Check in the mail: our analysis of Epstein’s correspondence

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0:32

The Economist.

1:21

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. Hello, I'm your host, Rosie Blore. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Since December, under 16s in Australia have been banned from social media. Other countries are getting ready to follow. But does such legislation actually work? And for this recording, I was taken into the studio blindfold, then asked to guess what I was tasting. It turned out to be part exercise in ritual humiliation, part education about a new phenomenon coming to a supermarket near you. First up though, The recent release of documents relating to paedophile and rapist Jeffrey Epps Epstein has revealed an astonishing network. An unknown number of powerful men and some women trafficked and abused. A much larger number of vulnerable women and girls. The emails also reveal a broader trade in influence and favours. A network peddling patronage secrets and access. But making sense of the more than 3 million documents comes with incredible challenges. One journalists all over the world are tackling. Our data team has just published its analysis of what the Trove contains.

1:28

Fortunately, there was this volunteer group of software engineers who extracted all of the text from these PDFs.

3:05

Dan Rosenheck is the Economist's data editor.

3:15

And transformed them into a big fat database that anyone can search on the Internet via a website that looks just like Gmail and that we were able to train our analysis on.

3:19

What were you actually looking for as you combed through the releases?

3:34

These emails, which are concentrated between 2008 and 2019, span a range from the mundane to the explicit to in some cases the potentially criminal. We were looking for two things. First, just straight accounts of who Epstein was in touch with. And second, what evidence was there of Epstein's crimes in these files? For the first portion, we identified each message by sender and recipients and then tried to group them all together despite misspellings and different names and email addresses and stuff. And for the second, we trained a large language model to search through and score all 1.4 million emails on how disturbing they would be to an average reader to find the needles in a haystack that were at least explicit and potentially evidence of criminal activity.

3:38

So what did you find?

4:40

Most of the correspondence was with his team secretary, accountant, pilot, lawyer, all of the various staff at all of his properties. Then if you exclude them and look at his external contacts, one of the main things that struck me was Epstein's network was unbelievably broad and balanced. He was messaging directly with very high level or top end or elite people of the non staff contacts. Fully a quarter have their own Wikipedia page in like lots of different industries. 19% finance, which makes sense because he was a financier, but 10% science and technology and I think 6% in law and 6% other types of business, you name the field. He had at least a handful of very influential and well connected people in that industry. Really broad.

4:42

And what did you find out about the individual correspondence?

5:44

There were a handful of people who were in touch with him all the time. The one that leapt out really in a class by herself was Katherine Ruemmler, who was Barack Obama's White House counsel for a number of years. She actually just resigned from Goldman after this came out. But she exchanged over 11,000 emails with him between 2014 and 19. And I like broke down the frequency and it was on 70% of days. So out of every seven days of the week, on five of them they exchanged at least one email. Other people who were always in his inbox, Ariane de Rothschild of the Rothschild banking family, a billionaire. 5,500 emails with her. He was in touch with Larry Summers all the time, the former treasury secretary. He was in touch with Tom Pritzker all the time, the Hyatt Hotels billionaire. A lot of these relationships were extremely consistent and intense. Emailing With Jeffrey Epstein is not a crime. And many of the people who did email with him say that they had no knowledge either of his crimes or of the scale of his crimes. And the only person on our tree map who has been even charged with a crime, not to mention convicted, is Gillian Maxwell, who was his longtime accomplice. And then there was a long tale of rich and powerful people who were there less often, but enough to show up. And one way you can really tell you're kind of getting only the tip of the iceberg here is some of the rich and famous people who appear less often. When you look at those messages, a lot of them are messages to and from secretaries and assistants just being like, can we schedule a phone call?

5:49

And do you have an example of.

7:54

That one in particular that leapt out? Steve Tisch, who's a billionaire, who's the owner of the New York Giants American football team. They had an exchange where they were discussing women to whom Epstein could introduce Tish. And Epstein says in a message, can you give me a number to call? I don't like having written records of this stuff. Steve Tisch, for his part, has issued a statement saying that he regrets his relationship with Epstein and that all discussions he had with Epstein regarding women were regarding adult women.

7:56

Dan, you've spent far more time with these emails than is probably healthy. What have you found out about how Epstein spoke with the people he was involved with?

