This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Hi, Top Comment listeners. Marianna here. It was brilliant to meet some of you on Saturday at the BBC's Maida Vale Studios for our live podcast event, CastFest. If you weren't there, don't worry. We thought we'd give you a taster of what you missed right here in the feed. Matt and myself are on stage with our fabulous producer, Laurie, to talk about why we're making Top Comment and some of the things we have to think about behind the scenes while analysing the unpredictable world of social media. You'll hear us discuss stuff we've covered on previous episodes, as well as some brand new analysis, including an update on that frenzy of misinformation surrounding the Epsom story. And we even answered a couple of audience questions. Hello, everybody. We seem to have been given the prime 450 slot. So hopefully we're like that band that you accidentally turn up at in the wrong tent because you can't get to the other side of the festival in time. I'm very rarely seen or heard. But Marianna and Matt, who you probably know much better, are the stars of the podcast and they'll be able to tell you a little bit more about what it's all about. Thank you for coming. We hope you like our ominous bunnies sitting on the table. You haven't had that in any of the other podcasts. I still don't know what those are. And that is the whole point. So this podcast is in some ways sort of brain rot social media core, which is all the stuff that pops up on your social media feed and you think, what on earth was that? Where did that come from? Why is it being pushed to me? And so mine and Matt's jobs involve getting to the bottom of where those posts came from, why they're appearing, and often spotting stuff before it's ever kind of made its way to the traditional media or any other podcast you might listen to. I'm the social media investigations correspondent. You also might have been in the AmeriCast sessions. Thanks for coming to those. And so I spend too much time hanging out with trolls and conspiracy theorists and looking into algorithms and everything else. And Matt equally enjoys doing strange things for his job. Yeah, that's a good way. Yeah, I'm an investigative journalist. I've covered everything from Andrew Tate to Logan Paul to a lot of the kind of darker corners of the internet. And yeah, like Marianna said, you know, what we always hope to do is reveal the deeper story behind what's popping up on your social media feed. I'd say about half of our stories are stories where social media has somehow distorted what's happening in reality. So a good example of that is the US-Iran war. So a lot of people will have seen the AI Lego videos of the Iran war. So that's how they come to perceive the Iran war. But of course, those videos contain all sorts of distortions and untruths and is essentially a distorted version of reality. We, for one of our episodes, managed to speak to the creator of those videos, which we can talk about in a little bit. Another example, it could be something like Coachella, where you're seeing that on social media, but a lot of the influencers who you're seeing there weren't actually even there and are just pretending to be there. And then the other kind of stories that we tend to do are ones where social media, it's almost the reverse. Social media influences and generates its own reality. So an example of that could be Epsom, where very recently a series of violent protests were kicked off by some posts on social media by people like Tommy Robinson, which we can also talk about in a bit. Yeah, so this is going to be like a behind the scenes, like you're in our very exciting meetings every week. So if there are things that you want to ask us about, like stuff that's popped up on your feed, there is nothing too embarrassing or weird. We would love to hear about it. And we can talk about it. We're sort of like the social media feed agony aunts, for want of a better word. So do get thinking. And if something comes to mind, do not be scared to put your hand up and we will come to you. but we're maybe going to start with a little rundown of like what's worked on the podcast and what we've liked. Yeah I think let's sort of talk about the sort of stories that we try and do because the internet is a super weird place right like a lot of stuff pops up and I think we try and cover things that aren't just viral for the sake of it but you know as Matt said have a bit more depth to them so we'll definitely come on to that probably Epsom we'll talk a little bit about as Matt mentioned and a couple of the other things that Marianna and Matt are investigating but just to get a flavor of the sort of things that do pop up in our pitching meetings on a week-to-week basis. By the way, our meetings are so weird. Like, people walk past us having our meetings, and you can see them go, like, what? Yeah, they're like, how are they getting paid for this? But, so I saw something, for example, this week. I don't know if you guys have seen it. It's, like, the left ear, right ear memes. So it's designed to watch with your AirPods in, and you get fed one thing in your left ear and one thing in your right ear. These were, like, really big a couple of years ago 2024 and one re-emerged on my feed this week which in the left ear is Mozart's Symphony 25 sped up to times two and then in the right ear is someone reading the Bible in Mandarin um and like