 All right, we're about to begin. Thank you all for coming. My name is Rossi Ginsburg. I'm the director of the INRAN Center. Tonight's event is organized by the INRAN Institute, nonprofit organization based in the U.S. that works to promote RAN's ideas around the world through distributing books to teachers and students, running essay contests and organizing events such as tonight. So if you wanna see more of these events, please consider donating to the INRAN Institute. After tonight's event, your own book will be signing copies of a new textbook of Americanism, The Politics of INRAN, a collection of essays about INRAN's political philosophy edited by Jonathan Honegg. It includes essays by several Objectivist intellectuals including Dr. Brooke and previously unpublished essays by INRAN. Our moderator tonight is Kate Andrews, Associate Director of the Institute for Economic Affairs. Kate appears regularly in the media on shows like Question Time and on Sky News. So please join me in welcoming Kate Andrews and our speaker, Sarah. Thank you so much and a big thanks to the INRAN Institute for hosting this event with two wonderfully interesting speakers who I'll come to momentarily, but let's introduce the topic should the government regulate Facebook, social media and free speech? So in recent years, questions around free speech and its connection to social media have really been on the rise. The internet has promised to fill us with a sense of community. To some extent, this has been true. People are meeting their future spouses online. They're finding groups to chat about their niche interests. It's become a real form for positivity for some, but there's no question that on the other side, we have hate and abuse and bullying. There are questions about fake news, rigged elections and lurking dangers, especially for younger people or in those under the age of 18. So where does this leave us in 2018? What sort of speech should be regulated? How should these platforms be regulated and who should decide? I think that question will really come down to the private companies that own them, the government, the public or maybe something else. So to answer those huge questions, we have two fantastic speakers tonight. Yerim Broke, to my right, is the chairman of the board of the Anne Rand Institute, as already said, a nonprofit entity that offers a variety of educational experiences to promote the understanding of philosopher Anne Rand. He's co-author of the National Best Seller for the Free Market Revolution, how Anne Rand's ideas can end big government. And he has a new book out, Equal is Unfair, America's Misguided Fight Against Income and Equality. If you like what he says tonight, you can hear him weekly on the Yerim Broke show, which airs on a blog, talk, radio podcast. And you can watch him frequently. He's a guest on national radio and television programs, a columnist at Forbes and features widely across the media and print journalism. To my left, we have Brendan O'Neill, editor at Spike, to the British magazine that reports on humanism, democracy, and freedom. Its logo is that it wants to make history as well as report on it. Columnist for the Sun and the Spectator, he has a collection of essays coming out just later this month, so we can all anticipate that. It's called Anti-Woke, the collection of essays, and it's coming out to coincide with his trip to Australia, so stay tuned. Similar to Yerim, Brendan travels the globe hearing across the media, speaking at universities and to groups like our wonderful audience tonight. So let's get right into it. I'm going to start with Yerim, and I want to hear from both Yerim and Broke what role they think social media plays in our lives today. So they're gonna have five, six minutes to introduce their ideas, and then we're really gonna get into it. So Yerim, what is the role of social media today? For you, for me, for everyone here? Well, I think we all use it a little differently, so I don't think there's one answer to that. For me, because I'm old, I guess, it's primarily a marketing platform. I view social media as a way to increase the reach of my ideas dramatically across the world into places I could never have imagined are reaching. I'll give you an example, and this really struck me and the power that social media has. I think I was in Porta Alegra, which is in the south of Brazil, I don't know, eight years ago or something like that. And I was going to speak to a group of students, and they introduced me, and as part of the introduction, the guy, the person introducing me asked the students how many of you know who Yerim Broke is? And almost every hand in the room goes up, and it's like Porta Alegra, a bunch of students, how the hell do they know who I am? And he says, how do you know who he is? And I said, we watch his videos on YouTube. And it just struck me that suddenly everything I do has this global potential. I'd always known it as a potential, but that was a reality. It was right there. They watched the videos on YouTube, and every time I'd take my iPhone out, everybody would laugh, because in my videos I always take my iPhone out, and everybody knew to expect it. It was like this, this, this. And that's when it really, here we have the internet and social media in particular, where you can articulate an idea, whether in video or in written form, or in a meme, or in a short 144 character, used to be 144 character statement. And at a marginal cost of zero, hundreds of millions of people get exposed, potentially get exposed to this idea. And it's a fantastic opportunity for somebody like me who deals with ideas, deals with my ideas, which arguably on the margin of the discussion of ideas, so radical ideas that are not part of the mainstream, way out of the mainstream. And yet suddenly there's an opportunity for those ideas to enter the minds of individuals all over the world at a marginal cost to me of zero. That is a bigger revolution than the printing press. That is massive. But other people use social media for other things, right? I know a lot of people who use social media to stay in touch with family. I know people who use social media for dating. I know people who use social media just for the sake of hammering their particular political point of view. Social media is this amazing tool for community, for information, for individuals to articulate, you know, to express themselves in a variety of different ways. And I think one of the things we don't appreciate is this didn't exist, right, 10 years ago, 12 years ago, it didn't exist. Some pretty amazing people, and I consider them pretty amazing people, spent a big chunk of their life and their effort and their energy and their thought in creating this amazing tool that we are now all using for all kinds of ways. I'm sure if we pulled the audience, there'd be 20 different things that people are using social media for. And it strikes me as interesting that, but predictable because we always do this as human beings, that here's this amazing tool that people have developed and that we are using and we're using a lot, which suggests that we get value out of it for the most part. And yet we're bitching, complaining constantly about it. They can't do anything right. And everything about social media is up for grabs now. And we want social media to be what we want it to be rather than what it is and how we're using it. So we take it for granted. It's like the air we breathe now. It's just a fact, a metaphysical fact of reality. So I've used social media based on how many people use it and based on how people use it is this amazing, wonderful, spectacular tool. And it's up to us what we do with it. Brendan, are you as positive? Yes and no. I think the way I see, I mean, how do I use social media? I don't use it very much at all. I don't use Twitter. I've stopped using Facebook. I only use Instagram because it's nicer. It's just photographs of food and stuff. So there isn't all that intense kind of arguments and people bitching and then slagging you off and all that kind of stuff. But I think the... You like the cat photos. Yes, that's right. But I think we have to make a distinction I think between the promise of social media and the reality of social media because I think the promise of social media is amazing and huge and historic. The promise of social media, which is really the promise of the internet itself is to completely and utterly liberate publishing from all the old forms of control, whether it was state control, authoritarian control, even editorial guardianship, all those things, all those barriers that traditionally existed, some of which were good, some of which were bad, have been utterly swept aside by the growth of social media and by the internet more broadly. So I think Jaren's absolutely right that this is even more radical than the printing press in its implications and that is the promise of social media. I think that's a wonderful thing and an amazing thing and we do often forget how historic and profound that is, the fact that you can now publish something to the entire world walking down the street using your thumbs. I mean, no generation in history would have been able to conceive of that, not only in a technological sense, but even in a moral sense. They wouldn't have been able to conceive of the ability or the liberty to do something like that. So that's extraordinary and I think that's something that I certainly appreciate people's freedom to do that and I think many people also appreciate having that freedom. That's the promise of it, but the reality of social media, the unfortunate side to it, is that it has molded itself around our already existing cultural political atmosphere and in the West in particular, our cultural political climate is one of fragility, censorship, offence taking, the politics of identity, all these things which mean that social media has become a space, not simply for expression, but also for the control of expression and it's become a new means through which language is policed, ideas are policed, opinion is policed and the parameters of acceptable thought are policed and also enforced and I think it's moving more and more in that direction and I think what we're living through and I think we really cannot underestimate the enormity of this, we're living through the outsourcing of censorship from the state to private companies. Now, as every libertarian and liberal will know, there has always been informal censorship, there has always been non-state censorship and if you read John Stuart Mill, he argues that that informal censorship is if anything worse than state censorship. He calls it the tyranny of wisdom, the tyranny of opinion, that kind of extraordinary pressure to conform because you know if you don't conform you'll be ousted from polite society or you might not get a job or people won't like you very much. So there has always been that kind of non-state form of thought control and speech control but I think what we're living through now is almost the conscious industrial scale outsourcing off censorship from the state to these private companies, particularly the social media giants, the tech giants, Silicon Valley and I find that terrifying. I think that the left and the liberals in particular who are calling for social media companies to play this role have no idea whatsoever what they are letting themselves in for and they are marshalling capitalist power to control public speech and I think that is a moral error of historic proportions and you can see it already starting with the banning of Alex Jones from Twitter and YouTube and Spotify and so on. The recent development with PayPal where they are now refusing to allow Tommy Robinson to raise money using PayPal and also anti-fascist groups in fact are now being restricted in their ability to raise money using PayPal. They are kicking up a fast but of course those very same anti-fascist groups demanded that people like Tommy Robinson should be deprived of the oxygen of publicity. They didn't learn the first lesson of freedom of speech which is that you have to defend it for the people you hate if you want to enjoy it yourself. So we're gonna see more and more of this I think because governments in Germany and Britain and elsewhere are putting pressure and in non-European countries in particular are putting pressure on social media giants to control speech, to punish mis-speakers, to report on people who are not saying the right thing. And we're also seeing the growth of this informal network of influential people, academics, left-wing activists and others who are marshalling social media power to have certain people banned, to have certain opinions pushed beyond the pale. So what I think we're witnessing, we're not quite there yet but I think we're going in that direction where social media has moved from being this wonderful invention that allowed expression. And that's why in the early days they were all so pro-freedom of speech. Remember the guy at Twitter who said, we are the free speech wing of the free speech party. They had this incredibly instinctive support for the idea of freedom of speech because they recognized they created a historic revolutionary tool. So it was all about expression. Get on here and express yourself. Increasingly it's about the control of expression. Increasingly it's about Twitter mobs. Clamping down on people, demanding that people be banned, demanding that blue ticks be removed and all those kind of things. And I think that's a fault not of technology itself but of the climate and the culture and the historic period in which this technology has come forward which is one in which across the Western world there is incredibly little cultural validation for the idea of freedom of speech. And any technologies that emerges in that kind of era is I think inevitably going to become a quite sensorious tool. Thank you. Breton I'm going to come back to you and then to Yaren because I think you've already answered half the question but no which is good because we can follow up. So should government regulate Facebook? It sounds to me like you're critical of private companies having full control. You said that the government is essentially outsourcing the policing of free speech to these private companies. If government were to regulate do you want the politicians deciding what is an acceptable platform, what users can be on and what can be said? No, for two