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Sept. 30, 2023 - Blood Money
54:13
Jason Fyk - "Why I’m suing Facebook and the US Government." Blood Money - Episode 16
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Hi, my name is Jason Fick.
I'm the founder of the Social Media Freedom Foundation 501c3 nonprofit.
In 2018, I filed a case against Facebook, and I've taken that all the way to the Supreme Court, and I'm on my way again to the Supreme Court.
We've also recently filed a constitutional challenge of Section 230, which affects all America, and in fact, recently, even most recently, we put together a new legislative bill proposal to fix Section 230, to fix the I spent a lot of years involved in social
media and a very, very large audience on Facebook years ago.
We probably had about 38 million fans.
38 million fans for what?
On Facebook. All different pages.
Some very, very large pages.
Big followings. I turned that into a marketing thing.
We were making a good $300,000 a month.
And this was in the heydays of Facebook.
This was before they recognized that their advertising program actually directly competes with their own users.
And over the years, unfortunately, they moved in tighter and tighter and tighter until they basically found a reason to just get rid of me.
Now, they think or say that it's objectionable in some way or offensive in some way, but the reality is it wasn't.
It was nothing different than it had been in previous years or anything else like that.
You know, I had this big business, and I used to do big money, but then when they took it down, we kind of caught them right-handed because they took the content down saying that it was somehow objectionable, but I went to a competitor of mine, and they went to Facebook, and Facebook said they wouldn't restore my stuff for them.
Or excuse me, for me, but they would for them.
Which was odd because the content was identical.
It had nothing to do with content, but it had to do with the owner.
So it meant that I caught them kind of red-handed, and so in 2018 I sued Facebook.
Could you give me a little bit of timeline?
So when did your social media accounts grow to...
38 million people.
What was the time period that was happening?
I had started on social media in 2010.
Towards the end of 2011, I got very aggressive about building a social media audience.
By 2012, somewhere around there, I do recall actually I counted up my fans because I started working with College Humor.
It was about 17 million at the time.
What was the subject matters that you guys were putting out there?
Well, I ran most of the Family Guy fan pages.
I ran all different named pages here and there.
I guess my primary business was WTF Magazine.
Everybody says, well that's the acronym.
What the app. No, that actually is not what we were.
We were where's the fun. It was a play on the acronym because everybody would remember it, but we were really kind of above board in our content because everybody says, well, then he must have put up bad content.
No, we put up basic stupid memes and funny stuff.
I told my crew to always just stay away from kids stuff, stay away from criminal stuff and just make fun of stuff.
Just make funny stuff.
And we were very good.
I mean, I've had...
I had a post once.
168 million likes.
Engagement was like ridiculous.
Half a billion, you know? These were the days when you really could get stuff to take off quickly.
And, uh... And that was like 2012.
And then it got up to, you know, sometime in the 2013-2014 range, you know, we had, I know documented I have at least 25 million, but we were closer to 38 if you counted everything that we had going on.
We was huge.
And They just took it from me.
Was there any political, like, were you guys talking about politics at all?
This is completely, had nothing to do with politics.
Nothing. We simply entertained people.
That's all we did. Just had fun.
I stayed away from politics because politics would quickly get me shut down now.
I will say that we lost 99.9% of my reach overnight in early 2014.
Because Facebook was competing with us.
They wanted to shut us down so that they could put their advertiser-sponsored content on.
We went forward from there and we went to 2016.
I finally got completely wiped out.
They shut down six of my pages, 14 million fans or so, overnight, gone.
Not all of my pages, ironically, but a good number of them.
And that was where we had got them because they put that content back.
And only for my competitor who, of course, paid them substantially more.
And when I mean substantially more, meaning I had spent like $43,000 in advertising to that point because organic reach was free.
You didn't need it. Well, sure enough, they had spent $22 million in advertising.
Much, much, much larger audience, right?
So, we...
You know, we sued them. In 2016, you know, it proved that they were wrong.
It took till almost 2018 before we actually got the case filed.
It's complicated. Because, of course, it all relies on this one law, you know, Title 47, USC Section 230.
You know, most people just understand this is 230, you know.
This law is...
The best way to describe it is broad.
Very broad. Not only is it broad, the courts actually turn around and make it even broader.
So, what would be essentially broad discretion has turned into internet sovereignty.
They can do anything they want.
And that's not actually how this law works, and that is unconstitutional.
The government can't delegate that kind of authority to a private entity to regulate another private entity.
It's just not the way it works.
Nobody's ever challenged that, though.
And I hadn't yet.
So, we sued Facebook.
And my allegation was very simple, that they had engaged in anti-competitive behavior.
And, I mean, it was pretty blatant.
They took my content down for their own financial gain.
It was just for that, right?
It wasn't like you had done, you didn't break any rules, you didn't post anything objectionable.
They just saw you as competing against them?
Well, here's the thing.
If my content was bad, right, found to be objectionable, right, and it followed within Section 230, whatever it was when it was taken down, it was the same as when it was put back.
So they validated that it never actually violated any community standard in the first place by putting it back.
The only difference was who paid them more.
