 Hi i'm nick gillespie with reason and i'm joined by zack wise miller of reason tv zack please say hello Hello And we are talking yet again in a reason live stream with robbie suave who is dialing in from uh, washington dc We are here in particular to talk about two, uh, just kind of bombshell stories that robbie has put out One is going to be the next cover story of the magazine and then there's a live story Up today with emails, but this is Robbie has gotten his hands on a series of emails between facebook people And the cdc and a couple of other government actors to show exactly how the cdc and facebook were coordinating attempts to uh keep disinformation misinformation mal information From getting on to that platform during the height of the covet hysteria robbie Why don't you uh start off by telling us exactly, you know, what's what's the import of the uh of the stories that we're talking about here today Sure, so these are emails for the most part from the cdc to facebook meta is the parent company of facebook it owns facebook and instagram uh about pandemic covet related content vaccine related content that appeared During the years of the pandemic. I think my report is in keeping I hope at least with what was done in the twitter files, you know, these series of reports that have taken place with journalist matt tiebe and barry weiss and some other people that shed light on how much Communication there was between government actors and twitter on a bunch of issues election covet hunter biden, etc What i'm saying is the same exact thing was happening with facebook and then presumably other platforms as well the amount of Conversations that government employees and the social media companies that decide how much you can speak about certain subjects It's a lot. It's a lot more than I would have guessed several years ago And I think that fact in and of itself is interesting I think the public has a right to know about how much conversations there were About what you were allowed to say between the cdc and facebook Okay, and uh just a couple of quick things to get out of the way one I want to point out reason uh magazine has published the reason foundation of 501c3 non-profit We have received donations from meta the parent company of facebook. So, uh, you know, that's out there Um, but true to form we are reporting our story as we see them as we find them Robbie, can you tell me where did you get the emails? Yeah, so these are emails that uh, probably anyone could get if they depending on how they ask this is part of a lawsuit Between uh, the state of Missouri has filed this lawsuit against the bided administration for The policies that led to covet skeptical people Being kicked off twitter and some other places right the new civil liberties alliance is a non-profit civil liberties group That is participating in the lawsuit and I got them as a result of that Other reporters other interested parties may have gotten them as well I think i'm the first person to kind of package them in this way or release them as I did and explain why I think they're so interesting Um, so that's you know, that's what's going on there Great, uh, I have one more quick point that i'm going to throw out to uh, zack to ask a question But uh one for people out there listening Uh, you know, you may not be on facebook that much anymore. I know I am not I use facebook as kind of like uh, you know I go there to post things for my adoring fans and things like that But I you know There's a sense particularly in the media class that facebook is you know, it's your grandfather's ultimate appeal Nobody fucking cares about it Facebook if any of these platforms is the public square facebook certainly globally But even in north america it is I don't know like probably a factor of 10 bigger than uh twitter in terms of average daily users It is a place where people share live Swap a lot of information. Uh, the other thing I want to say is also, you know At the end of the year we had a reason webathon One of the gifts if you gave a certain amount of money was a recent stress ball Mine showed up yesterday and uh, you know, it's a couple weeks late because I could have been squeezing this thing for all of 2022 and probably the rest of this year Zach, uh, what do you want to ask robby? Well, yeah, and I'll just throw in there that I've been off facebook since about 2016. So i'm one of those people who you know in my personal life I kind of like downplay the importance of it, but you're you're right It is kind of the big the big boy in the room Although it's been losing it's been steadily losing Users especially in the us over recent years and I think that there's a lot of You know, they're they're facing a lot of competitive pressure Which which is a good thing and something we can probably get into a little bit more later But I wanted to start off asking robby about this sentence that I highlighted from his web article Which where you can go to see Some of these embedded emails that we're going to be discussing today And you say robby that facebook moderators were in constant contact with the cdc And routinely asked government health officials to vet claims relating to the virus mitigation efforts such as masks and vaccines So I as it pertains to the emails here I just want to know, you know before we get into the big picture of all this this issue raises Which which you delve into in in the cover story that we displayed earlier Tell us specifically about some of the emails Who's involved in them? What are some of the most what are some of the most interesting and revealing ones say Yes, so these are by and large emails between the cdc's kind of communications officer that office and moderators at meta and They're very friendly. They're very collegial in fact On meta describes the cdc as their colleagues In including in emails where they've cc'd a bunch of kind of comms people who are just You know in the private sector and working to help various government health agencies get their message across But they ask they send specific claims. They'll say In these emails several times many times meta will say we're seeing this claim Going really viral on facebook. How do you feel about this claim? You know, is it is it true? Could it be true? And then they'll they'll ask questions eventually they start asking well Is this harmful? How harmful this is is this and then much later it becomes do you think this could cause vaccine hesitancy and the cdc's? Anything could cause vaccine hesitancy. So yes It's it's a it's a very Differential friendly and differential series of messages. They are essentially Um putting out giving the cdc Sort of de facto control over what you were allowed to say on these controversial subjects. They were they were Totally giving it to the cdc in terms of who is going to be the decision maker on whether this was a legitimate topic of discussion Um kim yeah, let's go through uh another specific email. Um, zack and uh, we'll talk about it in that context Sure. I mean here here's one About what robby was talking about where the Facebook is kind of emailing the cdc and saying look here's some of the things that are trending Could you just weigh in on this give us your opinion of what you think of these trends? And this email at the top is uh, there are cdc contact carol crofford saying thank you very helpful The one I have highlighted here has to do with double masking and says that Some high interaction posts from pages mocked the idea of double masking and Fauci's changing position on it While in groups criticism came in meme form Uh, it's it's unclear if any uh action was taken on that but it's it's kind of interesting that That that was something that would be you know flagged for a government agency to review Um another example that maybe is a little more substantive here is This is just a list of claims that were being made after the vaccine came out A lot of these are you know clearly crazy and and untrue COVID vaccines cause ulzheimers COVID vaccines causing magnetism So and then you know if you keep going Well, we'll get to the the lab leak in a second But let's start with those two because on one hand you have you know some criticism of Fauci Which it seems like just kind of some some good natured Meming and then on the other hand you've got these uh rather insane and possibly harmful claims being made What is uh the approach that uh, you know, what is wrong with the approach that facebook is taking to Yeah, look to be clear What I see in a lot of these emails Claims that are going viral on facebook that yeah that I think are crazy. I mean, I'm not an anti-vaccine person. I'm vaccinated Right. Um, yeah, I think it should be your choice, but I generally favor of it But look, I kind of just thought it was interesting that facebook's um Operating procedure here was to leave it up to the cdc to decide that every time something makes them uncomfortable They send an email and they say well, what do you guys think about this? Especially given, you know, what was going on in public all that time You have political figures democratic political figures including joe biden at one point in july of 2021 as some of these emails are being sent Joe biden says facebook is killing people. That's his that's a quote And his communications director says on tv. I believe to mika brisinski says, you know If they don't do more to clamp down on this misinformation is killing people if they don't do more Their regulations should be tweaked to cause them more pain. They should change section 230 So they're being threatened in public by democratic political figures and then behind the scenes they're Basically putting the cdc in charge of all the policies they can and I wonder if there's some connection there And if that should be concerning to Civil libertarians and everyone else maybe the answer is no, but I wanted people to know I thought people would be a little taken aback by how much discussion went on between facebook and the cdc It just so happens I pulled those two clips that you referenced and I'd like to play them so everyone can see and remember the context of What what kind of messages were going out from the top as all this was happening all this You know internal communication was happening Because I think that's