that's really hard to kind of like analyze and and that's one of those examples where there really isn't maybe that much depth to it it's just kind of an example of the internet being weird but obviously what you guys are doing on a week-to-week basis is much deeper than that and that's kind of what we have to pass through in the meetings but because like things like that for example like the like really odd stuff that appears on your feed because your feed is so personalized um i obviously talk about algorithms all the time it means that you experience it in quite a solitary way um and it means that all of our experiences of the world are now often happening through our feeds but we're we're seeing it on our own so if you think of all the stuff that you've consumed on social media even over the past week probably the people in your life know like one percent of that if if that an example of that kind of post that i'd been seeing a lot of and matt had as well when we first started the podcast was um this concept of decline porn so this idea that people are posting videos or pictures or um distorting the sort of reality of what's happening in certain cities around the world and particularly um more metropolitan often more liberal cities bigger cities and so we focused quite a lot on london but this has been happening all across the us um in other british cities manchester places like that and it was really interesting because i'd started seeing these croydon water park like ai so i'm from south london um not that far from croydon i was thinking there's not a zoo or a water park or an aquarium anywhere near apparently there did actually used to be an aquarium but that's a separate point and anyway there were these ai generated videos of croydon with people in balaclavas what you might call kind of roadman stereotypes and well that's what the creator was calling them and they were like going down these water slides and it would say the water side is taxpayer funded and there'd be like sharks swimming around in croydon and all this stuff and like on the surface it's it's like laughable, it's quite absurd. But actually there was something more important to look into and to talk about which was the way that this kind of absurd bit of decline porn could be impacting what people think about certain cities and actually reinforcing racist or otherwise harmful stereotypes and i tracked down this guy who goes by the name of radial b or d depending which of his accounts is suspended at which time and when i spoke to him he essentially said i don't really care if my content is being repurposed by people who are pushing political points who are saying london is overrun with crime and immigration and everything else far beyond legitimate questions or concerns people might have you know this is this is stuff that goes beyond the truth of what's really happening he said i don't really care i basically just really like getting likes was the kind of main takeaway it's almost like this sort of ideology of engagement he just cared about the reaction he got this kind of nihilistic approach i guess and it's something that we see in almost all the stories we do that it's the systems the way that the companies are running their social media platforms that result in this kind of content which often has a political impact but without a political aim and so that's kind of one niche bit that we looked at but actually like Sadiq Khan the mayor of London cited um decline porn and this phenomenon in a recent speech and basically spoke about the real world impact of this stuff so you know whatever criticism that term decline porn we believe we we think we may have I think we popularized it okay but he actually said you know we've got it impacts tourism it impacts just wider perception of london it can impact elections and politics and you know whether you there are legitimate criticisms to be made of the mayor or of any mayor but this is stuff that goes beyond legitimate criticisms and that's why it's interesting to look at and and it's working and it is changing our politics so statistically londoners have a perception that this city is safe but outside of london statistically a majority of people find believe that london is unsafe and that is largely because we believe due to things like decline porn another example is is kurt kaz he's a youtuber and he made a video recently where he kind of braves south london and he's trying to show it's the most dangerous city in the world and in the thumbnail of the video he's changed all of the sharp signs from english to arabic writing and he's put balaclavas on the black and brown people that are in the background of the video with ai so this is you know a perfect example of how social media is distorting reality yeah i think also when we talk about this sort of thing it's interesting to acknowledge that a lot of it is grounded in real thoughts and real things that people believe right and so even though a lot of this is kind of misinformation and distorted and kind of a bastardized version of like what's actually going on it's effective because it's to do with things that people already believe and i think we find that a lot with misinformation and you guys do where, for example, I don't know if everyone saw, there was a story that CNN did a couple of weeks ago, and it was about this kind of like online rape academy. That's how they phrased it. So it was really