Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein dissect Twitter's chaotic post-acquisition state, critiquing Elon Musk's inconsistent reinstatement of Donald Trump while excluding Alex Jones. They analyze the devaluation of blue checkmarks amidst bot proliferation and shadow banning, arguing that restoring silenced right-wing figures like Milo Yiannopoulos is vital for cultural relevance. The discussion extends to media failures in reporting the Hunter Biden laptop and Russia disinformation claims, suggesting these oversights exacerbated geopolitical tensions. Ultimately, the episode posits that true free speech requires consistent governance rather than reactive business incentives. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Twitter's Economic Incentives00:15:29
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
What's up?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith, the most consistent motherfucker you know, and he is Robbie the Fire Bernstein, the king of the caulks, COVID Jesus.
What's up, my brother?
How you feeling this morning?
I'm doing well.
I had a great time in New Orleans.
Thanks for everyone that came out.
Nice.
Dude, that's a fun town.
Yeah, New Orleans is wild, right?
Yeah.
I mean, I love live music, so you just get to walk around and be real ADD about it.
Yeah, that's a good town for you.
You're real into drinking and live music.
I think that's, I think that's, you might have found your home.
There you go.
I could definitely spend more time there.
It was cool.
Me and you will definitely, we'll definitely set up a show.
We've never played New Orleans together.
We'll definitely do that some point soon.
That'd be fun.
Oh, yeah.
I'm down.
And then this Friday, of course, after Turkey Day, me and Rob will be up in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Hope to see a bunch of you guys out there bringing Chris Vega along with us.
And yeah, that should be a fun time.
Also, don't forget New Year's Eve, the big one.
Me and Louis J. Gomez return to the comedy store in Los Angeles there.
Tickets are moving fast.
So go grab them.
You can get the link at comicdave Smith.com.
All right.
Anything else you want to plug, Rob?
Yeah, I got hella live dates coming up.
Tucson, Arizona, Phoenix, Arizona, Omaha, Nebraska, Kansas City at the Shell, throwing a big old New Year's blast.
And then Mike, I think I'm going to be putting together an end of year thing.
So be on the lookout for more local dates because I'm going to run that.
Hell yeah.
Last year's was awesome, dude.
I'm looking forward to that.
All right.
So what I wanted to talk about today is the state of Twitter.
Tweeter, as you know, was recently purchased by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk.
This has been, if nothing else, a glorious spectacle.
And it's really, you know, as we've discussed a little bit before, it's really done a lot to expose how important it is to have control of communication to the kind of progressive establishment and what a threat they view someone like Elon Musk coming in and saying he's going to make it a free speech platform, as he was initially saying when he bought it.
It is, in its just that alone, I think we're somewhat indebted to Elon Musk for just exposing the hysteria that's generated by simply saying, I'm going to allow people to communicate.
You know what I mean?
Like there's just something kind of priceless about that.
And to be clear, you know, there were all the people who are threatening to leave Twitter who all seem to still be on Twitter, still threatening to leave Twitter.
But there was, just to be crystal clear about this, there was never any point where anyone in either the progressive establishment or left-wing America ever thought that Elon Musk had any intent of silencing them.
That's just not, it was never a thought.
He was never suggesting that.
He was, in fact, suggesting the opposite of that.
Like that in itself, I just think is very revealing.
That it's not that they were ever concerned that they would get suppressed.
It's just that others would be allowed to speak too.
That was enough for it to be their fear.
So that was a pretty beautiful moment to create.
Did say, though, way back when, when this was first floated, that there were a whole lot of things that had to happen and that the odds were not overwhelmingly good.
Like at the beginning, I was like, I don't know what the odds are that this even happens, that he even actually buys Twitter.
He's just offering to all these different things can happen before, you know, that ended up going through.
I also mentioned, I think we both talked about this a bit, that then there's still the huge question mark of how he actually governs once he's in charge of Twitter.
Now we're starting to get a little bit more of a glimpse into that.
And so that's kind of what I want to talk about, what the state of Twitter is now.
But you could Elon Musk claiming he's going to buy Twitter and treat it like a free speech platform.
You could, you know, like, it'd be like if a presidential candidate was saying he was going to end all the wars and end the Federal Reserve or something like that is amazing.
We'd all be thrilled about that.
But then there'd still be this big question of, are you actually going to do it once you get in?
So let's talk about so far your thoughts on how Elon Musk has done with this.
I'll say this at least so far.
We got through him buying the company.
That actually happened.
He's taken over and he has now brought several key figures back to Twitter.
That actually happened.
Personally, I know my followers are going up.
It's just like when they lifted whatever this program was a few months back and then they put it back.
All of a sudden, I'm back to like my tweets are seen and my follower count is increasing like much faster than it used to.
Things are different.
It's not the same Twitter, but there's also some signs of it not being exactly what he said.
So let's get into all of this.
What are your thoughts, by the way, Rob?
I mean, you're on Twitter.
I don't know how much you use it, but what are your thoughts on how it's changed?
Well, off the bat, I think I pick up about 30 to 60 new followers a day, which was rare.
And it's more fun for me now because when I tweet things out, it seems like, like, I used to tweet when I was live reading the news, and it was a lot of fun because you get a lot of engagement and then that seemed to die down.
