 Ευχαριστούμε για έναν άλλο πρόεδρο της Ευρώπης Ευρώπης Σύρρης. Πολλοί άνθρωποι who agree that freedom of speech is under attack tend to disagree a lot about what should be the status with social media, and this discussion became even more prevalent when Twitter, for example, banned Donald Trump. Πολλοί άνθρωποι άνθρωποι πραγματοποιούν ότι πραγματικά είναι η πρόεδρο της Ευρώπης Ευρώπης but it has become so big that it is the equivalent of a public square therefore it cannot follow just the rule that says its private property we can do whatever we want. Οπότε boat loί, we are going to examine this discussion in more depth, so our guests today is Brendon O'Neill. Βραίρεν έχει been for more than a decade the editor on Spike, but since yesterday or very recently, he's now the chief political writer on Spike online. So Spike has been one of the most brave and uncompromising defenders of a public sphere where we should be free to say our thoughts and to speak our mind, therefore we're very happy to have him. Βραίρεν's on the other side, of course, we've got Yaron Brooke, Yaron is the host of the Yaron Brookshow and the chairman of the board of the Iron Run Institute. So the rules, the usual ones, two introductions, this time Yaron is going to go first, then we're going to let the panel discuss a bit, and then we're going to take your questions via Super Chat. Βραίρεν, any further delay? And of course, let me say a big thank you to the Iron Run Institute for supporting and sponsoring this series. And without any further delay, Yaron, the floor is yours. Βραίρεν, thank you for doing this, really appreciate it. Βραίρεν, I have debated, discussed these kind of issues in the past and it's always a pleasure. Βραίρεν, let me start by saying what I think is obvious, I think, where we will all agree, and that is that the social media platforms today are, you know, not fulfilling what they claim they stand for, that they are restricting and have a restricted speech on their platforms, that they do not follow any kind of objective standard in terms of the criteria by which some speech is allowed and other is not. Βραίρεν, they seem to be arbitrary in the way they enforce the standards that they claim. Βραίρεν, in terms of service, are purposefully ambiguous and provide very little guidance to public intellectuals like myself and Brandon and many other people in terms of what we think we are getting trouble on and what we won't get in trouble on. Βραίρεν, there's no objective standard for these things, there's no clear criteria. And in that sense, I think they are doing a disservice to the customers, they're doing a disservice to themselves, and they're doing a disservice Βραίρεν, they're doing a disservice to debate, to debate in the world around us. So, I'm not here to defend social media and the practices indeed I think that their practices have been and seem to be abysmal, and there seems to be no sense in which there seems to be no Βραίρεν, there are no objective measures that is we've been complaining about this, they've been at the forefront of the debate for now, several years, and there is no indication that they are learning anything from this debate I still don't see objective standards Βραίρεν, while none of my videos have been taken off platform, certainly some of them have had the COVID warnings which I think are ridiculous and pathetic. Others have had demonetized, although I can't understand why some are demonetized and others are not. Βραίρεν, it fits into no formula that I can make any sense of. Generally, it seems that there are certain issues they don't want me to discuss, sex being one of them, maybe they're right, maybe I shouldn't be discussing sex, and abortion being the other, even though I tend to have their position on abortion, that is, I tend to support the right to choose which is the people at the platforms position typically. Βραίρεν, by what standard they make these decisions and that is my main criticism. Publish a standard, publish an objective standard by which you're going to make these decisions and let us then decide whether we want to use your platform or not. Βραίρεν, the position today of the ambiguity is I think from a business perspective untenable. However, at the same time, these are indeed public. Βραίρεν, these are indeed private businesses. This is not a public square. A public square is by definition, not private. One of the characteristics of anything private is that the owner of that property has the right to decide how it's going to be used, how it's going to use includes what is being said on that particular private property. Βραίρεν, indeed, I think free speech is a right that is dependent on property rights. Free speech only applies to my ability to say whatever I want to say on my property, not on yours. Βραίρεν, indeed, on your property you get to determine the rules of what I can or cannot say. Just as I and my property get to determine the rules of what you can say or not say. Βραίρεν, indeed, it is in my house I get to decide who comes in if I decide not to invite fascists or communists. That is within my right. If I decide to kick somebody out of my house, because of what they say has offended me, it is completely within my right. Βραίρεν, indeed, the same is true of a owner of a broadcasting station the same is true of an owner of a theater they get to decide what plays to put on and what plays not to put on what movies to show what movies not to show. Βραίρεν, indeed, so at the end of the day, free speech is restricted and limited to the space in which you have control. You can say whatever you want to say within that space. Βραίρεν, again, you do not have an indeed public space is typically associated with space that is not owned specifically by anybody. Βραίρεν, the consequence nobody has the right to strict speech on that space, but the internet. Generally, and certainly services like Twitter and Facebook platforms like Facebook and Twitter are not public spaces they are owned they are owned by specific individuals, they are owned by specific companies that have every right to determine a policy with Βραίρεν, but to what is acceptable and what is not acceptable on their platform and to kick off people who they deem as unacceptable in the platform. So, while they have that right, I think it's being, I think they're doing it poorly. Βραίρεν, but that is not. There is no job here in that sense for government, a government has no place to come in and force Twitter to carry what the government deems is appropriate because even the government would decide I think on Twitter and Facebook. Βραίρεν, but what is it is not appropriate to have on. I think there's few question. Βραίρεν, the fact that the government would restrict things like pornography or certain types of hates what's considered hate speech, I don't know what that term actually refers to certain types of speech would be restricted, but the government has no place here once you let the government come in and decide what Βραίρεν is acceptable or unacceptable in a private platform. You are violating the speech rights of the platform you're violating their right to decide what speech is acceptable and not acceptable on their platform. Βραίρεν, but once you're then opening out to government interference in private