Who was the bigger, you know, I mean, it had nothing to do with content.
And unfortunately, when we sued, we said anti-competitive behavior was blatant.
It's a tort.
And the court came and turned around and said, they have 230C1 immunity.
And what that is is that you can't treat them as the publisher or speaker of content of another.
Well, that's not how they've read it.
And a lot of people don't realize there's a mistake there that the courts have made pretty much since 19...
Well, the law was written in 96.
97 they got it wrong.
And they said you can't treat them as a publisher.
That's not what it says. The law says you can't treat them as the publisher.
Well, in the case of my content, pretty simply, I'm the publisher.
I put it there. I was treating them as a publisher, a secondary publisher, in addition to me, and that's not what the law says.
It says the publisher. Every word is important in a law.
That's, you know, how they say the letter of the law, right?
Because when you're being punished, right?
That's what this is. It gives them the regulatory power to punish you.
And the government's got their back.
Well, that's the same as the FCC or SEC or any other commission that's given that power to regulate.
Well, they took it and I never got a day in court.
They kept throwing me out saying that I was treating them as a publisher.
Well, I was technically, but I wasn't treating them as the publisher who was me.
The law specifically says the publisher, not the publisher.
Correct. And in the circumstance here, I am the publisher.
I published it.
I never said that I didn't publish it.
They unpublished. They republished.
They manipulated. They changed its value.
They developed the information. They did lots of things.
They solicited a new owner.
There's lots of things that they did that's not publishing at all.
When you say sold it to the new owner, you're saying sold...
I sold the unpublished pages to the other owner because he could get them reinstated so they would have value, whereas with me, they were worthless.
Unpublished pages, they might as well be toilet paper.
Toilet paper actually probably has more value because it has a use.
So, faced with no other option, I sold them the pages.
And sure enough, three days after they were sold, like magic, they all came and turned back on again.
Surprise, surprise, my content was never actually...
Remember, I'm the publisher, so my content was never the issue.
Proves it. Doesn't matter what it was.
So, unfortunately, the California courts didn't want to fix it.
They just aren't fixing it. They aren't listening to the language.
They aren't listening to the actual law.
And it's unfortunate. They're really screwing this up.
But see, here's where things got a little bit different that most people, and obviously what we were talking about, most people have no idea what's really happened since then.
Yes, I lost. No, it was not wrong.
I was right.
But I never got a day in court, went all the way to the Supreme Court, and then another case comes along, literally within weeks of my other case being dismissed, and it said that the Good Samaritan Provision of the Communications Decency Act, which is Section 230, does not immunize blocking and screening decisions that are based upon an anti-competitive animus.
In other words, my allegations of anti-competitive animus Should have made it through dismissal.
Same statute, same allegation.
And they said, well, no.
That case analyzed 230C2. Yours was a 230C1 case.
Well, see, here's the thing.
What most people do not realize, and this is semi-technical.
Can you tell the difference between 230C1 and 230C2? Sure, sure, sure.
So the point of, it works like an outline.
230C is your title, right?
And it says, Protections for Good Samaritan Blocking and Screening of Offensive Materials.
C1, which is the next one down, that says that no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
Boiled down, it means you can't be treated as somebody else for what somebody else posted.
They said I was treating them as somebody else, so they're protected, except that somebody else was me.
I wasn't treating them as me.
So there's a flaw in there, right?
And it hinges on that one word, a versus the.
The second one, 230C2, is where they actually have active liability publishing ability.
See, it's confusing because people say, well, are they a publisher or are they a platform?
Well, technically, under C1, they are still a publisher.
But think of it as a passive publisher.
They're giving this platform, but they are still technically publishing because their system is publishing, right?
But they're not involved in the content consideration.
They're not content providers.
But the second part of it is where they become active publishers.
Now, they are still not allowed to provide content, right?
They are only allowed to restrict it.
And basically the government said, hey, you can restrict anything you consider objectionable so long as you do it in good faith and everybody forgot the most important part, as a good Samaritan.
Enigma came along, this Enigma versus Malabites came along and realized, wait a second, the good Samaritan provision, you can't be a good Samaritan and take somebody's content down for your own financial gain.
It's antithetical. It just doesn't make sense.
So they said, no, this doesn't get covered.
Well, where does the Good Samaritan provision reside?
Where is it? Well, like I said, it's an outline.
It is 230C, says protection for Good Samaritan, blocking and screening of offense material, meaning It's above C1 and C2, so logically, it applies to the whole section, correct?
Makes sense? Makes sense in an outline?
Well, the courts, keeping in their pathway to just screw everybody, they said it doesn't apply to C1, but it applies to C2. So now they're picking and choosing which subsections Good Samaritan applies to.
But see, here's the thing. Now the court called it a Good Samaritan provision, and it is, it's a provision, but there are quotes on it, right?
And it's funny because I have a lot of lawyers, you know, because I don't have a bar license, you know, and a lot of people ask me, well, are you a lawyer?
I'm like, no. Now the reality is you don't have to have a bar license to read the law.
You don't have to have a bar license to read the Constitution and understand it.
