Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

April 14, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

26:17

4058 Mark Zuckerberg Testifies, Facebook Under Fire | True News

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Boy, if there ever was an intergalactic squid that gives a Me Too moment to your digital soul, that would be Facebook.
	And of course, as you probably know, recently, Mark Zuckerberg faced off against a semicircle cryptkeeper of questioners in Congress.
	And most of the people who were questioning him, well, Facebook had donated quite a bit of money to...
	The average age of the people questioning him was 62.
	That's robust.
	And they had maybe five minutes to ask him questions.
	And so I guess Mark Zuckerberg faced a challenging situation for just about any young person, which is to try to explain to your grandmother how email works.
	And boy, they put in some pretty embarrassing questions.
	Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican from Utah, actually asked Zuckerberg, how does Facebook make money?
	That seems like something you'd kind of want to get squared away before asking him, given that I guess his time is about a jillion dollars an hour.
	Someone else asked if you can read emails over WhatsApp and other embarrassing stuff.
	He did put, at least said it was conspiracy theory that Facebook was listening in using your phone microphones.
	And in response to issues around security and so on...
	They said, well, we're going to increase our security experts from 15,000 to 20,000, which means hiring approximately 19 high-octane security experts every single day until the end of the year, which only seems believable if you don't hire people, particularly people of any talent and skill base, on a regular basis.
	And they didn't seem to understand, as most people don't seem to understand, and it's understandable why they or you wouldn't understand what the business model is of Facebook.
	Facebook collects massive amounts of data, but it does not officially sell that data.
	Advertising spots, right?
	So that's really important.
	They don't sell the raw data because that's kind of giving up the magic sauce that makes their whole business model work.
	What they do is they sell placements.
	So an advertiser goes up and said, and I did this back in my business day, you go up and you say, well, I have this particular product.
	I want to reach this kind of person, maybe this gender, maybe this educational group in this area with this income or whatever, and they will do their very best in trying to target Your information to the people who might be most receptive or who you think will be the most receptive to receiving it.
	So, they'll show the ad, but they're not supposed to hand over the raw data.
	Now, Facebook has recently admitted that the majority of its users' information has been, in fact, accessed by third parties, that it scans your messages, and just because you delete something and it's no longer visible to you, doesn't mean That it is actually gone.
	It is marked as deleted, and they pretty much keep your data forever.
	It's like trying to break up with a girl you think you've broken up, but then she shows up in various disguises, haunting your every particular step.
	Also, they can harvest your browsing data using cookies.
	Now, you can, of course, download, and certainly a good idea to do so, I suppose.
	You can download the information that Facebook has about you, but...
	It's not the full story.
	Your browsing data is usually not included in the information.
	You don't find a complete list of the advertisers that have told Facebook they can target you with ads.
	You won't find information that references you that you didn't directly upload, like pictures of you that Facebook knows is you that have been uploaded by other people.
	Or maybe you said, well, I don't want to share my phone number, but somebody else said they want to share their contact list and they can get metadata on phone calls, which is a big problem because you didn't actually officially agree to give your phone number, but they harvest it by scraping other people's phone records and contact lists and so on.
	So it is...
	A challenge. It also was fascinating, of course, to see Zuckerberg admit that Facebook is working with Robert Mueller because, of course, the whole Marussians fantasy is playing out in social media.
	The Democrats fully understand, as the left as a whole does, that it is social media that is transforming.
	Western politics and giving it more of a free market and nationalistic and border-friendly kind of perspective and actually achieving success in that.
	So naturally, rather than make good arguments, they're going to try and shut down the discussion as much as humanly possible.
	Now, this is according to a search engine, DuckDuckGo.
	They're pretty pro-privacy.
	They say that Facebook's trackers are on almost a quarter of the top million websites in the world.
	So if you're browsing popular websites, your activity can be recorded by Facebook.
	It can be linked then to your Facebook identity and stored by the company in these databases that seem to go across time, through time.
	And in n-dimensional space of advertising-friendly tentacle-up-the-nose invasiveness.
