From Chaos to Clarity: How to Challenge Misinformation with James Mawhinney

Adam: 

Welcome back to This Anthro Life. I'm your host Adam Gamwell. In today's episode, we're diving into the wild and chaotic world of misinformation. We talk about the existential threats that it poses, the disturbing pace at which it spreads, and how we can fight back. Joining us in this high-stakes discourse is none other than James Mawhinney. He's the founder of Media.com. Now, having been at the epicenter of a whirlwind of misinformation himself, James shares his riveting journey and opens up about how it led to the creation of Media.com, which is a platform that's dedicated to countering misinformation and giving folks a chance to fight back when they themselves fall into the trap. or prey to misinformation. Get ready for a mind-boggling conversation that uncovers the dark side of the information era and shows us a beacon of hope amidst the storm. So remember, the best defense against misinformation is both staying informed and staying informed about how you can fight back. So don't miss out and stay tuned. Make sure to hit that subscribe button, leave us a review if you like it, or some comments down below, and don't forget to check out previous episodes for more mind-blowing stories from the world of anthropology. Let's dive in. Maybe you can kind of walk listeners up a little bit in terms of your story and how you got into the idea of founding media.com and the questions around misinformation and what shaped that.

James: 

Yeah, certainly. It's a hell of a story. I'll start by saying that. In 2009, I established my own personal private investment company. And then between 2016, 2020, we went out to the public to raise funds so that we could increase our investment capabilities. In three and a half years, we raised just over a quarter of a billion dollars. That enabled us to invest in a whole range of different private equity assets. At our peak, we had assets in 11 countries. We had over half a billion dollars worth of assets and less than a quarter of a billion dollars worth of liabilities. Everything from bricks and mortar tangible real estate. We bought a very iconic Australian asset called Dunk Island in September of 2019 and a couple of hundred properties on the mainland for a big $1.6 billion redevelopment of the region. right through to backing some very successful technology companies and kind of everything in between as any responsible investment manager would be to run quite a diversified portfolio. So things were going well. Our investors, by the way, were effectively all lenders to the business because they're debt instruments they subscribe to for fixed income. Everyone was paid. Everyone was paid on time. Everyone that needed to redeem was paid on time. And business was going well. And then I'll tell you where we ended up and then I'll back, I'll fill in some of the gaps. Fast forward between say March of 2020 when COVID hit and our worst period, which was probably 12 months after that. I ended up with a 20-year ban for dealing in financial products. I was banned from leaving Australia, the country. Our company or our group was fined $30 million for alleged misleading or deceptive conduct with our advertising. And as you can probably appreciate, this had a catastrophic impact. across our business, across the lenders that had entrusted us with their funds. A lot of them were retirees. The property vendors that had committed to selling us their properties at certain dates got derailed. People, in some instances, they'd moved into their caravans or actually relocated into state on the expectation that their property would be settled. But what had happened to now kind of fill in the gap in between, in late 2019, we had a journalist that attended an event unannounced, sat in the back row. And in the space of that journalist attending and within 24 hours of that, there was an email sent. by someone that's a short seller. For those that don't know what a short seller is, they profit when companies fail. The difference was our group wasn't public and we're a private company, but the short seller had written to the deputy commissioner of our local securities regulator. And in fact, his exact words at the end of his email, making a whole range of very broad allegations were, this is entirely speculative, of course, except my Spidey sense is going off badly. I didn't know the person from a bar of soap, never met him, never had anything to do with him. As far as I was aware, our business had nothing to do with him and he had nothing to do with us, but he claims to have taken our materials, sent them to the regulator. Within a matter of weeks of that, the regulator started taking steps to effectively see that our business was frozen and then ultimately collapsed. Three and a half years later, more than $10 million in legal fees, 23 court cases triggered off the back of it. Insolvency practitioners appointed to more than 40 entities. I've had death threats. I've been referred to in articles along with Charles Ponzi. And Bernie Madoff, who are renowned fraudsters, was likened to a fraudster whose foot washed up on the beach in, I believe, northern New South Wales in Australia. There's a fugitive that not too many people know the name of internationally, but very well known in Australia called Christopher Scase. And Christopher Skase was around kind of the 70s, 80s and 90s, I believe, and fled to Majorca when his company collapsed. That journalist that attended the event that we ran in Sydney in 2019, a few days after that event, wrote an article with the headline, I'm no Skase. Wow. Implying basically, there was a comparable there between an international fugitive that had fled the country and me. So where this ties into what we're now doing with media.com, there was a point where admittedly, I Googled myself, as I'm sure most people, if you ask them, they will admit that they've done the same thing. But at one point, you know, 12 months after the regulator had kind of come