Episode 1953 Scott Adams: Let's Talk About Those New Twitter Revelations. Were Laws Broken?
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Content:
Twitter Files & cognitive dissonance
Twitter throttling & suppression
Making up rules on the fly
Bad analysis to Twitter Files
Were crimes committed?
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Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of civilization.
Yes, it's Coffee with Scott Adams, and it's going to be a rousing affair today.
Yes, I've been putting my stick into the stew and stirring it up a little bit.
Let's see if we can get people to reveal themselves as the NPCs they are.
And... Clank, you say?
Yeah, I just blocked sticks and hammer today for being a dick.
But that's another story. If you'd like to take today's experience up a level, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen drink or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called simultaneous sip.
Go.
Yeah, that's good.
That's good.
Thank you.
Yes, I do block people for being condescending.
And if they blocked me for the same reason, that'd be a good reason.
Perfectly good reason. Yes, Dixon Hammer was kind of a condescending dick to me today on Twitter for no good reason that I could see.
So I've decided to remove him from my life forever.
Yes, I do make decisions like that.
You should just talk to some of the people I've removed from my life forever.
They will confirm that when I remove somebody from my life forever, I really don't go back.
Don't go back. So he's gone forever.
You may have noticed I removed my profile picture on Twitter that featured me in my Black Lives Matter shirt because I feel like our work is done.
Our work is done. You know, I think the whole Black Lives Matter thing had a role to make sure that we valued black lives as well as we should.
And I think the Brittany Griner event shows us that we now do value black lives higher than white lives, and that's all everybody wanted.
So I feel like our work is done.
We can now say with confidence that black lives are valued by America more than other lives.
So good for you, Brittany Griner.
But I don't need to wear that shirt anymore because our work is done.
I'd like to give a shout-out to Mark Cuban.
You might know he's got a startup called costplusdrugs.com, where I guess he's up to 350 types of pharma medications that you can get through his online outfit, substantially cheaper than you could get your drugs any other way, I guess. So isn't that what you want to see more of?
And also, to his credit, my understanding from the news anyway, Is that Mark Cuban is very directly involved with the company.
It's not just a passive investment.
So there's somebody who doesn't need to do anything.
Am I right? Did he need to do any extra work?
No. He hasn't needed to do any extra work for decades.
But he still goes to work.
And he's working on behalf of the people of the United States in this case.
So that's like the best of America right there, in my opinion.
That's us operating at our very best.
Because the free market was there.
Somebody who did not need to work.
Said, well, looks like I might be the person who needs to do this, because I can.
And now he's working on it.
Now, I don't know if it'll work, you know, in the long run.
Who knows how that'll turn out.
But I just want to see more of that, right?
Just more of that.
So that's your good news.
All right. Shall we talk about the latest Twitter file dump?
What do you think? Are you going to be able to handle this?
All right, here's what I saw.
There's something about this situation that is causing massive cognitive dissonance.
But it's causing it for everybody.
It's not just the left.
And it's really fascinating.
A lot of NPCs have, you know, revealed themselves.
You can tell the NPCs because they have the same tells.
So if I say something like, the sky is blue...
The NPC will say, so, you're saying your car is on a gas.
Now, you don't have to read anything after the word so, because that's telling you, I'm in cognitive dissonance.
Whatever follows the word so will be something wholly unrelated to the conversation, which I will say is my dunking on you.
L. You get the L. Take the L. Yeah.
So here's what I think has happened.
Let's first of all talk about what we learned yesterday from the Twitter files.
Some of you don't follow the news.
So here is what we've learned.
Number one, Trump was very aggressively throttled before the election.
So a week before the election, he was basically almost erased from Twitter.
Not good. We also know that they went after James Woods hard.
And we know that the Twitter Terms of Service were not sufficient to address all the situations in the view of the employees.
And Yoel Roth, in particular, seemed to be in a position where he was kind of making up the guidelines as he went.
Would you agree? That seems to be the conclusion.
He was making up the guidelines as he went.
And of course, the people on the right say, well, that's a bad sign.
Nothing worse than that.
Making up the guidelines as you go and always nailing the conservatives.
Oh, and also Breitbart. Breitbart was specifically throttled back on Twitter, which basically was a huge blow to the business.
Breitbart's traffic was probably mostly from Twitter until they erased him.
So here's what we can conclude.
For sure, Twitter employees were doing something that looks like shadow banning.
So that's now just a fact.
But, interestingly, I don't know if you caught this, there was no mention in any of the documentations that we've seen yet that suggests that Jack Dorsey was aware of the specific actions.
I'm not saying he was or he wasn't.
I'm saying that no evidence has been produced of it.
