I'm the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
I've been covering technology for them for four years, five years actually now.
And yeah, so this book is basically a summation of the past five years of work, this descent into internet censorship that we've all witnessed and experienced.
Sometimes you have to censor things What we're seeing like now is the political manipulation for power right the versus Censoring things when you have to, because it might be more illegal.
And, uh, we're gonna go nuts, because we got so much to talk about, especially, like, every chapter of your book is gonna be crazy.
And, uh, this is all coming on the heels of more exposés from Project Veritas.
We have, uh, one of their stories now, this guy's basically saying, like, oh, we definitely can censor, you know, right-wing individuals, and... It's just, it just, it pains me to say, it feels so obvious.
You know, it's great to get the confirmation, don't get me wrong, and I, I, you know, it's, it's awesome that we have Veritas doing this work.
But man, to see it again and again and again and to know.
We need something.
And I feel like, you know, something to be done.
And I feel like we've got these DOJ, you know, DOJ people going after Google for antitrust is just not gonna do anything.
So we'll talk about all this.
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We do the show Monday through Friday live at 8 p.m.
And, I don't know, let's just get back into the conversation.
So I don't even know where to begin because let's do this.
Let's talk about this DOJ antitrust suit.
So I've got the story right here from Fox.
Lawmakers hail DOJ antitrust lawsuit against Google is long overdue.
Senator Hawley called it the most important antitrust case in a generation.
Today's lawsuit is the most important in a generation, Senator Josh Hawley said.
Google and its fellow big tech monopolists exercise unprecedented power over the lives of ordinary Americans, controlling everything from the news we read to the security of our most personal information.
And Google in particular has gathered and maintained that power through illegal means.
The DOJ suit alleges that Google has used its dominance in online search and advertising to stifle competition and boost profits.
The suit could be an opening shot in a battle against a number of big tech companies in coming months.
A Google spokesperson told Fox News, Today's lawsuit by the Department of Justice is deeply
flawed.
People use Google because they choose to, not because they're forced to,
or because they can't find alternatives.
We have a fuller statement this morning.
Later, the tech giant released a lengthy blog post in which it said the DOJ complaint
relies on dubious antitrust arguments.
This lawsuit would do nothing to help consumers.
To the contrary, it would artificially prop up lower quality search alternatives, raise phone prices, and make it harder for people to get the search services they want to use.
The lawsuit says, for years Google has entered into exclusionary agreements,
including tying arrangements and engaged in anti-competitive conduct to lock up distribution
channels and block rivals. American consumers are forced to accept Google's policies,
privacy practices, and use of personal data, and new companies with innovative business models
cannot emerge from Google's long shadow. For the sake of American consumers, advertisers,
and all companies now reliant on the internet economy, the time has come to stop Google's
anti-competitive conduct and restore competition, it says.
I think that was a whole lot of hot air and it is the wrong target and it's going to miss because I
think Google makes a really good point.
I don't use Bing.
I don't want to use Bing.
I do use DuckDuckGo sometimes, you know.
So there are choices when it comes to search.
The issue with Google is they're more than just a search engine and the DOJ lawsuit is very much focused on search and how they manipulate search.
No, the issue is that YouTube, for instance, which we're on, is heavily subsidized by other areas of Google.
Because of that, no other video platform can compete.
And some argue, no video platform could survive with how expensive it is to do streaming, to do this.
I mean, I'll tell you guys, we're doing this show right now, cost me nothing.
To press live on this stream, so that all of you can watch, nothing.
Google just says, if we make money off it, we'll take a cut.
So that can't exist on a lot of other platforms, because it's really expensive.
Like podcasting, for instance.
If I got anywhere near the amount of views on podcasting, it would be an insane amount of money to handle all that bandwidth.
So anyway, let's dive into it.
What do you think, Alan?
You were telling me before you don't think this antitrust stuff is going to do anything.
Well, it's important and it's good that the Republicans are punishing Google and being seen to punish Google because I think the idea that a lot of tech companies have had for a long time is we don't have to listen to the warnings of Republicans about censorship because they're never going to regulate us.
They're never going to do anything.
So there's one positive thing to it.
Also positive, the fact that we might actually get to see behind the curtain, see how Google is training its search algorithm.
That's something we don't know about, really.
We've got some idea of it based on whistleblowers I've talked to, based on James O'Keefe's whistleblowers as well.
But if, through the case, we can get a look at that, that would be excellent.
But I don't think antitrust focuses on the right thing.
So it's true that Google is a monopoly that control 90% of search worldwide.
It's true that they're, you know, pretty bad to competitors.
Not just search competitors, but as you said, you know, competing video platforms, competing... Email.
So it'll be very good for companies like Yelp, but it doesn't really focus on, I think, the real problem of Google, which is its vast power over political information, its ability to swing elections, and its ability to destroy people's livelihoods.
Like, if you're a website, if you run a website and it goes from page one of Google to page 1,000, it's going to have a huge impact on your business.
So maybe I'll reap some benefits from an antitrust thing where they, you know, separate all these companies or whatever.
I don't know.
But I kind of feel like... I think, you know, Andrew Yang made this point.
He was like, nobody wants to use Bing.
Antitrust isn't the real issue.
I guess kind of like what you're saying.
But then when you have Google, Alphabet I suppose now, controlling all of these different industries in one big massive corporation, Maybe the issue isn't search.
Maybe the issue is search needs to be separate from video, needs to be separate from email, needs to be separate from, you know, Google Drive and all that stuff.
If you really want competition among the search engines to give, you know, smaller players like DuckDuckGo an advantage, one of the things one of my Google sources told me is that what you need to do is separate the data from the rest of Google.
I have a friend who's doing this big push for owning your own data.
It's like a big movement.
And if that were the case, then that would, that could function.
It could function that way.
away from the data, you make the data non-exclusive and suddenly other search engines can compete.
Actually, you know, I guess in that regard, I would say their search is a monopoly.
It's an interesting phenomenon we're seeing with social media, Twitter, Facebook, and Google, where the only reason they're a monopoly, they dominate these spaces, is because no one uses anything else.
And because no one uses anything else, there can be no competition.
So it is challenging.
I can't blame Twitter because everybody's on Twitter, but because everybody's on Twitter, no one does anything else and it's creating monopolistic problems.
There's an argument that these are natural monopolies because you want to go to a social network that has the most amount of people on it.
That's where you'll get maximum viewership for your content.
And with search, the advantage gets locked in once you have that amount of data, because once you have it, your competitors by definition don't have it.
And Google's really mastered this.
This is why they've gone into smartphones, they've gone into browsers, they've gone into laptops, because that's just more ways to gather data.
But I also think you have to free their software code because if it's private code and they give you data, it could be false data and you wouldn't know.
So the only way to verify that the data is real is if you understand what the code is measuring.
What I would like to see, especially with regards to political manipulation, is how do they train their so-called hate speech algorithms and their disinformation algorithms.
So when you're training an algorithm, the way you do it is you're training it to recognize language if you're trying to detect certain types of speech.
And you'd have to train it on a set of data.
This is hate speech.
This isn't hate speech.
That's what you're giving the algorithm.
So I would love to see their list of examples that they've used to train these algorithms.
That would be the way.
That would be like the smoking... Well, we've had so many smoking guns already.
It's kind of ridiculous to say it, but that would be yet another smoking gun that would conclusively prove political bias.
Although, again, I say that the blackpilled reality is that we've had the smoking guns and nothing has been done about it.
There are some senators who are very good on the issue, Hawley, Cruz, Blackburn, but like the vast majority of Republican senators, they can't be trusted on this issue either.
But I will say the second point, the left supporting censorship, this is extremely naive.
If you think these technologies that have been developed by Silicon Valley won't one day be turned against the left, the anti-war left especially, Yep.
So, most of the book is based on stuff from Silicon Valley sources.
But, by the way, if you want to get it, it's called Deleted, and you can find it at deletedbook.com.
But there's one source I talked to from the government, and he's been following the censorship issue for a long time.
And the way he put it, I think, was very chilling.
He said, Up until 2015-2016, Western establishment elites saw internet-free speech as a good thing because it helped them regime change and destabilize countries abroad.
That was, you know, Twitter, the Arab Spring, Eastern Europe as well, color revolutions.
