 These giant tech companies have so much power. Big tech poses the single greatest threat to free speech in our country today. So much economic power and so much political power. Everywhere you turn these days, big tech companies are under fire. Instagram supposedly addictive and negative effects on teenage girls have lawmakers comparing its parent company Facebook to Big Tobacco. Conservatives like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Governor Greg Abbott have signed controversial legislation banning social media platforms from moderating content and kicking off users for political reasons. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas has said businesses like Twitter and YouTube should be subject to strict federal regulation. Liberal legislators in Colorado have proposed creating a digital communications commission that would have the power to change how platforms do business in the name of fighting hate speech and misinformation. Lawmakers in at least 38 states have introduced over 100 laws in the past couple of years to regulate online speech and business practices. In his new book, Tech Panic, reasons Robbie Suave says such attacks are modern-day witch hunts that fall apart under even mild scrutiny. They're the contemporary version of past freakouts over video games, rock music and comic books. We shouldn't fear Facebook or the future, right Suave? The actual threat, he says, comes not from private companies, but from politicians, woke moms, social conservatives and activists whose real goal is to limit speech they don't like. Robbie Suave, thanks for talking. My pleasure. Give me the elevator pitch of Tech Panic, why we shouldn't fear Facebook and the future. Sure, Panic about social media is very popular right now. It's bipartisan, it's cross all over the ideological spectrum. People as different as Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley and Joe Biden and Donald Trump all think we need to do something. The government needs to do something about social media, about big tech. My book argues no, that's wrong. The concerns are overstated. The solutions that these people offer are very bad. Don't, from a range of not fixing the problems that they're talking about to they'll make things worse to the problems they're talking about aren't even problems. I get into all the various, the most popular panics about social media and discuss to the extent they're true and what should be done about them. Okay, so we'll go through them and we're going to come to things like section 230 and antitrust actions against big tech. But first, the kind of panic du jour, which came up in a big way after the book was printed has to do with Facebook and Instagram having a terrible negative effect, particularly on young girls. This is Instagram. Report came out, the Wall Street Journal talked it up about Instagram and Facebook researchers had looked at the platform itself and said, oh my god, Instagram is driving young girls to anorexia and worse. What is wrong about that? Right. So it looks to me like Facebook has come up with some internal data showing a mild increase in feelings of depression or not being good enough or not being pretty enough among teenage girls. I think their figure was a third of their teenage female users were experiencing heightened depression because of Instagram. The idea being that Instagram is showing you more in the search feature, it's showing you, it's curating for you a feed of images based on things you've been interested in. So you're going to see more makeup, more models, more pretty people. Also Instagram itself is this kind of deceptive medium where you're seeing the best, the most glamorous, the most attractive version of everyone, and that can lead to feelings of insecurity about your own appearance, etc. So I think from looking at, and I looked at a lot of other data for this book, if you want to say there are reasons to be, we should be concerned, we should keep studying this, it might be having a negative effect on some teenagers. Absolutely. I think that could very well be the case and we should continue to look at these things. The idea that there's some broad insurmountable problem for the vast majority of social media users does not seem well founded. You can cherry pick this data a lot of ways. For every statistic about how teenage girls have become more anxious or more unhappy in the last 10 years, you can find one showing that, well, this other category of social media user hasn't. It's really hard to measure these things. And also, some of the data looks to me like the users who use social media too much or extreme all day have some bad mental health outcomes, but so do the teens who don't use social media at all, the ones who are not, who are loners, who are not connected with their friends. Part of the concept of the book, and it's in the title Tech Panic, is social media has become kind of like the garbage bin that we dump all of our anxieties in about everything that is kind of going wrong right now. If you think about it in terms of, it's just like any, there's some comparisons to remember video games, Panic over violent video games, and then it turned out that a lot of preliminary research or even assumptions, not even research that video games were going to make kids, teenage boys more violent, didn't pan out. In fact, it might even be true that for like the most at risk capable of violence, young men, it might even deter them from it because it's an outlet other than engaging in violence. So I expect to see some of that, but also you can still say it's perfectly appropriate for parents to limit the amount of time their teenagers spend on social media. I was only allowed to play an hour of video games on weeknights because left to my own device. When I was a kid, I would have played video games all night long, but that was the rule, and that was a healthy rule, and I think it's totally reasonable. Jonathan Haidt, who is concerned about this, but he said that that's a practical, parental intervention, requires the government to do nothing whatsoever, just take the phones away from the night. Well, I guess before we go to whether or not there's a public policy dimension here, it's that question of in the 90s, you were talking about when video games really came online, like high intensity and like with good graphics video games that also coincided with cable TV coming under real scrutiny. This was the Clinton administration, and people like Janet Rena, the attorney general, constantly talking about that. One of the findings was that kids who watch like 10 hours of TV a day had bad outcomes, but it was not even clear that it mattered what was on the screen. It was more something is off if you're using social media or any media for that kind of period of time. And if you stay up all night looking at your phone, just as if you stayed up all night doing anything, you're going to be tired, you're going to be more sluggish in school the next day. Lack of sleep correlates very obviously with bad mental health outcomes and other struggles you might go through. So I absolutely agree. If it's