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Nov. 2, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:05:46

Allum Bokhari

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	I mean, this week's special guest could not be more topical.
	Listen another time, subscribe with me.
	I love Deling Poll.
	Welcome to the Deling Poll with me, James Deling Poll.
	And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I mean, this week's special guest could not be more topical.
	And we've got just a few days to go before, I think, the most important election in the life of probably anyone living, actually.
	I don't know whether my guest, Alan Bakari, will agree with me.
	Alan, am I right?
	Absolutely, especially when we think about internet freedom.
	It's really incredible how there's only one arm of the government in the US right now that's serious about reigning in these big tech giants.
	And it's the executive branch under Donald Trump.
	And that'll completely change if Joe Biden gets elected.
	And there's no other government in the Western world that actually wants less censorship on social media.
	They all want more censorship.
	So it's internet freedom versus digital totalitarianism.
	Huge question next week.
	And it's not just internet, it's basically freedom versus totalitarianism, because the internet is, well, we'll come on to that in a moment.
	So The reason that you're topical, in case anyone hasn't worked it out, there's a clue in the background.
	You've written a book called Deleted, which is about the power of big tech.
	And I... Do you know what?
	I almost didn't want to read it.
	After I'd read a couple of chapters, I thought, this is so depressing that I don't want to know anymore.
	But at the same time, I had to read on because I had to find out what horrors awaited us.
	I like particularly, well, in the way that I like Salem's Lot or Nightmare on Elm Street, I liked the chapter on the most, was it the most evil company in the world?
	The most dangerous company in the world?
	The most dangerous company in the world, yes.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So we'll come to that.
	So we had a conversation, didn't we, when you came over to England?
	Because you're based in the US now.
	Yeah.
	It was kind of weird because I did two podcasts that day.
	Or was it a vidcast?
	I can't remember what I did with you anyway.
	I think it was a vidcast.
	But I certainly remember there being people around and it being in person and there being no masks, which is hard to remember these days.
	Isn't that weird?
	And do you know the even weirder thing?
	I was feeling really rotten that day, because I had The Rona.
	I had coronavirus.
	I didn't know it was coronavirus at the time.
	I only got tested afterwards.
	I thought it was just a cold and I thought I'd just carry on working through it.
	I felt quite rotten, but not.
	So first of all, I poisoned David Starkey, who was my first guest, and then I moved on to you.
	But you didn't get anything, did you?
	No, I'm totally fine.
	So many people have had it and had no symptoms.
	So I hope I have had it to make myself immune.
	But I honestly have no idea.
	But you are, you are in the child age group where you children don't get, you know, you get it asymptomatically.
	And that's great.
	I envy you that.
	But I tell you what I don't envy.
	I don't envy the world that you are about to inherit unless, unless, unless things go very right in a few days time, or maybe by the time people watch it, watching this, they won't need, you know, to guess.
	They'll know already.
	I can't believe how much depends on the result of this election.
	Well, the interesting thing about the past four years is, and one of the biggest positives of Trump is that he's made the elites, he's made the ruling class take their mask off and ditch all the pretense about democracy and the rule of law and freedom of speech, all of the things they used to just pretend to believe in, they now openly Disbelief.
	And we've seen that.
	We've seen, you know, all, every part of elite society, every part of the ruling class unite against Donald Trump.
	And the reason I wrote this book is unlike the other parts of elite society, the administrative state, the mainstream media, the power of big tech is something new, a weapon that the elites didn't have before, and a more powerful weapon than they've ever had before, I think.
	And you know, we can get into some of the ways in which they invisibly manipulate us in addition to all the outright censorship we're seeing.
	Yes, yes.
	I think lots of people are dimly aware that that big tech is in the hands of really quite radically left wing people.
	And that there is a degree of censorship around, you know, I mean, I occasionally get people having a go at me for Raising money on Patreon, as though I'm in bed with big evil.
	But actually, reading your book, I realise just how bad the situation is.
	It's much worse, I think.
	Anyone who hasn't read the book, I think, will be unaware just how bad things are already.
	And you start off With the reaction, don't you, in Silicon Valley to Trump getting into power in 2016, they were appalled.
	And they all vowed to do one thing, which was to make sure he doesn't get back in again.
	And that is essentially what your book is about, isn't it?
	Yes, that four year journey that Silicon Valley took after 2016 to make sure nothing like 2016 ever happens again.
	I think Not just Silicon Valley, but the whole establishment was terrified by what happened in 2015 and 2016.
	Not just Donald Trump, but the rise of Brexit, the rise of Bolsonaro, the rise of the worldwide populist movement, Salvini in Italy, all of these people.
	And I think a lot of them blamed the internet for allowing it to happen, because the internet was, until the tech giants clamped down, this open environment, this free and open forum.
	Where anyone with a laptop could potentially access a global audience.
	So that was a radical threat to the elite's control of information.
	And I actually talked to one government source in the book.
	You know, he's anonymous, of course, which is probably quite prudent.
	But he's been following this topic for a while.
	And he said, you know, Western elites used to see the Internet in the Obama era as like a useful tool to help them, you know, regime change, Dictators in the Arab world, or in Eastern Europe, or in all of these places.
	But, he said, as soon as 2016 happens, as soon as you get Brexit and Donald Trump, they start to worry, oh no, the internet can be used to regime change us.
	The establishment in the West will lose its power as well.
	And they obviously didn't want that to happen, which is why they saw this huge backlash right after Trump was elected against the tech companies, forcing them to censor their own platforms.
	And the pressure was, you know, from outside the companies, from the media, from politicians, from NGOs, and also from inside the companies, from their own employees.
	Yes, you make the point that if you think that the CEOs of these companies are woke, wait till you meet the employees who are just like, I mean, radical, rabid, rabid revolutionaries, aren't they?
	I mean, they are just commies.
	Oh, 100%.
	I mean, Utterly deranged.
	They all believe in critical race theory.
	They all believe in far-left feminism.
	They actually have a whole field now in Silicon Valley, which is something encouraged by the tech giants.
	You also find it at universities now.
	It's called machine learning fairness.
	Of course they call it fairness.
	As with many of their words, the precise opposite of that.
