 The revelations, the bombshell, the biggest story since, I don't know, since Watergate, not, not, the biggest story since Watergate is not the Washington Post story about the systematic constant lying to the American people over the last 20 years about the war in Afghanistan and all the kids killed there for nothing. That's not the biggest story. That wasn't the equivalent of Watergate. That wasn't, you know, the bombshell because nobody cared. Nobody literally cared. It was a brilliant reporting. It was really excellent piece, a big study, interviews and transcripts of interviews from the decision makers in Afghanistan, some of the most damning, damning material we've ever seen under nature and the functioning of the American government and how much it cares or not cares about the American people. And I did a show on it. I've mentioned it a couple of times since then. Nobody cares. I mean, I don't know if you care, but nobody out there cares. Nobody in the media cares. Nobody, nobody covered it. Nobody did anything. Washington Post has put out the whole thing and a special supplement. It's all out there. Anybody can read it. It really is really good reporting. But Facebook, every news media outlet covered it. It was splashed across everything that I looked at today. It was number one in Google News all day. And it's been that way for a week, but particularly today because of the congressional hearings, not even to say what happened. Anyway, so this was the top. So what do we learn? What do we learn from this, from these renovations? It turns out that things that none of us knew. Facebook treats influences on the platform, influences people who have a lot of following differently than they treat the average person. Shocking. Just shocking. It's surprising, right? Facebook is having a hard time facilitating healthy conversations between strangers on the internet, particularly ones who disagree about politics. I didn't know that. Did you know that? It's hard. By the way, I'm taking a lot of this just because he put it so beautifully and brilliantly together. I'm taking a lot of this from Mike Solana. I've recommended his substack before. I recommend it again. It's called Pirate Wires. He writes a lot about tech, about Silicon Valley. I generally agree with what he writes. It's not always, but I generally agree with what he writes. He works for a venture capital firm. Peter Teals, I think, venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. I think that's right. Anyway, he's often brilliant and always very good and always thought provoking and stimulating. But the revelation they made the most news, other than polarization and I don't know the fact that, you know, shockingly, did you know this? I don't know if you knew this, that Facebook actually encourages, you know, it encourages engagement. It feeds you stuff based on engagement. Shocking. Shocking. And oh, the most shocking thing of all that came out of these hearings, they're coming out of all the documents, just truly astounding for an American corporation. This is truly, truly unbelievable, but Facebook tries to maximize profits. I know. I mean, by what right? By what right? Does it place profits as its primary motivation, shareholder? What maximization? I don't get it. I mean, where or where did America go wrong where its big businesses are trying to make money? It's just horrific and shocking. But the most important revelation and the one that I think has caught, you know, the attention of most of the media and most of the people in Congress and everybody else. We'll talk about Congress in a minute. It turns out that Instagram is making your teenage daughter want to kill herself. Well, not every teenage daughter, a small, tiny fraction of a percent of teenage girls. And, you know, we don't really have any evidence that it's actually making them want to kill themselves. But it turns out that Facebook's own research team has discovered this and Monk Sakaba buried it. And hey, this is the new tobacco. Literally, Facebook is killing our daughters and it knows it and it's hiding the facts from us. I mean, it really is unbelievable. So let's take the political side of this first. Most of the criticism here of Facebook is that they're not limiting the speech, limiting the communications of right wingers enough. They're not restricting right wingers enough. I mean, Sakaba basically did not have the ability to prevent the Capitol riot and didn't. You know, he just let it happen. And the Capitol riot was told because they planned on Facebook. And generally, Sakaba is a lying conspiracy theories. He's allowing lies, political radicals, political nutcases. He's not only allowing them to post, but he's because they get, you know, posts that reflect anger and conspiracies and people expressing strong emotions because those posts get a lot of engagement. Those posts rise up and they get viewed by more people and more people get engaged. So Sakaba is responsible for spreading conspiracy theory, right wing, crazy ideology in the world. Not only that, but during the Myanmar genocide of the Muslims in Myanmar, it was, they used Facebook to inspire the genocide. So therefore, Facebook is responsible because the algorithms, I guess, encourage this. At least that's the claim. Indeed, one article in Atlantic suggests that we should view Facebook as a hostile foreign power and treat it like a hostile foreign power. It's basically a country, a massive country, bigger than China. It's got 2.7 billion users, bigger than China and India combined. And we should deal with it as a foreign power. You know how you deal with foreign powers who are your enemy? You can imagine. All of these problems, political radicalization, polarization, political