Tech Made Fun | Tech Podcast By SK NEXUS

TMF 016 - Jhoot Bolay EU Kattay

March 20, 2024 Saqib Tahir Episode 16

EU is being praised recently for many massive gamer moves against the tech giants. On one side, this was much needed, a kick to know that there are still bodies that can control when needed. But on the other hand are they stifling innovation? Let’s find out in this week's episode of Tech Made Fun.

Hosted by Saqib Tahir
Support the show: https://support.sknexus.com/

Main Topic Highlights:
A study by the European Union showed that four out of five influencers don’t bother to disclose sponsorships though required by EU law. The screening was conducted on posts on platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Twitch. The study concluded that out of the 576 influencers only 20% indicated the advertisements. The study also found that about a fifth of the influencers promoted activities like crypto trading, alcoholic beverages and gambling to name a few.

Most influencers fail to admit to advertising, EU study shows
An alarming 80% of influencers aren't disclosing sponcon, per new report
80% of Influencers Have Secret Sponsors - WAN Show February 16, 2024

Following are references for you to read:
Apple Fined $2 Billion as Europe Sides With Spotify
Epic Games just got unbanned by Apple — again
Epic celebrates 'a big win' as Apple reverses course
Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis
Google’s Woke Image Generator shows limitations for AI
No, Google is not closing down Gmail — it's a hoax
Google denies Gmail is shutting down after viral hoax
New ThinkPad T laptops get more repairable with help from iFixit
Lenovo ThinkPad T16 Gen 3 announced before Q2 2024 release with return to more modular and repairable design
Ridge CEO’s tweet
Marques Brownlee adds a corporate gig to his résumé at accessories company Ridge

Support the show

As always -
Thank you for listening, please send any questions or feedback to podcast@sknexus.com
See you next time.

Subscribe to the newsletter: https://sknexus.com/subscribe/
Keep the show running: https://buymeacoffee.com/sknexuspk

