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Oct. 6, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:39
The Leftist Quest To Seize Control Of Facebook | Ep. 1348
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Facebook comes under fire from the Democrat media complex.
Joe Biden thinks about minting a $1 trillion coin to avoid the debt ceiling.
And Healthline announces men can get pregnant.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so yesterday saw this big Senate hearing on Facebook, and this is all manufactured.
Let's just be clear about this.
The new Democrat media complex attack on Facebook is completely manufactured.
There are serious questions to be asked about how Facebook nudges you in particular directions.
We've talked about that extensively on the show.
We've talked about how Facebook's news feed is incredibly biased, how they use certain metrics in order to try and promote legacy media content.
and suppress alternative content, which is sort of a newfangled thing because back in 2015, 2016, they really didn't do that.
And then there was blowback from the left and Facebook, because like all other major corporations, cowardice is a factor there.
Facebook decided that they were going to back off and start making changes to their algorithms to please the Democrat media complex.
Well, once you give an inch, they seek to take a mile.
And right now, and it's perfectly obvious that what the Democrats want is to just control Facebook.
They don't want to destroy it.
They want to hijack it and use it for their own purposes.
That is the goal.
They don't want to set any sort of neutral rules by which Facebook could be held accountable or to which Facebook could adjust.
They don't want regulations that are clear and transparent.
What the Democrats want at this point is an agency that sits over all social media and then adjudicates on a case-by-case basis whether social media have met the demands of Democrats.
That is what they would like.
And this is what the media would like as well.
Because you have to understand that there is this iron triangle between the Democrats and the media and the social media sphere.
And that iron triangle determines what you see.
A huge percentage of Americans get their news online.
And this is a newfangled thing.
This happened over the course of the last 15 years.
It used to be.
Even online, the way that you got your news is that you went directly to the websites that you like to visit.
You would bookmark Breitbart, you'd bookmark Daily Wire, you'd bookmark whatever, CNN, New York Times.
You'd bookmark it, you'd go directly to the site.
Then Facebook became such a massive source of aggregated eyeballs that news outlets started using Facebook in order to promote their news.
Then Facebook started its news feed.
So now, it was a one-stop shop.
You would go to Facebook to get your news.
And Facebook would tailor its algorithms to what you liked to see.
So if you were conservative, you were more likely to see links that you were more likely to click on.
And that made sense because it was supposed to be the town square and in the town square there were a bunch of newspapers available and you'd go to the kiosk that you actually liked.
And Facebook made it convenient by lining up the kiosks you liked near where you were entering the town square.
That's effectively how Facebook's newsfeed operated.
Democrats saw, however, that Facebook had re-established a distributional monopoly.
And now because everyone was getting their news via Facebook, this meant that they could turn off the spigot on people they didn't like.
And Facebook decided that in order to please the Democrats, they were going to go ahead and start to do this around the edges and more and more openly.
So it started off as sort of a fringe phenomenon and then it became part of their mainstream and how they manipulated the newsfeed.
That's a real concern and it's something that I've talked about.
But Democrats aren't satisfied with that.
What Democrats would like is a standard set by the federal government that is no standard at all.
What Democrats actually want is a radically non-equality based standard.
They want no neutral standard.
They want to just be able to control, essentially what they would like, Democrats, is to appoint somebody like Kara Swisher as the head of a government agency that oversees Facebook and tells Facebook what to do.
That's what they would like to do.
They would like to seize the means of distribution.
And now, if you did this openly, it would be illegal.
If the Democrats were simply to pass a law saying we are going to control Facebook, like top to bottom, that would be illegal.
And the reason it would be illegal is number one, it would be a seizure of private property without just compensation.
And number two...
You cannot actually control distribution of speech in that way.
The First Amendment prevents that sort of stuff.
So Democrats are seeking to find another way of doing that.
And so what they are claiming, as they always claim, is that Facebook is doing grave harm.
Grave harm.
Now, there are certain things that could be done to prevent Facebook from discriminating on the basis of politics.
We've talked about those things in the past.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was intended to provide a broader spectrum of political viewpoints online.
Originally, there were liability concerns with anybody who allowed third-party posters to put material up on the internet.
So any comments section of a website, you could be held liable for whatever got put up in a comment section.
Section 230 said you're not liable for third-party content that is posted on your site.
And then there was a legal case in which one of these major websites was sort of cultivating the content that it put up, mainly to try and prevent pornography and spam.
They were sued because the argument was now they're cultivating the content, so they're responsible for the content.
They were sued and they lost.
And then the federal government stepped in and said, OK, that's not really right.
We should be allowing people who cultivate content at least to get rid of pornography, for example, or spam.
We shouldn't make them liable for the other content that's on their site.
This is how sites like Facebook are able to remove pornography, remove violent material, remove spam.
Without being subjected to the same legal regimen of liability that, for example, Daily Wire's editorial page is subjected to.
And then Facebook started to move beyond that and actually censor content and nudge people in particular directions.
The best way of correcting that would be to change Section 230 to remove the catch-all provision.
To just say, okay, Facebook is allowed to remove pornography, obscenity, violent content, but they're not allowed to just remove things on the basis of politics alone.
And if they do start doing that, Now they look more like the New York Times or the Daily Wire in terms of the liability they undergo.
Okay, that's the right-wing point of view on Facebook.
The left-wing point of view on Facebook is that Facebook is bad, not because it doesn't allow enough content, but because it allows too much content.
The left-wing viewpoint on Facebook is that Facebook is such a dominant place for people to get their information that they can grab it and they can use it to their own advantage.
And Democrats and the media have become experts in this inside-outside game they now play with corporations, where somebody inside a corporation, a staffer at a corporation, gains access to confidential material, and then goes and quote-unquote leaks it.
They're a whistleblower, right?