But that appears to be back now.
So as far as I'm concerned, I mean, Twitter's been a good platform for working on jokes for me.
I can tell you I benefited from it of just kind of throwing out jokes while I'm just reading stuff.
And it gives you more of an outlet to kind of experiment with humor.
So I enjoy the site.
Except I will say the negative of that is that when you're on stage and the set's over, it's over.
That little fucking button, I'm a sucker for it.
Do they like it?
Do they like it?
Are they talking about me?
So that definitely sucks me in more than I wish it would.
But overall, I feel like Twitter's been a good comedy resource and it's been made better.
It's challenging.
It takes discipline to use social media.
And I think the more of a following you get on there, the more that's true.
Like I have to put my phone away and like not have it.
You know, because like just in any idle second, if there's just nothing going on, you can just be like, you can check.
Check.
Let me check.
Let me see who's engaging.
And I have to be like, okay, family time.
Nope.
This is gone.
And then I'm going to go focus on that.
And then, okay, I can have it in a few hours or whatever.
So it's a, that's how I deal with it because it is like, it is very challenging to have the thing in your pocket and not just be tempted to like, you know, pick it up.
And the fact that it's got a work tie-in, because that's my, that, that's what suckers me feeling not unproductive.
And I do pull news stories from it.
Sure.
So it's like, you never can't look down and scroll, which is what you're describing.
The second you're bored, you're like, hey, there might be some excitement here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, so that is, that's, I mean, and that's always been a thing.
Like that's, that's just a thing with social media.
People got to like adjust to how to use it in the way that's not negatively affecting them.
Um, so, okay, that I've definitely noticed, right?
Just more engagement and more followers going up.
Whatever little shenanigans they had going on before at least seem to be rolled back to some degree.
The other thing is that several, now I don't know.
You know, I don't know.
Maybe Brian, even if you could see if you could find this.
I was looking before and couldn't find this anywhere, but like a compiled list of all of the accounts that have been reinstated.
There have been a bunch.
And the big one came just a few days ago, which of course was Donald Trump.
Donald Trump's account, at least what Elon Musk says, and he says it's reinstated and the account no longer says account suspended, but Donald Trump has not tweeted from it yet, which is an interesting move.
Like Donald Trump's just making everyone wait and the world's going to explode when he fucking tweets for the first time.
It's not crazy.
He's in a weird predicament because he has a fine, I mean, he's got a financial interest in the competing company.
And so coming back to Twitter kind of, I would think, mark the end of that other platform in which he has a financial interest and other people are working for him.
But if he wants to win and he's serious about running again, I don't think he can not be on Twitter.
Like that was his power.
He has access to it.
You're saying he's not going to use it.
I just, I find that to be very, very tough to imagine.
And again, there's just so much there, by the way, with the 2024 campaign of Donald Trump versus 2016.
It's like, can he still, you know, does he still have that magic with Twitter to be able to do what he did?
And I'm not even talking about whether you like Trump or dislike Trump or you're indifferent to him.
I'm just saying like analyzing it, that he was able to utilize Twitter in a way that no political figure ever had, where he was dominating the conversation every single day.
Every single day, the entire corporate media apparatus was responding to what Donald Trump had said on Twitter.
And he just controlled the narrative through the entire primary and the entire general election and then into his presidency, you know, debatably to his own detriment.
But still, can he still do that now?
I really don't know.
I'm somewhat skeptical.
However, I think you really, you, you kind of outlined it in the perfect way to think about it.
Here you have this business interest, which is truth social, with a bunch of people who have invested money in it, including, I believe, like Devin Nunes and like other, you know, or like are, you know, primary shareholders of this company.
And they, the entire backbone of this company is that Donald Trump isn't on Twitter.
He's here.
This is the only place you can go to see Donald Trump's tweets in effect.
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From a business perspective, yeah, that's well, then you kind of can't do that without screwing over all of your investors, which I don't know if Trump has a big problem doing, but without screwing all those people over, you know, there's no way to go back to Twitter.
However, Donald Trump just announced he's running for president of the United States of America.
And if you're doing that, there's no way you're doing your campaign justice by not using the tool that you used more potently than any political figure in history.
So I don't know.
It's been a few days now of his account being active and him just not tweeting.
I guess we will see what happens with that.
Alone, though, it's a huge, huge statement for Elon Musk to have reinstated Donald Trump.
That was like, I'm letting you know I'm serious.
It was also a little bit interesting the way he did it.
Did you see this?
That he had a poll.
Now, I don't know how do you feel about that?
I'm curious your thoughts, but there's almost like two ways of looking at this.
One is that this kind of was a sellout move.
You know, like, oh, so you're putting it up to a popular vote whether the former president of the United States of America and current leading GOP candidate should be allowed to communicate on Twitter.
And, you know, I mean, he, and they won, the vote won by like 52%, or at least last I saw.
There was like 52% of millions of people voted.
Who knows how many bots, but whatever.
But it's like, oh, okay, so you're putting that up to a vote.
And because the vote won, now you'll allow free speech.
That's very different than being a self-described, quote, free speech absolutist.
