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Oct. 26, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:23
The Growing Threat of Tech Censorship: Stefan Molyneux Speaks at the European Union Parliament
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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux.
I hope you're doing well.
So this week, I flew to Brussels in order to give a speech at the European Union Parliament.
Now, first of all, I want to thank you for this opportunity.
I believe that I did as proud.
I know that the subject of high-tech censorship is very, very important and very, very close to my heart and mind, as it is, I think, to the entire community of civilized and rational thinkers.
But I really, really want to thank you for this remarkable opportunity to stand in a parliament building and speak truth directly to power.
So thank you for your support, your liking, your subscribing, your sharing, your conflict, your dislike, your hatred, your opposition, your debate, your love, and your enmity, all of which have coalesced to give me these remarkable opportunities, which philosophers have very rarely had throughout human history, to speak truth directly to power.
So I really, really want to thank you.
I also do want to ask you, this is exhausting work, it's tiring work, it's difficult work, Lots of red-eye flights, lots of staggering around, trying to get my thoughts together on little sleep.
So I really, really would appreciate it so much.
I promise I will continue to do great work with the resources you provide me.
I really, really do ask you enormously and deeply and humbly and gratefully.
To support what it is that I do.
I believe I'm doing a great job in the service of humanity, of philosophy, and of you, my dear listener and watcher of this show.
So please, please, my friends, go to freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.
The link is right here attached to the video and the audio.
freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.
I need your help.
I will continue to do you proud.
Thank you, thank you, thank you everyone so much for all that you have given me and for all that you enable me to give to the world.
And now, the video of my speech.
about high-tech censorship at the European Union Parliament.
There were a few technical issues, nothing too insurmountable, but the quality of the audio does improve in the second half.
Once again, thank you so much for this opportunity.
I look forward to the next one.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
It's a great pleasure to be here.
It's always nice when a philosopher can address a legislative body without actually being accused of, say, corrupting the young or not believing in the gods of the city.
So I really, really appreciate that, at least yet.
So I'm going to talk about five major issues that are occurring when it comes to free speech.
But first I want to remind everyone that free speech is the essence of civilization.
The truth It's a very slippery and elusive beast and it takes a team effort of conversation and debate and challenge and empirical evidence to begin to encapsulate the truth.
Nobody has a monopoly on truth.
The truth is a social conversation and it's uncomfortable because we all have things that we believe and when they're challenged It's difficult emotionally and being able to handle that emotional difficulty is the essence of civilization.
There's an old saying that says the first person to throw an insult rather than a rock founded civilization and I really want to make sure that we keep The great challenging conversations in the world, civil, open, challenging, exciting.
And the tech giants have facilitated, as has this technology, the most amazing conversation in human history.
It's really, really important to understand that.
When I look back throughout history, and my graduate degree was in the history of philosophy, The Overton window, what you could talk about throughout most of history was very, very narrow and very circumscribed.
And censorship and deplatforming, as in not allowing you into the priesthood and not allowing you into the university, was very much the rule of the day.
So we have this incredible capacity to have a worldwide conversation about truth, reality, virtue, courage, civilization, And that is something which we should enormously treasure.
It's almost like all of human history has pointed us to this very particular moment where a global conversation is possible for the first time to unite us in the umbrellas of reason, evidence, truth, philosophy, virtue.
But all opportunities are potential disasters throughout history.
And the tech giants who are facilitating, using the technology available, facilitating this conversation, are at great risk of silencing it, of cutting it off.
And that is a great challenge which I would like to talk about now.
Now, do you guys run the PowerPoint?
All right.
If we can get ourselves started, that would be excellent.
I do have a technical background.
I was a software entrepreneur for about 15 years, a chief technical officer, head programmer, so I know how a good deal of this chunk of stuff works.
So the first thing that I want to talk about with regards to the tech giants is conflict of interest.
Now, of course, as parliamentarians, you're very aware of the challenge of conflict of interest.
And conflict of interest in the high-tech world is very, very important.
When they write...
About people like in this front row or yourself if you challenge some orthodoxy that a lot of tech companies believe in.
