he didn't, he was going to lose the case anyway. You can't sue people or platforms for negative opinions like being called, quote, a bad date, which is what the person said.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: Section 230 also almost certainly immunizes Meta from a lawsuit here since they can't be responsible for content posted on their platform.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: But the cherry on top is having AI do this work without human review. It's just, continues to be unacceptable and people are just going to keep learning the hard way. Maybe it's the sanctions that they'll have to pay here. That'll be the true lesson.

Dave Bittner: I'm thinking about Lionel Hutz from The Simpsons.

Ben Yelin: Lionel Huz totally would have used AI.

Dave Bittner: Right?

Ben Yelin: Right. I move for a bad court thingy. Well, he's had in for me ever since I kind of ran over his dog. Well, replace the word kind of with repeatedly and dog with son.

Dave Bittner: So, okay, here's my other silly question. You said a three, three judge panel. Any chance we're going to go for an en banc?

Ben Yelin: No, no, no en banc for this one. This was a three, three zero decision. Yeah. I mean, this guy is welcome to try and petition for an en banc hearing.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: But that has not a chance of happening.

Dave Bittner: That's funny.

Ben Yelin: Usually the qualifications for the en banc aren't set in stone, but generally you have to have some type of dissent where it's possible that the full panel would see the case differently than three judges.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: That's, that's not the case here.

Dave Bittner: It's not going to happen here.

Ben Yelin: Yeah, this is, this is about as easy an appellate case as you're ever going to get.

Dave Bittner: Yeah. Oh well, bless his heart.

Ben Yelin: It is. I mean, I was actually reading the decision and the tone of it is just hilarious.

Dave Bittner: Oh, I see, yeah.

Ben Yelin: In this appeal, in this appeal we affirm a dismissal of a litany of claims arising from a few social media posts about the plaintiff's reportedly obnoxious behavior on dates after a breakup. Like, ooh, he body slammed him in that first sentence there. Not only is this guy submitting poor and unsuccessful potential lawsuits, but he's also a bad date.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: And seems to be quite obnoxious.

Dave Bittner: Well, there's a bit of the Streisand effect too, right. Because, you know --

Ben Yelin: Oh yeah.

Dave Bittner: -- it's all reported on now. So, you know, and he, it's just going to make it harder. If anyone, potential dates Google him, right.

Ben Yelin: Yeah. He might have to go petition the name change office. Which also itself doesn't work usually.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: Because if you go and they understand the reason that you're trying to change your name is like because you did something stupid and you want to escape the consequences of it. Ultimately, a judge has to approve that name change. So it's just not, it's just not going to go well for this guy.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: Long story short. Yeah.

Dave Bittner: I love it.

Ben Yelin: Don't use AI in litigation. Also send nicer texts. Let's not read people out with terrible swear words.

Dave Bittner: Right, like you said, take the L.

Ben Yelin: Take the L.

Dave Bittner: Just move on. Yeah. All right, we'll have a link to that story in the show notes. [ Music ] My story this week is also Meta adjacent, or probably a little more Meta direct than yours was. But there's a couple interesting elements here. So this comes from the San Jose Spotlight, which is a local media organization in San Jose, California.

Ben Yelin: Go Sharks, yep.

Dave Bittner: Yeah, and Santa Clara County has filed suit against Meta alleging that the company knowingly allowed scam ads to proliferate across Facebook and Instagram. And they're claiming, the county is claiming that Meta weakened their fraud prevention efforts in order to preserve their advertising revenue. They allege that Meta earns about $7 billion annually from scam related advertising. So not just advertising, scam related advertising. And they get into some of the specifics here. Most of the scams are around, wait for it, cryptocurrency.

Ben Yelin: Shocker.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: Total shocker.

Dave Bittner: Their impersonation schemes, fake investments, and fraudulent medical cures. I think anybody who's been on Facebook has seen all of these.

Ben Yelin: Yep. And it's 100 times worse than it was even two years ago.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: Like it is slop through and through.

Dave Bittner: Yeah, and it's so aggressive.

Ben Yelin: Yep.

Dave Bittner: So the complaint references are an investigation from Reuters back last year that linked Meta to one third of successful internet scams in the US.

Ben Yelin: That's genuinely impressive. I feel like Ron Burgundy when I'm like, I'm not even mad. That's, that's legitimately incredible.

