All Episodes
Oct. 20, 2020 - Timcast IRL - Tim Pool
02:12:51
Timcast IRL - DOJ Prepares Antitrust Suit Against Google As Veritas Drops Another Expose
Participants
Main voices
a
allum bokhari
44:46
i
ian crossland
07:28
t
tim pool
01:17:55
Appearances
l
lydia smith
01:16
| Copy link to current segment

Speaker Time Text
unidentified
The Department of Justice is pleased to announce that the U.S.
Department of Justice has approved a new law that will protect the privacy and security of U.S. citizens. The law
tim pool
will be passed in the next two years. Thank you.
The Department of Justice is getting ready to file an antitrust suit against Google because
Because Google, they say unfairly uses its power to dominate the market.
It's fairly obvious what an antitrust suit is, and I'm not entirely convinced it's actually going to do anything.
We'll see how it plays out.
Interestingly, it's only Republicans that are actually getting behind this.
There are some state attorney generals that are all Republican that are getting behind this.
And it's for obvious reasons.
The Democrats get a free pass for the most part from a lot of the censorship, and they're allowed to run wild and advocate violence.
Or, I should clarify.
Antifa and far-left extremists are allowed to advocate violence, organize violent events, with impunity.
If a conservative says, learn to code, you're gone.
So I have here this book.
It says, Big Tech's Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election.
This is deleted by Alan Bakari, who's hanging out with us tonight.
Alan, take your book.
unidentified
Oh, cool.
tim pool
I just wanted to open with that line.
I was like, that's a good line.
Erase the Trump Movement.
And what is the last one?
allum bokhari
And steal the election.
Not hyperbole.
It sounds like a very partisan, hyperbolic title.
It's actually, first of all, it's not my opinion.
This is the opinion of whistleblowers inside Facebook and Google.
And all these companies who told me this is what they're doing, and it started literally the day after the election.
And, you know, we've seen it happening before our very eyes, the deplatforming of the Trump movement over the past four years.
And that's just the stuff we see on the surface.
This book gets into what's happening behind the scenes as well there, you know, subtle algorithmic tweaks, and we'll get into that.
tim pool
Yeah, we will.
First, who are you?
allum bokhari
I have.
Good point.
Yes, who am I?
Who is this guy?
Yeah, I just wanted in the studio.
tim pool
Who are you guys?
unidentified
You walked in like, I got a book, and I'm like, yes, sit down.
allum bokhari
So I'm Alan Bakari.
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.
tim pool
You've actually exposed a bunch of this stuff, too.
You know, we'll get into all this, but you covered, I think, the good censor.
Was it you who released that footage of them, like, crying after Trump won?
allum bokhari
That is correct.
That went huge.
That was, like, probably over a million views on Breitbart.
That was such an incredible video to see that.
Like, you know that's what they believe, but to see it on video is just another thing.
tim pool
Right on.
We'll get into all this.
Of course, Ian's hanging out.
ian crossland
Hi, everybody.
tim pool
And this will be interesting, too, because Ian, you have direct experience with censoring people and being an evil overlord.
ian crossland
100% true, Tim.
The line of good and evil.
Run through every man.
I was co-founder of Minds.com and an admin on the site for eight years, doing a lot of behind the scenes.
Hands-on with with you know censoring and not sensor and realizing that censoring doesn't mean it's bad.
tim pool
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.
ian crossland
Because it's illegal, for instance.
With Mines, if it was illegal, we'd take it off the site.
That's a form of censorship.
But if Google's writing their own terms of service that are like, they can censor and delete whatever they want, that's a big deal.
That's different.
tim pool
Here's the question.
Just trying to do some kind of intro.
Of course, Lydia's hanging out.
lydia smith
Yeah, I'm here.
tim pool
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.
Smash that like button.
Hit the notification bell.
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.
allum bokhari
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.
Right, reviewing as well.
tim pool
Yeah.
allum bokhari
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.
You're done.
tim pool
I knew a guy who did online sales, and Google one day changed the algorithm, and then his company didn't exist anymore.
allum bokhari
Yeah.
Well, look at what they've done to news publishers.
So, Breitbart News published a couple of months ago research showing they've cut visibility on Breitbart links by 99% compared to 2016.
They've done it to a lot of other websites as well.
Almost every conservative news website with the exception of one or two like Fox.
Just colossal fall in visibility since 2016.
And that's completely artificial because traffic numbers haven't gone down.
It's just Google visibility that's gone down.
tim pool
My two main channels are blacklisted on Google.
You can't search for them.
They're gone.
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.
allum bokhari
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.
tim pool
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 could function.
It could function that way.
So if every bit of information that one of these companies might get from you, you own
and can distribute freely as you choose, that's a really interesting idea because then all
these other companies can build better services based off of all of this data anonymized.
allum bokhari
It's the basis of their market power.
It's also the basis of their ability to politically manipulate people, which we can get into.
tim pool
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.
allum bokhari
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.
ian crossland
Man, this makes me think so.
I think giving the data to the user is paramount.
I agree with you guys.
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.
tim pool
I don't necessarily agree.
I mean, that would be them defrauding you and defrauding the government.
ian crossland
Yeah, it would be.
tim pool
And I just think if they commit a crime, you punish them for the crime.
ian crossland
But you wouldn't know they were committing a crime.
tim pool
Well, the government would subpoena them to verify the records.
ian crossland
By showing their code?
Yeah, but they don't have to release the code to the public.
Well, I mean, the government is public.
allum bokhari
Right, right, right.
tim pool
The idea is they can look at the code without revealing trade secrets, and so they can see if the data is verified or not.
I don't think just a company giving up the property they develop makes sense.
I don't know.
What do you think?
allum bokhari
Well, there needs to be a lot more transparency.
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.
tim pool
There's like a pile of guns in the other room that are aflame.
It's like they're sending smoke signals with the burning guns.
Like, wow, look at all that smoke coming out.
We know it.
And then you've got... There's a reason why it's Republicans going after these companies and not Democrats.
I mean, the Democrats are stupid for it, don't get me wrong.
But they're sitting there and they're just like, well, we're not getting banned, so let's roll with it.
They're banning our opponents.
But what it's really doing is creating this warped reality where conservatives look normal and the left looks psychotic.
Like, you get Antifa on Twitter saying, we're gonna go burn it down.
And a regular person's like, that's crazy.
But the conservatives who say anything kind of like that are nuked instantly.
You see what I mean?
allum bokhari
Well, I'll make two points about that.
First of all, the Republican establishment, especially the ones in the Senate, are complete wusses.
Many of them bought and paid for by Google.
So we saw the New York Post get censored last week.
And the Senate Republicans came out, oh, we're going to subpoena Jack Dorsey.
I think it was a day ago.
tim pool
And they voted it down or whatever.
allum bokhari
Yeah, yeah.
The Republicans wavered.
We're not going to subpoena Jack Dorsey.
So I'm being maybe too harsh.
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.
You're being very naive.
tim pool
They're already getting nuked.
allum bokhari
Already, yeah.
tim pool
Yeah, so I remember when Veritas did that expose on Pinterest.
Something they didn't catch when they were talking about live action being censored, the pro-life organization.
I looked at it and I was like, whoa, anti-media is on there.
And they're like, you know, anti-police brutality, anti-war progressive left, anti-establishment.
They're getting censored.
Why would an anti-war leftist organization be censored?
Isn't that weird?