Now, that would be consistent with the fact that Jack Dorsey said publicly to Musk, you should release all of the documents.
Because if Dorsey wanted all of the documents released, he obviously knew that it wasn't going to hurt him.
And so far, he's accurate.
Now, let me tell you all of the bad things that I see in terms of analysis.
Let's try not to take this personally, okay?
Number one, bad analysis.
Jack Dorsey lied to Congress because he said we don't do shadow banning.
Now, that's a bad analysis.
Because the evidence so far suggests, now we don't know, but the evidence so far suggests, and by the way, Musk has confirmed this as his opinion as well, that Dorsey didn't know what was going on.
At the level of these, you know, these decisions.
Which means that he would not have been lying to Congress.
He would have been telling them what he believed was the company policy.
And I think it was the company policy.
Like, officially, they didn't shadow ban it.
Now, suppose you had Jack Dorsey in front of you and you said, damn it, Jack, I know you're lying.
Because you know that these people were specifically looking for people and banning them.
You know that was happening.
What do you think Jack Dorsey would say?
Would he say, I didn't know anything about it?
Because he was actually on one of the committees that made decisions about it.
No. He would say, I assume, I can't read his mind, but I assume he would say, yeah, we have a very active suppression tool, and I am part of it, and we suppress people who do things that are dangerous or against the terms of service.
Then you say, aha, you just admitted to shadow banning.
And then what would Jack say?
Probably, no.
I just told you we do what everybody does.
We get rid of things that are dangerous and clearly bad or illegal.
That's what those tools are.
That's what we do.
And that's not shadow banning.
Now, I'm not telling you that it is or is not.
Let me be clear. For those who are a little bit maybe new to me, I'm going to be saying some things that sound supportive of Twitter and supportive of Yoel Roth.
Can most of you confirm for anybody new that that does not mean I'm an apologist for them or that I'm on their side?
Can those of you who know me tell the rest of the people That I show both sides and you will not know which side I'm taking.
I'm just going to describe things.
If that makes you uncomfortable, this isn't the right place for you.
I'm just going to describe things.
Now, would you agree with the following facts?
That nothing has been shown yet that would implicate Jack Dorsey except that he said to Congress, we don't do the shadow banning.
But as far as we know, he wasn't aware of it.
Now, could he be aware of it?
Yes, of course. But that's not in evidence.
So let's just deal with what's in evidence.
Now, number two.
Was it illegal what Twitter did?
How many of you think that there was a crime that you've detected in what has been reported so far?
Anybody?
Well, I have a very educated audience.
Because on Twitter, people are saying it's obviously a crime.
And here's what...
And this is how you know that the conservatives are experiencing cognitive dissonance.
It's both. I'm going to get to the left.
But here's how the conservatives are experiencing it.
They are positive they see a crime.
But there isn't one.
And so they're hallucinating crimes, and they're convincing themselves they see them.
Here's what a number of people are hallucinating on Twitter right now.
They're hallucinating that Twitter acted like a PR agent for the Democrats.
That part, you could argue, is true.
But therefore, therefore, Twitter was giving a donation in kind to Democrats.
And that that would be illegal because they're not disclosing it.
How many of you think it would be illegal that they're giving a donation in kind by helping the Democrats?
Illegal? Okay.
For those of you who think that's illegal, do you think Fox News ever does anything that would help, say, Trump when he was president?
Do you think Fox News has ever done anything that would look like a donation in kind?
Of course. How about MSNBC? Have they ever done anything that looks exactly like a donation in kind to the Democrats?
Of course. How about the New York Times?
How about the Washington Post? How about CNN? Of course.
With the exception of Axios, The only entity I know that's in the news business that is trying to be, you know, objective, as far as I can tell.
Every other news agency is very clearly doing work in kind for one of the parties.
Very clearly. Who disagrees with that?
Nobody, right? Doesn't that fuck you up a little bit?
If thinking, oh, this is clearly illegal, and then I tell you, it's what everybody's doing all the time.
It's the baseline of everything.
Bias people doing things that are helping one side.
That's all that's happening.
There's nothing but that happening except for Axios.
It's the only one.
Axios is the only one who's not doing it.
So you'd have to prosecute everybody except Axios.
So that's a terrible argument.
The donation-in-kind argument, you're not going to see any TV lawyer argue that, I don't believe.
Because as soon as you say, what about Fox News, it's over.
That's the end of the argument, right?
The question about whether it should be Section 230 or not, I don't find it interesting.
I don't know why. But, you know, yeah, let's talk about it, but I don't know.
I just don't find it interesting.
I'm not sure why. All right.
Was it a crime that the FBI and maybe the Department of Justice and the DNI, I guess, so government entities were meeting regularly with Twitter to try to influence what things were banned?