	And some of this surveillance that they do on browsing history gets them into some hot water with European data protection agencies, but not enough to stop it.
	Now, one thing I found fascinating, and please understand, I'm no lawyer, it's just sort of my opinions about looking at this kind of stuff, which is...
	The question of whether Facebook is more like a library or more like a newspaper, right?
	So a newspaper prints a bunch of stuff, they choose what's there, and they then put it out there in the world, so they're liable for the content.
	Whereas a library just has a whole bunch of books, and let's say you find some book in there that says, I don't know, here's how to poison something, and you go out and poison something or someone, the library is not responsible.
	Right, so that is really an interesting question.
	And there has been, I think since about 1996, this act which says, well, it's kind of contradictory in a way.
	There's certain legal standards that kind of cluster around this.
	So the first thing is, The phone company can't say, well, we're not gonna sign you up if you're a Republican or a Democrat or a Libertarian or whatever, you know, or we're not gonna continually degrade the quality of your phone conversations if you are a Zoroastrian or a Christian or something like that.
	And so they just have to Sign you up and give you the best service, and regardless of the content of what it is that you're saying.
	So if you use the phone company to phone in a bomb threat, then you're responsible for phoning in a bomb threat, but the phone company is not responsible for transmitting that information because they don't discriminate.
	Now, there are also statutes that say, well, you're allowed to regulate according to community standards.
	What that means is...
	It's not like anybody's guess, but there are some community standards that you're allowed to censor on.
	One of those community standards, though, I don't think is being a conservative, right?
	So that's the big question.
	If you want to hold this common carrier, which means you're immune from things like defamation and libel and all of that kind of stuff, there's a huge immunity from legal liability if you're just this common carrier.
	You can't sue the library because they have a book saying do something bad.
	But if the newspaper prints something that says do something bad, they may be more liable.
	So the way that you maintain this common carrier, this legal immunity for things, is by not discriminating or not controlling content except on the basis of this general community standards.
	And I don't think that includes political viewpoints at all, as FedEx has pointed out.
	So Zuckerberg was grilled on this, you know, do you control for content?
	Are you a publisher rather than a neutral sort of common carrier?
	And I don't know, his questions, his answers to those questions, let's just say they led me down a rabbit hole of I wonder if anything further should be investigated regarding this.
	Because, sure, private company, you say, well, they can discriminate against whoever they want, and that certainly is true.
	That certainly is true, but if they start to discriminate, then they lose immunity, as far as I understand it, they lose immunity from particular legal repercussions, which they don't want to do.
	They really don't want to lose immunity.
	Immunity from that and Zuckerberg appeared to say that he didn't even really know much about the content of the laws that fundamentally govern the massive profits that his company accumulates which I don't know I mean there are lots of funny memes about his sort of wireless charging mat because he's a pretty short guy and so on but I don't know oh and by the way you know people say well he wasn't under oath you're still not allowed to lie to Congress you can't be charged with poetry but you're still not allowed to lie to Congress So,
	to me, it's a fascinating question and a very interesting situation that you have this platform for human communication that seems to have a significant ability to affect political outcomes.
	Now, in general, that's because people aren't taught how to think.
	It's a failure of government schools that people are so easily...
	Like, if you think, oh, a couple of handful of Russian bots is going to change the outcome of the election, well, I would go back to why aren't children being taught how to think?
	And reason. And be critical thinkers.
	And that goes all the way back to, you know, governments don't want that as a whole.
	So they want, see, they want, they want citizens who are programmable by governments.
	But they don't want citizens who are programmable by any other means.
	Now, it's a bit of a one color.
	It's not like a very delicate brush.
	It's one of those roller brushes, right?
	It gets everything, right? If you raise children to be susceptible to propaganda and programming and so on, Well, tragically, you know, this show and other shows accepted who try to teach people you critical thinking, well, they're going to be programmed by a whole bunch of people.
	And this is where censorship comes from.
	Censorship fundamentally arises from an unwillingness or perhaps even these days an inability to teach children critical thinking, and therefore you have to censor it because you want only...
