Ezra Levant and Alam Bokhari expose how Big Tech—pressured by CISA, NGOs like Dense, and advertisers—systematically censored conservative voices from 2016–2020, including shadow-banning Breitbart and The Daily Wire. Meta’s own engineer admitted to suppressing posts critical of Kamala Harris, while the EU’s Digital Services Act and Brazil’s pro-censorship rally (200,000 strong) show global collusion against free speech. Elon Musk’s revival of deplatformed figures like Tommy Robinson and Alex Jones on X highlights the fragility of dissent; a Harris or Walz win in 2024 could criminalize "misinformation," risking a chilling effect on media worldwide. The election may decide whether platforms like Rebel News survive—or succumb to coordinated ideological suppression. [Automatically generated summary]
What a great conversation today with really one of the smartest guys in tech, Alam Bokhari.
He used to be a journalist at Breitbart.com.
Now he's the head of an online freedom activist group.
We're going to talk about everything from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg and the election.
You don't want to miss it, but I'm going to show you a bunch of clips and I want you to see them with your eyes, not just hear them with your ears.
To get the video version of this podcast, you got to sign up at RebelNewsPlus.com.
Just click RebelNewsPlus.com, hit subscribe.
It's $8 a month.
That might not sound like a lot of money to you, but boy, it sure adds up with us.
Because as we'll talk about with Alam, we have been demonetized by big tech, so we rely on you.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, big tech companies helped sway the election for Joe Biden in 2020.
Will they help free the election for Trump in 2024?
We talked to Alan Bokhari about this and other things.
It's October 22nd, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you sensorism bug.
You know, I saw this amazing graph the other day, and I almost didn't believe it, but in my bones, I think it's true.
It shows the donations by senior tech executives over the last few election cycles.
Now, you would think that people in tech are engineers and doers and builders and entrepreneurs and problem solvers.
You would think that by nature, those folks are right of center or conservative.
I remember when I was a student at the University of Calgary, whenever I was with the Young Reform Party handing out flyers, our best departments were engineering and management.
We stayed away from the soft social sciences.
But over the last generation, you can see how tech became colonized by leftists.
And that's because the tech bros, the engineers, were soon replaced by HR specialists and sensors and other more, well, I would call them more feminine activities.
And I think this was crystallized by a series of those day in the life at Twitter videos that caused Elon Musk to purge 80% of the staff when he arrived.
If you don't know the videos I'm talking about, here's one that just showed who started to work for tech with massive six-figure salaries over the last decade.
Take a look.
Hey guys, come to work with me at Twitter in Atlanta.
This was my first time going into the office in such a long time, but it was nice to have a change of scenery for my apartment.
Look at my coworker, Brie.
She's so cute.
For lunch, we decided to go downstairs to Barvegan.
If you haven't tried it before, it's a black-owned restaurant inside of Pond's Market.
We ordered the quesadillas with tops and then also got a fancy pants cocktail and they were all really good.
So I'll definitely be back.
After lunch, we came back upstairs to an extremely empty office, but honestly, we were just so proud of our productivity.
After work, we went back downstairs to Monero's to reward ourselves with some afterwork.
Margaritas.
We stayed at Happy Hour until around 7 p.m. and then I finally headed home to enjoy a well-designed ballad.
Bye, guys.
Yeah, when Elon Musk came aboard, he fired 80% of the staff.
And I would put it to you that the product is stronger than ever.
But my point is, tech was colonized, and a lot of it was on purpose.
For example, George Soros himself bankrolled various NGOs designed to change the terms of service for using tech platforms.
He actually created an NGO called Change the Terms, which was to get tech companies themselves to ban and censor political activists on the right.
Well, things are snapping back.
You can see it in big tech investors, including that all-in podcast.
These are billionaires who have made their money in Silicon Valley and have historically voted Democrat, but they are swinging back to the right, partly appalled by the state of San Francisco, which has just become a drug-infested, woke meltdown, and partly by Donald Trump.
And I don't know, I think that there's just something going on out there.
And the personification is Elon Musk, who himself has gone all in, not just campaigning grassroots level with Donald Trump, but setting up his own PAC called America PAC and giving away a million dollars a day to people who sign up to his petition to support the First and Second Amendments.
A lot going on.
And when I want to think about the state of tech and politics, there's really only one name that comes to mind.
We met him when he was the senior tech writer at Breitbart.com, and we've kept in touch with him as he's moved on to a different project.
He's now the managing director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.
You know who I mean, our friend Alan Bokari, who joins us from Austin, Texas.
Alamett's great to see you again.
Don't mind me rambling on there, but I really think there's movement for the first time in memory.