reasons. Firstly, for the practical reason right now which is that we live under governments that can't spell the word freedom. Never mind, stand up for it. That we live under governments across the West in fact and this includes in the US where they have a First Amendment. Governments and officials and politicians who don't respect freedom of speech. So if we were to call on them to regulate social media companies in order to ensure that they defended freedom of speech that would be crazy. And they are the same governments if you look at Yvette Cooper and the committee in the House of Commons which drags social media bosses in front of them and basically says to them why are you not censoring more people? To call on that government then to put pressure on them to defend freedom wouldn't work. So practically that would be the wrong thing to do but in principle as well I don't think, I'm not, I don't have any kind of, I don't have a general opposition to government playing important roles in certain areas of life. But I would have a problem with government increasing its intervention into a sphere of life which is largely about communication and which is largely about the sharing of ideas or the sharing of information. Government intervention in the railways, we can talk about that. Government intervention in some spheres of education, I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with those things. I think we can get into that discussion but when it comes to a sphere which is, which was founded to facilitate the exchange of ideas and information, I think the government needs to stay out. So Yaren, these are private companies. They can decide which users are allowed to partake and which they want to kick off. Is that an issue when Facebook has over a billion users? Has it essentially become a public good? Well I don't think there's such thing as a public good I mean that's a whole other discussion so I certainly don't think Facebook is a public good because I don't think there are such things. Values, human values have to be created. They're not just there. Nothing just appears. Even something like water to be really useful as a human value has to be channeled. Somebody has to dig the channel. Somebody has to engineer it. Somebody has to think about it. So there is no such thing as a public good other than the oxygen we breathe. So no, I agree to a lot. I stand with Brendan when he says that there are real problems and there are real challenges and it's getting scary out there. Although I have to admit I'm a lot less scared of somebody who does use social media. I'm a lot less scared I think than Brendan is about what these companies are doing. I also recognize that these companies face a very, very difficult challenge. But before I get to that, let me just clarify what I mean by censorship and what I think the word actually means. I think censorship can only be done by government. I don't think publishers censor when they decide not to publish my book. Even if they decide not to publish my book and lots of publishers have decided not to publish my book because it's badly written or because they don't agree with the ideas or because whatever the reason is, that's not censorship. Censorship is a violation of free speech, can only be done by government. A private entity like Facebook, a private entity like Twitter, part of its free speech is to decide who has access to its platform and who doesn't. If I had a platform and I decided I didn't want neo-Nazis on the platform, then it's my platform. I get to decide. If I had a publishing company, I get to decide whose books to publish and who's not. If I own an auditorium like this, I can decide yes to the Iron Man Institute, no to, I don't know, fill in the blank, whatever organization you get to decide because it's your private property. So private property gives you, part of your free speech rights is to decide how to use your property for the purpose of speech. And I don't have to invite every point of view into my home. I don't have to invite every point of view into my workforce. Indeed, I know that there's certain people I would not hire because of their opinions and I don't consider that censoring the opinions. I consider that I don't like your opinions and I don't wanna hear them in my property, on my property. So I very much think this is an issue of private property but also an issue of free speech. You don't solve the issue of free speech by forcing people to engage in speech they don't believe in. So the solution can't be some kind of regulatory authority but we've already accepted. Government is the vastly wrong tool to do that, particularly in an era where government clearly can't spell the word freedom, can't spell the word free, never mind freedom. F-R-E-E is hard for them. They have no concept of what it means and they have no concept of what speech means and they have no concept of what private property means. And so keep government away from these kind of issues. They, I would like them to be focused on the one thing they theoretically at least could do well, which is to protect us, which they don't do very well even that, at least in certain places around the world. But so to me the issue is here there is a real challenge that these companies faced and I think that's another thing we don't appreciate about them. They're gonna exclude certain things, right? Facebook does not want pornography on its platform. It's gonna exclude pornography. Do they exclude ISIS? Well, where's the borderline between ISIS and the so-called more moderate forms of Islamism? Where do you draw the line? Do they exclude Nazis? Well, where's the line there? They're going to exclude. People talk about Google search engine being biased. Well, of course it's biased. You try to put together a search engine that's not biased. By very definition of your ranking things and you're choosing among millions of different options, some bias is gonna enter, whether it's your point of view about how to rank those things, that is a bias. So I think what's not appreciated is how difficult the job these companies are trying to do is. And I know you are skeptical because of who they are. But it's not easy to figure out where those lines are and how to rank searches and what is acceptable and what is acceptable, given what you wanna create in terms of a platform. Not what we wanna create in terms of a platform because Facebook didn't ask us what we wanted, luckily. Because none of us, it's not just that, not to take for granted the fact that Facebook exists, but not only previous generations couldn't have thought of Facebook. I couldn't have thought of Facebook or Twitter. I mean, eight years ago I would have said, would I have as a venture capital, invest or funded these things? Probably not. I mean, they seem stupid to me at the time. So here's this massive innovation. They're trying to figure it out. Now the problem is that they are a reflection of the culture. And in America, the people who work at Facebook and Twitter and these other places are a reflection of the ideas that educated people in America have. And unfortunately, educated people in America have really, really bad ideas. Really, really bad ideas. So what these companies are is a collection of educated people with really, really bad ideas, leftist ideas, anti-free speech ideas, identity politics ideas, all the corrupt ideas that we have. The solution is to fight those ideas. The solution is to challenge those ideas everywhere we can. It's not to, you know, not that anybody here has yet argued for that, break up these companies, or regulate these companies, or control these companies. It's to argue against the ideas that are motivating the people in the companies. Brendan might argue that in order to challenge those ideas, you have to have a platform to do it. And so I would love to hear that response. But also, once you've responded, Brendan, if you could talk a little bit about free speech, and, you know, when Yaron talks about pornography, or ISIS, or terrorist threats, I actually think a lot of people who believe in free speech will also think, well, yeah, that's quite right to crack down on that. So to what extent should free speech be able to ran on Facebook, whether that be the users who are banned or not banned, or what they actually say? Yeah, so I really disagree with some of what Yaron has just said. Because I think, you know, we have a dual problem, I think, in relation to freedom of speech today, which is the left tends to elevate personal safety and personal comfort and self-esteem above the value of freedom of speech, whereas some on the right elevate property rights above freedom of speech. And I have a problem with both of those approaches. I have a problem with the idea that censorship is only something that the government does, because that's clearly not true. And, you know, we can get pedantic and say, well, what does the word censorship really mean? But if we're talking about a culture of censorship in which certain things are not said, or certain things are not published, or people censor themselves, that doesn't have to be enforced by the state. And that's why we live in a country right now in Britain, and this applies to other European countries as well, where actually huge amounts of state censorship have been dismantled in recent years. In Britain, we've got rid of the blasphemy laws. It's no longer... Most pornography is available, apart from some forms of violent pornography. I did an interview with the British Board of Film classification for the spectator a few years ago, and they said they pretty much pass everything into cinemas now, really. You can go to a mainstream cinema and see hardcore sex in a French art house film, and no one bats an eyelid. So all those old forms of censorship have been dismantled. However, we live in an incredibly censorious climate in which Jenny Murray from the Woman's Hour will be prevented from speaking at Oxford University because she doesn't think a man can become a woman, or in which people are hounded off campuses all the time, in which people are forced to apologize for holding certain opinions, and in which huge numbers of people feel that there are some things they just cannot say about all sorts of issues. So where does that come from? It comes from what John Stuart Mill referred to as the tyranny of custom. It comes from this social pressure, which is not led by government, or even codified by government law, this social pressure to have the right opinion, and this social recognition that if you don't have the right opinion, maybe you should just shut the hell up. That's the climate we live in, and every great defender of freedom of speech in history really has made the point that censorship is not just a state phenomenon, it's also a social phenomenon, and one of the worst forms of censorship is self-censorship, which comes from that kind of culture that we live in. In my mind, one of the greatest things ever written about freedom of speech was by Frederick Douglass, the freed American slave, who wrote a piece called A Plea for Free Speech, which is a very short article, everyone should read it, and he wrote that in response to a mob invasion of a public meeting. He wasn't talking about governments, there was a public meeting of slavery abolitionists, which Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists were making the case for abolishing slavery, and it was invaded by a mob of pro-slavery people, slave owners, and so on, like the mobs today that invade campus debates and try and shut people down. His argument was, what's the point in having the legal right to freedom of speech if you can't actually exercise it in the public sphere? That is one of the best things ever written about freedom of speech, if you read it, it's eminently quotable. That was not about state censorship, so I think we have to recognize that there are different forms of censorship, and I would say that even though state censorship is still a serious problem in this country, this is a country in which a man was arrested for teaching his dog to do a Nazi salute, and all that stuff goes on, but there is a bigger problem, which is the culture of conformism. I think just, and then the other thing I want to say is that I think, yes, these are private companies, but if we fetishize the fact that they are private companies, I think we're in big trouble, because they are not, whether they like it or not, and I'm sure they don't like it, and I don't really care that they don't like it, they are more than private companies because they are the facilitators and the builders of the cultural architecture of our lives. They oversee the cultural infrastructure of 21st century debate, of 21st century politics, of 21st century sharing of information between individuals. They are in charge of that. Now, there was a really interesting Supreme Court case in America in the 1940s, where a Jehovah's Witness lived in one of those company towns, you know those towns that are built by a private company, owned by a private company, for the purpose of doing something for that private company, and this Jehovah's Witness lived in a company town, and the company said to her, him, I can't remember, you can't distribute your religious leaflets on the street and the First Amendment doesn't apply because this is a private company town, so go home and shut the hell up. It went to the Supreme Court eventually, and the Supreme Court ruled that when a private company or a private corporation is so vast and so huge that it is not simply providing a service to people, but it is the facilitator of a public square, it is in charge of a public square, it is part of the public space, then it has to adhere to those public values. And in the US, of course, the key public value is freedom of speech. So it ruled in favor of the Jehovah's Witnesses right to distribute religious leaflets in the private company. I think we need that same spirit today. We did the same spirit today, which doesn't necessarily call for the courts or the government to put pressure on these private companies, I would not be in favor of that, but which creates a cultural shift towards always emphasizing the importance of freedom of speech above every other freedom, including private property rights. Freedom of speech is above all of those other freedoms, and that cultural dynamic might go some way to shifting social media back to its