	But the point of machine learning fairness is to bring the fields of critical race theory and left-wing sociology and far-left feminism and merge it with computer science so that all the algorithms of the future that are going to run our world are going to have those leftist assumptions embedded in them beforehand.
	They call it fairness.
	I almost want to ask the question now because I'm so depressed.
	Is there any hope in what we can do about it?
	But I think maybe we ought to just outline the problem in a bit more detail first.
	So tell me, tell me exactly how the big tech companies are corrupting the political system.
	Because, for example, I think that without big tech, this would definitely be Trump's election.
	to lose.
	I think he'd win easily.
	But the reason it's very much in the balance, I think, is because of Big Tech's extraordinary influence.
	So just persuade the sceptical among my viewers why this is so.
	Well, we've always known that, you know, the leading institutions of society are all biased towards the left, the mainstream media, academia, most corporations.
	But here's why Big Tech is so much more powerful than those.
	So when the mainstream media is propagandizing you and you're watching a BBC show or whatever, you're aware that there's some kind of bias there.
	Your critical faculties are on alert.
	But you don't really... With Big Tech, it's kind of invisible.
	So one of the things my Facebook source mentions is how after 2016, they started this program against so-called polarization.
	They want to depolarize people on Facebook because they were getting criticism from the mainstream media that their platform was leading to filter bubbles and hyper-partisanship and extremism.
	So they created this system to depolarize people.
	Well, how do they do that?
	My source explained it to me.
	They look at the people who have gone from the so-called far right, and I guess the far left as well, and move towards the center.
	And in the words of my Facebook source, they build a model from those individuals looking at the kind of content they watch, the kind of posts they read, and they can then use that to micro-target other people on the so-called far-right.
	But of course, the way Facebook defines far-right is obviously very different to the way normal people define it, because they're also left-wing.
	But it's an invisible brainwashing tool, because people are getting fed these posts and these videos, and they have no idea that the algorithm behind it is incredibly biased and designed to change their political opinions.
	It's the combination of the level of detail that these companies have on us, and their ability to microtarget us with specific information.
	That's just one example of the book.
	There are many others.
	I'm sure that Facebook will consider me far right, because in this new world, anyone With a vaguely kind of classical liberal libertarian outlook seems to seems to pass.
	So if I used Facebook, which I don't really, what would they be targeting me with with things designed to lead me away from wrong think?
	Essentially, yes.
	And you know, keep in mind these algorithms are very sophisticated, they improve over time, they'll keep perfecting the system until it and I doubt you'll even be able to notice it.
	Because What's, what's the first stepping stone from far right to centre?
	It's probably something a little bit less right wing than what you usually watch.
	And then the thing after that is a little bit less right wing and on and on and on.
	I imagine that's how it works.
	But it's probably much more complicated than that.
	And we have no idea how this system they've built actually this depolarising system actually works.
	Right, right.
	Yeah, it's it's it's so sad, isn't it?
	Because you and I are old enough to remember because you don't need to be very old to remember it.
	a time when we thought the internet was going to free us.
	It was going to be I mean, I remember I wrote loads of pieces saying about how it was like the printing press that it suddenly brought sort of democracy of thought to the to the world in the same way that the printing press meant that no longer could information what no longer was information the preserve of rich lords in their castles, but suddenly Everyone can own a book or at least have access to a book.
	And in the same way, you remember Climategate, the story that I helped write about the massive conspiracy, if you like, of the scientific establishment to get us to believe that the world was catastrophically warming and it was all our fault, etc, etc.
	And The point I often made was that this story would not have been possible without loads and loads of people around the world sort of amateur, amateurs, scientists, some of them people, just people with terrier like tenacity to dig through all the information and, and penetrate the firewalls of these citadels of establishment power.
	And that I argued that wouldn't have been possible before, before the internet.
	But now, it's become It's become our shackles, hasn't it?
	How did this happen, Alan?
	If you publish Climategate today, I'll tell you what would have happened, exactly what happened in the New York Post with the Hunter Biden story.
	You'd get accused of Russian disinformation.
	You'd get suppressed on Twitter and Facebook.
	You'd have fact-checkers coming out and posting big labels in your articles about how wrong it is.
	So they'd throw everything at you if you published it today.
	But yeah, how did we get here?
	Interesting, you compare it to the printing press, and there's a whole chapter in the book about previous revolutions in communications technology, including the printing press, and also the telegraph in the 19th century, the rise in literacy, the rise in mass literature and mass market newspapers, and also the rise of TV and radio.
	Every time this has happened, there's always been an elite backlash, because in any period of history, the elites have a huge interest in controlling The people who wield political power, the people who rely on myths and lies from, you know, the world being flat, I suppose that was threatened by the printing press, to today, you know, gender being a social construct.
	Wherever there's, in any era in society, elites have an interest in controlling the flow of information.
	So these new technologies always threaten them.
	So if you look back through history, you'll always find a panic and a backlash whenever there's a new revolution in information technology.
	So back at the end of the 19th century, when you had these new mass market newspapers arising, newspapers of the masses, not just for the establishment.
	And the reason you had that was because there was a huge uptick in literacy at the end of the 19th century.
	You also had this pejorative, the yellow press emerging to denounce these new newspapers.
	And interestingly, the targets of the denunciation were people like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, people who today we think, you know, the pinnacles of journalism.
	But also, you know, with the rise of TV, people worried that TV was going to They're called video malaise theory.
	They said that because we were all watching TV, we weren't interacting with messages anymore.
	We weren't getting involved.
	It was leading to a decay of democratic norms.
	And today with social media, the panic is flipped the other way.
	We're too involved.
	We're too interactive.
	We're getting too partisan.
	Social media is going to turn us all into crazy extremists unless we get it under control.
	So every time there's a new technology, there's a panic.
	And the panic is always pushed by the people who have an interest in controlling information.
	In this case, the most powerful forces, I think, pushing for it were the mainstream media, who, of course, want to suppress their competition, suppress sites like Breitbart News, and all these sort of internationalist foreign policy NGOs, which had a big vested interest, especially the ones that are focused on Russia, because they're the ones who are most terrified by Trump.
	They thought Trump was going to pivot away from Russia.
	That's very interesting what you said about the Russians.
	paychecks depend on a continued US focus on Russia.