Big tech is, if not leaning to the right, certainly showing its skepticism towards the woke left.
That's new, isn't it?
That is.
It's new in a sense because, you know, tech used to be somewhat balanced between Democrats and Republicans, but there was sort of a, I would say, a counter-revolution between 2016 and 2020 when tech, along with every other major sector of the economy and society and institution, just became completely radicalized.
They bought into the media hype, which painted Donald Trump, who won in 2016 as the second coming of Hitler.
And they just shifted massively to the left.
And that's when you saw the peak of censorship in Silicon Valley.
You saw the peak of left-wing attitudes in Silicon Valley.
And I think that was partly because of the media scaremongering around Donald Trump.
It was also, as you said in your opening remarks, the fact that Silicon Valley had become beloated with all of these non-technical employees who lean to the left.
Yeah, now there still are major tech players who are obviously hard left-wing.
I think of Benioff from Salesforce.com, even Mark Zuckerberg, who poured hundreds of millions into get out the vote strategies last time, which he claimed were neutral, but were so obviously designed to boost the Democrats.
He has shown a little bit of remorse, I think, or embarrassment.
I think he's tried to rebrand himself as a regular guy.
And he wrote a letter a few weeks ago where he basically said, I'm not going to meddle this time.
People took it the wrong way, and I'm going to be super neutral.
I didn't believe a word of it.
And I see in your old stomping rounds, brightboard.com, a story basically highlighting James O'Keefe's latest sting, where a senior engineer at Facebook Meta admits that Facebook demotes anti-Kamala Harris posts and shadow bans conservatives.
So Mark Zuckerberg might be telling the truth about his personal ideology, but his company is so large and it's so infested with leftists, they seem like they're censoring like it's 2020 again.
Yeah, and that goes to the point you made earlier about Elon Musk coming into Twitter, formerly Twitter now, X, and cutting 80% of stuff.
Mark Zuckerberg, while he personally may not be planning to interfere in the 2024 election on the side of Kamala Harris, maybe his personal political viewpoints have changed.
Maybe people around him at the top of Facebook, it's the same story.
But I think censorship became so deeply ingrained in every major tech company between 2016 and 2020, you know, spread out across their content moderation departments, their trust and safety departments, as well as all the NGOs and government agencies that they relied on for censorship advice, which are all pro-censorship.
We cover them a lot at the Foundation for Freedom Online.
That's so deeply ingrained that unless you do the kind of cutting we saw with Elon Musk and X, those systems are still going to live on.
Those people in the content moderation department are still going to be there and they're still going to be doing the same things.
And I think that's why you see stories like the one you mentioned at Breitbart about the Facebook employee.
Yeah, that Breitbart report was basically unpacking a video by James O'Keeffe.
Let's play a little bit of that video.
This is Jeeben Giawali, a senior software engineer at Meta.
Let me show you the primary source.
I was crediting Breitbart because that's where I saw the video, but it's actually James O'Keefe, the renowned undercover investigator.
Here, take a look at the primary video with your own eyes.
Paul in Ohio said something about Kamala Harris is unfit to be a president because he doesn't have a channel.
That kind of shit is automatically demoted.
Are they doing a good job protecting our democracy?
Because I can see these right-wing groups setting up Instagram accounts or Facebook accounts for that matter, right?
And just start posting this information and be like, oh, like Harris is like blah, blah, blah.
That's all going to be demoted 100%.
The Civic Classifier is strong.
Would the person who posted that be made?
Would he be notified?
The person would not be notified, but there's these things that we collect.
If a bunch of items that, at least a couple of items that a person has created, has violated the Civic Classifier, then they're also registered.
Called shadow banning?
Shadow banning.
Okay, so they would be shadow banning.
Correct.
They would never be shown.
But so they will see a dip in like impressions and engagement, but they would not be like officially warned of the reason why.
Correct.
Well, Alan, back to what you said there, I think it was so ubiquitous, this censorship and the phrase disinformation and misinformation and the community standards, this whole censorship industry and its related fact-checking industry, which was, of course, more opinion-checking.
If you had the wrong opinions, you would be checked.
I think it became so ubiquitous that people just accepted.
That's how it is.
It's sort of like, if I may refer to another debate, global warming.
It's so pervasive.
It's so ubiquitous that unless you're actively trying to dissent, you just, it's like a fish that doesn't even know it's in water.
It's so completely infused in everything.
You have to be a real willful skeptic to oppose the global warming thesis.
And I think maybe to defend some tech leaders, it just everywhere they went, everyone was talking about it.
It's all government asked them about when they would go to Congress or Parliament.
The politicians were demanding it.