platforms and private speech, you're opening it up to the ability of the government to then decide what is acceptable what is not acceptable to regulate speech, even in private places and hopefully hopefully we don't get to that point. Βραίρεν, so to summarize, while I have a real distaste to what Twitter and Facebook are doing. Βραίρεν, my understanding with it is through voluntary means of this associating with them, or just complaining about it, or making our voices heard in terms of a dislike for what they do. Αν υπάρχει πραγματική διεθνότητα, ο κυβέρνητος θα το δημιουργήσει. Νομίζω ότι ο κυβέρνητος να το δημιουργήσει σε αυτές τις σκέψεις... είναι πολύ πιο σύγχρονο από όλα αυτά που το Twitter και Facebook... θα το δημιουργήσει σήμερα. Ευχαριστούμε. Ευχαριστούμε, Ρον. Ρέναν. Ευχαριστούμε. Ευχαριστούμε, Νίκος. One of my favourite censorship stories is from the UK in 2008. In 2008, the blasphemy law in England and Wales was finally abolished. This was a law under which people had been hung, drawn and quartered and had their tongues ripped out and had their cheeks branded and all sorts of other horrors visited upon them over the past two centuries for blaspheming against God or doubting the truth of the Bible or saying something scurrilous about Jesus Christ. Right up till the 1970s, this blasphemy law was used. In the 1970s, it was used against a publication called Gay News which published a supposedly blasphemous poem about Christ on the Cross engaging in homosexual activity. And that was the last time in which it was used. It was a successful prosecution. People were fined and there were huge consequences. So when the blasphemy law was abolished in England and Wales in 2008 lots of rationalists and secularists and free speech warriors were celebrating including me, the very next week after it was abolished an advert was banned in the United Kingdom for being offensive to Christians. And this was an advert for hair products, shampoo and hair curlers and all sorts of other things. And it was an advert featuring sexy models dressed up as nuns and they were praying and praying to these hair products as if they were holy artifacts. 23 people complained to the Advertising Standards Authority and the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the advert was indeed offensive to religious sensibility and instructed the private company that made it not to display it ever again and they didn't. Now the reason I tell this story is not because I think you're on or anyone else is here to defend a regulatory body like the Advertising Standards Agency I know that they would never do that but I'm raising it to point to what I considered to be one of the most serious problems of the early 21st century which is the outsourcing of censorship the outsourcing of censorship from the state to other bodies whether they are regulatory bodies, workplaces or in the instance that we're talking about tonight private companies and I think the thing that concerns me when I speak to Libertarian friends of mine who I agree with on many many issues including pretty much everything that's just been said about the problem of Twitter and Facebook and their lack of an objective standard their lack of clear rules and clear regulations and how that can lead you down a rabbit hole of Kafkaesque censorship I agree with all of that but a serious point of disagreement is how Libertarians contend with the fact that censorship to a large extent has been outsourced by the state to other organizations and is there a danger that Libertarians in the instance that we're talking about tonight in defending property rights are they unwittingly defending this outsourced censorship and essentially defending old forms of censorship carried out by new organizations so the issue of outsourced censorship has interested me for quite a while and the reason it started to interest me was in discussions with usually with left-wing activists and people who would like to know platform their enemies and so on I did many debates on campuses over the past few years about this issue of freedom of speech and I'd always get the same response from people it's not censorship unless the state does it and that's what the left always said so they would say if a student union chooses not to platform someone that isn't censorship it's not the government preventing you from speaking it's just a fairly small association of students deciding that they don't want to hear your views more recently I've heard the same kind of left-wing activists argue that being thrown off Twitter and Facebook is not an incursion on your free speech rights because it's not the government you can go somewhere else you can go to Parla they used to say before the big wigs of the internet essentially destroyed Parla temporarily which I think really undermines the argument I hear from lots of people which is that well set up your own platform because people did set up their own platform and it was essentially switched off so I hear that argument all the time and it got me interested in the question of who is primarily responsible for censorship these days and it isn't actually the state now that's not to say that state censorship isn't still a problem of course it is a problem there have been numerous cases in Europe across Europe over the past few years alone where people have been arrested and fined and threatened with imprisonment and in some cases even imprisoned for things they said for offensive rap songs for making scurrilous comments about the Prophet Muhammad all sorts of state punishments have been handed down to people for supposedly offensive things for what is referred to as hate speech which to my mind just sounds like thought crime like whenever I hear the term hate speech it makes me think of the term thought crime so state censorship is still a problem we have a huge amount of laws on the statute books in the UK in England and Wales which do control what we can say so for example if you say something gratuitously offensive online you could be visited by the police you might be told to take it down you could even be imprisoned which happened to a young man a few years ago who was imprisoned for 56 days for making racist comments on twitter which we all agree were repulsive but I also think that is not a matter for the state to punish that even that kind of speech so state censorship is a problem but bit by bit over time it seems pretty clear to me that censorship is being slowly given away by the state or entrusted rather to other organisations student unions are a pretty good example of this censorship on campuses now is far less carried out by university management or by state funded university authorities and tends to be the realm of student associations informal student groups gatherings of protesters and so on and it has a very real impact on what can be talked about on campus and who can visit and what kinds of debates students can engage in another example is in relation to advertising so for example the advertising standards authority a regulatory body is now primarily responsible for censorship of advertising the left says that advertising is not a free speech issue because it's business and we must control business I disagree I think it's in the realm of speech it's in the realm of ideas