founding position of facilitating as free speech as possible. Yeah, does Brigham have a point there that we often say, well, if you don't like Facebook, you don't like their rules, you can go to another platform, go to a different private company, but nobody does because it is a monopoly. Facebook is that monopoly for that kind of space, Twitter has become a monopoly for that kind of space, goodness forbid if Donald Trump lost that glutech or his account, that would have a huge impact on his ability to reach his base. Now, like him or loathe him, he doesn't have another Twitter option, that's it. So have they become, as Brendan says, big enough to be deemed a public space? Well, I mean, there's a lot there. First, there's lots of Supreme Court decisions, I disagree with this, would be one of them. And so I don't believe there's a conflict between free speech, properly understood, as freedom from coercion and property rights. I don't think they're in conflict. You don't think you have to rank them? What's that? You don't think you have to rank them? I don't think you have to rank them, they are both equally important, and they're the same, because I think we're conflating free speech. We're not talking about free speech when we talk about you wanna say whatever you wanna say on Facebook and Facebook has to give you the right to do it. That's not free speech anymore. That is your whim being exercised on somebody else's property. And we completely understand it in certain forms of property and other forms of property we want to, we discard that because it's uncomfortable for us. But there's a really important point that Brandon brought up that we agree on that I wanna emphasize though. And that's what the Frederick Douglass essay, which we agree completely is a masterpiece, as most of what Frederick Douglass wrote. Suddenly a mob cannot stop somebody from speaking. Now why is that? Because this certainly is an issue of free speech and it is an issue of government. Government's job in protection of free speech, when there is a First Amendment saying that shall not abridge free speech is to protect our ability to express ourselves when we have the forum in which to express ourselves. A mob coming in is violence. That is the one thing government is supposed to do. It's to protect us from violence. It's to protect us from people stopping us from executing the rights that we have secured. We've secured the right to speak on this forum right here and Tifa jumps in. There should be a policeman there stopping them. We shouldn't have to hire private security in order to do that. That is the one job of the police. It's to protect us from living our lives, executing our rights in a day to day. I mean, if you think about, when I think an Ayn Rand Institute published on this, when Solomon Rushdie, there was a fatwa put out on Solomon Rushdie. That should have been an issue for the British government. It should have been an issue for the American government saying we will protect our publishers. We will protect Solomon Rushdie. This is unacceptable. In a sense, this is the declaration of war against us. You don't come to our country and kill somebody out because he offended you, right? The one job of government is to protect us from the use of force when Tifa does what it does. When the platforming happens, when violence is used, and I would argue that much of self-censorship is an issue of fear of violence. It is the job of the government to come in and protect. One of the reasons the Danish cartoons were not published by many newspapers around the United States, now I think it was a massive act of cowardice and if they'd all published it, of course, the Islamists couldn't have done anything because everybody would have published it. But one of the reasons was is because the US government had made very clear that they, the US government found these cartoons offensive and they the US government wouldn't actually protect you if you published them. So the job of the government is actually to protect us and I think a lot of the self-censorship would go away if we were protected from it. Now much of it, as Bannon has said, is cultural and I agree with him completely. And the solution for this cultural silencing, I don't think it's censorship but it's silencing, is to speak. It's to argue against it. It's to challenge it. It's to make the intellectual argument that it is false and it's for individual brave individuals to stand up and speak out against it. It's to publish the cartoons as Fleming Rose did in 2006 in, I forget, I can't pronounce the name of the journal. But anyway, it's to actually stand up and fight. This is a cultural civilizational fight. I think, and here I think we're gonna agree, the most important fight we face today, there is no more important fight that we face today than the battle for free speech. But one of the things that's going to happen is that as this cultural phenomena becomes a cultural phenomena, as it is today, it will impact the institutions of the state. It will impact the institutions of censorship. We're seeing it in Europe. What was the European Commission, the European courts decision recently about something offending Islam and therefore you can't say it anymore. Now that's the court of law, that's the state now. As the culture shifts against free speech, the courts and the legal system and the legislature will shift with it. This is why this is such a important battle. This is why we have to stand up and fight against it. And this is why I think that we have to fight against whatever silencing is being done on these platforms. I'm not saying these platforms are wonderful, just leave them alone. I'm saying if we have a point of view about what Facebook should do, then we should articulate that point of view. By the way, where do we articulate that point of view? On Facebook. So Facebook still allows us to criticize Facebook significantly, which I do and many others do on a regular basis. We need to fight them. And if the time comes where let's say, if Donald Trump got banned on Twitter, then I think you'll see an alternative rise. I have no question. I don't know if you know Eric Weinstein, the guy who coined the intellectual dark web. And Eric said, he actually believes the government should come in and break up these companies. But at some point he said, contradicting that, he said, let them just try and take all of us off and they'll see what happens. That's when you'll see an alternative platform. The fact is that I still have a Twitter account, I still publish on YouTube. You know, once in a while, YouTube says we don't want to sell advertising for your video. Who cares, right? I mean, I care a little bit because a little bit of revenue goes away, but they're selling advertising for me. How cool is that, right? I appreciate every time I get a dollar from any video I put up on YouTube. I think that's amazing that they put the effort into, right? So once in a while they want to advertise, I still can publish pretty much anything on Facebook. Nothing of mine has been taken down on Facebook. I can still advocate for my ideas. When the time comes that they really silence those of us who are making rational arguments that are building significant audiences, they will find out that there is an alternative to Facebook and Twitter and the rest of it. They will be capital to invest in it. They will be alternatives to it because they'll be money to be made creating that alternative. So you think that the people that they've banned or taken posts down from are on the fringes enough that it just hasn't created that genuine alternative? Absolutely. I mean, who's going to create a platform for Alex Jones with all, you know, as much as I think he should be able to say whatever he wants to say. But I think Facebook is completely within its legal right and moral right to ban Alex Jones. Now, whether it turns out to be a smart business decision, I'm skeptical. If I were at Facebook, I wouldn't have banned Alex Jones because I don't think it's probably a good business decision for them. And I think it creates a lot of problems for them as we're seeing right now, particularly in an environment where the government is just itching to jump in and control them and now use any excuse like this to do so. So I'm, again, I'm not justifying them doing it. I'm justifying their right to do it. But if they do it enough, alternatives will arise very quickly. Do you think if they do it enough, won't that any Facebook? I agree with some of that. But I think particularly on the point of culture and challenging the culture and the best way to do that is to speak when you're told you shouldn't speak, you should just speak. Not everyone can do that. Not everyone is in the kind of position we're in, but I do think that's the best approach. But I think the point about it's extremists at the moment who are being taken off social media platforms for the most part, although I know people who've had, who've been put into Facebook jail as they call it for seven days because they posted something critical of transgenderism or they said something pretty stinging about mass immigration, not racist, but just a criticism. So it does happen on a low level as well. There is this climate, this rolling climate of censorship on social media, which I don't think we can afford to ignore. But I think, but the point, the broader principle point is that, you know, when you're fighting for freedom of speech, you have to defend the psychopaths and the extremists and or as H.L. Menken called them the scoundrels. He said, you have to, you find yourself defending scoundrels all the time because censorship and authoritarianism comes for them first. And I think that applies to social media. I think that applies to the new era of corporate censorship that we are, I think, sleepwalking into. Even there, I think you have to stand up for the people who you detest and who are crazy because if you don't, then the logic is set in motion. And we saw this on campuses in Britain. We saw this logic develop over the period of 30, 40 years. When student unions, the first people they know platformed were fascists. The only people they know platformed were fascists. A handful of proper liberals and libertarians and so on argued against that on the basis, not that they liked fascists or necessarily wanted to go to a fascist meeting, but that a president would be set that would spread and spread and spread. And that's exactly what happened. After fascists, the Zionists were banned. Then it was Islamists. Then it was homophobes. And then it was Eminem's music. It was banned at a campus in 2002 because it was homophobic, it used the word faggot. That was a really important turning point and then it was everything else. And now it's Jermaine Greer and Julie Bindal and so on. So if you don't attack the first flickerings of censorship, and I do think it's censorship even on social media, if you don't attack the first flickerings then it just grows and grows and grows. And then we're all in serious trouble and eventually it will be you. There was a perfect example of this last week where people were trying to hound Roger Scruton out of his position in the housing commission in the government and all these core banisters and everyone was saying, get him out, he's right-wing, he doesn't like gay marriage. They went crazy, they wanted him out. And then literally like 24 hours later there was another Twitter storm against a left-wing person called Aaron Bustani who said something offensive allegedly about the British royal legion and the wearing of poppies. He thinks wearing a poppy is an act of white supremacy, whatever. And then there was a right-wing Twitter mob against him saying, get him out of the Labour Party, get him off Twitter, who is this scumbag? And it was so bizarre because the very same people who criticized the hounding of Roger Scruton were then hounding this man. And then the very core banisters who had literally spent every waking minute trying to get Roger Scruton sacked were then outraged that people wanted to get one of their friends dumped from the Labour Party. And you just think, you people are profoundly stupid and you don't understand the basic principle of freedom of speech, which is the point Thomas Payne made more than 200 years ago, which is that in order to secure liberty for yourself you need to defend it for your enemy. And I think that applies to the new era of corporate censorship. I do think, I think that the really profound point of disagreement here, which might be less important than what we agree on, which is that freedom of speech is really, really unbelievably important. But I don't think, because I come from the left, I don't think property rights are really that important. But what I mean, or really what I mean by that is that I don't have as, I think they are quite important, but I don't have as principled, my approach to property rights is not one of principle. It's not a blanket approach. My approach to freedom of speech is one of principle. It is a blanket approach. I think you should be able to publish and say anything you'd like. But with property rights, I think it's a case by case basis. So, let me just make this one quick point. So you use the example of going into someone's home and you wouldn't have someone just walking to your house and start saying things about how wonderful Hitler was. Now, I'm with you on that. So on that level of property rights, I'm with you. But a home, your little house with your family and your kids who don't want to hear about Hitler is different to a private media created public platform that has two billion human beings on it. There's a difference between those two things. So in the house situation, property rights, I'm with you. Get out of my house. Who are you? What are you doing here? That's fine. But Facebook, Twitter, that is different. Yeah, and you can come back on private rights for companies, I promise. I just very quickly want to ask Brendan to sort of tease out, I think you've put it so well to talk about the importance of defending the indefensible and the right to say the indefensible because eventually they'll come for you, very well said. But what about the mandate to allow others to publish? I appreciate you're not as committed to this idea that corporates and private property are the Buellen Endall, but would-spiked magazine publish absolutely anyone? And if not, is