Is that illegal?
Crime. And the crime would be a violation of the First Amendment, because when the government's involved, right?
Okay. Now, let me ask you this.
Do you think that those same government agencies talk to the other news entities and encourage them to do or not do different things?
Of course they do. Do you think there's any entity that the government does not talk to, the big ones, on a regular basis to try to influence them?
It's all of them. What would make Twitter different?
Here's the defense for the FBI. That's our job.
That's our job. If we see something that's both inaccurate and dangerous, we're going to tell the people who are spreading it so that they can decide to maybe not spread it.
If you think it's illegal, are you going to be surprised when there's no court case?
Because there's no court case for anybody else.
Why would they be treated differently?
So let me ask you this.
If you're a member of the FBI and you say to a big company, let's say it could be CNN or Fox News or Twitter, if you say, I'd like to have a meeting, is that illegal?
The meeting's okay, right?
And then let's say in the meeting they do talking.
They do some talking.
And they say, we think this is what would be a good way to go.
Is that illegal? Let me give you a story that happened to me.
I have a well on my property.
Which is rare, because it's grandfathered in from many years ago.
When I bought the property, I inherited that right.
But when California had a big water shortage a couple years ago, I was the only person who could water my lawn.
Now, it's mostly drip irrigation.
It's a pretty efficient system.
But I was using my own water to water my own lawn.
What did my local government ask me to do?
My local government asked me to cut it out.
And they said explicitly, it's totally legal what you're doing.
It's your own water.
We cannot make you stop using it.
I'd like you to stop using it.
And I'd like you to do it because we think it's good for the...
basically good for the community.
It's bad optics, right?
Bad optics. And I agreed.
And it cost me $50,000.
Because that's how much of my landscape died.
And I had to replace it.
Something like that. I mean, it might have been $30,000, I don't know.
But it was very expensive.
Very expensive. And I did that because my city leaned on me.
Was that legal? Was it legal for my city to lean on me that way?
If it wasn't legal for them to lean on me that way, why would it be legal for them to offer an opinion to a news entity if there's no threat?
Remember, there's no explicit threat.
My town did not give me an explicit threat.
They just said, this is what we think is the right thing to do.
Now... It's a bad analogy if you're comparing all the parts.
The right way to use an analogy is to pick out one thing you think is the useful part and only focus on that.
And the useful part is, if my government leans on me, but I don't have to do what they want, but I do feel like it's a little bit of mafia talk, like maybe they might come after me some way, I don't know.
I don't know the answer to that.
I don't know the answer. But here's what I think.
In my perfect world, the government is full of human beings who are citizens of this country, and those citizens can say anything they want wherever they are.
That's what I say. I say if you're in the FBI, you can say exactly what you think is right to anybody.
To anybody. Because the FBI also have freedom of speech.
They can have a meeting with anybody, And they can say anything that isn't their opinion.
Now, I would like their opinions to be well-intentioned.
And so far, there's no evidence that I've seen that the government came to Twitter with bad intentions.
Has anybody seen counter-evidence?
I've seen evidence that they met, evidence that they influenced them.
Is there evidence that their influence was the bad kind?
Or did they simply help them take down things that were literally dangerous and untrue?
Somebody says suppression is bad.
But the problem is you can't suppress free speech To support free speech.
And that's what you're suggesting.
You're suggesting that the government, the FBI, should not have free speech in this case.
Because if they exercise their free speech, it would impinge on your free speech.
That's what you're saying. Well, I think the FBI, as an entity...
Maybe you should not do a thing that's against your free speech.
But the individuals within the FBI have free speech.
They can have a meeting with anybody they want, and they can say anything they want, as long as it's legal.
I don't think they have anything to answer to.
Now, I haven't heard the specific examples.
If the specific examples were, I'd like you to suppress Republicans, totally illegal.
Would you agree?
If the government asked Twitter, even just asked without any threat, just asked, if they said, can you suppress these Republicans so that they don't get elected, totally illegal.
Everybody on board with that?
That would be totally illegal.
That would be an obvious, you know, pressure on free speech that we couldn't.
But what if the FBI went there with the only intention of making sure that Twitter knew what was true and what wasn't true of things that could be dangerous?
Suppose that was their legitimate intention.
Is that illegal? I don't see how it could be.
Because that's what I will want my government to do.
If you told me my government wasn't telling people important things that they knew, I'd say that's a bigger problem.
I want the government to tell anybody who needs to know there's some danger that we see that maybe you don't see.
You don't want your government to alert you to danger, even if they're wrong.
They might be wrong, but seriously, you don't want them to alert you to a legitimate danger that they honestly see as a danger.