When they write about you they're not writing objectively.
A lot of times they're writing about a direct competitor.
So what do we do?
We talk about current events.
We talk about news.
We analyze what's going on in the world today.
It's a kind of citizen journalism, I suppose you could say.
Now, the tech giant companies are not neutral platforms.
That's where they started.
But that's not where they are.
Where they are now is direct investors and partners with news outlets.
Tech giants have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in developing news sources.
They have partnered with particular news sources.
So, when you have an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars, do you promote your competition that is outstripping that investment sometimes?
Well, of course not.
For the tech giants to write about us is like Coke writing about Pepsi, if they thought that Pepsi was Nazis.
So that's an important thing to remember, and I think that should have us question how the tech giants are working with the people who are directly threatening their investment of hundreds of millions of dollars.
They cannot be objective in this sphere.
Now, they've also promoted, quite often, partners in news.
All right, we're getting some slide there.
Here we go.
Here we go.
All right, I'll do that slide in a moment.
It's just kind of professionalism that they just can't compete with, you see.
Is it warm in here?
All right.
So, when the tech giant have invested all this money and they face people like us who are taking away market share from their investment, they cannot be objective about us.
When they promote their partners in news to the top of the feed, which occurs in Facebook, it occurs in YouTube, they are enhancing their own investments.
They're enhancing their own partnerships.
And they're doing it without clearly marking it as sponsored content.
It's very, very important.
Because it used to be, back in the day, if a video floated up to the top, it's because it was very popular.
If it floats up because of a manipulation of the algorithm as the result of a partnership, it looks popular, but it's not.
And it doesn't have the word sponsor underneath.
Now, to me, this is somewhat fraudulent.
I don't mean legally, I just mean counter-morally.
That if you're artificially promoting your partners or artificially promoting your own news organization without telling the end user...
I don't think that's a fair use of the monopoly power that some of these companies seem to have.
So I think that's very important.
And it comes to this question, which is right up there on the slide.
This is a very philosophical question, and this legislative body wrestles with this every single day.
There's a Christian perspective which actually ties in very closely to the evolutionary perspective.
The evolutionary perspective says, how did we advance?
How did we develop these giant craniums and this amazing technology?
Well, because we evolve by gathering resources, by hook or by crook, and applying it to those with the closest genetic proximity.
Our families, our tribe, our communities.
And so we're kind of selfish.
We're not objective.
We're not fair, we're not just, we're not moral.
We're scathing animals looking to gather resources and feed our young.
Now, we have a layer.
We have a layer of civility on top of that seething evolutionary hunger.
But that's why those who study human evolution recognize that human beings are elementally corruptible because it serves our evolution.
That we are corruptible.
That we have an in-group preference.
That we prefer genetic proximity to genetic distance.
That all of those who said, no, no, my children don't need to eat.
Your children should eat first.
When hunger came along, well, evolution made pretty short shrift of that kind of generosity.
So we have developed into...
Altruistic people who can put aside personal or biological interests, but at the same time, there's that lizard brain of survival at all costs, which is one of the reasons we can't handle power.
Now, Christians also say that we're in a fallen state.
Christians say Satan is very, very tempting.
You know, Satan is like fishnet stockings swinging a purse and...
You know, very alluring.
He's got pharonyms.
He uses acts.
I don't exactly know how it works.
I'm not a theologian, but it's something like that.
And so, Satan is going to tempt you with power, and he's going to say, I will give you the material goods of this world in return for your soul, in return for your integrity, for your morality.
Well, we like the material things of this world because we need them to survive.
That serves the Darwinian side that we have.
So if you look at people who study evolution, you look at Christians, they say the concentration of power is very dangerous because people will use it for their own biological material ends and people will use it to control others, which is why Christians and other religious people say let's have a small state because human beings can't handle power.
It's too much for us.
It's not good for us.
And the evolutionists believe this, the Christians believe this, but the socialists believe The hard leftists?
Yes, you.
They take a different approach, which they say human beings can be perfectible.