You just have to be smart. Well, I started reading and those quotes really bugged me.
Why are they there? And every lawyer that I have ever asked, they'll generally say because they intended to emphasize it.
Right? Which quotes exactly?
The quotes surrounding Good Samaritan.
Oh, gotcha. Protection from Good Samaritan blocking screening of offensive materials.
Well, why they were there, it's something called An articulated, which is why it's in quote, it's spoken, intelligible principle.
And the irony is most people don't know what intelligible means, but it means simply understood.
So it's the simply understood principle under which all of their regulations, meaning all of their community standards, are supposed to be written.
They're supposed to be for the benefit of others in the public interest, for the good of others, right?
Yeah, it's a good guy.
It's that you'll render care for the good of others, not yourself.
That's the principles of Good Samaritan.
It goes back to biblical. The Samaritan came along and his enemy, he rendered aid because he was hurt on the side of the road.
Something to that effect. And that's the point.
That's what they're supposed to do. That was the principle upon which they were supposed to create all of their community standards, etc.
Well, they didn't do that with me.
They weren't good Samaritans, and it should apply to C1 as well.
It's what they call the whole text canon.
Basically, you're supposed to apply to the whole text, right?
And consider it harmoniously.
A lot of different, they're called canons of statutory construction, so the way laws are built.
So we got into this whole thing back and forth, and then I started going down the rabbit hole.
And I'll tell you, everything that they talk about online, all the general consensus that's out there, it's all wrong.
No other way to put it. Which general consensus?
Well, for example, Section 230 is a protection for the First Amendment.
No, it's not. Not in any capacity.
Why? Because a First Amendment right is a right.
It's insured by the Constitution.
You don't need a statute to protect it.
All Section 230 does is immunize a company right now to restrict the life, liberty, and property.
You can go, life, what?
No. No, not the life.
They don't have that power, but they do have the ability to restrict the liberty and property of the third party.
You, me, everybody else that uses it.
And they have government protection when they do it.
I have a question there. I've actually read a law that states that any laws, regardless if they're codified or not, That is correct.
It would.
Absolutely would. And as a matter of fact, that's what we have brought to task.
So when the United States writes a law that can restrict liberty or property, it has to Grant you due process.
You get your day in court.
If they take something from you, if it's done illegally, it's called an illegal taking.
You're not allowed to take something from somebody, any U.S. citizen.
You cannot take something, either life, liberty, or property, without a day in court.
You get to challenge it.
You get your full due process.
Well, the United States gave them the power to restrict my liberty, my property, they took it under the protection of government, and I never got a single hearing.
Nothing. I never got a day of court.
So I was denied by the United States government of my due process rights.
And the thing is, is that, is it the law that's repugnant of the Constitution, or was it just what happened?
Well, here's where it gets kind of interesting, is because The United States had denied me my constitutional rights, which meant that I now had the standing to go after the government for harming me.
Which we did. And we filed the first ever that we know of constitutional challenge of Section 230 and...
What year was that by the way?
That was April 26th of this year.
Oh, okay. This was just around the deal.
This was... We're actually waiting on the Attorney General of the United States whether or not they're going to enter into the case, you know, within the 60 day time period.
And basically, it is a First and Fifth Amendment challenge.
And for those out there that really want to understand the technicals, it is a major questions doctrine issue, both on their face and as applied.
And these are all on their face and as applied.
Because the application is the way that 230 has been screwed up, and right on their face, it's right in the statute, you can't do this.
So there's a major questions issue, which is a private entity does not have the authority to answer major questions for United States citizens.
Like, for example, vaccines.
They're answering major questions for millions of people, right?
They're making the decision for you, are they not?
And they're doing that under the protection of government.
Second one, which is very similar to the major questions doctrine, which is the non-delegation doctrine.
Now that one's a brutal one.
They're going to have a hard time getting past that one.
Why? Because the non-delegation doctrine basically says that a private entity cannot be granted the power to regulate another private entity.
By the U.S. government. It's unheard of.
Why? Well, there's a case called Schechter-Paltry, which was the first precedent.
But there's another case that's very similar to ours, and it's Carter v.
Carter Coal Mining. The basic principles was the Bitumenist Coal Mining Act was given...
They didn't know how to regulate the coal mining, so what they said is...
Hey, Mr. Coal Miners, we're going to give you the power to self-regulate.
If you have a larger company, you'll have more delegates for voting and smaller companies, smaller, you know, less numbers of delegates.
What ended up happening is inevitably the larger companies regulated to their own benefit, did they not?
Yeah. Makes sense.
Self-interested private companies.
Hey, little guy, you have to do the things that you can't do, that we can do, Because we want to regulate you right out of business.
Well, they fought back and they said, you can't do that.
It's unconstitutional. They don't have the right to regulate me because they're not a governing body.
They were never elected. So, the long and the short of it is that that delegation of regulatory authority is unconstitutional, on its face, and that's applied.
No ands, ifs, or buts.
All you have to do is go read it.
Well, of course, that's where the intelligible principle comes into play.
The intelligible principle is the administrative law.
It's what makes it administrative law.