That's very different than saying this is a free speech platform.
If it was truly a free speech platform, we wouldn't need a vote to determine this.
It would just be like, no, those are the rules.
He has the right to speak.
On the other hand, you could also say that this was a brilliant way to disarm the backlash against him by reinstating Trump and being like, hey, the Twitter user is determined.
I just put, I just, you know, you guys love democracy so much.
I just left this up to a vote.
So I suppose you could make some argument on the second, but it makes me a little bit uncomfortable that this wasn't just an immediate move.
Like, no, this is what I bought the company for.
This is what we're doing.
And instead, he went to the vote.
So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
Well, I think you laid it out pretty well.
And I do think that it would have taken some balls and it would have been cooler for him to just be like, yeah, we bought it at Donald Trump.
You're allowed back.
The one thing I think you're missing out is that he might have known that if he put it up to a vote, that was going to win.
And with all the bots on the platform, he might have even maybe facilitated that.
And if I own Twitter, I'm just saying if I'm in the business of Twitter, you want the most interesting people in the world on the platform.
The entire platform is about engagement.
Letting Alex Jones Off the Hook00:12:23
The only reason why you would remove somebody from it is if the government basically told you that you had to.
If you're actually in the business of having a platform for engagement, which is all it is, is, hey, people are going to interact and we're going to have a market that we can advertise to.
So, you wouldn't remove your most interesting programming unless there was some reason why there was a different financial interest of basically being in the good graces of the elite.
Yes, you're there.
Look, it's not as black and white as saying you would never remove people, but there's no question that all of your economic incentives would line up to push you toward not kicking very popular people off of your platform because obviously you want the very popular people to be on your platform.
And this is why before the government started getting involved, there wasn't really a thing with people being kicked off of social media, at least not for at least it was rare that it would just be you and I were removed from Facebook for being violent extremists.
I'm not allowed to advertise on the platform and our group is gone.
Yep.
And, you know, just as an example, that it was in 2020 that this happened and it was over the COVID stuff.
I mean, that's it, that our group was just all, you know, a bunch of people who, in real time, when you weren't allowed to do it, were opposing every inch of the COVID regime.
I just got another strike on one of my YouTube channels for playing the congressional hearing.
I don't even know if it was a congressional hearing, but Thomas Massey and others had the writers of the Great Barrington Declaration on once they took over Congress to basically revisit all the errors that were made in COVID policy.
One of the best moments, it was literally a one-minute clip where they were discussing why, in their opinion, natural immunity was ignored.
I played that on my show and got a strike for it.
But I know what actually, but here's what I know happens.
It's that if I get over the algorithm's threshold for how many new followers the account's getting, they go down my archive and give me a strike to cool the channel.
The point I'm just making is like you and I are living the censorship thing.
Like we're actively being, and that's that's what I see.
I don't even know what happens on like the shadow banning side.
Yeah.
No, it's that's right.
Who knows?
No, you don't know until something like what happened with Twitter happened, where it's like, oh, something clearly was lifted.
Like something was going on that now isn't going on anymore.
So that is really interesting.
Okay.
So other big accounts that I've noticed have been back.
Sargon of Akkad was reinstated.
Andrew Tate was reinstated.
And then I know that there have been like smaller accounts who were coming back.
Yeah.
I think that Dave Forrest Mommy, I think I'm not very happy about the fat Dave one.
I'm going to work.
I'm going to do everything in my power to get him back on.
Yeah.
I said Sargon of Akkad.
Yep.
I noticed he was back as well.
Now, Elon Musk did draw the line at Alex Jones.
Is Reed back on?
I think Reed, I think Reid is back on.
Yeah, sometimes I can't tell like the parody from the non-parody, but I think he's back on.
Okay.
Yeah.
But is it like a reinstated one or is it like he has a new account?
I'm not sure.
Okay.
That I'd have to double check.
But yeah, so he did say, Elon Musk said that he said that he is not going to reinstate Alex Jones very clearly.
And I got to say, this, look, it's, it's an interesting thing.
And what Elon Musk is saying is that it's over the Sandy Hook thing.
I guess Elon Musk lost a child, which is really tragic and awful.
And I certainly understand why that would be like a personal thing for him.
So he's like, oh, you denied the Sandy Hook thing.
I'm not reinstating you.
There are, look, as somebody who's had, you know, I mean, I've never lost a child, but I have Been very worried about losing a child and having a sick kid and like going through all that.
Um, I get it, I get where this would be like a personal thing for him.
Um, and and I understand.
I, you know, to be honest, I kind of just as a parent, I feel a similar sense of like, I think that uh, people in the pro-Alex Jones world really let him off the hook for that, no pun intended, uh, too, too easily.
I think the amount of money that he was ordered to pay is like insane and terror of terrifying precedent, but it was really truly a scumbag thing what he did.
And just, you know, there's a sound argument that is just unforgivable.
All that being said, this is a tough thing for Elon Musk to now do because you're either first of all, Alex Jones wasn't kicked off of social media for the fucking Sandy Hook thing.
Um, he was on social media for years after the Sandy Hook thing, after he had already admitted that he was wrong about that and that it was all legit and it happened.