going to relate to You know the the legal challenge that uh, you know, you you pulled these emails from so first here's the biden clip where he Said that social media companies are killing people by not Being more aggressive removing social media companies of killing people for allowing vaccine myths to circulate online Unvaccinated And then here's his communication director. This is all happening around the same The president said he was open to getting rid of section 230 and i'm just wondering if he's Open to amending 230 when facebook and twitter and other social media outlets spread false information That caused americans harm shouldn't they be held accountable in a real way shouldn't they be Liable for publishing that information and then open to lawsuits Well, we're reviewing that and certainly they should be held accountable And I think you've heard the president speak very aggressively about this. He understands. This is an important piece So this is like the the troubling pattern that we discussed in a previous stream and That it's difficult to you know, there's a lot of blurry lines here because that you know the you know Governor people who work in the federal government are careful enough not to say, you know, take this down or else But there is this kind of concerted pressure campaign. Yeah, that that's for adam schiff and members of congress to do Right, right. Yeah, they'll put that out on their twitter feed. But you know, even that they will say well, I'm just You know expressing my my opinion. It's not an actual threat So there's you know tiptoeing up to the line and you know, how do we know? When that's been, you know, very clearly crossed Right, and I think what you're seeing is that you've created an environment where So I don't want to blame meta too much Of course, they feel like given those public threats that better safe than sorry Let's just do whatever the government tells us to do That's our safest from a from a regulatory Compliance standpoint. Honestly, that's what we saw with twitter. The more of the twitter files come out The more I actually feel a little bit for yul roth who was the kind of head moderator who was portrayed very negatively in the initial dispatches But the more of it we see what you see is in terms of election misinformation stuff You see, you know, the fbi come to them over and over again saying you're you're flooded with russian based disinformation You know elections are vulnerable unless you do something they turn around and say Uh, we looked at those accounts. We don't we're not seeing that we think this is fine And then it's oh, it's relentless And it's more threatening and it's like and and then it's the fbi saying, you know, there's democratic politicians very interested in this There's the media is very interested in this. You're really not going to do anything. You're really not going to do anything You see their resolve waiver you see and then finally they're like, okay, whatever you tell us What are the accounts you want us to take down? That's what was going on. Now we look at facebook Of course, they're asking the the cdc for everything for every and you know going to go to a lab leak Can I uh, you know before we get to the lab leak? I also asked just to you know, kind of put this out there Um, you know a lot of what they're asking is basically like, you know There's a bunch of people online who are saying that I got the vaccine and now fork stick to my cheeks On things like that. Is there any truth to that? Is there, you know, they run through a list of popular common things That doesn't strike me necessarily as like, oh, you know, we're quaking our boots or tell us what to do that does actually seem to be kind of You know, I want to say corporate, uh, you know responsible corporate behavior in the best way possible unironically like they're trying to get information from the agency that is Supposed to know this stuff right and unlike election misinformation and whatnot this You know particularly during the pandemic there should be right or wrong answers for most of this stuff, right? Well, I mean So there's that and then the other question is that so they're talking to them And you know, we also have at the same time we have like, you know The heads of these corporations and the heads ahead of the u.s. Government, you know attacking them Um, it's not clear to me necessarily that everybody is that people are working in concert, but How do we know that facebook said? Okay, you you gave us this information and now we quash Certain accounts or we minimize the reach etc Do we know how that worked because part of what the twitter file showed us was you know There were actual black lists that were called black lists to keep people from really, you know being seen by other people So I guess first that you know Respond to the idea that you know what they're actually being good corporate actors here They're going to the best source or the most official source possible trying to get good information I think it's certainly acceptable to get information from the cdc You know, this was their this was their starring moment I think the cdc badly handled its starring moment. You know, we could Agree, we can talk about all the things they screwed up. But look, I would say there are legitimate healthy debates to be had over How effective mass and what kind of mass have been at various levels of the pandemic? I think there are valid questions about where covet originated and frankly, I think there are valid Questions about how necessary vaccines are for young people and for children and whether potential risks I don't know that they're very serious risk, but whether potential there doesn't seem to be very Serious risk for otherwise healthy young people of the disease itself and and you know, whether at some point Even if there's a low risk of the vaccine, there's not really a benefit for it for that That group actually even the cdc right now is very angry at I believe Pfizer for not making all of the data available when they approved it for younger people So even the cdc itself has some questions about this because science is you know, it's a it's a process that involves Give and take a chain changing of minds Fauci's changed himself so many times during the pandemic Sometimes legitimately other times I would argue because he was with help with holding of actual facts that he thought And he thought we weren't ready to hear them or he wanted there not to be too many people Getting masks is what if a medical professionals didn't have them Anyway, I so I think there are legitimate discussions to be had on many of these subjects I think the cdc's default was too much in the in the wrong direction And that they would have led facebook to not allow those discussions to happen Okay, and so how do do we know that facebook did not allow the conversations or or basically was kind of either You know blocking or heavily Squelching the reach of people who were espousing things that the that the cdc didn't what yes even in some of these emails they explain that They they they allude to well, this is already there's a couple things they say this is already violating our policy So we don't even really need you to tell us whether you think it's wrong or right But uh, so so they're implying that well then this claim maybe if you Depending on what the cdc says about this claim we might say that's violating too and we're gonna we're gonna Squash that they did um, and I know from my own experience how suppressed the Discussion of the lab leak was for I think up to a year Actually, that might be one case where they actually uh, the cdc might have based on what the cdc said They might have actually reversed that policy if i'm following the timeline correctly Let's let's talk about the uh lab leak This is the email That pertains to the lab leak theory And so this is facebook moderators emailing the cdc Saying uh, is the claim COVID-19 is man-made false unproven unsupported by evidence or true And the cdc responds inconclusive It's technically possible because we don't know the origin still It being man-made is theoretically possible, but extremely unlikely and then as you know, robby points out this was Here's the terms of service for you know What they allow and disallow on facebook and highlighted there COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured was not allowed for quite a while on facebook And then you know, you wrote robby that this is this debacle shows why banning misinformation Is a terrible idea and I you know, it's like You can understand. It's such an extraordinary situation Entering this this pandemic Right on the heels of an election where suddenly There's an expectation that This is the role of social media companies because that was not always the expectation You know before 2016 it was like the only thing really expected of social media companies was to police like You know terrorist activity child abuse things like that And suddenly it broadened to well misinformation got Trump elected and so they have a responsibility to do this Then a pandemic hits and uh, so you can kind of understand from one perspective like Okay, there's literally lives on the line here but Then there are situations like the lab leak theory, which still to this day. We don't we don't know the truth about You know, what what what does what transpired around the lab leak theory? Make you think about you know, the entire notion of Misinformation and and the government's involvement in that and social media's Involved in uh, kind of reining it in these are I think and these are very different things the government's legitimate role in sure in preventing terrorism and organized crime and violence on social media I'm a libertarian. I think if the government has some legitimate role to play in society I think policing violence terrorism crime is acceptable So in some sense to me now, I still think they wildly abuse their power on you know Everything the FBI was saying about so many subjects, but you know, the FBI says to facebook or twitter Hey, this is an ISIS group. You should take this down or you should give us the information about it for a law enforcement purpose I don't think that's inherently legitimate I think if there's anything that the government