Punitive, right? You can punish somebody.
They can, right? Under power.
So, the next step, then there is the void for vagueness doctrine.
Void for vagueness doctrine is essentially if a law is so broad, loose, like, you know, nondescript, that it leads to arbitrary prosecution, right?
You need to know what is prohibited, right?
Black and white. That's it.
You either broke the law or you didn't break the law if they're going to take, if they're going to punish you.
If a decision is arbitrary, it gets thrown out.
Well, nothing about Section 230 isn't big.
I mean, it's just, it's a mess.
Do whatever you want. Whatever's objectionable.
What's objectionable? We don't know. Whatever they choose.
And not only that, but it's a sliding scale.
It could be objectionable Tomorrow and not the next day.
We don't know. We never know, right?
That's void for vagueness.
And the only one that is a First Amendment argument Because everybody says it's a violation of the First Amendment.
Well, it is in one way, and it's probably the weakest argument of it, and it is something called the Substantial Overbreadth Doctrine.
And what that says is that when a law is so broad that it does more to restrict lawful free speech than it does to actually do the job that it was intended to do, It is substantially over breadth.
B-R-E-A-D-T-H. Over the breadth and width of what the law is supposed to be.
A little harder to prove because you have to have lots and lots of examples of how...
You know, they don't want hypotheticals.
But of course, we don't really have to go hypothetical with that, right?
It restricts a lot of free speech, does it not?
It doesn't do what it was intended to do, which was protect children from harmful content and protect sites that acted as a good Samaritan to do that.
Was that, so the initial...
So, the first case that it was predicated upon was Stratton Oakmont case, right?
Stratton Oakmont had a website that was, they held themselves out to be family friendly.
And they did. They policed their content, you know, they restricted anything.
You know, this is before 230 existed.
And they missed something.
Something along the way.
It got through. And they got sued for the content that was remaining on their site, and they lost.
You know, 230 didn't exist.
Something objectionable, offensive, something like that, they lost.
And unfortunately, Congress looked at this and said, well, wait a second, we have to be able to let them take something down, because if they take some down, they become responsible for everything else that was left behind, because they've acted as a publisher.
Mm-hmm. But we want them to allow them to do that to protect our children.
So that was the fundamental reason.
To protect the children so that they can act to remove content.
And they said, well, we don't want them to be responsible for everything else.
We don't want them to be treated as the publisher.
Someone else. And that was how it all came to be.
Essentially, 230C1 is so they can't be treated as someone else.
So 230C2 allows them to remove the content.
Right? Right. The problem is the discretion.
Way too broad. And now there are other reasons why it violates, is constitutionally unsound because, for example, there's statutory construction issues, meaning the way that the courts have it currently understood, if you look at the statute as a whole as one part, it has to make sense.
They call it harmonious.
The way that the courts currently understand it is that if you cannot be treated as a publisher, right, and there's no measure of motive, and then the very next law, 2.3.2, is a publishing function.
Well, if you can't be treated as a publisher in the first place, what's the point of the second one?
It's like saying to somebody, you can't drive, and the next law says, well, you can make a right on rent.
If you can't drive in the first place, it's useless, right?
In legal terms, it's called surplusage.
It's just surplus to the other law.
They don't build laws like that.
So it makes no sense for them not to be able to treat it as a publisher.
It only makes sense harmoniously if they can't be treated as someone else when they're not involved in the content.
The next law then makes sense because when they are involved in the content, they become a publisher and are protected for those actions limited.
Now, the difference is And this is so confusing because everybody wants to solve the publisher platform argument, right?
Well, here's the thing. They're a publisher in both scenarios.
It only comes down to whether they were actively publishing or passively publishing.
Passively publishing means service.
The site was doing the publishing.
They were really never involved in the content, therefore they shouldn't be treated as somebody else.
They're not involved. C1 protection.
That makes sense. C2 protection is they are an active publisher protecting our children, so therefore we pat them on the back and say, you're protected because we're a Good Samaritan.
Well, of course, throughout the idea that Good Samaritan even applies, There's no standards.
So we challenged the whole law.
We sued the United States government.
We are wading through that right now.
We're going to see what the outcome of that is.
That could, you know, I don't like to self-aggrandize.
I don't go for attention. I don't go to be famous or anything like this, but I can tell you without any shadow of doubt in my mind whatsoever, This law, this court case that I'm fighting right now, the constitutional challenge, is probably the most important case in modern history.
Outside of Roe v.
Wade being reconsidered by the Supreme Court, this will decide whether freedom of speech exists online or not.
And this isn't a case against a big tech company anymore.
We're actually going after the source and saying, your law is bad.
It's wrong. The U.S. government law is bad.
Correct. It is badly written.
It is way too broad. A private entity can't be delegated to this authority.
There's all sorts of reasons why my constitutional rights, your constitutional rights, everybody's constitutional rights are being violated.
So it is repugnant to the Constitution.
We want to strike. Now, we don't want to strike all of it because it would be catastrophic for the internet.
We want to fix 230C1. They can't be treated as the publisher, as someone else.
That makes sense. We need to fix that.