But, he said, as soon as you had Brexit, as soon as you had Donald Trump, establishment elites realized, oh no, this technology can be used to regime change us.
This was a long time ago, he ended up going, I think, I could be getting the details wrong,
but I think he went to prison, partly because of it, because they were doing, uh, they were
reviewing Stratfor data.
So this is strategic forensics, it's, I guess it's like- So I do remember this, the big Stratfor thing, yeah, yeah, I do remember this.
And so, in it, we learned that, I think the US Air Force was purchasing sock puppet accounts.
These are, a sock puppet account is a dummy, it's a bot, that's what they say, bots.
It's an account with a fake picture and a fake name, and then one person controls 50 of them, they're called sock puppets, to create the perception of popular opinion.
This is one of the biggest problems that's affecting big corporations today.
Like, Pepsi will put out a commercial and it's like a guy drinking, you know, and throwing a football, and they'll get inundated with like 50 to 100 messages on Twitter saying, you're racist, and then all of a sudden they're like, we're being attacked, what do we do?
Quick, issue an apology!
And it's like, dude, it's one guy with 50 accounts.
So we learned this back in 2011, I think it was 2012, that U.S.
military was buying sock puppet accounts.
For what purpose?
Middle Eastern intelligence operations and persuasion, psychological operations, and things like that.
So, this has been an ongoing thing, and at some point, you had the political parties realize they can do it, and I gotta be honest, I think the Democrats figured it out way before the Republicans.
First, I mean, ActBlue, which you're familiar with.
ActBlue is the progressive, you know, fundraising—it's a progressive GoFundMe, essentially.
And then Republicans only launched WinRed recently, and that's the, you know, the Republican version of it, so the Democrats have had You know, have been on the forefront of this.
But something weird happened in the Trump era, like in the 2015 with the Trump army, the Trump train, the memesmiths.
All of a sudden you had an organic explosion of people who are actively producing content and propping up Trump.
Well, the story now, I guess, is that it's such a weird and complicated conspiracy of nonsense.
Was it Ratcliffe who issued the statement basically saying that Hillary Clinton created the Russian intelligence, believed that Hillary Clinton was going to create a fake campaign accusing Trump of working with them to get the press cycle off of her email story, and that Obama was briefed on this so they knew?
At least the insinuation is Hillary Clinton created the fake idea just out of the blue.
It convinced, well maybe they were in on it, I don't know, but all these well-funded foreign policy NGOs that are European NGOs, American NGOs, Just a few days ago, we published a story at Breitbart News about the German Marshall Fund.
This is one of these extremely well-funded foreign policy NGOs, very focused on Russia, very focused on the Balkans.
They're the ones who have been pushing the disinformation narrative, the Russian disinformation narrative, for four years now, and pressuring the tech companies to censor what they call disinformation.
Another one of those groups, the Atlantic Council, are working directly with Facebook.
And this other one, the German Marshall Fund, they've actually said that Breitbart News, Fox News, The Blaze, basically every conservative news website needs to be suppressed by Facebook.
They need to apply friction, because in the words of this think tank, which by the way is funded by the US government, and foreign governments, and the German government, sounds like foreign interference to me, I don't know how that word's defined these days, but they said Facebook has to apply friction, which is their word for suppression of all these so-called deceptive news sites.
There's a funny meme that, someone posted this on 4chan a long time ago, that any sufficiently free internet space becomes right-wing, and the left can only maintain the space if they have hard moderation and censorship.
That seems to be the case.
If you look at Facebook, in spite of the censorship, the top posts are still Daily Wire, Dan Bongino, Fox News, etc.
I think that's right, and I think it's in any period of history where you have one faction, social faction, political faction, whatever, trying to maintain an ideology based on complete myth.
Which many of you know, the assumptions of the cultural left are, you know, gender is a social construct, all of these things.
As soon as you have free speech, that'll be threatened, and the most popular people will be the people who challenge that.
You've got the neocon never-Trumpers who ran full speed of the Democrats after Trump booted them out.
You've got Antifa beating people up on behalf of them.
A guy comes out and he's like, yo, it's really bad that international, you know, multinational billion-dollar corporations are restricting the rights of the people.
Punched in the face.
Joe Biden is funded by Wall Street.
Trump is winning on small donors.
Biden is winning on Wall Street donors.
And Bernie Sanders is supporting Joe Biden.
Talk about backwards and insane.
The billionaires in this country are terrible, destroying everything.
Now go vote for the guy funded by the billionaires.
To be fair, Trump is a billionaire himself, so I guess it's still a weird circumstance.
I think the most frustrating thing about the social justice warrior left, the Antifa left, the left that'll punch you in the face, is that they pretend to be anti-establishment.
They've been doing that for years, but actually they've found themselves in alliance with elites and with corporations because they're the only powers in society that actually suppress the truth.
And they need the truth to be suppressed because their entire ideology is based on nonsense.
Yeah, I think they're being manipulated by the powers because they're not smart.
I don't want to say they're stupid because it's a broad generalization, but anyone that's out on the street just doing random street violence is pretty dumb.
the populist left and the populist right is probably the thing that terrifies the establishment the
most. I kind of think that's... If you look back through history, there's always, you know,
new political consensus is formed to replace the old ones.
The Reagan consensus, the neoliberal consensus replaced the FDR consensus.
There's a new consensus waiting to happen, the populist left and the populist right are forming the nucleus of it, but it's being held back by this establishment class that simply won't let go.
I think that was starting to happen during Occupy Wall Street.
So, the early days of Occupy Wall Street, when I was down there, I remember seeing a really, like, a 60-year-old man and woman, and they were sitting in chairs with an American flag.
Nobody complained, and they had it set up, and people were talking about it, because the core of what brought people out was, the big banks in Wall Street are corrupting our system, it's revolving door politics, the whole thing is broken, and you had conservatives, libertarians, and leftists who had shown up.
Then, along came intersectionality.
Identity politics.
The older people who could not live in the park ended up leaving, the younger people did, and then these wealthy college-educated Brooklynite kids with trust funds, not all of them but a handful of them, I know them personally, they are trust fund kids, started preaching intersectionality and identity politics.
And then all of a sudden, you end up with someone, you know, Serena Williams, who is a black woman worth tens of millions of dollars, and she's oppressed, and the homeless guy sleeping under the bridge is an oppressor because he's white.
What that did was it fractured any possibility of the populist left and right coming together.
Because now you got AOC who is full on board with overtly racist ideology.
That is like... It's freaky how racist these people are.
They're calling it anti-racism and then literally saying, but we should have racial discrimination.
Yeah, okay, that's racism.
Well, no, but we're anti because it's for good things.
I don't care what you think it's for.
It's funny because the ideology they espouse, they're like racism is prejudice plus power.
Therefore, only white people can be racist.
Anti-racism is quite literally the same thing when it's for minorities and you discriminate against specific minorities and other racial groups for the benefit of particular racial groups.
Machine learning fairness is an entirely new field set up in universities, and it's being funded by Silicon Valley, and they have their own machine learning fairness departments now.
The point is to bring computer science and critical race theory together, and left-wing sociology and left-wing feminism.
They want the assumptions of those left-wing fields to be embedded in computer science.
So, an algorithm, an unbiased algorithm, is just a machine for noticing patterns.
It's a machine for analyzing data.
And pattern recognition, noticing data, analyzing data, is actually inherently right-wing, because it busts politically correct narratives.
Imagine if you train a machine to look at crime data, or you train a machine to look at, you know, the data of women going into certain fields or certain educational fields, you know, or, you know, train a machine to who's more likely to commit a terrorist attack around the world.
Like, that's going to spit out some very politically incorrect conclusions.
So this is why they created machine learning fairness, to bias the algorithms.
So I guess, theoretically, they could put weight in them.
If this word emerges, then apply it.
But I don't see it working.
You know, I did a segment on my second channel talking about the problem with Wikipedia and critical theory in general.
The example I used is transgender.
And so what the leftist started doing was pulling the clip out of context to make it seem like I was anti-trans.
Here's what I actually said.
If you go on Wikipedia, which is a very formulaic and logic-based system, granted it's subject to manipulation and bias, but the way it works is very simple.
Present a source.
What does the source say?
Include it.
Cite it.
So, you go to Wikipedia, and you have this web of all of these different articles that interlink with each other.