should do it should be doing that That is so different from communicating to social medias Companies about what their approach should be to therapeutics and vaccines and those things I get that lies are still on the line but uh, but it it seems much closer to just policy disagreement and speech and you know You might not like what people have to say if they're anti-vaccine or they don't think the vaccines are good And you can argue against that all you want on social media and may if the platforms themselves don't like that content It's their right to take action against it But I think that is so different from the government standpoint for the government to say that Our significant efforts and resources should be harnessed towards suppressing Speech we disagree with on this subject on social media I think that's very dangerous and and very not in line with the proper function of government I think they were wrong about a lot of things or at least some things are questionable and debatable And uh, and it gets us to a very a very Scary frankly place Can I ask is there a room for the interpretation of this? And I think you could also do this at twitter where you know, this isn't about the ownership of uh, you know Facebook or whatever who the hell knows if mark zuckerberg is even still alive or you know Maybe he's been replaced by like an animatron or something I think he's missing legs now or maybe they know he's been selling himself off in order to buy You know a full body and in the metaverse and stuff but What if this is Facebook's choice, you know and in your writings, you know, and we always hit this note At reason because it is important. We include the clause in anything We're writing about these are private companies and they have you know, wide latitude if not absolute right to publish what they want to you know to You know censor what they want etc What if this is the way that facebook or you know wanted to go about Cleaning its site up or regulating its site. Um, is that a plausible? Uh understanding and then does that change the critique? In the same way that twitter, you know, it's not clear, you know when you when you hear jack dorsi talking About his personal philosophy and his life philosophy That wasn't really being represented at twitter because twitter is run by a lot of different people You know in in the mid management who are making a lot of shots so You know are these just ways that these platforms within their rights as private entities are kind of figuring out Okay, what's our take going to be and what are the parameters of discussion? We're going to allow on our private platforms Absolutely, they are within their rights and in my criticisms of these companies policies in the past like you said I always say that look this is just my criticism as a user. I think it would be better I would prefer it or it would be better for society or or Whoever if they do something different, but they can do whatever they want. I've always said that Um in reading these emails and in reading the twitter files I the question comes up What we say it's it's they can do whatever they want. It's their choice Did they feel like it was their choice? I think that's the question Um, do they feel like they actually have a choice when joe biden is accusing them of killing people? And democratic politicians and republican politicians by the way republicans want to screw up big tech big tech in 80 Often for doing the exact opposite thing. They're mad for opposite reasons So they can these companies can't make congress happy no matter what they do But there they've been dragged before congress been made to answer ridiculous questions from people who don't understand I mean from people who are literally geriatric and you know, don't understand You know the windows 95 was the last time they had any de grasped on the technology the kids were using They're they think I think they were rationally Very rationally worried about what government forces were going to do to them if they didn't Comply to a to a great degree. So they did and I I don't think it was terrific for the discourse that question of Was it a free choice is really the central question? And I think a way to dig into that would be to talk a little bit more about this court case Which we talked a little bit about on the last stream. We had robbie on the state of missouri Eric schmidt et al versus joe biden in the united states government and the the question that This lawsuit seems to be trying the legal question seems to be Trying to answer is How far can the government go with these kind of pressure tactics before it does become You know unconstitutional censorship of speech and in your cover story on this Robbie you go into a concept that is called Become known as jaw boning. I just want to read a little bit of this excerpt and then Have you explained? A little bit more about what jaw boning is and you know, what what the legal experts how the legal experts define it and you know What sort of indicators we we might be looking for to see if something falls within that category or not You're right You know, there's a word for government officials using the threat of punishment to extort desired behaviors from private actors It's jaw boning The term arose from the biblical story of samson who said of slaying a thousand enemies with the jaw bone of a donkey according to the economist john kenneth galbraith the words public policy use began with the world war two era office of price administration and civilian supply which primarily relied on verbal condemnation to punish violators So could you talk about a little bit more about this concept? and whether Any of this behavior that we see in these emails might fall under that rubric Right. So historically this term was applied to behavior from political figures or government agents who You knew it would take too long to you know go through the motions of actually Enforcing some kind of regulation so they just say hey, you guys got to stop You know raising prices or have or outs Offshoring outsourcing whatever we're mad about yeah We just yell at you and threaten some kind of non-specific regulation Or maybe even some kind of specific regulation And then they do it that is jaw boning This this is the we're now kind of applying that to what's going on with speech on social media Which is a little bit different and I think it's an open question Whether what we've seen from the white house political figures and government bureaucrats Rises to that level obviously the new civil liberties alliance in the state of missouri is arguing that it does I interviewed will duffield who's a policy analyst of free speech expert the kato institute who who thinks that the Quantality of the circumstances when you take what biden is saying and what these agents are saying and what the political figures are saying and what was asked And these specific invoking of specific regulations take it all together. He thinks there is a strong case to be made This is ultimately Violating the first amendment. This is taken together. This is the government restricting a private entities speech rights By by threatening them with with punishment because obviously you couldn't have a situation where Where where maybe there's something that a government actor can't do legally? There's no law, but they can you know extort you or induce you to do something By threatening to pass some law in the future or do something else to you Right, we would recognize that well, then they're just kind of conveniently getting around whatever civil rights protections or civil liberties protections We have there are a couple examples I bring up and courts have ruled kind of wildly different ways on this like There's an example of you know a sheriff like a kind of christian conservative sheriff Not wanting there to be a phone sex hotline in town And you know threatening the phone company again not not threatening to like blow up the phone company But you know whatever kind of to to bring some kind of annoying or pestering action against them So then they get rid of that that they cut that phone line You know is that an example of job owning is is threatening a book store There was a city council that wanted a bookstore to stop having what they thought were a provocative or offensive books That kind of thing which obviously you can't you know the first amendment says the government can't Couldn't pass a law saying the bookstore can't have that book that would be like a such a straightforward first amendment violation So can the council get around that by saying well, we're going to do x y and z to you unless you get rid of that book That's the question Yeah, the the tough thing to determine I guess is because those are such uh, you know very You know you're talking often about small businesses or at least you know one kind of specific law enforcement agency and here there's just so much uh So so many relationships that are hard to trace all the way back of who got introduced to whom and there's you know Rotation between when we saw on the twitter files that the former fbi council was part became twitter's uh council So there's you know the the revolving door and it's really hard to knowledge That when we're talking about us political figures senators and members of congress they have Pretty Litigated robust rights to kind of say whatever they want as much as that is annoying to us. Yeah But the government employees are a different category and so much of this was coming from fbi agents bureaucrats at the cdc You know in some sense those are our employees. They work for the american taxpayer um We could certainly come up with I mean even if there isn't an existing legal framework that Prevents them from doing that like with the cdc could have different policies, right? It's like it's a government agency that could operate differently based on Uh what we would constrain it with through regulation or just or just through Who's in charge of it right there could be policies that hey, it's it's inappropriate for you or for the fbi To start bossing around social media companies. Yeah Can I ask though? Why are we presuming that there is a? conflict of interests or predilections between The people at facebook and the people they were communicating