The Week Unwrapped - with Olly Mann

399. Iran vs Sweden, jabless vaccines and social blocking

Why is Iran sending text messages to Swedes? Should we administer our own vaccines? And what's the latest outrage at http://x.com/ (X.com)? Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days. With Vincent Moss, Holden Frith and Suchandrika Chakrabarti

Broadcast on:: 27 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

Why is Iran sending text messages to Swedes? Should we administer our own vaccines? And what's the latest outrage at X.com? Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days. With Vincent Moss, Holden Frith and Suchandrika Chakrabarti

It's the weekending Friday the 27th of September, and this is the Week Unwrapped. In the past seven days we've seen Israeli strikes displacing thousands of people in Lebanon and Hezbollah firing a missile at Tel Aviv, the Prime Minister promising there's light at the end of the tunnel in his speech at the Labour Party Conference, and Finland returning two giant pandas to China because they're too expensive to keep. You can read all you need to know about everything that matters in the Week magazine, but we're here to bring you some stories that passed under the radar this week. Big news not making headlines right now, but with repercussions for all our lives. I'm Oli Mann, let's unwrap the week. And joining me today from the Week's Digital Team is the boss man Holden Frith. We welcome back writer and performer Sir Chandrika Chakraborty, and today marks the auspicious debut of Vincent Moss, former political editor of the Sunday Mirror. Hi Vincent. Hi, hello. Now Vincent tradition dictates that as it is your first time on the show you must now declare to us all a fact about yourself, which we could not have discovered merely by Googling you. Right, my fact is I once returned the former Prime Minister David Cameron's stolen bicycle, which he had stolen outside of Tesco's in Notting Hill, and we when I was on a newspaper track down his bicycle and gave it back to him, much to his complete surprise, and to ours too. Wow, that makes you a hero I think. I think so. Maybe qualify for social housing now too. Possibly, although there was a sort of a postscript that went rather wrong, which is the front wheel had been nicked, so we replaced the front wheel, it later came off, and he accused us of trying to kill him, joking me I hope though. Have you ever had a bike stolen, Holden? You strike me as a cyclist. I haven't had a whole bike stolen, but I have had various parts of one, including the saddle, which did make it difficult to ride. And Sir Chandricka, I don't know why, but you just strike me as a walker. I am more of a walker because I've had bike stolen semi-zymes. Yeah. There you go, it's the experience. You need Vincent on the hand to return anything. I'll come and find them, let me know. Vincent, you're up first, what do you think this week should be remembered for? Thanks Ollie, I think you should be remembered for how tech is now becoming the new frontier in warfare, but maybe Sweden hasn't quite got the message. The aim was to create division in Swedish society. The words of Swedish prosecutors on Tuesday, as they accused Iran's intelligence service of hacking a phone operator last year, to send some 15,000 messages, encouraging people to take revenge on protesters who had burned the Quran. Violent riots broke out in Sweden last year, after several anti-Islam activists set fire to copies of these-- Salina Sykes reporting for France 24 on Tuesday. Vincent, what's the story? Well this week, Swedish prosecutors have been talking a lot more about something that happened in Sweden last year, which was this sort of fascinating case about how Iran effectively hacked into the SMS messages of about 15,000 Swedes and sent messages out saying that, following the book burning of the Quran, their holy book last year, that people should take revenge in Sweden, so it's very much attempting to sow the seeds of division and create the impression that Sweden was an Islamophobic country by sending out all of these text messages. And these were messages that were sent on a commercial phone operator? Yeah, essentially what had happened is according to the Swedish security services, they'd hacked into a phone operating system, and a cyber group called Anzu, who believed to be acting for Iran's revolutionary guards, have hacked into this system, managed to send out these messages, and finally these Swedish prosecutors this week have sort of spoken about it and tracked down, and they don't think they'll ever be able to bring this Anzu group to justice, but it's just fascinating how they've got into these phones and essentially sent a message to all these private individuals in Sweden saying that those who insulted the Quran must be punished for their work, so obviously a very sort of dangerous precedent and something that if other terror groups can do it, I mean, who knows where it could end? Well, except Holden, in this case, it's actually not malware is it, as I understand it, you know, when we talk about, as Vincent just said, getting into phones, this is an idea, this is propaganda, this is a text message saying this is what we think you should think about