	So all these NGOs like the Atlantic Council and the German Marshall Fund, they're all, you know, pushing social media platforms to take control of information.
	So many, many forces pushed Silicon Valley to do this, including, of course, Silicon Valley themselves, because, you know, they're all very left-wing.
	That's very interesting what you said about the Russians.
	I hadn't thought about that, that I've noticed, certainly in the years I've been writing for Breitbart, that there is a really powerful industry which wants the Cold War with the Ruskies to carry on indefinitely.
	It's It's like a lot of the geopolitical thinking of a lot of people I think you ought to know better.
	People in the military, people in the think tanks seems to be very much geared to the idea that the Russians are the threat, which I've never, never really felt.
	I mean, I'm not saying that Putin is above bad behaviour.
	Clearly, he's not.
	But I mean, isn't it?
	The Chinese are a much bigger threat.
	This is why I mean, I think they I think they do know better.
	It's just that their jobs and their think tanks and their donations all depend on the have were all predicated on the focus on Russia.
	And they want to keep the gravy train flowing.
	Look at the look at groups like the Atlanta Council and the German Marshall Fund.
	They're funded by the US government and by many European governments specifically to focus on Russia.
	So as soon as the focus shifts elsewhere, their entire cottage industry is at risk.
	Yeah, so many vested interests.
	I was just, en passant, I was lightly appalled, I would say, because I'm really quite naive about the ways of the world.
	Interesting, you pointed out that the reason that, correct me if I'm wrong, the reason that YouTube suddenly started getting much more censorious, whereas before it was a bit of a free-for-all, is because of attacks launched by the print media, which recognised that it was stiff competition and wanted to rein it in for their own selfish interests.
	100%.
	I mean, the mainstream media really hated YouTube more than other platforms, I think, because suddenly you had kids in their basement Who were getting audiences that rivaled cable news hosts that had multi-million dollar budgets and dozens of staffers working for them, dozens of researchers, and suddenly along come people like PewDiePie getting 10 million views per video.
	With, by the way, much younger audiences than them, which meant, you know, their audience, the audience of a big YouTube has more longevity than the audience of a, you know, MSNBC host with a median age like, I don't know, 59 or something.
	So YouTube was, it was pretty obvious that YouTube was the future.
	So I think the mainstream media just, the reason they focus on them first is because this is just a huge threat to their industry.
	This is going to destabilize them.
	Remember the momentum that these people had in 2016 and 2017.
	Independent journalists on YouTube, independent news websites like Breitbart and many other independent websites as well.
	So much momentum.
	Audiences just kept skyrocketing.
	It's still very, very good.
	But the mainstream media has now forced big tech to give them an advantage because they knew they were under threat.
	They run an existential threat.
	And interestingly enough, despite all the advantages they're given by big tech, including hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from the big tech companies, including being privileged in their algorithms and their search results because they're so-called authoritative sources, despite all those advantages, So it's like Breitbart News, Dan Bongino, the Daily Wire, still beating them on Facebook, for example, and the mainstream media is still mad about that.
	So the pressure is going to continue until the independent and conservative media is completely snuffed out.
	Have you got any theories on why?
	I don't know how familiar you are with with the UK conservative press and its traditions and so on.
	Have you got any theories on why it's gone so left wing?
	Why, for example, the Telegraph is not really very conservative anymore, and why the Mail is much more left wing than it used to be?
	Well, I think it's the sun.
	Right, I think it's the probably the same reason that you saw magazines like National Review go left wing in the US.
	There was, there's been a trying to think of the right word.
	It's separating the wheat from the chaff, right?
	Over the past four years, we've kind of seen who the real conservatives are and who are just, you know, the people who...
	You know, I think low taxes are nice, but are generally pretty socially liberal and don't really believe in, you know, traditional conservative values.
	And there are also, of course, you know, the pure foreign policy conservatives who just care about bombing random countries on the other side of the world and don't really care about traditional values or anything like that.
	Don't really care about fighting the establishment, fighting the mainstream media.
	Then along comes people like Trump and Farage.
	And they do do that, they do it very effectively.
	And we suddenly see that culturally, all these people who used to call themselves conservatives are actually quite liberal.
	They've got more in common with, say, a Tony Blair supporter than they do with a Donald Trump or a Nigel Farage.
	And a Tony Blair supporter probably has more in common with a Hillary Clinton supporter than they do with a Corbyn fan.
	You've actually strayed a Delightfully onto one of my favourite topics, which is, which is conservatives in the media who aren't really conservatives.
	And also that that very much applies to think tanks.
	I mean, this this year has been a revelation to me.
	I mean, I don't know whether you agree.
	But it seems to me that More of our freedoms have been taken away more rapidly than at any time in history, probably.
	I think it is absolutely unprecedented.
	And it's not just a UK thing or a US thing, this is happening across the world.
	COVID-19 has been used as a way by elites, by the deep state, by by civil servants, by local government, by the media, to steal away the freedoms of ordinary people.
	I mean, I think it is all part of a plan to close down small businesses and grant more power to companies like Amazon, I think, to make people more reliant on the state and so on.
	And to get to my point, because that's the subject of a whole other podcast, To get to my point, I'm looking at some of the think tankers from think tanks whose claimed aim is to stick up for free markets and free speech, that kind of thing.
	And I'm sure that's what their donors are hoping they're funding.
	And instead, these so-called libertarians are saying, yeah, well, I sort of, you know, I know all about communism and I know all about Mises and Hayek and so on.
	But actually, when push comes to shove and real totalitarianism is imposed on me, I'm just going to roll over and ignore it.
	Have you noticed this?
	I have noticed that.
	And we see the same thing with libertarians and big tech as well.
	They defend the tech giants, even though the tech giants are as powerful as they are because of government handouts they got from the US Congress in the 1990s.
	So it's total nonsense.
	I think what it comes down to is that even for libertarians who are, you know, Probably more on the spectrum than any other political ideology, let's be fair.
	Even libertarians, principles take a backseat to social pressure.
	So you want to believe what all your friends believe in.
	And culturally, I think, you know, these establishment think tank guys are in the same boat as the left.
	They're probably friends with left-wing people.
	They move in the same circles.
	They come from the state, you know, educated at the same universities.