with at the cdc I mean one of the things of the twitter files that came out is that you know a lot of the people at twitter Were searching, you know, they had already made the conclusion that they wanted to Shadow ban or squelch the reach of a you know deamplify somebody And then they were just trying to figure out what would be the pretext because their existing policies didn't necessarily You know You know allow for that Why are we assuming that there is a broad difference between the people at facebook who were sending messages to the cdc And you know the people at the cdc who were responding to that Because this is if I may just this is part of a mostly conservative critique of tech companies Which they are all a bunch of non-binary, you know, uh, you know marxists postmodern marxists who are you know trying to destroy america from within Yes, right. So I don't agree with that critique. I I disagree with your characterization slightly Although you're right about the hunter biden laptop story That was there was very much initiative on twitter's taken by twitter itself They suppressed that and then they tried to come up with a justification for having done so afterward So and that was the first twitter files was all about that the more of them I read subsequent to that The more it puts that in context and shows that there actually was a good amount of skepticism and pushback Not with that specific case but with so many other cases of law enforcement coming to them and saying hey Can you get rid of all these accounts? And they'll say They they did push back they push back a lot and that desire to push back Collapsed over time when they were just inundated with requests And and they were told over and over again that if you don't do this you democracy No longer exists if you don't do more of this That's what the media was reinforcing to them the mainstream media is I think another very Bad actor in all of this Um And and then they have democratic politicians threatening them. So they they're they're resolved. I see they're resolved weakening over time um Facebook you're right that in the coveted and the facebook context. I certainly see You know, I read emails over a long period of time lots of them and there was a lot of continuity and their Desire to appease there was not There wasn't even pushback because it was very directional from meta asking this the cdc Yeah, I'm just reading the emails. They also had constant Conference calls and you read tone of the cdc's responses are so brief And so, uh, I think careful. I would I could only imagine that they were a lot more Instructive in in the conference calls, but obviously I don't I don't know for just a side point about the mainstream media or Not mainstream media but legacy media or traditional media I mean like we're we're You know missing a story too if we don't think that mika brzezinski for instance or everybody at msnbc And everybody at fox to the extent that they have these contacts Aren't in constant contact with either people who work in the government in agencies or You know top-level People who are actually setting policy to get their read on stuff like that and that clearly influences them as well So in a in a weird way, you know even by focusing on social media You know, you know, we're kind of holding social media to a very different standard Then we do to traditional media which has a much bigger footprint and certainly in terms of elections You know the stuff that's coming out and I would like to get back to this when we talk about remedies You know the one thing you can say about the 2016 election Facebook didn't decide the 2016 election. It was you know conventional not even cable news broadcast news did that and these people are you know, if if Social media companies are going back and forth with people in government Man, I got a feeling it's like 10 times as bad when you're talking about abc cbs nvc I got a wonder Nick though, isn't there a fundamental difference there between a pundit at msnbc Or fox having a government official whispering in their ear which we know for certain Was happening with someone like Sean Hannity texting with trump people all the time but You know, Sean Hannity is not running a site that's shutting down people's accounts Deciding what is allowed to be Yeah You know, uh, you know what? Shadow banning certain individuals like it it seems well Maybe this is a is a good moment to you know kind of shift to and we should come back to this lawsuit That Eric Schmidt has filed and and also by the way, I don't know if it's jaw boning or whatnot But remember as an attorney general of Missouri Eric Schmidt joined 49 other state attorneys general In trying to in and bringing a court case to break up google So, you know, and on the one hand he's he's like I want to restrain government from doing this or that On the other hand as a government actor He is trying to force a business to do his bidding. So it gets confusing very quickly, but can we You know start talking about remedies then because is you know, robbie? I guess as a starting point is the issue here Not even necessarily what facebook is doing But the fact that we don't know what facebook is doing We didn't know what twitter was doing until your reporting came out until the twitter files come out is you know, is this As much as anything is it a question of transparency or where you know platforms are pretending to be One thing when in fact there are very different things I think the issue is what the government is doing and what the government is saying to these platforms Which is the least transparent thing of all like we I think we've all been kind of blown away, right by just by the volume of communication between Government bureaucrats they spend all their time like the fbi cdc Don't you do you guys have anything better to do then bother facebook and twitter and youtube and whoever else all day to Take down accounts that you don't like or you think are wrong or were mean to you I mean is this is it healthy even for our government? It's like accounts with like 30 followers You know, but they're obsessed with this they're you know We just the the world economic forum is going on in davos and I watched the other day The the disinformation segment where disinformation was framed as the central problem of our time that all Issues all things bad things facing society are downstream of People saying crazy or bad things on facebook And this was a panel that included brian stelter and seth mold democratic congressman And a member of the european union who like regulates speech for a living and the person I got to say who was like the most hysterically Worried about disinformation was the publisher of the new york times who was explicitly saying that You know, we'll never solve these problems as a society as long as people can just say whatever they want on facebook Honestly, he was basically saying that we won't solve any problems until the facebook is preferential until facebook is preferential treatment to the new york times That was basically the implication of what he was saying And I think that's such a because as you pointed out nick You know the the explanation for 2016 on on social media is so I mean it's collapsed There's been so many studies and surveys now Explaining that you know the swing vote the 60 000 or however many were swing voters in michigan and pennsylvania Who who are working class bernie supporters who ended up voting for trump over hillary? It's not because russia told them on facebook like these people are less were less online than the average human being They they knew trump from tv They listened to talk radio the existing media structures were perfectly sufficient Um, so it's really some misplaced priorities So Rewriting of what the rules are for what you can say on social media. So I don't People so let's let's talk a little bit about this though then is facebook's problem though You know, so I mean you're you're concerned and I agree with you completely and I think one of the great Uh benefits and contributions that your reporting is made and certainly the twitter files is by showing how the How much how often the interactions happen is you know the volume is important and then the quality of them When you see the back and forth and what people are asking and is uh, zack who momentarily disappeared I will see who comes who they come for next but um You know, you know just seeing the level of insanity of like going after accounts with 30 followers and and that type of thing But is the problem that facebook should be Open, you know, should they be more open about saying hey, you know what? We are not Wide open we put parameters on our speech. We remind you of this We make you you know check off scroll down to the bottom of page without reading it and check off that you agree with our Terms of service, but should they be more open about it? Should they deny the cdc any role in kind of uh informing how they make decisions about what is or is not allowable discourse Should they allow crowdfunding so that uh, you know crowdfunding of information so that when somebody posts something Uh, you know a box pops up and says, you know what like 60 percent of our readers think this is horseshit 40 percent, you know think that it's actually, you know, uh divine Uh, you know divinely inspired words of truth You know what what should facebook be doing in you know in response to all of this kind of stuff Yeah, I would say that I have not been impressed by expert or elite efforts to I police disinformation or to even frankly to identify it. Um, they have not seemed to perform Much better at that than anyone else and in fact the fact checking that facebook regularly deploys It's these third party fact checking organizations. It has a certain number of them Uh, I find them to be very activist in general. I mean they flag things I've written as Well, and then they've changed their mind when I pointed out that you've actually like misquoted me I know john stossel has had the same problem with them. Yeah, you can think whatever you want about his lawsuit But I agree with him on the underlying His complaint with what the fact checkers had said is I was totally legitimate But actually what twitter is doing is a vast improvement on this I