Now, if you're saying to me, Scott, Scott, Scott, they're pretending to be honest brokers, but really, really it's all about suppressing Republicans.
It might be, but it's not an evidence.
Your suspicions would be, you know, certainly well-placed, but it's not an evidence.
I think I'd want to...
All right. All right.
I'm trying not to get triggered.
If you can't deal with the fact that I'm just going to try to show both sides of this as straight as I can, and that looks to you like I'm spinning or like I'm an apologist, you are really missing the fucking show, all right? Because nothing like that's happening.
You don't know my opinion.
I'm just describing things.
Just describing.
All right. Would you agree that all of our major media have bias in favor of one side, with the exception of Axios?
Would you agree? And how different is Twitter?
Some people say, Scott, you're missing the difference.
Because a major media entity is only censoring itself, whereas Twitter was censoring you citizens.
To which I say, what?
That's not true. The major media is censoring you, too.
They're totally censoring you.
Yeah. Do you think if you had an opinion that was counter to the narrative on MSNBC, they would invite you as a guest, as a citizen?
Hey, citizen, come on here and give us your counter.
No, no, they would censor you.
Now, the fact that individuals tweet, whereas the news, you know, they're doing more vetting to see who gets on, that's kind of a small difference.
That's a pretty small difference.
These are entities which are absolutely squashing opinions on one side to promote the other, and they are squashing them of citizens who have an interest in the news representing them all, but it's not happening.
When they do it covertly, it's not for the public good.
It's all covertly.
It's all covertly.
Are you aware of the meetings that MSNBC has about who they put on the air and who they don't?
No, it's all covert.
So, one is broadcasting.
They're both broadcasting.
Yeah, you have to work pretty hard to find out why you'd be angry at Twitter for acting exactly like all the media that you're kind of okay with.
I mean, you don't like the ones that disagree with you, but you're not fighting with the fact that they're all biased, because you like the one that's biased on your side.
Twitter was strong-armed by the FBI is not in evidence.
That's not in evidence.
There's no evidence of strong-arming.
Nothing. Well, if you've seen it, I have not seen it.
So let's be clear about something.
We're still in the fog of war a little bit.
So if I say there's no evidence to something, don't tell me I'm wrong.
Tell me what the evidence is.
Okay? Can you do that?
Because it doesn't help me to say I'm wrong if I think I'm right.
Just tell me what they found.
If you're saying it's implied because of the FBI, I don't think that's true.
Put yourself in the room.
Put yourself in the room.
FBI says, we would like you to ban this one, this one, and this one.
And you say, huh? Okay.
I agree on this one. I agree on that one.
No, this one doesn't violate our terms of service.
I disagree on that one.
Then what? Do you think you're going to get audited or something?
If you put me in that room, I would not be afraid of the FBI. I mean, unless they really wouldn't mafia talk on me.
But if they were just coming in to say, I think these three things are a problem...
Shit. Lost my connection.
If they're just coming in to say, these three things are a problem, and then I say, I agree with two, but not the third, and then that's the end of the meeting, did they strong-arm me?
I don't think so. You're saying it's laughably stupid.
I'm telling you how I would feel.
Today, a number of people have told me I'm wrong about my own opinion in my head.
My opinion could be wrong, but I'm not wrong about what I'm thinking.
That part I get right every time.
All right. What about all the doctors suspended?
What about it? What about it?
Now, some of these, what about this, what about that, you're taking it from the perspective that I agree with everything Twitter did.
That's not happening.
I'm not defending Twitter, I'm describing.
So you don't have to say, what about, what about?
That would be for somebody defending.
I'm not defending.
I'm describing. So don't challenge me to defend something that's not the topic.
I'll describe it for you if you want.
When I say you're not going to like it, I'm priming.
You know that, right?
I'm priming you to be more flexible.
I'm not... That's a priming statement.
All right.
All right, let's see what else is going on.
Well, here's the thing.
Here's what I see. I think it's going to be very unsettling...
For the public to learn that voters do not consider the facts and then go vote.
Because that's sort of the model that we all had, you know, some years ago.
We imagined that voters would look at the information, they'd come to their decisions, and then they'd go vote.
But you know nothing like that happens, right?
That's like our fantasy version of our system.
In the fantasy version, we become informed voters and then we vote.
That's never been the truth.
Never. What's true is, for every big media entity, there's usually one billionaire who tells that entity what they can and cannot say, and then they assign that opinion to the public, and the public believes they made up their own mind.
And then they vote. The biggest problem with what we're finding out about Twitter is people are learning that they were never independent agents.
They were just sort of doing what they were programmed to do.
So that's sort of the bigger picture.
And once people realize that None of this stuff is real.