We need to make sure the courts do that.
That could stay in place, at which point you sever, they call it severing, because you might be able to split this piece off, and 230C2, where they're able to regulate to their own self-benefit, gone.
If they mess with my content, whatever.
Now, we could sue them, and we could get to the merits of the case.
But I wasn't done there.
I was approached by a gentleman by the name of David Morgan who was drafting legislation to redraft 230 and he was very simplified.
He wanted to do it simplified but the problem was it was too simple.
Missed things. And of course, most of the lawyers out there, they look at precedent.
They don't actually do what I'm doing which is full-blown litigation.
I'm in it. I know the things that nobody knows because I'm in it.
I'm physically in the job.
It's just like sitting there saying, you know, oh I know how to drive because I read the manual.
I watched a few people drive.
No. If you've driven for ten years, or in my case six, I've been in this litigation for six, I know things that nobody knows.
How to power slide, drift, all of those strange things that nobody understands.
What oversteer it is, what wheel cheat is.
And people are going, you can't get that from a manual.
You get that from real world experience.
That's what I have done. He asked me, and I agreed, and I sat down and I rewrote Section 230.
And the thing is, is that people go, oh, here we go again, because everybody's trying to rewrite it and replace it with all these other things.
I'm really not trying to, I'm not trying to replace it.
I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel.
Best way I can explain this is, I'm trying to reinstall the spokes so the damn thing turns in a circle.
You're adding more details to it to make it more of a specific, precise instrument as opposed to what sounds very sloppy.
Correct. An official regulatory commission generally is disinterested.
They don't care if they're just regulating across the board.
When a private entity is granted this power, if they're given broad discretion, they will use it to their own benefit.
There is no guidelines, no procedures.
They don't have to... Like the FCC, for example, which is similar in the way it was granted power in the same Telecommunications Act...
It was told that, hey, look, you have to follow the APA, which is the Administrative Procedures Act.
They have procedures to follow.
They have qualifications, like the first qualification for every commission.
Only a United States citizen can restrict the life, liberty, or property of a United States citizen.
So whatever it is, whether it's a jury duty, you have to be a U.S. citizen first, right?
You don't have to be a U.S. citizen to restrict an American citizen under the protection of U.S. law, Section 230, In the case of private entities.
For all we know, what is it, you know, somebody from China, Korea, Russia could have taken down the president.
That's crazy. That's just, that's dangerous, right?
So there's these qualifications and all these things that have to happen.
So what we did was we built them as the spokes.
We said instead of this ridiculously broad You know, discretion.
We're not giving them discretion anymore.
We're saying, here are, and everything aligns with existing commission's procedures.
I didn't come up with ridiculous stuff.
None of that, but then you have this argument, oh, you're going to compel them into things.
You're going to what? Compel them.
You can't compel speech.
Everybody freaks out and then turns on that.
Well, here's the thing.
We're not compelling anyone.
What does that mean, to compel speech?
So, if you were to say, if the law, if I rewrote 230 and it said, the company must keep political, and this is all it said, the company must keep political speech online.
That's compelling. That means, yes, the United States government is giving them a mandate that they have to do it.
We're not saying they have to do it.
We're saying they have to do it as a contingency of the protection.
Which is not compelling them to do it.
It's simply saying, if you don't do it, you don't get the protection.
But you can still do it under your constitutional rights.
You can take that stuff down, but then you're going to have to forego.
You don't have sections. Right.
We are respecting their First Amendment rights.
We're saying, you can take down anything you want.
We don't care what it is.
You totally have a right.
And everybody says, well, great, then we can sue.
No, actually, you can't.
Because here's the thing. If you had a kitty cat site, and your rule said that you can't put up pictures of puppy dogs, and they took down somebody that put pictures of puppy dogs up, is that illegal?
No. Right? Do they have a First Amendment right to do so?
Yeah. Were you financially harmed?
Did they defraud you?
Did they do anything that was illegal in any fashion whatsoever?
No. If you don't do anything illegal, you have no cause of action to sue.
Which is to say they still can take down anything they want.
They can have virtually any reason they want.
But, If they go outside of the obligations that are set forth by the new Section 230, the Online Freedom Act, right, or the OFA, the Online Freedom Act says, well, if you don't keep these things in place, well, then you can still do them.
You might still not be liable, but you do not get liability protection from the United States government for doing it because it's not as a good Samaritan, it was not in good faith, And it was not in the interest of the public for the good of others.
End of story. They revoked that protection.
So, yeah, it doesn't mean that the internet's going to collapse.
It's not, you know, the apocalypse of the internet.
They're not going to take everything down.
They're still going to have an incentive to make sure that their site is good.
I mean, that makes sense, right?
If they want it family-oriented, cool, make it family-oriented.
Tell me what the, like, one of our examples of an obligation is to plainly and precisely state what the prohibitions are.
Why do we say that? Now that's lay terms, but in legal terms, in terms of constitutionally, is that if the FCC or SEC or any other commission that has this power wants to regulate you, do you know what they have to do?
They have to...
What's it called?
It's called fair notice.
You have to know that a law exists, right?