Welcome to Tech Made Fun. Where we don't report the news, we just cover the news after 2-3 weeks. But as you can see, most of the tech articles are written 6 months old on Pakistani websites. So we are still ahead of them. And that is what matters. So the name of today's episode, as you have read, Jut Bhole, EU Kate. I don't know. Sounded funny in my head. Maybe not so much funny. Said out loud. So basically, as I told you in the last episode, in the first 3-4 months of the year, breakthroughs. But this year, the work is going on in Europe. The EU has finally decided, I think, after so many years, that tech companies have made a lot of trouble. There are big problems everywhere and we will take everything under our control and we will follow everyone. So the first topic I want to cover is that it has nothing to do with tech companies. But I think it was very relevant because one of the pain points as a Pakistani person who watches a lot of YouTube or likes a lot. He studies content on social media. There will be blogs, videos, so on and so forth. I've always had this pain point that the ads in Pakistan, even the ads of Google, or the ads in your Twitter feed, or even the local influencers here, they just feel so scammy. to a person like me who has deeper knowledge about these topic areas. Right. Now, common people don't usually bother to study so deeply. They fall for a lot of scams, a lot of like spam ads and so on and so forth. So I always had this theory that look, if you watch someone who's like, quote unquote ethical and moral YouTuber, let's say For example, Marcus Brownlee or Snazzy Labs or Mr. Mobile or what do you call it? Anand Tech, Linus Tech Tips, Mr. Who's the Boss, name any big tech YouTuber in the West. They are usually very open with like when they get sponsored, if a video is paid or unpaid. Some people like Marcus, they have grown so much that they don't sponsor their videos. Usually they make money from other means or YouTube ads. But there is a very clear and moral and ethical balance. which I have noticed the trend, most of your tech YouTubers, they're very good about this kind of stuff. That if there is a video sponsored, they'll tell you upfront. If there is an ad, they'll tell you upfront. And if there is a mistake, then in their podcast or somewhere, they will highlight it and they'll make a correction in the comments. Sometimes it happens, it's a human being, it's a mistake. But then comes our local YouTuber or local content creator. I don't think it's comfortable to take anyone's name in ABC, XYZ, but you know who they are. They randomly sponsor every next video. In half of the videos, they don't even mention that the video is sponsored. Especially what I've seen most of the time, when I open Instagram once a month, there are so many ads in stories these days. And it is clear it's a paid video, but they're just showing that they've got a perfume, it's a very good perfume, it never smells like that. Or you're buying a plot here, this is a very good society, this is that. And they don't even bother mentioning that this is an ad or something is sponsored. And I always had this, I've argued a lot with people, that look, there are no moral, ethical standards here, and if you talk to Pakistanis, they have similar problems. But funny thing is, now I have some data to prove it, that not only Pakistanis, but the same is happening in Europe. So the opening topic, finally we get to it, is that a study by the European Union showed that five out of four influencers don't bother to disclose sponsorships through required EU law. So... Basically they studied, I think about 500-600 accounts. We found out that, man, 400 people don't even tell us that they have an advertisement or a sponsored video. And the trend was most common with crypto trading, alcoholic beverages and gambling, to name a few. Alcohol doesn't sell that much here, nor is gambling so popular here. But crypto trading caught my eye. And this is where we get into story time with, which basically says that I had a kind of a buy cut from all the local content creators. Like I was like, I wouldn't watch anyone again because of just one thing, which clearly it was paid for and people didn't bother disclosing. And the episode we covered, you can go and watch it two years ago. Ban Crypto Safe, Pakistan one, I had mentioned that, that Binance's advertisements. When Binance came to Pakistan two years ago, now without saying crypto is good or bad. I'm not getting into that. I'm just saying that the behavior was that they paid a bunch of money to a bunch of content creators who are making videos here, who have no idea about technology, no idea about blockchain, no idea about trading, they know how to use camera app on their phone, this is a big deal, they create content. And they are pitching this service to, for lack of a better word, illiterate people who don't have any knowledge of these things. And for the last two years, I've been keeping an eye on the market. Now I go to Quetta for tea, the waiter comes and asks me, sir, can I invest in crypto? I say, why do you know about crypto? Because it has clearly worked. What has Binance done for the past two years? All your local content creators have told them to do their advertisements. Show them, they make such money. Then they run ads in Urdu. They have an whole application. But if you download their app, I have verified this too, they have a whole Urdu app that... educated and knowledgeable people, they are being targeted to put 10-15 thousand. And then you think about it, okay, I've put 10-15 thousand, I've lost, what's the big deal? And most people do this, this is their pitch. You put 