this, I mean, it can be, I suppose, just as dangerous, but it's not the same as something that's taking over their phone or something like that, it's some words. No, and that there's a really broad spectrum of threats that this sort of encompasses, you mentioned the attack on Hezbollah, and that was, you know, clearly using our attachment to technology, but with a more conventional war-like attack. And then right at the other end, you've got these sort of provocative messages on Facebook or by the phone network, as it was in this case, or WhatsApp has often been used in this sort of way, and, you know, in between these two streams, there's a whole range of practices known as, you know, sort of gray zone warfare or sub-threshold attacks, it's even been talked about in the context of Putin and Russia, saber-addling over the potential use of US and UK missiles by Ukraine, and the suggestion that, you know, a state of war might exist between the two countries, some people read into that, it was a nuclear threat, but a lot of security analysts think actually it's much more likely that some sort of cyber attack, which may be, you know, more of the kind of disinformation that Russia has become known for, but could actually be a sort of slightly more disruptive attack on, you know, something like trying to take control of NHS computers, air traffic control, energy companies, those sorts of targets. And Sichandra, it's kind of interesting that this story only really came out this week, but as Vincent said, the event happened last year, because you'd sort of hope, I mean, I know we've had the Hezbollah pages, so that's, you know, very much focus everyone's minds, but you'd sort of hope that all governments and all institutions are very, very aware of tech threats, that should be almost their number one concern. Yeah, because we've had, like, the British Library was kind of unusable for quite a few months, wasn't it? And we've had, like, wave-on wave of attacks on NHS records, like the data is something that criminal gangs want to get hold of, but actually we do have one success story, and there probably are others, but obviously security issues around making these stories known to the public. So we've got the Lockbit story, so what happened here was the National Crime Agency infiltrated systems belonging to Lockbit, and I'll get into who they are in a minute, and it actually flashed up a message on their website saying this has been taken over, which I feel is like quite a win for a government agency, so Lockbit is meant to be a Russian organisation and a really prolific ransomware group, and they're always trying to break in stuff. Some Lockbits, targets with the Royal Mail, NHS suppliers, and law firm Alan Overy, and also Boeing, who've got enough problems of the rain to be dealing with, and basically the UK government has to crack into their systems and kind of get one over on them for once, so the government is kind of, like, each government is kind of in a fight on going against these kind of gangs against other organisations that are using ever-evolving technology to break into our devices. Yeah, although that threat from Russia, Vincent, is something that I think people are probably a bit more aware of, you know, and think about more ever since the allegations around Trump coming to power with the help of Russia, et cetera, you know, and Russia's involvement in social media, and particularly in Sweden as well, because they're on Russia's doorstep. But what is the relationship between Sweden and Iran? Well, I think where the complications have arisen really is, there's a sort of long-running background about where Iran has taken Swedish hostages as pawns almost to get their own people out of jail, and it's also trying to influence mafia gangs in Sweden to do their bidding, so the tensions are rising between those two countries very much, and this is the latest, if you'd like, twist in this, and Iran is now seen as a very serious threat by the Swedish government and Swedish prosecutors, and the text messages are very much another sort of alarming development in the tensions rising between Iran and Sweden, but then we've also got the further complication that sort of the geopolitics of Europe, Iran is, of course, backing Russia in what's going on in Ukraine. So all these conflicts, whether that's Gaza or Ukraine, are all being played out in these other ways across Europe, and fear that that's only going to get worse, what we're seeing happening in Sweden and that SMS hacking, there's no reason why that couldn't happen in the UK and other places, what it seems like is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard literally employ these groups of hackers, almost as a commercial enterprise, and say, "This is what we want you to do, we want you to spread disinformation." This time it was in Sweden, but there's no reason why that couldn't be Russians doing it and employing hackers and doing it in the UK, or in the US elections that are coming up or anywhere else, so it's a very pervasive and alarming, malign influence, and a great way from a criminal point of view, or a terrorism point of view, of getting directly into those devices that we can be all trust. It was worth saying Iran denied the