And I'm not making this up out of thin air.
This is actually FCC, Fox v.
FCC. This is exactly what it is.
They changed the law. They didn't have enough time.
They weren't given fair notice of the prohibition, so they couldn't have known that it was against the rules and regulations, and therefore it was thrown out because it was arbitrary and capricious.
Well, there's what that does.
It does the same thing as what it is technically, but in lay terms.
Another one. We say to timely...
You know, I don't know the exact verbiage off the top of my head, but it's basically timely notify of what the violation is, a specific violation.
Okay, what is that? Well, in legal terms, it would be called show cause.
If an agency like the FCC takes an action, which these are just representative of Congress, you know, and it says, okay, we're going to take an action against you, show me why.
Why did it happen? They don't have to do that right now.
There's no procedure for that.
There's no safeguard whatsoever.
They can sit there and say, you violated all...
I mean, this is literally the verbiage.
You violated one or all of our community standards.
What the hell is that? That's just ridiculous.
Which a law, because most people don't recognize that that's actually what this is, regulatory code, power to make law.
Backed by the U.S. government.
So when they make that law, it has to be precise.
You need to know, black and white, whether you are going to violate or not violate the community standard.
End of story. Things like that.
We put those obligations in.
And the last thing about the Online Freedom Act that's really interesting because, of course, now that we've made all these changes and we made it, we were essentially going to make it work the way it was supposed to work.
We're only just adding, you know, meat and bones to the procedure portion of it, saying, hey, look, this is a strict mandate.
This is what you're allowed to do.
None of this nonsense of doing anything you want anymore.
What about the nuisance suits?
You know, in technical terms, it would be frivolous lawsuits, right?
We've set up an arbitration level.
Which essentially, the person motioning, the person who has the dispute says, hey, you took my content down, not in good faith, not as a good Samaritan, right?
Which is what they'd have to prove to the court.
Did they act in good faith?
Did they act as a good Samaritan?
Did they act within these obligations?
Did they do their job? That goes to an arbitrator.
Now, it would be mutually agreed upon.
You then go in there, and both sides split the fees, and you go in there, and you go to an arbitrator, and within 30 days, the arbitrator, which is, of course, the three usually lawyers, but they act as judges, and they make a determination.
Now, they may determine, hey, look, you didn't act in good faith.
Uh-oh. That report's going to go to...
If they go up, step up to the courts now and go for a lawsuit because the arbitration says, no, you didn't actually follow the guidelines and you didn't act in good faith.
I'm sure the courts are going to take that into account and probably you're going to beat dismissal.
Well, that company is now...
Not only the losing party is going to have a $15,000 fee shift.
Now, we haven't determined that exact amount, but mostly it's going to be a palatable number for people, but it's a risk.
Would you risk $15,000 because they took down your puppy dog?
Hell no. But if you knew that they violated some law...
If they robbed you like $300,000 a month and $15,000 is not...
It's palatable. Yeah.
And you're not inundating the courts with nuisance suits.
You have somebody in between going, making some sort of third-party determination whether or not did they do the job.
So all these details are contained within your rewriting of Section 230?
They're simple. They're in very easy, understood language, but it's more expansive so that, one, we guide the courts.
So, for example, I'll tell you how we fixed the publisher, right?
Because we've talked about that issue.
How can they mess that up?
What they did is they read the publisher as a publisher.
So what we said, we added one word to make it all make sense again.
We added the word principle.
Principal publisher. So it was the principal publisher, which is what the denotes.
It was the originating, you know, the origin of where that content was published.
You can't be treated as that person.
That makes it someone else.
We didn't change anything.
We didn't reinvent the wheel.
We simply made it do what it was intended to do.
That's it. This is a law that was written in 1998, so a lot of the...
96. 96, so a lot of the realities of today's online experience were not really developed back then.
That's a good way to describe it, because it was a well-intentioned law, and it is actually quite good what shifted, besides the fact that the courts misinterpreted it.
The thing was, is morality and ethics have changed.
96 people still got the door for one another, you know?
Nowadays, we can't even figure out which gender we are.
I mean, it's just lunacy.
And the problem with that is that these companies have nothing stopping them.
Back then, a judge would have had different morals, different ethics, and would have been like, whoa, this is way outside the scope of what you're supposed to do.
Nowadays, judges don't care.
Because it's like political activists, judges, and just a politically very kind of...
Morality has changed.
Morality, yeah, yeah.
Morality has changed. And there's where...
Because everybody says, what's the problem?
I love this. They always ask me, can you put this in a paragraph?
26-year-long problem.
And I'm going to sum this up in a paragraph.
No, it is several different problems intertwined, all interconnected with one another.
It comes back to a broad discretion of delegatory authority that gave it to them and said, do something with morals and ethics, and then they don't have morals and ethics.
And then on top of that, courts made it even broader.
And on top of that, you have these super wealthy companies that are just manipulating the hell out of it because they're motivated by all sorts of other things.
So yeah, it's a compound problem that legislative, if we put in the procedurals and the obligations and the confines of what they're supposed to do, the strict state mandates, it would fix it.
