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July 19, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
31:00
Tough Luck, Zuck - Meta's 'Threads' Implodes!

Meta/Facebook's "Twitter Killer" social media app Threads attracted a huge level of interest when it recently launched. Unfortunately for Zuckerberg and his Meta company, traffic soon absolutely cratered. What's to blame for the failure? Also today - Pence touts his foreign policy "experience" in his GOP run - but what kind of experience?

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Time Text
Meta's Threads Crash? 00:05:54
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
Well, good morning, Dr. Paul.
Are we on time?
Yeah, no, we're not.
Well, we're going to get a page.
We're on time.
We'll find somebody to play.
Well, very good.
And we're ready to rearing to go and update people on a few things we considered interesting, at least.
The viewers will decide if it's important or not.
But the one that really caught my attention is the unbelievable numbers involved with MetaThreads.
Zuckleberg, he's a genius.
He's just a kid, at least he's getting to look like an older kid.
But he comes up with a new program to compensate for something Stacy has made to compensate and try to go after Twitter.
So he's really motivated.
I don't think he, you know, even though he lost a lot of money for a while, I don't think he worries about the money because the money, when it's necessary, hundreds new subscribers.
Boy, that's a lot more than we have.
So he gets 100 million people, and I thought it was magic forever, and he'll be king of the hill, and nobody will ever touch him until a day or two afterwards.
And then there was a crash.
Big bubble, big crash, and he lost half of them, which means nothing was very solid.
There was a little bit of misjudgment and a little bit of malinvestment there.
But that to me is a demonstration on how quickly information spreads.
You know, we saw a lot of that, you know, with COVID.
It would spread quickly and all, but nothing like this.
I'm very impressed with that, that that many people could sign up.
But maybe speed isn't necessarily quality.
So people find, hey, maybe this isn't cracked up what it's supposed to be.
And maybe they're not going to offer security like the people want.
That might be the reason they backed off.
But so it'll be interesting to see the final report is not in.
It may be that they'll recover and make sure that Twitter is still on its way out.
But we have a long way to go on that.
But to me, the big thing is how quickly information changes things and whether it has gearing people up for war or scaring people by viruses and all.
It's a weapon that can be used.
It's, of course, a weapon.
When they weaponize the Justice Department, they're able to do that.
But that means people need more than ever sources of information that they say, well, I might not agree with them all the time, but they're doing their very best to reach the truth on the matter of things.
And I hope that we can be noted for at least striving for that goal.
Well, you know, Threads by Meta, which is Facebook, was billed as the Twitter killer.
And we're not taking any pleasure or gloating in the fact that they've had a big decline, but the symbolic implications of this are enormous because obviously When Twitter was changed by Elon Musk after the purchase to be a more free speech-oriented platform, and we know from the Twitter files how unbelievably heavy-handed the censorship was on Twitter under the old regime, including with so much government involvement.
And when Elon Musk came in, you know, he cleaned out the stables and got rid of all of this.
Now, he's not perfect by any stretch, but he turned it into a more free speech as opposed to the more controlled speech, Facebook, which still does censor very aggressively.
And so, when Zuckerberg and his meta, Facebook came in and said, We're going to kill Twitter, we're going to do it with kindness, we're going to have a kinder, gentler Twitter.
And so, we opened up threads.
And a lot of people anticipated it.
People who hate Elon Musk and for some reason hate free speech.
I don't know why.
So, after a couple of weeks, let's put it up now.
This is why we're talking about it.
Now, this we saw on Zero Hedge: Meta's threads bombs as daily active users halved.
Now, go to the next one if you can, please.
And this is a study.
While a strong start makes threads a contender among possible Twitter replacements, daily active users dropped from 49 million to 23.6 million in a week.
Zero Heads had a little fun with this.
If you go to the next tweet, they said threads usage drops by half from the initial surge.
At this rate, it will need a bailout from the CIA.
And now, looking at it in graphic form, this is what the chart looks like.
If we can do the next one, just to finish this part out of what we're discussing.
Now, that black line is threads.
And when it launched, there was a huge surge of interest that first couple of days.
And indeed, it surpassed Twitter in terms of usage.
But very, very quickly, interest in threads plummeted.
And you can see that black line.
Well, Twitter has stayed relatively solid with a couple of increases in the thing.
So it came in, and people were interested, and they weren't that interested.
I wonder what that does to the planned battle, physical battle between and they say Zuck is training.
Threads Surge Then Plummet 00:08:03
Wow, pay-per-view.
I bet they'd make a billion dollars.
Yeah.
That is weird.
I used to dream of the days when I started thinking about war.
Why don't we just have the two presidents of the country fight it out?
