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Jan. 14, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:48
3963 But Twitter Is A Private Company...
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So, as you've probably heard if you haven't had your eyeballs glued to the tentacle brain implants of mainstream media propaganda, James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas Intrepid team of truth revelers have broken a massive censorship story regarding Twitter, that Twitter has algorithms and has Engineers and other people admitting to shadow banning entire groups, master leading accounts based upon what they call machine learning, like the machine is just somehow independent.
I'm a computer programmer or was.
I mean, I know input is input and output is output.
It's not the machine that's learning.
It's what you're putting into it.
And they're putting in search terms like guns, Trump, cross.
So, you know, basically targeting white Christian conservatives for suppression, for shadow banning, for mass deletion, for account deactivation, and so on.
And I got a whole bunch of comments from people on that video saying, oh yeah, same thing happened to me.
Now, whenever this kind of stuff comes up, you do get a whole bunch of people swarming from the mothership of political irrationality across the internet, typing madly, apparently with their single remaining nutsack, that, well, it's a private company, you see, it has the right to discriminate against whoever it wants.
And this comes from the left and the right.
And it's...
It's a terrible argument.
I know me saying it doesn't make it.
I'll tell you why. It's a terrible argument, but it's a terrible argument.
And it's a wrong argument in very fundamental ways.
Let me sort of clear something up first, that the mere exercise of control over your own private property is not a government function.
So, I'm having a great pool party, you come over and you're openly peeing into the pool, I get to kick you out of my house, right?
And I'm not being a fascist, I'm just saying, you can, like the bar owner at 2am, you can go anywhere, you just can't, you don't have to go home, you just can't stay here.
So, yeah, excluding people from use of your own private property, Is, of course, not the same as censorship.
You run a message board, someone's being a troll.
What do they always do? They ban me, you're interfering with my free speech.
Like, no, you can type anywhere you want, just not on the server that I'm paying for, right?
So I want to sort of be clear about that.
And the question is not whether this...
Whether Twitter has the right to suppress these things.
I'm going to use the word censorship here even though that's more of a political function just because it's a commonly understood term and I don't want people to get confused when I have to keep repeating shadow banning or suppression, which they may not be as clear on.
But it's definitely censoring of opinions based upon their political content, right?
So here are the issues, and there are a couple of them.
First and foremost, when you have a platform like Twitter, then people can spend an enormous amount of time to develop their following, to develop their base, to add value to their account.
It's sort of like if somebody says you have clear title to the land, and then you spend a year building a house, and then somebody says, oh, wait, no, I'm taking away your title to the land.
You're like, well, what about my house?
It's like, no, I'm just going to demolish it.
So think of Twitter as the land and the Twitter account as the house that people built on that land.
Now, if somebody says to you, well, you can build here, but the land ownership is still in hot dispute, and it could go either way, and, you know, then they're going to say, no, I'm not going to build here.
I'm going to build somewhere else. I'm going to go and apply my energies or resources.
I'm going to build up a blog. Maybe I go to Facebook or YouTube or whatever it is.
I'm not going to go to Twitter because there's this sort of random pull the rug out, destroy your account, delete years of your work, and so on.
So, now, of course, Twitter does say, you know, we have the right to terminate accounts and so on, but they do have terms of service, and the terms of service do have a lot of ambiguity in them, of course, you know, I mean, who knows what standards objectively you might reach or not reach for these kinds of things.
But what happens is, of course, there is confusion and misdirection because you go onto Twitter and you can see the most egregious stuff that's been up for years, you know, like, you know, you can, wanting the assassination of this person and the destruction of this race, of the white race, of course, and this stuff stays up.
So you say, okay, well, so that's allowable in their terms of service.
So they obviously allow some pretty astounding and horrendous stuff to go up.
And, you know, the picture of Kathy Griffin holding Trump's simulated severed head and so on.
So, clearly, it's not really anal when it comes to repressing and suppressing.
It's not just what you can...
Post pictures of cute kittens and dogs that don't look like Hitler and you're fine.
Good luck, man. And so you see all this stuff and you say, okay, well, they're not crazy about this kind of stuff.
So I can put forward opinions that are controversial.
I can put forward arguments that are challenging and so on, right?
So that's sort of the implicit contract that's there.
And so you then build your house on this plot of land.
And then what happens is you come back and your house is gone.
And you say, well, wait, I thought I was obeying, right?
I wasn't doing anything criminal on this land.
I wasn't doing anything with this other guy.
You say, well, the thing is you put this yard sign out front.
You say, what? He says, my neighbor has like 10 yard signs.
So why do they get to stay and I don't?
Like, why did you toast my house when I have one yard sign when my neighbor has 10 yard signs?
We don't have to tell you because we have the discretion to do it as we like.
Now, that is interesting because the question, like, let's say that the yard sign is a political candidate, right?
So let's say your neighbor is a socialist and you're a libertarian, right?
And so your neighbor has 10 yard signs and Twitter comes to you and says, you know, we deleted your, we got rid of your house, we've taken back ownership of the land, we got rid of your house because you have a yard sign with political content.
And you say, well, my neighbor is a socialist, he's got 10 yard signs of political content and they just never get back to you.