8:32

There are some very worrisome needles in haystacks. To find them, we fed the entire archive into a large language model and had it score every message based on how disturbing it would be to an average reader. And that filtered out 1500 email threads that were, at least in the bot's estimation, very much not mundane. And the vast majority of those disturbing messages were not with people with big public profiles. A small handful of individual messages with people with public profiles that were flagged as alarming, but not a ton.

8:43

And, Dan, there's so much information here, and yet we know there's also a lot more. So what's not here?

9:32

The Justice Department said that it did not publish everything. It dug up 3 million of the 6 million total documents that they unearthed on a first pass they determined not to release. The second thing is that we were only able to analyze the email portion of the files. There are lots and lots of other types of documents that are also in the files that may reveal a lot more, and analysis of that is trickling out, but that will take longer. The final thing is that I think the biggest remaining questions about Epstein are not answered and probably cannot be answered by this type of information, which are, number one, how exactly did he get that sweetheart plea deal in 2008? How did he manage to kill himself in a jail cell when he was supposed to be under constant surveillance? And who else was involved in his sex trafficking ring and potentially might be being protected to some degree with all the redactions. There's one example that we cited in the story of a message from a redacted sender that says, and I quote, your littlest girl was a little naughty to Epstein. So we don't know if that is from somebody who abused the littlest girl, somebody who provided the littlest girl, but the name's blacked out.

9:39

Dan, thank you very much.

11:18

Thank you.

11:19

And you can find much more by digging through the Digital Teams project online. Find it in the Economist app.

11:23

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12:11

All right. Kids are ending up in the hospital with burns all over their hands. Other places too. Why? You asked whether lighting themselves on fire for a TikTok trend.

13:01

A teenager has been remembered by his family as gifted. After taking his own life following blackmail over nudes he sent on SNAP. Dr. Vivek Murphy says social media is.

13:10

Contributing to the ongoing mental health crisis in young people. Many people reckon they should be banned from using it altogether and In December, Australia did just that, stopping under 16s from using Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other platforms. So I was kicked off of my YouTube and my Snapchat platform. So far, that has had mixed success. I wasn't kicked off any of my social media accounts except for YouTube. Yeah, same here. Only YouTube has denied my access to it. I've only known a few people that have been banned only on TikTok and Snapchat, and really there was no huge difference. They would easily fix the situation, make another account, get another device. But other countries are considering similar regulation. Spain recently proposed a ban to protect children from the digital wild West. A dozen countries, from Britain to Malaysia, are also toying with the idea, as are several American states. Question is, does a ban actually help kids?

13:20

These proposals come from a totally understandable desire to keep young people safe online.

14:25

Tom Wainwright is our media editor.

14:31

They come after years in which governments have been probably too relaxed about some of the risks that people face there. But these blanket bans for younger teenagers may be unlikely to achieve the aims that policymakers hope they will achieve.

14:34

Tom, aren't we all worried about what our kids are looking at online? There seems to be a problem here that does need solving.

14:48

Yeah, I think it's one of those things that every parent worries about, and I think probably quite a few children worry about as well. We're at this interesting moment where today's parents of teenagers for the first time are of an age where they themselves might have used social media in their own teenage years or in their 20s. We've seen a thankfully small number, but significant number nonetheless, of really serious tragedies involving children who've hurt themselves or even killed themselves partly as a result of things that they've seen online and at a bigger population level. I think many people are trying to figure out what is behind a worldwide decline in the mental health of young people. There's been a statistically significant increase in depressive episodes across many countries over the last 15 years or so, which roughly coincides with the period in which smartphones and social media have become much more popular. And so people are wondering what, if anything, can be done to try and solve this problem.

14:57

So what's the general perception of those bans? What do people in different countries actually think about the idea of social media bans?

15:52

Well, I'm not sure I've ever seen a more popular policy than this. I mean, it's just extraordinary. There's huge support for this among adults pretty much all over the world. I saw one series of Polls done by Ipsos last year, they did questioning in something like 40 countries, and in every single one, there was a majority in favor of banning under 16s from using social media. I look down in a bit more detail at one of the polls here in the uk and it's a policy which has support among people of all ages, of both sexes, people who lean left, people who lean right. I think it's one of those policies where there's kind of something for everyone. The left wingers, I think, maybe like the idea of holding to account these sinister global corporations that want to monetize your children. And right wingers, for their part, maybe want to get back to a conservative traditional childhood where kids are outdoors building dens in the woods and that kind of stuff. So it seems to be something that really everybody likes the sound of.