Um, the other thing is that it's just like the here's the issue with the Twitter thing, right?
If you're gonna say this is a free speech platform, then it like it's either a free speech platform or it's not, and that if you're obviously there are going to be some things that you're not allowed to say, like there's no such thing as the like, you know, you know, like there's there's limits to what you have a right to say, even in a legal sense, there's limits of what you have a right to say.
Like, I can't just say to someone, I'll give you $50,000 to go murder Rob Bernstein because that's like incitement to violence, right?
So, okay, you have to, if you want it to be a free speech platform in a meaningful sense, then what you need is you need to have like the slimmest of limitations of what you can say.
So, it could be probably things like inciting violence or perhaps even like some type of egregious targeted harassment.
And then it needs to be very clear what the rules are, and then it has to be equally applied.
If you don't have that, then you're not a free speech platform.
And if that's what your promise was of in taking this thing over, then as egregious as you may find it, Alex Jones saying he thinks something was a false flag event again, years after admitting it wasn't, that's just not a good enough reason.
And the fact that it bothers you personally and that you have your own, you know what I mean, like issue with it, that's also really not a good enough reason.
If that's the case, then you're not really a free speech platform.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
I firmly defended Alex Jones in regards to those lawsuits.
And I had a conversation with someone recently who had a very different perspective.
And I feel that I have to revisit it.
But the biggest thing is, I don't really have a firm understanding of, I guess, the how much of a show focus it was.
Because I don't trust the media in the way that they report these things.
And so, like, I don't know how often he was doing it.
And then I also don't know to what extent he just lies on the show because I don't really follow the show.
My feeling has just always kind of been more free speed absolutist.
And that I was watching the prosecutors talk about how this is about censorship and making sure that no one could do this again.
And so I was more scared with the precedent than I was with Alex Jones.
And I also gave Alex Jones the benefit of the doubt that I could see government doing a false flag.
So I don't think that he had evil intentions.
Like I could see as to how someone in this space would get that wrong.
But I could also understand that if Alex Jones is really just an absolute sales guy who will just say complete bullshit on his show for better ratings, and he found something as evil as saying the kids that died in a school shooting weren't dead, that maybe that's on an offensive enough level that I could understand why people go, I don't want that on my platform, and that that is different than conspiracy or other things.
I somewhat get it.
The real problem, Alex Jones, you know, there's like all those, you know, Alex Jones was right kind of like things that'll come out.
And like, there were a lot of things Alex Jones was right about, you know, and really important things.
But also, if you did listen to him, and I didn't listen to him for long, but I used to listen to him like way back in the day, a little bit.
He was also wrong about so much.
He's wrong about so much.
Like he would just throw shit at the wall and constant claims of conspiracies that once the evidence came out against it, he'd just back off and move on to the next thing.
You know what I mean?
Like it didn't matter.
That was like the weird thing about Alex Jones' show.
I mean, I remember this is way after I stopped listening.
I remember I just happened to catch this one segment, but I remember right before Donald Trump's first Supreme Court appointment, then he, him, and what's his name?
Who I've had on the show?
God damn it, I'm blanking out, Roger Stone.
They went live on the Alex Jones show to announce to his audience that it had been confirmed as a matter of fact that Donald Trump would be appointing Judge Andrew Napolitano to the Supreme Court.
This was going to happen.
We had it from the inside sources.
It's happening.
Judge Napolitano is going to be the next Supreme Court justice.
And it's just completely wrong.
And then, like, as soon as that's over, they just move on.
It was just like constantly that.
This is constantly telling you, I have the papers, I have the documents.
This is what's going to happen.
Blah, blah, blah.
I mean, there's like, you know, there's this video clip of his that people shared around like a few months ago of it was his reaction to 9-11.
And he's like, they're like, look, look at all the stuff he got right.
And there is some shit he got right in there, like predicting how this would lead to the neocons going crazy and fighting a whole bunch of wars and shit like that.
I think he even predicted that they were going to go fight a war in Iraq over it.
But he's also in the middle of it saying that he's like, look, we're going to get nuked over this.
Iran already has the nukes.
They've had him for five years.
I have the documents to show that they have them for five years.
It's just like crazy shit that's just not right at all.
And he's so look, it's a mixed bag with all that stuff.
But the thing where he really fucked up with Sandy Hook is that for all of Alex Jones' conspiracy theories, even the ones that turned out to be completely wrong, the enemy was always powerful institutions.
So he was always, it was always like, who are the bad guys here?
Well, it's like the FBI or the ATFs or the CIA or the Republicans and the Democrats or the billionaire banker class or the like those were always the enemies.
But with Sandy Hook, he made the enemies, the parents who had just lost like six-year-olds.
They were the crisis actors.
Turning Parents Into Enemies00:11:42
They were the people who were perpetrating this whole fucking like thing on you.
And like, it's just a, it's just a very different thing to like turn your audience on them.
I mean, you know, like parents who just lost their little children.
So I do understand that from Elon Musk's perspective.
That being said, you can, you can believe all of that.
You could even believe in that they had a case that under slander laws, you know, that that he, you know what I mean?
Like he was slanderous toward them.
Even if you're not like a hardcore ANCAP like me who doesn't believe in slander laws, but like or libel laws or whatever.