think the uh the kind of what used to be called bird watch and is now I think community Notes where users get to offer a fact check and then you can vote or you can rank or you can weigh in on How you feel about that note, uh, you know wikipedia has Has this I would not say entirely figured out but is doing a lot better than other places on the internet the Uh community feedback a kind of democratic or or a crowd sourced Uh soliciting of opinions has actually worked out better I would say on the internet than top-down solutions or saying well We're just going to ask a government expert what the answer is and then we'll ban everything else How well is that worked out? I would argue not very well Now and you know, there are other examples of kind of collaborative hive mind Maybe I think we've talked about this in the past, you know in the early aughts people were still talking about the wisdom of crowds There was a popular book with that title now We know that crowds are actually mobs. So like you know, they're out and experts are back in or something But there's places like reddit, you know with subreddits where one of the things that's interesting about them You know, they have you can up vote and down vote comments images whatever information Which plays a role? But then also all of the editorial filtering is done very transparent or very openly and explicitly Um, and that seems to me to be preferential because you know robbie, it's interesting You know the world economic forum it seems to me that the world economic forum is less powerful It's certainly less In the media when it happens than it used to be 20 years ago people wouldn't shut the fuck up about it It seemed like it was growing now It's kind of a pathetic place where you know, they're you know, they're just pushing their seed oil and a fried bug You know agenda to fewer and fewer people to give a shit And I think they have less control over governments the eu isn't even what it was You know 20 years ago and stuff like that but You know the idea that all of this is disinformation because there is one truth This is a radical supposition that I think is false and this is the postmodern libertarian and me talking is that a lot of this stuff Um, there is not one right answer. Uh, there are many defensible answers and I will leave it, you know To other people to kind of suss through everything But it's like, you know to if if you really think that disinformation is anything you don't agree with You were born in the wrong century because more people have more access to more information and also to You know hold and to kind of share and distribute their worldview however fucking stupid you might find it And I think as libertarians we really should responsibly Be upholding that, you know, this is for me. I've always you know for over 20 years I've likened all of this to what happened in england in the 17th century When the church of england was essentially Disestablished as the one religion the one way you could practice christianity and hence everything Hence religion in england It you know it led to a flowering of all kinds of different religious sects And once they were granted legitimacy as long as they weren't violent You know, then you just had more and more different groups of people believing different things professing different things Trying to evangelize for that point of view and out of that comes freedom of conscience freedom of speech All of the things that I think 21st century libertarians and the vast majority of americans hold near and dear Which is that like you you get to live your life the way you want it to to the greatest degree possible You get to run your business the way you want to etc These are good values and so for me There's an epistemological issue with the way the world economic forum and a lot of experts Whether or not on the right or the left or even libertarians want to pronounce something as truth with a capital T And force you you know to eat it like it's Clash webs Clash swabs Future diet for the planet But this is like this seems to be the the current policy of the federal government. It's like they And it's just it just seems to get amped up every year I there I want to play this clip from vivic Murthy that's I think illustrates this and the surgeon general for those of you who are woefully and wonderfully Not into this stuff. Yes, and I'd like to get your you're actually both your reactions to it on this point of the way that Information kind of is this like creeping Concept that gets absorbed in all sorts of weird ways, but let's listen to murthy for a second I issued a surgeon generals advisory on the dangers of health misinformation Surgeon general advisories are reserved for urgent public health threats And while those threats have often been related to what we eat drink and smoke Today we live in a world where misinformation poses an imminent and insidious threat to our nation's health So, I mean he's he's defining misinformation quite literally as a public health threat. I mean his job is is public health Um, I guess my question is for you nick uh following up on what you just said You know, what is the way to is this just an inevitable creep? you know kind of cultural acceptance of Yeah, misinformation is something that has to be policed like from the top down and is there any way to You know keep that at bay. Yeah. Well, you know Uh last week we uh did a live stream with michael heist Of the mesas caucus and despite many disagreements, you know one thing that he talked about was, you know that culture um, you know culture precedes politics and whatnot and I think They sure to answer the way that we push back against this is ultimately a cultural one where We look at people like the vivik murthy. We look at people like joe biden We look at people like donald trump who tried very hard to You know jawbone and to scare various people into shutting up and doing his bidding in a particular way It's like that that does not work. That is so fundamentally un-american That there may be times when you really do have to regiment certain types of speech If there is some kind of massive Invasion of the united states if there is some kind of smallpox level You know black plague level threat for a short limited Clearly, you know term limited time period or something where we're suspending our normal rules Maybe but we have to push back against this kind of stuff and the one thing and I think You know robbie's reporting over the years and particularly the flip-flops on all kinds of covet Truths that were later revealed to be like. Yeah, that was a bad conjecture where that was something totally wrong And we knew all along is like experts have been doing a very good Uh, you know job certainly through the 20th century and into the 21st century of showing how bad they are at Understanding the thing the very thing they're trying to control But this is where I think a really robust culture of free speech and open expression Needs, you know, we need to be doing everything we can to build that up because in the end The laws, you know, the laws can be there or not but it's really the culture and the way people approach knowledge pluralism and You know and and the right to live and think the way that you want is what's going to make the biggest difference Let me pull up a couple questions from the audience here that Pertain to what we were just saying first just a Compliments and a five dollar donation from a j. Dizzle. Thank you a j and Matthew harvey says Nick for one is constantly talking about how libertarian Libertarianism is about more than just government and we should advocate for a culture of free speech I think that's what you were just doing there Um, and this is a question That I wonder if Robbie might address since we're talking about how we got here how this kind of acceptance of This top-down management of the flow of speech became so widespread Dan glenn asks was this being done in the last administration or since 2020? Right So most of the emails that I saw in this release, which I've termed the facebook files was from the bite administration They were from 2021, but we know that uh that The fbi was talking to twitter and warning them about You know so-called russian disinformation and election stuff that was going on under trump trump You know for all his complaints about the deep state did absolutely nothing nothing less than nothing He he complained about it in a useless way Um did not fire anyone, you know unless they really crossed him personally. That's what so um So sickly about the republican criticism of these institutions Is that it's only they only care if people are being spied on or their rights are being violated If it's like literally donald trump and then they you know lose their mind over it And we're saying like the patriot act should have never been signed stop reauthorizing it if you're so mad Stop stop and then and except for you know like a few brave republicans Who have been consistent on this stuff since the very beginnings before trump your massies your pauls etc Everyone else just just doesn't do anything to to to fix it because and then ultimately well I absolutely agree with with nick about fostering a culture of liberty and a free speech At the end of the day somebody's somebody's got to get elected and get rid of a couple like the tsa No amount of cultural change can get rid of the tsa should be gotten rid of tomorrow, right? It should just be shut down and someone government just has to like do that They just have to follow through on what is obvious I I think the communications policies at the fbi and the cdc for one should be revisited. I think so What do you have agents routinely look at twitter for like accounts making fun of them and ask twitter to take those down They do okay. Who did that? They should not have that job Dude, what do you think about the legislation? I think zack flashed a while ago, but uh this bill That would effectively from government interference act, which robbie references in his cover story, right? And is that is that a what is that robbie and is that a plausible remedy? Yeah, so that would do along the lines of what i'm saying it would treat uh government employees trying to jawbone private companies We lost robbie for a second