Like all the who did what, whatever.
Let me give you an example.
How many of you think that the election was changed by the fact that James Woods got banned on Twitter?
Do you think that changed the election?
No. I don't think he changed any votes.
I'm not even sure that banning Trump on Twitter made any difference.
I don't know. I mean, it certainly helped him get elected the first time, but by the time they were suppressing him a week before the election, it might have made a difference, but I doubt it.
Stopping the New York Post had an effect, did it?
Do you think there's even one person who really would have voted differently?
There's a survey that says that some number of people would have voted differently if they'd known about the Biden laptop.
That's not the real world.
Let me describe the real world and then compare it to that fantasy one that you have in your head where people got information and then the new information changed their decisions.
Is that the world you live in?
Where people can get new political information right before the election and then they change their decision?
That doesn't happen in the real world.
Let me describe how it happens.
We just got some information that everything about the laptop is true.
I'm a Democrat voter and I have to vote tomorrow.
What do I do? What do I do?
I'm a Democrat voter and I find out that everything about the laptop is true.
What do I do now? I explained it away in my head.
I explained it away as, no, that's about Hunter.
And then other people say, no, no, you're missing the story.
It's not just about Hunter.
It's about the big guy.
And then the influence.
But I'm a Democrat.
And I don't want Trump to win.
So I say, yeah, that's just about Hunter.
And I say, it's like you're not even hearing me.
It's not about Hunter.
It's about his father and potential connections.
Yeah, but that's not proven.
See what I mean?
You tell me.
That's a good suggestion.
You tell me that you think that a Democrat would have changed their vote because of something about Hunter's laptop.
I don't think there's any chance of that.
There's nothing we've learned about people or the world or anything that would suggest that that would change any minds whatsoever.
Are you seeing the Twitterphile revelations?
Have you seen anybody change their mind?
Have you seen any Democrats say, damn, I had no idea I was on a team that was doing bad things.
I'm going to change to Republican now.
No. No.
Yeah. So we can get all excited about how much difference any of this information makes, but it probably doesn't.
What does make a difference is that it's good to know.
I think transparency helps.
So the more transparency, the better.
Now, here's going to be the toughest part for you.
Consistent with my theme of the month...
Individuals are innocent until proven guilty.
Jack Dorsey?
Innocent, unless proven guilty.
So far, there's no evidence to implicate him for the decisions you don't like.
None. Will we find out that he is?
Maybe. I would say that would be well within the possible range of outcomes.
But not yet.
Not yet. Now, let's talk about Yoel...
Roth. Is he a bad guy?
Go. Bad guy?
See some yeses?
Not a fan? All right.
What do we know about his intentions?
From the Twitter files and everything else we know, what were his intentions with his actions around what he banned and what he didn't?
What were his intentions? Do you know?
Well, we can't read his mind, but the intention that, let's say, would be suggested by his actions are that he had a worldview of what was good and safe and, you know, what would be a good way to live in the world, and then he acted as best he could to be consistent with some notion of what would be the right thing.
That's all I saw. Now, you're saying, but Scott, he did the wrong thing.
Did he? He had two ways to lose and no way to win.
Right? Because if he followed the terms of service to the letter...
You know that that won't capture all the weird possibilities, right?
Would you agree with that? He certainly had the option.
He had the option of following the letter of the terms of service.
But if he had done that, would you agree there would be a whole bunch of grey areas that maybe a human should have made the decision about, or a group of humans?
Do you want the rules to be the rules?
Because there's a reason that we have jury trials.
The reason we have a jury trial is that you think things are cut and dried, but they rarely are.
There's always these extenuating circumstances that you'd rather have a human wrestle with, not a terms of service.
So I would say the following thing.
Anybody who thinks that you could just follow the terms of service, that's very unrealistic.
That's very unrealistic.
And I would certainly not want to know you if you believe that.
Anybody who would follow a technical rule and allow it to harm somebody when they have the power to stop it, that is very unethical.
Very unethical.
If you see a rule, and it's your job to follow the rules, and everybody agreed on the rules, but there's this exception, Your human fiduciary responsibility is to take the exception.
Because you have a higher responsibility to humanity than you do to following some rules, even if everybody likes those rules.
So I don't think that whoever was in that position would have any choice but to make judgment calls.
And he made judgment calls.
It was his job.
Now, suppose he'd made them differently.
Would everybody be happy?
Suppose he had looked at these situations and made whatever is the opposite of all his decisions.
Would that have made everybody happy?
Nope. Because these are judgment calls.
There isn't any situation in which a small group or even one person can make a judgment that makes everybody happy.
So don't ask your Roth to do something that's literally impossible.
Literally impossible.
You can't do the impossible.