allegations, obviously, I mean, how sophisticated is this as a threat, because it was alluded to earlier, sounds like it's just an SMS. Was it even targeted at Muslims, or was it did it just go out to everybody? In this case, it's hard to find those sorts of details, and as far as has been reported, there's no evidence that it was targeted. One case that's been studied a lot is the 2016 US election where the Internet Research Agency, which is a Kremlin-backed group of hackers, ran quite a concerted effort to discredit Hillary Clinton, which included hacking into email accounts, publicising those emails, but also a similar sort of disinformation campaign to try and so to send, and there they really did have quite a specific level of targeting where they were setting up pages related to Black Lives Matter and sending out messages that were targeted at African-American campaigners talking a lot about police brutality and encouraging people to protest about that, and at the same time, sending messages to white supremacist groups with messages that were designed to appeal to them, and in one case, they actually managed to engineer a protest and can to protest in the real world by telling each group that the other was going to be at a certain place at a certain time and getting those to come out onto the streets. So clearly, this sort of thing, if it's done convincingly and if it's targeted well, can have significant real world effects, but there has, contradicting that, been other bits of research which have suggested that that was a bit of an anomaly and that usually this sort of messaging doesn't manage to change people's minds because it tends to be seen only by people who already believe the message that's being propagated, and that actually a very small number of people overall saw those Russian propagated messages during the 2016 campaign and those visions and the attitudes of Trump versus Hillary Clinton era were much more the result of authentically held views propagated by Americans rather than Russian backed agents. But Vincent, in this case, what is it that the Iranians would actually want out of sewing discontent because the issue in Sweden was, as I understand it, two people who themselves were Muslims, they were Iraqis, burned a Quran in protest and under Swedish rights to free speech, that's something that was condoned, but then there was a counter protest that Iran wanted where people turn up outside and say, this is unacceptable, you're burning our holy book, what would be the advantage of them doing that, rather than having a smaller incident go by, they've created a bigger incident which sews more discontent? Well, that's right, it does seem a bit strange, but I think that once they saw those rather graphic book burnings in 2023, they just wanted revenge effectively, which is what they were asking for in those text messages, so one element was they wanted to paint Sweden as an Islamophobic country and intolerant of their beliefs, and the other element is this an idea of prisoner swaps where there are Iranian nationals that have been arrested and are in prison, and they're using that as leverage to try and get those prisoners released. Right, okay, the prisoner swap thing makes a bit more sense of it, because I'm trying to think what's the advantage of making Sweden seem like a more Islamophobic country if you're worried about Muslims who are actually in the country at the time? Well, exactly, yes, but I think the prisoner swaps is a key element to it, there was one individual in particular who was arrested at Stockholm Airport in 2019, and he was sentenced to life in prison in July 2022 for his role in mass killings in Iranian jails some time ago in the 1980s, and they were very keen to get him out, and there was a prisoner swap announced and he was released in exchange for a European diplomat. So there's that sort of ongoing sort of under the radar diplomacy, and this is an element of increasing the leverage to sort of make those prisoners swaps work a bit better from Iran's point of view. So we've seen exploding pages, you know, we've seen mass SMSs, what other technology should we be wary of, Sir Chandrikan, what's next? Well, basically any of our devices can be accessed because there are two ways straight, aren't they? We can receive signal and send them out, but the NSA, the American National Security Agency does have some tips that can help keep you safe, they seem pretty straightforward, but this is your advice on trying to safeguard your devices. So they mentioned something called spearfishing, and one thing about this situation is there are lots of amazing new words. So spearfishing is when your phone is targeted to install malware, so it's basically getting a virus on your phone, which you think should happen more often, but it doesn't, I've never really had that. So their advice is to power your phone off once a week, and that really helps to stop the criminals keeping the data that's stored on your phone, so that feels like good advice, and then there's a couple of other things that it's worth a listener's maybe hearing about, update your apps, use the official app stores only for your phone, watch out for public Wi-Fi and avoid joining it, especially when it doesn't