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March 3, 2021 - Rudy Giuliani
27:04
The DIRE CONSEQUENCES Of Misinformation On Social Media | Rudy Giuliani | Ep. 116
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Welcome to another edition of Rudy's Common Sense.
Before we get started, I want to share with you some very exciting news that we have coming up.
Episode 120 will be very different.
I'll be answering your questions.
So leave your questions in the comments section below or email them to info at RudyGiulianiCS.com.
That's info at RudyGiulianiCS.com.
When I answer your questions, I'll read your name on the air.
If you prefer that I keep it confidential, then you just say that, and I will.
And if you just want to make some comments and some suggestions on these topics, I really would appreciate it.
The last couple of episodes, I've been trying to get all of you to give me information because I sincerely need your help.
These issues are not...
How do we get there?
one person or one mind or one outlook.
They're very, very complex issues.
It's basically an acknowledgment of where we are right now as a country.
Now, how do we get there?
I mean, we're a country that you can overstate it or understate it or kind of go right in the middle.
But we're in a country that appears to be on its way to socialism if we're not somewhat there already.
When you consider, when you analyze socialism, that in a socialist state, that doesn't always have to be, or communist state, doesn't always have to be government ownership of property, taxation can create government ownership of property.
And in the state that I live in, in New York, I think the government already takes more than half of what I earn.
And with the legislation being proposed, it's going to be 55% of what I earn.
So I'm working for the government.
I'm the senior partner.
I'm the junior partner.
That's a movement towards socialism, if it isn't socialism itself.
So, just how we got there is really important.
Did we get there by things that happened to us, or did we get there because of things that happened to us and an external plan to try to undermine us?
So, let's take a look at something related to that.
And that's the misinformation that now abounds in our society, or I guess some people call it fake news.
They're all a little bit different, but certainly much more prevalent than they were in the past.
And there's no question that it's proliferated because of the social media.
Now, this should not be a big surprise.
The social media is not regulated, and it's not required to be accurate.
The social media is not a television station or a newspaper.
And this is a decision that was made by our Congress.
Most of it gets embodied in Section 230.
You've heard of that.
That's the immunity that social media get from being sued for a libel or defamation.
So if someone wrote something false about you in the New York Post, the New York Times, They said it on Fox or they said it on CNN or NBC.
You'd have a big hurdle in suing because suing for defamation is tough and the press is very well protected against it, but you could sue and people have recovered.
In some cases, large amounts of money.
They usually lose, but it's kind of geared to protect First Amendment rights.
However, you cannot sue social media.
They could print the worst thing about you.
Congress has made them immune.
So therefore, Of course there's going to be misinformation, and there's going to be fake information, and there's going to be false information, because nobody's checking it.
They're considered like, you know the analogy they use?
They're considered like the public square.
It's almost like we're in Athens.
There's a square in Astoria that looks like a square in Athens if you ever want to come and see it with me, where Socrates would show up every day.
And all the people of Athens, all the boys of Athens, because I don't know that women got education then, which is another horrible thing.
We're talking about Athens now.
But all the boys of Athens would get together and he would conduct his dialogues, which are all repeated in Plato's dialogues.
And he'd pick a question, like we're doing.
He'd pick a question.
And then he'd ask questions of his audience.
And, you know, it's the...
It's the method they use in law school to educate you, the Socratic method.
You're educated not by lecture, but you're educated by question and answer.
So Socrates would do that in order to get to the truth, which is something that we're trying to do by using common sense.
So we do have a proliferation of fake, and we do have a proliferation of misinformation.
And it's so much, it's hard to illustrate it all.
But it is because people are increasingly getting the news from social media.
And this is a Pew report that goes back to July of last year, very recent in terms of things, and it shows that the social media is now among the most common pathways where people, particularly young adults, get their political news.
18% of adults say they, and this includes young people, we're talking about 18 and over, 18% of U.S.
adults say they turn most to social media for political and election news, 18%.
That's lower than the ones who turn to news sites and apps, but that's only 25%.
And it's on a par with the percent that turn to cable television, which is 16%, and local television, which is 16%.
And it's higher than network TV, radio, or print.
Once again, it's right in there.
We put a pie chart up.
And if you look at the pie chart, we can see it one more time, so you know what we're talking about.
News website or app, 25%.
Then the second most is social media, 18%.
And then cable and local television at 16%.
And then we have a network TV at only 13%, radio at 8%.
13%, radio at 8%, print at 3%, 3%, and then other.
I guess that's like the town crier at 1%.
Maybe those are people who don't get news at all, like the ones that Waters used to, wish he would do that again.
He'd go out in the street and he'd question people and he'd say, what do you think of the president?
Now, who is the president?