But you could argue they have a case and you could still just be appalled by the amount of money that like that's insane.
That's insane to try to take like a trillion dollar to take a trillion dollar verdict or whatever the fuck it was from him.
It's just like it's I also I don't get the summary judgment thing.
That also just makes it seem like it was not a fair trial.
Yes, I agree.
I agree with that.
But just to the point of like the amount of money, it's like you could believe shoplifting should be illegal, but if they were like chopping off hands like Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, you could be like, no, I actually don't think this is a good way.
This is this punishment is, you know, a little bit severe.
So anyway, I'm just saying it's interesting that Elon Musk is already now that he's in charge there kind of drawing a line.
And now what's going to be interesting is to see who else does and doesn't get their accounts back.
Like who else is?
Because there's a lot of people out there.
A lot of people are very influential people who have were taken out of the conversation.
And, you know, that's, it's, it's, it's interesting to see.
Free speech, for my own selfish interest is probably my most important issue because it's something that I have to deal with in the business I'm trying to build for myself.
Like it's not, and I'm, and I confronted it.
It has negatively affected my career without question.
And I also, it's not even just career.
It's people being fucking misinformed on things as big as COVID and us losing years of our lives or going to fight bad wars or supporting the Fed, inflation, like all these things.
And the reason why people are so uninformed about it is because of the propaganda and the fact that the internet does a very good job of removing other opinions and making it seem like people are crazy so that the people that read the New York Times every day can still go, oh, well, I read the Times, so I know what I'm talking about.
With all that being said, you know what I mean?
I couldn't be more of like a free speech absolutist.
If it's not being directed by the state, the guy does have to make some business decisions.
And so, you know, I can understand why, even if down the line, he were to be bringing on Alex Jones, maybe if in week one, he goes, hey, we're being 100% and we're even letting that guy back on.
That might just be too toxic of a business decision at this time.
No, listen, I understand.
I'm just saying it's like, look, if you're going to, if you're going to say that this is a free speech platform.
And you got to live it.
Well, then I think you just, like I said, you just have to have what I said before.
You have to have very clear rules and they have to be equally applied.
And that's kind of like what the issue is with all of this stuff.
And what, you know what I mean?
Like, it's like, okay, well, what's a bannable offense?
Why is it a bannable offense that for, you know, say like Donald Trump, Donald Trump never, what he ultimately got booted for, I believe, was that he was still after January 6th contesting the results of the election.
Like he was still, he wouldn't give up on that.
And they were like, oh, at this point, that's just inciting violence.
And so you're out.
But it's like, so he's contesting the results of an election.
Is that the line?
Like, okay, but then if that's the case, then that has to be equally applied to everybody who contests results of elections, which as we all know is not exclusive to Donald Trump.
I mean, now you could say, you know, when people point out like, you know, like Hillary Clinton obviously contested the results of the 2016 election and Stacey Abrams contested the results of these, like all of them.
Now, people point out differences.
They go, yeah, but Hillary made a concession speech the next day.
Donald Trump never made a concession speech or something like that.
It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's not Twitter.
You know what I mean?
Like that's not what we're talking about.
Are you talking about on this platform?
You are not.
Is that one of the rules?
Free speech, unless you do not believe the last election was legitimate.
Like, and if that is the case, then it has to be applied equally.
Otherwise, we're still going to live in this, we're still going to live in this world where Twitter is, in a sense, not a free speech platform, but is a political tool for one side over the other.
If they can get away with doing something, but your side can't get away with doing that.
You know what I mean?
So that's the only way to actually make this thing what he claimed.
I do think, I've said this for a long time too, that I think, look, forget the fact, obviously, as we know, and I think we've, we've like, I think pretty conclusively argued this point and demonstrated to be correct that all of the rise of tech censorship is a problem of government intervention into the marketplace, much like so many of our problems.
That being said, if you take that element out of it, as I've said for years, the rise of social media and how big it's become really does, it's a challenging example for libertarians.
It's a truly challenging example of what really, what, quote, rights, if anything, do people have to access to these platforms?
Now, I know, obviously, in strict libertarian terms, you'd be like, oh, it's a private company.
You don't have any right to use their service and they have the right to kick you out for whatever reason they want.
I completely understand that.
It's not that I don't grasp libertarianism 101.
It's just that when you look at this, the state of these, where we are, you know, like, look, there's lots of examples that libertarians would have to acknowledge.
Certainly, once the government has intervened to some degree, things get a little bit murky.
So for example, if back in the day of landline phones, if ATT or Sprint or whatever, Bell Atlantic, whatever those companies, you know, were at the time, if they said, we disagree with your politics, and so we're not going to let you talk on the phone anymore.
We're going to cut off your telephone.
I think that would be pretty alarming to a lot of people.
And probably the libertarian would find a justification in being like, well, it's government infrastructure that built these fucking telephone polls and everybody paid for that with their tax dollars.
So like, yeah, I don't really think you do have a right to do that.
You know what I'm saying?
Now, certainly once the basis of like the First Amendment is like, okay, well, you have this government that everyone's kind of forced into.
And so the government can't stop you from speaking.
So, if you go, anybody else can stop you on their private property, right?