Dave Bittner: Right, right. They claim that, again, the county claims that some scammers remained active despite being flagged more than 500 times. And the county says that Meta enforced what they call revenue guardrails that discourage removing scam ads if doing so would reduce revenue beyond a certain threshold. So the county is looking for attorney fees and a court order blocking these alleged violations of false advertising and unfair competition laws. Of course, Meta denies the allegations. and says that Reuters mischaracterized their efforts to combat fraud. They say they removed more than 159 million scam ads last year and they plan to fight the lawsuit. Let's look at this.

Ben Yelin: Does it seem like if they removed 159 million scam ads and are still having these problems, doesn't that imply that there are billions of scam ads?

Dave Bittner: Right, exactly.

Ben Yelin: First of all, I want to know if Santa Clara County does win the case, what's going to happen with the $7 billion? Because, you know, any jurisdiction would love to get their hands on that. That's a lot of money. It seems like they're not asking for that. They're just asking for attorney's fees and declaratory judgment, but.

Dave Bittner: Yeah, I guess they want it to stop.

Ben Yelin: Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of like, go for the big kahuna. You can always use it to upgrade your infrastructure, build housing.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: Seven billion dollars is a lot of money. Look, I, I think there's a lot of merit to this case. You never know what's going to happen in court, but I think it's likely that this goes to litigation. The reason I think this has a decent chance of success is that Santa Clara County did the prep work and used this Reuters investigation to plausibly allege that this was intentional. Facebook was always going to have the defense that like, we're doing our best. It's really hard. When you have a platform with billions of people, like it's really hard to stop scammers. But this Reuters evidence that they knew that this was going on and they still put up guardrails not to cut down on fake advertising, but to protect their profits. Like that's a pretty, that's a pretty serious allegation.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: And I would be very interested to see this actually go to trial, though I suspect if Meta eventually thinks that it's not worth it for them to lose this case, then I think they could settle with the county for some amount of money plus attorney's fees. But, you know, I think Meta for reputational purposes might actually try and fight this. I say, and maybe this is my personal bias creeping in, good for Santa Clara County. Like it's just gotten out of control. It's not, I heard somebody else say this, I'm forgetting where I heard it, but it's not even social media anymore. It's basically, very few interactions on Facebook are with people that you are friends with.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: Most of the content is advertising, scam advertising, as we've seen here. AI slop, which is all over the place and people in the comments who clearly aren't realizing that it's AI slop, it's just a complete and total cesspool.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: And so I understand that like Zuckerberg feels like he has a fiduciary duty to make as much money as humanly possible.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: In my mind, he's just completely gone off the deep end and cannot plausibly justify what's happened to his platform. It goes beyond anything that we saw in 2016 with Cambridge Analytica because it's just, it's more fundamental than that. Like he's been willing to turn the platform into the lowest common denominator of stuff, and I'm trying to break my Facebook habits.

Dave Bittner: Yeah, it's awful.

Ben Yelin: But you know I have a tough time quitting legacy social media sites.

Dave Bittner: I know, I know, I know, shame on you.

Ben Yelin: Really, shame on me.

Dave Bittner: So in the commentary I've seen about this, I've seen some raised eyebrows that it is a county that is going after Meta. I saw one person say, you know, how would this play out? Would we go county by county? And then that's not really scalable. What do you think about that?

Ben Yelin: Yeah, I mean, Santa Clara County makes sense. It has the resources to pursue this lawsuit. It's obviously where Silicon Valley is located. But it is interesting that it's the county. I mean, it also means that any potential relief in this case won't impact anybody outside Santa Clara County. The county is going to recover attorney's fees. And so --

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: -- that's a little bit of money going back into the coffers. It would force Facebook to put an end to these practices, which is good, but there would be no other tangible outcome that we'd see in other counties. Yeah, I think county by county, it would take too long. If Meta loses this case, the fear would be that when they're sued in some other county, you'd get in front of a different judge. It would be a different set of facts. And it would only be persuasive precedent from the Santa Clara case and another case in some other state court. So yeah, it is kind of a risky way to go about this. They think, Santa Clara County does have standing. I think they can raise standing based on the fact that they can easily prove that most Santa Clara residents use Facebook. That this is --

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: -- I'm sure there, it's a violation of some type of consumer protection statute in California. So I think that's not going to be that much of a burden. But yeah, I mean, I think if I were to design a perfect lawsuit, it would be a class action on behalf of the 330 some-odd million users of Facebook in this country where all of us get like 10 bucks --

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: -- for the slop that has controlled our timeline over the past several years. I'd even take a public apology from Zuckerberg, awkwardly sitting in front of a Senate committee or something.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: But kudos to Santa Clara County for getting out in front on this.

