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June 2, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
08:43
Should your Social Media Accounts be Treated as Property？
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Let's talk a bit about tech and big tech bias.
So you were quite recently demonetized by YouTube for advertising revenue stripped from your channel.
I think Lee's puts you in the same boat as Tommy Robinson and Count Dankula.
Yes.
So first of all, did they give you a reason for doing it?
And second of all, how badly did it impact your personality?
Well, they did it over a joke.
Obviously, it does deeply impact me because the majority of my funding was coming from my channel.
So that's quite a problem.
But I'm sure I'll be able to work past it.
And maybe YouTube will see it in their hearts to consider that maybe demonetizing someone's platform over a joke.
And it was a silly joke video.
It was marked as comedy.
It was a blooper reel of jokes.
It obviously wasn't meant to be offensive or taken literally or anything like that.
Maybe they'll see it.
Not just a joke, but a blooper reel joke.
Yeah, yeah, it was a series of outtakes from a previous video, though.
I see.
And maybe they'll find it in their hearts to re-monetize my channel after considering my side of the story.
But yes, I think it's...
Why do you think they went for the whole channel, not just that one video?
I have no idea.
I guess we'd have to ask YouTube.
But I think it is part of a demonstrable pattern that targets Trump supporters.
Because I've been a Trump supporter for a while now.
I wasn't originally, but he persuaded me around because he did a great job.
And so now I'm a full-throated Trump supporter.
And I think that we're coming up to the 2020 elections.
And I do suspect there's a great deal of political bias involved.
If you don't mind me asking, what was the joke?
How bad was it?
Well, it was the Jess Phillips one that we were talking about.
Oh, the Jess Phillips one, I think.
This was the consequence of media pressure.
Right.
So YouTube have essentially caved into this kind of media narrative, regardless of the truth, just because there's a great deal of hysteria being generated.
So the joke was made on YouTube.
It's interesting that tech companies have started to ban people, not just what they do on their platforms, but also off platforms as well.
It's sort of become like a test of your virtue as a whole, not just in their particular property.
Well, it's interesting how that gives them claim to all of your behaviour.
No matter where you are, in what context you are, no matter what you're doing, they are now the moral arbiters of your behaviour.
And if they're not happy, if there's enough media kickback about something that's happened, they won't stand their ground and say, well, according to our terms of service, he's done nothing wrong.
Which, according to the terms of service, I haven't done anything wrong.
They'll instead bow to this kind of pressure and bow and scrape and do the politically correct thing.
It's like getting thrown out of a pub in England for insulting someone in an Australian pub six months ago.
Absolutely.
That's exactly what it is.
So what sort of policy change would you like to see either here in the UK or in the US to make tech censorship less viable?
Well because of the location of Silicon Valley, it'd have to be done in the US.
And personally, I would like to see some kind of digital bill of rights that guarantees what we can effectively call like the right to a digital trial perhaps.
I think that, and I think that this is something that the tech giants themselves would probably agree to.
Because I actually kind of feel bad for the CEOs and the tech giants at this point.
You can see on their faces with Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dawson, you can see they've created a monster that they find themselves riding on top of and they're not sure how to handle it.
But what I would like to see is the decision-making power about who gets their accounts banned, taken away from the platforms and actually delegated to a jury with an actual judge of some form.
Couldn't just be like a regular court.
Why can't you just take social media platforms to court and get your account reinstated?
Well, I would actually like to have to go through a legal procedure to get them suspended.
Right.
Because it is at the moment a digital death sentence.
Once they say, no, we've decided for whatever reason, good or bad, you've got no recourse, you've got no way of actually getting that back.
And it's always the worst possible outcome at the first instance.
Oh, Milo Yiannopoulos has tweeted that Leslie Jones, quick destroy his, ban his footers down.
It wasn't one strike, it wasn't a trial, it wasn't a warning, it wasn't, there's no way there's no recourse from Milo, he can't get that back, you know, under a promise of reformed behaviour.
It's the worst, you know, if this was legal, a legal trial, it would be just a tyrannical king beheading people in the marketplace.
I sometimes like to compare it to property.