interrupting these sleep patterns of young people, that's probably not healthy for them, but that's not even a that's not really a problem with the technology itself. You write a lot about the book in the book about the documentary, the social dilemma, which says, you know, at various points, this was a Netflix documentary that showed that, you know, social media is different. It's not like anything in the past. What I want people to know is that everything they're doing online is being watched, is being tracked. Every single action you take is carefully monitored and recorded. A lot of people think Google's just a search box and Facebook's just a place to see what my friends are doing. What they don't realize is there's entire teams of engineers whose job is to use your psychology against you. Scientists, psychologists, you know, data scientists have figured out ways to hook you and addict you. In that Wall Street Journal story about Instagram, towards the end, Jean Twenge, the social psychologist, talks about how this sounds a lot like RJ Reynolds, a tobacco company, hiding data, you know, about the addictiveness of its product. Can you engage that a little bit? Is there something uniquely addictive and different about social media? Or is this the video game panic, the, you know, the movie panic in the 20s, the novel panic in the early 19th century? I mean, you know, how seriously should we take the idea that, no, this is categorically different because we have scientists manipulating us and giving us endorphin hits. Right. Because they're inflating their own contributions to these projects. So, I find it a little hard to believe. I also think these people, since they're so engaged with the technology, these were the people most likely to be addicted to it, to be so online. So, of course, they're going to see it as a problem. I mean, journalists who spend and policy people who spend all day on Twitter are, you know, invading against Twitter and all the harms it's causing. But most people aren't on Twitter all day. That's just you. So, it's one's own, like, being addicted to the technology is, I think, causing the policymaker in a concerned group of people to be worried this is having the same effect on everyone else when it's not. I think, probably, there are aspects of these technologies that are addictive or can be addictive. But even, like, gambling is addictive, right, for some people. Some people shouldn't gamble. You shouldn't go to the casino, you'll bet your wedding ring, you'll bet the farm, whatever. You'll bet the rent money, as Bill Bennett, who had a gambling problem, talked about it. Right. But most people can go to the casino, spend a little bit of money, have a good night, go home. So, most of the society is not, I don't think, is vulnerable to this kind of thing. So then, you're going to regulate it or legislate it because there's a minority of people who have some kind of struggle with regulating their own internal use and might have some mental health outcome that's bad. Now, it's getting into a very far-off field problem. In your discussion of some of the ways in which people talk about these as addictive or as threats social media is controlling its users, you make reference to a book from the 50s called The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard. Could you summarize that and explain why that is good to know about when you're thinking about today's tech path? Yeah, this is the Mad Men era and Vance Packard had come out with this book about subliminal advertising, subliminal messages in advertising and how you're no longer, you, the consumer, are no longer in charge of what you're buying because you're being manipulated by some subliminal message in commercials and in posters, etc. And that advertising agencies have availed themselves of psychologists, the depth boys, I think they were called. They'd hacked the human brain just like the people in the social dilemma are saying now. But of course, none of that was true. Subliminal messaging is a fiction. Actual people who worked in ads understood that they didn't have that power. This is a very clearly made up moral panic. So because we've gone down this road so many times, we should be extremely cautious. The social dilemma is very concerned about what ads the companies are. And they treat as nefarious this process that is not necessarily nefarious. That these sites make money by selling advertisements because they've learned something about your habits based on what you've clicked on. It's actually better to see more relevant advertisements. Like if I watch TV, I might get an advertisement for a car I'm not going to buy. I'm not in the market for a car. But on Facebook, my ads are targeted to my actual interest. This is not a defect. And the product is free for you. The social media site is free for you because they're monetizing it in this way. And so this was, I mean, it used to be talked about as junk mail, right? Like junk mail is mail you don't want. And advertisers were wasting tons of people's, their money and people's time by flooding mailboxes with stuff that they didn't care about. I mean, your argument is essentially that the sites, whether it's Hulu serving up ads or other programs you might watch or Amazon, they're actually giving you stuff that you might remotely be interested in. Yeah, which is better. This is a, this is a positive hack to advertising that, that the tech kind of phobia people are treating as necessarily bad and evil and sinister and scary, which it just, it isn't necessarily. Let's ease off that. Well, you know, and part of, in, in various parts of tech panic, you talk about, you know, one of these things is the story about how, you know, a kid, you know, a happy-go-lucky boy, you know, has a kitten, he goes, he watches one or two YouTube videos about kittens and then about five videos and he's become part of Al Qaeda or ISIS, right? A proud boy slash Al Qaeda. Yeah. Talk about that trope and why that's actually not happening. Yeah, it's just nonsense. There's been several good studies of this phenomenon that I reference in the book, but it looks like YouTube was aware that there was a radicalization problem at some point in particular and, you know, they made tweaks to how the algorithm recommends your stories, but it appears to be the case the algorithm is much more likely to recommend you, an extreme person, more moderating content than it is to recommend you a moderate person, extreme content that's going to slowly radicalize you in some direction. You're more likely to be guided away from, like, InfoWars style conspiracy, which is a good thing. Yeah. Well, you know, we don't have to make that judgment. Yeah. And I guess InfoWars is off of YouTube anyway, so. And so, you know, that goes into, you know, a larger category of discussion. So, I have been very critical in my writing, at reason and other places, of a lot of individual moderation decisions that social media sites make. I take seriously the claim that social media is aggressively moderating provocative or right-wing or even sometimes left-wing content that falls outside of a kind