it's in the realm of images and brands and therefore it should fall under the title of freedom of speech and so you have this pseudo-independent body advertising standards authority which has censored a huge number of adverts over the past few years often on the basis of a handful of complaints adverts for Ryanair adverts for the hair products that I mentioned earlier adverts for alcohol one of which I think dared to suggest that alcohol is an enjoyable pastime you're not allowed to say that anymore and most recently it banned an advert for in which fathers were depicted as hapless and it is now considered sexist to depict fathers as hapless and to depict mothers as bearing sole responsibility for children so it's really digging down into essentially thought policing and controlling what businesses can say about gender and sex and of course about their own products but that's kind of control that the government might once have asserted has largely been outsourced to a pseudo-independent body and then we get to the question of social media and you see I was really struck by what Yaron was just saying in relation to if we invite the government to instruct social media companies that they must host things they don't want to host he said that that will give rise to the government itself saying what can and cannot be online but we really agree with that so I don't think there is an easy solution to the problem that we're talking about but the flip side to that is that the government already puts pressure on social media to host certain kinds of ideas and to refuse to host others and we know that social media the social media giants have been summoned for meetings with British members of parliament for example there are close relationships between German and the social media bosses in that country and in other European countries too there have been close connections between state actors and these supposedly independent companies where the state actors will often put pressure on these companies to institute new forms of censorship particularly that there was a real explosion of that after the influx of migrants a few years ago when some government officials in Europe became concerned about things that were being said online and they put huge pressure on social media companies to control these debates which they did so to me that was a very clear case of outsourcing censorship now we could have a discussion about what's worse is it worse if the government does it directly given that the government can threaten us with life changing punishments for example imprisonment or fines and other forms of punishments or is it better if it's done by these social media companies who are at least our private companies and they can't really destroy your life they can just throw you off the internet I think that's a bit of a that is a bit of a distraction and the fundamental fact we have to contend with is that censorship has quite knowingly quite consciously been outsourced from the state to other bodies and I think that's what's happening here and it's not that we live under states that have suddenly stopped caring about blasphemous speech or climate change denial or what is referred to as hate speech or transphobia or islamophobia all these other terms that are used in many instances really to control genuine public discussion the expression of genuine moral beliefs all those things are now controlled under these slippery terms to do with phobia and isms and so on it's not that the government has lost interest in controlling what people think on those issues and potentially punishing people if they think the wrong thing it's just that it can feel pretty relaxed about the fact that we have a society in which that's now done by others and the people it is done most clearly by is social media that is where most people, most ordinary people probably the only place they will encounter censorship in the 21st century is on Facebook is on Twitter is on these kinds of platforms in most other areas of life we're pretty free to say what we want although the workplace is becoming a bit more stringent with the intervention of groups like Stonewall now going in and telling people what they should think about gender and so on but it's online on those platforms that ordinary people face censorship in a way that people in the past would have faced state censorship and it's not an entirely independent form of censorship that is being dreamt up by social media oligarchs in California it is influenced by the government arena in which they are working it is shaped by the demands of local governments most clearly in more tyrannical regimes where social media companies will very often play along with the state and ban certain forms of speech but also in the West too so the question I think for libertarians is how do they make the case for freedom of speech σύμφωμα για τη διάφορα their freedom of speech is no in which censorship is no longer just the handy work of the state. Αυτό είναι κάτι που θα πρέπει να αναργαθεί, because that's going to be one of the defining features of our age. Τα very simple solution to finish with. Και ότι ξαναστυτόζω, είναι σημανορή επίσης να κάνει τη διάφορή. Θα σημανωστήξε ότι να αρχαίνονται όσονοι μονοπί Example solution is that to begin with these businesses θα πρέπει να γίνουν σε their law of the country, in which they are operating. και εάν ο προκάω σε οικονομικής πρότεχα, δεν θα θα χρειάζει την κατάσταση αν'veν, επειδή εκείνης είναι η επικοινή. Δεν θαρέπει να χρειάζει την κατάσταση ο Κόμπρος. Δεν θαποθερεύουν την κατάσταση,... Πειδή αυτό δεν θα δημιουργεί εμ fluorescentbird. Σε το κυνύχο της Ελληνικής Δεν θα δεν θα καταλούν πολλή φορά που ακιέσει αν κάποιος με τ centigrade είναι η είδας, διότι, ότι δεν είναι προς του Θεού, δεν μπορούν να καταλούν το τεχνικό μέρος, Οπότε υποσπαθούν να μπορεί να κάνουν ότι πρέπει να ανοώσουν την ανοίγηση της ανοίγης της χώρας, που είναι πολύ μυγική, αλλά αυτοί θα είναι ένα ανοίγηση για τους να κάνουν αυτό. Και το ίδιο στη Ευρώπη, πρέπει να ανοώσουν την ανοίγηση της ανοίγης, as defined by the local government rather than by their own prejudices or the pressures they feel from other officials telling them to sense them more and more. Αυτό είναι το ανοίγη, είναι ένα very low starting point, γιατί από εκεί we have to get to the question of how we then disentangle government from the issues of speech from matters of thought, from the question of what we are and are not allowed to say, and how we then go from there to ensuring that private platforms adhere to the same standards of freedom. Thank you Brennan. So now I'll let you two discuss any issues that there are of disagreement, and later we're going to go to questions from the audience we already have, και τώρα θα τελειώσουμε ένα δύσκολο πρόκλημα για έναν από εσύ. Γιάνν. Νομίζω να συμβαίνω πίσω. Ανθρώπω πίσω. Τώρα θα απαρακεί. Γιάνν. Αθρώπω πίσω. Λάμπω πίσω. Λάμπω πίσω. Λάμπω πίσω. Εγώ πιώ άνθρωπος στην ταξιδέία, Η Αχθ MMA Gesichtio is almost recordings from EU, 14 years ago. Sailor Moon was at the top. This is a real pro, and to the extent that it is happening it is obvious to me it is happening in Europe but Europe is more complicated because of these hate speech laws and because there is no real protection of freedom of speech Αυτό είναι