15:59

And yet you said at the top that those bans might not have the impact that politicians and the general population wants them to.

16:55

Yeah, I mean, it's early days, but I think there's reason to be skeptical about how much good these outright bans are going to do. One reason that is worth saying that people sometimes forget is that social media aren't all bad for children, just as they're not all bad for adults. If children are cut out of social media, it cuts them off from one of their sources of news about the world. In particular, children who feel a little bit isolated, maybe because of where they live or something about themselves, their sexuality, for example. Going online can make them realize that they're part of a bigger community worldwide. There's a lot of worry about what the ban might do to them and what they might be missing out on. And we spoke to a number of Australian parents about what they thought about this.

17:03

As a social worker, I'm really concerned about the socially isolated kids, those young people. I think the threat to their wellbeing and lives, that outweighs their benefit of a poorly implemented ban. That's my feeling about it.

17:44

One of the things that really struck me when I was doing this reporting was that these bans have been largely opposed by child protection groups. As I discovered when I spoke to Andy Burrows, the chief executive of the Molly Rose foundation, the problems of bad.

18:01

Actors and criminality won't disappear. They will simply migrate to where children go. There's a real risk that if we say that we're proceeding with a ban that immediately drains the energy away from regulating the services that are still in scope.

18:15

I think many parents have in their mind a sort of idealized idea that as soon as they take away Instagram, their child is instantly going to get back to the Latin poetry or learning the piano or something like that. But the reality is that the kind of childhood that people perhaps had in the past has been pretty severely curtailed in recent decades. And that's what we heard from some of the parents that we spoke to.

18:33

We can't go back to the 80s. That's not realistic either. We can't recreate times from years ago because we have fond memories of it. And I'm pretty sure some of my teenage behavior was extremely risky. I think I'd rather Charlotte's in her bedroom on Instagram, to be honest. Tom, we've got a concrete situation, which is Australia, where under 16s have been banned from going on social media since December. How's that ban going?

18:56

Well, we thought we'd ask the real experts, meaning teenagers themselves in Australia. And the first thing they pointed out was that they're finding lots of ways to get around this ban. They're faking their age, they're recreating accounts using other people's identities, or they're using obscure news sites like Lemon8, for example, which had a burst of popularity when the ban first came in.

19:23

A lot of kids have found a ways around it and now that so called harmful content is easy for them to access because parents don't have control over their account.

19:44

Australia hasn't banned young teenagers from messaging apps or from multiplayer online games, so cyberbullying may continue on those.

19:53

I do not like the ban because it's just purely isolating the people who were banned from the other people. And I feel like we were born around it, our generation and them just taking away from us is not good for our mental health.

20:00

And then there's the worry that higher age limits may just delay problems until youngsters are 16. Then they'll suddenly gain full access to social sites that they don't have much experience using.

20:16

16 is such a high number. People are thinking about their jobs, thinking about university, getting their learner's permit and getting ready for the real world, their future. And not having social media is honestly kind of harmful.

20:26

It'll be a long time until we know exactly how the Australian plan has gone, but so far it seems as if implementation isn't without its problems.

20:38

So then what can be done, Tom? How can social media be made a more suitable place for teens to spend their time?

20:46

I think there's a lot of appetite for reform here. And one thing that interests me is that whereas in the last decade or so all the focus has been on the content on social media. It seems as if now people are moving more towards thinking about how the platforms themselves might change the design of how they operate. And we're seeing a pincer movement here where in the US there are legal challenges which have just got underway, which could have some very big impact. There's a case going on in California against Meta and against YouTube by an individual who believes that those platforms harmed her mental health when she was a child. And at the same time, in the European Union, the European Commission has preliminarily found TikTok guilty of breaking its laws on creating an addictive platform. And it has cited features like TikTok's infinite scroll, its auto playing videos, its personalized algorithm. And these are things which are completely core to how TikTok and apps like it operate and what makes them so popular. So if these design features, the apps are now in the crosshairs, the result could be that these apps turn out to be quite different things, not just for teenagers, but for adults too, going forward.

20:53

Tom, thank you very much.

22:06

Thank you.

22:08

This is hilarious.

22:23

I see you've got the.

22:24

I do. I do.

22:26

Wait a minute. Where are all my bits and bobs? You've got them here.