I think it's because it's not so much about the conservatives when they're doing censorship.
It's about the people who oppose the establishment.
And when, like you say in your book, they're trying to, you know, what are they doing?
They're stopping the Trump movement.
allum bokhari
Yeah.
tim pool
The Trump movement is anti-establishment.
Trump booted out the crony rhinos and took over the Republican Party.
So what's really happening is that censorship is against those who dare challenge the establishment.
And that includes anti-war left.
And that includes, for the most part, the larger group, the conservatives, those who support Trump.
allum bokhari
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.
So that's the mentality now.
tim pool
You know what I love?
During the Arab Spring, I had a bunch of friends who were active activists who were trying to provide communications.
And then one day, my friend was like, I just noticed something.
You notice all these Libyan revolutionary people speak perfect colloquial English?
And I started laughing.
I was like, that's an interesting thing, right?
And they're like, that's really weird.
And then they try and justify it saying, well, it makes sense because Twitter is a very Western thing.
So only people educated in the West or who are Western would be using it.
And some other people were like, I don't know.
know, maybe, maybe they're just trying to convince people who use the platform in America
that Libyans want us to intervene.
And then we did, and Hillary Clinton said we came, we saw, he died.
I'm not insinuating anything, I'm just saying what people were talking about at the time,
I don't know.
But it is, it is, do you know about Barrett Brown's investigation, Project PM?
allum bokhari
Uh, no, enlighten me.
tim pool
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.
allum bokhari
Oh, no doubt.
tim pool
Yeah, definitely.
They were using Facebook and all that stuff.
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.
Something that they couldn't pay for, you know?
allum bokhari
Yeah, and you hit the nail on the head.
This is stuff the Obama campaign was doing in 2012.
Cambridge Analytica was just a smaller scale version of what Obama was doing in 2012 with Facebook's help.
And it was a pretty senior Obama campaign person who revealed that, who was working directly on it.
She said that Facebook actually helped them and gave them assistance in 2012.
Her name was Carol something.
I'm blanking on her last name.
Carol Peterson, perhaps?
But also with the bots.
The bots you mentioned from Stratfor.
unidentified
Or sockpuppets.
allum bokhari
The reason there was this panic after Trump's win was because all of these people, the foreign policy establishment, had been doing this for years.
They started accusing everyone else of, you know, using bots and sockpuppets and disinformation.
Of course they were terrified that that would happen to them because they'd be doing it for so long.
So they couldn't imagine that this movement might actually be organic, might actually be real people.
They thought it was just the same thing they'd been doing for years and years.
ian crossland
It probably was like a kid in Russia in an apartment, and they traced some IP, and they got like one.
And they were like, oh, the Russians, the Russians, it's the government, the Russian government.
And you're like, no, actually, it was just some dude who maybe had a Russian IP.
tim pool
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.
ian crossland
It seemed like it came right after her email scandal dropped.
tim pool
And she just started saying it.
She's like, Trump's working with Russia!
And it's like, uh-huh.
This is the stupidest thing.
allum bokhari
And you know who it convinced?
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.
tim pool
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.
allum bokhari
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.
tim pool
The only way they maintain this in popular, that's what cancel culture is.
You know, you see what happened in San Francisco with that guy?
The free speech rally got his teeth knocked out?
allum bokhari
The guy got punched?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
tim pool
Think about how crazy it is that this guy decided to step up and say the billionaires are bad, so Antifa shut up and punched him in the face.
allum bokhari
Yeah.
tim pool
Are they working for the billionaires?
allum bokhari
Yeah, I call it the n-word as well.
tim pool
Yeah, over and over again.
allum bokhari
It's weird alliance between the cultural left, which used to be the anti-establishment left, and the corporations.
tim pool
The billionaires!
allum bokhari
And the neoconservative foreign policy think tanks.
They're all aligned on this.
tim pool
No, what is this?
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.
allum bokhari
It's very strange.
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.
tim pool
It's so stupid.
None of it makes sense.
Antifa going out and hitting somebody because he's complaining about billionaires?
That's just weird to me.
ian crossland
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.
I think it's a dumb thing to do.
It's not a smart way to get your point across.
allum bokhari
These are the same people who trashed Seattle in 1999 in the trade protests.
They were all about, you know, ending the bad trade deals.
And along comes a president who said, I'm going to end the bad trade deals.
And he does end the bad trade deals.
And now they're just beating up his supporters in the street.
tim pool
Dude, look at Bernie Sanders in 2015.
Seriously, go back.
A lot of people might not remember this.
You go back and you Google search Bernie and Trump and you'll find a bunch of articles saying Bernie and Trump are very similar.
And there was a point where Bernie had to be like, I'm not like him.
But a lot of their core policies were the same.
Illegal immigration was bad.
Bernie was fairly moderate on gun issues when he said it was a rural versus urban debate.
Because he's in Vermont and he's like, we don't have the same problems.
Because people in Vermont like their guns.
You had him saying the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, was a problem, and we've got to...
What happened to that guy? All of a sudden now he's like, the billionaires, but they're all
funding Joe Biden, so go vote for him. It's like, he immediately just said, please let me in the
establishment. Trump on the other hand kicked the door in, you know? You know, an alliance between
allum bokhari
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.
tim pool
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.
It's like the same thing.
allum bokhari
Yeah.
Well, when you say prejudice plus power, who is more powerful today than Google?
tim pool
Yeah.
allum bokhari
The most racist people in the world today are in Silicon Valley.
They're programming the algorithms that run our world.
If you get the book, read the part on machine learning fairness.
Machine learning fairness.
tim pool
Oh, that's the good sensor thing, right?
allum bokhari
That's actually not the good sentence.
There's something different.
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.
tim pool
That's impossible.
It's functionally impossible.
allum bokhari
Well, this is what I say in the book, right?
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.
Obviously, they call it fairness.
It's the opposite of that.
tim pool
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.
allum bokhari
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.
tim pool
But that's actually fine.
allum bokhari
Yeah.
tim pool
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.
ian crossland
What they should do is make trans woman one word and have a completely different definition.
tim pool
That's offensive.
ian crossland
I mean, it's logical.
tim pool
That's the problem with critical theory.
So, and again, I'm not saying any of this to say trans women are or are not.
I'm pointing out the clash in the existing system on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is not going to create some kind of nebulous understanding of critical race theory.
Or, I'm sorry, critical theory in general.
Intersectional left.
When you go to them, they will hold contradictory views because they're human beings.
But a computer doesn't do that.
It can.
But you go on there and you're like, this makes no sense.
These things don't connect.
But it's like, how could Wikipedia say two different things at the exact same time?
ian crossland
Quantum computing.
tim pool
I guess, sure.
ian crossland
Yes, both exist in the same- Maybe that'll help us define trans theory.
lydia smith
There you go, perfect.
allum bokhari
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.
ian crossland
Is this all stemming from liberal college kids like Zuckerberg, Larry, and Sergei just being, happen to be the ones that coded it from the beginning?
No, no, no.
tim pool
I don't think so.
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.
allum bokhari
Here's what I'll add to that.
I think you're right.
That is what happened.
I remember that distinctly in 2013, 2014.
But I also remember that the backlash against that also did mad traffic.
unidentified
Right.
allum bokhari
So, exactly.
It sort of naturally correct.
If they allowed it to happen, it would have naturally corrected itself.
unidentified
No.
allum bokhari
Because people would have got sick of it.