Even though the information is not illegal.
They take that information that is confidential, and then they put it out there in the public sphere with the help of the media that have an agenda.
The media push it, Democrats hold hearings on it, and then all of them threaten all of these social media companies into doing what they want.
They essentially make Facebook into an agent of the Democratic Party by threatening them with legislation or regulatory oversight if they don't do what the Democratic Party wants.
This is incredibly dangerous stuff, whether we are talking about the free speech area or whether we're talking about business areas.
If the Democratic Party is doing the same thing with regard to major corporations, which they are, you have a whistleblower at a major corporation.
The whistleblower will report that a corporation is doing nothing illegal.
That's something the Democrats don't like.
The media then blow it up into a major issue.
The Democrats then hold hearings and they say, we will regulate you and we will come after you and we'll find a way to punish your business unless, unless you do what we want.
And so they turn private organizations, private businesses into agents of the Democratic Party by using the power of government to threaten.
Even though if the government actually went forward and passed legislation along these lines, there's a good shot it would be unconstitutional.
So we'll get to how this is expressing itself with regard to Facebook.
And it's super dangerous because if you think that there ought to be a level playing field when it comes to your access to information, that this is the core liberty that the First Amendment was seeking to protect, Democrats doing this with social media is unbelievably dangerous.
They're attempting to reestablish the media monopoly, media oligopoly, that they held for 50 years before the rise of the Internet.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so.
The new push against Facebook, which remember this is like their third push against Facebook since 2016.
Right after 2016, there's a push against Facebook on the Russian disinformation front.
Ah, Facebook needs to crack down on foreign actors manipulating US elections.
The reality, as I've said before, is that the amount of actual Russian manipulation during the 2016 election via Facebook was minimal, statistically speaking.
Then there was the push in 2018-2019 that there was too much generalized misinformation being put out there and Facebook needed to crack down on it.
And Facebook reacted both times.
By trying to placate the Democrats.
In 2018-2019, the Democratic Party demanded that Facebook create some sort of answerability for quote-unquote misinformation, right?
They shifted from disinformation in 2016 and 2017 to misinformation in 2018-2019.
And that's when Facebook started to institute fact-checking regimes that were designed to downgrade conservative content and to upgrade legacy media content because the fact-checkers themselves very often were working for the legacy media.
Hey, now we have reached the third stage.
This is the third iteration of the attack on Facebook.
And this iteration is, Facebook is just bad.
Facebook is bad because of what they do.
So, there's this Facebook quote-unquote whistleblower.
I say quote-unquote whistleblower because she's not blowing the whistle on anything.
She literally is revealing no new information that people did not know.
Like, is it information that teenage girls using Instagram may not make them mentally healthier?
So by self-polling data, many teenage girls say that Instagram, like 42% say Instagram makes their life better and only 15-20% say it makes their life worse.
But like, let's face it, pretty much every fashion show ever has made teenage girls' lives worse.
Teenage girls...
Coordinating online and viewing pictures of beautiful people and feeling envy and a certain level of bodily discomfort by looking at other pictures.
And this is true for Facebook, it's true for Twitter.
Anytime teenage girls are comparing themselves to some sort of ideal, this is not good for mental health.
Frankly, online very often it's not good for mental health, period.
And that's true for boys and girls.
So nothing new is being revealed by the quote-unquote whistleblower.
She's a democratic activist.
So, her name is Frances Hogan.
When I say she's a Democratic activist, what I mean is that it's pretty damned clear she's a Democratic activist.
According to the Daily Wire, she has a record of donations to far-left Democrats and a history of raising issues about purported bias while at previous employers.
She's working with Democratic operatives to roll out her complaint.
She has the same lawyers as the anonymous Ukraine whistleblower, whose allegations led to Donald Trump's impeachment, but who reportedly turned out to be then-Vice President Joe Biden's top advisor in the country.
So, she is a long-time radical leftist.
On January 13, 2020, for example, she gave money to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
She's made more than 20 federal campaign contributions since 2016, all of which have gone to Democrats, according to the FEC.
She was invited to testify by the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security, chaired by radical leftist Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.
The lawyers that she has are from a group called Whistleblower Aid.
The group was founded by Mark Zaid, who previously represented the national security official who alleged Donald Trump inappropriately pressed the Ukraine president on a phone call to investigate whether Joe Biden pressed the country to drop an investigation into Burisma.
Hogan's case is pretty obviously being pushed by a raft of people who have been involved with the Democratic Party.
The public relations firm of former Obama aide Bill Burton, a company called Bryce and Gillette, is providing Hogan with strategic communications device, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
Jen Psaki, by the way, worked for Bryce and Gillette as a senior advisor until September 2020.
But the Center for Humane Technology is one of her clients, according to ethics filings obtained by the Daily Wire.
So this lady is really, really well-entrenched with the Democratic bureaucracy.
So again, the game is this.
Find a quote-unquote whistleblower.
The whistleblower doesn't blow the whistle on anything.
They just say a bunch of stuff Democrats like.
Democrats bring the Facebook whistleblower forward.
They have her say a bunch of stuff we already knew, but in tones of high dudgeon.
And then the Democrats threaten Facebook with vague regulation.
And what they really want is to set up a governmental quote-unquote oversight body that is designed not to promote any sort of neutral standard that the government could be held to or that could subject the government to lawsuit, for example.
Instead, they just want to have like a specialist who sits over a business.
They want to have a shadow CEO at the governmental level.
That's the goal.
So here is Frances Hogan saying this, right?
She specifically asked, OK, if Facebook's a monopoly, why don't we break it up?
Is that your contention?
She says, no, no, no, I don't want them to be broken up.
I want heavy regulations.
And really what I want is a government agency that sits on top of them.
And Mark Zuckerberg has to have a boss appointed by the Democratic Party.