10-15 thousand, no problem, this much loss is fine. But when you think 10-15 thousand, we've lost 25 crore, let's say 10 lakh people also invest 10 thousand rupees. That is a lot of money, right? And this is the issue I had. that there are a lot of expertative sponsorships in Pakistan. And our influencers, especially non-tech influencers, they promote these things without thinking about the negative effect of their average audience, their layman audience. So I stopped watching like all local content creators. Now it's been two years, so have those people fixed that? I don't know. I don't see them now. Have they realized they made a mistake? Did they apologize? Again, as I said, I don't know if they did it, it's very good. But I know that when it comes to content creation in Pakistan, they don't disclose sponsorships. And it is very clear when a company sits down and throws sponsorship money to everyone, everyone is talking about the same thing. And it is like very annoying and very frustrating. And this is not even about influencers. This is a big problem even in our digital ecosystem. Let's say you have an Android phone. You open the Android phone. Open your Play Store right now, especially if you can open it with a fresh account in which your history is not logged. If you open the Play Store and you go to trending apps, which are their top charts, 20 out of 30 apps are your gambling, streaming, money-throwing apps. Because that too, again, the thing is that Android phone is usually with middle-lowers socio-economic classes, so sell them such scam money-throwing apps. And there are men's sponsorships and ads running on it. And people are clearly buying them. You will often see 100k downloads, 1 million downloads, 5 million downloads. And that is basically your entire ecosystem here in Pakistan, which is being abused through these kinds of apps, different explorative practice. So I am really happy personally that EU has stepped in. They did nothing for Pakistan. They targeted big companies outside, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. But I have often seen that when something like this starts somewhere, it has a trickle down effect, right? that if it happens there, it will happen in the US, if it happens in the US, then somewhere, eventually, someday, it will happen in Pakistan too. And that is the whole takeaway I want to give you from this story. I know this topic is very boring and it's like, who cares, I watch videos, what's the problem? The problem is that you're not just watching, tomorrow your siblings, your kids, your parents... Now everyone is watching TikTok, everyone is watching YouTube, everyone is watching Instagram. These ads and these sponsorships influence you little by little, and the clock keeps ticking in your mind, and eventually you buy in. And if you don't buy in, you're sure that because you saw those ads, you'll mention it to someone. I keep getting ads from Binance, what's the scene of this? Now the next person who didn't know anything about Binance, they might start researching on this now. And he gets sold. Or the next person gets sold. So on and so forth, the chain goes on. So this top of the mind awareness scene is... Very important to understand as a layman that it has become very common in tech. And this is not like tech has something new. Why do people add Coca Cola and Pepsi? Everyone knows why Coca Cola and Pepsi. But why have they put such big banner buildings on the side? So that you have Pepsi and Coke running in your mind. That okay, if you want to eat, you have to order that too. Don't escape from my mind. So the same thing is happening now in the tech industry, which is kind of sad to see because things come with very good intention and then they are abused. because we have to make money. But that's what makes this episode very interesting because we are not just talking about making money here. Here, on the contrary, we are talking about taking back a little control from a big company. So moving on to our next story, Apple, one of the biggest companies, they are having a lot of fights with the EU. It started with USB-C and Thunderbolt on iPhone 14. And now there will be a talk here that two or three very big news have broken in the last two weeks. First of all, EU has fined Apple for two billion dollars, two billion dollars, which is... Pakistanis multiply it by 300 and its value is 600. $2 billion have been fined to Apple. You can read this in two ways. One, you can say on the side that Apple is a $3 trillion valuation company. What does they get from a $2 billion fine? Or you can read that$2 billion is probably the biggest fine we've ever seen being slapped on a tech company, if I'm not mistaken. Apart from the civil action lawsuit. So $2 billion is a lot of money. Even for Apple, you have to understand, 3 trillion is their valuation. They don't have cash on hand. They have cash on hand, they have 300-400 billion dollars. So when you talk about that, 2 billion dollars is a significant chunk of that money. Not too significant, but enough that Apple is pissed off right now. So you may be asking why is Apple being sued and like Google and some of the companies also got sued, this whole BMA digital market that is going on, which I mentioned in the last episode. So basically if you have a thing called reader app. So this is a classification that Apple has created, which is called reader apps. The purpose of which is those apps, which have nothing of their own, and they are providing you access to any other content. Usually, they use this term in the matter of digital content. So for example, Spotify, where you can access music. Netflix, where you