super serious. But then it was aggregated by a different account, and they'd mixed it up, and all of a sudden there was this news going viral that there were 62 million people, 62 million men, obviously an insane number. That wasn't in the original reporting in this Telegram group. And that was grounded in original CNN reporting that was real, but it was obviously distorted so much that the story that really got pick up was the one that was the real extreme version of that story and we see that all the time don't we yeah and and you know a lot of the things we talk about kind of fall into different buckets in that way so decline porn is a is a phenomenon the kind of thing that you've seen on your feed but you didn't really know the name for it or the way to describe it and that's that's what it is another thing we've spoken about is like phantom trends where people think that something is a trend or is going to happen and then actually it turns out so people might remember this red versus blue school wars thing and understandably everyone kind of got a bit freaked out and thought schools were going to fight each other because these posters were going viral but the problem was is that actually the response to it understandably from parents schools the police resulted in perhaps more real world consequence than the posters ever would have and i think that's the point we're getting to where you know social media feeds and everything that goes on is not fringe at all i've probably been saying this for quite a long time now as of you as of all of us but it's affecting and distorting everything about how we live our lives and i think one of the best things that we can do is try to sort of figure out like why people do what they do and how they do it if we were doing a kind of live pitching meeting right now so one of the topics that we have been really interested in over the past couple of weeks which matt just hinted at is um these protests that have been happening in epsom i know we keep this is very south london heavy don't worry we'll talk about america and iran and other things in a minute but when it comes to epsom um there was a report made allegations made of a rape happening outside a church a young woman and the police said a woman in her 20s had been attacked and they appealed for witnesses they suggested that there were a group of people involved in in this rape but there was a real absence of vacuum of information they didn't really say who the people were they didn't seem to know what what happened and that vacuum of misinformation as we know to your point Laurie resulted in kind of legitimate people were obviously really outraged and shocked this is a terrible crime to be reported but it was quickly kind of weaponized and jumped upon and there were all kinds of theories spreading including specifically that the attackers were asylum seekers or immigrants and there was no evidence at that time to support that idea nonetheless protesters turn up and we covered it just as it was kind of starting to kick off we'd seen a lot of posts on social media from prominent accounts that push these kinds of narratives. And then the police came out and said, by the way, the police have issued their statements each time, like, just after we've recorded Top Comment, which Laurie loves. So they then came out and said, actually, you know, we're not quite sure the incident was as reported. We can't really share that much more information with you, but there's no evidence to suggest asylum seekers or immigrants who are involved. That actually didn't do anything to quell the very extreme online chatter to the point where Facebook groups were being overwhelmed. The admins were having to say, people keep posting hate and misinfo what is going on here you then had more people turn up this week and actually decide to like enter a hotel that they believed was being housed by by migrants and it wasn't and so all of this kind of spiraled totally out of control until we reached this sort of point on very late on thursday where the police said actually this never happened this crime didn't happen what we believe is that the woman involved had hit her head and she gave her a confused report about what happened she's allowed us to share this information we obviously take reports of sexual offenses very seriously but it didn't happen so in the end you had an entire misinformation frenzy built on something that never happened about people doing something that they'd never done that meant that there was real unrest and tensions and ultimately not dissimilar to what we saw happen in southport after three little girls were killed but what it made me think is has anything changed and in fact actually a lot of what could have stopped this kind of frenzy occurring has almost got worse and i think it's stories like this which are really why we want to do this podcast because it's difficult to overstate how crazy the world we live in now is right this is an example of a story where social media generates real world events out of complete unreality so you know tommy robinson tweeted that and stated as fact that a gang rape had occurred that that post was viewed around 800 000 times the police said that this attack didn't happen but that didn't stop people surrounding two hotels a home for mentally ill adults demanding that the migrants inside be released chanting send them back Send back who You targeting non