confrontation, fear, emotionalism online, shockingly, I didn't know this. Did you guys know this? Facebook exacerbates that. Yeah, it does. And the solution is, well, we'll get to some of that later. I mean, what is it here that we don't know? All this political stuff we know, there's nothing new here. We've been talking about political radicalization as a consequence of Facebook and the algorithms for a long time. But many have been complaining about the fact that Facebook is trying to, quote, do something about it. But you don't like what they're doing about it. So you want to regulate Facebook so that they stop doing restricting, let's say, right-wing populism and right-wing conspiracy theories. But that would be, but you want them to stop doing that, but then they'd be exacerbating this stuff even more so. It was interesting to see Ted Cruz and Senator Lee at the hearing today try to support their anti-Facebook agenda and try to shift it to political free speech as if it's political broadly or caring about the children when all it is is a naked power grab and an attempt to bring controls, political controls over Facebook. I mean, we know the left wants to do that. You should have heard Senator Bloomberg's opening. It was just terrific. I think he was the state attorney general for Connecticut, and then he did some horrible, horrible things to businessmen. Now he's brought that same attitude to the Senate. Yeah. Is it a surprise to anybody that anger produces engagement, that social media is incentivized to highlight that anger, that the more times you click like or share on a post that expresses anger, that is going to expand its reach and that all of that will create more animosity and more polarization? Is Facebook responsible for conspiracy theories of the people who start and promote and support and like and share conspiracy theories responsible? I mean, this is a real problem on Facebook. I'm not, I don't want to minimize it. And this is, I want this to be the context of our discussion today. If you can hold this as a context, what Facebook is trying to do is really, really, really hard. Generally, the Internet has created a lot of new issues that we have never dealt with. The technology has never dealt with. It's created the ability to connect between people at the speed of light, fast on anything, anywhere. It's created the potential of misinformation on scales that were unimaginable even 30, 40 years ago. It's created the potential and the reality of polarization of people living within bubbles only listening to their peers. Now, arguably, all of media does that. Certainly the biased mainstream media lives in its own bubble, creates its own bubble. People who read that bubble, reinforce that bubble, send it to their own friends and everybody reads them. And then there's alternative media, however you want to define it. And it creates its little bubble and everybody reads it. What Facebook and social media does is amplifies the effects of both those. But it's not like the Internet has created something new that didn't exist before. It's not like misinformation didn't exist before. It's not like political bias didn't exist before. It's not even like conspiracy theories didn't exist before. I mean, the truth of conspiracy theory by 9-11 existed before social media. And conspiracy theories about the murder of JFK existed before the existence of the Internet. And conspiracies about the elders of Zion existed before anybody even dreamed of an Internet. And one could argue that some of these conspiracy theories, certainly conspiracy theories about Jews drinking the blood of Christian children on certain holidays, those conspiracy theories existed before the printing press. So, and they were prevalent, witches, witchcraft, the whole idea of witches and witchcraft and the biggest conspiracy theory of all religion has existed and proliferated and dominated the world for a very, very long time. But the conspiracy theories, yes, I mean, the Internet makes it worse in some sense. And we can see the political culture in the United States deteriorate dramatically. At the same time as the rise of social media, correlation does not equal causation, but they are correlated and they might be a causal relationship there. We don't know there isn't. But let's blame Facebook because they're big, they're successful, we hate success and we drive much of this. And God forbid, they are really, really, really profitable. They make a lot of money. How dare they? Again, there are real issues here. There are real issues regarding privacy and what Facebook does with the data. And there are real issues we, as users of Facebook, should really, really care about and should demand to know more about how Facebook uses our data. If not, we should leave. But these are all issues between us and Facebook. The woman who got these thousands of documents is a thief. I hope Facebook sues her. We know she won't come under criminal prosecution, but she's a thief. She's stolen private documents. She's stolen information that was not public. If she traded an information, she would be prosecuted as an insider trader, but she is trading on that information. She's going to make a fortune as a public speaker. If you've seen her, she looks good and she's a good speaker and she's going to make a career out of this on private information that's not hers to give that she stole, stole from Facebook. What Facebook is trying to do to figure out what information to serve to whom, under what circumstances, in what order, when, during the day, how it's presented, all of that, is a stunningly complex issue. It's an issue that all social media is grappling with, is struggling with. There's no