have a password, use a VPN, when you do have to join a public network, trick you on your phone, disable Bluetooth if you're not using it, for those of us with AirPods, that is difficult, and then make sure if you have biometrics on your phone, so face recognition, finger recognition, use that instead of a pulsecode, and finally switch off location services, and disable it where possible. And try not to walk around in a constant state of crippling paranoia. And just try to travel back to 1980 and see you there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get yourself a burner phone from Nokia. I mean, just finally on this, Holden, when it comes to Iran, I mean, they've got other things to worry about clearly with what's happening in Lebanon at the moment, and this is sort of what they were doing last year, as we've alluded to earlier, but they also have a new president. Do you think that will make any difference? Do you think they're still going to be continuing to pursue this sort of line of attack? I think it's unlikely that that would have too much of an impact on this sort of thing. There's, you know, the Iranian presidency has relatively limited powers. There was hope that it may signal some sort of long-term change, but I think in terms of the sort of operational level, it's highly likely that Iran and, you know, all states, including western states, are going to be looking at technology and looking at ways to get into the minds of their opponents, enemies, even their allies, as we've seen in the past with some of the U.S. data collection programs, so I think governments and individuals should continue to be aware that this sort of thing might happen more. Okay. Up next, what will Americans soon be putting up their noses in the privacy of their own homes? Okay, Holden, it's your turn, what do you think this week should be remembered for? For the vaccine of the future, just follow your nose. Multiple companies and researchers are working on intranasal vaccines, but it is not an easy task. These vaccines use live but weakened viruses. The goal is to genetically modify the vaccine viruses to the point where they trigger the start of an infection, which the immune system will then shut down. This process teaches the body to be on guard against this pathogen in the future, but there's a sweet spot to hit with nasal vaccine. Why isn't there a nasal vaccine for COVID-19, a 2022 video from Stat News explaining how intranasal vaccines could work, and now, Holden, we have one? We do not for COVID-19, but for flu, and we actually have had a flu vaccine that can be administered via the nose for some time, but the news this week is that the US government has approved one which can be used in the home. So what this means is that Americans won't have to go to a GP surgery or a chemist, but they'll be able to order this vaccine from a website run by AstraZeneca, which is the maker of this vaccine, and if they're an adult, they'll be able to spray the vaccine up their nose their cells, and for children, adults will be able to administer it to them. And interestingly, I think I read that it's not for older people who are the people that are targeted, you know, by the NHS for vaccines in this country. Yes, that's right. One reason is that for older people, the NHS and the US government both recommend a much higher dose, and that gives them slightly higher protection against severe symptoms of flu, but for younger people, and in fact it's from the age of two upwards, for younger people, this nasal vaccine is recommended because it has a higher chance of stopping the infection at its cause because in a very intuitive way, the nasal vaccine actually provokes more of an immune response in the nose, which is how the flu virus gets into your body, and because children are quite prolific, spreaders of flu, if you can stop them getting the infection in the first place, that gives actually a higher degree of protection to everyone else as well. I mean, there's another reason, of course, to ChantraCo, which is a lot of us just don't like needles. How are you with needles? Does this appeal to you? I'm okay with them, and there was never any escape having a GP for a dad, so... I'm just constantly stabbing you with Chantra, potentially. You want to wear a hood and you wear a hood, and you wear a hood. Binton, how about you? Are you needle phobic? Hugely, I hate needles, it's one of the worst things in my life. I can't bear them. I mean, as somebody is a bit overweight, all my friends say, "You should get a zenpik," and get those jabs. I'm like, "I would love to do that, but I can't stand a needle." So even for good reasons, like medical health reasons, I will have the jabs, hate doing it, can't look at the needle, have to look away. If I accidentally see it, I'm in real trouble, so I'm in need of phobic. If you could administer a zenpik with a nasal spray, would you do that? I would 100% do that, is the only reason I don't do it, is because you've got to stick a needle in you, so not a big fan of them. But I am a big fan of vaccines, and I think one of the problems is that we're seeing a big drop-off in the number of people taking vaccines. Part of this is sort of spurred by some of the inaccurate disinformation that