Now, that's not nice because poor old Biden versus Putin.
Oh, that's right.
We'd be considered anti-American.
Abusing the CPU.
But I don't think our president is a good representation.
Maybe Kamala will do it.
Kamala and Putin can go at it.
There you go.
So, but yeah, I guess the market is working and it's swift.
That's a big point that I want to make because economic factors can be that swift too.
You know, things move very quickly.
Matter of fact, I was watching a television one morning on 9/11 when I was watching the business station.
And all of a sudden, the announcement came in the picture there, and the sudden changes, stock markets closed and everything else.
I mean, this is instantaneous.
So the economic system has they go fast and sometimes they're off and they have ups and downs.
But sort of on the medium to long term, markets are pretty smart.
And they'll sort it out because everybody gets a vote and the consumer eventually decides which product is going to lack.
And I think in this case, it'll be the consumer that's going to make the difference.
And it may not only be for the service that they're getting.
It might be the trust in protecting their information.
It might be the privacy issue that will make the difference.
And I would think from my non-expertise on the subject, I would think people would expect more protection of their privacy from Twitter than they will from Zuckerberg.
Yeah, yeah, that may well be the case.
But I think whatever the case, I mean, I think what this proves, and that's why we wanted to do it, because we often need a good news story too.
And it's not because we want to see Facebook fail by any stretch of the imagination.
But again, I think this sort of the censorship genie is out of the bottle.
And I think we learned from the Twitter files how much of a heavy hand these guys had on just literally determining what reality is.
Because, you know, for example, you talk about COVID during COVID.
If you disappear people like Dr. McCullough, you'll never know that there was that view out there.
If you disappear people like Dr. Paul, who was talking about the other Dr. Paul, who was talking about, well, what about natural immunity?
If you just disappear what people can say, then that's never part of the debate.
You know, that's like that cartoon where, you know, all the scientists agree, and then the one stands up and says, except me, and they shoot him.
You know, so I think what happened really is, and maybe I'm being too optimistic, is that people's perception changed and they said, you know what, now that I realize how censored everything was, maybe I don't want to go there.
And so I think that may have been what crippled threads from the very beginning.
But you know, the other thing that has become more apparent than ever before, and a good argument I've been able to use for some open-minded progressives, and that is the combination of big government and big business.
Because there are some out there that are honestly, you know, opposed to it, but yet they stick tight for political reasons to the people who are spokespeople for the progressives right now on war and other things.
But this has been very, very sharply emphasized with the pharmaceuticals.
And of course, many have talked about, and even more conservatives are talking about it.
And that is the combination of the military-industrial complex, which it's fortunate for every reason this happened that it was a moderate Republican that introduced that notion of the military-industrial complex.
But the big thing is, is this is big, the combination of, and they throw around the world the word fascism, Antifa, and this kind of stuff, gross distortion of it.
And one rule, this is my personal rule, the more I hear somebody shouting about those fascists, those fascists, the more fascists I think they are.
Yeah, they are.
That's right.
Well, let's dig a little bit.
Now, this is anecdotal.
I'll just dug up a few things.
But I remember at the time when Threads first came out, and there was a lot of interest, and libertarians and conservatives were saying, I want to check it out.
I want to check it out.
So this is anecdotal, but this is what happened within the first day.
Now, I'm sure some of it was they purposely wanted to test.
But let's look at an example of why we think people have run away from Threads and back to Twitter.
This is interesting.
So someone posted this.
I don't know how they posted it, but they went and they joined Threads and they tried to follow Donald Trump Jr.
Before they would let this person follow Donald Trump Jr., it said, are you sure you want to follow Donald Trump Jr.?
This account has repeatedly posted false information that was removed by independent fact checkers or went against our community guidelines.
It doesn't matter if you love Trump Jr. or can't stand him.
The idea that they would say, are you sure you really want to follow this guy?
He's a really bad guy.
It turns people off because it insults their intelligence.
Now here's another example.
Again, this is anecdotal.
I'm not pretending this is anything scientific.
This person, Shaney Rich, got a notice from Thread.
It said, your thread on threads has been removed.
We remove your post on threads because it goes against our community guidelines.
Well, what was it that he posted?
He posted simply a piece of information breaking.
It has been confirmed that the West Wing of the White House was evacuated due to cocaine being found.
The FBI is scrambling to find out who it could belong to.
That is simply a notice of fact.
It was removed.
And the reason why they said is that they had to prevent the account from being deleted.
They had to remove the fact.
And now the other one here is Ashley St. Clair, and she works for the Babylon Bee, which is a satire.
It's a conservative libertarian satire site.
Extremely good, extremely funny.