in unannounced and tried to freeze everything and put the brakes on our business. And I Googled myself and all 10 of the first page of the search results was very negative, as you can imagine. And I was reading this guy. What I'm seeing here being portrayed in the media and me and our situation are just two totally different things. I guess why there was just such a gap between what was being portrayed in the media and the actual situation in me as an individual was because really no one had really delved into checking the source. And you might find this difficult to believe, but here we are. now almost four years on since the journalist attended that event and the short seller sent that email, and I still haven't been interviewed by the regulator. The person that set the business up was responsible and is responsible for ensuring those that lent money to the group have their capital safely repaid and had successfully been doing that for three and a half years, building a portfolio with real value behind it, real assets, the properties. You can knock on the door, they exist. You can knock the walls, they all exist. All the assets, the shares that we help various companies, they all exist. And so the idea for media.com really came as a result of this unfortunate spread of misinformation. And we're not just talking one discreet email from that individual to the deputy chair, which effectively didn't go properly checked. But this then translated into a few months after that, insolvency practitioners being appointed to 17 companies, which were all just investment holding companies in a division of our group. And they wrote a report at very short notice. I think the court gave them six days to write that report. The report was sent to our lawyers. I got sent a copy of it and they said, Hey James, can you please respond to this report? This is where the original idea for media.com came about. And I looked at it, it was just a standard PDF, 20 or 30 pages from memory. And I read it and I went, well, there's a whole lot of inaccuracies in here. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say it was just a clear misunderstanding of our business, misunderstanding of the offer document that set out very clearly what was what. And I always said, James, you need to respond to this. And I thought, well, how? Do I do a video? Do I do a podcast? You know, do I mark the document up? Do I convert it into Word and add, you know, red text underneath or blue text underneath the black text? And so, you know, I thought about it some more and I thought, well, I'm just going to start a basic Word document and put a column in the left that says, you know, page one, paragraph one, line one, and in the right-hand side was the word or the phrase that was used that might have been inaccurate. And so I bold the phrase underneath that and say, well, this is false or misleading or unsubstantiated, depending on what it actually was, or defamatory even. And then underneath that would actually explain the reason why. And so I repeated that over and over, literally line by line dissecting this report. And I thought, there needs to be an online system for people to do this, not just by way of reports in terms of offline documents and letters and things like that, but also for the media. Because as we all know, there can be innocent misinformation which is spread just as a result of a typo. It could be anything from a missing comma to an allegation. There was an article written a few months ago about me and my business that said I'd been banned as a company director for 20 years. This is Australia's leading financial publication, or so they hold themselves out to be. And instead, I've been banned as a director for 20 years. I have never been banned as a director for 20 years. In fact, I've never been banned as a director. In fact, the court very recently shut down the regulator's case to ban me as a director, yet the publication said this and anyone in business understands that there's a challenge that then you have to generally contact your public relations manager. They get in touch with the publication, the journalists or the publication generally reluctant to do anything. And of course, once it's been published, the first 24 hours is when the most eyeballs are on it, the damage is done. And so I thought there needs to be a way to give the little guy the opportunity to respond to innocent misinformation, or as we're very much aware, there's a broader issue globally around disinformation. So that's where media.com came from. It's obviously a story I'm very passionate about. It's impacted me personally. It's impacted my family. My daughter was born 72 hours after the regulator issued proceedings. My partner was in hospital in ICU for five days, had to have two blood transfusions. And it was a very traumatic experience, both the childbirth and having federal court proceedings issued against a business which you know, within reason. I mean, no business is perfect, but, you know, we had lawyers reviewing everything. All of our marketing was approved by lawyers. We did everything, you know, within reason by the book. We had trustees overseeing what we're doing. We held two financial services licenses that we're operating under. We employed 70 staff, you know, the business couldn't be any more real, but it was misportrayed as though the whole thing was a sham, which was most unfortunate. And, um, that being said, the silver lining is obviously what we're now doing with media.com.

Adam: 

That is traumatic and such a poignant story to get us to reflect on the speed at which information gets out today, especially in digital. Once it's out, it's out very quickly. And then once an algorithm catches it, it's going to fly up on Google or whatever, a search engine. And so is it about trying to slow things down or is it about giving the ability to respond and change the narrative or add to the narrative so it doesn't just run away? Is that how you think about it? Is it a speed thing or a scale thing?