Go to Woman on Wikipedia, and what does it say?
It says, a woman is an adult human female.
And then you click female, and it says, barring, you know, certain abnormalities, irregularities, females are the members of the, you know, species that produce ova, etc, etc.
And then if you go to male, that produce a sperm, and then it says, man, an adult human male.
Then go to trans woman on Wikipedia, and it gives you this very different definition.
So, it specifically says that The point I'm trying to make is, how do you have the idea that a trans woman is a woman, but these two articles can't connect to each other?
Right?
So if a woman is an adult human female, then a trans woman can't, you know, according to Wikipedia, be a woman because a woman produces ova, so it doesn't make sense.
The logic of the system is impeded by the fracturing of what the ideology represents.
Which is why so often you hear anti-SW types say, define woman.
Because we can very easily using a system like Wikipedia, but in critical theory you can't.
So the point I'm getting to is if you try... Well, this is why they have to invent the rhetorical trick of, you know, gender and sex are two separate things.
So you can still have the biology, but you also have this concept of gender.
The problem is that when you have Wikipedia telling you... So, okay, what they need to do now is they need to go in and they change the definition of what woman is.
So that's why you get anti-CW people saying define woman because the official definition on Google, Merriam-Webster, and in Wikipedia is adult human female.
What we're trying to do with- Well, there will be some difficulties like that, but at the end of the day, what these leftists are trying to do is Every definition that these algorithms are trained on, everything they're trained to recognize, whether it's hate speech or misinformation, the people doing the defining, the people training the algorithms how to recognize those things, will be left-wingers.
So it'll always be their definition.
There will be some cases where, like gender, where the definition is very very tricky for the reasons you mentioned, but there will be other cases where The algorithm will only recognize the left-wing definition of something.
I've had this conversation with Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, who did this so-called squared hoax.
Very, very smart individuals.
And Peter Boghossian, for instance, he believes, and this was a while ago we had this conversation, so I don't, you know, maybe his opinion's changed.
that the intersectionality emerged through the colleges in the eighties and all the stuff.
My argument was maybe, but it only exists today because of the accident of the Facebook
algorithm.
And so I've mentioned this several times, but for you, Al, I'll tell it now to everyone
listening.
Basically what happened is in the early days of Facebook, they were trying to figure out
how to maximize site longevity, like how long someone was on the website.
And so they started creating feed algorithms.
It was a combination of factors.
In the early days of Facebook, you just got reverse chronological feed, right?
You followed somebody who were friends.
If they post something, you got it.
As the site grew bigger and bigger, people started following and liking more and more pages.
You end up with someone who, on average, had 300 friends, but also liked 300 pages, and their feed was so fast, they couldn't read through it.
So Facebook said, let's create an algorithm to make sure we're showing them what they most likely are to enjoy and click on.
What ended up happening was, around the same time, digital blogs started popping up, and it was partly because of Facebook they started making money becoming successful.
The articles were getting shared on Facebook, Facebook liked that because it was creating activity on the platform, and then these companies like Huffington Post, et cetera, started making money.
But something interesting happens when you incorporate Facebook constantly updating its algorithm to work better and better and better.
We ended up getting waves of police brutality videos.
There was a period where there was one website that was ranked global top 400 or something, when it was nothing but police brutality videos.
Why?
Because it was what people were clicking on.
So Facebook kept shoving it in people's faces, just beating them over the head with it, like, this is what you want!
And it was shockingly crazy footage of cops just beating people and beating people.
So what happens is the news organizations, the blogs, that started writing shock content started seeing more traffic and making more money.
Eventually they learned, wait a minute, there's more to life than just police brutality.
There's also racism and sexism, right?
So some article, some website started writing racism, racism.
Some said sexism, sexism.
Racism is X, sexism is Y. You get X views or Y views.
Combine the two and you get X plus Y views.
Intersectional articles started getting way more traffic.
The racist, sexist police.
Police brutality targeting, you know, black people.
And boom, Black Lives Matter pops into existence.
So what happens is these news organizations realized, and whether it was on purpose or not, They made more money when they wrote about all of these subjects combined.
And now you actually see this stuff.
Like, Vice had one article that was really funny that it was like, it was like black trans women of color fighting back against police brutality for Black Lives Matter, and it's like, they just jammed every possible keyword in there, because Facebook would then share it with more communities, they would get more traffic and make more money.
Thus, intersectionality was perfect for this algorithm.
It started to emerge because the algorithm was trying to find what, you know, people would want to see the most.
But isn't that how politics has always worked though?
It's always been reaction and anti-reaction.
I think what was happening on social media was the things people wanted to talk about that maybe the establishment class didn't want to talk about.
They were sort of out of touch by then.
That rose to the fore.
But it was still a battle between two distinct sides and I think the anti-SGW side was actually winning because they had the facts, they had the arguments on their side.
Their content was going just as viral.
They were the ones who got Trump elected.
So if the social media companies hadn't clamped down, I think this would have resolved itself naturally.
So you have these videos where these women are like back Damn, they're screaming!
I tell you this, you take a milquetoast vanilla conservative wearing a suit saying, you know, I just think that, you know, we should work hard and make money and then you put that next to the women screaming at the top of their lungs, what's a regular person gonna think?
It is backfiring, in my opinion.
Now, whether or not Trump wins is yet to be seen.
We've got two weeks.
I'll tell you this, man.
Suspending the New York Post, locking down their social media, was such an insanely desperate move.
The mask has been ripped off.
There's no more facade.
We know exactly what they're doing.
And it might work.
The fact that you have these women in their cars screaming like lunatics, it's because they're so heavy-handed in their manipulation.
That these people are trapped in a paranoid and delusional reality where Trump is literally Hitler and he's taking kids and throwing them in cages and they're freaking out and panicking because they see it all day non-stop and they can't break out of this just trap from big tech.
Well, I mean, the liberals' media model since 2016 has been, you know, Trump shock content.
We're going to shock everyone with how evil and bad Trump is, and that's what's leading to the screaming women in their cars.
But I will push back on the idea that only allowing the reasonable conservatives to stay on social media is somehow a help to the movement, because They're precisely the ones that are least likely to push back on this craziness.
They're the most likely to just apologize, say, oh you called me a racist, I can explain 10 reasons why I'm not a racist, and that's not convincing to people, that's not persuasive to people, it just looks weak and stupid, and you don't really challenge the arguments.
So that's that's the downside there.
Certainly for like elections it might be a help because voters, undecided voters, moderates will just see the craziness of the left And respond accordingly.
But ultimately, I think, you know, if Trump loses the election, it will be big tech that stole it.
And this is the whole thesis of the book.
When you start manipulating search results on Google so that people, you know, it all comes down to undecided voters.
So you might be like a heavy news consumer, especially if you're watching this show.
You're very clued up on all the issues, very hard to manipulate you.
But think about what an undecided voter Someone who doesn't follow politics every day is seeing when they go on to Google to find out about the two candidates.
The journalists are in, you know, it's really funny, it's like, here's the way I see it, they're all in the ivory tower, and they're sitting in this room with each other, all laughing and sharing fake news with each other, thinking they're in the real world.
The plan for polarization is to get people to move closer to the center.
We have thousands of people on the platform who have gone from far right... This is the way Facebook defines far right, by the way, not necessarily the way we define it.
Who have gone from far right to center in the past year.
So we can build a model from those people and try to make everyone else on the right follow the same path.
He goes on to explain how this would work.
Let's say everyone who goes from far right to center watched video X. Then maybe we adjust the priority of video X in the feed.
But it's probably going to be much more complicated than that.
So this is the stuff you don't see.
We can see the bans of the New York Post, we can see these high-profile bans.
We don't see this very subtle manipulation that's going on behind the scenes, pinpointing exactly what your beliefs are and tailoring the content to those people.
They used to do that, as you say, just based on how interested you are in a certain topic.
That's what would drive the algorithm.
But it's gotten much more specific than that, and much more focused on changing people's opinions.
This is like their attempt at brainwashing, whether they work or not is another question.
So what they're doing is you've got like a regular, you got a working class dad who's like firing up the grill and having a burger and they're like, oh, that far right guy, he's a white supremacist.
This is another area where we've actually literally caught them red-handed.