of normie, centrist, mainstream media-approved view. What they've done with some of the, you know, so-called COVID misinformation has been really despicable in a lot of ways and some other topics. So, I do not deny that there is an issue there and people have been right to call it out. But there's not a good solution that's been put on the table. And also, so much of the bad judgment calls that social media makes seem to have been pushed on them by our own government or mainstream media institutions that are constantly demanding more censorship or silencing. So, isn't the fault with them not with social media? Does that, you know, how do you talk about or how do you think about the Twitter and Facebook both, you know, either outright killing, spiking links to the Hunter Biden story shortly before the election last fall or in the case of Facebook, tamping it down and then eventually kicking Trump off? I guess let's talk about blocking that story at Twitter. Why is that a bad thing if, in fact, and I know we both agree that Twitter, Facebook, et cetera, these are private companies and they do have broad rights to moderate content as they see fit. Is it a problem that they, you know, they said at the New York Post, you know, no, we're not even letting people link to that story? I think it is a problem and they admitted it was a problem. They apologized. They said they got that call wrong. You know, they had their own kind of internal spokespeople, communications people saying, yeah, oh, we're very concerned that this story is misinformation, you know, suggesting that it's kind of, that it's kind of a hoax, not even that its premise is raw, but that like the information supplied in about the laptop is not real. We now kind of all agree that it was actual genuine information so that and they were wrong to do that and they said as much. So I think it was a black eye on those companies. They shouldn't do that. They said they don't do that. They don't want to do that. I don't think claims that, but then you'll hear from the right that, oh yeah, we lost, Trump lost the election because of this. That's just so stupid. I don't think anyone really believes that do they? I mean, there was a stray sand effect going on here anyway that punishing the story made it so that more people were talking about it and sharing it on other social media sites and stories about this story were still available. Like now it's not just this New York Post story, but now there's lots of stories in other places about the action Twitter and Facebook took against this story. So there was actually more attention paid to this than there would have been otherwise. Yeah, because the New York Post Twitter account got suspended for a while, but briefly, one of the biggest stories on Twitter was the New York Post follow up about being banned from Twitter. So I asked for this book. I asked specifically people at Facebook, so what goes into the decision to do this? And it's pretty clear to me they rely on cues from people in positions of authority and in the government and mainstream media institutions. So when you have the New York Times and the Washington Post and all the CNN talking heads shrieking it to that Facebook is evil, Facebook allowing this misinformation to be out there is ruining our elections and these companies should be regulated out of existence or broken up or whatever because they allow this kind of thing. Well, of course the companies are terrified. So they're scared into making some bad decisions, some bad calls. But what are we gonna if we got then you would just have and this is my argument to sort of like right-leaning people, but then if you do punish these companies, if you give them what the government wants, what the Biden administration wants, what the New York Times wants, then you're just left with those institutions that are brutally far more hostile to a conservative worldview than Facebook is. Facebook is in hostile as an institution. It's a very important platform for non-liberal views. Yeah, I was gonna I mean it seems I guess non-controversial to say that the people who work at Facebook really hate Donald Trump and conservative Republicans, but the platform that you know the the kind of coral reef that is Facebook allows these fish to generally swim and do extremely well. Why are conservatives so convinced that you know social media is against them when you know it seems unquestionable that social media was not responsible for but it definitely enabled Donald Trump's rise. I think they're missing the force for the trees. I think they're seeing a couple truly irritating moderation decisions that we are again it's fine to talk about find a complaint about them but are missing the fact that at any given moment the top 10 articles on Facebook are something like from Fox News, Breitbart, Ben Shapiro, and so on. They're killing it on social media. They need social media. It's been good for and on YouTube a lot of very far left progressive content has done really well just outside the kind of confines of what the mainstream media all that they want you to discuss this limited worldview that has existed for a long time and is now fragmented is now their gatekeeping role is over because of social media and a lot of us who don't fall into that narrow category which includes libertarians to a great degree conservatives some interesting people on the left we should be happy that that gatekeeping role is over. It's much better for us. It is kind of interesting that you know this happened with movies about you know at a certain point when movies were being supplanted by television suddenly saw a lot of movies about how evil television was the effects of TV are bad. I'm sure there were radio plays about how bad movies my book has so many examples of the New York Times in particular I pick on them a lot but just invading against the harm of you know everything from the phonograph to the radio later what a car radios you're gonna have radios in your car us just be the end of the world if you can get your source of information from something other than us so this isn't this is an industry fight they their social media is this upstart rival and they are they are they are attacking them for that reason and we should be really clear eyed about that by the same token another story that came out about the kind of larger Facebook penumbra is that Facebook was maintaining separate kind of rules for what were what was typically talked about in newspapers as elites but it turned out that there were hundreds of thousands of people if not more who were whitelisted is some way where they were able to do and say things that would have gotten lesser people bumped what do you think about that or the idea that Facebook presents itself and social media in general presents itself as this fabulously flat new world that you know the old promise of cyberspace in the 90s that anybody from anywhere had the same voice on you know on the internet nobody knows you're a dog nobody knows if you are a Harvard PhD or if you're like somebody living in your mother's basement and it turns out that's not true what do