James: 

Yeah, look, it's, it's unfortunately the speed thing, the day that the internet came about, speed, you know, was instant overnight globally, as we all know. Then when social media platforms came about, you know, with Facebook launching, I think it was in 2004. And then, you know, social media really evolving as we all know, particularly with Twitter or X, something can happen on the other side of the world and the whole world can know about it, you know, in the space of minutes. And so what, what has happened in the traditional media space? and where it fits in with the social media space is that you see this content get published. I'll use that article that I mentioned a moment ago. It gets published. It will typically get syndicated across the publisher's network that they ultimately control, given that there's only a handful of power brokers that largely control the media industry around the world. So it gets proliferated there instantly. It then also then gets, you get often the secondary publications or the second tier publications that rely on the first tier publications for their information. They will then go and write stories in their own words, but quite similar. And then of course, both of those sources of content end up getting shared across social media. And so once there is even a very minute piece of misinformation or even disinformation, if it is dishonest, but let's just give everyone the benefit of the doubt and say there's an innocent mistake, the horse is bolted. We're talking in a matter of hours, if not minutes, given the power and the connectivity that the internet's brought about. And that's very challenging. You can't slow down the internet and everyone would complain if you did. So, therefore, the solution, we believe, and whether it's with what we're doing with media.com or a platform like us, is to create a safe space where people can respond, where they can state their position. We're in the process of trademarking the term publish your truth. At least, you know, express yourself to tell the world what your official statement is or your official position is in relation to someone. and do it in a way where that's not then going to go and get misconstrued. As we've all seen with social media, you can end up being trolled and being abused. I personally went on Twitter in, I think it was 2021, I'm sure a couple of months period to try and clear my name. We were We were out of money. We just had two federal court judgments against us. It was, you know, one of the worst periods that we were going through. We just lost our family home. And I thought, I need, I need to get our story out. And so, you know, silly me, I jumped on Twitter at the time, set up an account very quickly and started posting, you know, official documents, official court statements, and tried responding. And what happened? The short seller jumped on. with 50,000 or 60,000 followers and said, where's the effect? I took your materials, I sent them to the regulator. They said, they told me that you could be facing criminal charges. If you go to jail, I'll visit because you seem like an interesting fellow. And naturally, here's 50,000 or 60,000 followers. So in seeing that, they jumped on the bandwagon. Going back to your point earlier about the speed of misinformation, the flow on impact, and I'm just a microcosm of the number of people, the millions of people around the world that get impacted by misinformation in personal relationships right through to business, government, regulatory decisions, courtroom decisions. It's something that's really just out of control at the moment.

Adam: 

I think, and it's such a challenge too, because even as you pointed out too, that when you have, because of social media and the kind of structure in terms of if somebody has a lot of followers and they post them, then oftentimes it is this kind of bandwagon trolling phenomenon at this challenge where it's like people kind of hop on and they, in essence, are letting the thought leader think for them. They're just saying, I'm just going to respond to what this person says because I follow them as a as a reporter or whoever else. And I think that that's such an, uh, a challenging point too, because then it points out, I think you're right. Like the, the problem with traditional social media in terms of trying to actually put forth a message. Um, it's, it's on one level of kind of ironic if you think about it, because the, as we know, like Facebook began as a photo sharing website, right? And then, and then Twitter blogger and, uh, and yeah, ostensibly to share social things, but here it's like a battle of, of stories and, and, and you know, on one side truth and one side just kind of anger, right? And it's like this interesting point of like, you know, why we, I think we need platforms like media.com because it's, we don't have a place like that. Like social media is where we typically try to go out and be public, especially if you don't have a PR agent, right? And even small businesses may not, right? I mean, as a small entrepreneur, like I also do my own PR, which is I know dangerous. But it's an interesting question of how do you control that? So on the one hand, I have two questions in mind. And one is to get a sense, broadly, of how do we think about what are the most pressing challenges that we have around misinformation? And I think your story illustrates, I think, a lot of them. We're going to start there. Then I want to go and basically, how can we begin to fix some of those through platforms like media.com?

James: 