	So if your entire culture of your entire social circle, your peer group is telling you to believe something, you're going to believe it.
	And you know, your principles will take a backseat to that.
	I know.
	How did you manage to survive, Alan?
	Because you were at one of those universities, I believe.
	What was it like when you were there?
	Well, I had two social circles.
	You see, I had my social circle at university and my other social circle, which was 4chan.
	So I think that's how I survived.
	I'm waiting for my wife to answer my phone.
	Because it's going off and I don't want to.
	Sorry, say that again.
	Well, you see, I had, I had two social circles.
	So there was people I saw in real life, you know, at university, and then there was 4chan.
	So I think that's how I survived.
	I just think it's, I think it's really sad.
	I know I keep banging on about it.
	But I think that one of the many terrible things that's happened to our world, one of the reasons it's going to pot so rapidly, is that the institutions have been seized on Gramscian lines by the left to the point where they no longer fulfil their ostensible function.
	The army, to a degree, is no longer about defence of the realm.
	It's about ensuring that there's diversity in the ranks.
	Oxford and Cambridge, which used to be about training an intellectual elite, are now about, again, celebrating identity politics, social justice and so on.
	And of course, big tech, as you argue in the book, is, I mean, it's full of graduates from these universities who are now taking it to the next level.
	And they've got the ability to do so.
	And that was the Gramscian takeover as well, because, you know, the original values of Silicon Valley, openness, freedom, give everyone a voice, completely thrown out of the window.
	And it's amazing how quickly it happened.
	When they realize, you know, actually, you know, these free and open platforms are working against this in some ways, they're allowing these counter-narratives to form and spread and go viral.
	It took them four years to shut the whole thing down.
	We went from unprecedented freedom of expression.
	Anyone with a laptop, anyone with a smartphone could access a global audience.
	We went from that, a level of free expression not seen before in human history, to unprecedented digital totalitarianism with Facebook building Yes.
	And it's that rapidity, to repeat a point I made earlier on, which is that I think is why a lot of people have been wrong footed.
	It's I get this sometimes when I'm talking about in Twitter debates about the BBC.
	And I say the BBC is a god awful institution, poison the wells, salt the earth, it is it is beyond redemption, because The staffers are all so, so routinely woke that there is no hope.
	No, no, no manager.
	If I were to come into the BBC tomorrow, and if I were given unlimited powers, I could not reform the BBC.
	It just it is not not possible.
	But there's always somebody who will say, yeah, but I don't know the BBC is it provides a great service.
	You think of the World Service and you think of and they start naming these, these comedy programmes that ended many years ago.
	So the BBC is trading on its past record in the same way the internet.
	Let's go to the number one example of this.
	Google.
	A lot of people still think, the one thing they know about Google's founders is that their founding motto was, don't be evil.
	So maybe you could explain to those who haven't read your book yet, why Google is so bloody terrifying.
	Because they probably think of it as just a search engine.
	Of course, well, first of all, this is a search engine that everyone uses.
	I think 90% of the search engine market worldwide is controlled by Google.
	It's a similar thing with Facebook, where you're being influenced and you don't realize you're being influenced.
	This is a crucial distinction, because when you realize someone is trying to influence you, whether it's a CNN host or a Fox News host, that puts your critical faculties on alert.
	You'll start to interrogate what the other person is saying.
	You'll start to doubt it.
	You'll start to, you know, do your own research and see if what they're saying is really true.
	But you don't get that with Google because you think you're doing it all yourself.
	You're the one doing the search.
	You're the one clicking on the search results.
	You're choosing to see this information.
	But actually, Google is choosing it all for you.
	And there's been research by a really great psychologist, Dr. Robert Epstein, who used to edit Psychology Today, showing that And he's actually done experiments in real elections with real voters, showing that when there's search manipulation in favor of one candidate or against another candidate, it can alter the decisions of undecided voters by sometimes double-digit margins, so more than enough to swing elections.
	So if Google deploys this on behalf of a candidate, they could shift millions and millions of votes.
	And of course, they're going to do it.
	They are doing it.
	They've suppressed search visibility to Breitbart News by, I think, 99% compared to 2016.
	You can't even search for the headlines of stories on conservative websites, and you'll see a list of websites that plagiarize them rather than the conservative websites themselves.
	So the search manipulation is happening right before our eyes.
	And we've caught them red-handed on so many occasions.
	I've published so many leaks from Google just completely exposing their bias from a deliberate search, an actual search blacklist on YouTube, which is a site that they own.
	Deliberate interference in political search results for abortion, for the Federal Reserve, even the names of politicians like David Hogg, Maxine Waters.
	You search them on YouTube and YouTube will have meddled with that result because they've added those search terms to a special file that reorders the results to favor the mainstream media.
	So we caught them with that blacklist.
	We caught them with a document literally called The Good Censor, a document produced by Google explaining how they were censoring the Internet.
	We caught their executives on tape, their top executives, their co-founders, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, their CEO Sundar Pichai, many other Google executives as well, all on stage at a company meeting right after the 2016 election.
	Saying the election's a disaster.
	We're offended by the election.
	What are we going to do to make sure the populist movement is a blip in history?
	How do we erase this movement?
	So we put them right handed on so many occasions and nothing's been done to rein them in.
	So they are absolutely going to use their power to sway the outcome of this election.
	They're already doing so, in fact, by erasing conservative news in their search results.
	And I think we'll see in a few days whether that can swing an election or not.
	Certainly much closer than it would have been, I think, without this.
	Yeah.
	So that research that shows that they can swing particularly undecided voters, what sort of things are they doing?
	Well, it's simply about changing what people see in the top 10 results, because you have to remember the vast majority of people, I think it's upwards of 75% probably more, they don't go past the first page of Google results.
	I think the top three links on Google drive 60% of all clicks on Google.
	If Google just alters their algorithm to privilege CNN and the New York Times and the Washington Post, make sure they always hit those top three results, that's doing a huge amount to control the information that voters see.
	If you're an undecided voter and you're searching for Joe Biden or Donald Trump on Google, you're just going to be met with a wave of propaganda from the mainstream corporate media, and that's probably going to influence Your vote, because you don't realise that the list of links you've been provided with are coming from a biased algorithm.