obvious answer. Should they allow everybody to post? Should they eliminate some post? Should they ban some people or not? None of this is obvious. Nobody's ever done this before. I said this years ago about Facebook. They're trying to navigate a very complicated issue. And the issue of people responding emotionally and people reinforcing their emotions of other people and all of that, that just happens. It's how people behave, unfortunately, when they're not being rational. Facebook's not responsible for that, even if it amplifies it. So yeah, it's struggling to navigate the complexities of the world in which they live and the world in which, to some extent, they created. And if you have a better algorithm, a better solution, go for it. You know, the whistleblower's revolutionary solution is, instead of ranking the post based on engagement and sending them out to users based on engagement, they should be based on chronology. But then I'd be flooded with stuff that doesn't interest me. Is that really what people want? But no, the whole point of these hearings is not to give people what they want, but to give people what the whistleblower wants, what the central planner wants, what Senator Cruz wants, what Senator Blumenthal wants, what the Democrats and Republicans together want us to know or not to know. They want to define what's mainstream, what's acceptable, what's okay for us to engage in. They want the algorithm. They want to tinker with the algorithm. They don't even know what an algorithm is, but they want to tinker with the algorithm. They want to control us. Facebook is a means to that end. They realize the power that Zuckerberg has, and they want it. You see this, particularly somebody like Ted Cruz, and they couch it now. They couch it now in the name of saving the children. So what is the so-called the internal study at Facebook that was such a bombshell, such a revelation? What does it actually say? So you can find this or see journals, publish this. It's a PowerPoint. It turns out that 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram, which is of course owned by Facebook, made them feel worse. All right. So 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. Okay. I mean, let's be real here. There are real issues that our teenagers are facing. The real issues of depression, the real issues of alienation, the real issues of second-handedness, looking at other people, focusing on other people, but the real issues that every teenager faces of trying to fit in and trying to understand, trying to find one's own identity, define one's own sexuality, know who you are, discover who you are. You've all been teenagers. You all know this. We all went through it. And one of the challenges of modern society is that when we attain a certain level of wealth, when life is not just about survival, people have time to think about, well, what's my body like as compared to other bodies? Am I sexually appealing enough as compared to the latest, I don't know, Playboy, Penthouse, whatever the thing is today, model that's on Instagram, or as compared to the other girls in my class that are posting bikini shots of themselves on Instagram. Now, you've got to ask where the parents, given that these kids are putting it up on Instagram, why aren't the parents have any control over that? But yeah, teenage girls, probably more than boys, focus way too much of their time, energy, thoughts, focus on their bodies. Now, I said yesterday, was it yesterday, Sunday, that you should care about being healthy and fit. But you can control the genetic side of it. You can control the particular body type you have. You can control, you know, what's nature's provided through your genetics. I mean, you can have plastic surgery to change it, if you really want. But look, before there was Instagram, there was the Kardashians, right? Everybody wants to look like Kim Kardashian. There was Baywatch, remember Baywatch? There was television more broadly. There were magazines with all the big models and big movie stars. There was Teen Vogue. Remember all the accusations that get Teen Vogue and how it made girls feel body shame or whatever? I mean, this is not a new problem that Instagram created. This is a problem that exists and a problem that is exacerbated by the easy availability of Instagram. And now, what Instagram, the difference between Instagram and let's say Teen Vogue, is that Instagram allows you to compare your body, or the way you look, to other girls in your class, other girls in your class. So it's become a lot more personal, in a sense. Yeah. These are all issues. These are all issues that we probably don't, as individuals, as family members, as mothers, as fathers, we probably don't do enough to deal with without teenage kids. And there's no question. These are the things that we talked about, need to be discussed within the family, outside of the family, in society. But this idea that somehow Facebook or Instagram is responsible for this, and somehow that the government should have some kind of say about what happens on Instagram, is absurd and nuts. I mean, parents need to step in. But it's not just Instagram. I mean, I don't know if you guys are being on the internet recently. I mean, porn is available. I mean, and the most weird, disgusting, you know, nutty pornography is available like that online to any kid, which is horrible. Which is horrible. And parents need to step in and control parents, not the government, not Facebook, not Instagram, parents. But it's not just teenage goals. We live in a society where people are constantly looking at what the neighbor has, how the neighbor lives, what the neighbor gets, where people are constantly thinking, oh, I need to live