there Um, yeah, I mean I was just as it was getting good I I was looking at the text of this a little bit earlier and um, it essentially it is It prevents it it prohibits government actors whether that is elected officials or people involved with agencies from demanding censorship on social media platforms so asking Just the kind of behavior that was shown in the Facebook emails The cdc would not be allowed to be involved in saying This kind of content is not allowed. Well, actually that's a question I have for robbie when he comes back is how much of that would be disallowed because they aren't In many cases specifically asking for specific accounts to be taken down in this case They're kind of in this ongoing consultation between them and facebook the twitter files It's a little more clear because they're specific accounts where the fbi is flagging them and saying look This violates your terms of service. You better take a closer look at that and that is what this bill is explicitly designed to Stop right? Um, so how do you how do you feel about that? I mean it's uh, I know we've had an ongoing conversation about this You're amenable to that in principle. Do you think? You know, which is not a bad, you know, I think that's totally defensible Um, but you know, do you think does this bill as written? Do you think it gets that job done? I mean my immediate reaction to it is well It sounds pretty good to me. Um, I You know, I haven't studied it in detail But uh the concept of doing something to try to rein this in I think would would be a positive step I those those issues like we were talking about like Well, what about just kind of even vaguer communications or these semi formal relationships as fact-checkers, uh between the social media companies and And government agencies. I don't know that that would be covered or that by that bill or that that even could be covered legislatively so right at some point I think, you know, we we should support Things that that improve the situation even if they don't solve that anything everything But uh, you know the the real solution and this is the the drama. I'm always banging is uh technological like We've got facebook. We've got twitter But the important thing is that there's always channels that are relatively unrestrained that those always exist And yeah more people over the years have been migrating to Services like signal or telegram where right a little bit more Decentralized I'm now on, you know jack uh, uh noster, which is this new decentralized Um communications protocol where your your your tweets or you know, your posts are kind of just relayed around A hundred different places. So there's no single point of failure Like those are the kinds of systems that ultimately safeguard against a you know, totalitarian crackdown on speed Yeah, I mean, I agree with that but they also I mean if the if the uh means of communication is decentralized says the audience right so um, oh, yeah, I you know, I I mean I I agree with you completely and you know jack dorsi again I think is the most interesting, uh, you know billionaire or or Let's put it in less loaded terms a tech founder the most visionary in terms of wanting an internet of internets, you know You know a twitter of twitter is that so there's no way to shut it all down But you know, what we're talking about here is when an audience gets big enough That's when the government is going to try and do something and I'm I agree You know broadly speaking there are rules in place against uh in all sorts of contexts You know where if you work in a congressman's office or something you can't do electioneering You can't you know out of your main account. You're not allowed to do that You know people who work at state universities know that they're not allowed to use state You know listservs that are within the university setting for political campaigning and things like that There are rules against that they kind of work people still do it. I I'm going to come back to this question of you know, how do we You know, how do how do we create a culture? That does not allow this so that there is a you know, the breaks that are put on this are not legalistic, but rather You know kind of uh etiquette based almost where it's like no that is considered poor form if you're in government I mean, I guess I want something more than that, but it's also, you know, the more and more that you You know the more regulations you put on speech in any given context It seems to me then you create, you know more lawsuits you create more Jesuitical kind of analysis of everything and then we spend all of our time You know kind of doing compliance work rather than just getting on with whatever conversation we're trying to have That's why that's why it's it's crucial I think for us libertarians to be insistent that any such regulations be Firmly on the government side of the equation Yeah, so that's what was you know immediately appealing about that particular act as it seemed to Be on it seemed to be restraining government officials and not necessarily imposing anything on the private companies because they need to be free to experiment with this stuff And it's it's a real concern that a lot of the momentum and kind of political energy is towards the opposite where okay, we are going to you know the Joe Biden and the democrats want to use section 230 to make The the social media companies bend the need to us So the conservatives need to get in and use section 230 to make them moderate things to our liking that seems to be kind of the back and forth that's going on right now and and that's extremely destructive and Let's yeah, let's hopefully robby is going to join us. We got word that his computer died But um, and let's turn to Two supreme court cases that are challenging section 230 in a second But I want to read a couple of comments In our readers because we're trying to be interactive here spark, which uh writes Let's be real conspiracy theory just means we'll have proof soon at this point. Yeah, maybe Uh, what are the penalties for abuse of power by government actors asked to v news? That's a good question Yeah, well this new this new bill might be something that could actually Uh, create some of that leverage and again, I don't know that this if this specific legislation is right or not But you know something that's targeting government actors. I think is certainly what should interest us Yeah, matthew buttz Comes up with the canard by reason. I thought facebook was a private company that can do what they want lmao Uh, you know, I think we've covered this this is you know I I don't understand when people get on this hobby horse because it's like, okay, so you want it to be A government regulated utility then or a common carrier or something like that and it's like come on You know, uh, I don't think that's good You know and and and these two things are not You know exactly at odds what we're dealing with is a shift in understanding how power operates Which is that you know, it is no longer the sledgehammer It is you know, it's the sweet talker You know the the iron fist and a velvet club half the time or it's a common You know, it's it's a common kind of growth of interest We're assuming that facebook's interests and the government's interests are wildly at odds And I I think we would need to prove that in any case Yeah, and I'll I'll also just say that We do need to accept on some level that a private company is And the people who run it are going to do things and make decisions that we don't like and that's kind of like The price of freedom and you can't uh legislate That that that's why I take uh exception to the idea that you're going to use section 230 or something like that to kind of force Your interpretation of like, uh a free speech platform on on everyone That that's not the way to do it the way to do it is by You know gravitating towards the platform that You know suits suits your needs the best and and supporting that you know We talked about shifting the culture one person who's doing that right now is ilan musk with his twitter takeover Which I've been generally supportive of not I think ilan musk is you know doing everything right but at least he has kind of shaken things up and uh, he's he's uh shaking those assumptions that we were talking about earlier that everything has to be Managed so strictly and that uh misinformation is this problem that can only be solved by Automated moderation at scale. He's kind of questioning some of some of those assumptions We don't know how it's all going to shake out, but we want to that's where we want our implementation to play out I think and yeah, yeah again with twitter I mean everybody was bitching and moaning about it before he took over they're bitching and moaning about it now I have to say and I'm a very heavy user of twitter. I've spent a lot of time there I've built up a lot of presence there. I have a hundred and 15 000 followers or something insane I do not notice any difference Seriously, I mean like maybe on the margins because a couple of people are back who had been banned But you know, it's like I either read them or I don't I mean but functionally It's exactly pretty much the the same as it was before So, uh, you know, and I'm there for the lowest mostly looks like we got Robbie back. Let's can you hear me? I can yes, we can Uh, and you know, we can't even see where they roughed you up. So That's good I think uh, you know the old timer still got it, but uh, bouchie was kicking your shin so hard. You almost felt it um, let's we have moved into A point now where we're going to talk about the two supreme court cases that are under Under, uh, you know Consideration thank you this term twitter ink versus tamna and Gonzales versus google each of these cases. This is somewhat related to what we're talking about here because they threaten Uh, you know section 230 which is the law dating back to the mid 90s that allows Interactive computer services such as isp such as websites such as platforms, you know, whether it's yelp or facebook or youtube to Moderate some content without having to do all the content You know, they don't they can pick and choose what they choose to moderate or an allow or disallow And it also indemnifies them from most third-party