that because of your size? Is Sargeman actually that Facebook has just become too big? No, that's a really good question. And I agree with something that Yaren said earlier. When a publisher doesn't publish your book, they're not censoring you. They're making editorial judgment. And it's the same. We get emails at spiked all the time. Will you publish this piece saying abortion is the most evil thing in the whole history of the world? And we say- You're gonna crack pieces. You're gonna crack more pieces. Right, we get pieces. We say no to them. We make an editorial judgment. This doesn't fit with our... I mean, we occasionally do. We facilitate discussion between opposing views, but we have a very strong editorial line, which is humanist and pro-freedom, and particularly at the moment, pro-democracy and pro-Brexit and so on. And we want to maintain that. So that's an editorial judgment. But these social media companies are different. And well, certainly the way they presented themselves was different in the beginning. They've now shifted. They've said they're not news platforms. But they were, yeah, but they presented themselves. You know, there was that whole idea of net neutrality, this idea that the internet should basically be neutral and should just put stuff up and then not make a political moral judgment about that. That idea has just disappeared. And now what we have are social media platforms which are not magazines and not newspapers and therefore the editorial judgment doesn't come into it, but which are increasingly being called upon by governments and activists to play that role of making a moral judgment on speech, which is not what they wanted to do in the first place and it's not really what they are designed to do at all. So there is a difference there. And I think the more that we call on them to be the moral arbiters of public discussion, the moral architects of what you're allowed to say and where you're allowed to say it, this is such a mistake. This is such a mistake. And we're not there yet, but we are getting into a situation where more and more of public life takes place in the virtual sphere and that's fine, that makes perfect sense, but that virtual sphere is completely or increasingly rather under the monopoly of private companies and rich capitalists who by the way are anti-capitalist capitalists. So these are not, they're not free market types at all. Silicon Valley, they all hate the free market and then they benefit from it. That's what they're all about. So they are not, so anyone who thinks, oh they're private companies therefore, they will definitely stand up for the right of free marketeers to express themselves, might be in for a rude awakening at some point. But so these are quite unpleasant people in some ways. They certainly have unpleasant views. As you say, they have those views of educated Americans which are pretty naff views. And they are now through these companies they've created imposing those views on everyone else across the world and policing anyone who kicks back against them. The further we go down that road, the more we're going to regret it. That's all I would say. This is the token American in the room. Some of us really do like free speech, just because I need to stick up for that. Yaron, I'm gonna give you the right to get back on that. And after that, I want to move to a question where I think there's a little bit more consensus. Yeah, I mean I think that again there's a lot, there's a lot here. And we agree on defending fascist right to speak and we agree on all of that. If you don't stand by the barriers and fight on the barriers for the people who you most disagree with then free speech is lost. And so Alex Jones, if the government was involved in silencing Alex Jones or in attempting to silence him or in motivating Facebook to silence him, then I would be definitely radically more upset than I am about Alex Jones being banned from Facebook. But that's not the case. Facebook has always presented itself as a platform for creating communities. You can think of that what you will, but that's kind of how it's presented itself. And I think that if you're in the business of creative communities, part of the judgments you're gonna make are what kind of communities and what kind of stuff is being said in those communities. So we might not like the decisions Facebook makes. I certainly don't like the decisions Facebook make, but it's their decisions. They're creating the platforms to create the kind of communities they wanna create. And if you don't like it, leave Facebook. It's very easy, but Brandon's already done it. So you can leave Facebook. There are alternatives on out, very interesting alternatives right now because I don't think there's enough resentment out there in the culture against Facebook to create those alternatives. I think if they continue along the path that they're going on, which I think is a bad path. So again, we agree on the fact that all these social platforms are moving in the wrong direction. I do think that you will get alternatives when the resentment is large enough when there's significantly enough people to create kind of an alternative platform. Look, you know, the whole issue of right to free speech and the right to property rights, in my view, there's only one right, and that is the right to life. It's the right to live your life as you see fit based on the values necessary for your survival, your thriving, your success as a human being. That right to life, which is the only right that exists, requires two auxiliary rights. It requires you to be able to produce property. And there's no difference, indeed it's the opposite. There's no difference between building a home for yourself and building a multi-billion dollar platform. The only difference is it takes a lot more talent and skill and ability and energy and capital and expertise to build the platform than it is building your house. So I have a lot more admiration for their platform than I do for somebody's house and a lot more respect for the private property that that engages because of the energy they put into it and because of the effort and the mind, the thinking that had to go into it. So I have enormous respect for the creators of property. Property is something created. I have an enormous respect and I think it would be a disaster for Western civilization and a disaster for free speech. If we started to undo and break down these questions around property, these questions around property, free speech is, of course, another one of those pillars. If I am to live my life as I see fit, right, using my mind, which is the only way I think one can live one's life, then I have to be able to think outside the box, radical thoughts and there's no meaning to thinking radical thoughts right or wrong if I can't express them. So again, the right to free speech who comes from the right to think freely which comes from the right to live and both property rights and free speech are a derivative of this right to life that's right to be left alone and that the only thing that abridges your life is force, is violence and this is why I wouldn't regulate anybody on any issue. So I don't see this conflict between the two. Facebook has the right to do whatever it wants with this platform, discriminate against anybody and its platform, fire anybody for whatever reason. It's theirs. We don't have to like it and we can object to it and we can publicly speak about it and which we do and we can create an alternative to it which I think we will at some point when things get bad enough. What scares me the most right now which I think is going to happen is that the calls to regulate Facebook, the calls to demonize social media are creating an environment where we're gonna get government massively involved with these social media platforms and then we'll get the worst of both worlds, right? The worst of all worlds. We'll get the efficiency of private corporations driven by real censorship, driven by the gun, the force of government and to me that will be the ultimate disaster if that comes together and that's what's coming together and unfortunately because the people running these companies don't share my philosophy, they're cooperating with us. So Facebook is in negotiations with the government to figure out what the right way to regulate Facebook is. By the way, one of the reasons to do that is it will prohibit competition. So exactly the thing that I hope that these other platforms will arise to compete with Facebook is gonna go away if government steps in to regulate these industries because they'll create a very high barrier to entry and Facebook will be the legitimate social media and they'll exclude illegitimate social media. The government intervening is not gonna make things better, it's gonna make things a lot worse but that's where we're heading and that's part of the fight has to be therefore on both the issue of free speech and on the issue of private property and on the issue of keeping the government away from these platforms as far away as possible and then we can fight them. We can fight them intellectually, we can argue against them, we can argue against the decisions that they make but again, once you get the government involved it's downhill and it's very steep and it's very, very bad. So the lots look forward to you there, yeah. It doesn't look good. I mean, the reality is it doesn't look good for free speech. But the government already interferes with Facebook's property rights as it is. You say Facebook can fire anyone for any reason but it can't. No, I know, right. It does already interject to them. Yeah, it can't fire a woman because she got pregnant, it can't fire someone because he's black. So the government or across the Western world the government interferes with and intervenes in in some ways rightly, in my view, property rights of companies. So you know, you can't throw a woman onto the street just because she's six months pregnant. What's, what's? So all I'm, but where we agree is that I think, we disagree on government intervention in private companies. I think sometimes that's necessary because private companies can be pretty nasty organizations sometimes and people need to be defended from them as well as being employed by them. So we disagree on that, fine. That's great. We can carry on that discussion. We can, forever. Yeah. But where we agree is that the idea of government intervention into these companies to make them defend freedom of speech or to make them adhere to at the first moment, I agree actually that would be the worst of both worlds because I don't think it would fix the problem because the government shares the prejudices at the moment of the social media companies which is that certain forms of speech are dangerous, some ideas should not be expressed in public. There are some things you shouldn't even think, nevermind say, you shouldn't teach your dogs to a Nazi salute. The government thinks all that stuff, the social media companies think all that and it would simply empower that process. But I do think, and probably we should leave this one side because Kate wants to come on to something where there's more consensus, but I do think, and I would love to hear what people in the audience think, I do think there is often a conflict between property rights and freedom of speech. And that I think is something that we need to have a reckoning with and work out which one, in those instances where they clash, which one do we think is more important? Can I just make one point on that? If there is a conflict, then now the only way to resolve that conflict is through the courts and now the government has to get involved. So again, I think when, if there is a conflict is a very dangerous conflict, I don't think there is, but where there is, it's the government that's gonna determine what that conflict is and we're screwed. And we don't want politicians arbitrarily deciding what Trump's what as you, as Brendan says, they're not always on the side of the righteous. So, well, no, this is interesting because despite all the disagreement that we've heard, a few things I picked up on is that you both think that government could very possibly make the situation worse. And it seems to me that the real battle that you both think we're facing is the cultural one. At the end of the day, this is about cultural attitudes towards freedom and the freedom of speech. And so I wanna hear from both of you how you think we need to address and deal with the mobs that are now created on social media but come offline. So I'm talking about groups of people who come together online, who could have never met before or communicated before, who decide that culturally someone's committed a crime. Someone has the wrong opinion, someone said the wrong thing, someone's acted the wrong way. And we have trial by media. We have trial by Twitter. And these groups come together on social media but it comes off the screen, off of our phones, and someone gets fired. Someone loses their job, somebody loses everything they have, someone loses their reputation. Not because they were found guilty in a court but found guilty on social media. That's not really something that we can chalk up to Facebook or Twitter. This is actually quite organic. Doesn't have to do with users being banned or brought on. This is something that social media has produced. Erin, I'll start with you. How do we go about addressing that? Is there any merit to it? And what are the consequences? Well, again, I don't think you can deal with an issue like this in isolation. There is a real cultural problem. And as Brandon illustrated before, it's not even left and right anymore. Like the left will gang up on somebody and then the right will gang up on somebody and people who object to the ganging up will participate in it the next day. There is a massive agreement, I think, both on the left and the right, that reason and augmentation and discussion and debate are out. And it is about rallying as many voices as you can to attack the other position that is of value. Ben and I could have an interesting discussion about democracy as well. But, because we might not agree exactly on democracy, because I think this is a reflection of the problem with democracy. Property rights at the mercy of the size of the group that is going to vote to take away your property rights, then we become all obsessed about creating bigger and