up to their standards. This is not unique to children. It's unique to our culture. And there's something devastatingly wrong about our culture. It's a culture of second-handed people. It's a culture of collectivists. It's a culture that doesn't take their own life seriously. It's a culture that doesn't, is not selfish enough, selfish in the rational, long-term sense. It's a culture that doesn't think enough, doesn't use reason enough. It's a culture that's jealous and envious. That's the problem. Not Facebook. It's us, like always. It's not immigrants. It's not China. It's not elites. It's us. Look around you. You're the problem, unless you're acting, unless you're doing something to make your life different, to make your life better, to make your life meaningful, and to protect your kids. So take this report about suicide, about the girls feeling worse about this because of Instagram. Okay, so they do. So we now have feelings. You know, this is exacerbating feelings of inadequacy among teenage girls. Okay. But now there's a leap that the media is all engaged in. And the leap is between that and suicide. And then the Senate hearing that kept being repeated over and over and over again. This idea that Facebook is encouraging kids to commit suicide. Yeah, it's depressing to compare yourself to the most beautiful girl in the class. I mean, Janissian, I don't know, how many of you remember Janissian? Janissian wrote a song about this before Facebook, before the internet. A song that I fell in love with when I was 15. I think most 15-year-olds fell in love with, unless you were the handsomest prettiest girl in the class. And that was at 17. If you've never heard the song at 17, go check it out on Spotify or on Apple Music or something. Right? I don't have the words here. But basically, it expresses exactly this. You know, at 17, I learned the truth that something, something, you know, basically, the pretty girls get the guy and it's rough. Yeah, it's rough. So it's rough to be a teenage girl. And we live in a culture that makes it rougher and that's sad. So it turned out that when they did surveys, that when they did, sorry, when they did focus groups at Facebook, Instagram employees, heard directly from teens who were struggling, quote, I felt like I had to fight to be considered pretty or even visible, one team said, of experience on Instagram. Again, is that an experience unique to Instagram? Or is that an experience unique to teens? Isn't that every teen movie ever made about the kids who feel invisible can be seen, unappreciated for their mind? It turns out that according to the research that Facebook did, Facebook did this research because it cares, shockingly. Among teens experiencing suicidal ideation. So this idea of suicide, not the actual act, the idea of suicide, 6% of Americans cited Instagram as the first place they consider itself home. Now, did Instagram cause them to feel this way? Did it exacerbate it? Did it? What is the cause of a relationship? We don't know. At least in the documents that were revealed by the whistleblower, we have no indication. So yeah, there's a toxic culture in the world in which we live. And teens are responding to that and some of them responding to it horrifically with suicide. And yes, many of them spend a lot of time on places like Instagram. All right, now what? Well, the conclusion is, if you listen to our amazing journalists and our unbiased media, the basic conclusion is that kills are being killed by Mark Zuckerberg. He's in the business of killing girls. By the way, boys who nobody talks about in God Facebook, maybe because Facebook didn't do a study about boys or maybe boys are not that into Instagram, interestingly enough, Instagram is primarily girls. YouTube, what you guys are on is dominantly men, right? 90%, 94% of the people watching the Iran book show on YouTube, amen. Not true on Facebook, not true on other platforms, but on YouTube it's men. Instagram mainly women, just a statistical fact interpreted how you want. Well, it turns out that boys commit suicide at about four times the rate girls do. They don't have that much exposure to Instagram. They spend a lot of time on YouTube. It's probably those cat videos that are killing them or maybe the boys are spending time on porn sites, which is probably what boys are doing and feeling inadequate as a consequence of that and committing suicide. Four times more often than teenage girls. But the real question is, why? Why are so many people? Why are so many young people? Why are so many of our kids committing suicide? Is it because of dysfunctional families? Is it because of lack of friends and social struggles or romantic crushes gone to miss? Is it because bad sexual experiences? Is it because of school? School. I wonder if school makes you want to kill yourself. Maybe. Why don't we have the Secretary of Education or school boards out there explaining why there's so many suicides? Because I bet you if you asked teenagers, does high school make you want to kill yourself, you'd get a lot of yeses, a lot of yeses. I mean, I interviewed Brad Thompson once about what school does to kids. Public schools in particular, I mean public schools, not every school, but the boredom, the drudgery, the nihilism, the the the the anti-objectivity that it uncockates. And now we've got, you know, critical race theory or whatever imposed on all that, the guilt of being white, I guess. Schools. But no, no, no, that's complicated. That's a complex issue. We can't go there. What are we going to do about it anyway? Let's go after Facebook instead. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching. Show your appreciation. 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