was around the COVID jabs, but I was just looking at Pulse, the medical magazine the other day, and they're noting that, particularly among children, the take-up rate on childhood vaccines has fallen again, in known vaccines meeting the 95% target for coverage, particularly important for parents who've got children that are not immunizing against the whooping cough and measles. These are potentially killer diseases. Some don't want the immunization for ideological reasons. Some may have other reasons, they may be needle phobic, or their children may be, but it's a really worrying trend, because for vaccines to work, you need a critical mass to take them out, and a lot of these figures are now showing there are downward trends. The first dose of the MMR jab has now fallen below 90% nationally for three years in a row, and this decline, I think, puts us at real risk of a big childhood outbreak of measles or something like that, and that's not good for anybody, really not good for children, and it's a really worrying trend in the UK at the moment. So do you think it could be coming to the UK, Holden, this technique? Not in this particular case, at least in the short term, and that's, I think, for two reasons. One is that the nasal vaccine is only used among children here so far, and self-administration amongst children probably is a step too far, but I think the other reason is that the health service here is much more centralized and institutionalized than it is in the US or other countries too, and the NHS generally has been slower than other systems to move treatments out of hospitals and GPs to other providers, even to NHS chemists or walk-in centres. There's pros and cons to each approach in the UK's COVID vaccine program, which was sort of nationalised and centralised, that did very well at reaching vulnerable people, but it doesn't lend itself to a self-service approach, and I think it would be a big philosophical leap for UK health regulators to say people can start administering their own vaccines. And are there any downsides to the nasal spray? Yeah, I mean, there's a fairly long list of reasons that it can't be used, which are around respiratory problems, so, for instance, if these are specifically guidelines for children because fluenza is only available for children in the UK at the moment, so if they're wheezing, if they're wheezing in the past 72 hours, they can't use it, if they're using asthma reliever intakeers, they can't have this nasal spray vaccine, if they've needed intensive care due to an allergy to eggs, and allergies are on the rise, then they can't have it. Any condition that weakens the immune system, any condition that needs study-silate treatment, so there's like contraindications or other conditions, and children who've been vaccinated shouldn't be around, other people were severely compromised, immune systems. I guess it's also the risk of insulin, you just might not do it properly, and that's the other thing, isn't it? We know this from COVID testing at home, people, will they bugger it up? Absolutely, it was quite uncomfortable, wasn't it sticking those things up your nose and trying to get it right, so it's not as simple as it seems. One thing I would say about the American says, their drugs tend to be on the whole hugely expensive compared to what we pay here, so it'd be very interesting to see if we can get things like that licensed over here, because it's easier you make it for people to do things in self-administer, the better it works, but potentially the big risk this winter, as we haven't really got there yet, is we face some kind of big flu epidemic, because everybody knows the NHS is at breaking point, and the last thing we need is a few flu epidemics, so the better we can stop that, the better it is for all of us, really. And also holding a potential exciting bit of research that you've awarded me from Nature magazine suggests that we might not need to get vaccinated against flu every year, that we might be able to get lifetime immunity one day soon. Yes, that's the hope, and there's been a huge amount of progress on multiple fronts with vaccines since the pandemic, the research into mRNA vaccines in particular, and there's at various stages of research and development, we now have vaccines in the pipeline for bird flu, SARS, MERS, C. difficile, herpes, HIV, malaria, norovirus, TB, and earlier stages of research for vaccines that will prevent some types of cancer. But yeah, as you said, current flu vaccines have to be updated each year, they target particular strains, the virus is always evolving, now there's hope that by targeting the sort of core of the virus, instead of the protein spikes, the sort of periphery of it, it will be possible to create a vaccine that targets all variants of flu, and new currently unknown variants of flu that might crop up in the future, and that would aim in it was much more effective, but B, as you say, mean that you wouldn't have to go through that process every year, and one other thing I'd just add on the vaccine hesitancy front, I saw quite a few medics suggesting that even though that feels like a very deep-seated problem to tackle, something like a nasal vaccine or an oral vaccine or a skin patch could have a