bigger and bigger and more vocal and more violent groups in order to represent us. And I think that's the end of freedom, which I think is the more important value. Democracy is just a reflection of. So, it's difficult to address it. I mean, one way to address it is get off social media. Get off Twitter. One reason not to be in Twitter, particularly if you have a career that might be sensitive to these things, is don't post, self-defense. We should, again, be speaking up against these phenomena. These are phenomena that are disgusting. This is tribalism, and tribalism is on the rise, I think, all over the world, certainly in the United States of America, which used to be, I think, to a large extent, the least tribal society is becoming a leader in tribalism. This is a reflection of tribalism. We should be arguing against tribalism. We should be defending individualism. We should be arguing certainly against the use of force and mobs to dictate anything, whether, certainly in the real physical world, where they use violence against you, but even mob that mob mentality online. We should use every tool that we have in our intellectual toolbox to be fighting against this. And this is why discussions on forums like this are so important, why live streaming this stuff, why doing stuff, and whatever social media is still available to get to the largest audience we can, is so vital and so important, because we have to combat this, we have to fight it. And I think the only way to combat it and fight it is to speak. I mean, this is why free speech is so important. It's the only way to secure liberty. It's the only way to secure freedom is to speak about it. It's the only way, if we disagree, there are only two options to deal with that disagreement, other than just walking away. One is to argue it, is to debate it rationally, and the other one is to throw fists. It's to throw punches. And if we stop debating, if we exclude debate, if we exclude speech, then we are at the point of throwing punches. And I fear that's where we're heading today. It's what Antifa would like us to do, and it's where Antifa and some elements on the right would like to push the conversation, is get rid of the conversation. Let's just fight it out and see who wins, and that's an ugly world. Brendan, what do you think about the mobilization that Twitter brings? See, that's one of the things where you see the promise of Twitter and the reality of Twitter, because the promise of it, not just Twitter, but social media in general, the coming together of people who would never have been able to come together in the past is wonderful. People with shared interests, people who want to date or hang out or whatever they want to do. So there's a lot of offline stuff, which is great. And then there's some offline stuff, which is not so good, which is, as you say, the physical manifestation of that kind of online virtual mob mentality, and that does happen. I agree with Aaron on this. We need to, the best way to deal with that is just to push back against it. I mean, it's really the only way to deal with it. You don't want more policing or more laws to control, how people express themselves publicly, even if they are very heated, even if they were standing outside this room screaming, although if they came into the room, they certainly should get a bit of a slap or something like that. Or certainly, you could then manhandle them back out of the room. But I think we have to kind of go back a step and look at where this kind of virtual mob mentality comes from. I think it really speaks to, the really dangerous idea that has taken hold over the past three or four decades, in fact, is this idea that words are a form of violence and words can hurt you as surely as being stabbed or punched can hurt you. And that's really taken hold among the new generation. It's really taken hold on campuses, in the academy and so on. And the problem with that is that if you think words are violence, then you think violence is a respectable response to words. That's the problem. If you go around thinking that someone who offends you or says something you disagree with is erasing you, this is the new identitarian phrase, they are erasing your whole life. You know, if I say, for example, that I have complete respect for trans women and their rights, but I don't think they're women, I think they are men, I'm sorry about that. Now, there are a lot of people out there who think that that is a form of violence that I am erasing people. Of course, I'm not doing any such thing, but if they really believe that, they will think that shouting at me or punching me or preventing me from going into the Oxford Union, which they tried to do a few years ago, is a reasonable response. So I think we have to dismantle this idea that words are incredibly dangerous and violent and are toxic. We have to really challenge the politics of identity which encourages this extreme hyper fragility among young people in particular, so they end up thinking that their self-esteem takes precedence over everything else in the world, including other people's freedom of speech. Those are, I think, the foundation stones of this new mob culture. So there's a lot of work cut out. I think we need to confront these mobs on a day-by-day basis and say, you know, stop behaving like idiots, but then more profoundly, we have to dig down and rip up the roots of this stuff, which is the politics of identity, the politics of fragility, and this bizarre idea that words are as bad as violence. That's what we really need to tackle. Well, thank you both so much. I want to go to the audience. I'm going to take one question at a time. I will allow speeches, as long as the speech is two sentences, and the second one has to end in a question. So hands high, and we'll try to get through as many as possible. I'm going to start with a woman in the red. Thank you. I mean, obviously what we're talking about here is something extremely new, the internet. But I'm interested in where history fits into your analyses. I mean, we can diagnose again and again how oppressive and authoritarian our society is right now, and I do that every week, and I call them for the Sunday Telegraph. I'm getting sick of myself doing it. And it strikes me that we need a little bit more of a deep analysis, and by that, I mean a sort of short-term sense of our recent intellectual history and why we got here, not just that we're here, but what are the developments in left-wing thought? Left did not used to be so authoritarian. So that's the sort of last 60, 70 years, maybe since Stalinism or whatever question. But in the longer term, I mean, I'm thinking in a really broad historical sense, is there a way in which we're just reverting to type and saying, okay. Keep the mic far away from you. There you go. There we go, I was getting too into it. You know, we can say there's been a very recent moment when there's been, you haven't been burnt at the stake or whatever for religious indiscretions. Should we actually be seeing what's happening now as like human nature just going back to its eternal tendency to control and be violent and be curable and then restrict? And actually just what we will soon be doing is looking back on a wonderful little blip. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great question. Let's, but it's sad, right? It's really tragic. There's never been a period in human history where we've had more freedoms than we have today. I mean, maybe, you know, and certainly if you're a little different than everybody else, certainly there's never been a period that we've had more freedoms, including freedom of speech. So even in Athens, you know, the great period of you wouldn't have wanted to be a woman in Athens and you wouldn't have wanted to be Socrates in Athens because ultimately they killed Socrates for what? For speaking, democratically, I might add. So my vote. So it is truly a unique, the last 200 years and for many people, really only the last 50 years, it really is a unique moment in history where we've had so much freedom in terms of our ability to speak. And it's all, I think, a product of a series of thinkers who are writing in the 18th century, you know, we call them the Enlightenment thinkers. It's a product of the Enlightenment that elevated reason, human reason, are back to where it should be. That is, our capacity to reason, our capacity to know the world, our capacity to understand the world, each one as an individual, where there's no authority to tell us what is right or what is wrong, we have to make that decision and we are left free to make that decision. And as long as we're pursuing our values and not hooting other people, hooting physically other people, then we should be left alone to think what we wanna think, to say what we wanna say and actually to do what we wanna do. That was a unique set of intellectuals who came up with these ideas and we've been living the consequence of those ideas for 200 years, slow progression to include more and more of humanity under those principles. And now what we're seeing is a backsliding. We're seeing a backsliding into all kinds of mysticism into a rejection of reason. And when you reject reason, when you reject man's ability to know the world and to communicate about it and to debate it and to say there is truth, look, here's the facts, here's evidence, the methodology of showing evidence and of logic and of debate. Then all you're left with is emotion and you're seeing this online. I mean, if anything, you're seeing the spewing of emotion all over the place and emotion needs to be guided somehow because emotion doesn't actually help you in any kind of significant way to figure out what truth is or not. So you need an authority now to tell you and you're reverting back to the olden days of authorities telling us what we shouldn't, shouldn't think, well, how we should, and today the authorities are, I guess, the group that intersectionality says is the most oppressed gets to decide what truth is or the university professors or politicians, whoever the authority is, now gets to dictate the truth. So for me, the battle at the end of the day, the battle that has to be engaged in from an historical perspective to get us back on track towards more liberty, towards more freedom, a track we've been on for about 200 years is a renewed respect for reason, a renewed respect for the human intellect, a renewed respect for facts and reality for their existence and a rejection of not just postmodernism, which is an extreme form of this, but all the different views that negate reality, negate facts, negate truth, and negate human reason. Brendan, do you think we're sliding backwards or is it just that people who have always been intolerant have a larger platform to be louder? I think, I don't think it is human nature. I think actually human nature tends towards wanting freedom and wanting more choice and wanting greater autonomy in your life. That's how most people think and what most people desire, even if they feel that they live in a period in which it's not going to be possible. And I think a lot of people feel that about the period we live in now. I think, I'm a Democrat. I think democracy is up there with freedom as one of the most important human values. And I think it's important to recognize that almost every illiberal, hysterical, extremist, sensorious outburst in history has not been led by toothless people waving tortures. That's the prejudice view of the mob. It's always been led by elites. It's always been led by the educated classes. You go from the Inquisition, you go to the Counter-Enlightenment, you go to the Peterloo Massacre, which is currently the subject of a film in cinemas. It's the clamp down, the hysteria, the mob behavior has always come for the most part from the educated sections of society who don't want as much freedom to exist as people want. So that's where the dynamic tends to lie. And I think there's still, that still exists today. I know, I use the word mob quite a lot today talking about Twitter mobs and so on. And I sometimes feel I have to correct myself because I know that in people's minds that creates a sense of ordinary people going mental. That's how they, that's what they think of a mob as. But in fact, even Twitter mobs tend to be, tend to come from very educated sections of society. And when I'm on campuses and they're like I was speaking at Oxford University a few months ago and there was a protest outside, 30 people, they were so posh. They all, they were, they were, you know, these cut glass tones, please get off our campus. You know, these were, they were really from that section of society and they were all doing PhDs and things I couldn't ever possibly understand. So that's, to my mind, what modern mobs are like. So I don't think it's human nature. I think it is, it's the return or the latest manifestation of an elitist discomfort with greater freedom and joys. That's what I think we're witnessing. One thing I really quickly wanted to say. Yes, I think the, I completely agree with Aaron about the importance of reason and the importance of the enlightenment in pushing that idea further. But my favorite, one of my favorite things ever to read is Emanuel Kant's What is Enlightenment, which is really short and it's the only thing he ever wrote which is really understandable. And you can find it online and it's magnificent because he talks about the importance of moral reason and it could have been written today. He says, I'm sick of having a book that thinks for me. I'm sick of having a physician who tells me what to eat. I'm sick of people telling me how to think, how to behave spiritually. And he calls them guardians and he says, I'm not gonna cut the open strings and go out on my own and you should all do the same. And that sentiment I think is so important to recover and the fact that we don't have that and instead, as Aaron says, people are looking for guardians to tell them how to think, to tell them how to feel, to give them therapy and everything else really suggests we are going back to pre-enlightenment times when people were seen as fragile and pathetic and weak and as needing this scaffolding of therapy and intervention and censorship to protect them. That's the climate we're going back to. Hands please. Great, I'll take the gentleman in the suit in the front. Do you think the banning of Alex Jones becomes more important when you