ο αυτοκλωσμός, η αυτοκλωσμή είναι η φορσία, σε έναν στήριο κομμάτι, μόνο η κυμπανότητα. Αν η κυμπανότητα είναι πραγματικά... στον μεταγράφος, να μην δημιουργήσει, δεν να δημιουργήσει αυτό το μήν, και αν δημιουργήσει, όταν πιστεύουν ότι θα κάνουν με το Facebook, θα μην πιστεύουν, θα μην χρησιμοποιήσουμε ανθρώπιες λόγες, θα δημιουργήσουμε κάποιες άλλες λόγες, να μεταγράφουν μετά το μεταγράφος, γιατί θα γίνουν κυμπανότητα, αυτό είναι ένα πρόβλημα. Και then the question is what can be done about that? I do not think what needs to be done about that is to violate the rights of the platforms in terms of their free speech and their property. I think in those cases at least the United States, the United States. I think government needs to be sued. That is, this is a case where we should take this to the Supreme Court and challenge the government's right to have an impact on these social media platforms and to use the social media platform as, in a sense, government agencies that are then censoring. So let's use the First Amendment, let's test the First Amendment. So for example, Donald Trump is suing Twitter for the platforming him. But one of his arguments, maybe the most powerful argument that he has is that they did this under the influence of the incoming administration, the Biden administration, under political duress. Who he should be suing if that is the case? Is the Biden administration, I think that would be much more interesting, much more legally efficacious. And if he can prove influence from the Biden administration on Twitter to deplatform him, that is something that I think the Supreme Court should rule on. And I think it should rule against the government. And there should be some kind of form of recompense from the government partially, a separation of the state from these entities. Now generally, I think that the solution to all these problems is a free market solution is to separate government from them. That is, the more we separate government from economics, the more we separate government from the marketplace, the more we separate government from ideas, the more free speech will flourish. We can talk about universities which are a difficult case given that most of our public institutions, at least in the US, then therefore the First Amendment should apply. And universities are a real problem because they're public institutions. On the other hand, we don't force professors to actually present all sides of a case. We allow them to present what they want to present. We don't force the all student organizations to invite everybody. Everybody, they get to choose who to invite. So it's a tricky situation. I think anytime an institution, and this is the danger of inviting government to intervene, anytime an institution is funded partially owned by the government, we create real challenges and real problems, problems that can be avoided through privatization. So I want to respect private property. I want to get the state out of the business of censoring to the extent that they are, to the extent that there is this outsourcing of censorship. It needs to be stopped in the US way of mechanisms to do that through the court system. Europe, I think you need to establish your First Amendment. When forcing platforms to engage in speech that they do not want to engage in, is I think at the end of the day, again violating not only the property rights, but also their free speech rights. Couple of points. I think there are two things going on with social media at the moment, and it's going to sound contradictory, but they're both problematic. So the first thing is that too many social media companies are willing to do the bidding of government in terms of censoring people or putting a force field around certain issues and preventing open discussion about them. So, for example, the pressure that was unquestionably exerted by officials in relation to the lab leak theory COVID-19, then as soon as Joe Biden said, well, maybe we should investigate this, the Facebook censorship of that issue was lifted immediately. I mean, a very close relationship between the most powerful man in the world, the head of the American Empire and these private companies. So that's a good example of where they do the bidding of government. It's even clearer in Europe and in other less free regimes where the government says you can't allow this speech and you have to stop it. So they do the bidding of government in that sense. So that's the outsourcing of censorship. But then in other areas, they go beyond what the government requires in terms of the censorship of certain ideas, and they censor more ideas. So on the one hand, they do what the government tells them to do. On the other hand, they defy national governments, even though they're working within national borders, by censoring things that it's not actually illegal to say in those countries. And the trans issue is a very good example of that. Most social media platforms have a rule where they will ban you if you misgender someone. Megan Murphy, the Canadian feminist was infamously banned for life from Twitter for referring to a very questionable person as a he and he is a he. So that's where they go beyond what the government demands and do more. And the reason I'm raising these two things is because firstly, what it demonstrates is that these private companies, it's the worst of both worlds in many ways. So on the one hand, it's that you have them doing what the state instructs them to do and punishing people in keeping with the state's own view of what's acceptable to think and what's acceptable to say. On the other hand, you have them creating their own little fiefdoms of censorship, which are given rise to new forms of thought control and new forms of speech control. So they have a tangible, measurable impact on what people feel they can say in a society. And I know that the Libertarian response is, well, you can get off Facebook and Twitter and you can go and say it on a street corner, although in the UK that's becoming less and less the case as well. Or you can say it in your house or you can say it to your friends in the pub. That's all true. But I think that underestimates the chilling effect that new cultures of censorship can have, especially on newer generations who come to think via their engagement with the world, which is almost entirely done through social media. They come to think, well, these are the parameters of acceptable thought. And so it has a tangible impact on the freedom of society. And I think that's something really worth bearing in mind and asking ourselves what can be done about that in a real way. A couple of other quick points. Just on the Donald Trump thing, I mean, I think the banning of Trump sums up the seriousness of this, because that is utterly unprecedented in American history that the elected president, he was still the elected sitting president at the time, could be removed from such an important part of public political engagement. And for many people, it's the prime way in which they engage with ideas, with news, with their elected officials. For many, many people, they do that via social media networks. It was utterly unprecedented that someone elected by 64 million people would suddenly be deprived of the oxygen of publicity on social media. The