significant effect in reducing that, just because psychologically it's harder to present a skin patch or an oral drug or a nasal spray as being a kind of instrument of state control than it is an injection, there's just something about a needle that sort of lends itself to conspiracy theories, and so you know, you're not going to get to everybody with that, but if you could reduce vaccine hesitancy, then that's a step in the right direction. Yeah, unless Bill Gates says anything about it, and then there is food for conspiracy theorists, isn't there? We're going to be talking about Elon Musk again, can you believe? He just keeps doing newsworthy stuff, I'd rather he didn't keep coming up, but he does! That's after this. So Chantrake, you're finishing the show, what do you think this week should be remembered for? Is Elon just giving Twitter over to the trolls? Elon, why are you removing the block button? I've blocked hundreds of people from my own safety, stalkers, trolls, people who are just genuinely trying to ruin my life, like if I can't block people, I'm going to have to deactivate my account, like I love this app, but I just won't feel safe anymore, but you're ruining this platform and you don't even care, please don't do this. Astrid Wet, who has 260,000 followers on X, responding to what news, Chantrake? X, formerly known as Twitter, is getting rid of the block feature. Elon Musk, who is apparently in charge of this platform, he has been kind of warning he's going to do this for quite a long time, but it does feel like now he's actually going to do it. There was a tweet from a web developer from X, who first reports the news, this is Neema Audrey, who said, right, the block function is going to go, and in the very official ways that he does like to report his news, Elon just messaged a reply to this person and was like, yeah, it's going to happen. And so we are losing the block function, which as we heard from the clip is going to make a lot of users on Twitter or X have a much worse experience of the platform. Okay, so for those of us who actually don't use X for listening, can you give us a 101? What is the block button, and why does it matter? The block button, so if I was to block Ollie, would I ever, are you still on Twitter? I don't know. I follow your every move. So if I was to block Ollie, that would mean that we can't communicate. And also if you looked over at my account, you will be able to see any of my posts. And so by taking this block away, it means you can still block someone from sending your direct message. So private messages will still be safe. But it means a person you've blocked while they can't communicate with you, so they can't retweet you or act you or anything like that, which is what it's like now. They can't look at your content, and it means they can use your content for their own ends, if necessary. They can use a tweet. Okay, so explain that because a lot of people, particularly female users, have been saying this means I'm going to get harassed. But if you can't DM someone and you can't at reply them, and you can't retweet them or whatever they call it now, repost, how would you be harassing someone? What kind of method would you be using just because you can access their public features? The most particular term for doing this, but what it can do is cause a pile on. So what you can do is take a screenshot of someone's tweet, I do this one, I don't want to give some more engagement, but I do want to share the tweet. And then you can use that as a picture in your tweet and say, for instance, why is this women's upset with Elon Musk? She is terrible or whatever, you know, terms and trolls are using now. And so that's where you can then get other people who are following you and who are not black blocked by the initial person, they can harass them. I suppose the question then is whether it is X's role to stop that kind of harassment, Vincent. You know, if it isn't direct harassment, if it is about saying we're a public square, that's what Elon Musk is fond of saying, isn't it? We're a public square, you know, it's all about free speech and say whatever you like. Those are the principles that I run this app on. Then I suppose it is kind of consistent to say you can't select who gets to look at what you write. That's not in the spirit of what we're doing here. True, but I think it's about where you set the bar. And I think the view about Elon Musk is he's got the bar in the wrong place. And he should and all platforms should be taking a greater role in preventing harassment and abuse, whether that's by screenshotting an image and then causing a pile on or any other method. And I think he's got a lot of these things in the wrong place and uses the veil if you like a free speech as an excuse to allow a lot of pretty abhorrent behavior to carry on. And that's what's happening at the moment. Some of the abuse on Twitter has caused an awful lot of people to say they're not going to continue using the platform when the block button and muting and things like that are a very important part of controlling or trying to control those who would seek to troll you or abuse you. And it goes further than that, doesn't it, Holden? It's actually an important regulatory part of