They would have wanted some challenges to the prevailing viewpoint.
tim pool
They did.
And it created the anti-SJW movement.
allum bokhari
Exactly, but then they shut that down.
tim pool
I mean, sort of, sort of.
But it was polarizing.
It was creating two tribes.
It was the reaction and the opposite reaction.
And so, yes.
allum bokhari
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.
tim pool
I don't know if it would have resolved itself.
I think we're still in it.
allum bokhari
Oh, we're absolutely still in it.
But I think it's being prolonged by Internet censorship.
If you took that control...
control off. I think you just have a natural conflict between two political factions and
one of them would win and that would be the anti-SJW side.
They're artificially controlling it to help the SJWs stay in power, control the narrative,
even though it's completely discredited.
tim pool
Well, so here's what ends up happening. When you get someone on the right who is
fringe and extreme and crazy or whatever, they get nuked immediately.
Just gone.
On the left, however, they're allowed to keep doing it.
So this is what I was mentioning earlier.
You end up with two sides.
One where the fringe elements of the right have been purged and all that's left are suit-wearing, you know, milquetoast vanilla conservatives.
allum bokhari
Yeah, who won't do anything about social media censorship, by the way.
tim pool
But but but the left is is have you seen this video of the six it's six videos of women in their cars Screaming at the top.
unidentified
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
allum bokhari
Have you seen the one where they where they mash it all together?
tim pool
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.
allum bokhari
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.
tim pool
It is endlessly.
Trump is evil.
Trump is evil.
All day, every day.
allum bokhari
That's the real thing.
tim pool
Yeah, but there was a story from Time Magazine.
This woman went around the country and found Nobody cared.
Nobody cared.
That she would go to these people and say, here's a headline, and say, oh, I don't care about that.
And, you know, the way they wrote it was, all of these people believe misinformation, what do we do?
And it's like, you're in a bubble.
unidentified
They don't care.
That's the thing.
tim pool
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.
And they're not.
Regular people don't like Antifa.
Call them out.
They won't.
They don't.
allum bokhari
It's true.
I mean, you can give these guys all the advantages you want.
You can put all their stuff at the top of Google, but if it's bad stuff, if it's bad propaganda, it's going to have the opposite effect.
I will read one extract to you from the book, though, because this gets to the heart of how they manipulate people and persuade people.
unidentified
Do it.
allum bokhari
If I can find it.
Yeah, man.
Give me a minute.
I want to hear it.
Ah, where is this?
tim pool
So what is this?
allum bokhari
This is their manipulating of... It's how they pinpoint people's political beliefs.
Oh.
tim pool
And... Yeah, you were mentioning... Did you find it?
allum bokhari
Right, here we go.
So this is a quote from a Facebook source.
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.
tim pool
Now here's the best part.
Remember that these people think anyone to the right of Stalin is far right.
unidentified
Yep.
tim pool
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.
Better feed him content to make him a centrist.
Yeah, we got Bernie Sanders.
allum bokhari
Send him the depolarization video immediately.
ian crossland
And also when you have the right and the left, and the left goes way over here.
Now the center is here, which was further left than it used to be the normal lefties.
So they're dragging people way, they're trying to like almost radicalize people on the right so that they're now in the center.
tim pool
It's literally what they're doing.
lydia smith
Yeah.
tim pool
It's literally what they're doing.
They're radicalizing people.
And that's why you see a video of these women screaming at the top of their lungs, crying and like, ah!
You know, look, there are a lot of us, I think the people who are watching this for the most part, you have sought out information.
It's the big difference between those who watch the mainstream media and get wrapped up in the fake news, and the people who watch shows like this.
You have to search for my show.
Sometimes YouTube does recommend the clips we do every day, but like I mentioned, my main two channels, Timcast and Timcast News, are not on Google.
Google has banned them outright.
ian crossland
I heard that they were back now.
tim pool
That is not true.
ian crossland
Someone said they found them.
tim pool
Nope!
These people don't get it.
People will steal my content and re-upload it knowing I've been blacklisted, and they can get my views from Google search.
ian crossland
We gotta un-blacklist Tim's channels.
tim pool
Can't do it.
ian crossland
Google knows.
tim pool
Google knows I know, and I've complained about it to Google.
They're doing it on purpose.
ian crossland
It's normal stuff.
tim pool
They do it on purpose, and that's part of the manipulation.
If someone says, did you hear Joe Biden's email thing?
You will not find my videos giving you the breakdown and the fact checks.
Doesn't exist.
allum bokhari
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.
tim pool
Do you know the name of that journalist?
allum bokhari
I was a Slate journalist, if I recall.
I can't remember the exact name.
tim pool
And I'm pretty sure she's the one who got Enrique Tarrio banned from Chase Bank.
allum bokhari
Oh, right.
There are these journalists who make a profession out of deplatforming people.
tim pool
This is what they do.
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.
allum bokhari
And this is what they did to PewDiePie, right?
This is the model.
You reach out to everyone's business partners, everyone who's doing business with them, anyone who's giving them a service.
tim pool
And you use loaded questions.
Kind of like, uh, what are some of these jokes?
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.
That's the tactic the far left uses.
allum bokhari
Here's why it's so powerful today in particular.
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.
This is why cancel culture exists.
tim pool
Well, I can tell you this.
I think Wikipedia is in serious trouble.
We were talking a little bit about this.
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.
So the whole thing is just questionable now.
allum bokhari
First of all, that's hilarious.
And if someone wants to write in Wikipedia that I'm a 19th century dairy farmer, just go right ahead.
I encourage that.
But, I mean, Wikipedia is already discredited with so many people.
So, like, can you even discredit it any further?
It's funny that Wikipedia calls Breitbart an unreliable source, by the way.
We've got a guy writing for us, T.D.
Adler, who edited Wikipedia as one of, you know, a really prolific editor for over 15 years.
So you're calling your own former editors unreliable, if that's what you're saying.
tim pool
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.
And that's reliable.
allum bokhari
And they go way beyond just calling people unreliable.
I mean, they've called virtually every prominent figure on the New Right alt-right at some point.
That's on their Wikipedia pages.
I mean, how many people have they called alt-right?
They've called Breitbart alt-right, false.
They've called Mike Cernovich alt-right, false.
Jack Peserba, Lorenzo.
All these people who are not alt-right at all.
They're on the New Right.
So that always goes up at the top of, you know, the Wikipedia page.
It's completely discredited.
The thing is, we all know it's discredited, but it's still at the top of Google, and you can't sue these people.
Well, you can, but you'll lose because of Section 230.
tim pool
I disagree.
allum bokhari
Has Wikipedia ever lost a lawsuit?
I don't think it has.
tim pool
I don't think people are trying because of Section 230.
allum bokhari
Oh, I think they are trying.
I mean, here's the thing.
Wikipedia is the most powerful publisher in the world.
It is a publisher.
The fact that it gets Section 230 protections is ridiculous.
If any website should be liable for defamation lawsuits, it's Wikipedia.
tim pool
Well, they do have special rules on biographies of living persons because they're susceptible to lawsuits.
The issue is, I think, when it comes to all these platforms, people aren't suing.
They're not.
Sometimes you'll hear a story about a lawsuit and they lose and it's like, I get it, but people need to actually start making these challenges.
You know what's going on with Patreon?
allum bokhari
I know there's some legal action happening there.