So back in early 2019, I got a leak from a Google insider, and he literally called this leak the smoking gun proving Google's bias.
Obviously lawmakers did nothing about it because, you know, we don't have enough smoking guns.
But this was YouTube's controversial search query blacklist.
It's an actual list they have inside YouTube with a list of so-called controversial search queries, and whenever they add a term to that list, What it does is it tells the algorithm to prioritize all the videos from the mainstream media and shut out anyone that doesn't meet YouTube standards, meets YouTube's approval.
And the reason I found out about this list was because a left-wing journalist had reached out to Google saying, look at all these pro-life videos in the top 10 search results for abortion.
Within hours, Google goes in, they alter that file, they reorder the search results completely.
So they'll send a message, which is a veiled threat to a corporation, right?
So let's say, you know, Alum's Nachos is a company.
And I see a proud boy eating them.
I send a message saying, I couldn't help but notice that the Proud Boys were eating your nachos.
Do you support white supremacy, and why do you support white supremacy?
And they immediately respond with, we hereby disavow, we want nothing, and then the journalist puts out a message, Nacho Chip Company disavows the Proud Boys.
You say, uh, when did you start beating your wife?
Right?
It's like, wait, hold on, it's a loaded question.
The assumption is, right.
So what they'll do is they'll reach out to your business partner, to your partners, and it's almost like tortious interference.
They will ask a loaded question.
Now many of these companies, they get this email and it'll say, we saw the Proud Boys wearing your shirt, Fred Perry.
Why do you support white supremacy?
And they know there's nothing they can do.
The company knows that it's total BS.
But they're going to get a PR hit unless they play ball.
They don't care about you, so they just say, send them the generic response, we hereby disavow all of that.
And then boom.
So I talked to people, I was talking to these guys recently, and they wanted to get like a photograph and stuff, and I said, I'm not interested in doing photos with other companies.
And I was like, because of the political ramifications.
And they're like, no, no, no, no, trust me, these companies don't care.
And I said, no, no, no, you don't understand.
When the company ends up getting inundated by Antifa and the far left, and then not caring about me issues some stupid statement insulting and defaming me, then I have to deal with them, not the wacko far left.
If I'm seen in a photograph or, you know, I don't think I have to worry about this too much, but if there's somebody who is seen in a photograph with, say, Coke, a Coca-Cola executive, then Coke's gonna be like, we don't know who this guy is or care, disavow.
And they'll put out a statement saying white supremacy is wrong and we hereby disavow this individual, thus creating a newspaper story calling you a white supremacist.
So my book is very positive about the early years of the Internet when there were no big tech giants.
But there's one very bad thing that's been the case on the Internet for a long time.
I've got a whole chapter in the book on this.
I call it the defamation engine.
So before the Internet, if there was a political scandal, if you were in the news for some bad thing, first of all, it generally only happened to politicians and celebrities, people who were public figures.
Second of all, you know, it's in the news for a day, it's on the TV, it's in a newspaper, then the newspaper gets chucked in the bin, TV moves on to the next thing, it goes away.
On the internet, it doesn't go away, the internet is forever.
As soon as any, you know, online news site, BuzzFeed, the Daily Beast, write something about you, and by the way, they do it to everyone now, not just public figures, as soon as they write it about you, it's on your Google results forever, and Google will prioritize it, and Wikipedia will cite it, and they won't cite articles from right-wing media potentially debunking it.
So this is what I call the defamation engine.
It's the connection between the media, Wikipedia, and Google.
I'm going to be a little light on the details, just because...
I don't want to exacerbate anything, but there is a group of individuals who have a forum that's very active and they've come up with an operation that's very, very, very clever.
The idea is to go on Wikipedia to random articles, nothing important, and put edits into random articles that are inane and arbitrary.
For instance, they'll go to the Wikipedia page for cardboard and put, you know, Hans Schmidt in 1932 developed a new means of manufacturing cardboard.
Nobody cares.
It's not vandalism.
It's a random tidbit.
And so what happens is enough of these edits bypass the vandalism filters from the actual Wikipedia editors.
So if someone goes to, say, Joe Biden's Wikipedia page and says, you know, Joe Biden is an abusive father whose son's a crackhead or whatever, they'll immediately jump in and say, get rid of this vandalism.
If someone goes in and says, you know, Joe Biden was using his son as an intermediary to make money off of Chinese equity investment and cite Breitbart, they'll say Breitbart is unreliable.
Remove it.
But if someone goes to the Wikipedia page for cheddar cheese and writes, Alan Bakari was a famous dairy farmer in 1871 who developed a new process for manufacturing cheese that lowered the price dramatically, nobody notices that, nobody cares, and it could sit there forever.
Now imagine you get thousands of people doing this.
So that's essentially one of the ideas.
Wikipedia becomes completely unreliable because it's full of fluff.
Fake factoids that no one can tell is real or fake.
It's completely broken when you look at, like, Vox is credible and Breitbart isn't.
And I'm like, Vox has published ridiculous, you know, without getting into naming people, there are some people whose opinions flip depending on what's politically expedient.
Very famous individuals, lefty, Vox, high ups, higher ups, and they'll tweet something like, we should do this with the Supreme Court, and then like a day later, like, we should do the opposite.
Whatever works for their politics, it's very, very obvious.
So I don't know exactly where we're at recently, but this was like a month or two ago, that basically Patreon's gonna be on the hook for tens of millions of dollars because of arbitration.
Whether they win or lose, they have to pay up front.
So Patreon could be over, as far as I know.
And I don't have all the full details in front of me, but the general idea was They banned several people, and they had this provision that you couldn't sue them, you had to go to arbitration.
So then, these people were like, hey everybody, file a complaint, sue them for five bucks or whatever.
So Patreon then says, we're going to arbitration, and they say, great, you've got to front X dollars to the arbiters, to the arbitration.
We're talking about people who have tens of thousands of followers.
And so all of those lawsuits, all those arbitration claims, and then all of a sudden Patreon's on the hook for tens of millions of dollars they can't pay.
And so they're in trouble.
Actually, Patreon tried suing the users back to block the arbitration.
It's because Patreon is a financial company in some way as well.
Wikipedia I think it's a lot more difficult because they can claim traditional Section 230 protections because they're just hosting what all these anonymous editors say.
I think that works on Patreon because Patreon, first of all, they're gonna have to pay thousands of these, right?
Second of all, they're not as wealthy as, say, a Google or a Facebook or a YouTube.
These companies have endured billion-dollar fines from the European Union.
They're still standing.
It may work on Wikipedia, actually, because the Wikipedia Foundation has a few hundred million, I think, but it's not as insanely wealthy as a Google or a Facebook.
Think about how amazing it is on Wikipedia that you could do an hour-long lecture on the dangers of white supremacy and the evil of white supremacy, and then they will call you a white supremacist or alt-right.
And when you try telling them that you actually campaign against it, and part of my work is criticizing it, they say, you're not reliable.
Well, actually, they'll give a concession to the left on this.
If you look at... I did a chapter on Wikipedia, and while I was researching the chapter, I was comparing the Wikipedia pages of people like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs to people like Rachel Maddow.
And at the top of Rachel Maddow's page, you see Rachel Maddow, in an interview with... I can't remember the exact channel, described herself as, you know, a political moderate with some left-wing beliefs, blah, blah, blah.
It's like the Encyclopedia Britannica is liable for defamation.
If the Encyclopedia Britannica defames you, you can sue them.
Wikipedia is a more powerful and more widely read version of that.
The fact that it's not liable is just insane.
And you know, like I said, I agree with Twitter, with Facebook, they publish Well, they don't publish, but they host millions and millions of content, millions and millions of posts, new ones every day.
So yeah, sure, if you held them liable for all of those posts, of course their business model would not make sense.
But Wikipedia is just big pages like an encyclopedia.
It would not be crippling to them if they were liable.
I was at an event in the UK years and years and years ago.
And they found me through Occupy stuff and they wrote the bio for my introduction off of Wikipedia and it was one of the funniest things.
Tim Pool invented a zeppelin and I was just like, excuse me sir, you clearly just pulled that off Wikipedia.
You have no idea who I am, you have no idea what I've done, and there were other instances where people had been cancelled because of negative articles on their Wikipedia pages.
The first thing people see when they search you is the card on Google that says Wikipedia.