I'm actually against the breaking up of Facebook because even looking inside of just Facebook itself, not even Facebook and Instagram, you see the problems of engagement based ranking repeat themselves.
So the problems here are about the design of algorithms, of AI, and the idea that AI is not intelligent.
I also believe there needs to be a dedicated oversight body, because right now the only people in the world who are trained to analyze these experiments, to understand what's happening inside of Facebook, are people who, you know, grew up inside of Facebook or Pinterest or another social media company.
And there needs to be a regulatory home where someone like me could do a tour of duty after working at a place like this.
And have a place to work on things like regulation, to bring that information out to the oversight boards that have the right to do oversight.
What a self-sacrificial whistleblower!
She's literally saying, leave Facebook intact, leave it huge, leave it dominant, let it retain market share, and put me in charge of it.
Understand that's what she's saying.
She's saying there ought to be a regulatory home where someone like me, a quote-unquote whistleblower, can leave Facebook.
I was just a product manager, right?
They have thousands of product managers.
I could be a product manager, but instead of being a product manager, I'll be Mark Zuckerberg's boss.
Via the Democratic Party in a regulatory oversight body where I could work, right?
She literally says that.
She literally says I could leave Facebook and then I could move over to the regulatory side and then I could tell Mark Zuckerberg what to do.
Understand this is what Democrats want.
This is not about being anti-Facebook.
It's about being very pro-Facebook so long as Democrats can run it.
They don't like the idea of Facebook being independently run even though Facebook does a lot of the things Democrats want.
But this is the point.
This is true for business as well.
Democrats, when it comes to this sort of stuff, they are economically fascist.
Economic fascism is corporatism.
It's essentially the idea.
That the federal government should essentially control businesses top-down in a very detailed manner.
And that if these businesses work hand-in-glove with the government, then we leave them alone.
Everybody else who doesn't work with the government, those people are screwed.
But if you work with the government, we'll leave you alone, we'll let you retain your market share, but we will essentially control every aspect of how you run your business.
This sort of corporatist mentality is obviously on display here.
And it's why Democrats are pushing this.
There is nothing new.
She didn't say anything new.
Now, the way that Democrats have to justify taking control of Facebook is to claim that Facebook is quote-unquote promoting violence.
I remember there was an attempt to do this with Parler as well, which is why Amazon Web Services knocked Parler offline in the immediate aftermath of January 6th.
So, this Facebook whistleblower, Hogan, she says that Facebook is going to lead to genocide.
My fear is that without action, divisive and extremist behaviors we see today are only the beginning.
What we saw in Myanmar and are now seeing in Ethiopia are only the opening chapters of a story so terrifying, no one wants to read the end of it.
Congress can change the rules that Facebook plays by and stop the many harms it is now causing.
We now know the truth about Facebook's destructive impact.
Okay, this is just, I'm sorry, it's top-down censorious bullcrap.
It turns out that genocide and human polarization and people treating each other terribly has been a feature of human life since as long as human beings have been on planet Earth.
It is not Facebook, which is simply a place where people gather and talk with each other, that is causing polarization, or that is causing genocide.
It is people who do these things.
And her suggestion is, well, if we just controlled the distribution of information top down via the government, which has never been bad, right?
I mean, the government has never been used to polarize people.
The government would never ever seize control of the means of distribution of information and start promoting propaganda on behalf of one political party that affected how people vote and how people think.
They would never do that.
I mean, sure, they did it like in the last election, like the whole last month of the election when they just sort of downgraded all conservative traffic via social media, under pressure from Democrats, and also got rid of openly true stories like the Hunter Biden laptop story a month before the election.
But they would never do that.
These are the good people.
We have to stop Facebook.
We have to stop social media.
This is very reminiscent of the basic democratic argument that is often brought up that rights themselves are dangerous because rights can be abused.
Therefore, the government should get rid of the rights.
You see this with regard to, for example, hate speech laws that Democrats are constantly pushing.
The notion that hate speech must be policed, right?
Because some people could say bad things, therefore, the First Amendment ought to be curbed.
It's a very popular view on college campuses, and now it's being extended into the corporate sphere.
Now, as I say, it's not as though this lady is saying anything new.
She's not saying anything new.
According to Reason.com, And thanks to Hogan and the Wall Street Journal reporting, we know that Facebook attempted to survey teen users on how platforms were impacting their mental health.
Unsurprisingly, the findings were not entirely encouraging.
One in five respondents said Instagram made them feel worse about themselves.
Teens already struggling with mental illness said the platform was giving them a harder time.
But something like 40% said Instagram made them feel better about themselves.
Ostensibly, says Reason, the problem with Instagram is that it promotes social competition, the race for likes and comments among users posting artificial filtered images of themselves, which may exacerbate body image issues.
Of course, there's nothing new about this because glossy magazines have been doing this for literal decades.
The achievement here, as Reason says, is one of self-branding because Hogan did not tell us anything new about all of this.
Like anything.
As Mike Solana points out, quote, among teenagers in a state of mental crisis, how many are struggling with their family?
How many are struggling with their friend group or their crush?
How many are struggling in a classroom?
To the question of does high school make you want to kill yourself, how many suicidal teenagers would answer yes emphatically?
All of them?
Next question.
When are we dragging the Secretary of Education in front of Congress to explain why he hasn't solved depression?
Okay, again, this is really just a Trojan horse for an attempt to grab control.
That's all this is.
For his part, Mark Zuckerberg has responded.
He put up a Facebook post and he said that he found the criticisms non-compelling.
He said, quote, First, the SEV that took down all of our services yesterday was the worst outage that we've had in years.
He talked about the service outage that happened with regard to Facebook.
He says, second, now that today's testimony is over, I wanted to reflect on the public debate we're in.