Abraham Lincoln, or, you know, three years later, 10 years after he's out, George Bush, or, well, Trump was president, Obama, or, Who's your senator?
Daniel Webster.
All these people, like, are graduates of our magnificent schools, with the wonderful history we teach now.
And imagine, they're going to social media, and they are in much larger numbers, the 18 to 30, whatever, are going to social media for their news, and social media is not required to be accurate.
The other groups that I mentioned to you in that pie chart, they're required to be accurate.
And think how often they're inaccurate.
Think how much fake news they have.
Think how much misinformation they have.
And they are required to be accurate.
So you can imagine with social media, it's the old west.
The old west.
So, it's something that you have to be aware of.
Something you have to be aware of, and we're gonna show you toward the end what to do about it, because there is something to do about it.
We'll be right back.
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to 65532. Again, that's 833-GOLD-777 or text Rudy to 65532.
And now we'll continue with our analysis. Pew Research did another report, and this
one was back in 2019. And there, they found that most Americans agree with what I'm saying.
I bet they agree even more now.
9 in 10 Americans recognized, 88%, that social media companies now have control over the mix of news.
And about 6 in 10, 62%, feel that it's a big problem.
They say that social media companies have far too much control over the mix of news that people see each day, and I'm not sure they all know exactly why, but one of the reasons is, and I know we're beating up on the social media companies, and for a lot of reasons they deserve it, but in this particular case, they're not supposed to.
interfere in the news.
They're supposed to be like that town square where you just come out and you can say what you want, and the town square is not responsible for whether you're lying or telling the truth.
The marketplace of ideas, as Oliver Wendell Holmes would say, has to take care of that.
So that's what they're like, but I don't know that most Americans know that.
75% of Republicans, by the way, and 53% of Democrats believe that social media has too much control over the
news that people see.
And to show you that this is going to grow, and where it's the biggest problem,
of the people who rely on social media, 52% rely on Facebook, 28% on YouTube,
17% on Instagram, on Twitter rather, 14% on Instagram.
So that's 52% on Facebook, by far the biggest, 28% on YouTube, 17% on Twitter, 14% on Instagram.
LinkedIn and Reddit and Snapchat had smaller, but audiences in the 6% to 8% range.
8% range.
So and basically Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit were the ones where people went to mostly
for the news.
Thanks.
So, again, that's news that is not checked out in any way for being accurate.
But what we have found now is of even more concern that it is checked out for another purpose, agenda, political agenda, because we see that they'll take down They'll take down a site like President Trump's site, and people say, well, the thing that's going to check them is the market.
If it gets a lot of listeners or followers or viewers or downloads, they'll keep it on because they'll make money.
And if it gets few, it'll be off.
It'll be a marketplace.
No, no, no, no, no.
Agenda decides.
Trump, I believe, had 85 million followers on Twitter.
Some people could say when you go back to 2015, his user Twitter made Twitter.
But they were willing to sacrifice that to exterminate him as a voice, exterminate his voice.
Well, before we get to whether that's unconstitutional or not, that's un-American.
You know, we have constitutional rights.
One of them is the right of free speech.
If you very narrowly construe that, that's just as against the government.
But we have a constitutional value of free speech.
We either believe in it or we don't.
And to the extent we believe in it, we're Americans.
And to the extent we don't, we're not.
And whoever runs Twitter, is it that Dorsey guy?
Well, this guy doesn't believe in free speech.
Otherwise, he would not cut down the right to know of 85 million people.
Forget Trump.
What about the 85 million people who have a right to know what he's going to say?
So these guys interfere if they don't like one of my podcasts, like YouTube does.
If they don't like one of my podcasts, they interfere.
And they interfere based on what they call social norms or politics or sensitivities.
But they don't interfere when people put totally false things down.
And that way they get immunity.
We'll take a short break, and we'll be right back.
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So let's get further into the subject.
Here's an example of a real life event caused by misinformation on the social media.
And it's one that goes back, um, three, three, four years.
And it, um, therefore there's no chance it's going to be contradicted or run into somebody's sensitivities.
This, uh, was during the time of, um, The presidential election, in fact, it spanned until it was over, and it was called Pizzagate.
And it came from a misinterpretation of an email or emails between John Podesta and Hillary Clinton.
Again, let's take the responsibility for this one, not everything, but this one off Wikileaks.
There's really nothing there to support.
But whoever worked this thing up, it became viral, and the theory was that these pizza restaurants were being used for getting children and doing all kinds of perverted things.
A gentleman named Edgar Madison Welsh, who lived in Salisbury, North Carolina, had come to the conclusion that this was being done at the Comet Ping-Pong restaurant, which was in Washington, D.C.
He was all the way in North Carolina.