If we change the environment, if we have the right language, if we have the right approach, if we punish the right people and reward the right people, we can achieve a paradise, we can achieve a utopia, which means everybody who doubts that stands between the leftists and the paradise that they wish to create in this earth.
Now, if you have paradise just beyond that one person, it's pretty easy to get rid of that person.
Now, leftists, and fascists as well, but leftists, since we're talking about them at the moment, have particular ways of getting rid of people.
Right now, relatively civilized.
In the past, not so much.
If there's utopia and one human being standing between you and utopia, it's very easy to say, well, of course they have to be deplatformed.
Of course they have to get out of the way because paradise is just on the other side of that person's disagreement.
And if that's what you genuinely believe, it's very easy to unpeople human beings and to assume that you have the answer that everyone else is missing and if these damn people would just get out of the way, you could make paradise on earth.
And this idea that you can just use power for good, eh, it corrupts other people, but I can handle it.
I will do nothing but greatness with this power.
It's very, very tempting, and we can see this playing out in social media giants, Google, Facebook, YouTube.
They have a challenge, and I'm not going to say it's easy.
They have a challenge to satisfy a world community of wildly divergent perspectives, to satisfy legislative requirements, to satisfy pressure groups who can sometimes be very dangerous.
So I sympathize, but we do have to delineate the issue.
If we can move on to the next slide, please.
So this is a bit of a roll.
If you can just scroll down to the end here.
This is just in 2018.
This is a list of the people who either temporarily or permanently were unpersoned.
Vanished.
Some have re-emerged.
Others are gone in perpetuity.
Of this list, there were over 800 alternative news accounts banned just before the U.S. midterms by Facebook.
And these are the ones that we know of.
These are the people who have some public power, who can raise the red flag, who we see.
There are lots of, you know, in the First World War, they couldn't identify half the bodies.
They're just unknown soldiers.
There are lots of people who vanished who didn't have The visibility to fight back who didn't have the social support to fight back.
And these are all people who challenge leftist narratives.
And look, we all know the pendulum is way, way on the left at the moment.
It needs to have a balance.
And I believe, and having talked with these people last night, I know for sure that our goal is to prevent the swing from going too far.
We wish to arrest it in the middle.
We are moderates.
We wish to keep it a conversation.
We wish to keep it civil.
Let reason and evidence win the day.
Not passion and hatred.
We have swung very far to the left.
There are 40,000 outright Marxists in American universities.
And yet everybody's worried about Nazis.
I mean, it's mad.
And we are trying to arrest...
There's going to be blowback.
It always happens in history.
You swing from one side to the other.
We're trying to arrest that swing in the middle to keep the conversation civil.
If we are deplatformed, the pendulum is going to swing way far to the other side.
And we've seen that before in history.
We really don't want to see that again, so let's not de-platform people.
All right, if we can move to the next slide, please.
So, we talked a little bit about the conflict of interest.
You can just take this down to the bottom, please.
So, basically, they are developing their own news sources.
They are partnering with existing news sources.
They are changing their algorithm to favor establishment news sources.
Now, for most people, you say, well, there's some guy in the basement.
Well, that's not credible.
But then there's CNN, right?
There's all of the establishment news sources.
There's the New York Times, the Washington Post.
You can go on down through the list.
Should be no contest, right?
The guy in the basement, what does he know?
They've got a whole team of reporters and fact-checkers and lawyers and all this kind of stuff.
But, you know, to be frank, the mainstream media...
Has not been doing a very good job of predicting things.
It's more wish fulfillment.
I mean, everybody knows what their estimates were for who was going to win the election a couple years ago.
Was it 97% was going to be Hillary Clinton and they were completely wrong?
Because they wanted that.
It wasn't true.
It was wish fulfillment.
It's not reporting.
It's fantasizing.
Mark Zuckerberg stated that his goal is to promote high-quality news that, quote, helps build a sense of common ground.
You cannot have both, because truth is elusive, and it requires conflict to find it.
The truth is usually, Pegelian style, somewhere between two extremes, So if you want to build common ground, it means you're silencing people who disagree with a particular perspective.
I don't want that to happen.
I don't want leftists to be deplatformed.
I don't want communists to be deplatformed.
