 Typically, I don't like discussing politics on my YouTube channel because, quite frankly, I just don't care. I don't have a TV and I don't watch news. I don't watch CNN or Fox News or any of that garbage. I'm not interested in that whole my team versus your team mentality. I don't like all the constant fighting and, you know, that's why I don't hang out on places like Twitter and Facebook, you know, none of that stuff interests me. I think it's a complete waste of my time to get into political arguments with people. Quite frankly, I just don't care. I don't care about Trump, Biden, any of them. You know, I'm much more interested in political movements that actually matter. And that's not to say that, you know, some of the stuff that goes on in U.S. politics, it doesn't matter. But I'm interested in things that really make a difference in the lives of billions of people on the planet. And for me, you know, the political movement that I'm most interested in is the free software movement. And one of the largest companies that supports the free and open source software movements is Mozilla, that is the company behind the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird email client. Recently, Mozilla put out a statement saying that they want to silence certain voices on the internet. Now, think about that for a second. This company that supports free and open source software and one of the cornerstones of free and open source software is that, hey, the software is free. You have the freedom to do anything you want to do with the software. And that means anybody can use it. They can use it for any purpose. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if they're doing something that I think is evil or unethical. It doesn't matter. They have that freedom. Everybody has the freedom. Well, according to Mozilla, they don't want a free internet anymore. They have put out a statement saying that they want to basically censor the internet in some way. They want the ability to have the internet basically silence certain voices, people that put out unpopular opinions or unpopular political stances. They want to silence those voices and have the internet amplify the voices that they say are factual. And this is extremely scary. You know, this is like George Orwell, 1984 kind of stuff. But even beyond that, it is just completely antithetical to the free software movement and the open source software movement. So a couple of days ago, Mozilla put out this blog over at Mozilla.org and they said, we need more de-platforming. There is no question that social media played a role in the siege and the takeover of the US Capitol on January 6. And again, I don't have a TV. I actually don't know really what happened at the Capitol. I know some people stormed the US Capitol building and there were some deaths involved. But I really don't know much about that situation. So I'm a little bit out of the loop on the news. But apparently Trump tweeted some stuff afterwards and then Twitter banned him, which is, of course, Twitter is right to do that because, you know, it's it's not a public place. Right. When you're on Twitter, you're on Twitter servers. That's basically Twitter's house. You know, when you're in somebody else's house, you got to play by their rules. If you don't, they can kick you out. Even if you do play by their rules, it's still their house. They just decide, hey, I no longer want to deal with you. I mean, there's really nothing unusual about that. Twitter has the right, unfortunately, to ban anybody. That's why I like decentralized, federated social network platforms like Mastodon. And that's because you can't really get banned on Mastodon. You can get banned from the Mastodon server that you happen to be on. But you're still not banned from Mastodon. You can go join another Mastodon server after that, maybe one that has more relaxed rules. Or you can always create your own Mastodon server. With Twitter, you really are just at the mercy of that one site and their one set of rules. But according to Mozilla, Twitter banning people and Facebook banning people isn't enough. They are saying that Twitter and Facebook are actually responsible for these people that I guess Mozilla disagrees with, even having a platform to speak on to begin with. Quote, as reprehensible as the actions of Donald Trump are, the rampant use of the internet to foment violence and hate and reinforce white supremacy is about more than any one personality. Donald Trump is certainly not the first politician to exploit the architecture of the internet in this way. And he won't be the last. We need solutions that don't start after untold damage has been done. So they are basically saying people are using the internet to do things that we don't necessarily agree with. Can we stop it before it even happens rather than, you know, after somebody does something and then we ban them from, you know, the social network? Well, they've already said what they had to say. Can we stop them before they actually get a chance to even say something? That's that's crazy. I got this. This is crazy that this is coming from a company that makes free and open source software, right? This is and they make a web browser. They make an email client like they should be all in on a free internet, a free web. And this is so not that this has nothing to do with internet freedom. This is all about censorship. It is almost communist in its tone. And of course, this was from the Mozilla blog, but there's a ton of news articles about the situation and Mozilla, they keep speaking on this situation. They're really doubling down on this, how they want to change the internet and they want to silence certain voices and quote, amplify certain voices. They want people that are verified as speaking factually to actually have a bigger voice and they're asking for, you know, companies like Facebook and Twitter. We should all get together. We should all make sure that we're sharing our algorithms. And we know what the algorithms are doing to promote certain