migrants who aren in these buildings for a crime that didn happen So this is an example of a violent disorder that has come out of social media. It's come out of what the algorithm has pushed to people. So those stories where social media becomes a kind of crucible for real-world events to spawn from are really interesting for us. But another example of the other kind of stories we do are where reality is kind of refracted through social media. And I think the Iran story is interesting because I'm sure most of you have probably seen those AI Lego videos, which are kind of Iranian propaganda. A lot more people statistically have seen those videos than have seen real actual images from the Iran war. Partially that's due to the internet blackout and the lack of coverage. But we've seen that more than we've seen the war itself. And we've also seen the White House putting its own memes out. So we are perceiving a kind of unreal version of this conflict. And we managed to track down the guy who makes these videos, the team who makes these videos. And it was honestly one of the most bizarre interviews of my life because, you know, he is a bit evasive as to whether he was working directly for the Iranian government or was kind of freelance. We kind of pushed him on it and it turns out that he has done, you know, direct work for the Iranian government. but uh he answers the call and he's like his face is silhouetted and he's lit in in the colors of the iranian flag with like this whole set with like a quran open here and there's like handlers off screen telling him what he can and can't say it's like a translator wasn't it it was yeah it was utterly bizarre we did push him on some of the things in your videos are not true you know you are putting falsehoods in your videos for example one of your videos depicts in lego figurine AI style, the Iranian military capturing the downed fighter pilot, which didn't happen. But his response was so interesting. He said, most of what Trump says is a lie. We are essentially doing what he is doing, but better. And he even referenced this French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard's theory of hyperreality in his discussion of the creation of this propaganda. he couldn't have made that argument during any other administration arguably right they are meeting the discourse at the level it has sunk to and you know we all know we all we all hear about foreign states influencing our elections and influencing you know our world through social media propaganda but i think this is the first example of foreign states being inspired by the u.s administration in how to make their own propaganda so that was an incredibly interesting interview and a lot of things we talk about are either kind of the strategies that politicians or influencers or other people use to game the algorithms in this case donald trump is is in some ways the sort of person who's created the blueprint for how to do rage bait around everything political but particularly wars and now iran are not just using that but also the ai technology and tools that have come out of the us in order to make that same propaganda or at least people who are supportive of the regime in iran and then we also talk quite a lot about accountability for the social media companies right because all the things we're discussing are ultimately about decisions that the companies make about what gets pushed, what doesn't get pushed. And as someone who spends way too much of their time emailing these companies, asking them questions, it's incredibly hard to get them to answer those questions. And actually, one of the best things you can do right now, and we've done it on a few episodes, is talk to whistleblowers or people from inside the companies about why they're making decisions that often inflame the problem even when they know the problem exists. And without further ado, Laurie will now suggest other things that we should talk about on our next episode. Well, it's interesting you say people knowing that the problems exist because I think a lot of people when they talk about social media users, they say, well, why can't you be more discerning? Like things are often obvious when they're fabricated. I think the thing is, is that what we see is that these patterns are just repeated so much that actually it's the volume that is really difficult and volume more than anything is really what's going to persuade you. If you see like one video, it's not going to have as much impact as if you see 50 or 10,000. And often getting like increasingly more extreme. And also with AI, I'm sure we're banned from talking about AI fruits on the podcast because we bring up too much but I can't believe we haven't mentioned AI how many people have watched AI fruit love island show of hands so yeah I saw that the one um they're these weird they're these weird videos please don't go and look them up afterwards of fruits kind of like on a reality tv show um these they're obviously a joke but there are loads and loads of AI generated videos that actually are much harder to tell now increasingly the technology is much better and I used to be a person today AI is kind of like the dog that hasn't barked it has barked in a big way to the point where people then think that things are real at AI and then no one really knows what to trust anymore so they just sort of have to scroll on and again it's not just AI it's often merged with