I'm sure many of you have found the recent coverage hard to read because it doesn't reflect the company we know.
We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being, and mental health.
It's difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives.
At the most basic level, I think most of us just don't recognize the false picture of the company that's being painted.
Many of the claims don't make sense, says Zuckerberg.
If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?
If we didn't care about fighting harmful content, why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space?
Even ones that are larger than we are?
If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting?
And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, why are we still seeing polarization increase in the U.S.
while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy a use of social media Around the world.
We'll get to more of Mark Zuckerberg's response to the accusations of the quote-unquote fake whistleblower from Facebook in just one second.
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Okay, so Zuckerberg is responding to the fake Facebook whistleblower.
He says...
At the heart of these accusations is the idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being.
That's just not true.
For example, one move that has been called into question is when we introduced the Meaningful Social Interactions change to News Feed.
This change showed fewer viral videos and more content from friends and family.
Which we did knowing it would mean people spent less time on Facebook.
But then research suggested it was the right thing for people's well-being.
Is that something a company focused on profits over people would do?
The argument we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is illogical.
We make money from ads.
Advertisers consistently tell us they don't want their ads next to harmful or angry content.
I don't know any tech company that sets out to build products that make people angry or depressed.
The moral business and product incentives all point in the opposite direction.
But of everything published, says Zuckerberg, I'm particularly focused on the questions raised about our work with kids.
I've spent a lot of time reflecting on the kinds of experiences I want my kids and others to have online, and it's very important to me everything we build is safe and good for kids.
The reality is young people use technology.
Think about how many school-age kids have phones.
Now listen, I actually believe that kids very often should not be given phones by their parents.
I don't plan on giving my kids any sort of phone with internet access until they basically hit 17, 18 years old.
But that's up to parents.
Rather than ignoring this, technology companies should build experiences that meet their needs while also keeping them safe, says Zuckerberg.
We're deeply committed to doing industry-leading work in this area.
A good example of this work is Messenger Kids, which is widely recognized as better and safer than the alternatives.
We've also worked on bringing this kind of age-appropriate experience with parental controls for Instagram as well.
But given questions about whether that would be better for kids, we've paused that project.
Like many of you, I found it difficult to read the mischaracterization of the research into how Instagram affects young people.
As we wrote in our newsroom post explaining this, the research actually demonstrated many teens we heard from feel using Instagram helps them when they are struggling with the kinds of hard moments and issues teenagers have always faced.
In fact, in 11 of 12 areas on the slide referenced by the Wall Street Journal, including areas like loneliness, anxiety, sadness, and eating issues, more teenage girls who said they struggled with that issue also said Instagram made those difficult times better rather than worse.
And then Zuckerberg makes a mistake.
He says that we should really let the government get involved.
It's similar to balancing other social issues.
I don't believe private companies should make all the decisions on their own.
That's why we have advocated for updated internet regulations for several years now.
I've testified in Congress multiple times.
I've asked them to update the regulations.
I've written op-eds outlining the areas of regulation we think are most important.
We're committed to doing the best work we can, but at some level, the right body to assess trade-offs between social equities is our democratically elected Congress.
And what I think Zuckerberg does not understand here is that the goal of the Democrats is never to actually regulate.
The goal is not to pass a law.
The goal is not to create some sort of standard by which Facebook can be held accountable.
The goal is to just control Facebook top down.
That is the goal.
The goal is to take the biggest companies in America.
Whether you're talking about just the pure corporate sector or whether you're talking about social media.
And to have Democrats control every aspect of how work works.
This is the reason why wokeness has infused corporations.
These corporations know that if they please Democrats, Democrats will pat them on the head and call them good little boys and girls and then give them cookies.
And when it comes to Facebook, it's not enough for Facebook to try and serve its governmental masters in the Democratic Party.
The Democrats understand that Facebook, being a place where billions of eyeballs are gathered, is a heavy threat to their dominance via legacy media.
That is the reason we are doing all of this.
If there were no Facebook news feed, the Democrats would not care about Facebook.
This would not be an issue.
The reason that the Democrats care about Facebook is because they want to control the news that you see.
They want to control the content you are able to access.
That is their goal.
It's why they're consistently putting pressure on these giant social media companies.
The news feed, by the way, represents a tiny slice of Facebook's actual profit.
I know this for a fact.
The amount of profit and revenue represented by the news feed from Facebook is minute compared to the other areas of revenue.
The vast majority of highly trafficked posts on Facebook have nothing to do with the news.
Many of them are like cat memes.
People sharing silly memes with their friends or ideas with their friends.
The reason the Democrats are focused in on the news feed is because that's what they care about.
And you can see this in how the media are ecstatic over all of this.
Robin Given, the senior critic at large for the Washington Post, has a piece today in the Washington Post titled, The Whistleblower Came to Advocate for Humans Over Algorithms.
Facebook needs to be less twitchy.
This digital monster that has taught the culture how to overreact and fly off the handle needs to be tamed, regulated, open it up, slow it down, make it more human.
A hard intervention is like taking a piece of content off Facebook, taking a user off Facebook.
Soft interventions are about making a slightly different choice.
To make the platform less viral, less twitchy, said Francis Hogan, the former Facebook employee who testified as a whistleblower.
Hogan came to offer testimony about the way in which Facebook's profit strategy makes young people's lives worse.
Okay, first of all, I just want to point something out.
Whenever people on the left talk about the evils of profit strategy, understand that human beings are driven by ambition.
They're driven by what is in their self-interest.
And whenever people on the left say profit is bad, profit of course being simply the marginal increase of value The risk that you took and that paid off with regard to giving a profit or with regard to giving a product or service to somebody else.
When they say profit is bad, the alternative is the government setting the rules.
What are the incentive structures there?
The incentive structures there are not about pleasing anybody else.