	And because you rely on Google to find you information, there's no way of finding the counter narrative.
	It's very, very difficult.
	Yes.
	Yes, I've noticed that increasingly with my searches.
	So when you mention David Hogg and Maxine Waters, both of whom are really quite far left, you're saying that what happens is that
	Say you're me and you've heard of this guy, David Hogg, and you want to kind of find the rap sheet for him, and you go searching on the internet and on Google, and instead you discover that no, he's actually a fresh-faced, beautiful, caring campaigner who wants nothing other than people not to die.
	Is that the kind of thing?
	More or less.
	It's on YouTube that we found this blacklist, which is owned by Google.
	I'm not sure it works correctly in Google.
	But certainly on YouTube they have this file that they call YouTube Controversial Query Blacklist.
	So they call it a blacklist themselves, not my words, it's YouTube's words.
	And this is a huge list of search terms, including David Hogg and Maxine Waters.
	And whenever they add a search term to that list, it changes the top search results so that they're only hand-picked YouTube verified sources, usually CNN.
	Washington Post, all the mainstream media outlets.
	And what we found was that they even do this when journalists complain to them.
	So there was a case where a journalist from Slate went to Google and complained, look at the top results for abortion on YouTube.
	It's all a bunch of videos from conservatives.
	It's videos from Ben Shapiro from LifeSite News.
	Why are these the top results?
	Well, the answer was because they're popular.
	But within hours of hearing that complaint from the journalist, YouTube goes in, they add this term abortion to the list and complete change in the top 10 results.
	It's now all BBC and CNN and BuzzFeed and Vice.
	So deliberate intervention in search results related to highly politically charged topics.
	That is, yeah.
	So basically, now, if you're worried about abortion and you want information on it, you're going to be told, actually, abortion is kind of great because it's about a woman's right to choose.
	That's the propaganda you get.
	Essentially, yes.
	This isn't even an issue that interests me very much, but the brazenness of Google to do this to such a politically charged topic is amazing to me.
	Yeah.
	I shuddered slightly when I read your chapter on Wikipedia.
	Because I've been on panels with the nice guy who founded Wikipedia.
	What's his name?
	Jimmy Wales.
	Yes.
	Jimmy Wales.
	And he seems very reasonable.
	And I think he wants us all to be happy and the world to be a nicer place.
	But my God, It is it is a what do you call it?
	It's a kind of smear operation, isn't it?
	Against against people like me and you and the defamation engine.
	This is what I call it in the book.
	And the defamation engine is not just Wikipedia.
	It's the combination of Wikipedia, mainstream journalists and Google.
	And they all sort of work together because what Wikipedia does is they only accept citations in the articles from mainstream authoritative news outlets, by which they mean, of course, you know, the outlets we've been talking about and not conservative media.
	Conservative media is basically banned on Wikipedia.
	You can't even cite the Daily Mail on Wikipedia.
	So What this means is whenever a journalist smears an individual, smears you, James, or smears an organisation, calls them racist, fascist, alt-right, sexist, misogynist... Oh, Brightbutt, for example.
	Exactly.
	Exactly, yeah, yeah.
	Brightbutt's called all sorts of horrible things that aren't true on Wikipedia.
	That goes right into Wikipedia, and any conservative source that challenges that and says, well, hold on, this is all a bunch of malarkey, they will not get cited on Wikipedia.
	Google will put Wikipedia right at the top of their search results.
	Almost, you know, Wikipedia is by far the most popular website on Google.
	You'll always see it at the top of search results.
	So that's the defamation engine.
	And if, you know, my book is very positive about the early Internet and the Internet before the rise of social media censorship.
	But one of the ways in which the Internet has not been so good is the rise of cancel culture, the easiness, the ease with which people can defame other people and destroy their reputations.
	You know, in the 1990s, before the internet was huge, you know, if there was a scandal, scandals would mainly affect celebrities and politicians and leaders, people in the public eye, affect ordinary people.
	And what's more, scandals would disappear after a few weeks because, you know, you know, you know, the newspapers would move on, the networks would move on.
	But now, not only is everyone at risk, even ordinary school kids like the Covington Catholic High School kids who were smeared by the mainstream media because they wore MAGA hats and were smirking, also ordinary people at risk.
	And not only that, but the scandals don't go away.
	They're etched into your Google results for all time.
	They'll always be there.
	So this is, I think, a big part of the rise of cancel culture, this defamation engine.
	And if there's one website that does not deserve to be immune from defamation lawsuits, it's Wikipedia.
	Just to give your listeners some background, almost every website, almost every social network is immune from defamation lawsuits because the argument is, well, if it's posted by a user, then the platform shouldn't be responsible for it.
	So Twitter can't be sued for a tweet posted by one of its users, right?
	Wikipedia has claimed this protection.
	I don't think they should be allowed to claim that protection because there's no publisher more powerful than Wikipedia.
	There's no organization that has more power to destroy someone's reputation than Wikipedia.
	Yeah, it's been a while since I looked at my own Wikipedia bio because I find it upsetting.
	And one of the things I find upsetting is that you're sort of being, you're being libeled.
	But you can't do anything about it, because you know that there won't be any sympathetic reading and it says things about me which aren't true.
	And you mentioned about how Breitbart is described as alt-right, which of course, you make a very good point, which I haven't seen made very often, was that alt-right mutated.
	It originally meant something really quite innocent.
	It meant people who were kind of on the right and were kind of quite groovy.
	It was like sort of South Park conservatives, wasn't it?
	People who were familiar with Peppa the Frog memes and things like that.
	And then it got co-opted, the alt-right got co-opted by a particular strand of sort of white nationalist kind of thing.
	And anyone who might previously have been alt-right in a kind of friendly, groovy way, was suddenly given, tarnished with this reputation.
	And it's just not right.
	Including people who simply analyse the movement or describe the movement.
	Lots of people who have never, you know, even identified with the alt-right at all have been denounced as alt-right.
	I've never identified with the alt-right, you haven't, but I'm sure people have called you that, people have called me that.
	So it's just, it's just like another one of these buzzwords that they're using now, like racist, like fascist, Like Nazi, that they just use the label for their political opponents.
	It's a totally meaningless term now.
	Oh, well, you know, you said that early on.