reality or grounded in reality so actually when we were doing our pilots we spoke about the hurricane in Jamaica and we spoke about all of the AI videos and like misleading content and old content that was being spread about this is the hurricane in Jamaica look how bad it was a lot of it wasn't actually from that time and even last week we've seen exactly the same thing happen again like the patterns get repeated uh there was this earthquake in japan and there was a tsunami warning that ultimately got downgraded but by the time it had been downgraded loads of people had shared all of these ai videos like look at the earthquake look what's happened look at this and you're like what and we're always you can't keep up with it yeah and the point of that is to some extent yeah it can have a it can have a real world impact i mean if you're in japan or you know someone in japan And then you're panicking, thinking, what is going on? But then also, ultimately, this all comes back to the sort of trying to get engagement, because then if you have more followers and more reach, you can sell stuff or you can use that power and influence in some way. And so everyone is playing the game of the systems of these companies. And we're kind of all losing in the process. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos Inventory and shipping Sign up for your 1 euro per month trial And start selling today at shopify.nl That's shopify.nl It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side I wonder if anyone is feeling brave enough to tell us something weird they've seen on social media Oh yes Have you got a microphone? thank you so as a breakthrough the news i followed various like animals that cute animal love a cute animal this is right in my industry but what i've noticed is there's been a rise in these animals doing weird things like animals dancing around or animals that you know wild animals that would attack humans then like being their friends like you know tigers and mountain cats sort of coming in. I suppose my question is, why are people creating videos of cute wild animals? Like what's to be gained by turning feeds that have normal animals into these artificially cute wild animals That just occurred to me Where has it come from and what it gaining I mean I think some of it i do love thank you very much i do love talking about animal videos i frequently pitch them in our meeting i mean animal content in general is like we considered actually calling this podcast um bring back cat videos e.g like can we go back to what the internet used to be like um and you're kind of right they're like that that sort of genre of cute animal has either been sort of um turbocharged by algorithms and we can talk a bit about punch the monkey mudang the hippo any of the gerald the dolphin gerald the dot can we talk about gerald actually gerald's a great one to talk about sheamus i like sheamus but to answer to answer your question before we get sidetracked by gerald because we really will uh what i would say is that i think that they know that that kind of content now they're competing with a load of other like very punchy content and ai content it's like the the temperature level is just constantly increasing and so if you want to keep growing your following keep reaching people the more that you can have someone like you go what is going on here and you stay longer on that video and you kind of give them the time the attention then they get they get more promotion they get more clicks and likes and it's almost like this engagement arms race not just happening between the companies themselves but between users as they all battle for those views and likes gerald the dolphin was this wild story which we discussed on the podcast which was a real a real favorite which was about it was a story about a man who washed up on a beach in florida it was completely fake the story so the man didn't wash up on the beach and the man in the fake story You've omitted the most key part, which is... No, no, I'm going to talk about Gerald. Oh, okay. The man when he washed up on the beach, the not real man, said, I was abducted by a dolphin called Gerald, and Gerald forced me to build an underwater palace, and now I've come back... Which is why Gerald is wearing a hard hat... In all the memes. ...in all the depictions, because he works in construction. And it was like this whole wave of stuff where, if you had missed it, you would have absolutely no idea what was going on. And I think I'd been... It was the week that I'd been doing this documentary about algorithms, and I hadn't been on TikTok for a while, and suddenly all my feed was this dolphin in a hard hat. And I was like, how have I got to this side of TikTok? Stories that tend to do well are ones where there's multiple layers of reality or unreality. So a lot of people on the internet may think that Gerald the dolphin isn't real, but that a man did wash up on a beach in Florida and say to the news, I was kidnapped by a dolphin. I think we all could see that story happening in Florida. You kind of thought that was real. I would think that. That wouldn't surprise me. Say maybe someone had like, you know, psychosis and they said that a dolphin, you know, that could happen. So that is what I think a lot of people believe, that this man is just, this is a crazy man. But actually, Gerald the Dolphin isn't real and the man isn't real. Yeah, and that's