realize it wasn't just Facebook, but it was also Twitter and YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Instagram, LinkedIn, Mailchin, and then even Paypal. I mean, that sounds like mob in a way. Brenda, does that back up your opinion that it's part of the elite? See, that's a corporate mob. That is a corporate mob. Sorry to say that, Aaron, you might disagree. That's a corporate mob behaving incredibly badly. I don't like Alex Jones. I really have such a big issue with conspiracy theories. I think they are one of the worst things plaguing public life today. I think anyone who thinks 9-11 was done by George Bush is a bloody idiot. Anyone who thinks those school shootings in America were staged shouldn't. Awful, awful people. Very anti-reason, in fact. So I really detest conspiracy theories, but if we're serious about freedom of speech, we have to defend freedom of speech for conspiracy theorists. And there are actually a lot of conspiracy theorists in every mainstream society now, constantly hear about Russia. Apparently, Russia made me vote for Brexit, for example. So there's conspiracy theories are being mainstreamed, which is also worrying. But I think, but yes, that is like a mob. That's a corporate mob. And I think the Alex Jones thing, the reason it's important is not because what he says is of any value, but because of the president it says, because if they can throw him off for being a pain in the neck, then the door is open to them doing that to other people. That's where the problem is. Brenton, can I ask, hypothetically speaking, if Alex Jones were so loud on Facebook, but Facebook had a policy in which everyone can be on Facebook, doesn't matter what you say, you can promote conspiracy theories, you can promote disgusting racism, sexism, everyone can be on. But when you post a fake news article, we're gonna tag it as fake news. You can post it, you can put it there. But we feel that responsibly, we at least have to say to people that this isn't true. CMBC reported in 2016 that one of the top rated news stories of the year was that the Pope endorsed Donald Trump for president. He did not. Would you, actually both of you, would you see a circumstance in which Facebook said sort of as a compromise, you can post it, but we're flagging it. I'd have a problem with that. Because it would not just be the article about Hillary Clinton running a paedophile ring from a Pizza Hut or wherever that story was. But it would, you just know the definition would expand and expand all the time to include any form of, any article that was particularly critical of immigration or other things which you're not really allowed to say publicly very much. So I think it would set a worrying precedent. But also, I think it's worth, you know, we should take a historic view of the fake news. I think it is a moral panic about fake news. I think it's absolutely fascinating that our political elites only became obsessed with fake news when they started losing elections. Right, Hillary Clinton loses, the EU loses, and suddenly they think- About the Russians. But then they think, oh my God, we have to control the media. I mean, there is a link between it. But the final thing I want to say on that is we have to remember that when the printing press was invented, there was a similar reaction that heresy would be available, lies would be available. There was that similar response. And heresy was published. Some of it was pretty good. And things were published that were untrue. But it's better than just, you know, monks being in control of the media. So I think fake news is a small price to pay for having as much press freedom as possible. Yeah, on Alex Jones, the corporate bullying point, but also very much to fake news. Yeah, look, it doesn't surprise me at all that everybody banned Alex Jones. They all come from the same cloth that people in Silicon Valley, unfortunately. They all come from the same political philosophy. And they all acted in, you know, inconsistently with one another. I think the Twitter ban here, I can't remember if Twitter actually, I think Twitter kept him on or something. But yeah, I mean, they all approach these issues the same way. There's sudden speech that's offensive. And I agree completely, I mean, I can't think of anything more objectionable than conspiracy theories. It's why I, for one, so despise Donald Trump. It's because Donald Trump is constantly plays into the conspiracy theory. Remember, he was a, what do you call it, Bertha, right? And he refused to give it up even during the campaign. He actually had to be almost forced to give it up. So the guy is constantly perpetuates conspiracy theories and supported Alex Jones. So yeah, it doesn't surprise me. Again, what is the solution? The solution is, object to it, you know, while up against it, talk about it. But I think that, and I'm glad we agree on this, the solution can be for the government to step in and say, no, no, no, you have to carry Alex Jones because then, you know, where do we go from there? That becomes really, really, really bad and really, really, really dangerous. So, and I think the solution is, again, I think we agree, the solution is reason. The solution is to advocate for reason. And this is about the fake news, right? Suddenly, we don't have free will, right? Suddenly, you can't trust individuals to figure out what's fake news and what isn't. Suddenly, we can't go and do our own research. The beauty of the web is, I find, is that any news, so I don't trust anything I read in any newspaper, right? New York Times, Wall Street Journal, because what happens is when they write about something I really know a lot about, so I used to be a finance professor. When I find them writing stuff on finance and I go, this guy doesn't know anything about finance, then I extrapolate about everything else and I conclude that they probably don't know anything. So, it's scary to me, but the fact is, whenever I reach something that I want to comment on or that I think is important, I check. I go and I want to find the video where the person actually said it. I want to look at other resources. I want to look at other points of view because I want to verify it. So, the web allows us to do that, which is another beautiful thing about it. But the idea that now fake news, we're all automatons and just whatever the Russians feed us, that's what we do, is, you know, it's insulting and it's again a negation of the idea of human reason, our capacity to think, to investigate, to check, to look at other points of view. One of the, I think, positive things that have come out of it is all these fact checking websites. Now, some of them might be biased. I don't trust them completely, but I can check a number of them. There's snoops, the Washington Post stuff, a number of them and you can check them and you can see which ones, if they're all consistent with their differences and what are their sources and where do they get their information. So, the beauty of the internet, and again, I think we shouldn't forget this, is that for every one of these problems, I believe that ultimately we can find solutions online and Alice Jones has not disappeared completely. He's still out there. He still has his following because of the internet. I, when the video emerged of the CNN journalist making contact with the intern's arm, I must have watched 25 different videos because under every single one was a thread of people saying fake news, fake news, this has been edited. So I had to watch it from CNN, from CNBC, from the Wall Street Journal, from the rogue videos on Twitter to actually try to get comprehension of what happened. But, Jiren, as you say, one of the big benefits of the internet is that you actually can look for that. You know, you as, if you want to find the truth, you can access it. And since 2016, those fact-checking websites have been multiplying dramatically because there's a market for it. People are interested, which I think is actually very positive news. Hands up. Front row here. Lady in the front row. Thank you. I wanted to ask about Generation Snowflake. I think there's quite a few representatives here tonight. To what extent do you think it is actually a no-sport generational trend? Or is it simply that, you know, there are snowflakes everywhere, but we just happen to be drawing particular attention to when it occurs within that millennial age group? So are we particularly unfair on young people? Are there plenty of 50-year-old snowflakes? They've always been snowflakes. There are many more of them now. And there's a reason for it. And it goes back to something Bennett said earlier about self-esteem. I don't think any of these kids have self-esteem. I don't think what they're trying to defend is self-esteem, because I don't think they have any clue what self-esteem is. Self-esteem is hard, and it's earned, and they haven't done anything to earn it. They have been taught since they were very young, and I don't know much about the British school system. I think it's a little better than the American one, but the American one's a disaster. In the U.S., we sit seven-year-olds around a table, and we ask them what they think of the latest politic political event, right? The only thing a seven-year-old can think about the latest politics is nothing. There is no content there. So all they can do is emote, and then we're not allowed to judge those emotions, because they're emotions, they're what they are. What we've done with generations, and I think this comes from John Dewey and the whole progressive education movement, is what we do in schools is we cultivate emotions. We encourage them to emote, to feel, to get in touch with themselves. Self-esteem, the way it's taught today, is everybody gets a ribbon. So there are no challenges. There's no achievement. There's no ability. We don't care about ability. So we created a generation that is entitled. I should get a ribbon, which means I should feel good about myself, and you're making me feel not good about myself, and you're not respecting my emotions. I think the best thing Ben Shapiro ever said, and Ben Shapiro and I disagree on a lot of things, but was it something about reality doesn't care about your emotions? I think it's something like that, or facts don't care about your emotions. They don't, I mean, I don't care. I mean, I do to some extent, but that's not the issue, this is truth. But there is no truth anymore. They're not taught that there's truth. There's only what they feel, all in the name of self-esteem, which is a travesty, because self-esteem is actually a good idea, and there is something called self-esteem, it's just they don't have it and they have no clue how to get it, and it's not linked to just pleasing emotions. So there's definitely a consequence to bad education. There's definitely a consequence to bad philosophy, and every generation is going to get worse unless we alter something at the educational base, and again, that's why this is an intellectual battle, it's an intellectual fight. Brenton, I know that you've come face to face with the snowflake fight. I have, yeah. Tell us about those experiences. I really don't like the word snowflake. And in fact, we banned it on Spike. We don't use it, except maybe to criticize it. I don't like it. The reason I don't like it, I mean, I perfectly understand why people use it. I know what they mean by it, and I don't have any problem with people using it, that's fine. The reason I have a problem with it is because I think it wrenches, as Yaron says, this has long roots, this has been going on for a long time, this is a social phenomenon, and turns it into simply these hyper-fragile millennials who are ruining everything. So it's too narrowly focused on the problem of the millennials rather than on where they came from and the responsibility of earlier generations for giving rise to the culture in which they were socialized, in which they were educated, and in which they came to adopt these ideas. That's the more interesting thing. I think I have a real problem, I think the problem lies with anti-bullying initiatives in schools, and I'm not even being facetious. I think I did a talk at Eton last year and I said I have a problem with anti-bullying initiatives and all the teachers freaked out. But the point was, the point is that you now have a situation in schools where everything is bullying, not just being picked on for three months relentlessly by a gang of horrible kids, but even just being left out for a day, someone calling you a name once in a blue moon, anything is bullying, and there is constant teacher intervention into these playground squabbles to make sure they don't happen, to nip them in the bud, to bring consensus between the different parties. The problem with that is that young people no longer have the space in which they can discover for themselves how to resolve conflict, how to negotiate with each other, how to develop the raw materials of adulthood, which is being able to stand up for yourself, maybe getting through a fisticuffs every now and then. There are various things you have to do and that's reflected in the fact that young people are now less likely to have Saturday jobs than they were in the past. They have sex later, they don't drink much, they don't take drugs, there's this risk aversion among that generation, but I don't lay the blame at their door. I think it's a crisis of socialization and the failure of earlier generations going back really to boomers and Generation X to socialize the next generation into that sense of robustness, into the cultural gains of the past, the wonderful breakthroughs humanity has made, that's all now seen as dead white men stuff that we can't possibly teach them. So we fail to give them the practical materials you need to go through life without being offended by everything and we don't transmit to them the cultural knowledge of the past. And Hannah Arendt said that that is the most important thing for an adult to do. The most important thing for adult society to do is to socialize the new generation into the knowledge of the past and when society stops doing that, and I think we are getting towards a situation where we no longer want to do that. That's when real problems arise. It's interesting that we're talking about socialization. I know that question wasn't specifically about social media, but it also is because if it's about properly socializing people these