	I wrote a piece for The Spectator.
	Freddie Gray commissioned it off me.
	And he said, you know, do you want to do a piece about the alt-right?
	You know, sort of saying nice things about it in praise of the alt-right.
	Well, at the time I wrote that piece, it was just like, hey, Kids with their crazy memes are going to win the culture wars, you know, for the right.
	That was my line.
	And suddenly, something that was written in kind of complete innocence suddenly becomes like, you know, you are this evil person.
	I don't know whether... I'm sure that these, as you say, the internet never forgets.
	And it doesn't allow for new rules because the left doesn't want it to have any rules.
	They want to seize any opportunity to brand you as evil.
	So and also to brand you as kind of evil and simultaneously kind of crap.
	So I'm absolutely sure that the Wikipedia will, will major on all my kind of most embarrassing moments, you know, the time when Andrew Neil did this, or the time when, when the BBC did a sort of stitch up against me with, with Nobel Prize winning top scientists, Paul Nurse, and that's how it goes.
	Indeed.
	Meanwhile, people on the left are protected.
	You know, like this Hunter Biden story, for example.
	Tech companies worked overtime to suppress it.
	They probably won't be successful in the case of, you know, the Biden scandal, because just so many people have read about it now.
	But so many other people are protected.
	I mean, you won't see anything about Sarah Jeong's racism on the page of the New York Times, for example.
	Actually, let me double check that.
	Let me just pull up Wikipedia right now.
	Yeah, go on.
	Have a look.
	Yeah.
	I'm going to look at the page of the New York Times and see if it mentions the fact that one of their writers compared white people to dogs pissing on fire hydrants.
	Let me find that.
	What about the guy who made up all the stories?
	I just did a word search for Geo Nothing here on the page of the New York Times.
	Nothing at all.
	So that's a perfect example.
	Other examples from the book, you know, they call Sean Hannity a conspiracy theorist on his Wikipedia page for a long time.
	Don't do the same to Rachel Maddow, even though Rachel Maddow has been pushing this stupid debunked Steele dossier for four years now.
	So yeah, Wikipedia exists to defame the right.
	But sorry, I interrupted you, you were going to say something.
	No, no, no, I wasn't.
	Find it a very painful subject, actually.
	This is why I didn't really like reading your book, even though I obviously had to and I think it's everyone should read it.
	Because there are a lot of people out there on the right like like me and you and you very much in that in that category where all we want to do is just kind of make arguments in an entertaining way.
	There's no there's no malice there.
	There's no there's nothing in our thinking which really would would constitute anything evil or malicious.
	And yet, yet, in this new culture, we have been very successfully branded as, for example, worthy of demonetization.
	I didn't even try to get monetized on on YouTube, because I knew that they would demonetize me for doing what they're just doing what used to be routine for journalists interviewing people.
	I mean, back in the day, had you interviewed, say, I don't know, Colonel Gaddafi or Idi Amin or somebody, you know, one of the Pol Pot or somebody, I don't know, Stroessner.
	These would be considered kind of scoops.
	These were you doing your job.
	It wouldn't be considered an endorsement.
	But suddenly, even to break bread or interview somebody, even in a hostile way or a questioning way, you are branded as somehow beyond the pale.
	This is a frightening development in our culture.
	You're branded a platformer.
	You've platformed an extremist.
	I doubt anyone said that about Larry King back in the 90s when he interviewed first Louis Farrakhan and then David Duke.
	That was something an interviewer do.
	They interview extremists.
	Doesn't mean they agree with them.
	But this is where we're at today.
	Guilt by association.
	And the internet, I think, does make this worse because of this defamation engine dynamic I talked about in the book.
	Yeah, just going back to the mother of all of Google.
	I mean, how much does it know about us?
	Oh, everything, everything, everything.
	I mean, Google's entire business model is based around harvesting data.
	Why do you think Google deliberately makes its product so cheap?
	Whether it's, you know, their Google phones or their Google laptops, you know, some of the cheapest laptops you can get are, you know, the Google Chromebooks.
	It's because, you know, these are new tools to gather data.
	Everything they build is a tool for gathering data.
	That's what it's geared around.
	That's why they didn't stay in search.
	They also went into email, another way to gather data.
	They went into web browsers, another way to gather data.
	They went into laptops, phones, smartphone operating systems.
	It's all about gathering data.
	That's where their advantage comes from.
	So obviously, it knows a taste in porn.
	Unless we use a VPN.
	Can you?
	Does it know that?
	I use the onions if you use a VPN or the onion.
	I'm not sure if Google knows or either will be able to trace to your IP, but certainly a privacy expert I talked to does not put a great deal of faith in VPN.
	You have to work.
	You have to be careful which one you use.
	You have to pick one that's outside something called the five eyes, The intelligence sharing agreement between the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and I think one other country because.
	Uh, they've actually broken encryption now, so I think there was a court in Australia that said, well.
	It's OK for.
	Intelligent services to go into brick to break the encryption of, you know, on device like Apple iPhone.
	So there's effectively infectively.
	Even encryption isn't a God anymore, at least in certain countries.
	So it's very difficult to guard your privacy.
	But actually, there's a chapter in the book about the end of anonymity.
	It's important for people to know, because if you think you're posting edgy comments in the YouTube comments below this, and your edgy comments will never be tied to your name, or if you're on Reddit or on 4chan, and you think, well, these are just disappearing anonymous messages.
	It'll never come back to me.
	But not true.
	So one of the most chilling things I heard about was when I was interviewing people for the book was the fact that ad tech companies, so the companies that target ads to people based on their interests and based on this very specific data that they know about people, they have a big interest in unmasking anonymous commenters because
	That's another way to find... and linking anonymous comments to real-life people and real-life identities, because that's another way to gather more data about people and, you know, the things that interest them.
	So they're actually now, according to my source, scraping anonymous comments from places like YouTube and running them through language analysis software to match them to the comments of people on Facebook, so people with real names.
	And it's actually very easy.
	You think it might be hard to do.
	It's actually not hard at all.
	It's very easy to unmask an anonymous comment by looking at, you know, specific styles of writing, specific, you know, verbal tics and things like that.
	It's how J.K.
	Rowling was unmasked when she was trying to write under a pseudonym.