the, like, layers of disinformation. It's almost, it's, like, too obviously fake. So Gerald the Dolphin is clearly fake. So people assume that, oh, well, the other parts of the story are not as difficult to believe. So maybe those bits are real. And therefore, you believe parts of the story when the entire thing was fabricated. as to why people like watching videos of animals that is a a mystery as old as time but uh but the reason that people post those videos is because they're yes there is a financial incentive to to driving engagement you may may not realize that you are being marketed something if not by the account you're following then by the accounts that that account are then pushing you to anyone else feel brave oh yes um another question this feels like some kind of confessions session. I was just wondering, I'm a photographer and I have an Instagram account and every single time it drives me absolutely nuts when you get obviously a genuine picture, but you get so many people in the comments saying this is AI, this isn't real don't believe it, and recently I don't know if you saw, but there was a story about the RSPCA where they did a very traumatic dog rescue and I think it was 250 dogs or something and the images were so horrific everyone was like well this possibly couldn't be true this is obviously ai and the rspca were actually forced to put a statement out saying no this is genuine we unfortunately had to deal with these dogs and i was just wondering if you have any tips on how to very sort of eagle-eyed in a way spot an ai yeah that's it's such a good question we we discussed doing the dogs the rspca dogs on the podcast because that was this yeah it was a wild story and actually when i saw the video the picture of these dogs did you see this i i thought i genuinely was like oh it's a i unfortunately the answer is there is no answer we can give you as to how to tell whether an image is a or not because even if we were to give you a trick like look at the number of fingers or whatever four weeks from now ai will become so developed that it will be impossible to tell the only real way to tell that something is real is if a credible website has has um has cited or used it because they will have to know the origin of the photo yeah i think as well that um this whole kind of disbelief in anything i mean particularly disbelief in things that are quite shocking um has really serious consequences because it means people don't necessarily believe like violence has been committed or they don't believe that something bad has happened i think also because there's a little bit and i think this often about when i look into kind of really extreme conspiracy theories people actually like don't want to believe bad stuff and if they can have a reason not to believe it then ai is quite helpful in that way or they kind of want to just disagree with something they say it's not real I think that the best advice that you can give about trying to figure out if something's AI or not is to, and there's a phrase that people who believe conspiracy theories often use, which is do your own research. And it's like, actually do do your own research. So I think whenever you see something like, like, does it kind of make sense? Like, would, is it credible in the first place? Could you believe it? Who shared it? Why? You've kind of got to look at all the other things around the post rather than actually the content and the post itself, because AI is becoming so convincing that like, I see stuff that is AI or not and I think it's not and vice versa. And it's meant to be my job. There is less and less provable reality for us to cling to. The shared belief in reality that we all have is being challenged by social media. I mean, just thinking about the Epsom thing again, I went to a protest yesterday in Epsom, which was a women's protest, women's rights protest, and they didn't believe the police's account that this gang rape didn't happen because of things like Sarah Everard, so they didn't believe the police. The right-wing people didn't believe the police. They thought it was immigrants. No one believed anything. There was no shared consensus of reality anymore whatsoever. And I've seen the picture you're talking about, and to be honest, it does look like AI. It's something to do with the preponderance of limbs. And also, they all kind of look the same, the poor dogs. Yeah. Guys, I promise you there is a league table every week of animal stories and which one we should do first. and as much as Matt and Mariana have just said we can't explain to you why AI is AI and everything, I promise you on the podcast we do try to explain some of these things so please do subscribe if you didn't know anything about us already, it's Top Comment, you can subscribe on BBC Sounds, you can also email us topcomment at bbc.co.uk with any questions you have and Matt and Mariana will try and answer it on the podcast or send us a DM or anything, we actually love seeing what different people are seeing because the whole kind of unique algorithmic experience means that the more people we hear from, the better it is because we can figure out what different people are being pushed and why and where it's come from. Thank you very much. Thank you. Hi, it's Marianna again. I hope you enjoyed that little bonus conversation. And just in case you're wondering, we'll be back with our regular episode of Top Comment later in the week.