can access shows and movies. Amazon Kindle, where you can access their digital books. These are all called reader apps. Those who are not selling anything themselves, like in the sense that physical goods are not selling that, but they are a service where you can subscribe. And then, you know, you can watch their stuff and all that. They call it reader apps. I don't know why they're called reader apps. It's like boring, but whatever. So the thing is for a very long time, the reader apps, they have a provision that Apple allows them, only reader apps, that you can put, you don't need to pay me 30% Apple store cut. You can have people go sign up on your own website and pay from there and come back to the app. And then, you know, like if you don't have to charge Apple 30% on your subscription, that's why you might have noticed that in some apps, what happens is that if you subscribe in the app store, then its price is 30% more. But if you go to the website and subscribe, it's 30% less. It's very common in reader apps. That is all very good, but the process of doing this was very predatory and like, it's said that you can't put your own link, you can't tell people that your website has a cheap rate. Or you have to force people to buy through us. So Spotify was one company which was like, we don't care. And it has been fighting with Apple for the last 2-3 years that give us full control in the app. That we show openly that this is our payment method, our person can go and buy it. And we don't have to pay 30% cut. Cause when it comes to music, you already accept a cheap service like Spotify Pakistan is like stupidly cheap, like 200 or 300 rupees per month. If you take 30% of that on Apple and then so many percentage royalties go ahead of it. Money is very scarce and it is very hard to survive as a music streaming company. That's why Spotify is the only one who has been able to do it. But they fought this very long and hard that we are a European company, we have more rights, treat us properly, otherwise we will fight against Israel. And that's what happened. The $2 billion fine that has been imposed, because of that, I think Spotify will win. And because of that, a lot more things will open up for apps in the EU. And this is the point where I want to say, why am I covering all this? Right? Well, I said, sorry for that. But the reason is, I think very important for you to understand. If you are interested in tech, let's say you open a software development house tomorrow or you make your own app. Nobody makes it in Pakistan. It's stupid to register a Pakistani dev account because there are a lot of restrictions in it. So what used to happen until now, usually people would register either a US account. or UK account and companies will register everything there and through that they will release their app. But because of the EU's fines and rules and everything is going on recently, DMA is going on. I may cover DMA in another episode if I feel like it. But I want you to understand that if EU is doing all this, you might want to think about registering your next app business in EU, which will give you nice benefits because all of these are still in EU. So this $2 billion fine that is there, And the DMA passed, as a result, all the companies that are making changes in it, Facebook wants to bring its messaging across the platform. Google is democratizing its ads that it will not show its Google services at the top of the list. And who else? Apple has changed a lot of rules in the App Store. You can now have third party stores and side loading, the option of web apps has come and the option of different web browsers has come. So all these companies have been like, you know, indicated as gatekeepers. and a lot of restrictions have been passed on them. So now you just have to understand as a person who's into tech and who's into like, you know, understanding how tech works, this might be the time for you. If you are also starting to register a company or you have an interest in software development in the future, then you will be safer in Europe as a company, as a business and be safe from like 30% cut, app store rules and so on and so forth. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of companies will move their accounts. to Europe because of that because they have more business in the EU and they don't want to be based in the US or UK. Talking about being forced, Gemini has opened a big scandal, which is being labeled as forced diversification. So basically, as you know, all these image generator or text generated transformer diffusion models that we discussed in the last episode are going to be released, they have to be trained on certain data, right? Now, it happens, human nature is like this, or humans have this. that they will always try to mess up, try to generate something that is unethical or a little bit weird just to see what their system does. So what Google Gemini is saying is that whenever you ask it for a racially accurate image, let's say I show me a picture of a white chef, they will forcefully change the white chef to a different race, Asian or black or Hispanic and show it. People tried so much that they made a Nazi soldier. which doesn't look German from anywhere. They look like Indian or Asian or something else. And when you go and see the text prompt, what Google does is it takes your prompt and whatever race or oval you have set, it changes it, ethnically, it changes it from diversity and gives you the output. And it's basically forcefully telling you that, okay, you want a black person, I won't give you a black person. I will give you a black and yellow person because I am a diverse AI