So a landlord is not allowed to simply evict you.
He has to get a court order, doesn't he?
Yes.
And that's because your property is valuable to you.
Yes.
You've invested time and money in it.
And your social media accounts are definitely your property.
Right.
They're definitely something you've created that you've built up.
your presence and not only that I mean there are wider implications for it being and they're also worth something in the same way that physical property is worth something That's really, honestly.
I mean, make a lot of people a lot of money.
But it's also the ethical question of who gets to decide who does and does not speak.
And at the moment, it's a handful of billionaires and their activists in Silicon Valley.
And I think that's tyrannical, frankly.
And also, there's a wider issue here which goes beyond just social media platforms and tech giants.
It's the denial of service in general.
We're sort of seeing, I think, like an ideological Jim Crow in which people are being denied access to banking, to credit cards, DNS registrars, even restaurants over their political viewpoints.
What do you think of that trend?
Anything to be done about that?
I think it's really disturbing, and it is actually the path towards fascism.
Because what the fascists always complained about the liberal state being a night watchman, it was just there to guard people's rights.
It wasn't there to make a better society.
That was down to the individuals who lived in any state.
The fascists instead set up what they considered to be an ethical state.
The state itself had an ethical agenda and would mold the population in order to fit this agenda.
And that goes completely against what I believe it was Adam Smith who suggested that the moral good of capitalism was the anonymization of the market.
You didn't know with whom you were trading.
You didn't need to know, which meant anyone was free to go into any business and then exchange their money and goods for goods and services, which makes a much more fair and moral society.
It means that people can't simply be targeted by groups of people within society or by the state.
And it means we can all actually live in freedom.
So going against this, forcing companies to take ethical stances against individuals, I think is the clear sign that we're on that kind of path to a more tyrannical society.
And I think that we should definitely oppose this wherever we see it.
And the answer to Jim Crow was civil rights legislation, do you think that's the answer here as well?
Should we make political viewpoint a protected class in the same way that race, sex, and sexual orientation is?
It's the last thing that I want to do, but this kind of censorship just cannot go on forever.
Right.
I mean, at the moment, religion is treated as a protected class, which is terrible.
Because if you think about it, like, Britain is the home of religious tolerance, purely so we could critique one another's religions.
The idea that this is now a protected class, I mean, Christopher Hitchens would be spinning his grave, surely.
This is the worst thing.
This is the antithesis of liberty.
And so if we can't critique ideas, then we're out of options.
Where does politics go from here?
There are three arguments I find especially simplistic on this issue.
First is the argument that, you know, free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
I think that's what it's meant to mean.
Isn't that exactly what it means?
Like, going to prison is a consequence.
Yes.
I mean, what they mean, and they never make this distinction, but what they mean, we're thinking legal consequences and they're thinking social consequences.
Well, fine, you guys can unsubscribe from my channel if you didn't like my joke, or you can subscribe if you did like it, or you can decide to not come to a venue that's hosting a live event of mine.
But by the same token, I shouldn't be investigated for a joke.
Nobody should be investigated for a joke.
Nobody should be going to prison for things, for throwaway remarks that they're saying on social media.
And yet they are.
But don't you think the distinction between a government punishing someone for speech and a private corporation punishing someone for speech is a little bit overwrought because wouldn't you rather pay a fif well, you shouldn't be you shouldn't have to pay a fifty pound fine for law for like, you know, speech that doesn't harm anyone, right?
But wouldn't it be better to pay a fifty pound fine wouldn't you rather pay a fifty pound fine than have your entire YouTube channel demonetised?
I mean what what harms you more, right?
I would prepare I I would prefer to pay a fifty pound fine, yes.
Exactly, because you know they're both consequences.
Does it matter that one's imposed by a corporation and one's imposed by the state?
The the consequence should be the opinion of the people who saw it.
That should be their consequence.
And they then they should use the market to associate as and how they choose.
They shouldn't be able to destroy someone's livelihood or lifestyle or or d anything about them just based on something that they've said.
I mean they should just choose to spend their money elsewhere or, you know, u use their clicks and viewership elsewhere.
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