	They just ran the book through a computer algorithm, through a computer program, sorry, and it immediately unmasked her.
	And now apparently ad tech companies are doing this to random anonymous commenters on the internet.
	The technology will very soon become even more sophisticated.
	So my source talked about technology detect who you are based on how fast you type or how your specific mouse movements.
	On decrypting messages and things, have they broken Telegram and things like that?
	Because I always thought when we use WhatsApp and Telegram that these were devised by people who were protecting us.
	It's hard to know.
	It's honestly hard to know.
	I mean, it doesn't hurt to use them, but I wouldn't.
	Ultimately, the most secure way of talking to people is, I think, in person, not over any electronic device.
	Yeah.
	Well, this is what I'm thinking of, as we talk about this.
	I'm thinking, how do we stop?
	I mean, okay, DuckDuckGo.
	That's one way of not using Google, but it's just, it's a crap search engine, because it hasn't got the same quantity of data that Google's got.
	And it can't sort of fine tune itself, can you, to your Exactly.
	This is the source of Google's advantage.
	There are enormous amounts of data.
	This allows them to tailor their search results in a way that other search engines can't.
	So in a way, we've sort of done this to ourselves, because we want these products and services that know when we want to wake up, know when our flight's going to be, and send us a reminder.
	It's all quite convenient, but we're giving them an extraordinary amount of power in the process.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Exactly.
	Um, actually, before we go into what we can do about any of this stuff, I just want to say, and actually, this is this is weird, because Patreon, is Patreon on the side of people like me?
	Not really, is it?
	Not at all.
	They've banned so many people.
	Who did they ban?
	They banned Lauren Southern first, then Sargon of Akkad, And there was a boycott.
	I'm sure they banned many, many other people.
	But yeah, they don't like writing commentators.
	Subscribestar is a good alternative to Patreon, actually.
	I think they're pretty, pretty protective of free speech and allowing controversial people on the platform.
	Yeah.
	Well, may I say, if you enjoy this, this this podcast, or this vidcast, in some cases, with Alan, please remember to support me on either Patreon, or obviously, if you have ideological problems, and you may well On Subscribestar, I need your support, particularly because as we've established that it's very, very hard in this world for people of a conservative, libertarian persuasion to earn a living.
	And it's getting harder and harder all the time.
	So do please give me your support.
	I promise you that most of your money will go on me rather than on funding evil left-wing controlling organisations.
	So yeah, I'd appreciate that.
	So, Alan, what do we do?
	What can we do?
	I mean, apart from voting for Trump, that seems to be step one, those of us who can do that.
	Well, it's interesting you bring up the election, because I think there's one thing that will, that gives Trump an edge over Biden and all of these tech giants and all of the establishment forces ranged against him.
	It's his incredible ground game.
	And, you know, that's always a foolproof way to get your message out.
	If you're trying to fight for a political cause, if you're worried about tech censorship, you know, just talk to your friends, talk to your neighbors, get the message out there.
	Use email, use email lists, go old school.
	So that's one way.
	There are still ways to get around the censors despite everything.
	Definitely sign up to alternative platforms, to Subscribestar, Gab.com to Parler.
	TheDonald.win, that's the replacement for TheDonald on Reddit because they got kicked off there.
	Bitshoot, that's the alternative to YouTube.
	I wouldn't recommend getting off of Facebook or Twitter entirely because you're kind of self-censoring yourself.
	The objective should be to force fair standards on these companies, force some level of consumer protection on these companies.
	So absolutely write to your representatives saying you think this is unacceptable.
	And always point out one thing.
	There's one very, very simple fix to social media censorship.
	This is what politicians should be demanding as the standard to be a platform.
	And if you don't meet this standard, then, you know, these companies should be liable for defamation like any other publisher.
	The standard is, are you allowing users to opt out of your filters?
	Can you opt out of filters on hate speech?
	Can you opt out of filters on misinformation or fake news or any of these other things that they impose upon us?
	These restrictions on legal speech.
	That's what we should be demanding.
	Opt-outs of those filters.
	And they don't have an answer because, you know, this would obviously increase consumer choice.
	The reason why they don't give us those opt-outs is because they want to control news.
	They want to control the political information.
	They have no other explanation for it.
	Just just briefly, because we didn't really cover this properly at the beginning.
	Just give me a list of the ways that that left wing big tech censors us, censors the debate in obvious and not so obvious ways.
	So obvious ways, of course, they ban prominent conservatives from their platforms.
	They've banned so many people over the past few years.
	Think of some names, Laura Loomer, Sargon of Akkad, Gavin McInnes, Tommy Robinson, list goes on and on.
	So that's the obvious way in which they're doing it, you know, shutting down the New York Post, another obvious way, censoring President Trump's tweets, another obvious way.
	Also, they've started adding these fact-checking labels, these little notes adding context, saying, you know, click on this link to learn why this conservative story is all wrong.
	The less obvious ways.
	First of all, whenever they add those fact-checking labels, whenever they suspend an account, that also causes the account, even if it comes back on the platform, to be suppressed in the algorithm, so it won't appear as much in search results, it won't appear in your newsfeed as much.
	And also, everyone who follows the account will be affected as well.
	If you follow too many accounts that have been tagged as posting hate speech or posting misinformation or disinformation, that's also sending a signal to the algorithm That look, you're following all these accounts.
	We should probably turn down the volume on you as well.
	And you don't, you're not, you're never aware that's happening.
	That's happening invisibly.
	It's called network analysis.
	That's the way social media companies analyze, not just the content people post, but like the connections that people make.
	And then there's language analysis.
	Algorithms being trained to recognize hate speech or to recognize what they now call borderline content, which is content that doesn't violate their rules but comes close to violating their rules.
	And again, if you post too much borderline content, they'll turn down their volume on you and they won't tell you about it.
	You'll just be suppressed in search results.
	You just won't go viral.
	You won't appear at the top of your friends' Facebook feeds or Twitter feeds or whatever else.
	So many invisible and non invisible ways in which they're censoring us.
	I'm sure there are more.
	No, I think almost everyone who listens to my podcast says these are so amazingly good.
	We love you that you know, they're among the best anywhere.
	Why haven't you got a bigger audience?