And she posted this.
She went to Threads and checked it out.
She said, I posted a meme about Twitter being better than threads, and they removed it after one minute for, quote, incitement to violence.
And let's look at what she posted.
This is a very, very well-known meme that's used over and over, and it's very, very funny.
If you can go to that next one, here's what she put up, kind of as a joke.
It's a satire site.
So it's the guy drinking coffee, and it says, Twitter is better than threads, changed my mind.
And here's what she got after she posted.
If you can do the next one, your thread has been removed.
Your post on threads goes against our community guidelines on violence and incitement.
Come on.
And that's why I think, Dr. Paul, again, anecdotal, that if this happened over and over, the word gets out and people just say, you know what?
I don't want to go there.
You know, sorting this out with the Trump family or the Biden family and all the misinformation and all this social network that wants the control and now they've combined it with government.
But I think it's very much involved with Robert Kennedy right now, sorting out, you know, this.
Robert Kennedy, I like him and I believe he's an honest person, but he's not a type of libertarian that is going to be our answer.
But the point here that I'm trying to make is because he goes against the grain.
If you just took out and say, is he a devout loyalist to whatever the pharmaceuticals want?
Supporting Ukraine: Coburn's Stand 00:14:23
He's probably their biggest competitor or competition.
So that's the problem.
But, you know, so let's say something happens that all these individuals are out of the picture for a while.
They'll find somebody else.
There's somebody else who's ever going to challenge the lies told by the wild progressives that think that they are the purveyors of truth and therefore you have to go there in order to support wokeism.
See, wokeism depends on an ocean of lives that's rolling in after it.
And anything is challenging.
And how do they do it?
By telling lies.
You just repeated some of the lies they tell and they're fighting.
They're saying they're fighting the lies.
So that's always the best thing.
This idea came up, you know, when we talked about legislation.
I said, most of the time, Daniel, you'll know what the answer is by reading the title.
Yeah, easy.
Saved us some time.
And it was easy.
I was told it was easy for my employees because you could sort it out.
Anything that wasn't constitutional, I'm not interested in.
And other officers would say, you guys have it just too easy.
You can sort it out.
We have to satisfy all the sponsors and all the supporters and the donors.
Exactly.
Well, let's move on to the second thing that we noticed.
And this is written by Alexander Coburn, who's a hero of mine.
I think he's brilliant.
I followed him for many, many years.
But he did a piece in Responsible Statecraft that you noticed today.
And our friend Kelly Vlajos works over there, who we like very much.
But this is a really important article.
And you saw it.
I saw the headline, but I didn't read it.
And thankfully, you read it and recommended it to me this morning.
If we can put that next one up, it's a great piece.
We recommend it.
You can find it at antiwar.com.
But this first, here we go.
The $850 Billion Dollar Chicken Comes Home to Roost is what Coburn titles it.
And the subtitle says it all.
The military-industrial complex is not designed to actually fight wars.
If so, you wouldn't see Ukraine struggling right now to win one.
Very heavy indictment.
And he starts out, and we won't go into the detail.
He starts talking about all the problems with the Bradley fighting vehicle.
For years, for decades, 40 years, they fought over the fact that it wasn't very good at protecting the soldiers inside.
They light up like matches when they were hit.
And the point being that the military-industrial complex operates very, very much separately from the idea of winning wars or protecting the country.
And it's a great article because of that.
It helps us sort it out because some people are involved in this because of the money, the weapons, and the profits that they're going to make.
Others are real hawks.
You know, and they have a vindictive attitude, and then they blow it out of proportion.
You know, I'm very much aware of the shortcomings of the Chinese.
But sometimes I would, in a debate in the Congress, I would bring it up.
But have we solved all our problems on civil liberties, you know, and we're going to do this?
Then all of a sudden, when you see the statistics between what we are spending on interference around the world versus what China is, there should be a little bit more open discussion.
But I liked what the conclusion of Coburn's article was because he put it in perspective.
That's great.
Because we're talking about, we're talking about weapons and we're talking about war and what's going on.
But he concludes, he says, so the richest war machine in history, having scraped its cupboard bare, is now reduced to fielding a device of dubious military utility, deemed illegal by over 100 countries.
That's what we get for $850.
So there's the answer.
We're done.
Our dollar work is done.
Just spend your money.
Wise up, folks.
It's not worth it.
But don't worry, it's going to stop because we're going to run.
No, we'll never run out of Federal Reserve notes, but we're going to run out of value of the Federal Reserve notes.
And this is going to change.
And matter of fact, so much what I see today is already the early stages of running out of wealth.
That's when you're talking about deficits up to $32 trillion going up a trillion dollars a year.