He drove up to Washington D.C., based on the misinformation, all the way up to Washington D.C.
with three guns to save the children.
He walks in, and people panic, people run, people get scared.
Fortunately, he realizes he's wrong, and he surrenders the guns.
And immediately apologizes, saying he made, quote, an incredibly ill-advised decision to try to save endangered children who were never there.
Excuse me, I'm not laughing because it's at all funny.
I'm laughing because, in a way, it's so weird that somebody would act on this information.
So I don't know if that's the case, that there's something Wrong here, but the reality is nobody should have acted on this.
The intel on this wasn't 100%, Mr. Welch said.
I don't know what kind of research he did.
I'd really like to know what kind of research he did to back it up, because we're going to talk about that in a minute.
But he was sentenced, just so you know the end of it, he was sentenced to three years, four years in prison, three years of probation, and $5,744 in restitution for property damage at the Pizzagate that was guilty of nothing, nor were any of the others, nor was Hillary Clinton, nor was John Podesta.
Here's another example, just basically a year or so later, of misinformation on social media that went viral before anybody took the time to figure out if it was accurate, inaccurate, or whatever.
It's a photo that you see there of a little boy crying in a cage.
It was being shared on social media as a byproduct, another byproduct, of the White House's zero-tolerance immigration policy and their basic torturing of young children and putting them in cages.
And it went, of course, viral.
There's only one problem, as this article points out from CNN.
The picture is being completely taken out of context.
It doesn't show what it purports to show.
This was a picture that was not of an immigration center.
It was not of a cage.
It was a picture that happened during a demonstration that took place.
A demonstration that took place to protest Trump's policy of dealing with children.
And it was staged.
It's like Hollywood.
It was a staged event.
This boy was not in prison.
He was put there to make it look like he was in prison so they could attack Trump.
And it was posted on Twitter.
And it was up for a while, and it went viral, and the filmmaker, Jose Antonio Vargas, who posted the Twitter, basically defended it by saying, this is what happens when a government believes people are illegal.
Kids in cages.
Except this wasn't a kid in a cage.
And it also, of course, didn't go into the Also somewhat misleading fact, very misleading fact, that the cages were put there by Obama, not by Trump.
And Obama used them more.
This was taken, the picture was taken during a June 10th protest against the White House at the Dallas City Hall.
And it was a fact-checking source named Snoops that picked it out.
So kudos to Snoops for being vigilant about the accuracy of the things that are on the social media.
Now we could, you know, and we're not, we could give endless examples of misinformation on social media That comes from the left or from the right or just malicious.
This is a good time to take a short break.
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Thank you for coming back.
So, let's be very clear now.
I'm talking to those people who take things at face value.
Probably this is the wrong audience to talk to about that, because the mere fact that you're listening to this podcast tells me that you want to see the other side.
There are a lot of people who don't.
And I think it's important for us to let them know, and to remind ourselves.
Do not take things at face value, particularly on social media.
In fact, don't take things at face value in any of our media anymore.
They've lost their discipline.
And we have to stop complaining about them, and we have to put the responsibility on ourselves.
Our education is our own responsibility, both in school and after we're out of school.
And the price of free press and the price of an educated electorate is high.
It requires sacrifice of blood by some, but it requires time and effort from others.
So get involved in these issues if you're going to make a firm decision about it.
Read several different sources.
Listen to my podcast.
Listen to somebody else's podcast.
Read somebody's article.
Read a book.
Get involved in these things to preserve our republic.
We're in a lot of trouble.
We're moving in a really, really dangerous direction.
It was either Hamilton or Madison.
that said that the greatest danger to our republic is an uninformed electorate, an ignorant electorate.
Let's make that happen.
Let's not make that happen.
Let's become informed.
That's how we prevent this.
That's a better answer than government control, government lawsuits, independent monitors, fact-checkers.
I mean, we need fact-checkers to check the fact-checkers.
You be the fact checker.
That's why I'm asking you all to start reading a little with me.
Orwell's 1984 short book.
Not particularly challenging.
It is when you go deeper into it.
But it's an interesting book.
Brave New World by Algis Huxley.
Slightly different view of the same thing, but important to compare the two to each other.
And important to take a look at them and see how much of that's going on in the modern world.
That's the kind of thing we've got to do now with all of this competing fake news that we have.
And we've got to teach our children how to do that too, because they're going to be subjected to it maybe even more than we are.
So just have a little patience and follow along with me.
And I think we're going to at least find an answer to this.
We're going to be, we're going to be a well-informed electorate and you can't fool.
You can't do a thought control.
You can't do fake news.
You can't do propaganda, and you can't push to communism a well-informed electorate.
And we're going to be a well-informed electorate.
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