government, the state in America can't do that. It's just absolutely forbidden. And yet these social media companies can. And that was just such an extraordinary demonstration of the bizarre, surreal, ridiculous power that they have over political speech and over democratic rights. Because the democratic rights of people who voted for Trump were, in my view, impacted upon by these people who denied them a form of connection with the person that they elected. So that was a serious infringement, I think, by these companies into the public sphere and into public life. And then just on the question of what is censorship, I mean, we could that could be a seven hour discussion in itself. But it is just worth going back to, you know, those very important thinkers over the years and you're on and everyone else watching will be very, very familiar. I don't want you to, I don't want to go over things you already know. But if you look at John Stuart Mill, for example, on liberty, on liberty is primarily about conformism more than anything else and the tyranny of conformism and the pressure, the social pressure people feel to have the right thoughts. And he argues, essentially, that that can be a more tyrannical form of control than old fashioned legal restrictions. Because then at least, you know what you're up against with social pressure, it's a bit more amorphous and strange and unnamable at times, but people feel it in a very real way. So I guess you could say it's not actually censorship if you just have 7000 people screaming at you on Twitter and asking for you to be sacked. I mean, strictly speaking, you could say that's not censorship in the old fashioned sense of the word, but it unquestionably has a direct impact on the level of freedom in a society and people's ability to say and think certain things. So it's that the question of what, how do we respond to informal non state censure or punishment or pressure to conform? How do we deal with that? Because I think that's thrown into sharp relief by this issue. The final point I would make just to throw this out to the audience at some point, perhaps. What is more important? Property rights or freedom of speech rights? And I know that's a stark question, but I think it might well come down to that soon. It might well come down to the question of what is more beneficial for society. And Yaron said earlier that freedom of speech is essentially built on property rights. You have the freedom to express yourself in certain environments and perhaps not in others. I would, I disagree with that. And I think actually freedom of speech rights are the foundational stone of society more broadly. And every other freedom either springs from those or sometimes conflicts with them and therefore has to be worked out. And I think this is a good example of where property rights are in conflict with freedom of speech rights. And I really do think we have to, there's going to come a point very soon when we will have to choose to elevate one above the other. So Yaron, you can address this on your final points. Let's go to the audience because many people have commented. So thank you Phil. Phil says that the defense of rights have to be based on objectivity and not on a whim. And thank you Jeff. Thank you Jonathan. Jonathan says thank you Yaron for doing this and everybody says you should read his book, Price is Primary. I'm reading it at the moment. Jonathan, thank you Mario Lin. Thank you Hugh. So Hugh has a question. My question to both parties. If a transnational mega corporation outright buys the public square, does the public square still remain a quote public square? I think the public square should remain with capital letters public. So in a way could we say that the same has happened with let's say three or four big companies, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, they've quote bought the whole public sphere. So Yaron and then Brendan. Sure. No, I mean if you buy the public square it's no longer public by definition. You've bought it. It's private. And I would like to see public squares be privatized. I think the more, the less we have government involvement in these things the better. What was the other part of his question? That was basically that we need though a public sphere because that's where we exchange ideas. That's where we fight for the things that we consider rights and history has been made basically by. We don't actually. I mean we exchange ideas all over the place and you know historically you know how many people actually go into the public square to exchange ideas. We've exchanged ideas over the pages of the New York Times, but the New York Times has had a choice which outfits to publish and which outfits not to publish. I mean they've turned me down on several occasions. I demand my free speech rights and that the New York Times publish me. We've exchanged ideas on all kinds of private formats and all kinds of different ways while I think that the behavior of the social media platforms is not healthy. It is not healthy. I also question whose right it is to determine what a healthy exchange of ideas looks like. I certainly don't think the government is in a position to do so. So it's not true that we go into the public square to debate ideas that's never been the case. You know you still need a publisher to publish a book. Now today you don't. Maybe one of the advantages of living in a world in which we live today is that you can self-publish, but you used to have to have a publisher to publish your book. Many many people were turned down by publishers for a variety of different reasons including that the publisher didn't like the politics of a particular book. So it's always been if you will through the medium of private enterprise that we have exchanged ideas. Now I do sympathize with John Stuart Mill's argument and that Brendan argued about conformity. That to me is what's scary in the world in which we live. The fact that we live in a society that wants to conform, that seems to conform by the way on both sides. I see the right and I don't know where to put Brendan exactly. Right, left, you know wherever. But I see certain elements in the right conforming around a particular agenda. Nobody thinks for themselves. Nobody breaks ranks. Everybody thinks exactly the same. The same in the left. This seems to be complete conformity. Social media indeed encourages that by creating these bubbles in which we live where we exchange ideas with people who agree with us and we all those ideas get reinforced constantly. So I worry about conformity but the way to break conformity, the way to challenge conformity is by doing what we're doing, what Brendan does regularly, by publishing and arguing from a perspective that is not mainstream, what I do in debating people and in publishing and arguing and doing what I do from a perspective that's not in the mainstream. That's how you break conformity. You don't use the government to break conformity. It's exact opposite. Government loves conformity. The political power loves mindless people who just follow the rules even if they disagree with them because it's easier to categorize people. It's easier to identify the enemy that way. What they don't like, what political power doesn't like is people who think for