It doesn't matter what you want to credit, it matters that people just use it.
Which is why there's a group of people now that want to add inane and innocuous random edits to completely break the system because then people are going to be like, what?
The dairy farmer?
What is this?
So are you both familiar with the Gell-Man amnesia effect?
It was this guy who made it up, and they said, calling it Gel-Man Amnesia Effect makes it sound more prestigious and like official, and it was kind of a joke.
What it means is, you pull up a newspaper, and let's say you're an expert on big tech censorship.
And you see a story on the front page of the Washington Post that says, there is no big tech censorship.
And you laugh, saying, I know that's true because I've actually talked to these people.
Fake news.
You turn the page, and then it says, War in Syria.
Bashar al-Assad does X. And you go, wow.
You forget.
You get amnesia.
You saw something in which you were an expert, and you knew it was fake.
But then when you read something in which you're not familiar with, you assume it's true.
That's the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
So what this operation ends up doing is, eventually someone is going to be a dairy farmer, and knows how to make cheddar cheese, is going to be like, there's no al-Bukhari.
What is this?
And they just start questioning every other article he's read.
Maybe not.
Maybe he'll have amnesia.
But that's the idea.
They're sprinkling and peppering it with all this random garbage so that you can't even know.
You could be reading a page and like, that's just totally made up and you can't tell because it sounds real.
I know people whose job it's called reputation management, and they know how to manipulate, and they have high-powered Wikipedia editors who look like regular people who just want to, you know, help out.
When in fact they're paid seven figures to control Wikipedia.
And so there are princes and princesses and politicians across Europe and the US who hire these companies to go in.
They know how to remove articles from the front page of Google.
They know how to manipulate the search engine algorithms to get them off.
They know how to spam Google to get other sources pushed to the top.
And they know how to place stories in reputable sources so they can control your reputation.
You can pay them for this.
Now if you're not rich enough to pay them then they just call you, you know, alt-right and whatever and then there you go.
It's interesting too because it feels like Wikipedia is a place where wealthy people of prominence can control the narrative, but poor people who become prominent just end up as white supremacists.
I mean, that's true for a lot of the Internet, to be honest.
But let's do this.
Let's talk about anonymity, because that's one of the big issues with Wikipedia that you brought up, and we talked a little bit about this earlier.
I'm torn on whether or not people should be allowed to be anonymous on the internet, because what ends up happening is sock puppets.
You get one guy controlling a hundred accounts, convincing Oreo to, like, abandon their, you know, pumpkin spice flavor because it's offensive to Native Americans or some other garbage.
I'm making that up.
That's not a real thing to happen.
I'm just saying, like, you get it, right?
If people had to actually have their names and their faces, they're going to be more respectful.
Not completely, but more.
And they're less likely, and they're not going to get away with sock puppeting and manipulating these companies.
The problem with more respectful is also more respectful of the people in power, the people who control the narrative, the people who can destroy them.
I think in the age of cancel culture, and that'll be fake respect by the way, yes I respect the Soviet Commissar because if I don't respect the Soviet Commissar I'm going to the gulag.
That's what happens when you make everyone accountable for what they say and you don't give people private spaces to discuss controversial topics.
I think in the age of cancel culture anonymity couldn't be more important.
Even before the end of the founding fathers thought it was important to, you know, have a free and open debate about the Constitution.
They wrote under various pseudonyms in the Federalist Papers, right?
So it's been around for a long time.
French dissidents under the monarchy in the 1700s wrote on a pseudonym, you know, Voltaire being the most famous.
So it's been used for a long time for dissident thinkers to express controversial ideas with that while avoiding the consequences of the powerful forces of the day.
And given how powerful council culture is today, I think it's more important than ever.
But here's the thing.
Here's the kicker.
It doesn't actually exist.
We think it does, but it doesn't.
So one of the most terrifying sources I spoke to in the book, by the way, deletedbook.com if you want to get it, is someone who doesn't work for one of the big companies, someone who works for the ad tech industry.
Now the ad tech industry has a huge interest in de-anonymizing people because they want to find out exactly what people are interested in, even when they're posting anonymously.
So what she told me is that they've actually paid people to scrape, say, YouTube comments.
People commenting under this video might think they're anonymous, but actually, your comments may well be being scraped by one of these ad tech companies, stored on a database, so even if you delete it, they'll still have it.
And then they're scanning the text to match your writing style to, say, your Facebook post or your Twitter post, because they just want to find out everything about you.
It's quite a benign motivation, but you can easily see it being applied in non-benign
ways.
And the technology they use to do this is extremely sophisticated.
So what my source told me is that they're actually working on technology that can identify
people based on not just their unique writing style, but the speed of your mouse movements,
how fast you type on your keyboard, all these unique giveaways.
So what you do is you create a physical mechanism That you type on your keyboard and then it translates to actual physical robotic hands that perfectly separate each keystroke by a millisecond.
Yeah, I will say that the point I make in the book is the privacy guys, the people who value privacy and anonymity, they've got to get ahead of this stuff.
You can write programs.
The same technology that can be used to de-anonymize someone can be used to re-anonymize them by masking those unique signals.
And so I was reading something about how people think they're listening to your voice and giving you ads based on what you say.
It's not true.
They just know too much about you to the point where they can predict seemingly innocuous like like unrelated things So what happens is I remember I went to I went to Walmart and they had these TVs on sale fuck 200 bucks And I remember looking at him again I go home and I go I'm on a computer and I see on Facebook the ad for Walmart TVs in the middle of the aisle just like I had seen and I was like And so it's really simple.
My location data gave away that I was at a Walmart.
Facebook's machines know the average duration between when a person of a certain height, weight, and age has to go to the bathroom.
They know when you wake up, because they know when the phone's not moving and when the phone's moving.
They know when the phone goes out for lunch.
You're at your office, then all of a sudden you're at Hardee's or whatever, you know, they have your location services.
And if they don't have yours, they have your friend, who's saying, hey, I'm getting you the burger at Hardee's, or, hey, I'm at the counter right now, meet me at the front, I'll order for you.
Things like that, they all know it.
You take all of this data.
I say they know when you poop because that's the shocking and funny thing to say, but they know everything about you.
They probably know when you're banging your wife or your husband or whatever.
They know.
And it's because all of these little things combined give them a detailed map of your life.
So you might not think it matters that, oh, you know, I leave my phone in the office when I go to the bathroom, whatever.
Yeah, people are celebrating that the New York Post story got more distribution than it would have otherwise received because of the censorship, so it was a beneficiary of the Streisand effect.
That's great, by the way.
The New York Post has some great journalists.
I know some of them.
They're awesome.
Emma Jo Morris, John Levine, all these people.
They're great.
Most people who get censored, that doesn't happen to them.
When you do that, all of a sudden now, Facebook has a list, a very interesting list, of phone numbers, and on yours, it says, mom, dad, and then, you know, your siblings, Janet, Bill, or whatever.
You might even say brother, sister.
It then has a phone number, you know, 8-6-7-5-3-0-9, listed as mom.
Then it has a phone number that says, you know, Janet Crosland or whatever, whatever, I don't know your mom's name.
Someone who is, you know, in the immediate family, but then it has the same number, 8-6-7-5-3-0-2, in your phone as dad.
Now it knows who your mom's husband is.
Get it?
So let's say your dad never signs up.
They know who your dad is based on your mom calling him Jim and you calling him dad and having the same phone number and it's a game of Sudoku.
All of these things, they take all these little bits of data, combine it, and if you've never signed up for any of these websites, Everyone else has given your data to them.
And even if you don't have the Facebook Messenger app, or if you just visit a website that has like one of the little Facebook buttons, one of the little Twitter buttons, it's getting your data.
And it will build a profile for you and everyone you know.
And you don't know exactly what data is being given to them.
And the craziest thing about it is, when I tell people this, like, listen, Your contact list has your significant other listed as, you know, GF or girlfriend or something.
It now knows you're in a relationship and it knows who you're in a relationship with because that phone number then correlates to someone who calls your girlfriend Becky.
They now know who Becky is.
Then someone has, you know, little sister and they're like, now we know who your sister is.
The phone number thing is really obvious to us because we can understand how to correlate that data, but they can build a shadow profile from you off of really innocuous data like when you went to Burger King.