And these engineering nerds who think they're sophisticated masters of the universe, I think they got totally manhandled by the politicians.
And I think they were scared that if they didn't comply, they would be absolutely destroyed through regulation.
So I think they entered into a sort of partnership.
And by the way, you can see some of the emails that are being disclosed through litigation that even big tech companies like Facebook were appalled by the censorship demands put on them, but they were scared.
They were scared that if they didn't do what the FBI, CIA, Congress were demanding of them, that they would be in trouble.
So to cut them a little bit of slack, I think it was absolute peer pressure.
It was a velvet glove, but there was a steel fist underneath it.
I think that it takes genuinely dissenting thinkers like Elon Musk and some of the other names I mentioned, David Sachs, Mark Andreas, and Bill Ackman, Peter Thiel, that unless you are by nature a disrupting contrarian, it would be hard to fight against the censorship vibe.
Extremely difficult.
And, you know, as you said, the pressure between 2016 and 2020 on tech companies was extraordinary.
It was coming from all directions.
It was coming from activist organizations and NGOs.
It was coming from big advertising companies that would repeatedly threaten to boycott the tech platforms if they didn't come down hard on censoring political opinions.
You had media companies, big media companies that encouraged those advertiser boycotts.
They did it again and again.
They did it against YouTube.
They did that against Facebook.
And then they did it against Twitter just recently when Elon Musk took over.
So you had that really powerful force of advertiser pressure on the tech companies, all of which rely primarily on ad revenue to make a profit.
On top of that, you had every, as you said, every single government around the world telling the tech companies that they need to do something on disinformation.
They need to censor disinformation.
They need to censor hate speech.
And that included, by the way, many U.S. government agencies, because 2016 to 2020 was this very strange period where Donald Trump was in office, but many of the government agencies were a law unto themselves, and they were kind of working to undermine him, including by encouraging tech platforms to censor his supporters.
CISA, the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency at DHS, was a big culprit involved in that in 2020.
We've covered it a lot at the Foundation for Freedom online.
So all of these sources of pressure, advertisers, activists, NGOs, universities, the media, and government agencies, not just the U.S., but around the world, all of these combined creators extraordinary pressure on the tech companies between 2016 and 2020.
It was hard to see how any tech company could avoid caving in.
And, you know, that remained the case until just recently, where we had the simultaneous factors of Elon Musk taking over X and the House Judiciary Committee and other congressional committees investigating the censorship apparatus that the U.S. government supported.
Taylor Lorenz's Tech Journalism00:08:02
You know, while you were saying things, I just checked.
I just looked something up very quickly there.
In Canada, there was an edgy online journalist, sort of like in your country.
What's your name again, Taylor?
I forget the journalist for the Washington Post, who was their tech correspondent against who.
Oh, Taylor Lorenz.
Taylor Lorenz, thanks very much.
I'm glad I forgot her name.
That wasn't just a Joe Biden moment for me there, Alan.
Taylor Lorenz, who's, by the way, well into middle age, positioned herself as sort of the young hip online reporter.
And I'll tell all you folks at the Washington Post what the kids are up to.
It was sort of like that Steve Buscemi meme.
Hello, fellow youth.
And anyway, Taylor Lorenz offered to be the guide for boomers through the world of the internet.
But what she really was, she engaged in sort of gotcha-style, terrorizing activism journalism, where she would call up a big tech company or call up an advertiser and say, Hey, you are showing an ad on this hate site.
I'm doing a story in two hours.
Let me know if you're going to continue carrying this hate message or I'm going to get you.
Like it wasn't really journalism, it was extortion journalism that would serve to terrify.
Like it was, everyone was scared of everyone.
And these bottom-feeding fake journalists were part of it.
In Canada, our version of Taylor Lorenz was Rachel Gilmore, who was fired from global.
And then she went to work as a journalist, but not for any news outlet, for some U.S.-based NGO whose entire purpose was to terrorize advertisers on right-wing sites.
I mean, Rebel News lived through this in 2017.
We really have no advertising to speak of.
We managed to survive through crowdfunding.
But if you're a massive platform like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, et cetera, you can't survive without advertising.
Advertising is your entire model.
So, between government regulation on the one hand, ideological entryism and colonization, especially of your HR department, and then pressure from advertisers, it's a miracle that any sites resisted censorship.
And Elon Musk is the guy.
Hey, let me ask you a question about this.
I haven't heard your view on this.
A couple of months ago, Elon Musk, through Twitter X, launched a lawsuit against some advertising, sort of, I'm not going to use the word cartel, but it was like a group of advertisers who were concerned about hate speech online.
And he sued them, alleging bad faith that they were basically trying to put Twitter out of business.