This will fix 230 Online Freedom Act.
Matter of fact, go to socialmediafreedom.org.
The constitutional rights don't stop where the internet begins.
And that's all we're saying here is, no, we still have rights to free speech and all due process and all these other things.
This law can't supersede all that.
It is repugnant of the Constitution.
We are bringing that into play.
And, you know, we'll see what happens.
We'll see if the courts finally get their stuff together.
If not, legislatively, one way or the other.
I hate it because it's so cliche.
They say, we're the tip of the spear.
No, I'm like literally the micro-tip.
I'm the absolute forefront of this fight, and that's why nobody knows about me.
That's why the media won't touch me.
That's why I stood up in front of the Capitol with Congressman Gohmert, you know, saying, hey, look, we just filed one of the most important lawsuits in modern history.
We're challenging the law that basically would decide that freedom exists online.
We've got congressional amicus support, and none, not one of the mainstream media reported it.
That is our America these days.
2012, on that timeline, I was twice the size of BuzzFeed.
BuzzFeed's worth about $2.7 billion.
This is a monster case.
So you had a $5 billion company potentially?
Potentially. Wow. It's an analogous.
Had they not stood in my way, had they not slowed me down, had they let me keep going and building, That could have been billions of dollars.
All of the prospective economic advantage that I had, because I had this before, and everybody's like, well, you know, they're making money now.
They built this, what, 2016, whatever?
I was already gigantic.
Imagine what it would be worth.
It would have just gone bigger.
This whole thing started because of corrupt government.
You know, this is why I got into social media.
It's why I just won't back down.
Like, why I'm relentless is because, you know, If you've been in enough fights in your life, you know what it's like to get beat down, and so long as you can get back up again, you can stay in the fight, right?
Because people keep saying, I lost.
I haven't lost. I have to give up to lose.
I'm still going. It's incredibly slow, but...
So, where this all started was I was arrested for conspiracy to commit first-degree attempted murder for taking a cell phone video.
Wow. That's how this whole thing started?
That's how everything started. Wow.
They threw me in jail and said, you tried to set up a bum fight.
Get it on video.
The people that were involved in the fight, I only knew one of them for a few hours.
And they started the fight.
I wasn't involved in the fight.
Nobody was seriously hurt.
And I get charged with attempted murder.
Well, this is good old Baltimore.
It turned out the people that were involved in the fight had family that were cops.
So they abused the system.
They came after maliciously.
Think about that. So I took a cell phone video and I should be responsible with my life.
Well, this was 2011.
I was then, even though I surrendered myself in Baltimore, I literally drove down and said, here I am.
They said I was at flight risk and denied me bail.
So I got to spend two months in a Baltimore City detention center.
You know, people ask me, they're like, would you do it again?
I'd have to. Because honestly, it changed who I was.
It really defined me because I know what my limits are.
And I am not afraid of anything.
To be honest, I'm snot.
I was. I know what fear is.
I know what it's like going to bed wondering, am I going to get stabbed tonight?
I mean, it was that bad.
I mean, it was the second worst jail in the entire nation.
It was terrible. So when I finally got in front of a decent judge, she looked at what my charges are, what happened, and she literally asked the prosecutor, so what did he do wrong?
Can you imagine that?
Facing life sentences, basically going bankrupt because they're burying me with everything.
And the judge can't even identify what they did wrong.
What I did wrong. Which I, of course, knew.
I was constitutionally protected under the First Amendment for taking a cell phone video.
I'm not involved in the fight.
What just happened here?
Right? So, I was burned by the system.
I am adamant about using the system to screw people.
We have rights for a reason.
Mine were taken. Never gonna let that shit happen again.
Right? So when I got out, I will tell you that it was PTSD for a while.
I felt like everything I was going to do was going to get arrested again because I had been arrested for the dumbest thing on the planet.
I'd done anything wrong.
But once I sort of got my mojo back, what I thought was that I need to tell my story.
I tell people, there's a good way to throw it.
You can throw words at somebody.
And they might hurt, they might sting your feelings, but they hurt a lot less than throwing lead at each other.
Right? That's where we're going to go.
If we lose the ability to angry, argue, you know, bitch and moan, whatever you want to do, when you are just silenced, period, then the next step is lead.
We don't want to go there.
Nobody wants to go there. But that's where they're pushing us.
Well, here I am, and I'm like, I can get my message out.
Here's a social media thing where, you know, I do this magazine.
I'm going to go out and I'm going to get lots and lots of fans.
And I realized I needed tons of fans.
Like, tons. I needed to be able to distribute because voice is power.
Distribute to as many people as I can.
So I started building pages stupid fast.
Like, really fast.
You have to understand, I barely could put food on the table and I was buying people's pages.
Why? They sell them?
Why can't I take over the, you know, because pages were nothing different than a business.
I was taking over their businesses.
So I was buying up, you know, hundreds of thousands of fans when I had no money at all.
Why? Because I knew that there was value, right?
Distribution was key. This is kind of a crazy story, but this is how it all took off for me.
It was 2012, and my son, um...
He was three years old. He walked up to me and he said, Daddy Wessel?