I don't want anyone to be deplatformed.
Because the truth is going to be somewhere in the challenging thrust and parry of intellectual debate.
If you want a sense of common ground, whatever that means, you are outright declaring your goal to censor who you disagree with.
And he gave an example of good, trustworthy journalism.
The New York Times, the old great lady.
Now, for a lot of people, again, that's legit.
That's solid stuff.
They got some Pulitzes for covering up the crimes of Stalin.
But the New York Times, you know what the guy in the basement with the webcam has never done?
He's never started a war.
And the New York Times report, Leading up to the Iraq war was instrumental in getting the US to get involved in one of its most costly and destructive wars.
That's trustworthy journalism.
New York Times big fans of Hugo Chavez, where now middle-class women are having to sell themselves into prostitution for food.
They have to sell their children.
Any retractions?
Any apologies?
No.
Just move on.
Like some cold-hearted person hits a bump in the road and just keeps driving, doesn't circle around, doesn't reflect.
The New York Times endorsed Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton was instrumental in the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya, destroying A totalitarian but functional society and replacing it with a warlord-driven chaos with open-air slave markets and a massive migrant crisis is threatening the entire future of Western civilization.
But that's good, trustworthy journalism.
And that these people who were involved in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the destruction of entire countries, perhaps even of civilizations, that they dare, dare To speak of fake news.
What is the body count of the alternative media?
What is the body count of the mainstream media?
It's repulsive.
Next slide.
Bias.
Bias.
Yeah, so Facebook announced it was going to partner with publications to create exclusive news content ahead of the 2018 U.S. midterm elections.
It's going to directly fund news programming from CNN's Anderson Cooper and Mike.com.
I think fairly safe to say, pretty lefty.
Because, you see, they're very concerned about fake news.
Fake news.
Conspiracy theories.
Yes, there are some very ridiculous conspiracy theories.
One of my most popular videos, incomprehensibly enough to me, is an hour-long debate with a guy who believed in the flat earth.
Yeah, they're out there.
But they're still not getting half a million people killed in Iraq by believing in the flat earth.
You know, they may get lost if they try and sail across the Atlantic, but they're still not bringing down Western civilization.
But you want to talk about a conspiracy theory?
Let's talk about the Russia collusion conspiracy theory.
How much harm has that done to people's belief in American jurisprudence?
Google's CEO, Sindha Pichai, told Congress this company could only find $4,700 in ad spending from Russia-linked accounts in 2016.
That's it.
Anybody remember how much Hillary Clinton spent on her campaign?
Anyone?
What was it, $1.5 billion?
It was, it meant...
According to the National Review, private interests that closed deals with Vladimir Putin and his agents, thanks to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's public favors, gave the Clinton Foundation between $152 million and $173 million.
Almost 37,000 times the amount of money that Google admitted Russian-linked accounts spent on ads.
37,000 times the money.
And they dare to talk about the alternative media and their crazy conspiracy theories.
So they're partnering with news organizations.
What's their buyer?
It's very clear.
I'll put the sources to all of this when it gets published.
Tech workers overwhelmingly support Democrats.
In 2018, there was a study of the $15 million from tech employees that went to candidates, 1% went to Republicans.
1%.
Trump won the election.
I know it wasn't quite 50%, but let's just round up 50% of the vote.
50% of the vote, 1% of the donations.
Can you imagine if they lived in an area?
50% blacks, but they only hired 1% of blacks.
Everybody would go insane.
And rightly so.
1% of the money, 50% of the people.
And what's interesting as well is that there's strong indications from science these days, from genetic studies, that your political persuasion has genetic basis, significant genetic basis.
So they are discriminating against people Genetically, by excluding Republicans.
It may not be your fault.
You're on the right or on the left or somewhere else.
They are genetically discriminating against people for things that often aren't even their fault.
1% went to Republicans, 23% of the money went to Democrats.
23 times.
Countries 50-50, right?
23 times.
Are you telling me there's no bias?
Come on.
How many of the partners...
I was going to say partners in crime.
How many of the partners in news are not on the left?
Anybody?