	And I'm sure that one of the reasons is that I just don't It's very hard to get that reach because I'm sure that I'm being censored on some level.
	You know, the sheer amount of, I think I said this earlier in the show, but the sheer amount of momentum that the online grassroots right had in 2016, that's been completely taken away over the past four years.
	The thing that probably the scariest thought I've ever had about these tech companies is that they don't just suppress existing movements.
	They don't just suppress existing movements like the Trump movement and censor that.
	But they also have, because they know so much about us, they know so much about what goes viral, they have the ability to recognise when a movement is gathering momentum and prevent it from ever becoming a wider national movement.
	So they can not only censor movements invisibly, but they can prevent the emergence of new ones, I think.
	And we'll never know what movements might have emerged in the past four years that didn't because of the censorship.
	Yes.
	And also, I've noticed that there seems to be some kind of left wing hive mind, which decides these new things and makes them a thing.
	I suppose the classic example would be fake news.
	You remember, I mentioned that I was on a panel with Jimmy Wales, and It was in that place where the spectators debates take place, you know, that big hall opposite in near Westminster.
	Oh, Emmanuel Hall, I think it is.
	And I was sitting on that platform and all my kind of left fellow panellists, who were all on the left, were talking authoritatively about this thing called fake news.
	And I was thinking, this is just a made up thing.
	It's a made up thing.
	It's It's the left.
	It's the left's way of closing down stories it doesn't like by saying that there is this this thing called fake news.
	And I imagine that this is another another product of this big tech left wing bias, that they can very quickly promote left wing ideas, fashionable new things designed to close down the right.
	Yeah, they're so good at inventing these words, you know, fake news, disinformation, misinformation, foreign interference, All of these hate speech, the list goes on and on and on.
	And they've got a whole apparatus in universities and NGOs, organisations like the SPLC and ADL, whose entire job is to come up with words like this that the tech companies can then use.
	It's really obscene how vast and sprawling this empire of censorship has become.
	Just before we go, before I forget, There was a very disturbing thing that happened to one of my Breitbart colleagues today.
	He tweeted something about the Charlie Hebdo cartoons about them being footage of them being broadcast on a projected onto onto a building in Montpellier.
	And he got informed by Twitter that there had been complaints that he was in breach of Pakistani law.
	This is a scary new development, isn't it?
	What's that about?
	Twitter actually does enforce blasphemy laws in Pakistan for, like, users of Twitter in Pakistan.
	They've been doing that for a while now.
	And I think they're obliged by law or by their own rules to notify any of their users when the Pakistani government complains.
	I think it's the same with the German government, because the German government often complains about hate speech.
	So this is why I say, you know, Donald Trump really is the last hope for internet freedom because, you know, you've got governments around the world that are pressuring these tech companies to do even more censorship than they're currently doing.
	If Joe Biden gets in, he'll do the same thing.
	And honestly, the only powerful organization, powerful arm of government in the world right now taking meaningful action to stop internet censorship is the Trump administration.
	So the election really is the last chance for this issue.
	Yeah.
	It is, it is that important.
	What you were saying that, because I think we had this discussion about why Trump has not been as effective as we'd have liked him to be in our dreams.
	And one of the reasons is that he spent the first three years of his presidency being with the left trying to close him down and often fighting his own administration.
	And I think it's only only now that he started putting together the teams.
	You mentioned that, that he's put it put together some regulators with with teeth with an appetite for dealing with this kind of internet power that they've got.
	That's right.
	You know, there are people in the right positions now, they've really fixed over the past year or so the personnel issue, because in the first three years, administration was filled with never Trumpers with a deep state, they were just trying to undermine and sabotage the agenda.
	That's all changed in the past year.
	That will continue into Trump's second term.
	A second-term Trump would be far more effective, I think, than a first-term Trump.
	But we're going to see.
	We're going to see in a few days if big tech really can seal an election.
	So what needs to be done?
	How do we save the world?
	How does Trump save the world?
	Well, he needs to get this FCC nomination through.
	The hearing is going to be in a few weeks after the election.
	If he does that, there'll be a majority on the FCC to regulate the tech companies, to change the special law they rely on to censor people.
	And as I said, it's got to be a very simple standard.
	In order to exist as businesses, these social media platforms, they need to be immune from defamation lawsuits, because if they're legally liable for everything posted on their platform, suddenly they just get overwhelmed by the lawsuits, regardless of how wealthy or powerful they are.
	So you simply have to make that legal immunity, which they need, contingent on them behaving as neutral platforms and giving users an opt-out of all of their filters on legal, constitutionally protected speech.
	That's the fix for social media.
	Search engines?
	Far more difficult.
	With search engines, I think you just have to make them completely transparent and have some sort of oversight so that they aren't meddling in elections by, you know, fiddling with their search results.
	That's almost impossible, isn't it?
	To impose oversight on search engines?
	Well, yeah.
	No, I think it's perfectly possible.
	I think we saw with YouTube, these tools they have to change their search results are not as sophisticated as you might think.
	With YouTube, it was literally just a list of search terms.
	And you can see the list and you can see for yourself that these are obviously politically biased and you can see how the search results change.
	You can also get the list of verified YouTube channels and see how many are left wing and see how many are right wing.
	You can also look at their hate speech algorithm and see what are the examples of so-called hate speech that Google gave these algorithms to train them.
	So it's actually very simple, I think, to impose oversight on these companies.
	They're pretending that it's complicated.
	pretending that it's complicated.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Alan, you've just made me even more worried about this election.
	I can't... I mean, it's terrifying.
	The stakes could not be higher.
	Stakes... Yeah, they could not.
	Well, let's hope we've... A, that this video doesn't get censored, and B, that we've managed to shift the dial just enough to save the world from big tech, because I'm scared.
	Let's hope so.
	Oh, and buy Alan's book!
	Yes, go to deletedbook.com.
	There's a range of ways to buy.
	You don't have to buy it on Amazon.
	You can do Barnes & Noble instead.
	Are they less evil?
	I believe slightly less evil, yes.
	Slightly less evil, yeah.
	OK, good.
	Well, Alan Bakari.
	Thank you.
	It's been great.
	See you on the other side.
	See you.
	Good luck.
	Bye.

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