generator. And it's historically inaccurate as hell because, you know, there was no German or Asian in that era. So this is the another example where diversification is taken too far. Nowadays, it's funny because in movies, games, music, forced diversification is being put in. And it's a natural thing. Like let's say I'm a gaming example, that's because I'm comfortable giving gaming examples. No one will argue over it. There was a game called Forced Bokan. Now what is shown in that game? It's a woman led game and the end. The game's selling point is that the woman is your lead. And that's it. And I'm like, bro, you can't make a game on that. This game is a girl, so this game is good because of that. Like we have so many good woman led games. Storm Raider, Horizon Zero Dawn, Phantom Dark was in the past. So on and so forth, Uncharted Lost Legacy. List goes on. We have a lot of woman led games, which are actually good games and really fun to play. But this game I've first spoken on and they're like, The opening line of the game's trailer is first ever black female led game for real, I don't know what. And everyone lost their mind that is not a selling point of the game. It's a good thing, it's all led but at the end of the day it's a game it needs to be a good game, right? And similar things could be said about many movies and shows in which they forcefully get involved in their agenda or to complete quota. And it's really an agenda and quota. Go Google ESG. the governance score, economic, social governance score, ESG or something like that. So, companies often forcefully do to complete the quota. That we have to hire so many blue, yellow, black, black people so that our score goes up a lot. And the funny thing is that a company like Philip Morris or British American Tobacco has a higher ESG score than Tesla, which is an electric car manufacturer company and it wants to go towards green earth. that has a less EHG score than something like cigarette major literally, because they meet all the quota and when Tesla doesn't care about that stuff, then their score is less. This economic social governance thing is very funny in America. So yeah, like forced diversification is ruining a lot of different media for us and games and music. And again, keyword here is forced, right? I don't have any issue with diversification, but when they forcefully go in, That is where like it feels like a line cross over here. And this is just too funny that now it's happening in AI as well. Something that is supposed to work on its own, have its own mind and all that. It was also a force in it that forced diversification is coming. And this is like, whenever there is something racial, they go around, make all the headlines, right? But understand the fears that I have that if tomorrow there is something else in it, differences which we might not even know. Like for example, if I open Gemini from Pakistan, so it is giving me a totally different set of responses than if I'm opening from China or America. And that is a scary thing to be because already the concept of free and open internet is dying. Right? And just like we talked about the ads and the sponsorships, if you open a Twitter account in Pakistan, you'll see way more scam and spam ads. because here moderation and regulation is not as strong as in America or EU because there is more government input. Now this is happening in AI as well. I don't know in what cases it will happen tomorrow. This all leads to us having low quality content, but content is not everything, but low quality opportunities, low quality knowledge, low quality information, so on, so forth. Like if we talk about content, like why is there no content creation in Pakistan? So on one side you can be like, and our people are free, they don't like dirty things, so people make dirty things, and all the dirty people are YouTubers. But on the other hand, you have to understand, if a person gets up and goes to work hard on his PhD level or work hard on his line extractives level and take out a YouTube video here, the click here, the CPC or whatever it is called, its rate is one hundredth or one tenth of the US advertisement rate. So you must be earning so little. investment, your time and effort is the same. Or let's say if it doesn't look like that, it looks like half of it. It doesn't make sense that you make high quality content which has no value. And that is why as an end result, one of the realities of living in Pakistan is that you have to just agree that okay, people like this here, so this is sold here. This is the content made here. These shows come on TV. These shops are open in the market and this is how things are done here. So all this becomes a part of your ecosystem. So that when you go towards forced diversification, and I'm talking beyond race, I'm talking about economic opportunities, tech opportunities, education, knowledge, when you start to make a difference in everything and it's not the same across the board, you will see massive gaps in development and productivity and evolution across the map of the different countries of the world. But one thing that I could be happy about living in Pakistan, like in the last episode we were talking about we were talking about the framework laptop that tomorrow maybe a repairable modular laptop becomes the feature of all laptops, right? And recently Lenovo ThinkPad body, they have announced that brother, from now on, all the laptops that will come, we want to be more repairable and more modular. And that like hits it on the point, like I said in the last episode, that Dell's Latitude and Lenovo's ThinkPad and HP's Probook. These are the most common laptops