Dave Bittner: Now, what about would a judge in this case have to make Facebook change their ways?

Ben Yelin: It would just be an injunction where it would be like a court order saying that they have to do X, Y, and Z to get rid of these scam advertisements. And then the court would monitor Facebook's or Meta's progress in complying with the court order. So it's just kind of like any other injunction in which you are forcing an entity to do something. Either they do it or they'll face sanctions for not complying with a valid court order. So the court would certainly have the authority to at least try to enforce this. It's going to be really hard to enforce because Facebook is just such a, I mean, it's like the Milky Way at this point.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: Like it's so nebulous, it's so large. We don't know exactly who its user base is anymore. So much of it takes place internationally. So it would be hard to enforce, but at least it would force Meta to have to try to enforce it.

Dave Bittner: Let me ask. So could Facebook come back and say, hey, good news. No one who lives in Santa Clara County will have to worry about this anymore. We've geofenced them, and they're going to be scam free.

Ben Yelin: Yeah, then you're going to start to see suits from other counties.

Dave Bittner: Right. Okay.

Ben Yelin: So they probably don't want to do that. Now, Santa Clara County, like I said, a wealthy county, they have the resources to do it. A lot of counties don't, but a lot of counties do. Like I'm sure the San Francisco district attorney would be happy to pursue this --

Dave Bittner: I see.

Ben Yelin: -- if they think that they could be successful. San Mateo County, you know, part of Silicon Valley is in San Mateo County. Maybe they filed their own lawsuit. Eventually it starts to pile up, and that's going to cost real money. So I think like that solution would be too clever on behalf of Meta. Like I think the only way to definitively solve this problem, which I don't think they're going to do, is to actually crack down on scam advertising. But because it's such a center of profits for them, like absent them losing this case, like they're just not going to stop.

Dave Bittner: If you're the judge here and you look at a company like Meta and you see that they have a history of coming at these sort of things in, with bad faith, right. And, you know, not complying with past orders and just doing everything they can to try to circumvent these sorts of things. How do you come at that if you're a judge knowing, how does a judge come at that when they know the person that they're saying, you know, they're putting this injunction and, do you just have to put very specific and strict checks and guardrails in there?

Ben Yelin: Yeah, so for the purposes of the actual judgment, whether Meta wins or loses, courts are not supposed to take into account propensity to commit certain acts.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: You're supposed to judge every case independently on the merits. Now, there are a lot of exceptions to that. Any evidence of like a particular habit or a modus operandi that could be a scenario in which they would permit that type of evidence. But I think in the enforcement, I think the judge could put significant guardrails on the enforcement part of the decision. Assuming that the plaintiffs win the decision, the judge could say, I know Meta's history of evading court decisions, and our monitoring is not going to be the monitoring we use for other cases.

Dave Bittner: I see.

Ben Yelin: Like we're going to commit resources to this, whatever the equivalent of the US Marshals are for Santa Clara County, like they're going to actually go in and make sure that this is being enforced. So, yeah, I mean, I think that definitely factors in. We don't know who the judge is that they've drawn, and that might make a difference too.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: If they, if it's a judge who's spent any time on Facebook in the past couple of years, then they're going to be out of luck.

Dave Bittner: Right, right. It is just remarkable how bad Facebook has gotten. Just flagrantly bad Facebook.

Ben Yelin: Right, and like, for those of us who are in on the ground floor, it had problems. I was, my freshman year of college was the first year of Facebook.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: So I'm old enough to remember when you'd put what dorm room you were in, and you could click on that and figure out who else was living in your dorm room.

Dave Bittner: Okay.

Ben Yelin: Obviously, it was going to expand from there, and there were going to be a lot of changes as they tried to scale up. It got to a point in the early to mid-2010s where it was incredibly ubiquitous. Our parents started having Facebook and using it, but it still wasn't what it is now, which is just like pure slop. Any means necessary to grab your attention, even if it's scam advertising, even if it's clickbait, even if it's AI junk that's very obviously some type of deep fake. Like it's an, there seems to me to be an anything goes philosophy that as long as they're making money and people are still going to the site, as you love to quote Lily Tomlin, we don't care. We don't have to.

Dave Bittner: Right, we're the phone company, we don't have to care. Yeah, I think the thing that bugs me the most is just how aggressive they are with it. Like, you know, if I'm checking Facebook and, I don't know, an ad for a lampshade comes by and I make the mistake of pausing over that ad for more than a millisecond --

Ben Yelin: Oh, they know.