voices and demoting certain voices or in some cases, silencing certain voices all together, so we should be sharing algorithms to make sure the right people get promoted on social media and Mozilla on their official Twitter account has been making some just crazy outlandish statements like this tweet here. It's quote, this week we saw the culmination of a four year disinformation campaign orchestrated by the president. We have to acknowledge how the internet was misused to get here and we have to change it. So Donald Trump, he's been misusing the internet for the last four years. You're just now saying something about it four years later, but he was misusing the internet. So we have to change the internet. That's ridiculous, right? That's the most ridiculous statement I've ever heard. And I don't know why Mozilla and all these statements, too, they keep up bringing fomenting violence and hate and reinforcing, quote, white supremacy. How in the hell is Donald Trump a white supremacist? Now, again, I'm not a political person. So I typically don't say outlandish, ridiculous things about, you know, political figures, because I'm not invested in that world. But I'm pretty sure Donald Trump was a Democrat before he decided to run for president. Like he's not really a conservative. Then nobody would call him an ultra conservative kind of person. You know, he certainly changed political views to fit within the Republican Party so he could run for president. There's problems with racism. There's problems with racism all over the world, not just white and black, you know, here in the U.S. But it's a global problem, you know, with a bunch of races and ethnicities and religions, but here in the U.S. Was there a real racism when I was a kid in the 70s and the 80s? Yes. Did it get better? Sure. By the time I was in high school in the 90s, you know, in college in the late 90s, it was kind of normal, you know, so a lot more interracial dating. And, you know, just white kids, black kids interacting. You know, it was it's things certainly started to change. And that was 30 years ago, right? Now, we're in 2020. I mean, when's the last time you saw somebody that openly claimed to be a white supremacist like in real life? Not what people are doing on Twitter, right? Yeah. And the other thing, why are they complaining about Twitter and Facebook being a place for white supremacists to to spread their message like it's like Twitter is the place that white supremacists would go when Twitter is run by liberals, right? It's mainly a liberal platform. They censor a lot of conservative voices. I mean, we all know this. This is common knowledge. Why would white supremacists be wanting to do anything on Twitter? Anyway, nothing Mozilla says in these statements make any sense, right? This is all for a posturing for the media, you know, no longer is Mozilla worried about creating free and open source software because I think Mozilla realizes that they're never going to become mainstream as far as Firefox becoming a mainstream browser that can compete with things like Google Chrome or even things like Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari. It's because nobody wants to use Mozilla Firefox. The only people that use Mozilla Firefox, quite frankly, the only reason they have any kind of support is because of those of us that feel strongly about free and open source software. We are the ones keeping Mozilla afloat. All of these Linux distributions, these hundreds of Linux distributions out there that ship Mozilla Firefox out of the box on the distributions out of principle, they're keeping Mozilla Firefox afloat, right? It's us that are keeping you afloat. But now you are deciding, hey, we don't care about the free and open source software movements anymore. We don't care about free speech. We don't care about a free and open Internet. What we care about is posturing to make ourselves look good. We have to appear woke and like we're, you know, hip to the latest political wins. So maybe people will give us a shot because maybe some of these ultra liberal people that support socialism and communism and, you know, are really invested in all this racial fighting that's going on. Maybe they'll give Mozilla Firefox a chance because they posted this really woke blog post. And if that's what Mozilla is trying to do here, I understand. From a business perspective, but from a principled perspective, as far as free and open source software, for somebody that just cares about the software, you know, I can't really support Mozilla on this. Right. At some point, I just have to check out. And Mozilla is a very large corporation, so they don't always do things that I personally would do as far as from a free software perspective. You know, they've had problems with certain decisions they've made in the past, as far as plugins and extensions, certain policies that they enact and things like that. But they've never done anything that just was completely and totally antithetical to the free software movement until today. And the idea of censoring the Internet is completely antithetical to the free software movement. And as of now, I don't think I can use Firefox anymore. And the great thing about this, though, is there are a ton of good free and open source web browsers out there. I already have Brave installed in my system. It's a Chromium based browser, but it's free and open source. And it's a fantastic browser and it works. I'll probably just start using Brave or Kube browser, Kube browser. Also Chromium based. It's keyboard driven. It uses a lot of them navigation style key bindings. And I really like Kube browser. So I don't need Firefox. I've been a Firefox user for 20 years. I've been a Firefox user since day one when they started, you know, from the transition from Netscape navigator over to Mozilla Firefox, because I've always wanted to support this company because I thought they were one of the champions of open source software. But for whatever reason, they're going in a different direction now that I just can't go.