Well, that's a problem.
That's a problem in terms of are they consistently applying their rules.
Now, they are free, of course, to not consistently apply their rules, but if they claim that they are applying their rules consistently, then they have to apply their rules consistently.
That's part of the contract, explicit or implicit.
of having people invest time and labor into your platform, right?
So if your neighbor has 10 lawn signs, you look at that and you say, well, they're fine, so I guess we can do lawn signs, and you put up your libertarian lawn sign, and then your house gets deleted.
Well, then, like, shouldn't you delete his?
And then his gets to stay up?
Well, then you have an inconsistency problem.
And what's happened is you have not been given the full facts Regarding your investment in building the house on that particular piece of land.
You weren't told socialist lawn signs are fine, but libertarian lawn signs were going to destroy your house.
Now, if you'd have known that ahead of time, Then you would not have put the libertarian lawn sign, or if you wanted a libertarian lawn sign, you would never have built your house there.
So if they'd said, well, you can have socialist lawn signs, you can't have libertarian lawn signs, you would have made your decisions accordingly.
But when they have socialist lawn signs up, and they say, we don't discriminate based upon political content, then clearly, you're allowed to have a libertarian sign.
But if you're not allowed to have a libertarian sign, but they don't tell you that, Well, then you have a problem.
So if it's hate speech if one group does it, but it's not hate speech if another group does it, you can threaten this person, but you can't threaten this person, this demographic can threaten this, but not in reverse and so on.
They need to be explicit about all of that.
So they need to say up front that we do searches for these keywords and we mass delete these accounts, we shadow ban people based upon these criteria, and the vast majority of our engineers And other employees who have review power over your account, the vast majority of them are left-wing.
So you're not going to get a fair shake, right?
Because see, diversity is really, really good.
Unless, of course, diversity involves hiring conservatives or non-leftists, in which case, well, you're just fighting Nazis.
So there's nothing wrong with that.
So they need to say, well, we have a leftist platform.
We strenuously oppose an attempt to undermine Conservative white Christian accounts, and therefore, sure, you know, we hate libertarianism, we love socialism, so the guy with the socialist law and science, his house can stay, but your house with the modern libertarian sign is going to be toast.
Well, you can make your decision then.
You can say, well, do I really want to invest my time and effort and labor and hundreds or maybe even thousands of hours building up an audience on a platform that has this particular prejudice against me?
You know, if you ain't white, you're right.
If you're not a Christian, they just need to be explicit about all of that because otherwise it seems pretty dishonest to me.
I mean, it just seems pretty dishonest.
They need to be clear about the guidelines.
So they say it's not written down.
One of these engineers says, well, it's not written down, but it's kind of talked about and it's implicit in the way it trickles down from the top and so on, like who we ban and...
So they just need to say, we do moderate based upon political content, and we do take action against accounts that go against our political beliefs, and our political beliefs are X, Y, and Z. That this is a leftist promotion platform and a non-leftist suppression platform, and so you need to make your decisions accordingly.
If you're not on the left, then you need to make your decisions accordingly.
That's being honest, right?
That's being honest.
And it's sort of like if you're involved in an adjudication dispute, let's just pretend there's no such thing as conflict of interest like with the Clintons or something, but if you're involved in some sort of dispute and it goes in front of a judge and they say, well, which judge do you want?
Do you choose this judge?
And it turns out that the judge is like best friends with your opponent.
Do you feel like that's fair?
Like if they'd said, well, the judge is best friends with your opponent, and you just said, well, no, I don't want to do that, right?
So as far as that goes, people need the information so they know where to build their houses.
And if they're building their house on a piece of land that can be yanked away from them for doing exactly what other people do, but with a different political content or a different belief content, different ideological content, that's a big problem.
It's not being honest with people, because people spend a lot of time, a lot of time, building up Twitter audiences, building up their following on social media, and if they are going to be judged according to the content, then that needs to be explicit in the terms of service.
Here are the search terms we use, and it needs to be updated, it needs to be public, it needs to be transparent.
It needs to be transparent, right?
And so, sure, they do have the right to discriminate against whoever they want to, but do they have the right, and I'm no lawyer, I'm just sort of asking the question, do they have the right to represent that they have an objective process when they don't?
Do they say, well, here are the standards by which we are going to get into trouble, but then they don't apply those standards consistently?
In other words, if there's a bias in the application of standards, should people Know about that.
Should people know about that?
Like if someone says, come fly out for this job interview.
Like we're not going to pay for it because, you know, it's a good job and all that.
But if you want to fly out for the job interview, that's great.
And you're going to say, well, am I kind of in the running?
Is there a decent chance that I'm going to get it?
And people say, yeah, you know, it's still a wide open field.
We haven't made any final decisions.
You know, everyone's got equal standing.
And so you spend a thousand bucks, you fly out.
You know, you sleep in your car, you go to the interview or whatever, and then they say, no, actually, I mean, I just ended up, my brother applied for the job months ago, and he's a perfect fit, so we just, we hired him.
We just, we're doing this for show, right?
We just, we want to pretend that it wasn't nepotism or whatever.