in the LATOS market, right? And now seeing this news makes me happy that a company like Framework influenced it. Right? A new company came into the industry, which became famous because of repairability and modularity. And now the big boys are noticing that we should also go in this direction. Clearly, its brand appeal is very high. And that is why disruptors are really important in any industry. Small players are really important because if any small player becomes popular for any good reason, It influences something in the big companies, or at least it will give the regulators some sense that, oh, okay, so you can have a repairable and modular laptop. You don't need everything that is like 0.5 centimeters thick and you can't open it and you can't repair it. And it gives them a different approach to everything, different perspective to everything, which at the end of the day is a big win for us as a consumer. And this is like, I tell this a lot to like people who are into tech. Look, if you say that you are a tech enthusiast, it's right. biases are of someone. You might like Apple, you might not like Samsung, or you like one thing software wise, you don't like anything else. Whatever it is, the differences are fine. But as a collective, you need to understand that whenever there is something that advances tech or overall makes it better for the consumer, you should always support that decision. So if these new laptops are getting more repairable, more modular, and you are an Apple fanboy, you shouldn't be like, oh, but they look ugly or whatever, whatever. You should go to Apple and be like, no, you should also make your laptop more repairable and modular. That company is also doing it, then why can't you do it? And the effect of that comes on everyone at the end of the day. And I've seen that, right? Because, you know, right now, the biggest challenge of companies is, as I mentioned earlier, brand appeal, right? There are only a few companies left in the world, 10-20. So as a startup, as a new company, when you're entering the market, the most difficult thing that has become today, in my opinion, is that How do I become relevant? How do people know my name? Or I do branding or marketing in such a way that the people who buy my thing remember me for the rest of their lives. So that has become a really big challenge, right? We have companies that, like I mentioned in the beginning of the episode, they throw money on sponsors and their name will be written on the screen. Then there are companies that actually provide such a good service. You will use their service once and remember them for the rest of your life. And then there are product companies who make both unique or nice things. And then like they do very high quality support work and so on so forth. There are many ways to stand out as a company in 2024, but because there are many ways it's harder and harder to compete also as a new company. So just like in my last ending topic, I'm going to wrap up this episode back with social media and everything is that there is a company called Ridge. What do they sell? They sell very expensive wallets. They sell very slim wallets with cards and cash. If you watch any tech YouTube, you must have seen their sponsorship read somewhere. Now, one thing that I really liked about them is that they are one of the ones that I would call YouTube sponsored companies, who have made a lot of money on YouTube through sponsorship and they grew to a big point. But they actually had a really good product. Like they have a very expensive wallet. I think. 50-60 thousand rupees wallet which is obviously impossible to buy for us, but the country of the buyer is a normal unique thing that's never going to get lost or broken or whatever. So their CEO tweeted a very nice tweet about a year and a half ago and it actually came across my feed also. Twitter is not opening now. So that was that we've been spending so much money on sponsorships and we hire agencies, they run ads, blah, blah. We want an alternative future for our company. We want to stand out. We want to be unique. So what did they do? They posted a job post that they were giving a lot of money, like 200K or something like that for a contractual position that there is an existing influencer who is of a higher level, he should come to our company and work. Basically, they said that instead of spending so much money on company, partnering with agencies or partnering with ad companies, you want to hire an influencer to come us and help us without marketing and branding and outreach. And now it's been a year since I last tweeted and recently news came that Marcus Brown MKBHD will be their new executive board member and not just member like that equity maybe I think he has invested and has become their like chief creative partner. So that is like again, going back to the earlier point, right? A company in the US, an influencer in the US, this deal is of such a big level, millions of dollars exchanged. I'm pretty sure behind the scenes, the numbers will obviously be private. But I can assure you that millions of dollars on the table has been easily done here and there. There is an equity deal and Ridge is a very big company now, so this figure is easily done there. So this just goes back to saying that when you talk about Pakistan, then or when you talk about whatever, like third world countries, I don't want to just label Pakistan as the bad one. Here then you say that we don't have content creators here, then there are no companies here, there is no ecosystem here. That is the thing you should be understanding that if there is no thing here, then it is not for any reason. And