Which was him asking me to wrestle with him, right?
Like we would roll around on the floor and do the WWF kind of stuff, right?
And I was so stressed out because we were going broke.
I was losing my home. I was physically going to be on the streets in like a month and a half.
And freaking out.
And I thought to myself, somebody's got to be willing to pay me to advertise.
Somebody. So I thought, okay, what is similar to me?
And I thought, okay, why do memes and funny stuff?
College humor. Made sense.
It was pretty good analogous.
So I called them cold call.
Flat out cold. And I said, hey, are you guys interested in web traffic?
I can send people to your site.
And she said, no. We only work with corporate partners who can send at least a million hits a month.
I said, a million hits a month.
I can do that today. She goes, excuse me, what?
I said, I can do that today. She goes, well, could we set up a test?
I said, it's already done.
I said, what do you mean? I said, just go check your analytics.
I was doing it while I was talking.
So she gets on the computer and all I hear on the other end of the phone is, oh my God, oh my God, what'd you do?
I said, send people to your site. She goes, you got to stop.
I said, why? You crashed our servers.
I sent 380,000 unique hits in three minutes.
And it propagated a million total hits in under five.
I didn't even do it in one day.
I did it in five minutes.
People don't understand what real reach is, what full engagement is, right?
They stole that from everyone.
I basically was...
It just crushed it.
So I said to her, I said, are you interested?
And she said, yes.
You have to understand at the time, I had $17 in my pocket.
All of my accounts were overdrawn.
Credit cards were all shut down.
My credit was trash.
and I'm losing my house to sheriff sale in a month and a half.
She said, yeah we're interested.
I said, are you willing to pay me?
She goes, yeah. I said, how much?
She goes, I don't know, but a hell of a lot.
Two weeks later, I got my first paycheck.
$114,000.
That was more than I had made the entire last year in my first paycheck.
The following month I made $257,000.
I began making over $300,000 a month thereafter.
I couldn't even send my entire audience the direction of CollegeHumor because I crashed their sites.
I was having to selectively use bits and pieces just to keep them active without crashing their stuff.
And they paid me a ton of money.
And I became a millionaire within six months of being dead broke and bankrupt.
That's the power of the internet.
So ultimately, yeah.
Everybody says, well, they're a private entity.
They can take it away from you. You don't deserve it.
Let me ask you something.
Who built Facebook?
Facebook? No.
They built the service. We built Facebook.
Facebook is not...
It's a shell. It's like a shopping center.
They provided the land and they said, go build your business on our land.
You don't have to pay rent.
Go out there. Well, of course, what ended up happening is everybody built their businesses.
And then as the traffic came in, there was like, whoa, these big companies want to come in and pay us.
So they found reasons to get rid of the little guys, knocked their buildings down, put up big buildings, and said, well, you violated our community standards.
That's how it works. That's exactly the analogy.
They competed with...
People don't realize they are the competition of everyone on their site.
Everyone. Because they put sponsored ads into the news feed.
That displaces someone else, so they have to show yours less to show somebody else's more.
And they say, well, it's infinite space.
It's not. Because the attention span of a human being is not infinite.
So even if you consider that everybody looks at it, let's say, for an hour a day, And that's what, 300 plus million dollars?
So there's 300 million people in the United States, an hour a day, so there's 300 million hours of time.
And they're going to look at, in the hour post, maybe 30 posts, you can mathematically come up with an actual finite number.
It's not unlimited.
The more, the closer to the top, the more likely it is to be seen.
Well now, you don't see your friends anymore.
You see ads.
You see suggestions.
You see the garbage.
And here's the thing. If they're showing you an ad, or they're suggesting for you to see something, are they not the content provider?
They're developing that information.
By definition, they're a content provider, and yet, not one single court will hold them accountable for what is blatantly, by definition, content provision.
There's your problem.
It's not that the law is necessarily wrong.
It's broad. It's too broad.
But it's actually the application of it as applied.
The courts have just applied it too broad.
You have to fix the fundamental law first.
The law is wrong.
It needs to be built out much more finite so that they only have specific protections rather than this broad nonsense that they've got right now.
It has to conform with the Constitution so it's not repugnant.
That's what we're working on.
That is what I am specifically working on.
And what I would say there is, you know, this isn't free.
This thing has basically used up all of my resources because people are like, how did you fund it?
By myself. I put myself completely on the line.
I mean, I risk somebody sitting there going, whoa, we can't lose this power and taking me out.
I mean, it's that dangerous.
You know? But...
You know, I put my future on the line, and if you want to help, I mean, there's people out there that can help.
It doesn't have to be a lot.
It can be a lot. But this is expensive.
And the thing is, the Social Media Freedom Foundation, right?
Socialmediafreedom.org. We are 501c3.
It's tax deductible. If you're going to go to a charity, how about one that's actually protecting your rights?
Like, I'm not fighting just for me.
I mean, this affects you.
This affects everybody.
It affects even beyond the United States.
So it's not even just the United States citizens.
This will have ripple effects to the entire nation.
And everybody else is talking a big game.
We're actually doing it.
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