themselves. So I like all the problems that I see here. Politics is not the solution. The solution to these kind of problems is debate, argument, disagreement and yes, starting new platforms that while I know Paula disappeared for a while, it is back. Encourage people if they're interested to go and check it out and use it if appropriate. And there are other platforms, you know, there are probably 75 different social media platforms out there these days with all kinds of different ways to do things and indeed if the entire right had left Twitter because of Donald Trump's platforming or because of Alex Jones or anybody's, then Twitter would be a shadow of what it is today. And if they'd all gone anyway, they would establish a different platform. Nobody left. So people don't stand by their supposed convictions. If they did, the world would be a different place. Brandon, privatizing public space. Yeah, I think that's a good question. You know, if a private company buys up public space, is it still a public space? There was a Supreme Court case on this very question in the mid 1940s. There was a company town in Alabama, I think, and this was a privately owned town. The town was devoted to the local company for a particular purpose of work. And a woman who lived and worked in the company town was distributing Jehovah's Witness literature on a street corner. And she was told that she couldn't do that in this privately owned public area. It was forbidden to engage in those kinds of religious activities. She went to court. The court originally sided with the company and then eventually it went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court issued a ruling, which is very interesting because it talks about the importance of property rights. It doesn't just poo poo them, but it then expresses preference for her fundamental rights under the First Amendment and a constitutional right to express herself publicly, including by distributing religious literature. That's a good ruling in my mind. And the reason that's a good ruling, I would like it to have been possibly a bit firmer, but the reason it's an interesting case is because it does weigh up property rights and freedom of speech rights. So that has been done or in the US case, private property rights versus the First Amendment. And it kind of came down on the side of freedom of speech being an incredibly important value that probably should have preference. And that's my take on this question. My take on this question is, I don't deny that property rights are important. I don't deny that it's important to have an area of life in which you or the company you own can assert your own authority. I don't deny any of that. And it's very interesting in fact that the idea of privacy and the idea of having your own private space in which government could not encroach really emerges around the same time as freedom of speech. So I don't think these things are contradictory. You know, in the 17th century, Edward Koch saying to each man, his house is a castle, now that's become a kind of hackneyed phrase in Britain, every English man's home is his castle and people think it means that we like to look after our homes and have a nice garden. It doesn't mean that at all. It means that it's a castle in the sense that you should not come into it. You are forbidden from entering into this home unless we invite you in and it was really aimed at the authorities. And that idea emerged in the 17th century around the same time as the struggle for press freedom, the struggle for freedom of speech. So these are not contradictory ideas and in some ways they're very complimentary, especially at the individual level, especially at the level of in the US, I guess you'd call it your First Amendment rights. And I think it's the Fourth Amendment, which forbids government from entering or going through your private property or looking through your home without just cause. There's no contradiction between those rights, certainly at the individual level, at the level of US people. But at the bigger level of huge, vast private companies that which do exert an extraordinary amount of control over the realm in which political speech takes place, I think it would be a little naive to think that there wouldn't be contradictions and tensions there. And it's pretty clear that there are contradictions in that realm between the right of Mark Zuckerberg to treat Facebook as his own castle and the right of the two billion people who use Facebook to engage in open free discussion. And that that is where there is a contradiction. And we at some point we do have to come down at some point soon, I think we will have to come down on one side slightly against the other. But for now, I think the question that libertarians have to ask themselves, and I say this as someone who considers himself a left libertarian, I believe in freedom very, very strongly. And I've been asking myself this question for a long time, and I know others have too, of course. It's the question of how do libertarians prepare themselves for an era in which all of the stuff that we don't like, like the crushing of certain ideas, the enforcement of a culture of conformism, the demand for political obedience or moral obedience to certain forms of thinking and new orthodoxies, how do we prepare ourselves for battle at a time when those things are less and less done by the state and more and more done by informal groups, mobs, private companies, in the case of social media. So that's the question I think we have to ask ourselves and really confront it honestly. And then we might work out where to go from there. Some final super chat. So thank you Phil for your comments. Phil believes that social media do not encourage people thinking objectively. And it encourages people just not thinking at all. So another question by Phil, who also claims that the term misgender for him doesn't make sense even in its own terms, since you mentioned that it's like you can find yourself in trouble with the law in the UK. But Phil asks, what does the government put pressure on social media already exactly mean? And could you give some examples on that? Yeah, so in the UK, for example, social media bosses have been called to parliamentary committees to answer to MPs, to answer why they aren't camping down faster and harder on certain forms of speech, like for example, Holocaust denial or racist speech or misogynistic speech or the promotion of certain forms of dieting in relation to body image and so on. So members of parliament have quite openly, you know, I always think that parliamentary committees look a bit like a show trial anyway. And I say that as someone who's spoken, being invited to one, and you're kind of surrounded by these MPs and peers who just bark questions at you in a quite intimidating way. So anyone who's seen those kinds of exchanges will know that the government officials or MPs or representatives of the state have exerted quite publicly pressure on social media companies to be firmer in what they take offline and faster in the way in which they do it. And of course, that's not just that's not the only arena in which it's happened. The online harms bill is a very in the UK is a very clear expression of a desire by government to put more pressure on