Bueller?
Anybody?
None that I could see.
Let's see the next slide, please.
2018, after intense pressure from CNN, this was before the intense pressure from CNN to ban Alex Jones, the Daily Beast and other left-wing journalists, Facebook refused ad purchases from President Trump's re-election campaign.
They were aimed at ball-screen support in the midterms.
They said that the immigration ad, it was an immigration ad, cannot receive paid distribution because it violates rules against sensational content.
Oh no, it gets people's attention.
It's interesting.
Did that ever happen to the Democrats?
Of course not.
Now, Facebook, of course, trying to police the world.
Fail.
You can't.
You can't.
You can't police the world and its speech any more than you can centrally plan an economy.
You can't do it.
It's 2.27 billion monthly active users.
Every 60 seconds, 510,000 comments, 290,000 statuses updated, 136,000 photos updated.
They can't keep up with it.
They can't manage it.
They've lost a third of their market cap.
And their moderators, it's horrible.
There are people stuck in warehouses that make Amazon facilities look like the Hilton.
If we can do the next page, please.
So this is from Zero Hedge.
Let's read this quickly.
For as long as 10 hours a day, viewing as many as 25,000 images or videos per day, low-paid workers are buried in the world's horrors, hate speech, child pornography, rape, murder, torture, beheadings, and on and on.
They are not experts in the subject matter or region they police.
They rely on guidelines provided by Facebook, and I quote, dozens of unorganized PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets with bureaucratic filters like Western, Balkans, Hate, Oregon figures, and credible violence implementation standards.
As the New York Times reported last fall, the rules are not even written in the language the moderators speak, so many rely on Google Translate, which can produce some rather exciting results.
As a recent op-ed by John Norton in The Guardian declared, bluntly in its headline, Facebook's burnout.
Moderators are proof that it is broken.
So they can't police.
They have crazy guidelines.
They have people who are burning out.
This is not possible.
It's not possible even if you have the best of intentions, and given the bias they have for the left, they don't have the best of intentions.
Put these two things together.
And you see, this is the company...
That it's the world's policeman for what is acceptable speech.
They have been gathering call history and SMS data from Android devices.
They knew for quite a long time when they were selling ads that their account for their videos was incorrect but kept on selling them anyway.
Moral company?
Moral arbitries?
They dare, as anyone, to have the vanity to think that their particular judgment and these burned-out workers stuck in shuddery, horrifying tombs of horrors, that they can substitute their judgment and their underpaid employees for the robust marketplace of human interaction the world over?
It's madness.
Can I get the next one, please?
So, this is a continuation from the Zero Hedge article.
The platform's content ecosystem is too poisoned for human or machine moderators to cleanse.
Users are fleeing in droves, especially in the company's most valuable markets.
Ad buyers are already shifting dollars to competition competitors' platforms.
Governments are stepping up to dramatically hinder Facebook's data collection capabilities, with Germany just this week, this was a while ago, banning third-party data sharing.
The company is under investigation.
By the FTC, the Justice Department, the SEC, the FBI, and several government agencies in Europe.
It has been accused by the UN of playing a determining role in Myanmar's genocide.
You know that neckbearded blogger in the basement that everybody derides and calls fake news?
You know what they haven't been?
I can guarantee you.
They've not been accused by the UN of playing a determining role in Myanmar's genocide.
But this is the credible news.
This is the true news.
Not the fake news.
That Facebook so respects.
And that they push to the top of the list to make sure that you don't hear any perspective from anybody who has not been accused by the UN of playing a determinate role in Miami's genocide.
An executive exodus is underway at the company.
I'm not a big fan of criticizing other people's writing because I like the idea.
But I like how they go from, well, genocide to, yeah, well, some executives are unhappy.
You know, this is somehow some sort of moral equivalent.
Sooner or later, Facebook's board will see no option but to remove Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg.
That may or may not happen, of course.
Global's social market share dropped from 75.5% in December 2017 to 66.3% December 2018.
Biggest drop was in the U.S. from 76% to 52%.
Why?
Because they're not perceived as an honest company.
Because they're openly stating that they're changing things to benefit the left.