you think about that or how how should we be factoring that into the way we talk about social media I think we have to get used to the idea that moderation is always going to look unfair because they're not moderating they're not approving this content before it goes on there you know this happens so much where there's two videos or two users or two things we can compare and one gets taken down or banned or some kind of moderation decision is made the other thing's still there and we all you know people who care about fairness go why is this thing gone when this thing is is much more obviously violating the policy that's because no one flagged that yet no one complained it will all there's just so much content and they're doing it after someone reports it or an algorithm flags it or something like that so it will always be the case that that it looks uneven or unequal because it will be and there's just too much there's too much content so they're gonna have to the platforms have to have you know these kind of insufficient or irritating rules that will always result in in disparate impacts but there's just no other way to do that unless you want to go to a model and and you know get you mentioned 230 and this would be the model if you got rid of 230 where the platforms have much greater liability yeah let's talk about that in terms of section 230 it's a it's a good bridge into it section 230 it immunizes most social media platforms and websites from user-generated content so if you're Yelp and somebody says you know this restaurant is the worst restaurant of all time in the person you know is you know beats his dogs or something like that Yelp doesn't get in trouble the individual commenter might if you can find him or something like that the other thing it does is it allows websites to moderate content as they see fit what is you know why are people again on the right and the left why are they so pissed off about section 230 where this you know kind of obscure you know code in a 1996 massive telecommunications bill you know why is section 230 such a flashpoint yeah it's funny because again both sides really want to get rid of this law but for different reasons conservatives have this idea that the law a mistaken idea that this law either already or should prevent politically motivated or unfair moderation that there's some that they're supposed to be neutral platforms so if they're moderating content in a way that is not politically neutral they're no longer entitled to section 230 protection that's what many on the right are saying is not the case there is no requirement for neutrality i mean if you want to make an argument that there should be a requirement for neutrality that's a different matter josh holly has advocated that but then you're starting to get into well so there would be a panel of government people to decide if your platform is sufficiently neutral this would be a senate proposal so as the senate would convene such a panel why would the democratic controlled senate a democratic controlled senate panel for deciding whether facebook is sufficiently neutral and that's going to benefit conservatives how there's just there's like i'm we're missing step two in so many of these three different proposals you know on the right in particular there's always the conversation about shadow banning that somehow it's not that twitter or facebook is just you know completely blocking somebody or they've kicked them off the platform it's like they've reduced the reach and the influence is there any actual evidence of that i think they do that sometimes but a lot of times when people say i've been shadow banned and you say what do you mean by that i said well yeah my content's not showing up in people's feeds but it just it no what happens is that this person hasn't been looking at your you know you'll you'll get into a phase where you're seeing more content from a handful of users because you have a high level of engage engagement with their content the platform knows how long you spend looking at people's posts and then it's trying to give you more of that kind of relevant information so it will just so happen because you've clicked around or something some people's content will fall out for a while and then it can come back so a lot of what gets construed as shadow banning is is is not it's not taking place so it's it's just kind of ebbs and flows of you know whether or not your stuff is interesting to people yeah or ebbs and flows and what what's happened to be at the top when i turn on my twitter feed maybe it's something from my colleague christian brischke and it just happened to be the first thing i saw and then i like and favored it and maybe i make a comment so then maybe next time i'm on twitter it's going to show me a christian brischke thing too and so now i'm suddenly seeing less content from uh from eric bay my other colleague just because it's not nefarious twitter's not trying to hide eric from me right that's just what happens what what is the left critique of section 230 the left critique is that social media has allowed too much bad speech so they're making the opposite argument conservatives are saying not enough our speech is being too aggressively silenced and the left is saying they should aggressively silence these people more section 230 uh shields the companies from some of the consequences of having provocative speech so we should get rid of that so that they will purge more bad provocative speech we don't like what so they're correct that doing that like they're tactically yeah they're on absolutely solid ground that it would be worse for conservatives for non liberals if you got rid of section 230 it makes perfect sense why elizabeth warren hates this statute from her world view and from what her political goals it doesn't make sense that donald trump and josh holly support it too what's wrong with uh liberals or progressives saying you know what twitter you know you should you should mirror our vision of the world and you should shut down like you have the right to shut down people why don't you narrow the scope of acceptable discourse well i think that if this is political figures saying this that actually raises a censorship issue i mean the idea that the senate is going to haul and they've done this how many times now they're gonna haul mark zuckerberg and jack dorsey and everyone else you know in front of congress well now at least they just have to you know move from one room in their mansion to another right and hook up a zoom camera but these hearings are always such a farce anyone who has ever watched them comes away should come away you know with with huge doubts that our regulators our elected officials who are you know in their 80s have any idea how this technology works have the smallest the slightest clue to regulate it in an informed way but so no i find that i find that authoritarian and illiberal and wrong that facebook does something wrong or someone is allowed to say something on facebook and they don't do anything about it quickly enough for elizabeth warren or whoever else and they're gonna be summoned to congress