being part of the App Store and the Google Play Store. Yeah, that's right and there is some question about whether X will still be available to users of Android or Apple devices if he goes ahead with it because it is one of the rules that if you are distributing a social networking platform then you have to have some method of blocking people. I would say though that blocking on X or Twitter has always been quite a weak solution because there was nothing to stop serious stalkers or trolls creating another account and popping up over and over again. Or just opening a browser and incognito but not seeing people writing to do that if you want to see some of them. If you didn't want to go to that much effort you could just log out in fact and you could then see a person's profile and message and in fact that's something that Elon Musk has changed slightly for the better although possibly not with the idea of kind of people's welfare in mind but more to try and increase people creating accounts in that he's stopped using more than a few posts on anybody's profile page unless you do log in but yes you could still just create multiple accounts. I suppose this in some ways if this does have a significant effect then it would prove that most of the abuse and trolling and you know kind of online stalking you see is actually quite a sort of low threshold behavior like people just aren't willing to go to the effort of creating an extra account. It is something that people do quite casually and that suggests that it's something that could maybe be prevented at source slightly more easily if it was something that Twitter and other social media platforms actively wanted to do but I think the suspicion is always that it's just not in their business interest and hasn't been but Elon Musk has taken that to new levels. I mean where do you put this in the Elon Musk narrative, Sajandra Karan, in terms of since he took over Twitter he now charges for a blue check mark, he makes sure that he is visible on your timeline regardless of whether or not you choose to engage with him or not. What is the effect that these changes are having? Some really awful things have been going on so a couple of statistics here which are just so grim. The Centre for Councilloring Digital Hate and the Anti-Defamation League have both found that racist slurs have increased nearly three times since October 2022 and the Institute of Strategic Dialogue reports that anti-Semitic posts have doubled, that isn't just the last couple of years. That is really grim and also shows that there are no consequences for this kind of hate speech as well that actually Elon Musk's Twitter is not doing anything about that kind of thing. Also you mentioned that Elon is very present in all our feeds, he's like, was it Tom from MySpace but like Horrifying? He's like an emerald mine and he's Horrifying and I've got a feeling, this feels a little bit out there but I've got a feeling the timing is to do with Trump and the election, if you make this change now Trump was famously thrown off Twitter in the Jack Dorsey era in the kind of liberal era which is a long gone now it's when we were joined and things are changed and now there's an election coming up and things aren't looking good so it seems like a lot of people have got Trump blocked and now we can see his content and now it's going to change his visibility on the platform, it's going to change what he can do on that platform and to me it just seems like maybe it's visibility for the right-winger sphere that is going to improve and that is what Elon is doing right now. Well if you believe in seeing more from Donald Trump makes you more likely to vote for him, I mean there's an argument that actually him having been over on Truth Social for the last couple of years mostly, I know he's back on X technically now, has actually had the effect of hiding some of the wild and wacky stuff from the general public. Well it's impossible to know isn't it because you would think any right-thinking person would see that the more they see of Trump that they won't vote for him but we all tend to depending on our various platforms that we move on tend to live in a sort of echo chamber and you never know what happens, I mean I've thought in past elections because of what I was seeing on Twitter the results were going to be completely different from what they were and that's more a reflection of the people I was following than what was actually really happening. I think one of the key things about where we go with this is I was talking to a lot of politicians recently, I was at the Labour conference last week and they're all telling me how they hate Twitter and they're all moving to blue sky or threads, well that's fine but Twitter's got 370 million users and blue sky's got about 10 million so it's 37 times bigger if you want to get your message across however unpleasant that marketplace is that forum is, it's massive and if you're in the business of spreading news or keeping abreast of the news you probably have to stay on ex-hava and popularies yet there is this move because bear in mind many politicians were annoyed with Musk for his comments during the riots over here in the UK and some of the things he said so there's a move