You've seen the videos of the people crying because Trump got in, who were executives in these tech companies?
We'll skip that last part.
I'm sure we can distribute this, but this is just about their dishonesty about metrics.
They sell based on viewership, and they knew that the numbers were inaccurate, continued to sell.
But don't worry, they can police the free speech of the world, these paragons of virtue.
Challenge four, Saudi money.
Often not talked about how much Saudi money is floating around the high-tech industry.
Saudi money is already behind many of the biggest tech startups in the US, including Lyft, Uber, and Magic Leap.
Saudi Arabia's massive $45 billion check to SoftBank's Vision Fund, the largest venture fund of all time, means Saudi money will likely be part of the biggest pool of venture money for years to come.
The Vision Fund has made at least 26 investments, including into Slack, WeWork, GM Cruise, and other brand names.
Over the last five years, There's estimates that Saudi investors have directly participated in investment rounds totaling at least $6.2 billion.
Billion dollars.
Saudi Arabia's money is in multiple funds with global ambitions.
One of the biggest is the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which said it plans to grow from around $100 billion today to $2 trillion by 2030.
Now, why does this matter?
Muslims, in the West, overwhelmingly vote to the left.
90%, 92%, 95% or higher.
Saudi money, is it going to have any influence on the perception of criticisms of Islam or other things that may be occurring in social media?
Come on.
We used to have these sayings, you know, when I was a kid.
They were always so interesting and illuminating.
I think they've kind of fallen by the wayside.
I don't think people read Aesop's fables as much anymore, but he who pays the piper calls the tune.
It's not just Saudi Arabia.
Over 20 Silicon Valley ventures companies have ties to Chinese government funding, not Chinese investor funding, Chinese government funding, raising concerns about a tech transfer.
Transfer, you know, like how a shoplifter transfers some goods from a store.
Hey, Russia collusion.
Kremlin money is behind prominent Russia venture capitalists in Silicon Valley who has investments in Twitter and Facebook.
It's not proof of anything.
But it doesn't take two years of Robert Mueller to figure this stuff out.
Fairly easy to find online.
We'll get the next one, please.
Are they ungovernable?
There's a lot of talk in conservative circles, well, they're private companies that can do what they want.
Should we regulate them?
Should there be an Internet Bill of Rights?
To me, this doesn't matter.
The governments have almost no capacity, and I'll put this prediction out there, almost no capacity to regulate these companies.
Why?
Well, there have been a lot of data breaches.
CNN, September 20th, 2018, quote, Google is defending its policy to allow third-party apps to access and share data from Gmail accounts.
And if you don't raise your hands, but I'm sure that some of you at some point over the last 10 years have had a Gmail account.
Well, you get to share it with third-party apps.
Yes.
2017.
Google says they stopped scanning Gmail account emails for advertising purposes.
You're just going through your emails.
Now, they're looking for keywords.
I get all of that.
But you can build a pretty good profile of people.
Susan Molinari.
No relation.
I was close to my spelling.
VP of Public Policy and Government Affairs for the Americans at Google wrote in a letter to senators that no human employees read users' Gmail except in, quote, very specific cases where they ask us to and give consent or for security purposes like abuse investigations.
Somebody says that you said something mean.
And the kimono is open.
They go through your email.
It's not the government.
But it affects the government.
The company noted in the letter that it has a process in place for identifying apps that misrepresent themselves or aren't transparent about how personal data is used.
Google says it is able to suspend these apps in the, quote, majority of cases before they're allowed to access data.
However, it's unclear how many malicious apps have been removed.
So, the digital kimono is open to the world.
Who has your emails?
I doubt anybody knows.
I doubt anybody knows.
Who's got your search history?
Who's got your contact information?
Who's got your call history?
Well, if you used Android, maybe Facebook.
All the data you may have put on your shared drives.
Who's got your GPS? Your map history?
Where you were?
What you said?
What you stored?
So if you're in government, And somebody comes along and says, you know, I think we really start regulating these tech guys.
They got a lot of power.
Do you have any questions about how that might play out?
I think you do.
I think you should.