to apologize for it it's ridiculous and that actually we should fight against because that's wrong what's face is facebook implicated in the genocide of the rehingo this is one of the stories that comes up again and again you know because when social media as a concept or as a reality emerged in the late aughts it was celebrated you know both facebook and twitter early on you know they helped you know foment the arab spring you know they helped all the color revolutions were carried via twitter you know are they responsible for bad things happening that's a good question they certainly have facilitated some bad things happening including what you're describing i the the kind of the second half of my book when i get away from some of the sort of political speech and addictiveness in those topics you know i'm trying to be a reasonable person i i i think preventing violence is a legitimate function of the government i i i see more more leeway for for direct government action if you're if you're trying to address a problem of like genocide happening or if social media is fueling actual violence then sure but then we have to be careful well is that actually what's going on is many of these questions are very hard so with with the rohingya for instance me and mar this was the legitimate military government of the country that is is using facebook to to inspire attacks on the rohingya so they shouldn't prop they shouldn't allow that but now you're saying like this wasn't a rebel group this wasn't right this was the legitimate state government so i mean there are state actors in our own country who the sheriff's departments who exercise violence in ways a lot of people are not comfortable should facebook start shutting those down there's something about being the official government of the country right that maybe they should be allowed to be on social media but then maybe they're not if they're advocate like it ends up being kind of a not obvious call for what you know if you're going to have a blanket policy well this comes back to you know the fact that there's a number of authoritarian leaders who are still on twitter whereas trump is not right and what you're saying is that it's kind of a complicated call it is a complicated call because you can obviously make a case that no all these people should be these platforms should kick them off you could probably even make an argument that the government could require them to be kicked off because they're they're they're advocating for violence but then it's it starts to get tricky these and also these platforms are used by people to be aware of these threats of violence you know the the more we leave people in the dark in these countries where where things like facebook are important sources of information also you have the issue where terrorist plots threats of violence that are made on social media are organized through social media are much more likely to fail there's a sense in which we want all of our terrorists to be very online to be to be very public about you know posting selfies as they're having these meetings because then they're then they're much easily tracked down by law much more easily tracked down by law enforcement a couple of states have passed laws that would defang or change kind of section 230 or change the ability of platforms to do moderation and so one was passed in florida which became law and is currently under federal review so it's not happening in texas there was a law that passed what was in that and do you think it's going to hold up in is it going to achieve any of its purpose no because there were exemptions too in these laws for except where federal law is applicable well that's that's section 230 so they're gonna they're gonna you know they're going to run up against the fact that even without section 230 the first amendment conveys it considerable protection to private entities to set their own speech related policies at the end of the day that's what this is i know they're big companies i know to some extent they're functioning like they're the public square but they still are private companies that that make a profit from selling ads and and there is a powerful um uh bulwark against the government intervening to tell them what to do on speech related grounds and particularly to compel speech by saying no you have to you have to carry donald trump it's one of the most litigated honestly i mean the first amendment right is one of one of the more ironclad elements of our of our constitution that our supreme court is extremely pro free speech in a in a you can you get to do whatever we can't tell you private entity what to do sort of way now that is definitely true but people like clarence thomas who is generally considered pretty good on the first amendment pretty good on you know on limiting government he has said in various conversations or in rulings or you know in comments on rulings that actually you know maybe it's time to start thinking about social media uh you know facebook twitter at all not as public squares but as common carriers which then would be regulated because if you're a common carrier you don't have the right to say who can use your your um service or what they can do on it kind of like a phone company the atn t back in the day when it was a government-enabled monopoly couldn't say no you can't have a phone rob because i don't like your politics or if you had a phone they couldn't say we're gonna bleep your speech if you start saying something we don't agree right um you know are these services you know this is where people go to talk about shit but are they actual common carriers yeah and i think if clarence thomas was he would rule that way yeah i haven't seen a lot of evidence that that the other that he's speaking for a view supported by a majority of the court people like richard epstein the you know who has a podcast at hoover institution called the libertarian um you know has said as much this that they should be regulated as these platforms are just still very different from the phone company again they're selling ads they're selling a curated experience for their users one they think their users want that they're relying on feedback from their users they're analyzing what you're doing and they're they're selling a product in a in a different way than it's it's unique to them in a way that wasn't true for the phone companies and also you know you still okay even if we decided their public utilities it's like you have some right to be there like there's still there's still rules in like you can get thrown out you can okay a train is a public utility you get thrown off for saying insane things right you there's not some just for talking in the quiet car on amtrak right right that's but that's a sensible rule i good if you're in the quiet car when i'm in there and you're on your phone yes they should throw you off like we support that so every in so many of these cases you'll hear from people who say they're absolutists no we don't want moderation we just you know why are they kicking off people they shouldn't do this but then you start having a conversation