I mean, it is cracking.
And that is what will be the limitation.
That's always the limitation on tyrants and the breaking up of a system because it can't last endlessly all the way back to the Roman Empire.
They stretch themselves too thinly, spend too much money, ruin the currency.
And the people, when they're unhappy, they take it out on their government eventually, but too slowly.
Our goal has always been: how do you prevent it?
And that's the easy part.
This can all be prevented if we as a society will accept some of the moral principles behind a society that protects peace and prosperity.
It's not complicated, but it gets messy when you have to liquidate all the mistakes, all the malinvestment, and all the debt, because those are building the system, and that's why the market and just natural natural sources, that has to be taken care of.
You can't have new, fantastic growth on a society that we totally bankrupted, and then you have on top of that the problem of the moral bankruptcy.
And that's what we talk about a lot with this political chicanery that's going on.
That's really in bad shape.
Yeah, and I think a lot of the scrambling now is this realization, this basically, what's next is the collapse because this whole idea, and I think Coburn captures it well, we spend this much on, and what do we get for it?
This stuff doesn't even work.
It doesn't work that well.
So the charade is coming out in the open.
You know, the emperor has no clothes.
The money we're spending is not to defend anything.
It's simply to enrich the well-connected.
I'm going to just read a little bit from this paragraph because I think it's, aside from your conclusion, which is the best sentence there, I think this is a very good summation of the point that Coburn is making.
If we can put that next clip up, Coburn points out, Pentagon spending this year is projected to nudge $850 billion.
The total bill is already way past a trillion, but that's another story.
Yet, and here's what I underlined, even when endowed with such a gigantic pile of cash, the system is apparently incapable of furnishing the wherewithal for even a limited war, such as the one currently underway in Ukraine.
The conflict has been marked by successive announcements that progressively more potent weapon systems are being shipped to the Ukrainians.
Javelins, anti-tank missiles, 155 millimeter howitzers, HIMARS, precision and long-range missiles, Patriot air defense missiles, Abrams tanks, with F-16 fighters in the offing.
A U.S. military intelligence officer pointed out to me recently the actual basis on which these systems are selected.
Quote, when we run out of the last system, we're sending.
So when they run it out, then they'll send the next one and the next one and the next.
And then he goes on to say, so off we go to cluster bombs.
Their passage lubricated.
We can put the next one on by crocodile tears from the administration officials.
And I put this up because you pointed it out when we had a discussion before the show, Dr. Paul.
Quote, I'm not going to stand up here and say it was easy.
It's a decision that required a real hard look at the potential harm to civilians, NASA security advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters.
So he was agonizing over the decision.
Yeah, sure.
You know, my habit, I like printed out articles, and then I scribble my immediate reaction to it.
This one was, as soon as I saw, it was easy.
And I put down, sure, exclamation, Mark.
And then this one is, oh, this is, I get a little harsh here.
It's a decision that requires real hard.
Look, I says, that's a lot of BS.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, anyway, that was a great piece, and hopefully some folks will read it.
I guess we're getting out of time, so we should go to our last one.
This is just a little quickie that I noticed this morning.
Josh Rogan, who is a neocon, but not the worst person, I have to be honest, writes for the Washington Post.
He's most often wrong, but he's not a bad guy.
Put this next one on because it's a good article.
Mike Pence wants to update Reagan's foreign policy for Trump's GOP.
Now, you can see him over there.
He went over there to Ukraine, shake some hands, promised more and more ongoing support.
His numbers in the polls are not going as well as he might have hoped.
If you go to the next clip from this, this is what Josh wrote.
In search of momentum, Pence is doubling down on foreign policy and specifically Ukraine as a centerpiece of his campaign.
So he's going to make our support of Ukraine the centerpiece.
And in fact, we have a video that we can play if we can play that.
I think first 42 seconds.
Sorry, I've got you running around like a maniac back there, Sir Khan.
But if we can watch the first 42 seconds of this very famous exchange now with Tucker Carlson, where admittedly it's a bit of a gotcha, because I think given time he might have been able to explain it.
But let's go back to the beginning and play where he's basically asked about, you think sending tanks to Ukraine is more important than what's going on at home?
And he said, yeah, sure.
Okay, let's listen to what he has to say.
Okay, we're not getting any sound.
So anyway, it's Tucker asking him, look at the American, look at the inner cities.
Look at what a disaster it is.
Anywhere you go, things are getting absolutely progressively worse.
And yet you want to send more tanks to Ukraine.
Why don't you care about American cities?
And he said, well, that's not my concern.
And now, again, people say things, you know, in this situation.