It's about pleasing core constituencies and not pleasing consumers, right?
If you seek to get rid of profit, what is going to be the actual driving factor in human behavior?
The actual driving factor in human behavior is going to be soft societal approval or levels of power and control that you can utilize over other human beings without having to answer to a feedback loop like the market.
The reason that profit motive is good is because it is a feedback loop where you learn what people want and what they don't.
The reason that the government is very bad at this stuff is because feedback loops do not exist for the government, particularly in the regulatory sphere.
At least you can make the argument that if a legislator does something bad, people can get rid of the legislator.
This is not true in the regulatory sphere.
So when you hear people ripping on profit motive at Facebook, understand that the alternative is to have governmental actors who are not answerable to you, controlling major areas of your life for their own power and glorification.
That is the alternative.
And that's exactly what the Washington Post would like.
Facebook's technology encourages some of our worst and most dangerous tendencies, says this columnist for the Washington Post.
For any senator who wanted to argue that the world would be a better place if Facebook had a smaller footprint, Hogan disagreed.
Hogan essentially shrugged off the concern that conservative views were being downgraded, saying that this was a digression.
Of course, because Hogan doesn't want conservative views.
She doesn't want more speech.
She wants less speech.
She wants Democrats to control your speech.
The goal here is to prevent people from actually coordinating with one another and talking with one another.
This is why Anderson Cooper was gushing on CNN.
The overwhelming media love for this whistleblower should be telling you something.
Maybe it should be telling you something about self-interest.
Facebook likes to say it was built to bring people together.
It literally uses those words in promotional material.
Well, today it did bring people together.
For the first time in a long time, Democratic and Republican members of a Senate Commerce Subcommittee were together, united in their praise of whistleblower Frances Haugen.
Now, as you know, she's the former Facebook product manager who leaked tens of thousands of pages of internal documents indicating that Facebook knows the harm that they and Instagram can do But chooses to put clicks, eyeballs, and ad sales ahead of fixing the problem.
Okay, but there's no way to fix the problem.
This is the point that Zuckerberg has made.
What problem are you trying to fix?
And how would a regulation fix it?
No one has proposed anything other than Francis Haugen saying, I should run Fa- literally saying, I should run Facebook.
Hey, that's what it comes down to.
And the reason that I'm very passionate about this is because I prefer open platforms.
My criticism of Facebook is they haven't allowed enough control by the user.
They've allowed too much control by the people at the top of Facebook in terms of nudging you.
Francis Haugen wants the government to nudge you via the use of Facebook.
That is the goal here and the media are into it.
They're into it wholeheartedly because they want their monopoly reestablished.
This is a selfish plan on part of the media.
This is not an unselfish attempt to protect teenage girls.
That's not what the media are into.
That is not what they care about.
What they care about is preventing the dissemination of information that the media oppose.
And by the way, the reason that the media, this is a problem of the media's own creation.
If they wanted to reestablish faith with the American public, they could stop being dishonest jackasses, but they're not going to stop doing that.
So instead, they're going to try and seize control of, again, how you get your news.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so as I say, the media are fully invested in the bull crap Facebook whistleblower who's not blowing the whistle on anything because they want to leverage their power For control on behalf of Democrats.
That's why you have Alison Camerata who's berating the Facebook employees saying, you allowed the big lie to proliferate.
You allowed it to proliferate.
What do you mean you allowed it to proliferate?
It's an open platform.
Facebook is not responsible for third-party content that's posted on Facebook.
That's literally the entire principle of Facebook existing.
But according to Alison Camerata, it is Facebook's problem and Facebook's fault if people disagree on election fraud.
What about democracy?
Does Facebook take any responsibility for what happened on January 6th since it allowed the big election lie propagated by Donald Trump to proliferate on the site?
The responsibility for January 6th, I can't be more clear about this than to say the responsibility for January 6th lies with those who broke the law and those in politics and elsewhere who incited them.
Okay, the Facebook spokesperson is exactly right.
Her name is Bickert.
She's exactly correct.
But has anyone ever asked CNN, does CNN bear responsibility for the riots that happened last summer when they were allowing the big lie that police across the country are systemically racist to not only proliferate, but fill their news waves for day after day after day, for year after year actually?
Does CNN bear responsibility for that?
Should we regulate CNN on that?
And CNN, by the way, is an editorial, it's an editorial company.
Now imagine that CNN weren't an editorial company or just a bunch of people posting stuff.
Would they be responsible?
Is AT&T responsible for January 6th?
Because some people use the phone to talk to each other.
The goal here is to take control.
It is about control.
It is always about control.
That's why you have Senator Ed Markey.
Who is an out-and-out totalitarian when it comes to governmental control of business.
Talking to Francis Haugen and openly threatening Mark Zuckerberg.
Here's my message for Mark Zuckerberg.
Your time of invading our privacy, promoting toxic content, and preying on children and teens is over.
Congress will be taking action.
You can work with us or not work with us.
But we will not allow your company to harm our children and our families and our democracy any longer.
Okay, notice what he says.
Our children, our family, and our democracies.
First of all, parents have the ability to turn off Facebook and Instagram.
Our families.
Parents have the ability.
Like, this is a parental thing.
And then, when it comes to our democracy, this is what Markey's talking about.
What harms the democracy, according to Ed Markey, is the First Amendment.
What harms the democracy is your ability to access sites like The Daily Wire via the Facebook News Feed.
All of this is just a cover.
It is all just a BS cover for the actual seizure of power.
David Cicilline, the representative from Louisiana, he's openly saying that Facebook needs to turn over its algorithms to the federal government now.
If Facebook comes up with a proprietary algorithm that enhances their business capabilities, they don't seem to think they have to share that.
How do you make them share that?
Well, I mean, there's a number of ways you can require algorithmic audits to be sure they're doing what they claim they do.