content. So, you know, if a user writes a defamatory review of a restaurant on yelp or on google maps or something Those those companies are not on the hook for it There are things that are still illegal and that the platform can be held responsible for but section 230 is considered the internet's first amendment It's a 27 words that made the internet the internet it Effectively undergirds all of what we call social media or web 2.0 for sure Robbie, what do you think about these cases? They both deal with things where claiming that The different platforms twitter and google did not Did not curate their content enough so that terrorist acts happened because people were exposed to terroristic thinking And videos and content on these platforms You know, what's your sense of these particular cases and the fate of section 230 in the contemporary judicial and political climate? Sure, everyone who Loves free speech and wants the platforms to be more open environments for free speech should Really be hoping for section 230 to survive the way it is Should be rooting, you know for these for these Lawsuits not to cause us to destroy The beautiful thing that we have warts and all because imagine. I mean we're complaining about moderation decisions that were made I would argue Made a lot at the behest of government But this is what they did under the current regime Imagine if they were had more liability for what is considered bad speech on the platforms Imagine how much more censorship? How much more restriction? How much more silencing of important conversations would occur under a regime where facebook and twitter and google Uh, we're worried about liability for what anyone says on the platform like this It's so obvious that this would not benefit contrarians Conservatives libertarians I mean, it's so, uh, Characteristic of the horribly misguided republican approach to handling these issues that it almost baffles the mind I mean, I I try to say to republicans You know elizabeth warren supports this plan. You know, she wants to get rid of section 230 Probably not because that will lead to a proliferation of conservative speech, right? It's just so it's not it's not thought through at all like the immediate ramification Of making the platforms more liable for speech that appears on them would be a vast vast silencing That's just that's that's obvious um If you just care about I guess like making life more difficult for facebook and twitter And you don't really care about free speech. Maybe you would support this I the only argument against section 230 that I I have some Understanding of or sympathy for they'll say look. This is a tremendous protection for these companies I think it's one that makes sense that they're not Responsible for you know, if you libel someone on in a facebook comment facebook's not responsible That makes sense It is true that that is not a protection That it doesn't work that way for traditional public non web environment publishers, right? The the book publisher is more responsive for the books. They choose it's a little bit different honestly, though, I would say we should then We should make the policies that apply to traditional non web publishers more like section 230 would probably be My answer to that rather than make everyone more scared of libel Like that doesn't create a good free speech environment And in fact other countries even peer countries in the western world australia for one that have uh that are more in favor of The default more to privacy versus free speech there. You can't say anything critical of a powerful person You'll be sued out of existence. It's a major problem for newspapers. So let's let's not go in that direction It just it doesn't make any sense to me. What about you zack? Do you uh? fear the outcomes of these cases and you know, there's that quote from a previous Ruling or writing by Clarence thomas where he has, you know, he has signaled very clearly He thinks 230 is a bad idea and that there needs to be more regulation of online speech Whatever, you know, I do you think section 230 can go Into that good night or should go should it be reformed? You know, are you worried about the outcomes in these cases? I am worried about the outcomes and I share Both robby's concern and kind of bewilderment that this is like the strategy because It's kind of premised on the idea of well We'll also somehow control the levers of power Indefinitely and like use it the way that it should be used and I think libertarians are very attuned to the sense that that does not ever work out And the the biggest concern I have about section 230 is the way it's continually leverage to possibly job-own these companies into compliance and It to that end I would support Uh, you know, I maybe there's there could be efforts to fortify it Like I think we should be going in the opposite direction Fist of etiquette a regular commenter here It kind of summarizes it nicely nice private company you have there be a shame if someone over-regulated it That is exactly the tone that these past few years have conveyed to me Um, and so if anything, I would like to see it fortified and protected. Um, and then again We have to have the technological solutions as well that are kind of resilient against Whatever how ever this plays out because if if you know If if if this effort succeeds Um, there will be uh networks that survive it. Uh, I'm optimistic about that Yeah, I agree with that and you know with these two court cases in particular One of the things that bothers me beyond this section 230 question is that both of them are premised Uh, you know, they they were, um, you know launched by families who had children adult children who were killed or teenage and adult children Who were killed in terrorist attacks? Not in the united states by the way, but they're saying, you know, google twitter facebook Didn't police and regulate terrorist content on their website It's not even clear that they can show the particular terrorists who killed their family You know watched, you know, they started out watching a uh rick and morty video on youtube and then suddenly ended up You know in an isis training camp, you know, that's how I was Yeah, no, but but that mentality which also underwrites this whole concept of stochastic terrorism and whatnot Is a refraction of an insane Stupid and thoroughly refuted argument in the 1990s that was leveled against uh at that time The internet but also cable tv and whatnot, which was that somehow Exposure to fantasy violence and fantasy sexual imagery and whatnot had immediate and obvious And unidirectional real world experience you watch violence on tv You go out and you become violent that is not true in the social scientific literature. Robbie. I know in tech panic Uh, your your recent book you talked about other studies and things like that like this whole idea First off that somehow youtube is funneling people Into you know, they're you know, they're secret vertical of isis training videos and decapitation, you know How-to videos and things is just wrong But that mentality That you are what you watch and you become programmed by the media that you take in Is so flawed and is so anti-freedom That is a really really big thing. This is one of those arguments I thought that had been uh, you know, kind of like had a stake driven through its heart like, you know, Dracula Um, but it's back Um, and that's a part from section 230 But you see this start to come up when people who want to be in charge of things Feel like they're losing control. They start trotting out these arguments This happened in the 90s as the internet and as cable tv proliferated People in charge people like janet rena bill clinton's attorney general bill clinton hillary clinton Did this, you know, they wanted to control the discourse and they knew they couldn't so then they started invoking these phantasms Of you know of media that like essentially programs us as robots to do whatever the Whatever bad person they think is in charge to do We got to be fighting that as well as section, you know challenges to section 230 because it's not simply the internet We have is the best internet we can have and it's not, you know But it's definitely true if you take section 230 away and don't replace it with a better or more robust Defense of wide open speech We're going to be living in a much crappier world than we live in now. That's for sure Social media companies are under tremendous attack from right left and center, uh, you know, we keep it's exactly as you described Dracula has returned from the dead or maybe he's already dead. He gets out of his coffin again. I don't know It's all repeating repetitions of That argument actually you turn me on to this one, nick the hidden the hidden persuaders the advanced packard thing where In the 1960s this psychologist who wrote about how advertising, you know There's subliminal messages and advertising and we're all going to be, you know Zombies no longer in control of our actions because of that development and and the social dilemma Which is I think the most like Propagandistic film I have ever seen in my life Makes the same argument for what social media is doing now where there's so much worry about the harms to kids Which and look it is not that there is no downsides of social media It is certainly not the case that no one anywhere has made their lives worse or has made their parent It has many people have have made their paranoia worse or their anxiety worse or something just like Gambling is a big problem for addicts. Most people can go to the casino and have a good time and it's fine some people end up abusing whatever it is and but we don't make Policy for everyone or at least we shouldn't I think in a very Strictly libertarian sense you don't ban things for the entire Population because some people have had a struggle with it and this is so the case with social media even with young people Most young people are using it to communicate with their friends to express themselves creatively To network and find communities that were not available to them. They are they're Finding like-minded communities around their interests. I have used social media in this way. I'm connected to so many people I would have never known all across the world who like