Are you going to be pissed? Well, they have the right to hire their own brother.
They have the right to, you know, not hire you.
It's perfectly free. It's like, yeah, but I don't know that they, in this situation, the company wasn't particularly upfront.
About where things were.
They had a bias towards hiring someone.
They didn't tell you about it. You ended up spending a thousand bucks, go out, go to the job interview just to be told that you just wasted your money and your time.
Well, do they have the right to hire the brother?
Sure. Do they have the right not to hire you?
Yeah, but should they tell you upfront about what your chances are?
Of course they should. Of course they should.
That's wrong. Now, that having been said, so people say, well, these companies have the right to discriminate.
Okay. Let's put everything else aside, and let's say they have the right to discriminate, which of course I believe that they do.
I mean, if a woman has a right to say no to a man who asks her out, then everyone has the right to discriminate, because that's discriminatory.
Discriminatory used to be such a good word, you know, he has discriminatory tastes in wine.
Okay, so then we have a principle here.
We have a principle which is that companies have the right to associate and do business with whoever they want.
And they can use whatever prejudice they want.
They can use whatever political standards.
They can use whatever bigotries, whatever ideological approach.
They can do whatever they want.
And they should never ever be forced to do business with someone that they don't want to do business with.
Okay. Well, that's a very, very big thing to talk about because that means that you have to get rid of affirmative action, right?
That means you have to get rid of, I think it was in the mid-60s, equal pay for work of equal value where the government forced employers to put everyone in the category and pay men and women the same.
So that means that you can't have any preferential hiring policies at all, based on race, on ethnicity, on gender, on anything like that.
So, boy, if companies can discriminate against whoever they want to, we have a huge legislative task throughout the entire West, a huge legislative task, which is to dismantle all of these damn quota systems.
Then there can't be anything to do with maternity leave legislation.
There can't be anything to do with any kind of preferential height.
Because you see, if companies can discriminate against white conservative Christians, then they can discriminate against everyone.
Unless you're a complete racist and say companies should only be able to discriminate against white people.
So we have a huge task and we've really got to have this conversation.
Because people are all over the web admitting and focusing on and reinforcing and making the argument that companies have the perfect right to discriminate against whoever they want, whenever they want, however they want, in any category that they want.
So BOOM! That's it for quota systems.
That's it for affirmative action.
What about universities? Universities in many places in America add scores to blacks and subtract scores from East Asians, from the Chinese, Japanese, and so on, right?
Well, that's wrong because you have the right to discriminate against whoever you want.
You can just take red-headed people from County Cork if you want.
It's perfectly fine, perfectly valid.
You can never, ever complain about racism in a company or sexism or anything like that.
If a company wants to hire someone and a young woman applies, and she's recently married, and Well, that young woman is a pretty substantial chance of having a kid within the next couple of years, which means she wants to be a good mom.
She's going to be breastfeeding for the recommended year and a half and so on.
She may come back. She may not come back.
If she does come back, she's going to have diminished capacity to stay late, travel and work weekends because she's got a kid.
And so maybe you hire the man over the woman.
Well, nobody can complain about that anymore, right?
And so, if companies want to say, well, I'm just going to forget.
I don't care about college. I don't want to, I mean, college is ridiculous.
Because if I get someone coming in from college, particularly if they have an arts degree, they're going to hate the free market.
They're going to hate me as a boss.
They're going to think if I'm an exploiter, they've been programmed by Marxist idiot robots to hate the free market.
So why on earth would I want any of these people in my business?
So forget about all of that.
I don't care about college. Plus, they're going to have a lot of debt that they're going to We complain about and they're going to want higher pay because they're in debt.
If you're in debt for $50,000, you need more money than somebody who isn't in debt.
So I'm going to end up paying for their student loan.
I'm going to end up paying through proxy for the indoctrination of the next generation by pumping up the income of Universities and of course I mean student loans should be subject to bankruptcy laws.
Of course it should. Of course it should.
Because that way more students could declare bankruptcy get out from under their student loans and then banks will be less likely to lend to students to get into useless degrees which means that people will actually have to work for a living and contribute something of value to society other than producing another generation of red-based termites to chew through the foundations of everything that we value.
So You could say, as a corporation, you could say, I don't care about, I don't want anyone from college fundamentally.
An hour IQ test, an hour intelligence test, that's all I need, and statistically that's all you do need.
I don't even need an HR department because I'm allowed to discriminate against whoever I want.
There's no diversity, there's no quotas, anything like that, so I don't need an HR department, therefore I can get rid of this big giant pen to put women who can't produce things that the business needs as a core value and so on.
I just have an IQ test.
I'm going to take whoever scores 120 or more on the IQ test.
I don't care about their education.
I don't care about their college degrees or anything like that.
Well, everyone should say, well, fantastic.
It's really economically efficient.
It's going to save a huge amount of money.
It's going to allow the company to grow.
It's going to reduce the price of whatever it is they put out, which is great for the poor.
So boom, you see private companies have the right to discriminate against whoever they want.
So let's make that a principle.
And I'm actually down with all of that.
But if you just make it discriminatory, well, you see, companies can discriminate against whoever they want.
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