I'm saying you could carry your phone into a Burger King and it can be like this phone and this phone were in the Burger King at the same time and moved around at the same time.
Well, the interesting thing about the censorship is that it still can't bypass human communication.
And so they can ban Milo, Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, etc., but they can't stop them from communicating in the real
world.
And so it can actually backfire and amplify these ideas, like we saw with the New York Post.
Now, the best thing they can do is nuke the movement from the smallest grassroots first.
And then let the higher... Like, you know, I think banning Milo, for instance, was a really, really bad idea.
They should have slowly just started banning his followers until he had no influence anymore.
Because now he's an account with no interaction, no engagement, and then he has to change up his strategy and his tactics to do... They could have manipulated it that way.
Instead, they went from the top and it caused the grassroots to freak out, like, whoa, they banned this guy and it created a big story.
Not that I'm saying he's better off for it.
I think banning him was bad for him in the long run.
But that's what they can do.
But what's happening now is they're trying to actively censor.
But when they do, Alex Jones still has his own website and his own infrastructure and he can build his own thing.
They're not strong enough to erase someone from the internet yet.
Though they have started removing people from society in general, like Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys, for instance.
He gets banned from his banks, he gets banned from Uber, he gets banned from MailChimp, which I guess he doesn't even use and never even signed up for.
So the issue right now is, Well, they're working on their method, right?
Because one of the things I know they're working on is link banning.
You know, so Alex Jones can have his own platform, but if you try and share his links on these mainstream platforms, you're not going to let that happen.
Why is it that a black man can go out in San Francisco and say censorship is bad and a white antifuck screaming the n-word can knock his teeth out and the media doesn't freak out over that?
It was acceptable in this weird algorithmic universe they've created.
The AI that they built and their manipulation, because it's human beings at the end of the day, can't get into your home and they can't get on that stage with you to stop you.
They can't censor you when you have a constitutional right to speak.
But they can inflame some Antifa people, allow them to organize violent riots, and show up to your home and punch you in the face and knock your teeth out.
They didn't go to that guy's house, I'm just saying.
They've been going to people's houses.
So, they really need cancel culture to scare people into adhering to the manipulations that they want.
And they really, really need Antifa to knock people out.
Otherwise, what does the enforcement actually mean in the real world when people defy you?
They want to end the defiance in the physical realm, they'll punch you in the face.
They can already end the defiance in the digital world by just banning you and nuking you.
There's some 70-year-old dude who owns and runs all of these companies, and he's sitting in a room, and it was 1977 when he accidentally invented a sentient computer that's telling him what to do, and then he's going and giving his underlings orders.
That'd be a great movie.
Unfortunately, reality is actually scarier than that.
It's human beings, and they're knocking dominoes over, not realizing what they're building around them.
And so imagine that, but imagine they're connected in a big circle, and that's what it is.
So Jack Dorsey creates a platform where he lets the left run rampant, and then eventually the whole political world is inflated with this psychotic far-left ideology that he allowed, and then it infects his own brain, and then he gives money to it, a guy calling for racial segregation, he gives money to him.
He's created this world where it's literally, he's encouraging people to make sludge and refuse, and then he's accidentally eating it, And corrupting his own mind and body.
Yeah, well, then the Democrats believe it all too.
And the Republicans are not so much.
I wonder why that is.
Why, you know, when we look at the Pew research thing, where it shows the Democrats moving very far left, why the Republicans have stayed very much where they are, even with Trump and the rhetoric and cancel culture and all that stuff.
I think it's because, I think Jonathan Haidt talks about this, you know, he's the psychologist who does all this research about the roots of our political beliefs.
He mentions, you know, conservatives are quite good at understanding liberals, often because, you know, they were former liberals, but liberals are terrible at understanding conservatives.
So this is why I think Trump still has a fighting chance.
We have all this censorship, we have all this propaganda, but because liberals don't understand conservatives very well, don't understand, you know, normal non-liberal people very well, a lot of the propaganda is just bad.
Well, so what I think is happening is there's another chart that I love to share where it shows moderates.
60% of the moderate news diet is liberal and 30% is conservative, or it's like 66 to 33.
Conservatives is the other way around.
It's 66% conservative and 33% liberal.
Liberals only consume liberal news.
So I think one of the things we saw with Gallup recently is that if you compare party affiliation from their latest data set in September to 2016, Democrats went from a D plus five advantage to an R plus one advantage.
That's a huge swing.
People are leaving the Democratic Party and it's because, I always hear it, they started researching on their own.
The people who are in these videos screaming like lunatics, they're not doing any research at all.
The reason why Biden is a sort of a strong candidate for the Democrats, you know, stronger than the alternatives, is for the same reasons that the liberals would never imagine.
and we go, let me check that, I don't know about that.
I think the threats of violence, the screaming banshees on social media has scared people.
And there was this research I've cited quite a bit in the past couple weeks, because we're getting close to the election, showing that 10% of Trump voters will lie about who they're voting for.
You look at this early voting right now, and a lot of states, it's below 10% for Democrats.
Democrats are supposed to be way, way above Republicans in early and absentee voting, and in Ohio today, Republicans were winning.
The other day in Michigan, Republicans were winning, but it switched back.
Democrats took a bump.
So there's a lot of states where Democrats should have a massive advantage and they only have a tiny advantage, or a moderate advantage, suggesting they're underperforming.
But if he wins, which I hope he will, do we have to deal with these screaming, no offense, women in the car or whoever, screaming young people, uneducated people that are freaking out?
Because they're addicted and they're on Facebook and Facebook is beating them over the head and screaming in their faces and they're not smart enough to do a Google search.
I mean, the Gravel Institute, which is very, very far left, put out a video recently criticizing the tech giants
for their control over information.
Tulsi Gabbard gets it.
She's talked about this a lot.
She's come on Breitbart News Radio and talked about it.
So she's happy to work across the aisle.
And I think, especially the anti-war left, as you said, Tim, they're getting censored as well.
So there's some recognition in some parts of the left that big tech, the power of big tech giants is a problem.
The question is, will that ever gain momentum?
Because, you know, for the left now, it's all about freak... The way to gain followers on the left is to freak out about Trump, to freak out about so-called hate speech, demand even more censorship.
So, um... I think if Trump wins, and Republicans don't get the Senate or the House, Trump's out.
They'll impeach him instantly.
They're gonna pack the courts.
They're gonna add five or, you know, seven more justices to completely overrule whatever's there.
They are going to fundamentally dismantle and destroy this country.
There's already an article that says, abolish the Constitution.
No joke.
Straight up.
It's from the New Republic.
Not some fringe site.
It's the New Republic.
It's a prominent leftist website saying, abolish the Constitution.
They are not slowing down.
They are speeding up and appeasement doesn't work.
When they say, we don't really want to just get rid of all the cops, we're talking about defunding.
Then the New York Times publishes, yes, we mean abolish the police, straight up.
Then when you start saying, okay, we'll give a little bit.
They've defunded, I think, like 160 departments around the country.
Yes, to varying degrees.
Some very, very large numbers, some smaller numbers.
And then, does the left say, good, now we can have a conversation of what to do?
No, now they say, great, the next thing we want to abolish is the Constitution.
So they're planting the seeds because they will never stop pulling.
If Joe Biden wins, unless... So look, even if the Republicans win everything, then what are they going to do?
What are they going to do?
Nothing.
They're going to beg the New York Times to call them cool.
Will you call me cool and write a cool op-ed about me?
No, you're a fascist.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I'll do whatever you say.
Now you've got a mix of many of these, you know, you've got people on the right, libertarian right, and conservatives being like, we shouldn't interfere in the free speech of these big tech companies.
We should let them control the politics of this country and just run us out of office permanently.
If Trump and the Republicans win, there is a chance that right now with Trump with his hand on the cliff holding up everybody else can pull us up and slowly start to push back.
Trump banning critical race theory was a really good example of this.
All of a sudden we started hearing stories from people on Twitter, I lost my job, my company cancelled our contracts and everything.
It's over.
I can't believe I went to school for this.
There was one really funny one where a person was like, I went to school for, you know, five years learning about diversity and inclusivity and inclusion and now Trump's banned it and I'm completely out of a job and don't know what I'm going to do.
That's Trump getting rid of this crazy psychotic behavior.