Like, no one has to let you speak in their home or in their business.
But if you go into the town square and you want to say something and the government came in and said, you can't be here, we're removing you from the town square.
That would be a violation of your First Amendment rights.
Okay.
But today, the town square is social media.
And by the way, so many of these like internet companies in general, they were initially piggybacked off the government telephone infrastructure.
And so I'm just saying there is an argument that while not technically true by libertarian principle, in the spirit of what libertarians believe in, it's still pretty fucked up for you to just get removed from the public square for having views that other people don't like.
And you can think of examples like this, like Kanye West is a pretty easy example of this.
He was not inciting violence against any group directly.
I mean, unless you say him saying, I'm going DEATH CON or whatever is inciting violence, but I think that's like a pretty big stretch, certainly by the legal standard.
He's just saying something that's very offensive to a lot of people.
He was warning people about FTX.
The Jews were up to.
If they had just listened to him, we might have been able to avoid it.
Yeah.
It was probably too late to save it.
He's letting us know, quit sending money to Zelensky.
He's going to pretend like Russia bombed Poland, get us into World War III.
And we got to stop listening to these Jews before you spend all the money on their crypto and lose it on Gemini.
Look, I mean, you should have listened.
It's funny.
You bring up, there's an interesting other point there, but I would just say that it's like, my take would be that what I would prefer to see is that it's like, look, I don't care how offensive because these words like, this is the problem with terms like hate speech or offensive speech or anything like that.
They really are subjective terms.
And like, I guarantee you, and weirdly, me and you are Jewish.
I'm offended by their censorship.
Well, right.
Exactly.
You know, it's weirdly me and you are Jewish, but we just don't get our panties up in a bunch over this shit.
Like we both kind of have the attitude of like, say what you want to say, Kanye.
I don't care.
I don't really agree with you, but you know, whatever.
Say what you want to say.
I, again, though, this is like to my point, it's like it's in the eye of the beholder.
And that, you know, you can make a very good argument.
Like you obviously to like progressive activists, deadnaming, calling a biological man who identifies as a woman by his name that was his name when he was a man rather than her name as a woman.
That is considered wildly offensive.
Okay.
Some other people don't consider it that offensive at all.
A lot of those same people who don't consider that offensive think drag queens teaching little kids, you know, in a library is wildly offensive.
That other group.
So, you know, it's like there's, this is subjective to some degree, what, or at least whether it's subjective or objective, at least there is a wide range of perspectives on what is really offensive here.
So it's just, you get into a bad area.
And then, of course, the other thing, which kind of touched, you know, you're joking around, but when you mentioned the Zelensky thing, it's like, oh, yeah, by the way, you're also absolutely allowed to incite violence if it's a government program of violence.
There's no problem with inciting violence, like saying, you know, oh, I think we should bomb Russia right now.
That's totally fine.
Like this, this is the only time it's completely okay to incite violence is if you're saying that a bunch of lawyers in Washington, D.C. should order their subjects to go incinerate children in some fucking far off land.
Then it's okay to incite violence.
So, like, that all I'm saying is, like, for this to really be something that is a truly a free speech platform, there again, there has to be one standard that everybody that's applied to everybody, and it has to be clear what the fucking rules are.
Inciting Violence Against Russia00:02:21
And I'll tell you, it's a very weird thing.
As you were talking about how this personally kind of touches us, because this is what we do for a living, it's like it's a very weird thing to be out there.
And not only it, it's weird on several dynamics.
Like, on the one hand, you're like, okay, I you want to say what you want to say, and then you know, there are certain things that will get you flagged or get you in trouble for you know, like uh saying it.
And then, on one hand, you're like, Oh, yeah, this is my fucking, like, this is how I'm supporting myself.
So, I got to make sure, you know what I mean?
This is like really uh threatening to me.
And then you're also like, you're like, and I'm not even wrong.
I'm right about this.
It's not even like I'm out here saying, like, oh, I'm making a lot of money off spreading misinformation.
It's like, I'm pointing out your misinformation with a very strong argument behind it.
Um, it's it's a very weird thing, particularly when you don't even know exactly what the rules are.
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You're not even in a situation where it's just like, hey, look, YouTube has decided.
You cannot argue that the vaccine has negative.
It's not even that.
You're not allowed to question official policy.
And then you're going to strike.
Withdrawing From The System00:09:12
You can ask them, hey, what specifically did I say?
And then they just go, well, after reviewing it, you violated the policy, but they won't further clarify.
Yeah, you don't even know.
Right.
And so you're in this position now where you're like, again, you're like what your example, where you're citing like the Great Barrington Declaration.
You're like, I mean, I'm citing a group of renowned experts in their field explaining what they think happened here in a conversation with two sitting congressmen.
Like, I don't know.
Am I allowed to do that?
Am I not allowed to do that?
And then you have to be in this limbo world of like, I guess I'll put this out because I think it's really important to say.
I think this is really interesting and really like revealing.
And then just kind of be like, oh, I don't know.
I guess I'm not allowed to do that.
So that's the, you know, that's the weird thing of the situation that we're in now.