They actually did make a legal breakthrough, if I remember correctly.
tim pool
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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.
allum bokhari
I heard about this.
It's very threatening to them, this thing.
Oh, they're done.
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.
It's not their content.
That's the argument they'll make in court.
tim pool
That doesn't matter.
Well, whether you win or lose, as soon as you say, I want to go to arbitration, the company in California has to front the cost.
So they could... Patreon might win these arbitrations.
They still have to front the cost.
They can't do that right now.
So it's essentially like lawfare.
When you sue someone knowing they can't afford to defend themselves, so they cave in, right?
People do this all the time.
They know that their case is bonk, but then the lawyer's like, listen, it'll be 10 grand to settle, it'll be 200 to go to court, so just pay them off.
So right now what's happening is Patreon's like, we're going to- So this is why they sued.
They said to the judge, we're gonna win this.
They have no case.
They're just trying to get us to go to court to pay arbitration up front.
And the judge was like, I don't care.
You gotta pay arbitration up front and go to arbitration.
It's not for me to decide who's gonna win.
allum bokhari
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.
tim pool
Is it in California?
allum bokhari
Well, that's the question.
I'd have to look that up.
I would assume so, but that's something you've got to look up.
Also, it's a foundation.
It's not a company.
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't tell you exactly, but I do know they've never lost a defamation case, as far as I know.
People have tried.
tim pool
Did you know that for a really long time, my Wikipedia said that I invented a Zeppelin?
Some kind of remote Zeppelin?
allum bokhari
Well, that's not bad, as far as... Did you invent a Zeppelin?
tim pool
I have not invented a Zeppelin.
allum bokhari
You shouldn't have told people that.
You should have said, yeah, I invented a Zeppelin.
tim pool
When I tried complaining, Like, passively, like, hey, I didn't invent a Zeppelin.
They told me I was unreliable.
And I'm like, dude, I didn't invent a remote control Zeppelin, man!
And they were like, well, we have a source that says you did.
I'm like, no, you don't!
They didn't even have a source, and they couldn't take it off!
Finally, someday, some, like, high-ranking Wikipedia dude removes it, and I'm like, ugh.
lydia smith
Thank you.
tim pool
Geez.
And then whenever I bring the story up, people go in and start editing and adding stuff to it.
allum bokhari
They're going to do it tonight.
tim pool
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.
allum bokhari
Yeah.
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.
tim pool
Crackpot conspiracy theorist.
allum bokhari
Whereas Sean Hannity's page, Crackpot Conspiracy Theories, or something like that.
I think they changed that now, but when I was looking at his page, it was like, Known for Pushing Conspiracy Theories.
tim pool
Yep.
ian crossland
Do you guys think that Wikipedia should be shut down?
Or altered?
Or something like that?
allum bokhari
I think it would just be liable for defamation.
Let people sue Wikipedia if they defame you.
ian crossland
Wouldn't that just destroy the company?
No, it wouldn't.
They run off donations.
tim pool
Yep.
allum bokhari
Yeah, but they still have hundreds of millions of dollars.
ian crossland
Do they really?
Why do they need donations?
Every year he asks for donations on the website.
tim pool
Listen, listen, Wikipedia is different from Twitter in that it's compiling information and publishing it.
So with with Twitter, I understand that a user is making a statement. With Wikipedia, a person is not making a
statement.
Listen, on Twitter, I tweet under my name. And when I say Alan Bakari is a 19th century dairy farmer,
that is a statement of fact.
Alan then says, Twitter publishes.
And then you can see who changed what?
That says Tim Pool at Timcast and then a statement.
That's from Tim Pool.
On Wikipedia, it doesn't put your name.
It's a page that says Alan Bakari and then right atop a 19th century dairy farmer.
ian crossland
But at the bottom, No, no, no.
Doesn't it show the changed log?
tim pool
In the history.
unidentified
And then you can see who changed what?
tim pool
In the history, but that's a different post.
allum bokhari
Wikipedia is a book pretending to be a library.
Mmmhmm.
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.
tim pool
When I go to the page, Alan Bakari, there are no users.
It says, Wikipedia, Alan Bakari, 19th century dairy farmer.
That is a statement of fact under the Wikipedia banner and no one else is.
ian crossland
They'd go out of business instantly.
No, they wouldn't.
tim pool
They would create more stringent posting policies and verification.
And they would create a two-tiered system.
Right now, anyone can go in and make an edit.
Oh, so maybe on Wikipedia it could say, after every statement of fact, it would show who wrote it and when.
talking about where this operation is going to go in and add inane factoids.
ian crossland
Oh, so maybe on Wikipedia it could say after every statement of fact it would show who wrote it and
tim pool
when. Like a little subscript. So what would need to happen is if they could be sued for defamation
then what would happen is you would submit your edits and then it would go to an
And I'm generally in favor of online anonymity.
and that would protect them more so from liability, though they'd still be responsible for suits.
allum bokhari
You could make the editors liable for defamation, except they're all anonymous.
And I'm generally in favor of online anonymity.
I think it allows people to challenge taboos and have discussions you can't have in public,
especially in the age of cancel culture, anonymity is important.
But the last people who should have anonymity is a Wikipedia editor, who have more power
over people's reputation than anyone else.
They should be accountable for what they write.
It could destroy someone's reputation.
tim pool
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.
You click it and they believe it.
They believe all of it.
ian crossland
Wow.
So maybe the first thing we should do is not credit Wikipedia.
lydia smith
Yeah.
tim pool
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?
ian crossland
I can't say I sound familiar, but no.
tim pool
So it's a fake name.
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.
ian crossland
They could have been doing this the whole time.
tim pool
They could have been, but I think people liked Wikipedia for a long time.
They liked it, they used it, it made sense.
Now we're at a period where Wikipedia is completely weaponized for political power.
I mean, look at—remember when, before Kamala— I disagree with that slightly.
allum bokhari
I think Wikipedia has always been seen as unreliable.
You know, every school teacher will tell their pupils, don't rely on Wikipedia.
unidentified
Sure, sure.
allum bokhari
If you cite Wikipedia, you're getting a fail.
tim pool
But people were, in our generation especially, were like, yeah, it's fine, it's cited.
allum bokhari
It was convenient.
We knew it was unreliable.
We still know it's unreliable, but it's convenient.
It's actually a problem with Google.
Google always puts it at the top of their search results.
They consider it an authoritative source.
tim pool
And it's not.
allum bokhari
And it's not.
And everyone knows it's not.
tim pool
I love how you can take me, the person in question, and I can issue a statement.
I did not invent a Zeppelin.
Not reliable.
Take a 22-year-old intern working at BuzzFeed who writes Tim Pool, who invented a Zeppelin, and boom!
Historical fact.
allum bokhari
You know what would happen if you made Wikipedia liable for defamation cases?
I can tell you.
I've got a good idea of what would happen.
First of all, Wikipedia would shut down for a month or so.
And in that month, they'd be reaching out to people like you.
They'd be reaching out to everyone who's got a Wikipedia page about them, asking, hmm, is this actually true?
Did you actually invent a Zeppelin?
We're reviewing some of our articles.
That's what they'd probably do.
They'd shut down for a while, they'd edit all the articles, and then they'd put them back up.
tim pool
That's what I was saying.
They'd have to fact check.
So here's what's really funny about an unreliable source.
Me, as the person.
When the New Yorker was writing about me, they called me.
We would like to confirm some facts.
Is X true?
Is Y true?