Dave Bittner: It's all lampshades from, from here on out. Because obviously I'm in the market for a new lampshade.

Ben Yelin: And what happened to me is I made a terrible mistake of spending more than 10 seconds on a video of Punch the Monkey.

Dave Bittner: Oh.

Ben Yelin: Which I love that story. It was really cute. I should have just watched it on YouTube.

Dave Bittner: Poor Punch, yeah.

Ben Yelin: I, it's, you know.

Dave Bittner: So now you've got all primates all the time.

Ben Yelin: It's insane. And most of it is very obvious AI content of like gorillas being born, and I can't even describe how bizarre it is.

Dave Bittner: Yeah, yeah.

Ben Yelin: And I've tried to like report these videos, like I'm not interested in gorillas or chimpanzees. Like please stop sending this to me. Still get them.

Dave Bittner: Yeah, yeah.

Ben Yelin: Again, this is largely my fault for still being on Facebook, so.

Dave Bittner: Yeah, I was off of it for about four years.

Ben Yelin: Good for you.

Dave Bittner: But I, I legit missed out on things. The thing that made me come back to Facebook was an old friend of mine got married and I had no idea they got married.

Ben Yelin: And that is, that is really the rub here. I want, I don't want to have to call members of my high school or college class to know everything that's going on. I love seeing when people I knew had children or got married or had --

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: -- some major accomplishment in their life. And in theory, I think that's what Facebook was best for. I guess we should all pivot to LinkedIn. Maybe people can start --

Dave Bittner: No, no, no, no, no, no.

Ben Yelin: Okay, that's the worst solution.

Dave Bittner: I mean, talk about your lateral move, Ben.

Ben Yelin: Yeah, man, that would be terrible.

Dave Bittner: No, look, you could say, I mean, there's an argument for platforms like Mastodon that are, that have no algorithm, right, so it's harder to get up and running and get a feed that you want because it's all manual.

Ben Yelin: Right.

Dave Bittner: But once you do, it's wonderful because there's no algorithm.

Ben Yelin: Right, right.

Dave Bittner: But it's harder for, you know, non-technical people to do that. So you're stuck.

Ben Yelin: You are stuck. And that takes a lot of time and commitment when over 20 years, people have been building up their Facebook presence.

Dave Bittner: Right.

Ben Yelin: Like they've have hundreds, if not thousands of friends that they're following and they already have a presence and Facebook already knows so much about us.

Dave Bittner: Yeah.

Ben Yelin: It makes us like regret in 2006 posting what our favorite music was. Like if we had just, if we had just gotten out on the ground floor, then none of this would be happening.

Dave Bittner: Yeah, I feel like it's kind of like, you know, there was that whole generation that I guess my parents and a little younger than my parents, people who grew up in the '50s and '60s, how much they were smokers, right. And everybody knew smoking was bad, smoking was getting banned, it was harder and harder to be a smoker, but they're hooked.

Ben Yelin: Right.

Dave Bittner: And it's really hard to quit. And I feel Facebook is kind of like that.

Ben Yelin: Totally.

Dave Bittner: Where, you know, most of the people I know who are on Facebook hate Facebook and would love to have an alternative. But they're stuck.

Ben Yelin: I think that's a great parallel because like I know it's bad for me. Everybody who I speak to knows it's bad for them, but it's really it is addictive. It's really hard to quit.

Dave Bittner: Yeah, absolutely.

Ben Yelin: Maybe we, maybe they need to invent a patch that we can put on our arm.

Dave Bittner: A Facebook patch.

Ben Yelin: Yeah, dissuade us from --

Dave Bittner: Right. Every time you, you log on to Facebook, you get a little nauseous. Yeah, that's right.

Ben Yelin: A little a Facebook dog collar.

Dave Bittner: Right, right. All right, well we will have a link to this story in the show notes. We would love to hear from you. If there's something you'd like us to cover on the show, please e-mail us. It's caveat@n2k.com. [ Music ] And that is our show brought to you by N2K CyberWire. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing world of cybersecurity. If you like our show, please share a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an e-mail to caveat@n2k.com. This episode is produced by Liz Stokes. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. The show is mixed by Tre Hester. Peter Kilpe is our publisher. I'm Dave.

Ben Yelin: And I'm Ben Yelin.

Dave Bittner: Thanks for listening.