So it's not a note, but I think it reflects his real view.
Well, if you search real deeply for the truth of the matter, is in a republic, it would be the problem of a mayor someplace.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
But, you know, they cite Reagan, and rightfully so.
I think he was a plus for the movement of peace, and he talked to the Russians.
But I thought certainly it was Reagan that had had some agreements with the Russians to back off on the nuclear weapons.
But they never talk about that.
They're always talking about how do we put more in the South China Sea?
And how are we going to crowd Russia and prod them into expanding the war over Ukraine?
So people sometimes will misuse the people they quote.
Well, that's such a great point.
I'm so glad you said it because if you remember, I remember it very well.
When Reagan went to Reykjavik to try to make that nuclear agreement, he was absolutely savaged by the neocons in his party.
Because it was under Reagan that the neocons all went from the Democrats to the Republicans.
But remember, they told him, don't you dare go there, don't you dare go there.
He went there, and that's when they had a Soviet Union.
It wasn't even Russia.
So he went there.
He took a huge gamble.
Ultimately, it was not successful.
But he was absolutely brutalized by the Mike Pence's of his day for daring to talk to him.
In a superior type attitude when they do it, because they're righteous in their comments.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know.
The thing is, okay, this is Pence's thing.
I'm going to run on Ukraine.
I'm not sure that's going to be the best idea because let's look at the next clip.
This is Turning Point USA.
Now, this is a conservative, I think a pro-Trump organization.
I don't know that much about them, but I know they're right-wing and they're pro-Trump.
Well, they had a conference over the weekend, and they did a straw poll.
Now, obviously, this is not scientific.
This is simply probably a show of hands in people in the audience, or however they did it.
Nevertheless, here is the headline.
Whopping 96% oppose supporting Ukraine against Russia in Turning Point Action Straw Poll.
If you go to the next one, this gives you a little bit more info.
A huge 95.8% of the attendees at the Turning Point Conference straw poll said they oppose the U.S. supporting Ukraine against Russia, Charlie Kirk announced on the stage.
You'd say, well, 6,000 people were there.
They were watching Trump speak.
It's just a small little group.
Okay, fair enough.
But this is Trump's core, and Trump's numbers continue to rise.
Right.
You know, I have daydreams at times.
These are very vivid.
And my daydream has been around Ukraine is that somebody like Mike Pinch, Pence, you know, really gets involved.
He's ready to be elected or he's been elected.
He says, Ron, he calls me up, Ron.
Tell me what I should do.
Tell me what I should do because I'm making Ukraine my key to it.
I said, oh, great.
I love talking to you.
Why don't you try this?
Why don't you just say, you know, we just marched in.
Why don't we just march out?
And marching in today is a little bit different than our forces marching into the Middle East, but not a whole lot of difference because they're still our weapons.
They're our policy.
Marching Out Together 00:02:23
We have all the qualities in there.
And we do have CIA agents there.
We participated in the coup.
So marching out isn't just marching out a couple thousand troops.
It's marching out on the principles, the interference, and the control of our empire.
But my dream didn't end well.
It woke me up and I thought I was having a nightmare.
This is Mike Pence.
Well, it's okay to dream.
We still dream.
Maybe it's a phone or ring before we finish.
Well, I'm going to finish by thanking our viewers for your patience.
We do occasionally have technical problems here.
We're not in a metropolitan area, and that's just how it is.
We'll blame Biden or Pence or someone for not having infrastructure.
But nevertheless, you stuck with us.
Our live numbers are good.
I'm looking at them as we speak right now.
Our old buddies, Gypsy Magic and Brewster McBrewster, are chatting away on our live chat.
And I'm sure they're saying nothing controversial.
But everyone that's on our live chat, we're happy that you're there.
Everyone commenting, we're happy that you're there.
Please keep commenting.
Please keep enjoying the chat.
And please hit like and share it and send it around.
The more viewers we have, the louder our voices are.
And that's what we want.
So thanks, everyone.
And I do want to add to that because I think getting together on the internet or at a conference is very, very beneficial because there's no reason why you can't have fun.
I tried when I gave longer speeches at times that I would spend most of the time telling young people especially what kind of future they face and it wasn't glowing.
It was upfront.
There's problems out there.
But I always try to say at the end that if we do the right things and they're available to us, these things can be protected.
And lo and behold, although I spent most of my time warning them of it, I thought they would be turned off.
Oh, you're too negative, too negative.
But inevitably, young people would come up and say, you know, I like what you're doing because you're optimistic.
And so telling the truth, I think, is what gathers people together and say, that is what makes them optimistic because they're hearing the truth.
Bad things are there, but there's an answer to it if we so desire.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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