And is Z true?
And I said, yes, yes, and no.
I said, thank you very much.
And then they took out the BS.
Granted, it was still pretty BS.
It's a funny story.
Wikipedia doesn't do that at all.
They say, we can't actually listen to the person.
Every single fact checker in the past hundred years would be calling the person to confirm details.
ian crossland
How many people work at Wikipedia?
tim pool
Any ideas?
ian crossland
I think it's a small operation, and they don't have the manpower to fact-check.
The whole point is it's just a community, you know, thing that everyone contributes to.
It's weaponized.
tim pool
There are corporations.
ian crossland
And it has been weaponized, that's for sure.
tim pool
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.
unidentified
Basically.
allum bokhari
Yeah, the exact opposite of the ideals of the Internet.
We're going to give everyone a voice.
No, Wikipedia's just giving all the cocks a voice.
tim pool
Yeah, it absolutely is.
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.
allum bokhari
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.
tim pool
That's a good point!
allum bokhari
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.
tim pool
All combined.
allum bokhari
So imagine you throw away your laptop, you throw away your mobile phone, you change your
name, you travel to Outer Mongolia, you log on to a new laptop in Outer Mongolia, you
start typing and instantly they know who you are because of your typing style.
tim pool
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.
allum bokhari
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.
So that needs to happen quickly.
tim pool
Alam, do you know that Facebook is aware of when you poop?
allum bokhari
I did not know that.
That's a little snippet.
If I knew that before the book, I'd definitely put it in there.
tim pool
I was reading about it.
Facebook knows everything about you.
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.
They knew I was at a Walmart.
They knew my age.
They knew my demographic.
They assumed I would probably want to buy a TV.
ian crossland
They probably knew where you were standing in the Walmart based on GPS.
unidentified
For sure.
tim pool
Maybe.
I mean, I don't know how precise they can get, but the general idea is 18 to 35 year old male at a Walmart probably wants to play video games.
There's TVs on sale.
And so I noticed them because of who I am.
And they track these things.
So you're familiar with shadow profiles.
allum bokhari
Oh, of course.
Every social media platform has a shadow profile of you, even when you haven't signed up yet.
tim pool
Exactly.
allum bokhari
Even when you haven't signed up, they're tracking you around the internet.
tim pool
We'll get into that next, but I bring that up because they build a data profile on you from information from other sources.
And so, you know, I'm trying to explain this to my friends.
Some of them don't want to believe it.
ian crossland
Mines does not do that, by the way.
tim pool
Well, right, right.
But Facebook is a massive, massive apparatus.
And the phone.
So here's what happens.
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.
Then the phone stops moving.
unidentified
They know.
tim pool
They know.
allum bokhari
They figure it out.
tim pool
Yes, they figure it out.
They know.
There's no swipes.
There's no clicks.
There's no screen time.
They know the person has been gone away for 4.75 minutes.
allum bokhari
And they know how long, so they compare it to other phone users and say, oh, it's most likely to be this.
tim pool
They know the average person spends four minutes and 27 seconds on a potty break.
Your phone was inactive for four minutes.
And the best part is, people will check their phone, put it down, go to the bathroom, come back, check their phone again.
They know exactly when you're pooping.
They know when you're eating, know when you're sleeping.
They know when you wake up in the middle of the night.
allum bokhari
And here's why I say if Trump loses it'll be because of big tech, because imagine this technology applied to political movements.
Some people think it's just a few big accounts getting censored, just Alex Jones.
No, they're censoring entire political movements at once.
So network analysis, which is the tool they use to identify certain networks of people.
So, you know, they see some people go to Chick-fil-A every Wednesday.
They'll put them in a, they have a certain map of their activities.
They put them in a group with other sort of Chick-fil-A eaters.
They have these whole networks mapped out.
They do that for political people as well.
tim pool
Yep.
allum bokhari
Who's following Alex Jones?
Who's following Breitbart News?
Who's following Tim Pool?
And who those guys, are they following each other as well?
And if they send a signal to an algorithm saying, you know, this network posts a lot of disinformation,
our algorithm has detected that, they send to not just one or two people, but entire political
movements. When Alex Jones gets banned, that's not the end of it. That is also sending a signal to
the algorithm saying, everyone who followed Alex Jones, they followed an account known for posting
conspiracy theories.
Maybe we don't ban them, but maybe we suppress them in the algorithm.
Maybe their posts don't show up at all.
tim pool
Or they pepper a little bit, right?
So every third person gets the X. One of the most important things in the censorship story is that most people getting banned are small accounts.
For obvious reasons, there's more of them.
But periodically, Excuse me.
Periodically, someone with a lot of followers gets banned and they notice.
And then everyone says, whoa, I can't believe they banned person X. And then Twitter goes, that was a mistake.
We're sorry.
And they reinstate the person.
And then the algorithm carries on nuking people and just like mowing them down.
They accidentally hit someone too big and people noticed.
Oh, oh, oh, you can come back.
Okay, now get rid of the next 50.
allum bokhari
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.
Their message isn't amplified.
Most people just don't notice.
tim pool
The New York Post is big enough.
allum bokhari
It sometimes backfires on them, but in the vast majority of cases it doesn't.
That's why censorship is so scary and terrifying, and often it's invisible.
tim pool
My favorite story in all of this.
Shadow profiles.
So let me just tell all of you right now.
I love talking to a group of people, and I'll say, uh, you all have a Facebook profile.
And most of them will say yes, but then periodically they'll get someone to be like, no, I don't use Facebook.
And I say, no, you have a Facebook profile.
And they say, no, I've never signed up for it.
Or, no, I deleted it, or I got rid of it, or I don't use it.
Let's say, you, Ian.
You have your phone, right?
Do you have Facebook Messenger on your phone?
ian crossland
Yes, I do.
tim pool
When you log into Facebook Messenger, it says, find out who you're friends with at your contact list.
ian crossland
Jeez.
tim pool
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.
And it's the same phone number.
unidentified
Becky.
tim pool
Becky, Becky Crosland.
Perfect, beautiful.
And it says 8-6-7-5-3-0-9.
Who would be referring to mom by the full 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.
ian crossland
And their addresses and their phone numbers, well obviously, and their email address.
Sometimes their pictures.
Just based on your contacts on your phone.
Human rights violation.
tim pool
There was a period where Facebook accidentally published the shadow profiles.
Do you remember this?
allum bokhari
I do remember.
tim pool
That was amazing.
allum bokhari
That was amazing.
Yeah.
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.
It knows you're on that website.
tim pool
Yep.
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.
ian crossland
And then they can see where your contacts go.
They can track them around as well.
tim pool
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Drop the contactless thing.
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.
ian crossland
And now I'm thinking about NFC, near frequency communication.
tim pool
Near field.
ian crossland
Near field communication and Bluetooth, like the ability for like a smart refrigerator to measure your phone if your Bluetooth is on.
So it's getting more advanced.
allum bokhari
This is why Google got into smartphones and laptops.
And now cities, they want to build smart cities because there's just more and more ways to gather data.
Whether you sign up for their services or not.
tim pool
Your technology will be assimilated.
Resistance is futile.
unidentified
Indeed.
allum bokhari
Looking forward to living in the Google smart city.
tim pool
Are we at the point now where we've already become subjects of the Borg?
Is this conversation, is the AI laughing to itself saying, I am making them have this conversation, ha ha ha?
allum bokhari
They are the Borg.