After Elon Musk's lawsuit, this coalition was disbanded.
Do you know anything about that lawsuit or its status?
Do you have anything to say about that?
Actually, yes, we did a major report on this at the Foundation for Freedom Online.
The cartel was called, as it was in the past, Dense, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, and they actually shut down.
They ceased operations shortly after that lawsuit was filed.
Also, shortly after we published a report on the government contracts that many of their members have in the U.S., totaling over $1 billion to many of the big advertising agencies that were a part of this cartel that boycotted X or encouraged boycotts of X and went to tech platforms, you know, with helpful advice on their content moderation policy and how they could send some more people.
That's shut down now.
And that happened shortly after the lawsuit from X and also after investigations by the House Judiciary Committee.
But what that organization was, it represented, I believe, because it was a part of the World Federation of Advertisers, which represents over 90% of all advertising spending worldwide.
So it's basically the entire advertising industry that was involved in this group.
And it had one purpose, which was to create uniform standards of censorship on social media and on online platforms.
And that's exactly what they did.
They would go to platforms like Spotify and say, Hey, did you know that Joe Rogan, your top podcaster, had a vaccine skeptic on?
You know, were you aware of this?
This could be a problem.
You don't like this.
That's essentially what they were doing.
And it's kind of extraordinary because the platforms and the personalities that they complained about were extraordinarily popular.
Joe Rogan, the number one podcaster in the world.
And they were complaining that, you know, about one episode with a vaccine skeptic.
They also, in communications that were obtained through congressional subpoenas, you can see them admitting to targeting conservative media, targeting media they didn't like by, you know, watching them like hawks for any transgression of their principles.
So I think they specifically mentioned the Daily Wire and Breitbart News, how that specifically watched those sites for any violations so that they could go to their clients and say you shouldn't advertise on these websites.
So they admitted to unevenly applying their own standards to websites that they didn't like.
But I'll say another thing about the advertising boycotts related to what I just said about Joe Rogan.
It's kind of a trick.
And you can see how ideological these people are when you look at their internal communications, because many of the platforms and personalities that received the most advertiser boycotts were extremely popular platforms.
Tucker Carlson, almost all his advertisers left when he was at Fox News.
Joe Rogan, you see this massive advertising conglomerate complaining about his guests.
Twitter, X, over 100 million users.
So these are huge audiences that advertisers should want to be in front of.
And yet these advertising agencies and these advertising cartels are telling them, well, the risk to your brand is so great that you shouldn't be on there.
There'll be a massive consumer backlash.
But there's never been any sign of a consumer backlash.
The only backlash against advertisers for advertising in these places has come from the media.
It's come from activists.
It's come from a minority, a vocal minority of journalists and activists.
It hasn't come from the public.
No, there's never been a mass consumer boycott of any brand because their advertisers appeared on conservative media or appeared next to an offensive post on X.
It's all been from journalists and the activists plus.
The only time actually in the last five years where you do see massive consumer backlashes against brands come from the brands being too woke, like in the case of Bud Light or in the case of Gillette in 2019 when they did their toxic masculinity ad.
That's where you see brands actually losing customers and losing market share over a consumer backlash, not because they advertised on platforms that are too free speech friendly.
That's exactly right.
You know, that's what happened to us at Rebel News in early 2017.
I've seen internal documents at Google, YouTube where they say, oh, yikes, Rebel News is pretty spicy.
Better warn the advertisers, really?
So there were activists within YouTube, Google that were trying to block us.
And we managed to find other ways to survive.
But before we were shut down, we were on track to make a million dollars a year from YouTube ads.
And that's been reduced to zero.
We're still on YouTube because they haven't deleted our account.
So we still want to talk to people there.
But that has cost our company coming up on $10 million, which is a lot of crowdfunding we've had to do to survive.
EU's Shadow Over Musk00:14:16
It's absolutely atrocious, but what do you do?
There was nowhere to go until Rumble came along.
And it's still only about 1% the size of YouTube.
But they've had a real dedication to free speech.
And of course, Elon Musk buying Twitter was the biggest thing of all.
I see Guy Verhoststadt, who's a big European Union bureaucrat.
He's tweeting just today about how delighted he is that some investment firm estimates the value of Twitter is down by 75 or 80%.
I mean, just the glee with which the European Union bureaucrats want to destroy Elon Musk, and it's purely ideological.
It's not just, I mean, I saw the other day that Elon Musk was saying he's worried about going to the United Kingdom physically.
Like he's worried about traveling there because you have politicians there calling for his arrest over Twitter, speaking candidly about some of the mass immigration and the race riots there.
Here's a clip of Elon Musk saying that.