the architects of the internet to be more swift and more decisive in what they remove and how they control speech. So, you know, imagine you're a social media boss working in the United Kingdom and you see the online harms bill floating around and coming into power and so on. You know what needs to be done. You know how you have to play the game and therefore you're going to do that. So that seems to be a pretty clear case of outsourcing censorship, even though the actor in that case is the government, but the enforcer will tend to be social media companies. So there's again, it's that close relationship and there have been similar discussions in Europe. So, but it's that contradictory thing, because on the one hand, I criticize social media companies for doing what the government tells them to. And then on the other hand, I criticize them for going beyond the remit of our elected governments by banning speech that's not actually illegal. So I know that is a contradictory position to take, but the reason I do it is because I want to defend freedom of speech in all instances. So I want to defend freedom of speech against the government, which still has laws and rules about what we can say. And I want to defend it against the social media companies who have their own prejudices and their own ideologies and who want to ban forms of speech that are not currently banned on their platforms at least. So I want to push back against both of them in different ways for encroaching upon what I think we all agree is the most important freedom in the world. Actually, I don't think we all do agree, but what I consider to be the most important freedom in the world. So thank you, Thessie. Thank you, Phil. Thank you, Marilyn. Jeff says, don't we all have our lines drawn? They now will take my job from me if I am unvaxxed. What's next? What's next? They kick me out of my apartment or neighborhood, taking my home is my land. And indeed, we've seen people of more, let's say, extreme right-wing views in the US, where their banks accounts were closed, they cannot go to the gym and things like that. Enric says, to have more free and open debate on private property platforms is through changing the culture. So to answer Brendan, Enric's solution is fight to change the views in the culture. So many thanks to our superchatters. We can't take any more questions because we have to go for the final points to our two speakers. So, Jaron, the difficult question for you. I think it was actually asked by Brendan. So what do you... So what happens when property rights and freedom of speech come into conflict? And let me give you a scenario. 2024, let's say Trump wins the primaries in the Republican Party. So you have the odd view, the odd situation where the candidate is nowhere on social media. And we've seen that even mainstream media, remember, I think it was CNN, that they wouldn't show his, at some point, the candidate would say, okay, please cut the interview, I don't want to see Trump anymore. So wouldn't you say that this is more fitting to a banana republic, as the left would call it back in the day, which the left now, for some reason, likes all these things, rather than in a republic like the United States? Well, yes. I mean, if Trump is the nominee of the Republican Party in 2024, we can declare the United States a banana republic, no matter what social media does. I mean, that's my view of Trump and of an America that would choose him again as a nominee. So, look, I want to live in a country that's free, free to ban Trump at a personal level, at a corporate level. When Twitter banned Trump, my first response was, great, I'm happy to live in a country where that can happen, and where the police don't show up and shut down Twitter the next day. Because we know they couldn't ban the Ayatoula in Iran. We know they couldn't ban the Chinese Premier in China. But we still live in a country where the president of the United States can be banned. Not a bad deal. Now, I wish Twitter was consistent. This goes back to my opposition about objectivity. Twitter lets the Taliban post, but it won't let Trump post. It lets the Taliban post, but it won't let some people who might offend some people at the margin post. So the problem is their objective standards. Look, nothing about the world in which we live in today is satisfactory. I don't like anything that's going on today. I don't like the way social media behaves. I don't like the way the government behaves. I don't like that ruling from 1940s that Brendan does like. I don't like it. I think it's a wrong ruling, and I think it's part of the problem. I believe that the solution is more freedom. More freedom doesn't mean to impose our will on private actors. More freedom means a separation between those who wield political power and the rest of us. I want government to be restricted as quickly and as thoroughly as possible to what it is supposed to do, which is protect us and otherwise leave us alone. It is not the government's job to oversee Twitter and what is said there, oversee Facebook and what is said there. It is the government's job to prevent people from firebombing Twitter when Twitter says stuff that other people don't like. It was the government's job to protect bookstores from Islamists who were firebombing them because they carried the books of Salaman Rushdie. That's what it means to protect free speech. It means to protect the publisher who wants to publish the book and to protect the bookstore who wants to sell the book from those who would use violence against them to prevent the publication of that book. By not doing that, it indeed is the government that defaulted on its free speech responsibilities. The government is there to protect us from those who would use violence against us. The way to cure the problem, the way to solve the problem that we have today is, as somebody said a few minutes ago, it's to change the culture. I know that's cliche and everything's about changing the culture. But it is. Brenda's not going to get his way. I'm not going to get my way unless we convince a lot of people that we're right. At the end of the day, the way to solve these problems is to convince the culture to change the culture's views and politically, ultimately, to separate the state from all of these activities. The more the state is restricted, the more freedom there is. The reason so many of these social media companies conform, I think, are two fundamental reasons. One is because all the people who work there are studied at the same universities with the same frigging professors. We need to change the culture so that they're not studying those kind of ideas, those ideas, and to corrupt them in one way or another. We might be able to prevent corruption in one field, it'll pop up somewhere else. We need to change the ideas that exist in the culture. Second, they're conformed because of the amount of power the government has over them. Somebody asked for proof that the government intervenes. Just think of Mark Zuckerberg being forced in front of one of these sessions where he's treated like a witch or one of these ridiculous sessions in front of Congress. Of course, there's pressure being placed on these guys. The question is now, where do we place the fault? Who do we regulate? Do we try