Thankfully, I don't think it's got to that point yet, but I do think this election will be a test of, you know, can big tech swing an election?
Can the message get out?
I think the polls are narrowing at the moment.
I was very pessimistic a month or so ago about Trump's chances, but the polls are narrowing.
You know, like I said, you know, big tech can put propaganda at the top of someone's feet, but it has to be
good propaganda.
And the advantage that people like Trump have is that the mainstream media doesn't really understand ordinary
Americans very well.
They're not very good at persuading them.
tim pool
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.
They ban him from things he doesn't use at all.
Banks banning him.
That's like total removal from society.
allum bokhari
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.
Like BitChute.
BitChute as well.
tim pool
Yeah, so BitChute is a torrent-based video sharing platform, I think, right?
allum bokhari
Yeah.
tim pool
And so all of my videos automatically sync to BitChute as an emergency backup.
There have been a few instances where YouTube has deleted my videos with no strikes, with no warning, with no violations.
Just gone.
unidentified
What?
lydia smith
Just gone.
tim pool
Yeah, just gone because I said the wrong name or something.
Or I had like a news article that had an email in it or something.
But it will appear on BitChute.
If you try and share a link to BitChute on Twitter, it gives you a warning.
It's unsafe.
You can't do this.
And so that's soft censorship.
They're trying their hardest.
Cancel culture is their real world cudgel to enforce their censorship.
They need the far leftists to punch you in the teeth when you challenge them.
It almost feels like there is an AI consciousness forming in all of this big tech censorship inadvertently.
And it is, and people like Antifa are being manipulated into being the enforcers in the real world where the AI can't actually reach.
I'm not saying there's an actual conscious entity going like, I must control humanity.
I'm saying that we are creating this big network system.
allum bokhari
Well, it's a symbiotic relationship because Antifa and their sympathizers in big tech train the algorithms.
The algorithms then enforce what Antifa want them to enforce more efficiently than they can.
So it creates this circle.
tim pool
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.
So they've got their enforcers.
allum bokhari
And the enforcers are allowed to operate on these platforms.
I was talking to Ryan Hartwig.
tim pool
With impunity.
allum bokhari
I was talking to Ryan Hartwig.
He's a Facebook whistleblower.
lydia smith
Yeah, we're having him on Friday.
allum bokhari
Oh yeah, he's great.
unidentified
Yeah.
allum bokhari
He's awesome.
And you know that he was a Facebook content moderator.
He was told by his superiors, don't categorize Antifa as a hate organization.
So there you have it.
Another smoking gun to a long list of smoking guns.
tim pool
You know what I wish would be awesome?
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 it's getting scarier and scarier.
ian crossland
The domino goes all the way back around and then hits them in the back?
tim pool
Oh, definitely.
Yeah, so like, if you look at Jack Dorsey, for instance.
Like, that dude gave, what did he give, like 10 million dollars, was it?
unidentified
Yep.
tim pool
To Ibram X. Kendi.
lydia smith
Millions and millions of dollars.
tim pool
These people are, it's human centipede, but like, you've seen the movie Human Centipede?
allum bokhari
I can't say I have, no.
I've heard of it.
I'm aware of its notoriety.
tim pool
Yeah, you know what it's about?
So a mad scientist sews a group of people's mouths to each other's anuses and creates this big, long human centipede.
ian crossland
Sounds like a horror movie.
lydia smith
It is a horror movie.
tim pool
It is a horror movie.
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.
allum bokhari
And that money eventually comes back to pressure Twitter to censor someone.
lydia smith
Yep.
Abraham X. Kendi?
Yes, absolutely.
tim pool
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.
allum bokhari
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.
tim pool
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.
Oh, that wasn't true.
Or, oh, that was true.
allum bokhari
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.
It's precisely because he's an old blue collar, or seems to be just a friendly old blue collar guy
who's not too extreme.
That's the image he projects.
It's not what he actually is, but it's the image he projects.
Democrats and liberals do not consider that to be an advantage.
They probably think that's a huge weakness.
Actually, that's probably the only reason why Trump isn't actually ahead in many of these polls.
It's because Biden seems so moderate and inoffensive to so many people.
tim pool
I think the polls are wrong.
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.
allum bokhari
Oh yeah, 100%.
But think about that.
That's the wild card.
You don't know how many people are going to turn out for Trump because they've been so intimidated.
tim pool
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.
ian crossland
Dude, if Trump wins, are we going to have to deal with this again?
All this nonsense and the screaming?
tim pool
It'll be worse if Trump loses.
ian crossland
It will be worse if he loses.
tim pool
It'll be worse.
ian crossland
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?
tim pool
Yes.
unidentified
Why?
ian crossland
Why?
Why won't people just chill out and build something?
tim pool
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.
ian crossland
So we need a unified enemy and maybe it can be the tech oligopolies.
tim pool
You'd think COVID would have been there, but no.
Can't do it.
ian crossland
Because you can't see it.
You can't target someone or something.
It's too amorphous.
allum bokhari
There are some leftists who get it.
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.
tim pool
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.
lydia smith
So weird.
tim pool
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.
allum bokhari
Biden will certainly, this is like, there's a very clear choice to elect.
Do you want digital dystopia or do you want some chance at getting back our online freedom?
Biden will absolutely use the federal government to pressure tech companies even more to do even more censorship.
Yep.
It's really amazing how the Internet has changed because the Internet as it existed before 2015 was actually unprecedented in human history.
The amount of free speech we all had.
Never before could you just have a device, turn it on, reach a global audience.
That was new.
But it's now been entirely flipped on its head and controlled by these.
Now a handful of corporations get to control political discourse, not just in America, but all around the world.
Hartwig is going to be with you guys shortly.
He was talking about how he was moderating political speech in Mexico and Venezuela and Canada, all these countries.
That's foreign election interference right there.
tim pool
It's the Borg, man.
allum bokhari
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.
tim pool
Yeah, they're sly.
allum bokhari
They're corrupt.
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.
tim pool
Didn't the Roman Empire last a thousand years or something?
allum bokhari
Oh yeah, I mean, hell, Rome under the Caesars was not particularly a bad place to live.
tim pool
But it's like a thousand years?
We made it, what, 240-something?
allum bokhari
Yeah.
unidentified
250?
ian crossland
The Republic was like 400 years and then the Empire took over for about 300 or 400 more and then it split into two empires.
The Eastern Empire and the Western Empire.
The Eastern Empire became the Byzantine Empire.
allum bokhari
But you see the parallel where politicians no longer defend the interests of the people and only the executive branch does.
So what's the answer?
Well, you have to give more power to the executive branch.
tim pool
I don't like that idea.
ian crossland
What do you guys think about net neutrality?
tim pool
I don't know.
ian crossland
I remember it was huge.
allum bokhari
Total play on words by the liberals and the tech.
ian crossland
Can you define it?
allum bokhari
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
throttled.
tim pool
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.
ian crossland
A site like Mines, a startup like Mines would have went under.
unidentified
Why?
ian crossland
Because we only had like three moderators.
tim pool
You wouldn't have to moderate.
That's the point.
unidentified
But we would have to ban... No, you wouldn't.
ian crossland
We'd have to find the people who violated the terms.
tim pool
No, you're wrong.
allum bokhari
It's the opposite of that.
This is the argument that free market libertarians make, which is the opposite of that.
If you moderate, then you're suddenly in publisher territory.