And if, if, if Elon Musk does truly, you know, and I don't know exactly what his motivations are, it seems like he's having a lot of fun with this thing, which I got to say is refreshing.
It's fun to watch people have fun.
It's nice to watch people enjoy their lives.
And he seems to really be enjoying like needling people and tweeting and stuff like that.
But if he really does believe in this, like, okay, we're going to make this into something like what it's supposed to be ethically, then I think you got that's the big thing you got to fix is you people have to know what the rules are, and then you can know, like, okay, hey, I broke the rules, and I that's why I can't even decide on blue and gray check marks.
Seems like he doesn't quite have it all figured out yet.
I'll tell you, I hate the check mark thing that he's done.
I don't even know how it works now.
I guess evidently, you can just buy a check mark now.
It's kind of simple.
I hate it.
Listen, and this is from someone I've never had a blue check mark.
I've never cared about getting a blue checkmark.
I have no interest in it.
I don't care.
Um, yeah, I guess O'Brien just told me it's paused now until they sort it out.
Yeah, that was a fucking, you could kind of know who is a fairy because you'd be like, oh, look, fucking New York Times blue check mark over here has this opinion, of course.
The same way with the status symbol for one, it let you cut through and go, oh, yeah, it's some MSNBC cunt.
Yes, I well, that's here's the thing, right?
I never gave a shit about having a blue check mark.
Um, I like I like having a following, you know what I mean?
I like having a good amount of followers on Twitter, but I don't really give a shit about like whether there's a blue check mark.
The only thing that ever makes me want to have a blue check mark is when there's uh accounts imitating me, you know what I mean?
And then it is which they come and go.
I don't fucking know.
I think they do get shut down most of the time, but like it's never, that's never really been that big of a problem.
But that's the only like value in it is like being like, oh, okay, no, this is actually me talking.
So, you know, it's not, you know what I mean?
Uh, but what they started doing now is just like get now all of a sudden, like, people with three followers have blue check marks.
And then I've even seen like where there's parody accounts that have blue check marks and shit.
And you're like, oh, well, that's just, this is stupid.
Then just take them all away.
Either take them all away or have them for like people who are in the public eye to verify that that's actually who they are.
That's all to me, the value of a blue check mark was just that like, you know, when the New York Times tweets something and I want to roast them for how stupid they are, I know this is actually the New York Times.
Like it's not, I'm not just, it's not just some account that says New York Times next to it.
Anyway, yeah, that's been weird.
I also will say this is just purely anecdotal, but I have noticed a lot more bot accounts like in replies than I ever noticed before.
Like almost everything I tweet now, I'm getting responses that are like, hey, I just found out how to make six figures working from home.
Click this link right here to get in on it.
And you're like, oh, I don't remember this ever being a thing.
But that might just strictly be experience.
Yeah, maybe.
With the advertisers going, you got to bring in the clickbaity people.
Yeah, I guess there's some.
I guess there's something to that.
Anyway, I don't know.
Brian, did you see, was there a list of people?
Are there other big people out there who I have noticed who I've gotten back on on Twitter?
Because I'm trying to see and see what the latest is.
It's weird how he'll like, like, he just, he replies to people a lot, Elon Musk.
I do have a list here, but it's not, it's not.
It would also be fun to see people get original accounts back.
Like, I think Sam Triple used to have a much bigger account or Owen Benjamin.
Like, yeah, Owen Benjamin's a great example of one.
Like, should like, there's people like that.
Like, Owen's one of the guys who were like, you know, and I don't even know.
You know, I haven't talked to Owen in a while.
I love that dude.
I have not talked to him in a while.
I don't even know if he'd want it back.
Like, I don't know if he wants to be back on his old Twitter account because he kind of really went into like, you know, like, you know, he's like, I'm fucking kind of Retreating in many ways from this fucked up system was kind of his vibe.
But if he did want it back, it's like there's people like that who had like huge followings.
And they were like people who were like influential people, like really kind of moving the needle of a lot of conversations who were really taken out by the censorship regime.
And there's a lot of people like that.
You know, however you feel about him, Milo Yiannopoulos was a guy like that.
Like there were a lot of people like that that were very influential that got taken really, you know, in essence out of the straight now.
So they should let him back on.
Yeah.
They should let him gay.
He finished.
He got kicked off for being gay, but that's not a problem anymore.
Oh, Gavin McInnes, Anthony Kumia.
You know, it's a whole bunch of people I know who like that.
Kumia is another guy.
Like he's there now.
It's just, he has to keep making accounts.
But to be never have the following, you never.
Yeah, and it's cooler to see these people be massively culturally relevant and get the recognition of, yeah, look at that number.
Look at how many people are following him.
That's cooler.
Oh, and yeah.
And it has a huge, you know, effect on what type of impact and how much money they make and like all this shit.
Yeah.
It's like, it's that's a very big deal.
It's yeah, it's like if they kick you off, but let you make another fucking account or don't figure out you made another account.
Yeah, that's not the same thing.
You're still in effect kicked off.
So anyway, it'll be, it's just going to be interesting.
Like it will really shape in many ways the direction that kind of like the conversation goes, whether or not all these people get back.
And then, of course, also, you'll never be able, I guess, in a way, they still got all that time robbed from them.