	They have a big giant button called controllability, but the government is the one that wants to be able to push that button once other people figure it out, and then the government wants to start censoring other people.
	It's like, only I... Only I sleep with the tart.
	So that is a very big and interesting question.
	Now that the perception is that social media influences or affects political outcomes, now suddenly there's this hyper-regulation and control and focus and all this kind of stuff that is going on.
	Now, again, if you go to some really conservative website...
	And you apply for a job and you say, like, I'm a leftist and I want to write pro-leftist stuff.
	I'm a Marxist and I want to write pro-Marxist stuff.
	They're probably not going to hire you because they're going to say, well, listen, we're a conservative website.
	That's not really what we do here.
	So that's kind of upfront.
	That kind of upfrontedness is, to me, the big and foundational question.
	So if these companies are getting progressively more lefty, activisty, social justice warrior-y, then they need to tell you that upfront.
	They need to say, we have a significant preference for leftist content, and we have significant opposition to conservative content.
	Let's just say that, for instance, right?
	Well, if they say that to you up front, that's fine.
	I mean, you don't go to some leftist, hyper-leftist site and think that they're going to give equal shrift to conservative viewpoints.
	That's kind of the way that they run.
	That's the way that they roll. So you know that going in.
	But if they say we or imply or it's taken for granted that they don't censor or control based upon political viewpoints, then they need to stick to that.
	You say, oh, well, you can censor whoever you want.
	Well, you can.
	But if you tell people you don't censor, but then you do, that seems to me not upfront at all.
	Because then what happens is people start to build followers and they invest lots of time and money and energy.
	Maybe they quit their jobs. Maybe they go into debt to get studio equipment and they start broadcasting or publishing or writing, blogging.
	On the assumption, because they've read through their terms of agreement, where it doesn't say anything about discriminating against conservatives, and Ted Cruz was really good in this.
	And so if people say, well, no, there's nothing in here about discriminating against conservative viewpoints, so I guess I'm going to invest my time, money, and energy in building up a following on this platform.
	And then if it turns out that they do, in fact...
	censor or suppress conservative viewpoints or non-leftist viewpoints, well, that's not upfront.
	That's not honest at all.
	And this is a very sort of foundational thing and needs to be discussed.
	And I think at some point there's going to be lawsuits and at some point in discovery there's going to be someone or some group who has to reveal the algorithms that they use.
	Or the news sensors or cultivators or whatever that they use.
	And this has come out before in some organizations, but it's going to be up front and center.
	And then if there is bias in the cultivation or promotion of particular viewpoints, which is not spelled out in the user agreement, well, it will be very interesting to see what happens from there.
	So there's sort of two final points I wanted to make.
	First of all, I don't actually blame any of the software programmers, the engineers in particular.
	I mean, I spent 15 years as a software entrepreneur.
	I built and grew and sold a company, and I was chief technical officer.
	I hired lots and lots of programmers, worked with them.
	It's a wonderful environment.
	It's a great and creative and powerful and passionate group of people that I worked with.
	I hope everyone's doing really well out there.
	The engineers just want to solve problems.
	They're not particularly motivated by, well, let's promote this viewpoint and let's suppress this viewpoint and let's cultivate this perspective and let's reject this perspective and let's lay not so much into manipulation.
	They're not so much. They just want to make things run faster, be cooler, look better, work easier, whatever you name it.
	That's the engineer mindset.
	That's the software programmer mindset.
	And I was a programmer as well as chief technical officer.
	And that's what I love to do was to solve problems.
	So the question is, with these tech companies that are founded with all of these engineers who love problem solving and don't usually have much of a political agenda that they want to bake into the software, the question is how does it happen?
	Well, basically since the Second World War, this giant portal to leftism has opened up in companies and it's called the HR department.
	And the HR department occurs for a number of reasons, but a lot of it has to do with quotas, with diversity, with women, and perhaps their sensitivity to particular work situations that formerly would be handled rather poorly.
