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June 8, 2020 - Liberty Hangout - Kaitlin Bennett
09:53
How to Defeat Social Media Censorship
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Time Text
Why Conservatives Advocate Alternatives 00:09:22
Big tech, from what we've seen, they jump and they do it and they'll censor it.
It doesn't matter who it is.
It doesn't matter if you're the president of the United States of America.
So, you know, for your viewers who are watching this, you have to really question if they do it to the president, why are they not going to do it to me?
Hey guys, so since we finally launched LibertyHangout.tv, we wanted to expand our content and bring you guys a new kind of video today.
With all the censorship of conservatives that's been going on on social media, it's become more important than ever before to create alternative platforms in order to make sure the right wing can still have a voice online.
One man did that and had his name dragged through the mud for doing so.
We are joined today by Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab.com, a free speech-based social media website that's gotten a lot of attention ever since Twitter started censoring President Trump.
We're going to talk to Andrew about his website, get his thoughts on the state of censorship, and you'll be able to catch the full unfiltered interview at libertyhangout.tv.
Okay, thanks so much for joining us, Andrew.
Thanks for having me, guys.
And I have a lot of respect for you guys because you're fellow builders, right?
You see these problems that are going on and you're not just sitting around and whining about it.
You're building your own website, you're building your own platform, and that's exactly what we're doing as well.
So I have a lot of respect for you guys.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
There's a lot of conservatives say that when you don't want to be censored, then just create your own thing.
But they don't really realize what goes into that.
And we'll talk about that more later on in the interview about how hard it is to do it and the struggles with it.
To start off the show tonight, can you take us back to 2016 when you founded Gab and tell us what exactly inspired you to create a brand new social media platform?
Sure.
So I think God blessed me with the vision and the foresight to see what was coming, to see what we're experiencing right now, which is censorship of the president of the United States, the official White House account, congressmen, and of course tens of thousands of conservatives, not only in the United States, but around the world.
So I was living and working in Silicon Valley and my last company was an ad tech company.
So we were working directly with Facebook, Twitter, and Google for years.
I had a lot of relationships inside of these companies.
And, you know, I started to see the censorship sort of creep up during the 2016 election, specifically on Twitter with hashtags being censored and people being shadow banned.
It was just starting to metastasize at this point.
And I said, I'm not going to stand around and watch this stuff happen.
I'm going to build an alternative because someone has to do it.
We have this illusion of choice as consumers where we think that we have multiple options.
But when you really look at who owns all the apps in the app store, it's like two or three companies.
So, you know, just a prime example.
Facebook owns Instagram.
They own WhatsApp.
They own Facebook Messenger.
They obviously own Facebook itself.
So, you know, that is not a choice.
It's either you're using Facebook or you're using Twitter and that's it.
So I, you know, I wanted an alternative that was grounded in free speech and was grounded in user privacy and that was going to put people first and not advertise their dollars and not track people across the web to monopolize their data and sell it to advertisers.
So that's what I did.
Conservatives love to say, if you don't like it, if you don't like what Twitter's doing, go and build your own.
And that's what I did.
And I quickly found out that that wasn't as easy as I thought it was way back then.
From your perspective, how much worse do you think the censorship of conservatives has gotten on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube over the last three, four years?
And would you say that it's worse now than when you started Gab in 2016?
Oh, without a doubt.
I mean, they've been spending the past four years developing artificial intelligence to automatically flag certain links, certain words, even memes, as fake news or as misinformation or just outright removing it, right?
They've ramped up their moderation teams where they have tens of thousands of people around the world that are sitting and moderating content and looking for quote-unquote hate speech all day long.
Mark Zuckerberg even admitted that artificial intelligence cannot detect the nuances of quote-unquote hate speech.
And of course, as we both know, the Supreme Court rules unanimously that hate speech, whatever that may be, is absolutely protected by the First Amendment.
And that's why it's absolutely protected on our website as well.
Because who am I to decide what is hateful and what isn't?
It's totally subjective.
Something that is hateful to you might be common sense to me, or something that is hateful to someone else might be not hateful to the majority of people.
This stuff is, they've opened Pandora's box.
And once they do that, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle.
So this is only going to get worse.
And every time the media cries and says, well, what about this tweet?
What about that tweet?
What about this person?
What about that person?
Big tech, from what we've seen, they jump and they do it and they'll censor it.
It doesn't matter who it is.
It doesn't matter if you're the president of the United States of America.
So for your viewers who are watching this, you have to really question if they can do it to the president, why are they not going to do it to me?
And the answer is that they are.
And they likely already are doing that.
And I'm sure that a lot of your viewers have already experienced this by getting put in Twitter timeout or getting put in Facebook timeout or having things removed.
This is happening every day to normal people.
It's not just high-profile people anymore.
I think our audience has really understood it.
It's happening to us, especially on YouTube.
We put a post that we were creating LibertyHangout.tv or we were going live and on like the YouTube, you know, I have that little community tab that you can post pictures and stuff.
And they said, well, I forgot you guys existed because I haven't been getting notifications for two or three months.
They just took away their notifications.
You type in the search tab and only hate videos come up about me.
So we know what's happening.
Do you think that?
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
This is all about social conditioning.
These companies don't care actually about making money.
They care about controlling the flow of information and controlling the narrative and socially engineering tens of millions of people.
And it's working.
There are plenty of studies that have shown that Google search results can alter election results, which is crazy.
It's absolutely mind-blowing the amount of power that these people have.
It's not about the money for them.
It's about the control and about the power and about shifting the arc of history where they want it to go and abusing their power in the market to do so.
Do you think President Trump will get sick of Twitter and say Gab is where I'm going to go?
Yeah, so we'd love to have the president on Gab.
You know, his campaign manager has tweeted about us pretty favorably in the past.
You know, I think maybe they're going to wait out until after the election, which probably would be smart, but I don't see why he shouldn't get on Gab right now.
You know, big tech is going to continue to clamp down.
We're six months out from the election.
This is going to get way worse.
And the biggest thing that he can do is not legislation, not regulation, not going after them in court or any of this nonsense.
It's to use the free market and to point people to alternatives like Gab and like others and say, go use these, stop using these.
It doesn't necessarily mean he has to quit Twitter, right?
I think that would be silly, but he can use his platform on Twitter to say, go on Gab or go on BitChute or support these other alternative platforms.
That would be, that would shake up the entire tech landscape.
It would shake up the entire media landscape.
The mainstream media would lose their minds.
I think all of us know this, right?
And, you know, we're ready for him and we'd welcome him just like we would welcome any user on the platform.
One final question before we wrap up this interview here: Do you think Donald Trump will be banned from Twitter?
If he is no longer president, I believe that they will remove him from the platform.
Yes, when he becomes a private citizen again, I believe that that is when they will finally take action.
While he's the president, I don't think so.
I don't think it would make sense.
But after, I think they're definitely going to do it once he becomes a private citizen again, whether that is in, God forbid, November or in four years.
So, you know, it's inevitable.
This interview we just did with Andrew Torba is going to really shine an important light on big tech censorship and the lackluster response from conservatives.
Andrew did his part in combating big tech by creating Gab.com, and we did ours by launching LibertyHangout.tv.
To watch the rest of our interview with Andrew, go to libertyhangout.tv right now.
When you sign up for libertyhangout.tv, you'll not only get access to premier unfiltered content, but you'll also be able to directly support my work and help us make sure that we can keep producing this kind of content for you.
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