22:27

I may have my blindfold on, but my excellent sense of perception tells me I'm hearing the voice of Tom Standage, one of the Economist deputy editors. What are you gonna feed me?

22:31

Yeah, you're gonna find out. Right, Here comes a pop. One of them.

22:43

It's a good sound.

22:50

It is. Happy sound. So what can you tell me about that wine? What does it strike you as?

22:51

Not very sweet.

22:58

Okay, what color would you say that wine was?

23:00

Oh, good question. I was assuming it was white. Oh, maybe this is.

23:02

Hang on, I'm gonna have this one.

23:07

This one is a different temperature.

23:10

Yes.

23:11

Ah, so let's look at those skills of perception. Yeah, this does smell like red wine.

23:12

Okay, so now we have another wine here.

23:17

It's cold. I would say it is white. It's not fragrant. It's quite clear. Now. I've tried it again. I think it's red, but I wouldn't be sure about that.

23:22

Well, the answer is yes, because it's both. The third wine is this one here, and this is a wine called a Bluge wine that is a combination of blanc, white and rouge, because it's both. And what's happening there is that.

23:35

I thought that was.

23:52

No, it's different from. So basically, with white wine, you take white wine grapes and you crush them. And you have very little skin contact. You take the skins away and that's how you make white wine. With red wine, you take your red grapes, you crush them and you have a long period of skin contact and that puts all of structure and the colour into the wine. If you take white grapes and you treat them like a red grape, so in other words, you crush them and you leave the skins in there for a long time, you get orange wine, so that's white grapes put through a red wine process. And if you take red grapes and put them through basically a white wine process, you get almost your namesake, you get a wine that is much lighter than a red wine. What's happening with this wine with Bluges, is that white and red grapes are being fermented together essentially like a red. So it's like a red where you've lobbed in. Some white winemakers are deliberately splitting the difference between white and red. So you've got a wine that initially, when you first tasted, it tasted like a white. It had the freshness and the clarity of a white, but then it has the kind of depth and the structure of a red. And this makes it very, very versatile for food pairing. And these wines are generally being marketed in quite a funky way. They're not being aimed at old wine nerds like me, they are being marketed rather more like craft beer. So with names like Boogie Woo and Super Bloom, it's fantastic for, you know, a barbecue on a Sunday. Do you want red or white? Well, you don't have to choose. You can kind of have both. But the other thing that's really good about it is it turns out to be, for winemakers grappling with climate change, a really, really good hedge.

23:54

And why is that?

25:25

The trouble with red wines right now is that in many parts of the world that make red wine, if there's a heat wave or there's just, you know, a lot of very hot days, the red grapes are over ripening. So when you come to harvest them, you get a very alcoholic wine, 15 or 16% sometimes, if you harvest them early to avoid that problem, the tannins basically in the skin and in the pips haven't ripened. And then you get a very kind of stalky taste. It just doesn't taste right. So what you can do if you throw some white grapes in is you can leave the red grapes to ripen, you can harvest them and then you can co ferment them with white grapes. And the white grapes reduce the alcohol content and they also add back the freshness and the acidity that's lost when you have these very flabby alcoholic wines.

25:27

And how much of this is happening, I've not heard about it.

26:08

The problem is that there isn't a way of tracking the sales of this wine. There isn't an agreed on definition here. In some ways it's not new because there have been wines in the past. I mean, some champagnes use mixtures of red and white grapes and so on. So there isn't a sort of market category for this. And in fact, even the word bluege is quite controversial. Some American and Australian winemakers think that even though they're doing this style, their customers won't know what it means. Instead, they prefer to call this a chillable red or a light red. But the trouble is we don't actually have a category of blue that we can track. So you can't measure how much of this is. But the makers I've spoken to who are selling it say that they're seeing sales of this style going up every year.

26:11

And why do you have to drink it chilled?

26:48

Because then you get the freshness of the white. I mean, people like to chill red wines as well, actually, to make them less flabby, give them a bit more definition. So this is a wine style that is designed to be consumed just out.

26:50

Of the fridge and people are actually buying it.

27:03

Yeah. This is something that the wine press has latched onto, that the sellers of these wines are seeing their sales go up. You're starting to see wine lists in restaurants and wine shops specifically saying that they have these chillable light reds of this style.

27:05

Cheers.

27:19

Cheers.

27:20

Thanks, Tom.

27:22

Thank you.

27:23

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. See you back here tomorrow.

27:37

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28:00

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28:17