I mean, I don't know if this is just, if he's just being dramatic, but the world's most industrious man, the most prolific entrepreneur, the space adventurer, the electric car builder, the essential indispensable man, perhaps the most creative man, certainly the largest wealth creator in history.
He just drops the comment that he is afraid to travel to the United Kingdom for fear of being arrested, not for any crime, but for his opinion.
Here, take a look at this.
There's a lot of, I mean, although, you know, we've got quite a lot of bureaucracy here, but in Europe, they've got country-level bureaucracy, and then they've got EU bureaucracy on top of that.
You know, I mean, the EU headquarters in Brussels is a monument to bureaucracy.
It's really next level.
You know, and they don't, unlike America, they don't have a First Amendment.
You don't actually have freedom of speech in Europe.
So, you know, but we're kind of like a pretty rare situation having freedom of speech.
So, like there's crazy stuff happening in the UK where, you know, people are getting like two, three-year prison sentences for Facebook posts.
I've retweeted stuff that I could get set in prison.
Yeah, like, I'm like, I don't think I should go to, you know, visit Britain because I'm like, they're going to like drag out some tweet and say two years in prison for this tweet or something bullshit like that, you know.
So anyway, I think this, you know, with Trump elected, we can put a stop to that stuff and say like, oh, no way.
No, no.
Nope.
No throwing people in prison for random social media posts.
That's crazy.
Yeah, it's happened a lot.
No, I mean, it's so crazy in Britain that they actually have released convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for making social media posts.
That is a real thing that happened.
Insane.
I just got to throw one more thing at you, Alan, because I know you're originally from the UK.
We can hear it in your delightful accent.
But there was this conference that the new Labour government of the UK had trying to attract foreign investment.
Good luck with that, by the way.
But they specifically did not invite a man who's building factories everywhere, who's ramping up.
They deliberately did not invite Elon Musk.
And Trevor Phillips, who's a very interesting British commentator, was grilling the Labour cabinet minister about that.
Three times he went back to him.
Why not Elon Musk?
Why not Elon Musk?
And the Labour government just refused to say why.
Take a look at this outstanding video.
Big up to Trevor Phillips.
Take a look.
Why didn't you invite Elon Musk?
You're desperate to get a company which sacks its employees by Zoom, but you're stiffy about the biggest car maker in the world because he put something on social media you didn't like.
Look, I'm not going to comment on particular invitations for particular personnel.
Elon Musk is not some odd invitation.
It is Elon Musk, biggest car maker in the world, richest man in the world.
Why didn't you invite him?
Look, I'm not going to comment on the reasons for any specific person, but I can tell you we have 300 of the most significant investors, business figures, people who can bring significant amounts of capital to the UK.
Big names, things that will make a big difference to working people.
You're happy to talk to me about DP World, who sets their workers.
You're happy to invite the Saudis who authorize the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and they get the red carpet.
Why isn't Musk being invited?
I'm not going to.
This is you in opposition, isn't it?
Again, no, not at all.
This is about who can bring the kind of investments that will make the biggest difference to the UK, to working people's lives.
The fact that we have, I think, in 100 days.
Musk hasn't got a bob or two that he could put in a car in Britain.
Well, look, the criteria and the selection.
This is a summit.
I know that everyone wants to come.
I do understand that.
Not everyone can come.
And I'm not going to be right to go through the individual decisions for individual people, but this is about what will make the biggest difference.
Look, you understand how weird this sounds.
You want people to come and invest in Britain.
You want people to bring their money.
Yet, the one person who probably has got more money to burn and would probably like to invest in Britain.
In fact, he says so publicly when he didn't get the invitation, you're deciding he's not good enough for what reason.
No, look, if people have an investment proposition for the UK, of course, I will talk to them about it.
I'm not going to go through the thousands of people Trevor wanted to come to this summit.
Of course, they did.
Elon Musk is not that thousands of people.
Well, look, I'll simply say that the people coming, you'll see the scale of the investments.
You'll see the opportunities for the UK.
You'll see the kind of quality and depth of the engagement this new government has.
And I think to individually talk about a certain person here or there, look, that's not right on their government.
I love that.
And we all know what it is.
It's his politics.
And it's not just the UK.
I won't pick on them.
The California Coastal Commission recently cited his tweets for a reason why they won't let more spaceships take off from Vandenberg in California.
They literally said we don't like his tweets, so we're not going to let him fire spaceships.
Even Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who is at odds with Elon Musk, said that's nuts.
They hate him so much.
And when I was at Davos, Switzerland last year for the World Economic Forum, the two words that people hated were Trump and Musk.
Those are the two names on everyone's list.