And we're asking him to do that and judging him harshly because he didn't do the impossible.
The impossible was making everybody happy.
There was no path to make everybody happy.
This was some poor bastard who, as far as I can tell, as far as I can tell, was doing the best he could in an impossible situation.
But... If you say there's an impossible situation and it's going to affect humans, I want a person in that situation.
And I want that person to be empathetic more than a rule follower.
I want some empathy in that job.
Did he have empathy?
I think so. He looks like a normal, caring person who thought the world should be one way.
I think he had narrative poisoning.
As many of us do.
I think he was buying into a narrative a little bit, maybe more than you think he should have.
But that's not evil.
It's not different than the rest of us.
And here's why I'm going hard at this.
If you tell somebody to do an impossible job...
And then they do it because somebody has to do it, right?
Somebody's got to do it. And then they make a decision within that impossible job.
It's kind of fucked up to tell them they made a mistake because you didn't have to make that decision, right?
You should just be lucky it wasn't your job because there wasn't any way to do it to make everybody happy.
So if you're complaining about him because he didn't make you happy, you're on the wrong page.
Where was the option if he could make everybody happy?
That didn't exist. So if you're saying, he did not make me happy with his decision, that says nothing about him.
That's not about him.
That's about the situation is impossible.
Somebody had to do the job, and somebody had to take the arrow in the back, and he did.
Now, should he have been fired?
Probably. But that probably had more to do with what he told his boss and how the company would look if he stayed.
A lot of considerations there.
But so far with what we know, it looks like a person in an impossible situation who has tried to do their best job.
Now, how many of you thought to yourself, oh, you mean like a Nazi prison guard?
If you thought that, about an American citizen just trying to do the best he could for America, and you said, oh, like a prison guard at a Nazi concentration camp, check yourself.
Check yourself. Right?
If you think that's a fair comment, an American citizen with actual empathy for human beings doing the best he could do in an impossible situation where nobody's going to love it, I think he's closer to needing a medal than being prosecuted.
but he probably needed to get fired because there was something that needed to get fixed there and you probably had to get rid of him to do it.
All right.
Well, Cindy says in all caps, Scott really is getting more ridiculous.
So that's cognitive dissonance.
So if you want to know a TEL for cognitive dissonance, it would be all caps.
Scott really is getting more ridiculous.
TEL number one, all caps.
TEL number two, no reason given.
So everybody is just coming after me personally, because my arguments are very simple, aren't they?
I'm not making a complicated argument.
It would be really easy to say, well, you forgot this fact, or your logic is incomplete.
Easy. One sentence you could say what you don't like about my opinion.
But if your opinion is, there's something wrong with Scott today.
He used to be good, but now he's not good anymore.
What happened to Scott?
He used to be wise, but now he's not.
If you're having that reaction, you are having cognitive dissonance.
I didn't get dumber today.
I did not get dumber today.
I'm exactly... As wise or unwise as I was yesterday, if you think I change suddenly, it's probably you.
Probably you. All right.
What else is going on?
This is kind of funny.
One bizarre...
This is a tweet from Mike Solana on Twitter.
He says, one bizarre element of the Twitter story is it's pretty clear at this point that the, quote, trust and safety team was effectively running the entire company.
And Elon Musk responded to that with, absolutely.
The real CEO was the head of trust and safety.
Which, again...
Is confirming that Jack Dorsey wasn't aware of the details that were going on.
So Elon Musk seems to be excusing Jack Dorsey, at least in terms of knowledge of the situation.
He knows more than we do.
So... All right.
But I love the fact that the perfect literary...
The thing here is that Twitter's trust and safety group is the group that we don't trust with our safety.
There's nobody you trust less than the trust and safety group.
Nice irony there.
So what about the fact that Twitter was making up the rules as they go?
I don't have any problem with that at all.
Scott trusted the vaccines.
Incorrect. Just me, you fucking asshole.
Starting rumors and saying bad things about me so people will try to come after me as they do.
You fucking jerk.
No, I did not support the vaccines.
That never happened. Fuck you.
you're gone.
All right.
We also found out so far that That there's no evidence that the Trump administration, or at least the Trump team, asked Twitter to suppress anything.
Do you think that's going to hold?
Do you think we'll get to the other side of this and there won't be any evidence that the Trump team asked Twitter to suppress something?
Now, it's a little unclear because the FBI worked for the Trump administration, so, you know, what do you call that?
Am I blocking people?
Yeah, I'll block you.
I'll hide you on this channel.
You can make the same view about Putin.
He has a worldview. I do make the same argument, yeah.
See, the only thing I'm trying to add to the conversation is if you believe that the Twitter employees knew they were doing something bad, that's not an evidence.