If Biden wins and the Democrats take over, then you are going to live in an algorithmically manipulated universe where Republicans will probably never win again.
They'll pack the courts.
It will be... Listen, it's not going to be this utopia that people on the left think it is.
It's not going to be Skittles and candy canes and rainbows and universal health care.
It's going to be Hitler in a bikini with a female body dancing, doing Tai Chi with the Incredible Hulk while someone sings a nursery rhyme.
That's a real video.
That was a mash-up because a computer algorithm was trying to find things that people liked and it mashed them all together.
And it created this insane, the Incredible Hulk with Hitler, but Hitler has the body of a woman in a bikini and it's doing Tai Chi and then they're singing a nursery rhyme.
That's algorithmic reality.
And if the Democrats win and they're falling victim to all this, that's what we're going to get.
So it's gone from unprecedented freedom, not just to back to the status quo, but beyond that to unprecedented tyranny.
So that's where we're at right now.
And it'll get worse under Biden.
I just want to talk about one more thing.
This will sound like a massive tangent, but it isn't.
The Roman Empire collapsed into dictatorship because the Senate became corrupt, politicians became corrupt, and people turned to powerful strongmen instead.
We're really seeing that because, as you said, Republican senators, a great many of them, will do nothing to protect ordinary people from these tech giants.
The only entity in the world perhaps today doing that is the Trump administration.
They're the ones who petitioned the FCC, got the FCC to come out and say, OK, yes, we'll do something on Section 230.
They're the ones who appointed Nate Symington to the FCC, a guy who's a social media whore, got rid of the old guy who was skeptical about reigning in tech censorship.
So really, the American executive branch is the only branch of government that might actually do something.
So it was essentially a law that defined, well, an executive action by the FCC, by Obama's FCC, that made ISPs, Internet Service Providers, Comcast, Verizon, common carriers.
You know, treat everyone equally, treat everyone neutrally, so if Netflix is using your bandwidth, even if they're using way more of it than any other company, you have to charge them the same rate.
So it was really something that only helped Netflix and YouTube and these big video streaming platforms.
And the service providers, Google, Facebook, all these platforms.
So it was basically what's called in the technical FCC language, the edge providers, Facebook, Google, YouTube, versus the service providers, Verizon, Comcast.
It was a battle between corporations and under Obama, the edge providers, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Netflix, they won that battle under Trump. They got rid of
it. It's not really about net neutrality. It doesn't force anyone to be politically
neutral. And if it does, then it was aimed at the wrong target because the ISPs, to my
knowledge, have never actually censored political speech. If you're going to have net
neutrality, apply it to Google and YouTube and Facebook as well, because they're the ones
who threaten the actual neutrality of the Internet. They're the ones deciding who gets so-called
230 reform could save the republic. If 230 is clearly defined, which Ajit Pai should
have done a long time ago, now he's all of a sudden like, oh, we're going to do it. Yeah,
OK, sure.
If this had been a long time ago, and companies like Wikipedia were liable for their libel, and Twitter had to have strict moderation policies, then free speech would be allowed, debate would be happening, and people would have the opportunity to actually speak with each other.
Anyway, it's the opposite of that, because if you get Section 230 reform, the right kind of Section 230 reform, I will say, you don't want to repeal the entire law.
What you want to say is, it's very simple, it's so simple, I don't know why more people aren't suggesting this, you simply say, if you want to be a platform, if you want to have that legal immunity, You can't filter legal content, constitutionally protected content, on behalf of your users.
You can filter it, but only if the user chooses to filter it.
So exactly the same as Google's SafeSearch option, but for all types of content.
So you're saying if I, right now... If you moderate legal content on behalf of a user, so the user doesn't ask you to hide that from their feed, then you are no longer a platform.
You lose Section 230 protections.
But if you give the user the option to filter that content, say if you make a hate speech filter that liberals can turn on or off, that's fine.
So right now they can moderate against users' will, but this would say you're not allowed to moderate against their will unless they ask you to moderate for them.
So free market defenders of the big tech companies will say First Amendment Anyone can moderate their property, their communications platform as much as they want, or you're violating the First Amendment.
That's actually true, but not every company.
While every company has First Amendment rights, they don't have these special Section 230 legal immunities.
So what you can say is if you want these special legal immunities that no other company gets, then you're going to have to behave in a certain way.
Also, if that's how the law were, then it would be so much easier for tech platforms and new platforms like mine, because one, you wouldn't have to have moderators, and two, you wouldn't necessarily have to build the filters yourself.
What I imagine would happen would there be all sorts of Third-party browser extensions that filter content across the internet for you so you don't ever want to see, say you don't ever want to see obscene content on the internet, you want to keep your internet family friendly.
I imagine what would happen in this new world where tech platforms can't censor on your behalf is you'd have browser extensions that people install and it would filter your online experience across all websites.
That's a problem that Google has, you know, so they train algorithms to recognize that kind of content.
And what would happen is you'd have browser extensions that do the same thing, that have algorithms that recognize and they, you know, they get better and better and they improve over time with updates.
It's a story about a guy in the 1960s who's writing a letter on his typewriter.
The typewriter stops working and says, you can't use a typewriter anymore.
Your last letter was hate speech.
And he tries to call his friend on the phone, the phone operator says, sorry, you said hate speech through the phone last time, can't use it today, sorry, you're banned for 10 days.
Tries to go buy a newspaper, the newsstand owner says, well, your favorite newspaper isn't stocked anymore, it was publishing disinformation.
Look, that would have been so bizarre to our parents and our grandparents, but we're just accepting it on social media, the exact same thing.
And then... So if content goes up, it's objectionable, and someone complains, you're liable for it as a platform because you're supposed to make sure that the filter works.
But if someone has a filter, and they turn it on, they don't want to see porn, but the porn hasn't been flagged yet, and they see it, The site can get sued.
There are two, there are two parts to section 230, one which exempts, um, companies from lawsuits over the removal of content and one that exempts them for hosting content.
So I'm not saying that you should, uh, strip immunity from tech platforms simply for, uh, for hosting.
They need that immunity, but it should be contingent on behaving like a platform.
If you post a message saying, you know, screw Ellum, and you post it on a board out in the middle of the town square, I don't sue the board.
But if you stand there and scream screw Ellum, I say you're the one who spoke.
That's the difference.
Twitter is supposed to be a big, you know, community board.
People can walk up and put their messages on and walk away.
And you don't complain about the board because someone put a message on it.
That's why you can't sue Twitter.
The problem is, what Twitter has become is, in order to get in, there's a gate, and when you walk in, Jack Dorsey's standing there saying, uh, not that one.
Wait, what did you say?
Oh, I'm taking that one down.
And it's like, wait, wait, wait, you're curating what people can and can't say.
You're effectively speaking because you're restricting some things and promoting other things.
Colleen said, just heard about BitChute to possibly replace YouTube, Parler for Twitter, MeWe for Facebook, not to polarize communities, but these monopolies.
So, I don't think any of these things will actually replace.
One of the challenges with any one of these alternative platforms is that do they have a big enough community size to make it valuable for people?
And they're not completely the same.
And one of the challenges, yeah, what if people start polarizing because they're all, you know, all the right-wing people go on Parler and all the left-wing people stay on Twitter?
I think with videos, if it gets easy enough to cross-post, where it's just a push of a button and it is becoming easier, then you could see these platforms start to gather momentum because people will simply choose to watch, say, your podcast on BitChute rather than YouTube.
One problem with mines and not having cross-posting was that we'd have to take Facebook's API and it would be proprietary and they'd be tracking your browser movements if we implemented Facebook's API like a share to Facebook button.
So we don't have a share to Facebook button.
I say we, but mine doesn't have a share to Facebook button because we don't want Facebook to track our users.
Another regulation that I'd like to see is make it easier for people or force the big companies to develop a shared format where you can migrate all your content from one platform to another with a push of a button.
I wouldn't subject small companies to that because, you know, it's kind of onerous from a technological standpoint, but you could have some sort of, you know, Josh Hawley-like exemption where it only applies to companies above a certain market share.
We talk about Google a lot, but it's owned by a company called Alphabet that owns other companies called like X, which is like a technology firm that Alphabet owns.
There's Google.
Google owns YouTube, which is I like to go into alphabets someday.