about well we all think some level of harassing bullying um made pornographic that kind of well no we don't want any of that yeah that goes okay well then you start getting well what's up when you get it gets thornier when you start looking at if you had you know a panel of people to decide uh there would be disagreements about what they think is well obviously we're going to leave that up but oh no obviously when we said we don't want speech moderator we don't want things taken down or censored well we didn't mean that we want that gone so it's tricker so if that argument tends to am i kind of thinking and i might be wrong about this but that tends to come more from the right from conservatives and maybe some libertarians or people who claim that mantle on the left there's a big you know big big talk about using um antitrust to break these companies up because there is something awful and evil about facebook owning instagram and whatsapp uh you know it's just too big and you know it's squelching innovation it's doing this it's doing that what what is the status of actual attempts to break up say facebook in particular through antitrust legislation the problem that they run into is that there's not a lot of a rationale in existing antitrust law for breaking up these companies because that they're just big and they have too much power and maybe they're unfair to competitors right there's nothing in existing antitrust that bars you from being unfair to a competitor the theory of antitrust is there is harm to the consumer you know the idea that one company comes to dominate that some important market and then because you can't get this service anywhere else they could raise the price of it because they're not competing and they could punish you the consumer well that's obviously not what's happening with social media because we're talking about free services in a lot of cases and also they're not they do compete in a variety of services facebook as a place for political conversations just conversations in general to happen is competing with twitter as a political ad service it's competing with google as a place where you post your pictures it's i guess it's pretty unrivaled but who cares they're not charging you for the service it doesn't matter they're competing with your old photo books right it's it's not a so they're not they're not monopolies for any one thing if your view is you know you're someone on the left and you just don't like the idea of big companies in general which is i mean literally the right the argument right it's coming out of lewis brandeis and people like elizabeth warn and columbia law professor tim wu whose latest book is called the curse of bigness which is a reference to brandeis um what's wrong with saying you know what these companies are just too big like they really are really big and that's not good yeah as long as it's not it's not it doesn't seem to me to be having any obvious massive harm to customers to the consumers of these the users of these companies in fact most of them seem to really like the product i like google google is probably the closest to a traditional monopoly it really isn't has very little competition in its core search engine function right but that's because everybody likes that search engine the best and would use it they're not charging you for it they're they're you know maybe if they if they started charging you for it and then the they had no competition you could make some traditional antitrust argument but right now it's just the one everyone wants um and it's probably something else could come it's not inconceivable so many people have a failure of imagination they think these companies are entrenched and they could never on their own you know come to meet their end you know even though we've seen turnover for for what the top 20 internet companies are just over and over and over again so i don't take that view at all if you want to say we need to do some i'm trying to be reasonable you say we need to do something like okay but why do we need to do something and then they don't have a very good argument for that other than we just don't like bigness well we did it's just too much concentrated philosophically i just don't i don't share that concern i'm not seeing what the harm to us is what do you say about arguments and elizabeth warren is a you know it was a common thread in this uh breaking up a company like amazon you can be an umpire or you can own a team but you can't do both at the same time so let's break up amazon we're doing something to amazon because amazon is such a big company and amazon is using the data it gets from uh its users to sell its own version of goods uh you know this is a big complaint of hers that you can either be a marketplace or you can be the seller you know a fair and neutral marketplace or you can be the seller of your own stuff but the idea of amazon basics you know cheap kind of you know basic you know things commodities or you know you know anything from cords to certain types of clothing they sell on amazon basics line and they have an unfair advantage over the branded products that they're selling why is she wrong to be concerned about i think she must be living on another planet this is the greatest service ever you can easily find things you need that make your life better and pay a very reasonable amount of money for them and have them show up the next day on your doorstep this is this is fantastic this is amazing especially during after the last year and a half we just went through the pandemic right you when we were told don't go don't congregate with other people don't you know avoid excess socialization stay in your home citizen this kind of really thing i found very awful social media has made this so much easier you didn't even have to go to the grocery store anymore it can show up the things you need can show up on your doorstep with like the click of several buttons this is a good thing i don't the again the harm to the consumer is non-existent this is something that is great this is a good service that people love people love it more than the government amazon's approval ratings are higher than congress and that's true actually of most social media companies so rather than congress break up big tech maybe big tech should break up congress that would be the version that the american public would actually support right you have a chapter in the book on cancel culture and harassment let's talk a little bit about that how do you define cancel culture and is is it a real thing or in what way is it a real thing because you know part of the backdrop is that more people have more access to you know ways of expressing their opinions and reading other people's opinions so you know certainly compared to even 20 years ago but certainly something like 50 years ago you know you can just you can say what you want and kind of you know call it to people's attention so how does how do things like cancel culture and harassment come into that kind of backdrop yeah the the rise of social media has made it easier to uh criticize people and hold people accountable in