Sure. So I think your first question around where are the biggest problems 

involving misinformation, I believe that one of the biggest threats, and I know this is a very bold statement to make, but I believe that the biggest threat to human existence is misinformation. And that threat has become exacerbated more than ever really in the last 12 to 18 months with the invention, if I can call it that, of artificial intelligence. Because if you think about how Yeah, if you think about what AI is capable of, there's two real key elements here. One is using artificial intelligence, you can effectively create a bot or an automated program that will automatically go and create fake profiles. Um, and you can do that within reason on most of the major social media platforms. And of course. Their business models aren't aligned with information integrity. They're aligned with engagement because engagement sells advertising space. And you know that that's going right back through to the days of the newspapers where. No bad news sales. Why? Because people read it because they like to read about misfortune because it makes people feel good. And all of that is all to do with trying to sell more advertising space. So there's a big misalignment, I believe, with information integrity in the traditional media model, which is really to sell advertising space. But the second element of artificial intelligence is the fact that the content can now get created at such a rapid rate that we now face the risk not only of fake profiles being created at a far greater rate of knots. but also then the content that gets posted and the perceived accuracy or lack thereof of that content as, you know, fake images can be created, even fake videos can be created. You've got the whole deep fake issues, but if you just take, you know, innocent, not innocent, shall I say, but content that's being created with the likes and chat GBT on the fly in a matter of seconds, there is now a risk that the combination of those two things, mean that the social media giants are in this very dangerous situation where they are potentially at risk of facilitating this mass spread of misinformation. Whether it's my situation or many other people that are being impacted by misinformation right through to what's going on, in the very unfortunate situation in the Middle East at the moment, the regulators around the world are now starting to clamp down on this because they realize how much of a major threat this is causing society. I know I want to be the spreader of bad news, but let's say there's a plane innocently flying through the sky. Over a city, I won't pick a city, but let's say all of a sudden there's a post that is spread on one of the social platforms from a fake profile that's been artificially generated, that somehow it creates a photo or an image of someone on that plane threatening to take it down. The president gets alerted because it's spread like wildfire online. President scrambles the fighter jets. They go and take it out of the sky. Innocent people die. It turns out that it was misinformation, but of course, they don't know that. The finger starts getting blamed on this country over here. That country blames that country over there. Next thing you know, people and countries are sending nuclear bombs and bombers to each other's countries, and World War III breaks out. That, to me, I believe is a bigger threat. And this is why I say it's a bigger threat than climate change. There's a lot of misinformation about climate change in its own right, but climate change is something that's obviously going to arguably potentially take a long time to take effect. And whether it's our children's generation or their children's generation, we're already starting to see some changes, but it's nothing compared to the light speed at which misinformation can obviously spread. So that was your first question, Andrew. Sorry, Adam, your second question.

Adam: 

Yeah, it was just thinking about the question of if we get a sense of what is the scope of a problem? And I think that's a really interesting take also, because both climate change and misinformation in this case can pose an existential threat, right? But I think you're right on the two ends. The speed at which misinformation can trigger something to happen catastrophically at a large scale is quite frightening. And also why we need to take it seriously, right? And so the second question I was thinking about here is that, how can we think about this, like with media.com and your platform and kind of opening up this new line of kind of service, how do we, you know, what kind of, what's, I guess the business model, how do we think about that? Like, is this functioning as a kind of social media antidote or is it functioning as a PR, you know, buttress? Like how's, what's the kind of business plan behind this?

James: 