the same video games I do or cartoon shows or whatever or political ideologies, you know Conservatives and and and also many progressives act like we'd all be better We'd never had these smartphones and you could just sit in your village and you would only know like your neighbors and you Would you know instinctively hate and fear anyone who looks different like from you or doesn't think the way you do Like that's how most human beings lived for all of society And I don't think it's an improvement And I actually don't think like 98 of the people who say this is so great What actually enjoy living this way and try to try to take their smartphones away Try to take amazon away from them. See see if they would actually like it a lot better I'm guessing no the other thing about that is that even if there were Some improvements that there's it's it's kind of a fantasy like there's no going back and you know, there's All way with any technological tool Any new medium it's going to create new effects and new phenomena that we have to adapt to and that is I think what is is happening right now is there's been this shift in how we all consume information And it's created conditions that allow new things to happen that that were not possible before Donald trump might be one of those things but there's lots of uh, you know Good social phenomena that have emerged out of this Robbie mentioning different communities that have emerged solely that would not exist Except for the online, you know ecosystem And we just have to have a more mature recognition that All tools are double edged and sometimes you have to use the tool that is causing some problems somewhere to also solve that same problem and uh, it requires some You know experimentation and unfortunately failure in certain realms to get there What one of the comments down here kind of, uh struck me Anthony priestess said youtube is prompting me to get the latest information from the cdc about COVID-19 Green face smiling So that's like we get this all the time on our youtube videos here If we touch a controversial topic, there will be like an auto-generated wikipedia Entry beneath it saying get the facts about this topic and as a someone who puts stuff up on youtube I have you're a problem with that honestly like I am as long as it's it's evenly applied Uh, and that those are the kinds of technological solutions. I'm talking about where you're using this ability to keep layering information on top of information, uh, you know, we that we touched on, you know birdwatch or community notes earlier um That that's the beauty of the digital sphere is you can Meet bad information with more information and I I just hope we can get back to That idea like as a culture that that is a good idea and that is the way it's a combat bad ideas I think that uh, you know as we're gonna wrap up in a second But you know for me this always comes back to the point about media literacy You know that in the end we're individuals and whether we are up to the challenge We ultimately are left holding the bag for our own lives and our own thoughts and our own actions and that All the experts in the world and you know, we can access them more now You know for 200 a year you can buy like two master class passes or whatever So you can get you know the greatest minds in tv telling you how to write sitcoms all of this kind of shit It's like it comes down to you know, you you have to be responsible for Educating yourself and checking your bias and kind of learning more and better and all of that kind of stuff Robbie just has a final note and we'll we'll give you a final word to sum up a little bit I mean, I think what your work did, you know the cover story of the next issue of reason magazine If you're listening go to reason.com slash subscribe You know, it's like 15 20 bucks a year. You get Access to our archives all of this kind of stuff. It's for 11 issues. It's wonderful But you know both in the cover story that's coming up as well as in the piece that you just put up today I mean you help us Understand how media operates now and how not just media but information how power operates It is not, you know, the it's not the bludgeon. It's not the sledgehammer It's a lot kind of softer and kind of gooier and omnidirectional than that Including the ways that private actors can influence government But you know in the end, what's the final I guess to to wrap up What's the final takeaway you want readers of the of your coverage of the facebook files to really kind of make sure that they You know take heart about and really think about going forward Sure. I think if you share my concern and maybe you don't but I hope you do that the combination of constant messaging from government health bureaucrats And then and also actually FBI agents on separate subjects But government actors to private social media companies at the same time that political figures were threatening these companies very explicitly the combined impact of that Which resulted in a vast restriction in how you could discuss the covid 19 pandemic Is concerning and Potentially at least maybe more than potentially violates the first amendment at least violates the spirit of the first amendment I don't think it's appropriate to have closed off the debate about mass and even about vaccines the way that they did It's much bigger and broader than we could have ever imagined And if we don't like it and we want to do something about it We have to change the government's actual practices because punishing the social media companies will end up getting us in a much worse place I think that's so clear and something republicans especially need to listen to as they You know take over parts of the government and plot how we're going to respond um We need to train our You know train your fire put your fire on big government big tech has been a problem but mostly in its Subordinate behavior to big government and we we don't want to get rid of Social media companies entirely. We don't want to break them all up We don't want to destroy them because at the end of the day We're living through the greatest time for distributing Libertarian and provocative and alternative ideas that have ever existed. We need these platforms They have been good for our messages in a way the traditional media or the elite media the mainstream media that would never Let you listen to these messages has not in fact not only would they never have let you listen to these messages They are right now working in tandem with the forces. I just described They're the ones who most want to suppress Social media or to encourage social media to to take away your microphone. So Robbie Talk a little bit about the hill And rising you co-host to show there every day. What is that? What's the best way for people to check that out? Absolutely. It's a daily show Morning show that airs on youtube for the hills youtube channel. It's called rising. I co-host it Usually with brianna joy gray who's someone of the left. So it's a little bit of people from alternative perspectives having debates on On the issues of the day and on the news. It's a lot of fun. I love doing it I bring on a lot of reason people actually today we had on both Both liz's of reason. Uh, this week we did we had on lis wolf earlier and we had on elizabeth nullan brown today so i'm i'm using it to uh Get to call attention to the great work that my colleagues at reason are doing as well Thank you. Uh, zack. Have you been on rising? I have Yes, there's a wonderful, uh invitation. Thank you, robby and also thank you to norm van duker for the ten dollar Donation on the way out. Uh, you cannot outsource your responsibility for what happens in your life to a government agencies Says norm. Uh, I think that's what we're all saying here. So thank you Uh, and i'll also just point out very quickly. Uh, our best buyers are uh, social media Maven, uh, rights. Can you please address all the people defending this people say They're private companies but colluding with government's silence dissent isn't private company behavior It's communist behavior I actually think technically that would be fascist behavior because the government does not own the means of production but I think we've covered that Transparency is good transparency is out I think the remain Serious questions about whether or not facebook twitter, etc are doing What they you know, they agree with the government and they're happy to carry water or not. We've discussed that but Knowing what's going on and that's certainly the big takeaway from uh, robby's work Today and in the next issue of reason zack, uh, our next live stream will be next thursday at school choice week We're gonna have robber pundicio on he's one of the most interesting education analysts who Is just a Phenomenal out of the box sinker. So we're gonna have him next week. Uh, zack, what else are you working on? You have been a, uh, you know, just a fire hose of fantastic documentary work at reason Reasons video platform or channel at youtube reason tv. Uh, what have you done recently? What do you got in the pipeline? uh, recently I I put out a Essay kind of a video essay a video op-ed kind of summarizing The twitter files and what I think that Libertarians might take away from that. So if you're you were interested in this conversation That might be interesting to you In the future. I'm uh near future. I'm headed to texas to work on a documentary About homelessness and solutions to homelessness. It's an issue. I've covered many times over the years When I lived in california and now I'm going to texas to look at some different approaches Yeah, so go to youtube.com slash reason tv for our videos. We've got live We've got verticals for live stream. We've got shorts. We've got videos, etc It's a great place to go robbie Suave reason author most recently of texanic co-host of the of rising every day on the hill's youtube channel Thank you for joining reason My pleasure. Thank you guys so much and zack wise miller. Thank you again for Co-hosting this live stream and putting together all of our clips And again, I really want to recommend people go check out his work You can also get all of our work at reason.com google around look around for that, but it's great stuff Thank you zack. Thank you, nick