	And so there's all of these manuals and all of these standards and all of these, you know, to get access to certain government contracts, you need to have this percentage or that percentage of blacks or women and so on.
	And this is a big portal by which the left has come in.
	Now, it's kind of a circular thing, because there just aren't as many female engineers as male engineers.
	And that's not a function of sexism.
	That's a function of freedom. When women have fewer economic opportunities, they tend to gravitate more towards the highest-paying jobs, often of which, you know, petroleum engineer and so on is male-dominated.
	But then when women get more economic freedom, they tend to gravitate more towards, you know, touchy-feely, relationship-based stuff, which doesn't mean low skill.
	It can be a family doctor or whatever.
	But women will generally prefer to work with people a little bit more than men, and men a little bit more than women will generally prefer to work with things, objects, ideas, abstractions, and so on.
	And so when you say, well, we've got to hire a bunch of women and we've got to hire a bunch of other groups, then the question is, well, where do you put them?
	If there really aren't that many that can go productively or positively into the engineering department or, you know, other sort of male-dominated spaces, where do you put them?
	Well, you put them in HR. And so this, you know, where do you put all the women with women's studies who want to work at tech companies?
	Can you put them on the hardcore frontline coding arena?
	Can you make them big, deep, powerful project managers, given that they may also quit to have children?
	It becomes progressively, I guess pun intended, more difficult.
	So you have to create a department called HR to put the women where So this is one of the ways in which this portal of non-customer-focused, non-rigorous, non-market-facing Portals open up in an organization and that's where the leftists in general go to sit and then they start creating policies and then they start dictating employee manuals and then they start coming up with standards and practices and then they mire you down in diversity training and sensitivity training and next thing you know,
	James Damore is making the circuit because he dared to publish scientific facts about diversity.
	Gender differences. So that's really, really important to understand, that you get these mandates, these affirmative action, these minority and female quotas for hiring in companies, and then you end up hiring a bunch of people you can't put into your core business.
	So what do you do? Well, you end up with them infecting, in a sense, the culture, like the leftists among them, and the leftists among all groups, but in this particular case, it's a little bit more.
	They end up infecting the culture through the portal of HR, changing things fundamentally, and then Because the power created by the engineers wants to be harnessed by the people who prefer controlling people rather than things, you end up with the culture shifting underfoot and becoming in service to collectivism,
	in service to the totalitarian elements of the left, and in service of the equality of outcome rather than the equality of opportunity that characterizes central planning and the socialist style of thinking, to be as nice as possible using the word thinking.
	So that's important. It's important to recognize what the problem here.
	The problem here is not the free market.
	The problem is, well, the amount of money that can be controlled in the political process is so prodigious that anyone who can change elections or alter elections or influence elections ends up in control of so much money.
	The trillions of dollars that change hands may be differently based upon Which political party or ideology is in power?
	So the fact that they're chasing all of the giant government money through influencing elections, that is where that particular ring of power comes from.
	And of course the other is because there's all of these mandates and there's all of these, it's a strong business decision.
	Or a positive business decision to start imposing quotas and forcing the hire of minorities and women, but then the problem is if they're not as qualified as, say, the whites and East Asians that you're hiring, then you have a problem, and then you get this particular...
	It's like a cult forming within the company that influences, significantly influences the direction of the company, clogs up the system of engineering efficiency with rampant central planning...
	Hyper feels, emotionally manipulative ideology, which then of course creates a cycle of business where the new group that's too small to need an HR department can then replace the existing behemoth that have grown too big to survive the increasing gravity of their own ideology.
	But the last thing I'd say is, you know, there's an old saying that says, if you can't see the product, you are the product.
	And this is something I think everyone really needs to figure out and, you know, really take some time.
	Look in the mirror. Think about this.
	It's really, really important. To some degree, the cat is already out of the bag.
	You can't put the toothpaste back in the toothpaste tube, as they say, and if your data's out there, your data's out there.
	You know, it's been sold, repackaged, harvested, and I mean, Facebook has admitted as much, and I'm sure there are lots of other companies that say, yeah.