I'd like to believe that, but earlier today I did a check and my videos don't come up.
In fact, I was sent a trending search topic, which was the full title of one of my videos, because everybody who watched started searching for the title and it doesn't come up.
So I'll check again after the show, and maybe my whining has paid off.
For those that don't know what the context is, it's a CNN analyst who was in a business meeting with a bunch of journalists and started cranking one out on camera in front of everybody.
Blank Fields says, regarding the meme on 4chan poll about free speech leading to right-wing, what are your thoughts on what happened with Tay chatbot and how they removed it as it became politically incorrect AI freedom?
There's a real duality on the internet, because on the one hand, we've got this cancel culture, which will come from social media and Wikipedia, as you were saying, but on the other hand, we have this anonymous culture, which is the most offensive culture ever created.
Agent Toon says, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Tim, but I have to tell you Ian was right.
Your channels are showing up when I Google search.
See Twitter for proof.
I tagged both of you and Lydia in the post.
I'm going to stop right now and just say, I'm willing to bet a lot of people don't know the difference between Timcast IRL News and Timcast and also don't know the difference between playlists and the actual channel.
Or I made a video about it in the past three days saying Google blacklisted me, and someone at Google saw it, freaked out, and went and removed the blacklist.
When you search for, like, Tim Pool YouTube, it'll say Timcast playlist, and it will link to other people's channels who are linking to my videos, not the actual channel Confirm that you're actually seeing Tim's channel and then come back.
And I'll check after the show because, yeah, maybe my complaining has paid off for sure.
You know, I think one of the biggest problems we're going to face in the future is the internet has created instant gratification politics, and someone like Ocasio-Cortez, who is just no political experience, and I'm not saying that to necessarily drag her, because a lot of freshmen, you know, congresspeople come in, don't have experience,
But she's also just... She botched the Green New Deal stuff.
It's pie-in-the-sky, fairytale nonsense, and she really has no idea how an economy functions.
But imagine, she can get a half a million people on social media to follow her, and they go out and vote, and she keeps winning.
That's the scary thing.
So, when the big populism narrative started emerging, that was one of the actual decent arguments that people were making.
I think even Tucker brought this up.
That if you have politicians who just pander to the baser instincts of people, I'll give you whatever you want if you vote for me.
They do.
Like Andrew Yang tweeted something like, I'm literally offering to give people money or something like that.
Like, that's a dangerous prospect.
So AOC comes out and says, you're going to have everything you've ever wanted.
Like magic.
It's not possible to do that, but people want it.
And it's like, well, easier than, you know, working for years to try and earn it.
So we were talking about this the other day, not on the show, before we did the show when we were with James, I was explaining how social media was decreasing the duration of all of these moments.
The American Revolution took 20 years.
It wasn't just the war.
It was an ideological revolution where you had people one day being like, yo, I'm sick of this, and they started talking about it, sending letters.
Think about this.
You're in South Carolina or whatever, in pre, you know, in colonial, in the colonies when it's still, you know, it was still a colony of Britain or whatever.
And you were like, I'm writing a letter, you know, I want to say to the king, F you.
So you seal it, you give it to the the writer, and then in three weeks it's made its way to New York, or however long, into months.
Then in New York, some other guy reads and says, I agree with this letter, let's send it to the king.
They put it on a boat and three months later, it makes it back to the king, who reads it and goes, what?
I'm gonna respond to this, how dare you?
Send this back to them.
Three months later, it makes it back to New York.
Three weeks to a month, it makes it to the guy in South Carolina.
And so that took forever.
Imagine that exchange happening nowadays.
You go on your phone and you go, I say F the king, woo!
And then the king gets, woo, what?
And they text us back, how dare you?
And then within a minute, they've already had that entire exchange.
This is a great way to understand historical change.
I studied history in college and the main schools look at, you know, is it economics that causes historical change, you know, ideas, intellectual developments, but actually communications and how connected to society is a big part of it as well.
The reason why the Japanese were able to industrialize so quickly is because even though they were cut off from the rest of the world for 250 years, the reason why they industrialized within, you know, 30-40 years and no other country did, was because they were the most literate society outside Europe and ideas just spread around very quickly compared to other countries.
Whereas in Russia, which tried to industrialize quickly, more than half the population was illiterate.
So right now on YouTube, there's a thing that happens where if you have a certain number of incorrectly labeled videos, then you get what's called a pending review.
And depending on how bad you are or how big you are, you get a bigger duration.
So here's what happens.
On my main channel, which is youtube.com slash Timcast, All of my videos are monetized.
Every single one.
There's no swearing, there's no images of violence, and almost all the videos I do are like political analysis.
That's Timcast.
So they're all green approved.
I upload a video, you're good to go.
My second channel, Timcast News, every video I upload gets put in this frozen state called ads pending review.
It'll take 20 minutes, we'll watch your video.
That's the social credit score, essentially.
If you have a perfect credit score, you get money.
If you don't, your video pops up with no ads and no monetization.
It's not even demonetization.
Demonetization, you still make money, you still get some ads.
People have to understand how this works on the back end, because every single platform is like this.
The way they rank content, decide who gets at the top of your feed, who gets demonetized or monetized, It's all numerical.
Algorithms operate there on what can be quantified.
So every single platform will have these quality scores to rank the so-called quality of your YouTube video, of your website if you're on Google, of your post if you're on Twitter or Facebook.
And that numerical value determines whether you're gonna be at the top of people's feeds or buried, whether you're gonna be monetized or demonetized.
It is exactly a social credit score.
And it used to function on the basis of, you know, are you posting relevant popular content?
If someone could write a program that could measure where Tim is blacklisted and not blacklisted, and then extrapolate that so that any YouTube user could use the program to see where they're blacklisted through a VPN or something, that'd be a very cool program.
What's interesting is that your own followers are having trouble finding the links.
I mean, you'd think that if these algorithms were working as intended, the person most likely to see a Tim Pool video would be someone who watches Tim Pool videos.
Okay, so, you know, the book is, as you know, a big text battle to steal the election.
Not hyperbole, not my own opinion.
It's what the sources say.
It's what the sources inside Silicon Valley say.
Facebook, Google, all these companies.
If you want to read it, it's at deletedbook.com.
But my vision of the future, so there are two possibilities.
It really does come down to this election.
It's amazing how much it comes down to this election because the Trump administration
has made some excellent, you know, they didn't act as fast as they could have done, but they
made some excellent appointments in the federal bureaucracy, got people in the right positions,
good people by the way, Adam Kanday for example, a law professor who once sued Twitter in a
free speech case, the Megan Murphy case actually.
And he wrote the petition to the FCC to make the Section 230 rule change.
So these are people who know what they're doing, they understand the issue, they understand what needs to be done.
But literally, the executive branch of the United States right now is the only powerful force, I think, in the entire world that actually wants to fix this problem and has the ability to do so.
So it's really like the last chance for online freedom this election.
I'm not just saying that because I'm a Trump supporter, but it Can you think of another powerful entity in Europe, in North America, anywhere in the world that's actually pushing back on this?
I'll tell you what the pessimistic vision, the optimistic vision is, you know, Trump reforms Section 230 and fixes this.
The pessimistic vision is that we get to a situation where a handful of critical race theorists in the San Francisco Bay Area get to control, invisibly and undetectably, control the emergence of political movements.
So, you know, stop them even before they get off the ground.
So that hate speech laws come in, the Constitution gets abolished, you go out with a sign saying, I should have a right to speak, and the cops come and bash you with a truncheon.
And of course we do the show Monday through Friday live at 8pm.
Smash that like button on your way out because apparently that helps as we're dealing with this algorithmic manipulation and censorship and all that stuff.
Share this if you really like it.
We're also on, you know, Apple, iTunes, and all these other platforms because we diversify even though they'll probably act in concert at some point.
At some point I need to nuke everybody.
But anyway, if you want to fund my other channels, which some people can and some people can't, it's YouTube.com slash TimCast and YouTube.com slash TimCastNews.
Of course you can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Parler, at TimCast.
At the very least, tell people what's going on, because the most powerful thing you can do is speak up and share information, especially when we're dealing with these companies trying to restrict information.
Use your mouth.
They can't stop that.
But don't forget, you can follow at Sour Patch Lids.