Trump, because the threat he poses to the global order, and Musk, because people see that he will allow Trump to succeed if Trump is able to succeed.
I think, I hate to say it, you know, they say that graveyards are full of indispensable men, as in there's no such thing.
But I think Elon Musk is as close as it gets to an indispensable man in this moment.
That's right.
And he's similar to Trump in that, you know, the media loved him, celebrities loved him, you know, left-wing politicians loved him because of all the green car revolution, the electric car revolution.
And simply by changing his political opinions, all of these people, the same people, turned against him and completely forgot about all these other things.
The California Coastal Commission being like the craziest about it that say it openly.
Normally, there's a sense of plausible deniability, as that Labour MP was very unsuccessfully trying to do, trying to pretend that the reason he's being ostracized is for some neutral non-political reason.
What's funny about the California Coastal Commission is they came out and said it openly.
But we all know that's the case with the European Union and its investigations of Musk's company.
We all know that these All of these reasons they come up with for investigating musk companies or you know denying some permit for a space launch.
It's all just every supposedly neutral reason they come up with is just a fig leaf for a political retaliation, political retribution.
That's what's going on.
You know, I was in the UK and I was in Ireland over the weekend, Alam, and I bought a bottle of water and I discovered this new regulation.
I don't know if it's in the UK or just the EU, but when you unscrew a bottle from the top of the water, it doesn't come off completely.
There's this amazing innovation that the bottle cap, the cap stays on when you're drinking.
So it sort of squishes against your face or your nose.
And it's got that, it's a little bit prickly, right?
Where you broke it.
It's the most annoying thing in the world.
I'm sure it's done in the name of environmentalism because you can't drop the cap separately from the bottle.
I guess you could litter the whole thing.
And you know what I thought, Alan?
I thought in America, you've got Elon Musk who's sending 90% of the Earth's payload into space, more 10 times more than every other country in the world combined.
He's landing rocket ships vertically, being clasped by those big, huge robot arms.
He's doing stunning things.
He's giving internet to the world through Starlink.
He's got Tesla.
He's got this Neuralink program, which I don't know much about.
He's got like he is that's what he's doing.
But the European Union, what's their great innovation?
What's their competition to they've got that irritating little bottle cap that scratches your nose when you drink water?
And I thought, those are the two paths.
You know, choose wisely, young man.
On one hand, you have Elon Musk going to the stars.
On the other hand, the European Union with their regulations about bottle caps.
I thought that was, I just, I thought that is the state of the world today.
What do you think of that?
That's that's completely announced.
It's just a classic European Union regulation.
Now, you're right, that probably is because of regulation that the caps don't come off the bottles.
I always wondered why that was the case because it's the case in the UK, it's the case in Europe.
It must be a regulation, surely.
The other thing, the other thing to remember is, I think there is a sort of insidious relationship between the EU, Brazil, and other foreign governments that are going after Musk and Musk companies and the United States, because a lot of United States soft power organizations and NGOs and companies that have worked with the U.S. government to promote anti-disinformation research or to monitor disinformation online,
they're very active in places like the UK and the European Union and Brazil pushing for more regulation of Musk and pushing for more regulation of social media platforms.
And the State Department, which is supposed to stand up for American companies when a foreign government is threatening heavy-handed regulation, didn't do much to stop the Digital Services Act or even to water down the Digital Services Act, which is the European Union regulation that's being used to go after Musk companies.
The State Department should have done that, and they didn't.
And I think the reason they didn't is because the U.S. government probably quite likes it when the European Union forces American tech companies to go after disinformation and hate speech.
It's something they can't do directly themselves because of the First Amendment, even though they'd like to.
But a massive jurisdiction like the European Union doing it is the next best thing.
Yeah, we were down in Sao Paulo, Brazil, about a month ago for the massive rally after their authoritarian regime banned Twitter.
They were banning individual Twitter accounts.
Elon Musk revealed that publicly, so they banned the whole app.
I was astonished, Alam.
I went down there because I wanted to see with my own eyes, is it really a rally about free speech?
Because that would be very unusual for people to rally for something so abstract.
It just seemed like I've never seen a rally for freedom of speech in my life, actually.
And it's true.
Their signs were about Twitter and free speech and Elon Musk.
Just for fun, here's some of the streeters we did with Brazilians.
And by the way, it was a wonderful feeling.
Every age, every race, Brazil is a very mixed race society, different classes.
There was an amazing unity, and everyone was using the vocabulary of freedom.
It was really one of the most astonishing rallies I've ever been to.
And the fact that 200,000 people were there was just the punctuation mark at the end of it.
Here, just a little flashback.
Here's some of the streeters I did in a massive pro-Twitter rally in Brazil.