Yes, certainly. So I think the first thing I'll say is that the social media concept has been highly effective at creating engagement and even stepping back a step prior to that. If you look at the traditional media industry, when that arguably took off, when the printing press was invented by Gutenberg, I think it was in the 1400s or thereabouts, all of a sudden secondhand information was being published. And that's what traditional media, not to downplay the importance of it, it is secondhand information. This situation happened to this personal business over here and here's what occurred. So that's traditional media. You then fast forward to the introduction of social media. And of course, we all felt so empowered because now we could finally have our say. And so the media industry was arguably disintermediated by the fact that you and I and everyone around the world could create profiles and finally start having our say. And so the trust level that was once so high in the traditional media space started to decline whilst the trust level in social really started to increase. Now, what we've seen, particularly in the last 12 months with the spread of misinformation and disinformation and arguably presidential elections or elections in general being impacted, you've got war type situations in the middle of the Middle East and Ukraine, which are also being impacted. What's happening now is that there's this degradation of trust that's taking place in the social media space. And the question really everyone's asking themselves is, well, where do we go to next? And going back to what I was saying earlier about the challenge that the media industry as a whole has faced is that I believe that there is a fundamental misalignment between, as I said, the business model of the media industry, both traditional and social, and information integrity. You can't encourage authentic information and fact and truth if your objective is to sell advertising space. They are two fundamentally different outcomes and they arguably can't safely coexist, or at least to what I'd say is an acceptable level for, you know, hopefully the betterment of humanity over time. So what does that mean? It means that I believe the future of information will involve users continuing, as in you and I and brands and individuals around the world, continuing to tell their story themselves, so with their profiles, but every one of those profiles has to be verified so that the platform and the public that are viewing the profiles on that platform know that the person or the brand or the organisation that is publishing that content is who they say they are. It might sound really simple, but if you look at it in the banking industry, the banks are who their customers are. You can't open a bank account without being verified using what's known as KYC or Know Your Customer technology. As you probably know, you can't open cryptocurrency accounts these days largely without being verified. So almost anything and everything in financial services requires verification. But then if you also look at, say, the likes of the state governments and motor cars on the road, you can't drive a car down the road unless effectively you're verified. You've got a license plate and you've got a license. So there's an identifier that the local government knows who it is behind the wheel. At the moment, these big tech companies that are worth billions upon billions of dollars actually don't know who their users are with 100% accuracy or even 99% accuracy. And so that's why the regulators around the world are starting to put so much emphasis on pinging effectively and penalizing the big tech platforms. for the spread of misinformation because they're unable to delegate that down the line to the likes of the banks who know that such and such is laundering millions of dollars to go and fund the acquisition of a whole lot of arms for an upcoming war. The banks know who those transactions are taking place with. At the moment, the scary thing is that we don't, and the big tech platforms actually don't specifically know with 100% accuracy who it is that's sharing, not just misinformation, but information in general. So naturally, what does that mean for what we're doing? With media.com, we're creating a safe place where every profile is verified since inception using the same bank grade KYC and KYB technology. KYB stands for Know Your Business, so both individuals and businesses. And the third element of this is, and it's an important one, is the fact that social media, as you know, you are the product. You and your screen time and your preparedness to lie in bed and scroll through your feed is making the platforms money, which is making ultimately their shareholders money. Advertisers love it. It's a great way to engage. But you are, as you well know, you're the product. If now we look at what the alternative is, if you don't want to be the product, naturally, there has to be some form of not at all fee for that. And now, You know, people listening to this might go, oh no, all of a sudden I'm going to be charged for my social media. Well, think about it this way. If you rent your apartment or your home, or you even rent your office, or even if you rent your car, you're entitled to quiet enjoyment of that space. If we talk about it in a home context, if you pay X dollars a month, between those four walls, they are yours. There are no trespassers allowed. There's no homeless people sleeping in the corner. You haven't got a rock band that comes in every Tuesday to practice and thousands of people coming in and out for parties and making a ruckus. That is effectively what social media is. The big tech giants are the landlords and they're giving you free usage of their property because they're making money off advertisers. And so what we're introducing is not a new concept. We're already doing this in everyday life for the betterment of quiet enjoyment. And we believe that for media.com, by virtue of the fact that whilst we'll have no doubt over time, millions of free basic profiles, for those that are more actively engaged with the platform, there'll be a very nominal fee. We're only talking a matter of dollars a month. We're not talking hundreds of thousands of dollars, but you know, this is going to be, it needs to be very affordable because misinformation is a global problem. And in order to solve it, it's really important that there is for every profile, quiet enjoyment. We're not going to allow comments. We think that that is another way that information can get degraded and taken off in the wrong direction. So, again, a very nominal fee, and whether it's with media.com or future platforms, this is just going to be an integral compliant that everyone's got to get used to.

Adam:

 No, but I think that it's a powerful point too. And because, you know, you said a few moments ago that I think it's worth repeating too, is that when, you know, there's the common phrase, there's no such thing as a free lunch, right? When you're given a free service, you are the product, right? And it's interesting because like we've seen a lot of like, you know, subscription models pop up to, I mean, a lot of software now, right? So it's actually a, it's a common practice as folks know, right? And it's an interesting kind of question to think about. isn't it worth that, whether it's both freedom of quiet enjoyment or a semblance of being able to have that space, is an interesting model that paying for it makes sense. It's either advertisers are going to pay for it, or you're going to pay for it, and then what do you do with your data, right? You've got to go somewhere, right? I'm curious, too, to think about in terms of, I guess, people's thinking or reactions about this, but, you know, cause there was like the rise of Mastodon that, that came like when, when X, when Twitter became X and a lot of people exited, exited, left, you know, to go try to find a more open source, a more decentralized platform. Like, do you, do you kind of think about this in terms of, and DeFi does this too, or I guess some, some in the, the, the FinTech space, like, do you kind of lean more towards decentralization in terms of how the data is stored or in a centralized space? Like, how do you think about that?

James: 