a lot of ways that are good it has also had the effect of you can criticize and hold people accountable to a degree you probably don't need to and that they don't deserve it people who are not public figures you know so much of our speech takes place in text or or video or is recorded or preserved in some way including speech from when you're a young person i i feel lucky to have a you know finished high school before the era of smartphones where everything i young people say and do is saved forever and is out there and is lurking to to ruin your life at a bad moment maybe 10 or 20 years later it really is horrible uh what what can happen to people when it turns out you said something sexist or racist or homophobic when you were 13 something that everyone on the planet has done if we're holding people to this level of accountability no one would ever be able to get a new job or get admitted to college ever again but social media has allowed this to happen and i i do i think it is a serious problem i write a lot about it how we're becoming very unfair particularly to young people to non-public people and i do social media is responsible for that to some degree now there's there's not a very satisfying way to like put this genie back in the bottle i'm i advocate for different norms of just how we conduct ourselves i have different norms of journalism would be the first thing can you uh kind of lay those out like what's how you know how should we treat um somebody you know the uh teen vogue a you know very left-leaning condenast web only publication after going through a couple things a named a new editor who was a young african-american woman um and then it turned out she got cancelled very quickly because it turned out when she was in high school she had made a bunch of anti-gay jokes or you know jokes at the expense of gay people as well as asian so she got canned um you know how what's the different norm that is i mean is that good and fair or is that no it's stupid and bad and wrong and they should not do that she apologized and it was a long time ago and that ought to be good enough it ought to be good enough in all those those circumstances um no one can survive that level of scrutiny actually uh one of the leading people who is trying to get her in trouble well then it turned out that of course that person had also tweeted and then when you get that person in trouble the person that person who got that person in trouble will also have said something this is the way of the world that yeah no and we just need to disengage from this journalists need to practice different norms i've become more cognizant of the amount of um harassment and cruelty you can inflict on someone by naming them in a story so let's be more thoughtful about whether this really matters if you if you're gonna write a profile of someone you know you're a local hometown hero i mean that story had that uh yeah so the football uh guy who had the then momy beer money right and then they do a profile of him and the local reporter looks up his old tweets why don't do that that's a new norm of journalism but that had a that had a good ending because the journalists got fired after they found his tweets because they looked at his tweets yeah we need to stop that no more of that okay so this is like the greek play um uh in the orah style where it's like you just have to at a certain point you have to say okay we're no longer just kind of having a cycle of vengeance we're stopping yeah the killing and we're just gonna have something approaching justice yeah i think social media sites should also you know be very cognizant of letting people i mean they have policies against harassment doxing uh revenge porn uh this is you know these are serious subjects in which you might you could probably make a case for some kind of law or they're narrowly tailored fixed to section 230 that requires them actually to take down some of this content you know in the trade-off between you know privacy and free speech are both things we want to protect and then sometimes they do butt heads a little bit and and i am actually a libertarian i don't know maybe more inclined than others i don't know to actually even though i'm a free speech absolutist there are some cases where i will i will default in favor of privacy so to the extent that there's some need for the government to do something on those fronts i i can see a way for for that i'm interested for instance with um you know there's some statues there's some local laws against revenge porn i think you could treat it you know this is publishing people's intimate images without their permission you could treat it like copyright infringement you know you get a takedown request a site gets a takedown request if you're infringing copyright and then you get a period of time to take it down so it's not like you're instantly liable the second you know you have no control over it and if this just happens and then you're in trouble something like that seems reasonable to me there are a couple cases where technology the new technology has will force us to consider things of this nature and i i think that's reasonable talk a little bit about how you came to be a libertarian how i came to be yeah what's your origin story you know radioactive spider miltner rose freedman bit you on the arm yeah that's man that wouldn't that be the story no i i think i was i came from a republican household but my parents were basically libertarians you know very about uh low taxes low regulation but you know leave everybody alone and and seeing that that that was that made that was consistent i think it's the consistency that brought me and a lot of people i know to libertarianism that you have one party or at the time do you know when i was growing up nineties aughts you have one party saying yeah the government's not should should be less involved in your finances but it should be more involved in the bedroom and overseas and in all these other ways and then the other party saying the opposite thing well no we really want government to leave you alone in your own decisions and not be harassed by the police and and you know we're not going to try to destroy other countries but but yes we want more of your money and to tell you how to spend it and just the way you you you solve those those inconsistencies is to become a libertarian so i did yeah i mean do you is your pension for kind of consistency do you think that's just like temperamental or does you know or did you pick that up somewhere i used to think everyone has this inner drive to seek this consistency and this was the best argument libertarianism had going for it i actually think now uh people are not as motivated by consistency as i used to think because i used to think this was always a slam dark argument when i'm arguing for libertarianism well i said well you think this what about this i mean if you've seen that meme you know the face just saying yes yeah it's right it's people are are are happy to kind of or at least some of the people engaged in uh ideas on the right and the left i think are just like perfectly happy to revel in