Take a look.
Elon Musk, thank you for fighting for our freedom.
We are with you.
Musk, Fika Fermi, non-zanima, nous ajuda because you would say, ordinary Brazilians, how do they feel about Elon Musk?
Do they even know who he is?
You know, most of the people are with Elon Musk because we see what's going on.
We know what is right.
And that's why we think that we support him.
But it's easy to be at Lula's side.
I love Elon Musk.
Oh, I love Elon Musk.
He's helping us so much.
I hope so because he has a lot of power, a lot of money, a lot of everything.
I hope he can help us.
You trust him a lot.
If you had one message for the owner of X, Elon Musk, what would it be?
Brazil, we need to fight for our future and we need to stop more ice.
YouTube Recommendations Alarm00:05:46
I didn't hear a peep from the State Department about a massive American company being blocked like that.
And it wasn't just Twitter being blocked.
They went after Elon Musk's other unrelated holdings.
They went after Starlink, which is completely unrelated to Twitter.
And you would think that the U.S. State Department, by the way, here in Canada, the most terrifying American is not any senator.
It's not even the president.
It's the U.S. trade representative.
If the U.S. trade representative thinks that Canada is engaging in monkey business in softwood lumber, in mining, in environmental, holy moly is that terror because there's trade sanctions, there's tariffs, there's litigation in these free trade agreements.
I mean, they stand up for American rights in the economy.
Absolute silence when it was Elon Musk that was being basically expropriated by these other countries.
You've been very generous with your time.
I just wanted to show two more things to you.
Actually, I'll just show one more thing because we've been interested in the case of Tommy Robinson.
And not everyone shares my taste for Tommy Robinson.
He's a little bit rambunctious and rough around the edges, but I believe that he is a warning.
He is the canary in the coal mine, just like Alex Jones is in America.
You don't have to like Alex Jones.
You don't have to agree with everything about Alex Jones.
But when he was canceled in a 24-hour period by 14 different social media companies on the same day, including LinkedIn and I think Pinterest, they're banning.
It was just real, you know, Spotify, YouTube, all his accounts, 14 different accounts suspended on one day.
Don't tell me that's not political collusion.
People said, oh, it's just Alex Jones.
He's crazy.
He's out of control.
He's rude.
He swears.
Who cares?
Well, you know what?
That was a test drive to see what they could get away with.
And I think Tommy Robinson is similar.
Let me show you, Alan.
I know you know this, but I want to show our viewers again.
This is from a parliamentary hearing in the United Kingdom a few years ago, where Google YouTube's senior global executive in charge of counter-terrorism was meeting in London's parliament in front of a committee.
So, this guy's job was tracking how real terrorist groups like ISIS or Al-Qaeda would use YouTube for propaganda and for recruitment.
He had an extremely serious and grave job where he was dealing with life or death matters.
And he goes to Parliament, and I've got to think he was spending a week in advance preparing for this extremely important meeting.
You're in America, you're going to the UK, you're there to answer questions about terrorism and YouTube.
Wow, that's a big job.
But take a look at this.
I'm going to play a couple minutes of it.
The questions weren't about terrorism, Alan.
They were MPs complaining that they had to see Tommy Robinson videos and that the algorithm, when they typed in Tommy Robinson, kept serving up more Tommy Robinson.
Take a look at this.
We are working to make sure that videos that promote hate or promote violence, if they violate our policies, are removed from the platform.
If they walk right up to the line, we have also, at the encouragement of this committee, developed a new enforcement mechanism to limit the features that these have.
They should not be appearing in our recommendation engine.
If they are, I will take this back to our team and see what the problem is.
Okay, but they are.
I mean, they are appearing.
They are in my recommended timeline at the moment.
So, because I've been searching on my iPad for national action videos, I, as a result, have the first two videos recommended to me by YouTube.
When I just click on, as I've just done this afternoon, I click onto YouTube.
The first two recommendations are Tommy Robinson videos.
So, the Tommy Robinson that was identified as part of the Finsbury Park online radicalization process, that's what YouTube's recommended.
I've not searched for it.
YouTube has recommended that to me.
Doesn't that cause you some serious alarm?
I can't speak to these particular videos personally.
It causes me a lot of alarm, but I will take this back to our team and see why this is happening.
It's not even just about the individual videos, it's actually a recommended channel.
I have got up here, it is coming up as my recommended channels.
That one of the recommended channels for me is Tommy Robinson recommended channel.
I've also got British Warrior, I've got a series of other, you know, quite sort of extreme things that are coming up, but I have specifically Tommy Robinson recommended channel.
You can pass you my iPad.