Yeah. I mean, we all know the blockchain space took off at a point, and whilst it perhaps hasn't got the traction that everyone was hoping and expecting, there was, I guess, particularly in the younger generation, this hope that the world would move towards a decentralized model for everything, including banking and all that sort of thing. Obviously, regulation has put a lot of the brakes on what's been attempted in the crypto and blockchain space. We think with what we're doing by way of a business model is that in order for information integrity to really reign over and above what is currently a situation of chaos, That actually does need to be centralised from the perspective that people know that there is an online destination that they can go to available 24-7, where they can go and see what an individual or organisation's views are on a particular topic. And so if I give you an example, we envisage over time, and this will be as early as early next year, that when someone sits down in the morning to read their paper, whether that's a physical paper or on their phone or an iPad, for example, their morning tea or coffee, and they read the secondhand information that talks about, you know, this happened to this CEO, this happened to this Hollywood celebrity and all that sort of thing. then the user will also know that, okay, well now I want to go and see what their side of the story is. And at this stage, that dialogue just really doesn't exist. You can jump on their social media and, you know, we've already talked about the challenges that people have with posting on social media and having the narrative taken off in a different direction, but we believe that for there to be a healthy coexistence that encourages information integrity and actually closes what is currently a communication gap in society that is absolutely critical that the other party or the counterparty can also have their say. And in order for that to take place, really our view is that there needs to be one central location. for that to take place. Obviously we hope and anticipate that that's media.com. That's why we went at great expense to acquire the domain name. But, um, you know, that, that's, that's our hope and anticipate that whether it's us or another platform like us over time, it really does need to be one essential location where people go that is credible and authentic profiles are verified. And it's structured in a way that is very easy to obtain people's official positions on anything and everything that's said about them or their business.

Adam: 

Yeah, I think that's an important point too, because it's like if we're thinking about information integrity as some of the most important things, because as we've been talking about already too, that we are facing issues around climate change. We are facing issues of disinformation and AI created at massive scale, right? I mean, obviously COVID-19 is something else we could think about too, where it's like there's global scale issues that need centralized information on some level that people feel like they can trust. And obviously there is this broken system of trust in terms of do people trust the traditional media? Some people don't trust government, right? There was also this, to some people say intentional breaking up that trust, other people saying unintentional, but still, it broke anyway. And so I think it's an interesting and compelling challenge to try to overcome in terms of how do we reestablish what trust means in the 21st century, in the digital age, when we have challenges that are so much bigger than us. And so I think part of it too, even this, I think what's compelling here is reshaping the way that both I understand how to get information, like how I can find a trusted source of information around media. But then also, I mean, it kind of has two sides. There's that of how to engage with me and the other side of like, how do I manage my own presence too? There's kind of the two pieces there, it seems, which is important. So it's like, it also still, I think, as you're saying too, it helps add that level of dialogue that we need where it's both like, how do I engage with stories I trust, but then know that I can also be represented in a way that I intend to be represented, right?

James:

Adam, you've hit a really critical point here. If you look at the justice system, I've obviously now got many, many cases worth of experience that I can speak of, but if you look at the justice system, you know, effectively globally in almost every country, in a courtroom, the applicant opens their case and they say that the defendant did this and here's why we think it's against the law for that to take place. And at the moment, the applicant is either the media, as in the traditional media, or even arguably social media, saying, oh, this person did this, or there's some scandal or controversy. However, what does the defendant do at the moment? Do they jump on a social media account and start saying, no, I didn't say that, I didn't do this, and being trolled and abused and all that sort of thing? So at the moment, we actually have a courtroom which is disorganized and, to be frank, is actually total chaos. And so the right of reply that so many people, whether it's in a situation like mine or like many others around the world, that have ever had something said about me in the media that's adverse, or even in fact, if it's true, but they want to. reply and comment on it, the capability to do that really doesn't exist because it was a big masthead, a big publication. The New York Times, Washington Post, the Financial Times says something. Well, the generations, particularly before us, put so much trust and credibility in that. Obviously, that has been degraded a bit in recent, probably the last decade, the social media really taking off, but it's so difficult to unstick the mud once something's been said. And so what needs to happen, and again, we're hopeful that this will be the solution that media.com provides, is that all of a sudden we have an organised courtroom where the applicant opens the case and says, hey, this is what's occurred. The defendant could literally copy the URL of the press release, or the article that's been published on the major publication, drop it into their media.com app or the website and click on respond and then go through and deconstruct and say well actually that statement was false for these reasons, that statement's defamatory for these reasons, this one's unsubstantiated because here's the document that substantiates the fact that it's actually wrong or it's mistaken and so we're giving all of a sudden the capability for the user to respond in a structured format. And that's been very much missing from social media. It literally hasn't existed in the traditional media space because what the media giants and the journalists there say, you know, they've largely controlled and influenced obviously a huge amount of decision making in the world. But coming back to what we're saying about the courtroom, having that organized quiet time for the King's Council of the applicant to say their piece, which has already taken place and has been taking place for centuries. What we're now introducing is the fact that the defendant or the counterparty, whether it's because they've had accusations or they just want to comment, that right of reply just has not existed to date. That's something that obviously with what we're doing with media.com, we really hope that we're going to be able to empower millions of people with that capability.