to regulate the social media companies to behave like we want them to behave? Or do we put pressure on the government to get out of the business of controlling these entities? Ideally, we do both, but we do one politically and one culturally. Thank you, Brandon. Last question for you. Spike, then you did the right thing when it came to bake the cake case. You said, look, the baker has the right to say because of my religious convictions, sorry, but I'm not going to bake the cake. We understand that. But why would you say that when it comes to Twitter, for example, someone saying, oh, you need to have Milo or you need to have Trump. Isn't this the similar bake the cake situation? Aren't you actually telling Twitter you have to bake the cake, whether you want or not? Whether your values agree with the values of your customer or not? I think there are differences in these cases. One of the reasons I was very comfortable with defending the right of bakers to refuse to make cakes for same-sex weddings is because firstly, that was an infinitesimally small minority activity that was not a serious encroachment on people's lives. There were many, many other options. The vast majority of bakers were quite happy to do these things. In fact, there was a lot of activism in the approaching of certain bakers, almost as a form of public humiliation, a ritual humiliation of small Christian bakers or small Christian photographers to shame them in the media and say, look at these bad people, which was a really awful authoritarian exercise. So I defended the right of small companies in those situations to take their own decisions because it wouldn't have an enormous impact on the freedom of people to make a cake and to have their wedding and to conduct their lives as they see fit. If we had a situation where every bakery in the country was refusing to make the cakes and you couldn't find one to do it, that would be different. That would be more problematic and that would be more akin to what we're talking about with Facebook, for example, which dominates so much of the political public sphere in terms of discussion and which does censor certain things. And where else do you go? You know, you could go to Parlor and there are the other options too, but Twitter and Facebook are absolutely colossal. So there's a real problem there with size and influence. In relation to just a couple, just want to pick up a few things that you're on, said there. The freedom to ban is a very interesting phrase that you use and you'll forgive me if I say it made me think a little bit of 1984. Freedom is censorship and censorship is freedom. And I have a difficulty with that phrase because it strikes me as a contradiction in terms. And the reason I'm saying that is not just to pick at language, but because I think we always have to ask ourselves whose freedom are we talking about. And very often in this world we live in because people still like to pretend that they value freedom. It's still a fairly unpopular thing to say, to come out and say, I hate freedom, get rid of it. So people often have to do things under the banner of freedom, even if the consequences are actually illiberal. So freedom is often used to justify unfreedom. The clearest example, or one of the clearest examples is the smoking ban, for example, in pubs and restaurants, which was presented to us. The UK government invented a new word, and it was one word, which is very Orwellian, smoke freedom. They said they wanted the public to enjoy smoke freedom. So they invented a new freedom to describe what was actually an act of authoritarian control. The same happens with censorship discussions on campus. Student unions all the time would talk about freedom from the fence, the freedom to live quietly and peacefully. And often they will say, on our private property or on our private campus or in our private homes, because very often these aren't actually private campuses, but that's how the language they will use. So they present their censorship as an act of freedom. They're defending their freedom to breathe easily and to feel respected. And likewise, in relation to social media, their freedom to ban Donald Trump is experienced by vast numbers of people as unfreedom. It's experienced by Trump as unfreedom because he can no longer express himself in a significant part of the public sphere. And it's experienced by huge numbers of his supporters, millions of them on Twitter and millions of them in America at large, as unfreedom too, because they have less access to his commentary, less access to the words of the man they elected and the words of the man they entrusted to run the country. So it's presented as freedom because it's the freedom of Facebook to say, bugger off, we don't want you here, but it's experienced by significantly more numbers of people as unfreedom. So in those kinds of issues, I think we have to ask whose freedom we're talking about and whose freedom is more important. Is Mark Zuckerberg's freedom more important than mine, for example? Is it more important than the people in the Rust Belt America who try to shake up American politics? Those are the questions we have to ask ourselves. And I think if we ask ourselves those questions, we can start to work out where freedom is real and where it's actually been used as a disguise for unfreedom. The final point in relation to the culture, I couldn't agree more with you on this point and the points others have made, that really is the only way to do this. And my solution is not to invite the government in to control these censorious corporations, because the government doesn't believe in freedom of speech. It would be like asking a fox to look after the henhouse. It makes no sense at all. So there's a real problem there. And the solutions, as I said at the beginning, are not easy. So it really is about shaking up the culture. So my suggestion is that instead of saying, instead of putting a positive spin on social media censure by saying this is freedom, this is their property rights freedom, this is their right to behave in this way, instead we should just turn it on its head a bit and say this is the wrong thing to do. This is a mistake and you are undermining the culture of freedom. So it might be as subtle as that. So holding back from saying this is their private property rights and it's an expression of their freedom, and instead saying this is an imposition on society and you've made a terrible catastrophic error in making this choice. And when we start pushing the discussion more in that way, we can start, I think, winning more people to the broader cause to have a culture of freedom across society. So it looks like next time Yaron is around, we already have your next live, hopefully, in a real room discussion, which will be the freedom to ban with a question mark. So many thanks to Brandon again. You can read Brandon in Spiked online. You can see him. He's on talk radio. I think you're also on ZP News every now and then. He's everywhere. But mostly, mostly taking him out on Spiked. Many thanks to our Super Chatters. Some last minute Super Chat. Thanks, Christopher. Thank you, Thesi. Many thanks to the Andron Institute for supporting this series. And many thanks to Yaron for his time and his energy. Thanks, everyone. Bye, bye.