days, if you are someone who struggles with that, if you're not as confident, if you're a bit more meek, rather than being forced to learn how to do that to interact, you can go online. But the problem there, same phenomenon exists online. Because I think what young people now have been encouraged to expect is validation. They want validation. And I think Aaron's absolutely right about self-esteem. I don't have a problem with, I think self-esteem is a good thing, but self-esteem is something that you derive from an achievement or from a struggle for having done the thing in life you want to do or at least having tried to do it. You get a sense of esteem from that. What we have, I think today, is this sense that everyone has this weird thing inside them called self-esteem, even though they're like 17 and have never done anything decent in their lives. And it must be nurtured and flattered and indulged and protected. And that is what I think creates this generation which thinks that words will wound them and ideas are hurtful. And anyone who disagrees with them is harming their self-esteem, which is essentially their soul. That's what they come for. Maybe we've conflated it with confidence. If you read John Dewey, and he wrote on the philosophy of education, this is exactly what he wanted. That he wrote about the fact that what he wants is to socialize people to be more in touch with their emotions. And that schooling was not about knowledge. It was not about the achievements of the past. It was not about cultural achievements. It was about conformity and emotions and socialization. And John Dewey was taken very, very seriously by the educational establishment in the U.S. and schools were designed around his ideas. And we're seeing the consequence of that. Ideas, philosophies, you know, intellectuals matter. So while Brennan criticized elites, and I know exactly what he means, you know, the Enlightenment were elites as well. So they're good elites and bad elites. And the elites, no matter whether they're good or bad, intellectual elites matter. They shape the world. That's why it's so important that we try to establish good intellectual elites because they're the ones who spread the good ideas or the bad ideas that they're bad. We have to have solutions to keep them in check and to protect us when they're not there. I think elites can be good, elitism is the bad thing. And I think that's the kind of climate we're currently living in. Hands up, gentlemen in the blue shirt, yeah, wave in your hand, yep, you. And I'll ask our panelists to keep these answers a bit brief so we can get through more questions. We've got about 15 minutes left. Yeah, Ron, I usually agree with you pretty much on the economics because I think you're spot on. I just wanted to mention something you talked about, Eric Weinstein and how he said, if they just try to take us all off, what's what happens? And I followed the intellectual dark web too, but we had GAB, which is a sort of anti-mainstream social media platform. The mass shooter who attacked the Tree of Life synagogue, obviously, I don't agree with anything he did or said, he had a count on there. And he was obviously allowed to say what he said and he went on to do that. GAB has been taken off the App Store, the Android Store, they lost their URL domain. I don't know what's happening with them right now, but that was the last time I checked it. That's a potential solution to, and against Twitter and Facebook. How do you deal with it when you can't even have an App Store app, when everyone in this room probably has an iPhone or an Android phone? Would it, just to finish that off, would basically making one's political views a protected characteristic in the same way we do gender and whatever kind of solved that issue? Or what do you think? I mean, I don't believe in protecting gender or protecting any of that stuff. So again, I do believe the company has a right to fire the six month old woman and throw into the street, but not that I advocate for that, but I have the right to do it. So I don't believe that government should be involved in any of that, protecting any kind of characteristic, whether it's one that pulls at the hog tightly or one that we think is intellectual questionable. No matter what that thing, the government should stay out of it. What is the solution? If I knew I'd be a billionaire, right, and I don't know what the solution is technologically, but I can tell you there are billionaires who don't necessarily agree with the status quo in Silicon Valley and who are looking at this and who are investigating it and who will, when I think when the time is right, when there's enough outrage, will offer an alternative. And I trust markets. And again, if there's no demand for Jordan Peterson, if there's no demand for me and Brandon, if there's no demand for us, then there will be no other platform. But the question is you guys, right? Will you demand the good stuff? Will you spread it to your friends? Will you argue it to other people? Will you encourage people to engage in these, we are now I guess alternative ideas, and will we build enough in a big enough community so that it cannot be ignored? And then the question is, will there be an entrepreneur and a capitalist who willing to get behind that movement and set up an alternative social media? I have no doubt that that would happen. And again, what's the alternative? The alternative is for the government to step in and intervene and do it? No, I get it. So you need a backer who's rich enough to be able to create whatever the back end of the platform is. Can I ask to pick up on that and to bring Brandon in as well when it comes to these protective groups? I mean, you know, Erin, you say you don't think any of them should be protected. But you and I can have a perfectly healthy debate about that, but I would love to know what you think the right responses, right? So if a company were to have had the right to fire a woman who was six months pregnant or had the right to fire people based on their race, if they did that, and Brendan, I'd really love to hear from you as well. For all the talk about how free speech shouldn't be censored under any circumstance, of course the free speech of others does have the right to come back and morally condemn those people. So if the baker doesn't wanna bake the cake, right? To use an example right now, don't go to the bakery. I am, and I wouldn't go to the bakery. I would never use that bakery again if a baker refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding or for a Jewish wedding, or for a black wedding or Hispanic wedding filled in the blank, doesn't matter. I would boycott them, but I would also be on the front lines of demonstrating against them and letting people know that they're bigots and letting people know that they're immoral bastards. So you agree that there can be legitimate consequences for free speech? Absolutely, the fact that you can speak doesn't mean other people can't speak as well. That is, if you say something bigoted, then other people should say that guy's bigoted and he's a bad guy and don't deal with him, right? And if, in the same thing, I don't see any difference, if you fire somebody for irrational reasons or you don't hire people for irrational reasons, then we, the civilized among us, should boycott that company, should not have anything to do with that company and should let the world know that this company's bigoted and evil and bad. Well, I believe in workers' rights. I know that makes me very old fashioned. And I think freedom of speech is an essential part of that. I believe in the right of workers to organize in the workplace, to express themselves in the workplace, to have some political manifestation, to withdraw their labor and so on. And I think it's right that society protects those rights. The workplace, it's not a happy crappy place. There's a conflict in the workplace. There's tension. There are people with hugely differing interests. The boss usually has pretty different interests to the person who cleans the offices at night. So we, but the problem is, one side is much more powerful than the other. And I think in those kind of situations, it makes sense to me at least, that you have a social arrangement that means people can express themselves in the workplace. Now, so I think sacking, I don't have a problem with it being illegal to sack a woman because she's pregnant. I have no problem whatsoever with that. And that's what I mean when I say that I take the property rights thing on a case by case basis. Because if it's the right of your, if it's the fourth amendment right, not to have your house invaded by police or whoever else, I'm down with that. But if it's the right of a billionaire to throw a woman onto the streets when she's six months pregnant, I'm not down with that. So it's case by case. But I think the gap question is really important because I have two issues with this situation. Firstly, the idea that that platform or the discussions on it were responsible for the fascistic massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue. I just don't accept that because that is undermining the murderer's choice, his free will, the fact that he made a choice. And you get into a situation where you would ban the Bible because so many crazy stuff has been done on the back of the Bible. You'd ban the white album by The Beatles, which was the inspiration for Charles Manson. So we have to maintain a separation between culture and what people choose to do for themselves in a terrible way sometimes. And the fact that gaps have been taken off the app store is incredibly important because that could be presented as Apple asserting its property rights and its free market rights. But it has a very real impact on the potential creation of a new space. Now, there's no easy solution to this. We're not, are we gonna say that the government should force Apple to sell certain apps? That's not really what we want, but we do want a culture which values freedom of speech above everything else and under which Apple might then feel pressure from the public not to do things like that. Hands up, gentleman in the green shirt. You made reference to the European court's ruling on calling the pedophile Mohammed a prophet. Reverse that. In reference to Islam and the printing press, Martin Luther obviously with the printing press led the charge on reforming Christianity and the printing press was key to that. What do you see as the difference with social networks now in regard to actually working against, in many ways, the reform of Islam? Is it the culture of sort of seeing Islam as this special religion where we really don't want to criticize it? Or is it the democratization of the speech on social networks where it's publishing in the printing press was there was a barrier of entry but with the social networks basically anybody gets to say what they want and so the reform is more difficult. Brendan, I'll start with you. Yeah, there's a real, see, my view with Islam in Europe is that I don't think the problem is Islam. I think it's Europe's unwillingness to subject Islam to the same criticism as every other religion because I am a real stickler for freedom of religion. I think Geert Wilders and there's other people who think we should ban the Quran and so on are idiots and have tyrannical ambitions in fact because if you ban a holy book that's really a serious form of censorship. My view is the problem is not Islam. The problem is the European Court of Human Rights, Western governments which institute laws where it is potentially illegal to say certain insulting things about Islam, that's the problem because what that does it creates a sense particularly among more radical Islamists that it is wrong to criticize their religion and anyone who does criticize their religion might deserve punishment. I've always thought that the Charlie Hebdo massacre was actually not some terrible foreign imposition on Europe which is how many people understand it but actually sprung from France's own laws and own legal system and its own culture in which Michelle Welbeck for example, the novelist had been arrested for saying Islam is the most stupid religion of all time in which Brigitte Bardot, the actress turned animal rights activists has been fined thousands of euros for saying that Islam is barbaric because of how it slaughters animals. They grew up in that country in which people could be punished in public for criticizing Islam. So where do they get the idea that people should be punished for criticizing Islam from their own society? So when I say that we have to be able to say whatever the hell we want about Islam that's not because I necessarily want to say loads of things about Islam. I'm not particularly interested in Islam. I don't really want to blaspheme against Muhammad really that's not my bag, right? But the reason I want us to be able to say whatever we want about Islam is because I think it will take the air out of that tension and it will allow these arrivals to our continent to see that our freedom of speech is more important than their book, more important than their beliefs and more important than their feelings. That's the kind of culture we need to re-grade. And actually freedom of speech protects their culture, protects their beliefs, protects all of our beliefs. So I agree with almost all of that. And this is why Fleming Rose published the cartoons. It was exactly that and why he was so disappointed and I think all of us were so disappointed in the response to the publication of cartoons not just in the Middle East, but in the West and the weakness and weakness. I've always said, I mean, I'm happy to criticize Islam, have on many occasions and there are plenty of reasons to criticize it. I'm happy to criticize Christianity and Judaism as well on occasion. Although I think Islam is a bigger threat right now qua religion. So I criticize it more than I do the others although some would argue I'm equal with Christianity. And that's because I live in America where Christianity is a threat. But Islam, the problem of reforming Islam is that they have no model. So I think, so people say, why is the West declining? I had this debate with Douglas Murray. And my view is it's because of us, right? It's exactly this point. We won't defend free speech. We won't put child rapists in jail. We won't go after them. We won't put people who mutilate