	Massive amounts of user data has gotten out of the enclosure, has escaped the matrix, and is now running wild.
	And you can't recall that.
	You can't, right? I mean, it's just the way that it is.
	And it's pretty terrible stuff.
	But fundamentally, you know, there is a sin called greed.
	And the sin called greed is very important.
	And there's also another saying that says nothing's more expensive than free.
	Nothing's more expensive. If you've ever been to one of those, like you go on vacation and they say, we'll give you a free breakfast.
	You just have to listen to a small information package about timeshares.
	And it's like, free breakfast?
	Yay! And it's like four hours later, you're, you know, chewing your way through ropes to try and get out of the...
	Enclosure. And, yeah, well, nothing's more expensive than free.
	Nothing has crushed our capacity for rationality and philosophy than the free government schools.
	Look at students.
	In some states, you can't even have a drink.
	In Canada, Ontario, the legal drinking age is 19.
	You can't even have a drink. But you can sign up for...
	Unholy amounts of student loans in pursuit of a degree not driven by market forces, but by the university's desire to build another useless layer of bureaucracy and a little kingdom in academia, so you can end up in debt for $50,000, $100,000, $150,000 or more, and it's free, see?
	It's just, hey, I sign these papers, I get all this, you know?
	And it literally can destroy your life.
	It can destroy your life. Nothing is more expensive than the appearance of free.
	Of course, there is no such thing as a free luncheon.
	Anyone who tells you otherwise is using their syllables to bump into you so they can pick your wallet from the jostling on the other side.
	So what is more expensive than free?
	And Facebook is, quote, free.
	Well, it's not, of course. They're strip mining your digital soul to sell advertising spots to advertisers.
	And, of course, sometimes advertisers or malicious third parties get their hands on that data.
	Your privacy. Your security.
	What are you selling it for?
	So you don't have to pay 10 or 20 bucks a month to Facebook?
	Do you think you're saving 10 or 20 bucks a month?
	I don't know that you are. Pretty sure that you're not.
	How much would you pay to have all of your data recalled from the various places it's nestled into over the internet?
	Well, you can, right? It's like taking one of this dandelion, blow it, little spores fly off.
	It's like three weeks later, I want them back.
	It's like, oh. They've gone undercover, baby, and they ain't coming back.
	And... What is it worth?
	What is the sin of greed?
	I want to save 10 or 20 bucks a month.
	So, sure, you can pillage everything I do in order to serve me up ads.
	And maybe the ads are helpful.
	Maybe the ads help you save 50 bucks a month.
	Maybe. Or maybe they stimulate you to buy things you don't really need because they know how to target and they know what you might be looking for and so on.
	And maybe it works, maybe it doesn't.
	The problem with ads is, you know, you go look for something.
	You will often look for it in terms of research.
	You know what you're doing. You're going to buy a laptop or a tablet or something.
	You know what you're doing, so you've probably gone off and bought it or have some good idea, read the reviews or whatever.
	And then it's like, hey, would you like to buy this thing that you researched yesterday?
	It's like, no, I already found out the information that I want.
	Thanks very much. But what is it worth?
	You know, the bold fact and the bold reality, frankly, people, is that There are malevolent actors out there with a database that tells them more about you than most of your friends know.
	There are people out there with no good interest at heart who have harvested more information about you than maybe even your spouse knows.
	That they know you more intimately than your parents.
	They know you more intimately than your priest.
	Asterisk, confessionals not included.
	I mean, you have given up a lot in return for...
	Saving a few bucks, like that old Jim Morrison song, trading your hours for a handful of dimes.
	Trading your digital soul for a handful of dimes?
	It's an important question.
	Is it worth it?
	Is it worth it?
	Right now, the economy, as it stands, says, why, yes, it is worth it.
	I guess the question becomes, is it going to be worth it tomorrow or the day after, now that everyone knows how much is being strip-mined and sold across the world, and how many of your intimate secrets are laid bare for neckbeards to pour over in foreign lands?
	It's an interesting question.

▲