We'll do the next one.
So, the problem fundamentally is government power.
What is Google trying to do?
What are tech companies trying to do?
Well, obviously they want the left in power.
They like the left.
And there's a wide variety of reasons for that, which we can talk about the next time I'm here.
But there are trillions of dollars at stake in every election.
Some people are going to benefit enormously.
Some people are going to pay enormously.
When you've got trillions of dollars in play, of course people are going to get corrupted.
People can get corrupted by 50 bucks.
You should see some of the bribes put to these Russian judges in skating competitions.
I mean, it's like, here's a foot rub and a $50 gift certificate to Best Buy, and it's like, yeah, your daughter wins, you know?
Trillions of dollars are at play in these elections.
Of course, people are going to be tempted by that.
Tech companies can swing elections.
You can look it up.
Tech companies can swing elections.
Google can swing an election.
So if you're a politician and you want to take on Google, are they releasing some horrible gas in this?
Am I next?
Sorry, is the subject matter too dry?
So Google can swing an election.
Search engines can swing elections.
What politician is going to want to take that on?
They've got just about everything he ever did and they can swing an election if they want.
I'm not accusing them of anything, I don't have any proof of anything, but it's technically possible.
I think, in a rational universe, if you promote a new source that you've invested in, without telling the user, That it's not organic?
That is fraudulent, morally.
It's fraudulent.
You know, if you're a writer in the stock market space and you praise some company that you have significant holdings in and you don't even tell the reader about your conflict of interest, that is a serious ethical violation of your profession.
When you say, But there's an ad.
People say, okay, it's an ad.
It's not objective.
It's something paid for.
If you are promoting your partners or the people you've invested in without telling the user, come on.
Just wanted to throw this in there to get this in the record because the Canadian government recently announced a $600 million media bailout.
Because, you know, the media won't make that much money.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for watching.
Media's not making as much money as they want.
Well, who is, right?
But $600 million, which is wonderful.
It's absolutely wonderful because it means nobody has to believe anything the Canadian media says anymore.
They're bought and paid for.
Bought and paid for.
Because if the Conservatives come in in Canada, they're going to cancel that.
So they're being well paid to support the Liberals.
And it also tells you that only the most spineless, self-hating worm of a human being would retain any position in the Canadian media.
Because when you're bought and paid for, who on earth with any integrity would want to stay?
Can I write something critical about the liberals?
Well, you can, but we won't be able to pay you.
Oh, okay, that's no problem.
I can do that.
I don't know.
It is a significant issue, the mainstream media versus the alternative media.
I haven't looked this up for a long time.
So, on YouTube, I have over 900,000 subscribers.
I have close to 400,000 subscribers on Twitter.
Now, YouTube, actually, if you don't share your subscriptions, they can't even see your subscriber base.
Like, who's subscribed to you?
So, I'm – and given how – I don't think I'm controversial, I think I'm rational, but apparently rational is just controversial these days.
So, I probably have well north of a million subscribers.
USA Today has 832,000.
I think they have more than one person.
NBC and CBC are cooking around a million.
I have 900,000 to a million.
That is a significant competitive edge.
I can go faster.
I can get material out quicker.
I'm not bought and paid for.
I'm not reliant upon regularly regulatory compliance with diversity mandates from my HR department.
My HR department is a parrot.
So, can the media write about us?
Objectively?
We're kicking their butts.
We're faster.
We're more honest.
We're more trustworthy.
I don't take any ads.
I don't have any monetization.
I am reliant upon telling the truth to the audience.
I work on the Socratic business model, which is talk to people about philosophy and maybe they'll buy you lunch.
Oh, thanks for lunch, by the way.
It's going to be good.
So they write about us, and I don't think people understand that they're writing about their competitors who are kicking their butts.
So when they say, oh, this person is terrible, this person is terrible, do people know what the reality is of the competitive business situation?
And they don't even say, well, we are going to talk a lot of trash about this person, but they really are standing between us and the paradise of financial money, right?
They don't say that.
They don't say, well, I'm writing around a direct competitor, so be sure to take what I say in context.
They never say that.