That's not an evidence.
I mean, it might be true, but we don't have any evidence that they were aware they were doing something bad.
Now, are you telling me that the Nazis were not aware that the concentration camps were doing something bad?
I get that they had their weird justification for it, but I think they knew.
I mean, I think they knew.
Apparently, one of the tweets that got suppressed was on January 6th.
Trump had a tweet that told everybody to go home with love and peace.
And that's one of the ones that was suppressed.
I think... Can you fact-check me on that?
I thought that's what I saw, but if that's true, then Trump got in a lot of trouble for not saying something he did say, which is, be peaceful.
Now, we do know in other ways he said to be peaceful, but...
Do you think the election was changed by anything that Twitter did?
Some of you do. And specifically, what do you think changed the election?
Was it suppressing Trump?
One week before the election?
Was it suppressing James Woods?
Or was it suppressing the laptop?
I don't know. I think we have suspicions that might have changed things, but I'm highly suspicious.
Might have. Might have.
Now, apparently, according to Twitter user NameRedacted, NameRedacted247, who seems to be very well informed, this Twitter user, who is anonymous, listed 12 prior FBI employees who now work at Twitter in important positions.
So there are 12 FBI agents, past FBI agents, embedded at Twitter.
And they were all hired after Trump.
That's sort of a red flag, isn't it?
A little red flag.
But that was tweeted at Elon Musk.
We'll see if he looks into that.
All right. What else is happening?
Oh, um...
So, Sertovich said something about all the child exploitation stuff on Twitter, and apparently under the Musk regime, Musk was doing more to combat it.
And... One of the comments that Musk responded to is that it is a crime that Twitter refused to take action on child exploitation for years.
But Jack Dorsey chimed in on that and said, this is false.
So it is false that Twitter refused to take action on child exploitation.
But Elon Musk chimed in on Jack and said, no, it's not false.
When somebody who works there, who now runs Trust and Safety, joined Twitter earlier this year, almost no one was working on child safety.
She raised the issue, and then Musk...
I guess Musk is the only one who staffed it up properly, according to Musk.
So this is sort of a half-fake news.
Twitter was doing things about it.
it wasn't as much as Musk was doing.
Yeah.
So Musk was doing the right thing by the new CEO move.
So I've taught you...
Friction always does something, that's right.
I've taught you the new CEO move, right?
The new CEO move is when you establish who you are about what you do in the first week or two of being the CEO. And what Musk has cleverly done is gone hard at the child endangerment stuff so that that becomes like something you remember.
It's like a first impression.
You'll always remember Musk as being a champion against child endangerment.
Now, if he'd done just as much as he's doing now, but he did it, let's say, a year after he took the job, You wouldn't even notice.
He found the biggest thing that wasn't being addressed, that everybody cared about, and then he's putting on the show of addressing it in a big way, You can't do better than that.
That's the best you can do.
You pick the most important topic that everybody agrees on, mostly.
You went after it hard, and you went after it right away.
That's A-triple-plus.
There's nothing you can do better than that.
That's as good as anybody can do anything.
All right. How many of you think that Twitter meddled in the election?
That that's a statement of truth?
They meddled in the election?
All right. Yes.
Would you say that CNN meddled in the election?
Would you say that all of the major media, Fox News, etc., did they all meddle in the election?
Yes. Yes, they did.
Now, would you say that what Twitter did was functionally worse?
Now, you could argue that it's a different kind of platform.
Different people use it, different people see it.
That's not the question. So I know different people are using it.
But is it more or worse than what MSNBC did?
It's not worse.
You think it's worse?
You think that MSNBC, having...
Liars on non-stop all day long.
You think that that's not worse than Twitter trying to ban James Woods and Libs at TikTok?
To me, it's not even close.
I mean, this is a judgment call, so I'm not going to say you're wrong.
But my opinion, for what it's worth, is that MSNBC is an order of magnitude worse than anything we've seen in Twitter.
And I would say Fox News as well.
But only because they clearly are, you know, they're narrative makers.
They make a narrative for their side.
They're credible, but Twitter's not credible?
I don't know. Twitter was not supposed to be biased?
That comment, though, Twitter is not supposed to be biased, that's not really a real-world comment, though.
In the real world, there's no such thing as unbiased communication.
That's not a thing.
Maybe they were supposed to try, but...
Now, what makes you say they're unbiased?
Because from their point of view, they probably weren't.
Why is your opinion of what bias is, why is that more important than someone else's opinion of what bias is?
Why do you get to be the judge of what bias is and I don't?
Why can't I be the judge?
It's a tie, right?
It's just your opinion versus mine.
All right. Here are the...
Things that I hoped I could get across today.