their own hypocrisies on these things and say no we're not doing your thing where no one is in control of anyone's lives or maybe that sounds good in theory but our enemies are going to win that way and they're going to be in control so we need to be in control like they're you know they've got the ring and they're saying it's a this is a gift let gondor use it that's everyone in this conversation these days and that's and that's a problem for libertics we're just saying this has gone wrong so many times of course it's going to be no better with you in charge why do you have any you know thought to to this will this will work out this time but are you optimistic for libertarian ideas uh you know that on some levels you know on many profound levels it seems like you know just um not a very libertarian time government spending is massive government debt is massive control of our you know whether we're wearing masks or what documents we have to show in order to go to a bar or you know a restaurant on the other hand you know foreign policy seems to be in a place that is more non-interventionist which is a kind of traditional libertarian thing you know gay marriage or marriage equality drug legalization positive views towards immigration seem to be on the upswing and we have a lot of these technologies that are allowing us to live how we want on our own terms you know what do you think we're sum up the the current moment the i think we should be clear-eyed about the pandemic and pandemic restrictions that this has been a i agree with joe jorgensen our libertarian party candidate who said this is you know like a just unbelievable vast expansion of government policy that i wouldn't have even necessarily guessed that so many americans would go along with it i mean now you have and and and our political elites are are they're reveling in their hypocrisy they how many mayors get to be caught you know at the third jazz club of the night unmasked while you the citizen you the citizen should be and you should you know wrap a mask two layers of mask around your child your screaming child before you get them into the school i i think it is it is horrible the amount of restrictions we have said it is okay the amount of arbitrary capricious the government can tell you what to do at all times and it's for your own good and you can't question it uh so that's the bad and it is very very bad don't get me wrong but it is better actually that we that this is happening at a time where we do have social media the way that there is so many ways to complain about this and to discuss this the media is the biggest cheerleader the mainstream media is the biggest cheerleader of permanent pandemic restrictions on our lives that has that would have ever existed i can you imagine if this is happening and we have no way to discuss to express opposition to have conversations with people who are skeptical of this except for uh cnn your local newspaper the new york times the you know the the people who are just going to reflect the preferences of the bided administration or of lawmakers or in general that would be a lot worse so social media is is is we should leave it as this free uninhibited freewheeling space where the conversation is sometimes messy sometimes people say things that are wrong or that are scarier that we don't agree with but it is still so much better to have this open-ended conversation than to to go back to an era where a small number of people with a very limited very wrong worldview had complete control of the conversation how worried should we be that it's sometimes social media companies i mean this started in i guess 2018 but facebook twitter apple uh at various points tim cook said you know what the tech industry is out of control and we welcome regulation facebook is running ads saying you know what you know internet regulations haven't really changed since 1996 when the communication seats in the act passed you know obviously they need to be updated and they're angling for that how how implicated in whatever is happening are the companies themselves yeah facebook is all all on board with making these changes these changes that will be shepherded shepherded into law by by the revolving door of people who go from media to facebook to to the white house and and so on and so forth um actually twitter doesn't want to change a lot of these laws because they rightly view themselves as a smaller competitor and if you if you made policies that social media sites have to do more moderation well facebook can handle that just the way wal-mart doesn't mind if you raise minimum wage because you put all their competitors out of business first it's a very similar dynamic it's it's actually a very self-apparent one two libertarians or free market conservative type people i also think to some extent maybe facebook or the other social media sites are just saying they want to go along with regulation but then what does that actually look like you know they want to we're open to it we're open to it the right regulation one we had an input on and made sure was not the bad one that we didn't want so there's a certain amount of cynicism i take with um you know the subtitle of tech panic is why we shouldn't fear facebook which we've talked about and we shouldn't fear the future how do we get past a kind of panic stage with social media or with big tech right now what you know what what are the ways that we can kind of moderate um you know people's visceral reactions people need to train themselves to just like not believe what the media is saying about any of these things i really the the mainstream media is the villain of this book and is the villain of so much that's going on that the the narrative that they advance that everything new is scary and dangerous because it competes with them yeah i they clubhouse the uh this popular audio kind of group social media app that that was really briefly popular during the pandemic because it was way to chat with people you know the new york times has this just absurd coverage of this thing like well what if it's not going to be recorded so what if people are saying they can say whatever they want they'll say whatever they want is not going to be a fact check end of the world like that kind of that is moral panic and it has been the bread and butter of newspapers of local television of uh you know what are your what are your neighbors doing it's be afraid for your children that kind of thing that's why i call it a panic and and and you know we've and all of the so many of those in the past have turned out to be nothing to them from from video games to to the radio to the you know to the new york times said i i found the book the new york times said um alexander grand bale should be hung from the neck until dead because well now people can be calling each other all the time this would be the end of the world as we know it we gotta really train ourselves to not fall for that kind of thing that's a good point to leave it on robbie suave reason thanks for talking to reason the newest book is tech panic why we shouldn't fear facebook and the future thank you