little girls in jail. We won't live up to our standards. We won't advocate for enlightenment ideas. We won't advocate for what I consider Western civilization, which is enlightenment ideas. We won't say, you know what? Your civilization sucks. Here's a good civilization. I mean, by accident the West came up, figured out that the Greeks were right and this is the right way to structure civilization. We got it right. Hey world, emulate us. Instead we say, our civilizations are the same. All cultures are the same. You primitives and you dilate little girls. You're equal to us. You know, who will go to the moon, right? Everything's equal, right? Everything's equal. And if everything's equal, what it does is it diminishes us and it allows them to pretend that they're just our equals. I have nothing against Muslims who want to come and become Western. But they're not gonna want to become Western unless we say, here's what it means to be Western. It's not about color skin, it's about ideas. It's about those ideas of enlightenment which are universal. The truth for every human being who has the capacity to reason and I think that's everybody. And until we get self-esteem, right? In the values of the West and what it really represents and this has to do with free speech and this has to do with all these issues, they will continue to be a problem. And by the way, Charlie Hebdo was being prosecuted by the French government when the attack happened. The French government was going after them for insulting Phil and the blind whom, right? So if not the terrorists and not to put them off the hook at all because they're the evil bastards, right? But the French government was already trying to investigate use force against them to silence them. So it's not surprising that the worst elements within Islam or the worst elements within any of these groups come out of the world work when it's acceptable in our culture to silence certain people because of their points of view. I'm gonna do a little book plug for the Institute of Economic Affairs published a few years ago, a book called Islam and a Free Society. And it looks quite seriously and comprehensively the overlap between Islam and aspects of liberalism and where they actually can mesh together in sort of a progressive and forward thinking way. So it's free to download and you should, it's very good reading. Can I see some hands? And we have five minutes, so one sentence question, three sentence answers, let's get through them. Gentleman the blue shirt. Hello, what do we do about China as a libertarian and how do you stop them? Come on. How do you stop them? Stop China. From what? If China, I mean from a libertarian perspective, how do you fight back against extremely powerful nations or? Well, you do it like you do- That's not called human rights in the same way. Everything else, you speak up, right? So to the extent that China is becoming more authoritarian, you speak up against authoritarianism. You know, if they become really bad and you think that it's immoral to trade with them and don't buy their stuff, don't ask your government to raise tariffs on them, just speak up for liberty, for freedom and go to China and speak up there, right? As some of us do, against their government and against the authoritarian of their government and support those people within China who are pro-liberty and pro-freedom. What's interesting about China is that they're actually importing a lot of our authoritarianism. So they're really now into CCTV cameras in a big way, which Britain has been for years, and they're bringing in smoking bans and so on. But there's actually been some very healthy reactions against the smoking ban. People in China have been barricading themselves into pubs and refusing to stub out their cigarettes. So not only should we criticize the Chinese government, but we should also offer solidarity to Chinese people, many of whom want as much freedom as we do, including in those new authoritarian areas like smoking bans and all that stuff. China has for a long time, they look to the West as an example of freedom. As our freedom declines, it's not surprising that they don't have a model anymore. And 2008, the financial crisis was for them this crisis of capitalism. It's a failure of capitalism, and they become more and more authoritarian since then, just as we have. So the best way to get China back on track is to get ourselves back on track. Hands up, gentlemen, right here in the suit, yeah. Hi, question for Brendan, actually. The stock market values Twitter substantially less than Facebook, even by the amount of users, even if you look at it on a user basis. And one of the reasons for that is basically because advertisers don't want to advertise there because of the abuse that people get on that thing. They just don't want to associate it. And people don't want to go on Twitter as well for the same reason, like, oh, it's a cesspit, I don't want to get involved, and they leave it. And you say yourself, I'm not sure if you're not on Twitter for those reasons, but people are just not on that for that reason. So by allowing free speech and adulterating and criticizing the companies for restricting it, and that's one of the reasons why Twitter became, stop being the free speech platform of the free speech party or whatever it was called because exactly that, it wanted to get its market capitalization higher than where it currently is. It's 24 billion compared to Facebook's 407 billion. It's 16 times greater. And one of the reasons is people just do not like it because of the abuse. That's one of the reasons I don't use it. I'm sure everyone on Twitter hates me. And there's always these kind of Twitter storms, especially if you do TV or anything like that. But the thing is, we have to accept, the broader point in relation to what you've said is that we have to accept that freedom of speech involves freedom for speech that is really horrible and disgusting and abusive. So quote Karl Marx, who was one of history's great defenders of press freedom, really his essays on press freedom are unrivaled in my view. His point was you can, in relation to freedom of speech, you cannot have the rose without the thorn because people were always saying to him, but if we allow press freedom, they'll publish all this awful stuff and they'll be racist and horrible. He said, you can't have the rose, i.e. press freedom without the thorn, i.e. all the crap. That's the approach we need to take to Twitter. But if we lived in a healthier political, more liberal, freer, more reasoned climate, that would then be reflected in the kind of debates that would rise up through Twitter. The problem is we live in this increasingly identitarian, fragile, quite bitter climate, not everyone, but that is the cultural climate, and therefore that's reflected on these platforms. So I think, again, it comes back to challenging the cultural problems we've had. I suspect Twitter would be out of business if it's not for Donald Trump. LAUGHTER Hands up. Gentleman in the back. Second to last row. Sorry, third to last row. Hi. How do you get the average person that you walk in today to care about free speech? Because when I talk to my family and friends, they either don't care, or it's very difficult to sell the idea of justifying freedom of speech for the Nazi, the Nazi dog salute, whatever. How do you get people to care about free speech and say this is actually really important? That's a great question, Erin. I mean, it's hard, and the Nazi dog salute is nothing. I mean, Holocaust denial was the beginning of the end, right? That was the first one where there was a law that said you go to jail for it. I don't know how you do it without teaching them a little bit of history and teaching them what the consequences are of not having free speech and the way people are being treated throughout history when you don't have free speech. And the fact is, slippery slopes, I know people don't believe in slippery slopes, but they do exist, whether you believe them or not, and it just gets worse and worse and worse, and they'll come after you once they get rid of the fascists or whatever, the Nazis, the Nazi dog salute, they'll come up, whatever you care about, they will come after. And that's a reality if we don't defend the right to free speech of the guy who taught his dog something I think is despicable, but it's not, you know, he taught his dog, not my dog. And, you know, if we don't defend his right, then your rights are next, and we need to find ways to concretize that. If we don't, you know, and you can go back, if we don't defend the right of Galileo, then you don't get a scientific revolution. Now, he managed in spite of the fact that his rights weren't protected, but that's because there was a little opening during that period of time of a little bit more freedom. If he had been born 20, 30 years earlier, he might have been born to the stake, and then what happens to scientific revolution? So, every value we have today, all the values we have, including Facebook and Twitter and all these things, but including everything, all the technology we have, are consequences of the fact that over the last 200 years, we have for the most part had free speech. You cannot divorce free speech from economic success. They're not divorceable, and if you oppress free speech, all the things they supposedly do care about, their material well-being, that will disappear as well. Well, just I want to do my own plug now. We have a film on spite called The Curious Case of the Nazi Pug, which is a brilliant 20-minute film about this case, looking at the fact that it actually was a funny video, which is what a lot of people don't realize until they see it, and you'll find yourself laughing. But it definitely falls in the realm of comedy and freedom rather than incitement to hatred, which should also be, in my view, a free speech. So, have a look at that, but I think I completely agree with the Aaron on this. I think the way you make the case for freedom of speech is by explaining to people or encouraging them to accept the idea that every freedom and comfort we enjoy is a consequence of freedom of speech. It's a consequence of someone at some point, or some group, daring to say the thing you weren't supposed to say, whether it was that the sun is actually the center of our solar system, or whether it was the idea that women are just as capable as men of negotiating public life and having the boat, or whether it was the idea that a man should be allowed to have sex with another man and it's none of the government's business. All those things which 50, 60, 100, 500 years ago would have got you into serious trouble. If people hadn't said them and pushed those ideas, then people today wouldn't enjoy the freedoms and the comforts that they enjoy. Every single movement for progress has recognized the centrality of freedom of speech. This is a point Frederick Douglass makes in his essay, a plea for free speech. He says slavery could not have survived freedom of speech because as soon as, because if slaves had had freedom of speech, they could have organized, they could have published pamphlets, they could have got together, they could have made their case and slavery, he says, would not have lasted five years. So that's how much faith people had in freedom of speech in the past. He even thought that something as vile as slavery could have been defeated simply by freedom of speech and all the things that freedom of speech gives rise to. So I think we have to recognize, I was in Leiden in the Netherlands this year given a talk on freedom of speech and someone in the audience raised the question, why should we give a platform to unpopular views? And I made the point that in the 1640s in England, there was an English Revolution, there was an English Civil War, people wanted to publish radical pamphlets about democracy and freedom and the right, and they weren't allowed to, they could have their tongues ripped out, they were put into the stocks. It was a really risky business to publish these things. So where did they publish them? They published them in Leiden. In that place where we were, which was then part of the Dutch Republic, which was far more radical and which had had various processes of revolution and revolt. And that is, I think, explains the importance, firstly, of allowing freedom of speech because it's the motor of progress, but also in facilitating freedom of speech for people who seem unpopular or difficult or radical or awkward because they might be the ones who have the ideas that then improve human life. And exactly, who gets to decide which ideas are the right ideas, and who, again, if the church gets it, Galileo's out, if the king of England gets it, who's out, Leiden reminds me, John Locke had to escape to Holland, because he was afraid of a Catholic king what would do to him. Why? Because he was writing about the rights of man. So, no, free speech is at the heart of every intellectual achievement, and including the technology companies. I mean, somebody came up with an idea called Facebook and could talk about it and recruit people around it and market it and think about how Uber offends taxi drivers in London, right? I mean, without their ability to defend themselves, then even the material wellbeing that we have goes away. And to pick up on Brendan's point about unpopular opinions, I find it helpful to ask somebody, what is your unpopular opinion? Because every person you know has one. Every single, everyone in this room, everyone outside of it has an unpopular opinion, and when they realize that their own voice could be criminalized, I think that's very powerful. I've gone over time by five minutes, forgive me, this has just been too fascinating to stop. Hopefully our speakers will give the audience a few more minutes if you wanna come up and ask questions, but in the meantime, I'd really love to thank the Anne Rand Institute for hosting this event, for all the volunteers and workers here in London who put it together and got you guys to come out today. Thank you to our audience for your brilliant questions, but please, help me to thank Brendan and Jera and fabulous speakers. Let's thank them for the interview. If you haven't picked up your free copy of Defending Free Speech, you can do so on your way out. These aren't free, they're 10 pounds each, but Dr. Brooke will sign them if you buy a copy. Thanks. Thanks so much. Good.