usually that reason is one or two. One reason is that there is no demand for that thing because the consumer is poor or his thinking is poor or whatever the reason is. And the second reason is that the ecosystem does not exist here. That thing will never come. It will not be a plugin. We need like a massive disruption. We need a push from the government that such a thing comes, subsidizes and promotes it. So... You will never see such things here in a country like Pakistan anytime soon, unfortunately, where millions of dollars are being dealt by a YouTuber with a company, an equity stake is being made and he has to consult with them for 2-3 hours a week. So like YouTube has grown so much in America that you have people like this, who are at the celebrity level, right? You will call them celebrities nonetheless, because there are millions of subscribers, you have so many followers, you have equities in different companies, you have your own product lines also. They have also started their own businesses. So that is basically what celebrities are. Right. And then the biggest content creators we have so far are showing you the ads of Binance. And speaking of the ecosystem not being there, the last thing in today's ending segment, Darde Tech, social media ban, good or bad. Again, on one side, yes, social media ban is not good. Ban is never good. Right. But I think the main issue is that The real reason why we are banning social media here, which is obviously not mentioned in any news article or any place, are political reasons, right? Because of that, social media is trying to get banned. And I think that is the wrong reasons, like why it's being banned. Because you are not getting free speech platform, where you can openly discuss, they are trying to ban you. And that I think is fully 100% should not be like the reason why social media should be banned. But at the very same time, if I look at social media as a whole, without any like bias, without any personal, you know, stake involved, social media is being scrutinized everywhere in the world right now. Like we will cover in the next week's episode that TikTok's ban is back on the table. There is a case in the Supreme Court in America, banning social media for children. China has already been banned a lot. Chinese apps are banned in India. And... The reason simply is that yes, America, Europe and US and other countries have really good moderation efforts. So maybe social media doesn't have such a negative impact there. But in countries like India, Pakistan, where apps don't have moderation efforts, there actually social media harms a lot. Like there have been murders and I don't know, theft, robbery, all kinds of gangs and drug dealings. I don't know what all goes on. If you google the WhatsApp scandals, you'll be... horrified to know that what all things are happening. So, is ban the answer though? I don't think so. But yeah, I do want some kind of regulation on social media. But as you can see, Twitter is banned. I research this topic. Often, there are tweets in the topic research. I am not able to open the tweets that what I am saying, what I am not saying. Now someone might say, oh, you can use VPN and open it. I don't want to do that. I can install VPN and pay and do blah blah. But I don't want to do that, right? Cause that's kind of like BS, a total website ban, which is publicly open, the whole world uses that website. So yeah, like social media ban, the other attack, all the things I've just said. If you ban social media, then we don't have an ecosystem here, there are no content creators, there are no businesses, there is no whole support mechanism. Then when you ban social media like this, and let's say you don't ban it either, there was a news cycle that Pakistan is about to ban social media. So if there is a small business interest here or a company interest, they will also say that they don't trust us, they will ban something the next day. So I don't think we are in a position where we can ban things. That is my final verdict. Like when India bans something, like India banned TikTok of China. India is so advanced in tech and like infrastructure, architecture, money, revenue, whatever you want to say, they made their own TikTok the next day. Right? If they ban Android, they will make their own Android. So on and so forth. But we can't do that because, you know, we are a small country in the sense of that if we talk about tech development and our revenue share and all that. We shouldn't ban it now. Yes, regulate it. Figure out a middle point somewhere. Put a restriction or allow for two hours a week. Whatever. Total ban, I think, is not the way forward because total ban doesn't help anyone. Which will keep us back and forth. Again, thank you for listening to this episode of back made fun. Honestly speaking, I'll be clear with you. This felt like a very straight episode. And the reason is nothing exciting is happening right now. And one thing that could be improved is if you send your questions and feedback, we can make it more interesting or topical. Because tech news doesn't seem to be happening. And right now, EU regulations are happening. So yeah, just as always, thank you for listening. Please send any questions or feedback to podcast at sknexus.com. See you next time.

People on this episode

Podcasts we love

Check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, not an algorithm.

Accidental Tech Podcast

Marco Arment, Casey Liss, John Siracusa

The WAN Show

Linus Tech Tips

Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast

Vox Media Podcast Network

Robot or Not?

John Siracusa and Jason Snell

Darknet Diaries

Jack Rhysider