What Twitter did isn't worse than the other major media companies.
Is that an apology?
Is that an apologist?
Did I just defend Twitter by saying they're no worse than MSNBC? Somebody's going to say that.
Oh, I defended Twitter by saying they're no worse than MSNBC. If you don't know anything else about me, if I compare somebody to MSNBC, I'm not defending them.
That's the opposite of defending them.
That is damning them in the strongest terms.
I'm just saying they're all sort of in the same cesspool, right?
Which is, if you're looking for the no-bias platform, I believe there's only one option.
Just Axios.
And they don't really cover every bit of news, so they're a little bit of a different platform.
And while I don't disagree with you about your suspicions of what anybody knew or did or privately thought, innocent until proven guilty.
- See?
Now, if you had told me that we could get this far into this with no direct evidence that Jack did something illegal or immoral or wrong, I would have been surprised.
You figure any CEO is going to look a little bit bad if you start digging in enough, but so far, so far.
Now, I'm not going to defend whether he managed the company in the optimal way.
I don't know the answer to that, but clearly there was an issue here.
So I'm not going to defend it on that level.
And I'd be surprised if he defended it himself.
I don't think anybody who is running two major companies can quite honestly defend that they gave their best to both.
Would you agree? Nobody could be running two companies at the same time and say, I gave my best to both.
I think a realistic person would say, you know, that could have been better.
But at the same time, you know, there's a reason that Jack came back to active management.
It's because what they had before wasn't working.
So I don't know what the trade-off is there.
Defending Jack is a fool's errand, somebody says.
Okay, did you miss all of the parts where I said I wasn't defending anybody?
Did you miss all of those parts?
Can you get yourself out of that mode?
Just for me. Yeah, if you're dealing with somebody else, that's fine.
But I'm just describing.
No, I'm describing.
That is your interpretation if that's a defense.
That is your interpretation.
Because I would tell you if it's my interpretation, if I were defending anybody, I would tell you I'm defending them, because why wouldn't I? I have no reason to hide it.
I would just say I'm doing it, and then I'd do it.
I'm describing it, and then you can judge whether that's good or bad.
Scott thinks we are the ignorant ones, somebody says.
Gosh, why would I think that?
You didn't speak of how the independent voters might have dealt with the laptop.
Yeah, because there are none. Independent voters are a myth.
Independent voters almost always vote with one party.
It's just they call themselves independent because they don't want to be slimed with the bad things that party does.
Yeah, Twitter is the public square.
All right, the things that don't add to the conversation, because everybody knows it.
Twitter is the public square.
We all get it.
We all get it. It is different than other things, and it's special in that way.
And Twitter is a private company.
We all get it. I get it.
Right. So I guess...
Right, yeah.
Kirsten Sinema is now independent, but is she?
Some are libertarians, yeah.
Yeah, certainly a week before the election, people had their minds made up.
Are you enjoying triggering this morning?
A little bit. You literally just said Twitter is the same.
Analogies are so difficult, aren't they?
Twitter is the same on one dimension and different on the other dimensions.
Can you handle that? So Twitter is the same in the sense that they're a biased organization that influences elections.
That's the same. I didn't say that they're literally the same.
They're the same in that one way.
Scotty wants to give Yulroth the medal.
I assume that you're pretending to be a troll.
Yeah, did grab him by the pussy change any votes?
I doubt it.
I think some people say, maybe, but I doubt it.
Do you think yes?
Maybe. I just doubt it.
I think that it was a fake because some people might have wanted to do it and they said, okay, that'll be my reason.
Imagine if you were a woman and you're married to a conservative who's definitely a Trump supporter.
And you don't want to vote the same way as your husband, but you also need to live with your husband.
You just don't want that Donald Trump.
And then they grab him by the pussy thing happens.
And you say, there it is.
I can use that as my reason to not vote for Trump, and my husband can't say a damn thing.
It's my ultimate out.
It's my get out of jail free.
Ah, now I can vote against Trump, and I've got a reason.
But is it the real reason?
Probably not. Probably not.
It's a fake because. Although it might have changed the vote.
The fake because can change the vote.
Somebody says his wife played it that way.
Did the fine people hoax change the votes?
Yes.
Probably did. I think the fine people hoax is the tentpole hoax.
It's the hoax that makes you believe the other hoaxes.
Because if they can get you to believe that absurd hoax that you just have to watch the video to debunk...
They can really get you to believe anything.
And then, all right, we've proved he's a racist.
Now, everything else that might suggest that must be true, because this one hoax is holding up all the others.
All right.
Twitter amplified it.
All right. Okay, that's all I've got for now.
I'm going to go talk to the locals people for a little bit.