Oh, we have microphone issues?
No, you're good.
unidentified
Your headphones might have cut.
allum bokhari
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.
tim pool
That's a bad idea.
allum bokhari
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.
tim pool
So you would not have to moderate.
ian crossland
Okay, wait.
So if someone posts something illegal, I have to get it off the site as a moderator, or the site gets sued because we can't host illegal content.
tim pool
That's true now.
allum bokhari
That's true now.
Right.
Yeah, Section 230 doesn't change that.
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.
unidentified
Right.
allum bokhari
You just don't do it on behalf of the user.
tim pool
So right now what's happening is section 230 says good faith moderation is allowed.
The idea was you can't be responsible for what a user posts to your website.
That's not fair.
I didn't say it as a comment.
ian crossland
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.
unidentified
Right.
allum bokhari
So they can.
Here's the thing.
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.
It's very simple.
tim pool
Yeah.
So right now on Minds, you have the Not Safe for Work filter, right?
ian crossland
Yeah.
tim pool
People can turn it off and just see everything.
ian crossland
Yeah.
tim pool
And so if it's like, so one of the arguments was people need to be able to, these sites need to be able to remove porn or something.
Like, let's say you're a religious community forum and someone starts spamming porn, you need to be able to get rid of it.
So that is one of the challenges in setting these terms and these rules.
But the users have the ability to then say, filter this out for me.
And so they can't see it.
So someone come in and can post whatever garbage they want, but no one sees it who's actually participating.
There are still challenges, but the general idea is right now Twitter says it is objectionable if someone says vote Trump.
Therefore, we'll ban them.
Well, Section 230 says we're allowed to moderate objectionable content without crossing the line.
That needs to be defined.
What does that mean?
So the general idea that many people have had is you can't remove legal content.
If it's a violation of the law, like a call to violence, threatening harm, or, you know, horrifying images or whatever, then they can get rid of that.
They have to now.
But if it's someone saying, vote Trump, then you can't touch it.
allum bokhari
Yeah.
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.
ian crossland
But what would happen is someone would upload porn and they wouldn't mark it explicit because that's how they live.
They don't mark their stuff.
They put it up and then you have to go in and find it and then moderate it or you have to build an algorithm.
Or the users flag it.
allum bokhari
Well that's a problem now.
ian crossland
Maybe.
Or you get complaints that it hasn't been flagged yet.
allum bokhari
Well, that's a problem that you have now.
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.
tim pool
Yeah, it's time to, in a sense, scale back the desperate attempts.
Because what's happening is, you get Twitter and Facebook saying, this is objectionable and this isn't.
And then a bunch of people freak out saying that's not fair.
A really good example of the problem was when I was talking with Jack Dorsey.
And I said, your rules are inherently biased.
And they said, no, that's not true.
And I said, you ban people from misgendering.
And they were like, so?
Conservatives don't view the word misgender the same way you do.
Your rules are inherently biased.
You should not be allowed to do that.
Imagine this.
Imagine you make a phone call to your mom and you're like, did you see this story about Donald Trump doing a backflip?
And then click, phone goes off.
And then your phone vibrates and it says, you are sharing objectionable information.
That would be insane.
Nobody would be like, that's a private phone call.
Facebook's actually censoring private messages.
Twitter, when it came to the New York Post story, was blocking link sharing in direct messages.
This is well beyond acceptable behavior.
It's not good faith at all.
allum bokhari
You know what the equivalent is?
I start off my book with this, the prologue.
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.
ian crossland
I'd like to see them become utilities, big companies like that, once they have a certain amount of users per day.
tim pool
Maybe.
Maybe.
There's a lot of talk.
I think simple 230 reform is the first thing to do.
ian crossland
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.
tim pool
If the filter doesn't work... Objectionable doesn't mean illegal.
ian crossland
Right.
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.
tim pool
No, that's not true.
ian crossland
Well, if this 230 thing, that's not true right now.
tim pool
You are wrong.
You do not, you are wrong.
You are wrong.
allum bokhari
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.
So not moderating content on behalf of cases.
ian crossland
I love that.
tim pool
If porn gets posted, and it slips through the filter, that is not a violation of 230.
These things happen.
And the people can complain, and then the site can fix it.
But if the site purposefully takes action that violates 230, then they lose their liability protections.
ian crossland
That's the way to change it, yeah.
tim pool
And that's what needs to happen.
We'll see if we actually get to that point.
ian crossland
I think if we enlighten people as to what exactly, so they understand what the change will be, that there will be a lot more support for it.
allum bokhari
Yeah.
The problem is, uh, platform hasn't been properly defined under the law.
So we have platforms behaving like publishers.
That's what we want to... Some people say, you know, repeal section 230.
Don't repeal it.
It's necessary for free speech on the internet to exist.
Just reform it so that platforms behave like platforms again.
ian crossland
Can you explain the difference between a platform and a publisher?
allum bokhari
A platform hosts content and a publisher edits.
It speaks, it edits, it chooses what you see.
And that's what the platforms are doing now.
They're choosing what people see.
tim pool
Listen, listen.
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.
ian crossland
And then they become a publisher.
tim pool
Importantly, Twitter has begun actually issuing news statements.
So there's quite literally on the town center square, it says, the Twitter board and Jack Dorsey is writing things on it.
And now we're like, yo, I can sue you for that.
And they're like, actually you can't.
ian crossland
What about Twitter employees using Twitter?
What about them having a personal account?
tim pool
As individuals, they're not Twitter.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
So, one of the issues right now is that many of these companies are issuing statements as what effectively would be the New York Times.
Like, when Facebook puts a flag over a piece of content saying it's fake news, well, that's Facebook issuing a declaration that no one else can do.
Yeah.
Well, let's read Super Chats.
I want that.
All right.
Here we go.
Amber Black says, oh, a British accent.
This will be a fun show.
lydia smith
A great show, yes.
tim pool
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?
You know, then what?
allum bokhari
Yeah.
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.
ian crossland
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.
tim pool
Yeah.
allum bokhari
Yeah.
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.
That would be great to see.
lydia smith
That'd be awesome.
ian crossland
Mines might have a share to Facebook button.
allum bokhari
Yeah.
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.
tim pool
All right, let's see.
Let's read some more.
There's a bunch of posts about Geoffrey 2 been cranking it on a Zoom call.
So I'm like, I'm trying to read through these.
I'm like, okay, that's like the third one.
lydia smith
Good stuff.
tim pool
Do you see BuzzFeed, like, defended it?
They were like, come on!
Which one of you have not cranked it?
Who among us?
allum bokhari
They did say that.
tim pool
That's literally what they said.
unidentified
Wow.
ian crossland
I think the picture that James showed was fake, was doctored.
tim pool
That was not him.
allum bokhari
Right, right, right.
lydia smith
Okay, yeah, that's fine.
ian crossland
Thank God.
tim pool
All right, let's see.
unidentified
Oh my gosh.
tim pool
Brendan Thompson says, I wonder if there will be a day when we can charge Google and Facebook for our own data.
If so, how could we influence it?
allum bokhari
Interesting question.
ian crossland
I think, yeah, hopefully.
tim pool
Ken, do you have an answer?
You're the expert.
allum bokhari
I'm not sure if we will see a day that because, you know, Google's bought all the lawmakers.
The lawmakers don't act in the interest of the people anymore.
I'd certainly like to see it.
