UC Berkeley’s Hany Farid and James Currier of NFX on Musk’s Twitter takeover and the state of social media

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2022

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on two guests, Hany Farid of UC Berkeley’s School of Information, and James Currier, general partner at NFX, to talk about Twitter and social media. Farid is up first to talk about free speech (4:50), the ideal of the Internet (10:00), the content moderation challenge (14:45), Musk’s plan for Twitter (18:50), why Farid’s optimistic (23:00), the cost of misinformation (27:00), and his prediction for Twitter (30:30). NFX’s James Currier then comes on to talk about the state of social media (33:35), taming the savageness of man (40:40), the bot problem (42:35), the uniqueness of Twitter (44:35), the Tiktok effect (46:50), the rise and fall of consumer products (51:55), the return to social media normalcy (54:25), the value of a social graph and Twitter’s future (57:45), and the crash in tech markets (1:02:10).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:03.0	What is it all about?
0:04.5	And you've got to look at Facebook and say, okay, it's going to come and go, but how quickly?
0:08.4	And the answer is, well, you know, when the 35-year-olds who have all their friends on Facebook are 90 and dying, then Facebook will die.
0:21.5	But it's going to take a long time.
0:23.5	Like, these people have all their friends.
0:45.0	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech.
0:49.4	I'm your host, Danny Forsson, the West Coast correspondent for the Sunday Times.
0:53.0	And this week, we have a double header.
0:54.2	That's right, Two guests for you.
0:56.0	And they are both coming on to talk about social media.
0:59.9	Specifically, the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter and what it says about the broader social media universe.
1:06.2	Now, obviously, this has been kind of the story these last few weeks.
1:09.6	But I wanted to let the death settle a bit
1:11.3	just to kind of get some clarity on what is happening if this is going to happen.
1:14.8	And then bring on a couple people who I would submit are amongst the sharpest minds out there
1:20.3	when it comes to thinking about social media, innovation, regulation, and what this takeover might
1:26.3	actually mean for you, me, the world, you know,
1:30.1	kind of what direction this might all go.
1:31.8	So the first guest we have today is Hani Farid.
1:36.4	He's a professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information.
1:39.5	He's an expert in misinformation, digital forensics, and generally just being a very sensible voice about
	...

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