We're being objective.
We're writing objectively about the people who are winning hearts and minds away from us at a ferocious rate.
So, The solution will not come from the state.
They may try.
And then they'll find out how powerful the tech giants really are.
The solution is going to come from us and from you.
Who do you support?
Who do you give your money to?
Who do you give your eyeballs to?
Who do you give your shares to?
Who do you give your clicks to?
Hardship makes us stronger.
The fact that we're facing a countercurrent of abuse, of deplatforming, means that we have to be stronger and smarter and better.
Without loving it, I welcome the conflict as the chance to improve, to be better.
Now, the MSM, the mainstream media, running to the government, CNN, not doing well.
Who do they run to?
They run to the teacher.
They run to the social media companies.
They demand people be deplatformed.
And they succeed sometimes, but they will fail in the long run.
Because it's corrupt.
It's vicious.
It's underhanded.
Rather than improve themselves, rather than look in the mirror and say, why is it that one guy, one man, one woman, one tiny team can beat us?
Why?
What are we doing wrong?
What do we need to fix?
What do we need to improve?
What are we not listening to?
Rather than do that, they attempt to call in the airstrike of social outrage and deplatforming on their competitors, which means they get weaker every day.
We get stronger.
We may be deplatformed.
We cannot be silenced.
Now, of course, as they get weaker, they get more dangerous.
It's a very common phenomenon in life.
You have almost nothing more to fear than a weak person.
A strong person will confront you.
A weak person will poison you.
My concern is that all of this de-platforming leads us to self-censor.
That's the great danger.
To say, well, there's a smoking crater where this guy was, there's a smoking crater where this woman was, so I'm not going to touch this subject, I'm not going to touch that subject.
I'm going to self-censor.
Then they've what?
We've lost.
Not just our channels, not just our Incomes, not just our influence, but our virtue, our civilization.
De-platforming is a confession of failure.
It's a confession that you cannot meet the arguments, so you must silence the human being.
It's the ultimate ad hominem, which is a confession of loss.
So we must resist, resist with all of our might, the great temptation to self-censor.
There's no guarantee that we will succeed.
Thank you.
I'm a deep believer in free will.
There are larger historical forces, but the future comes down to the will of the individuals.
Whoever wants the future more will get the future.
I want a future of reason, of debate, of challenge, of free speech.
I don't want people deplatformed.
I don't want people who disagree with me to lose their jobs, to be slandered, to be libeled, to be censored, to be silenced.
Everybody has something to add.
That is a story of civilization.
That is a story of an open society.
And that is how we improve.
We're not done, you know.
We're not finished.
As human beings, we have not reached our perfection and we never will.
We can't stop at this point in history and say we have finally achieved so much wisdom that we know who to silence.
We know who's evil.
We know who's wrong.
We know who should just shut up and go away.
And we will destroy the lives of anybody who disagree with us.
That is a hubris and a vanity that Satan himself would blush before.
We're not done.
Of course people are going to be offended by progress.
Do you think slave owners weren't upset when slavery ended?
Do you think that the aristocrats weren't upset when serfdom ended?
Do you think that misogynists weren't upset when women got rights?
Being upset means you're getting somewhere.
Being upset is not an argument.
It is not a repudiation of human progress.
It is a confession that you're upset.
Okay, fine, you're upset.
Learn to manage your own emotions.
Otherwise, you will end up being a tyrant to others.
If you cannot manage yourself, you will end up being forced to control others.
And it is not my job to manage your emotions.
It is not your job to manage my emotions.
It is our job to be honest, to confess our discomfort, to put it aside, and pursue the truth.
And pursue the conversation.
Nobody has a monopoly on the truth.
When we accept that, we get to keep this wonderful civilization where I can stand before you, who may disagree with me enormously, have my say, get your feedback, and we progress.
Thank you very much.
And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
Please like, subscribe, and share, and all of that good stuff to get philosophy out into the world.
And also, equally importantly, go to freedomain.com forward slash donate.
To help out the show, to give me the resources that I need to bring more and better philosophy to an increasingly desperate world.
So thank you so much for your support, my friends.
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