Adam: 

And already that's such a refreshing and different take on what a social media channel can be, right? And that it's not a flood of comments. Because even as you note, if you try to respond today on X or Facebook and there's either people trolling you or just a massive conversation, you're talking into a fire hose, which is very hard to get a message out, right?

James: 

We've all done that before, and it's not very satisfying. There are mental health benefits of this. I met someone a few weeks ago explaining what we're doing, and this was a grown man in his 40s or so, and he said, I get scared, I actually get anxious whenever I post something on social media, even if I don't think it's contentious, because there could be people jumping on there and saying silly things. We've got this breakdown of trust, we've introduced all of this anxiety, and so the fabric and almost DNA of society is really struggling. because of this lack of trust and communication, we hope in the evening we're able just to start to bring this divergence of trust between two parties a little bit closer together and start to introduce dialogue. It can only be a healthy thing, I think, for the future of society.

Adam: 

Yeah, I agree too. I mean, it's one of those, I think that's an important story too, of the man that said he's kind of afraid to post, because I was thinking about this as well that, you know, depending on, it doesn't matter like where you sit on a political spectrum, right, there are kind of concerns on any area, I don't want to say side, but any area around the fence in terms of If I say something, I'm going to get jumped on or yelled at or taken out of context, or not even given the chance to make an argument if I said something too quickly. And it tells us something important if everybody has that concern. That means that nowhere feels safe to actually put out comments or information. And retreating to filter bubbles is not a smart way to do that, right? Because then it just kind of echo chambers an idea. And what we actually need today is dialogue, especially if we're facing such misinformation waves around us. And so one thing I'm thinking about this too is like, so We have the way we can help individuals and businesses engage with media, work on their profiles. But thinking about as people want to put information out there, if I'm a subject matter expert in anthropology or business anthropology and I want to either put some statements or some ideas out there or talk about some research I'm doing with some organizations, how could I get involved and feel like I'm able to share accurate information through something like Media.com?

James: 

Yeah, certainly. Well, I mean, that's a great use case. Media.com isn't just about crisis and controversy. It's about brand management. It's about communicating and communication and expressing oneself. We're big advocates for freedom of speech, but of course with that comes significant accountability. And you know, if you are going to publish something. the reality is it's going to be on, if it is on your personal profile, the user will know that you've only got that personal profile because you have actually been verified. They'll know your actual real name. We're not allowing, you know, silly fake names and that's it. You know, if you are going to have a nickname, then you have to also have your real name next to it. So just by introducing that very basic fundamental principle of capability, Immediately, the credibility of the information that's published on media.com gets taken, I believe, so much more seriously. And, you know, I was just in Washington a few days ago presenting at quite a large marketing and communications conference there. And it was really interesting to hear that one of the chief marketing officers for a very large United States brand said, and I won't mention the platform name, said that We're steering clear of this particular platform that hundreds of millions of people use because of the brand association. And what we're starting to see, particularly we've been just done a three week roadshow in Europe and the United States, is that there's this certain ickyness, if I can call it that, of reputable, credible brands and their brand managers and communications. Managers are, you know, so pedantic about protecting their brands yet in order to get engagement, they're having to put their brands on these platforms where they feel that there's kind of some credibility questions around the platforms. And so, you know, we're, we're anticipating that as that gap between. you know, lack of credibility, lack of verification, misinformation, disinformation, and platforms like media.com and others eventually come online over the next 12 to 24 months. I think we're going to see this big gap widening between the two from a credibility perspective and therefore people like yourself, you're in business, you've got an audience that you'd like to develop. And the way to do that is by making sure that your brand, both business and personal brand, is associated with a brand or a series of brands that are naturally going to help elevate your brand. Because otherwise, why would we do it otherwise? It just doesn't make sense. Yeah.

Adam: 

And we need it, right? Yeah, cool. But I think that's an important point you make there too, that we're seeing, you know, large corporations and brands also, obviously, I mean, on one level unsurprising, but also important to point out too, that like, they're also concerned about their own brand management in terms of how and where they're putting information out, right? Like they've got their PR blog, sure. But then, you know, obviously social media has an important role in terms of disseminating information in larger public squares. But we're seeing, if we're seeing them kind of question the ability to appear credible and what association they will then be given to them by what platforms they're on. That tells us also something important in terms of how businesses are thinking about shaping the future of how they want to tell their story, right? And so, I mean, I guess a flip side is it's a good way of saying nice product market fit validation that we need.