among the left and a lot of Labour MPs in particular to get off ex and to try and encourage other people a kind of pied-piper move to go on to blue sky but I've been asking friends about blue sky most people haven't heard of it so what's the point of going on to a new different platform if people don't know it exists yeah there's also just that slightly self aggrandizing thing, Sichandra Khura being like I'm off you know telling everyone on ex like they care where you're going you know like you were the reason they were there which I think people just etiquette wise feel a bit nervous about even if actually they've stopped looking at ex because it's so incredibly depressing yeah there's so many levels this isn't there of like how do you leave Twitter if you're going to leave it what do you do for some people it is really important they tell their fan base or their followers that you can find me over on Instagram or a another platform for other people like myself I'm staying until it burns I want to see what happens I want to see how this ends I think as Vincent says it's such a big platform still that it will take a long time for it to kind of lose everyone but the same time I think the bad publicity around this move is gonna get a load of people to leave I mean out of all of us are holding you are the one who's most responsible for the thing that Vincent was talking about there which is trying to spread news via the week's websites but actually ex is making that increasingly harder isn't it that it's harder to spread news it's easier to spread sensationalism so does it matter it was always the case that Twitter in the old days was responsible for less click throughs to the week or other publications I've worked for then something like Facebook you could get a lot of noise you get a lot of reaction but people wouldn't actually read the article you would often get more more comments on the platform you know praising criticizing the article than you would see click throughs from from Twitter to the website so you could know with some certainty that people were arguing about an article that they hadn't read the week still posts links on X it feels like we have a duty to put stories out there and maintain some sort of presence but it's not a priority for us in the way that it might once have been I was a very early user of Twitter I enjoyed it a lot at one point found it fun useful informative and especially when I worked at Wired it just felt like a natural fit you know you know probably guilty of some techno utopian feelings about it but I looked back on my last tweet was on 3rd of April 2020 and I think it's not a coincidence that that was the beginning of the pandemic and that was the time where it felt you know during Brexit Twitter had been quite an unpleasant place to be but it felt like the claim and counterclaim and the disinformation was sort of part of the story and helped in understanding what was happening and it really was a good way of getting a wide range of views but during the pandemic that became actively harmful and sort of detrimental to you you understood less about what was happening if you if you use Twitter as your source and I think increasingly that sort of spreads to other areas of politics so I mean I have a look at certain users and I kind of dip into them as sources but as a sort of general feed I do feel it's it's past the point where it brings more benefit than than cost and two sachandra has thought Vincent about the US elections and how this may be a play to try and sway that we all know don't we that it's only tens of thousands of people in certain swing states that are going to determine who's going to win the presidential election really who still haven't made up their mind are they going to be swayed by this then or even on X are they exactly I doubt it I mean it is those crucial handful of voters in half a dozen swing states that everybody's fighting over and all the rest really is noise I mean the most people I speak to now try and get their message across increasingly on LinkedIn or many of my friends now on Instagram but I think it was Mary Beard who said you know you really should want to stay and fight on Twitter because otherwise you're just giving up the ground to the idiots and the trolls and the extremists so I think I'm going to try and stay there and dip in occasionally but it has become increasingly unpleasant and we do need those things like the block feature because there are some people that there's only one language they understand and that's the block button isn't it okay well I'm pressing that button right now because we have reached the end of this edition of the show my thanks to Vincent Sajanjika and Holden you can follow this show for free and you can get every episode as soon as it's released just search for the week unwrapped and tap follow wherever you get your podcast you can also get six free issues of the week magazine what a respite from social media that is by getting a trial subscription at theweek.com/subscriptions in the meantime I've been Ollie Mann our music is by Tom Morby the producer Claire Williamson at Rethink Audio and until we meet again to unwrap next week bye bye. 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