You know what I mean?
It's like they probably would have kept growing and growing and growing, or maybe not, but maybe.
And that, you know, they'd still, even at best case scenario, have to start from where they were.
I don't know.
I don't know how a lot of this shit works.
But there's no question that the kind of like the right wing movement in this country that really kind of like culminated in 2016 with Donald Trump getting elected was seriously altered and hindered by the rise of the censorship regime in tech censorship that rose up in the wake of Donald Trump winning the presidency.
It's just no question about that.
Many of their most influential voices were essentially silenced.
And that's just, that's what happened.
And now Elon Musk being here is at least look, he let the big one back on, which is Donald Trump.
It's going to be very interesting to see where that sexual jokes about Donald Trump's temptation.
What are those?
I think you didn't see it.
So first was Elon Musk tweeted out like a picture of a monk next to like a tantalizing lady and he put the Twitter picture on and Donald Trump's face on the other one.
And, you know, those have been making the rounds.
Right, right, right.
I'm trying to.
They just need one night where Donald Trump eats a big old bowl of mayonnaise and rice.
And he's up at three in the morning.
He's drunk on that mayo and he just can't resist himself.
And hopefully his first words will be calling Bideman to fag.
Wouldn't that be an epic return?
Yeah, that would be something.
You know, the laptop, it's got the votes.
I finally figured out how they win.
They put it on Hunter's laptop.
They said that Elon Musk tweeted yesterday that Twitter added 1.6 million daily active users in the past week, and another all-time high.
So really interesting.
Could be restored accounts, though, like people that aren't even using it.
Yeah, I mean, maybe, but that's a lot of restored accounts.
Restoring Accounts After Implosion00:04:29
It's just interesting because they kept saying it was going to implode when he took it over.
So far, that does not MSNBC left for a week and then they just concluded that the Hunter Biden laptop was real and realized, you know what, maybe we got to go there and get some news ourselves.
Oh, by the way, we should, yeah, who was it that just had the report concluding it was real?
Was it NBC?
I don't think it was.
It was one of them.
I think it was all just the same trash to me.
It's like just one category of trash.
It's really unbelievable that they just now recognize that we've had an investigation concluding that the Hunter Biden laptop was in fact legitimate.
If you need the news two years after it's relevant, then I guess CBS is a good place.
If you want news from two years ago, just start watching CBS now and you'll get everything once it doesn't matter anymore.
Yeah, you could watch CBS now or you could watch our episodes from two years ago.
Instead of calling it news, they can call it late.
Not very new.
So, well, the thing that's that's interesting.
Yeah, literally, like they go, the CBS did it, ran a thorough investigation, and we've determined that this is all legitimate.
It's like, oh, it's weird because part of the problem ran an investigation and we determined it was legitimate the week it came out.
The week it came out.
The thing that's the most interesting to me about that, and I was watching this little piece on CBS where they were talking about it, and they mention it, but it's almost like a throwaway.
No, none of the reporters actually talk about it.
They just did show one clip of their like, at the time, Biden denied this.
And they just show the clip of him at the debate going, this is Russian misinformation.
And that's that.
But it's just so interesting that like in the context of like we're in a proxy war with Russia on their border, that they're not like forced to just like grapple with that a little bit more.
Like, oh, yeah, only, you know, only what is it?
A year, a year and a half before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Don't forget that this was the provocative tone that America was taking with Russia.
That we were claiming once again, and not just claiming, not just like Joe Biden, not just the presidential candidate now sitting president of the United States.
But he got up there on the debate stage and said, did you know that four former heads of the CIA have all concluded that this has all the earmarks of Russian disinformation?
They were making the accusation that Russia once again is trying to topple our democracy.
That they're doing something here that even like the Nazis could never do to us or the commies could never do to us.
They've overthrown our democracy.
And here they're doing it again.
And the fact that with the, even if you're going to get it two years late, I could like forgive that if you had the appropriate response to that, which would be, well, we want comment from all of these four former heads of the CIA.
We want to actually grill someone on like, why would you say that?
It should also come with an apology for how you covered it at the time.
And it should really, that should be the key story here.
Forget even bigger than is Joe Biden getting kickbacks from these deals or are any laws broken.
An even bigger story than all of that ought to be, why the hell did our entire intelligence apparatus decide to blame this on Russia?
Like they're lying through their teeth and making these wild accusations.
You know, I say, I know I've made this point a lot, but just think for a second.
Have a little bit of like just strategic empathy toward Russia and go, what do you think that sounds like from their perspective?
You know, when the biggest like war machine in the world is laying the groundwork for a case against them that they are overthrowing our democracy based on pure lies.
You know what I mean?
Blaming Russia On Lies00:00:38
Probably.
Do you think they're just seeing that and just laughing and going, haha, that's ridiculous and moving on?
I don't think so.
I bet they're taking that very seriously.
You know, just one more thing to think about.
All right.
That's our episode for today.
That's the state of Twitter.
Very, very interesting to see what goes forward with Twitter.
Twitter is, I would say, has always been my favorite social media.
I enjoy Twitter the most.
It's more fun than the other ones.
And it's going to be interesting.
The place has definitely been more fun since Elon Musk got there.