James: 

It is. I think also it's really important that we're not saying that social media will be dead in three years and media.com and others will take off. The reality is traditional media, social media, and platforms like media.com, and I specifically put them in three separate buckets, they can actually all safely coexist. Why do we need traditional media? Well, traditional media holds individuals and organizations around the world accountable because they're journalists investigating research and they will write about what's going on and that introduces a level of accountability. So that's in traditional media. Social media, it needs to exist. Why? Because the platforms have proven at the level of engagement that they can drive is just out of this world. But the issue has been the origins or the source of the content that has been proliferated across their very broad networks. That's where the challenge has been. So I don't think there's nothing broken in terms of their capability to spread and share information very rapidly, the challenge has been the source of that information. Again, that's really where what we're doing with media.com we think can really safely coexist with those other two behemoths within the media industry.

Adam: 

Yeah, no, I think that that's a great point too. And important, right. That it's, it's, you know, not to, not to pull on the, like the, the, the disrupt jargon of, of, you know, innovation industry. Right. But it's that I think coexistence actually is one of the names of the game that we need to actually be thinking about too, as we like both for ourselves and in business context too, in terms of like. Those, those like we need, we need media. Like we always have, right. And social media has proven its value too. Right. But then also we need like reputable, incredible backups when we need those, right. For ourselves and for businesses to, to, to share. So I think that's, that's, that's an important. an important piece there. So I just want to say as a wrap up, this has been a really fascinating conversation. I'm excited to see the future of how this all develops. So you were saying that Media.com is aiming to launch in the next 12 to 24 months. Is that where it's at or are we closer to launching?

James: 

No, we're a lot closer than that. This has been worked on initially in concept phase three and a half years ago. We'd been working intensively on this for some time now. our first profiles all being well. If we meet all of our deadlines, we should actually have our first handful of profiles activated before Christmas. And then first quarter next year, we're anticipating opening the floodgates. You can already go to our media.com website to register as an individual or an organisation. And then progressively, even over the coming weeks, we're going to start inviting those users that are pre-registered to get verified, with the view that then we'll give them access to their profiles very early next year. We should have our first several hundred profiles out January and thereafter. We're anticipating it's going to take off. We've got, to give you a bit of an idea, we've got registrations already from over 100 countries. People are hearing about what we're doing very much far and wide, but obviously the United States, United Kingdom, the reality is we're actually putting a big emphasis on India and the Philippines as well. There's a very large portion of English-speaking people there. We're doing a little bit with Australia just because I'm Aussie. But other than that, we're primarily focusing in English-speaking countries initially, and then eventually we'll move towards being multilingual because we know this is a product that we really think everyone around the world should ultimately use at some point.

Adam: 

Right on, cool. James, this has been a great conversation. I appreciate you hopping on in the morning time for you. So thanks for joining me on the podcast. And we'll link out to media.com and any of your other profiles you want to share in the show notes below. I always get that question, oh, we want to help people find you, but it's like, they're going to click the links in the show notes anyway. So you can say it if you want to, but we'll click it below. But yeah, just thanks so much for joining me on the pod today. I'm excited to learn about the work that you're doing. And I think this is a really important area, so appreciate it. Keep on doing the good stuff. Thanks, Adam.

James: 

I really appreciate the conversation and we'll keep in touch.

Adam: 

And as we wrap today's episode, I'd like to extend my sincere gratitude to James Mawhinney for sharing his valuable insights with us. Now, from navigating the complexities of misinformation to the vision behind Media.com, our discussion has covered essential aspects of the evolving media landscape and its profound impact on society. Now, reflecting on our conversation, one of the key takeaways is the urgent need to address the spread of misinformation in the age of social media. The potential ramifications of false information are far-reaching, and our responsibility as engaged citizens is to critically assess the content that we encounter. Now, how do you see the influence of social media and misinformation in your own life? Hopefully you've not fallen victim to it, but you may have seen some of it come into play in different ways, you know, even how somebody might represent you or something that you said online. So please consider sharing your thoughts, you know, as we're always eager to hear from the DysanthroLife community. And I'd like to express my appreciation for each one of you for your continued support. If today's discussion has left you pondering further, you know, I encourage you to explore more about this topic. And for additional insights, I recommend checking out media.com or delving into the related resources on the impact of misinformation on the future of media. And as always, I invite you to be an active part of the This Anthro Life community. Consider subscribing to the podcast, leaving a review, and your feedback greatly helps us in crafting content that resonates with your interests. Sharing this episode with someone who would find it insightful can also contribute to more deeper, meaningful conversations. And of course, for more AnthroCurious content, be sure to check out the AnthroCurious sub stack, which is linked below, and join our community where thought provoking discussions are always welcome. Thanks again for joining me today. And remember, the conversation doesn't end here. So keep exploring, stay curious, and until next time, we'll see you soon. I'm your host, Adam Gamwell, and this is This Anthro Life.