It's important for the company and for our bottom line for the recommendation engine to work as it is intended to make sure that people can find quality content that they are looking for.
It should not be serving up videos that incite or inspire hate.
If it is, there is a problem, and I will take it back to the team and see that it's addressed.
But lots of people have raised this with you.
This is not just us.
This is not the first time.
I do not believe this is the first time you have heard this.
Allegations and concerns that your algorithms are promoting more and more extreme content at people.
Whatever they search for, what they get back is a whole load more extreme recommendations coming through the algorithms.
You are the king of the search engine, and yet your search engines are promoting things that further and further radicalize people.
Whatever they search for, they get something more back.
Policy Shifts and Disinfo Panic00:04:29
And that woman who was leading the charge, Yvette Cooper, is now the Home Secretary, basically the Minister of the Interior for the UK in charge of censorship.
By the way, shortly after that hearing, they banned Tommy Robinson from basically all social media too.
They did an Alex Jones to him.
Elon Musk brought him back to life online and same with Alex Jones.
I don't know.
I think, Alam, that Rebel News would probably be dead meat by now if things had continued on that trend.
And if it weren't for Rumble and Elon Musk and Twitter and this revelation by independent thought leaders like Peter Thiel and others in Silicon Valley that, whoa, we're headed in the wrong direction, I...
I think that we were going in a very bad way.
And I really think this election, as Elon Musk said, is a do or die moment for America because if Kamala Harris, the most left-wing candidate in American history on a major ticket, if she wins, she'll do what she says she'll do.
Tim Walz himself has talked about censoring misinformation.
I just got to throw one more clip at you, Alan.
Here's Tim Walz, the vice presidential candidate, saying misinformation should be illegal.
Take a look at this.
I think we need to push back on this.
There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.
Well, Alan, I mean, I don't mean to be dramatic, but it's not just the fate of America in the balance in a couple of weeks.
It's the fate of so many other countries that take their lead from America.
And frankly, it's the fate of our company, Rebel News.
I'm sure of it.
And I think a lot of, I mean, I just can't, maybe I could overconsume social media, and so I've been radicalized.
But I really think that everything is at stake this election.
What do you think?
Certainly, when it comes to free speech, I think things might start getting worse if the Democrats win because, you know, as I was saying, so much of this was encouraged by the U.S. government and U.S. government agencies, and it's only stopped because of congressional investigation.
The same people who encouraged big tech companies to come down so hard on disinformation are still in the U.S. government, and they're going to stay there.
They're going to be promoted, I think, if there isn't a more pro-free speech administration next year.
And, you know, I would like the Democrats to become more pro-free speech.
I would like it not to matter if a Republican or a Democrat is in office.
I would like for both major parties in the U.S. to be similarly supportive of free speech.
That doesn't seem like it's happening at the moment.
There are a few Democrats who aren't as bad as the others, but mostly they've been supportive of the disinformation panic.
There are some establishment Republicans who supported the disinformation panic as well.
But certainly this election will change a lot when it comes to U.S. government policy.
And U.S. government policy, as I said, it's quietly encouraged censorship in foreign countries.
The U.S. Embassy in Brazil, for example, they put out a very mild statement saying Brazil should respect free speech back when the judiciary was going after X for having too much free speech on the platform.
But that same U.S. embassy had up till then been hosting events on how to combat disinformation online and how to deal with disinformation and fake news.
So it's been the policy of the U.S. government to support social media companies taking measures against disinformation.
And, you know, that could be very much affected by the election.
Well, and we're saying this in 2024.
Imagine how bad things would go three or four years into it.
I mean, I'm really three or four years of judicial appointments, three or four years of a regulatory squeeze.
I saw a graphic in the New York Times the other day of all the lawfare against Elon Musk and his various companies.
I believe four years from now, if there was a Harris win, Elon Musk would be in trial as much as Donald Trump has been on trumped-up charges.
And if you could take on Trump, you can take on anyone.
Four Years Slipping Away00:01:08
And I think they would.
Well, listen, Alan, it's great to catch up with you.
I'm delighted that you are the head of the foundationforfreedomonline.com, managing director.
It's always nice to chat with you about these tech things.
And I sign off my show every day with the same slogan.
I've been using it nine years here at Rebel News and at Sun News Network beforehand.
I keep saying, keep fighting for freedom.
That's the tagline I've used for really almost 15 years.
And you have to, because these freedoms were hard fought over centuries, even over millennia.
And they're slipping away.
And it's easier to keep them than to lose them and fight to get them back.
And I really think that we're at that key inflection in history.
Alan Bokari, great to see you, my friend.
Stay free.
Good to see you, Azra.
Right on.
There you have it.
Alan Bokhari, managing director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.