You can require greater transparency for algorithms.
You can, you know, permit agent and agency responsible looking at their practices, either its impact on competition, or on fairness to consumers are two obvious places.
Okay, under what rubric would you seize their algorithms?
Really under what rubric?
I know of very few other situations in American life where you are simply supposed to turn over your confidential business information to the federal government so they can oversee you.
Not because you're like flying an airplane around and you need to demonstrate that the airplane is going to fly to the FAA, but because you're just a business operating.
The point here is that you cannot demand that corporations turn over all confidential business information under the open acknowledgement that you are attempting to violate the First Amendment.
That's a wild thing to do.
But that's exactly what they want.
That is the goal here.
Why?
So they can reestablish that monopoly.
So they can continue to push forward their actual agenda.
It's always Agenda Uber Alice.
We'll get to what that agenda is these days in just one moment.
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Alrighty, in just one second, we'll get to the democratic agenda being pushed by the media right now.
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Now, the reason that the Democrats in the media want to reestablish the oligopoly in terms of informational dissemination is twofold.
One for the media, market base.
They would love control.
They would love to maintain their former levels of control because as the media space fragments and as people start to view podcasts like this one, or start to listen to shows like this one, or start to access the Daily Wire, that means less control over how you get your news and less money for them.
And they actually want their narrative to win.
And that narrative is so often at odds with reality that the only way their narrative can win is to shut down the dissemination of the opposing narrative.
So, for example, you've been hearing that Joe Biden is still in control of things.
I'm sorry, Joe Biden is not with us.
He has not been with us for a very long time.
For like a year, you were told that if you ever questioned Joe Biden's mental health, it was because there was something wrong with you.
Okay, Joe Biden is not even speaking English anymore.
He is not Englishing.
Hey, Joe Biden is not with us.
Here is Joe Biden.
Again, this is like the middle of the day, guys.
This isn't 7 p.m.
after he's had a long day, hard at work in the Oval Office or something.
This is like 2.50 p.m.
Central Time yesterday, and the man is slurring his words and walking into things.
When you build a charging station, it's like back in the day when my grandpa worked for the Maryland Granola Company back in the 1920s in that area.
They went from state to state convincing people that they allowed them to put 20,000 gallons of gasoline under the ground.
They didn't want them around.
I'm sorry, this is embarrassing.
It is.
You should be embarrassed as an American by this.
I know there are a lot of people who are embarrassed by how Trump talked.
Trump actually completed sentences sometimes.
Joe Biden... I never thought that I would be favorably comparing Donald Trump's rhetorical prowess with a future president, but that's...
I mean, it's like they play Hail to the Chief.
President Joseph R. Biden.
What in the hell?
What in the hell?
It didn't stop there, by the way.
The babbling just continues.
It feels like you are walking the halls of an insane asylum at this point.
They believe they'll win.
They'll win today.
And they can dictate their way forward and leave us behind.
They're betting, not a joke.
They're betting for the first time we won't respond to this inflection point in history.
And we'll fail to rise to the occasion.
But you've heard me say it a lot of times.
It's never, ever been a good bet to bet against the American people.
Never.
It's never been a gamba-doobly-sam-chim-goobly-sam.
Here's the thing the American people see through Biden.
His poll numbers suck.
They suck for a reason.
According to Politico, Democrats who were hoping that the monthly $300 per-child checks the federal government started sending to families over the summer would be a winner in the midterms, they won't like the findings of the latest Morning Consult poll.
Fewer than half of respondents, 47%, gave Congressional Democrats any credit for providing the extra cash.
Even fewer, 38%, credited Joe Biden.
While half of registered voters support the expanded payments versus 38% in opposition, only 35% want to make them permanent, which is what Democrats are trying at the moment.
Democrats just want to cram down the idea that they will give you free money and that you will love it.
You will love the free money that they are cramming down upon you.
And in order to justify spending all of this money, of course, they're going to claim that the Republicans are obstructionists because Republicans won't voluntarily raise the debt ceiling.
Here's the thing.
The debt ceiling is a way to pry concessions as far as future spending plans out of the hands of Democrats.
That is the goal here.
That is what Republicans are trying to do.
They're saying, listen, we understand you're trying to pay off the current credit card bill.
Also, we are not going to extend you a further line of credit unless you decide that you're going to restructure how you approach the economy as a whole.
But Democrats don't want to do that.
And here's the thing.
Democrats don't even want to be held accountable on all of this.
So Joe Biden is fulminating over the debt ceiling.
We're supposed to hit the debt ceiling in a couple of weeks.
Democrats have every ability today to pass a debt ceiling bill.
They can do it literally today.
And they can do what is called a vote-a-rama.
And they can do it today.
But Joe Biden is trying to blame this on Republicans.
He's saying that it's Trump.
Well, you know, the big problem here is that Trump was a big spender.
As I recall, all of the spending done last year was a bipartisan affair, including Democrats.
All of the spending done this year was a completely partisan affair with not a single Republican vote, so far as I'm aware.
Here is Joe Biden here ripping on Trump.
The reason we have to raise the debt limit is in part because of the reckless tax and spending policies under the previous Trump administration.
In four years, they incurred nearly $8 trillion.
In four years, $8 trillion in additional debt and bills we have to now pay off.
That's more than a quarter of the entire debt incurred now outstanding after more than 200 years.
Okay.
And then Biden continues along these lines and gets catastrophic.
Well, it's going to be, it's going to be the end of the subject.
Here we go.
Not only are Republicans refusing to do their job, They're threatening to reuse the power, their power, to prevent us from doing our job, saving the economy from a catastrophic event.
I think quite frankly, it's hypocritical, dangerous, and disgraceful.
Their obstruction and irresponsibility knows absolutely no bounds.
Excuse me, especially as we're clawing our way out of this pandemic.
And then he finishes up by saying, if you don't want to save the country, get the hell out of the way, because there's nothing that says bipartisanship quite like that.
Meteor is headed to crash into our economy.
Democrats are willing to do all the work stopping it.
Republicans just have to let us do our job.
Just get out of the way.
You don't want to help save the country?
Get out of the way so you don't destroy it.
Okay, they aren't in the way.
Democrats can pass a debt ceiling relief bill any single, anytime they want.
They have 50 votes.
They can do it via reconciliation.
Joe Biden doesn't want to do that because that would involve a quote-unquote voterama.
Okay, voterama is where the Democrats have to vote on a bunch of separate issues, and they all have to be on the record voting for those separate issues.
Biden doesn't want them on the record, so he's angry at Republicans.
That's all this is.
The media would love to be able to cram down narratives like that one without anybody being any the wiser.
That is the end goal here.
OK, speaking of the generalized Joe Biden policy on the economy, the Democrats are at this point talking about just ridiculous crap.
So the debt ceiling is scheduled.
Again, Democrats, anytime they want, can do what is called a voterama and they can vote through a debt ceiling provision.
Simply, by majority vote, through reconciliation.
They do not need a single Republican vote to pass reconciliation at this point.
That's it.
Okay, but instead, they are now considering, just to avoid the culpability of having to vote on a bunch of single issues at the Senate level, and then hold those Senators to account, to avoid all of that, the Democrats are now apparently contemplating the stupidity of minting a trillion dollar platinum coin, according to Axios.
A trillion dollar platinum coin could be minted within hours of the Treasury Secretary's decision to do so, says Philip Deal, former director of the U.S.
Mint.
Congressional solutions to the debt ceiling problem could take weeks to implement, especially if reconciliation is used.
And time is running out.
Well, then you guys better get on it, shouldn't you?
In case of emergency, a trillion dollar coin could be deployed to bridge any gap between the money running out and the debt ceiling being raised.
The U.S.
Mint already produces a one-ounce platinum eagle and has no shortage of platinum blanks already in stock.
So first of all, I'm just looking forward to the Netflix film about the ragtag group of diverse criminals who steal the one trillion dollar Fed coin that has now been created in order to pay off our ballooning national debt.
Apparently, a coin could be struck in minutes at the West Point Mint, and then it would be physically deposited at the New York Fed.
And voila!
You have bought yourself the equivalent of a trillion dollar increase in the debt limit without any impact on inflation.
Well, I mean, there is some impact on inflation, considering that when you start minting coins in order to pay off the debt, which is what you're talking about right here, The idea being that we'll backfill all of this later and then take the $1 trillion coin out of circulation. When you start doing that, you are leading the way to what if we just print more money? What if we actually just physically print more money?
That's clearly why people have been hesitant to do this in the past. But according to the Democrats, the real idea here should be to get rid of the debt limit entirely. Entirely. Here's James Clyburn making that case.
We have some arcade rules that we need to just get rid of.
This debt limit business is arcade and needs to be thrown to the trash pile.
OK, it needs to be thrown in the trash pile.
We want to have to remember the way that it used to be is that Congress actually had to appropriate specific funds.
Congress had to tell the federal government exactly what debt instruments they had to use.
This was the case from about 1787 all the way through about 1910.
And then during World War One, there were these sort of blanket Abilities for the federal government to take out debt.
And then in the 1970s, there was an attempt to effectively get rid of the debt ceiling by saying anytime Congress appropriated funding that would give the federal treasury the ability to take out debt.
And then that was walked back in the 1990s.
That's what the Democrats would like back.
They would like the idea to be that we never have to think about the debt ever, ever, ever.
It just automatically increases the ability of the federal government to borrow.
And then they wonder why people are worried about inflation.
Janet Yellen, again, it is incredible, and it says something about how our financial system works, that people move directly from the so-called independent Federal Reserve directly over to heading the Treasury Department for Joe Biden without any gap, and they promote exactly the same policy.
We're going to pretend that's not political in any way?
Here is Janet Yellen saying that inflation is transitory, but also it's not going to go away soon, which is not the definition of transitory.
Supply bottlenecks have developed that have caused inflation.
I believe that they're transitory, but that doesn't mean they'll go away over the next several months.
Oh, well, if it goes away, then... But it's also not... It's kind of transitory, but not... Also, she wants more control over how you do your finances.
So the Democrats have been proposing an IRS rule that would require all banks to report all transactions over $600.
So that the IRS can spy on everything you do.
$600.
They're not talking about $10,000.
Not $5,000.
That's $600.
They're not talking about $10,000, not $5,000, not $600.
You're talking about like taking out cash for a couple of nights at a hotel.
Here's Janet Yellen saying that the IRS should be empowered to audit basically every transaction you do automatically.
Banks will automatically be forced to report all transactions over $600.
Because regulators should control your life.
They should.
A simple way for the IRS to get a sense of where that might be is just a few pieces of information about individuals' bank accounts.
Nothing at the transaction level that would violate privacy.
Simply aggregate inflows into the account over the year and aggregate outflows.
Oh, okay.
Great.
Great.
Just the IRS should have more control.
All of this is about more control top down, and this is why they have to maintain the supremacy of informational dissemination.
If that goes away, they got a real problem on their hands.
Okay, meanwhile, Democrats have begun to narrow their differences on Biden's social spending bill.
As I predicted, this thing is not going to go down to flaming defeat.
Eventually, it will end up in the $2 trillion area.
According to the Washington Post, Democrats in a flurry of private talks are beginning to narrow their differences over the size of Biden's sweeping safety net bill.
As liberals signal, they are open to sizable concessions on the scope of what could be the most far-reaching social legislation in years.
I mean, guys, stop tubing all over the place.
That's some serious journalism.
Hot, hot, sticky journalism.
Most far-reaching social legislation in years.
The discussions, which remain highly fluid, suggest that Democratic leaders are pushing to move beyond a series of angry intraparty standoffs and focus instead on whether they can coalesce around a scaled-down package.
In a virtual meeting with a dozen liberal Democrats on Monday, Biden suggested a package in the range of $1.9 trillion to $2.2 trillion for the safety net bill, significantly lower than the original $3.5 trillion.
Still a massive bill.
Pramila Jayapal countered with a range of $2.5 trillion to $2.9 trillion, according to three of those people.
Biden signaled another potential compromise when asked by reporters whether he would sign the bill if it included the Hyde Amendment, a provision banning the use of federal funds for abortion.
That is a rider that is attached to pretty much every federal bill.
And Biden said, yeah, yeah, I'll still sign that, which is fun since last year he said he opposed the Hyde Amendment.
Biden is also attempting to tell people how important this bill is when we are in the middle of an inflationary spiral and we are paying people to stay out of work and there are 10 million open jobs in the country right now.
And Democrats are a little bit damned if they do damned if they don't hear.
If they don't do it, then they are incapable of getting anything done.
And if they do do it, then they are going to end up with a bill that is going to provide just a field day for Republicans ripping on how Democrats spend your money.
So there's only one way that you can get through that.
The only way, there's no way out but through for the Democrats, and that is they just have to keep talking.
They have to keep talking, they have to fill the airwaves, and they have to prevent anybody from speaking back against them.
Okay, this is true in the area of fiscal responsibility.
It's also true in the area of science.
It is just a continuing incredible thing to me how the scientific establishment has been completely perverted by a desire for social justice nonsense.
It's insane.
So yesterday, there was a meme that was going around.
It wasn't even a meme.
It was a thing from Healthline, right?
Healthline is a medical website.
And here's what Healthline is now saying.
It's under Parenthood at Pregnancy.
Can men get pregnant?
Is it possible?
Yes, according to Healthline.
It's possible for men to become pregnant and give birth to children of their own.
In fact, it's probably a lot more common than you might think.
In order to explain, we'll need to break down some common misconceptions about how we understand the term man.
Uh, so, um, no we don't.
You mean the misconception that's been held by all of humanity since the dawn of time?
Because human species is a sexually dichotomous species?
That is the basis for all human reproduction?
I mean, if men can get pregnant, I will say that the birthing process via the urethra is going to be extraordinarily painful.
You think it's bad through the vaginal canal?
Try it through the urethra.
Um, no, men cannot get pregnant, but our scientific experts are now telling us so.
The only way that you can promote garbage is, again, to hold an informational monopoly.
That is the only way that you can do it.
And that's how you end up with this insane situation with Sonic.
So, there's this insane story that made the rounds yesterday.
Again, this just demonstrates, it demonstrates at full scale how crazy our society has become.
There is a recent viral video of a trans woman in a heated conversation with a Sonic employee, and it sparked a debate about gender identity and transphobia.
Here is the video.
And then Sonic said they would investigate because everyone is a damned coward.
Here is the video.
Okay, but your entire staff has been calling me, sir, the entire time.
Okay.
What about me looks like a sir right now?
If they call you a sir, I don't know why they did that.
Because they saw the name on my credit card and they were not being nice people.
Well, I mean, they saw your name on the credit card.
What do you want them to tell you?
That has nothing to do with it.
There could be someone in the back that they don't see.
That's paying!
Okay, ma'am.
So why would they intentionally do that?
Can you tell me what your location has done to be transcompetent?
Because clearly they are not.
Okay, so the entire video is about a person who is complaining.
Because this person's credit card apparently has a male name on it, and people called the person sir.
And then this person got angry.
Satora says I demand to be given respect when it comes to my gender identity.
I refuse to let a cisgender, heteronormative world dominate my existence.
I and any other trans person fighting for trans liberation is doing so to make the world a more inclusive and equitable world for us.
As my friend Lola famously said, We aren't working with a broken system.
We're working with a system that was never in place for trans and gender expansive humans.
I don't want this Sonic manager fired.
That would do no good.
He would be transphobic the next place he works.
He deserves the chance to leave.
I want all businesses to hire trans-led organizations to teach their employees how to respect all humans.
So Sonic immediately looked into this and started thinking about whether they ought to fire this person for the great crime of pointing out that perhaps the employees were terming this person sir because the person's credit card had a male name on it.
It's just, it's unbelievable.
Okay, and at one point, the employee asks, so what are you?
Can I call you sir or ma'am?
And Taurus says, what would you assume looking at me?
And the Sonic employee answers, I assume you're a man.
And that's when Taurus turned the camera to face himself, displaying pink lipstick, long hair, and cat eye frames, and said, thank you, whatever, and drove away.
Okay, well, if you ask somebody whether they appear to be a man or a woman, and then they give you an honest answer, that is not transphobia if you are a man.
I'm sorry, it isn't.
You're a biological man.
But again, the only way that you can promote this sort of crap, and then you can do it to corporations, and then you can do it to the entire society, is by essentially monopolizing the conversation.
I keep focusing on it because it's so important.
The monopoly on the conversation is everything to the left.
If they lose the monopoly on conversation, they lose the conversation.
They know it.
We all know it.
That's what's behind the Facebook crackdown.
It's what is behind the corporate woke pressure.
It is all about monopolizing the conversation and shutting down dissent.
That's what it's about in the end.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out The Michael Moller Show.
That is available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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An Australian state has citizens sending selfies to the government to prove they haven't left their homes.
The CDC floats another virtual Thanksgiving, quote-unquote.
And most millionaires don't want to leave money to their lazy kids.
I don't blame them.
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