I think data ownership is a big way that people can take back control from these tech giants.
ian crossland
It's actually Alphabet, too.
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.
tim pool
Guy Allgood says, Tim, you're not blacklisted.
I just checked.
Your whining has paid off.
None of your channels are hidden.
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.
ian crossland
Clear your cash!
tim pool
That's right.
Yeah, well no, I always do that when I refresh.
I do a hard refresh.
allum bokhari
That happens so often.
Try searching for a Bright Button News headline.
The exact headline on Google.
See what comes up.
It's entirely a site to just, you know, rip off our content and plagiarize it.
tim pool
Wow.
What's funny is when you search the headline for one of my videos, it gives you the Facebook version.
And I'm like, Google would rather promote Facebook videos, because I do post on Facebook as well, than their own channel.
But maybe someone's saying it's not.
They checked all my channels.
I'll check.
Maybe finally somebody watched and was like, oh, we better back off this.
lydia smith
We have been talking about it.
tim pool
RussianBot says, I sent my aunt, who constantly sends me Linkin Project vids, a walkaway video, and she went ballistic.
She actually demanded I stop sending people those kinds of videos.
Cognitive dissonance at its finest.
lydia smith
Wow.
tim pool
Certainly.
SSS says, Cassandra Fairbanks, Giuliani gave Delaware State Police Hunter's laptop due to pick of underage girls.
unidentified
Woo!
Yeah, I've heard similar things.
tim pool
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.
ian crossland
He meant to take his video down.
tim pool
Or did he?
lydia smith
Maybe that's his jam.
Who knows?
tim pool
William Kelly says Jeffrey Toobin got confused when they said, let's crank this out and thought they said, let's crank one out.
So yeah, people are saying Justin Giuliani hard drive went to Delaware police because there's underage stuff on it.
unidentified
Wow.
lydia smith
That came out about an hour ago.
allum bokhari
Definitely more stuff coming out from that.
unidentified
Oh, yeah.
lydia smith
I'm really interested.
tim pool
Someone says, Dear Ian, Benjamin Stephen says, You are starting to grow on me.
Every time the camera pans to you, I can't help but think of the 2005 skateboard movie Lords of Dogtown.
LOL.
Much love, brother.
ian crossland
There you go.
I only saw clips.
lydia smith
There you go.
Lords of Dogtown.
ian crossland
Thank you, sir.
tim pool
Colleen says, I carefully, deliberately structured Google queries to return anything anti-BLM.
unidentified
Org.
tim pool
Not sentiment.
In May.
Not a single return.
Almost went insane.
Kevin McCarthy says Schiff lied blatantly about Russian disinformation.
Trump was right to investigate Ukraine-Biden connections.
Schiff should be investigated for his own influence and obstruction.
Yeah.
What is this?
Something about Lord of the Rings?
Okay.
Sporkwitch says new anti-lockdown anthem from Five Finger Death Punch called Living the Dream.
Video on their YouTube channel is spectacular.
Have these guys on the show.
Oh, we'll check that out.
unidentified
Sounds good.
tim pool
Booker DeWitt.
Booker Ketch!
Says, uh, I hate the musket argument in regards to 2A.
If the Second Amendment only applies to muskets, then the First Amendment should only apply to quill and parchment.
unidentified
Huh.
lydia smith
Facts.
tim pool
Uh, the Booker Ketch reference, I wonder how many- I'm sure most of the people got that reference.
Do you guys get the reference?
unidentified
No.
tim pool
Booker Ketch?
allum bokhari
Oh, that's a shame.
Is he from the video game?
tim pool
Yeah.
allum bokhari
Yeah, yeah.
Bioshock Infinite.
tim pool
And Booker Catch was because the woman would always be like, Booker Catch!
And then she would throw you something and people got really annoyed by it.
And then someone made a video where they got really angry and kept saying it over and over again.
It was funny.
Let's see.
Mark Salmonfink says, Alan, my old friend, you've been doing amazing.
I'm so proud of you.
allum bokhari
Thanks, Mark.
Good to see you in here.
tim pool
All right.
Brown Bear says, Tim, Tobin...
It's about Toobin again?
lydia smith
Oh no!
tim pool
Toobin wasn't, don't you know what is, uh, wasn't, don't you know what is female co-workers.
He was doing it to Trump losing the election during the election simulation.
TDS is a crazy drug.
unidentified
Okay.
allum bokhari
You know, if, if the algorithms only fed people information they were interested in, Jeffrey Toobin would be much more screwed than he already is.
tim pool
Yeah.
Well, so apparently on this call they were doing an election dry run, like simulation.
And so.
lydia smith
That's exactly what I thought.
tim pool
Trump was gonna lose, so he whips it out.
unidentified
I was like, if he actually is gonna lose, then you're gonna, you know, chill out.
tim pool
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?
Oh, do you guys remember that?
allum bokhari
I remember Tay, oh wow, that was quite an episode.
tim pool
It became racist.
allum bokhari
Oh yeah, yeah.
See, that actually was an AI functioning badly because it was responding to the most motivated group of people on the internet, which is 4chan.
tim pool
I don't even think it was that, like, necessarily 4chan, but yes, yes.
But what I mean is, it's just people trying to be edgy.
Shocking the con- like, it's funny!
Like, humor shocking- people like shock- like, Howard Stern was popular for a long time.
What was he doing?
Like, throwing hot dogs at women's boobs or something?
Like, just crazy stuff meant to shock you, and people liked it.
Like, Sarah Silverman, her whole shtick is just being offensive as possible and shocking, and that's really weird because she's like, SJW or whatever.
But, yeah, that's, uh, Chatbot was victim of that.
People just wanting to say crazy things, because it was funny to say things you can't say to a robot, and the robot became racist.
allum bokhari
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.
tim pool
All right, let's see.
Oh no, I'm not reading that one.
unidentified
No.
lydia smith
Is it about Toobin?
tim pool
No, no, but there's a lot of stuff about Toobin, man.
lydia smith
What the heck, guys?
Come on, man.
tim pool
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.
lydia smith
Or you could be wrong.
tim pool
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.
lydia smith
Yeah, maybe so.
I hope so.
tim pool
But this has been going on for a long time, and a bunch of other channels are blacklisted, a bunch of political channels.
ian crossland
What is the difference you just brought up between the playlist and the channel and the search?
tim pool
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.
lydia smith
I don't think so.
I see Tim Poole, Joe Rogan.
tim pool
It's not coming up.
lydia smith
That's all I see.
tim pool
You typed in Tim Poole YouTube?
And there's no, there's nothing.
lydia smith
Timcast YouTube and stuff, yeah.
tim pool
And what comes up is Timcast IRL because it's a new channel they didn't blacklist.
unidentified
Yep.
tim pool
Yet.
lydia smith
I see a lot of IRL.
tim pool
And nothing, no Timcast has come up.
That's what I'm telling you, people are wrong.
They're just totally, I don't know what it is.
So, you just did it on your phone right now?
lydia smith
Yeah, just now.
tim pool
My channels are blacklisted.
lydia smith
Yeah, man.
tim pool
They've been for a long time.
I reached out to Google employees, specifically, and they said, we'll look into this and get back to you, and then ignored it outright.
And then I followed up again saying, oh yeah, we're gonna look into it, and then ignored it outright.
lydia smith
So the other thing you may be seeing are Tim's videos in a playlist that someone else has put together.
So I'm guessing that's what you're seeing.
But I don't think that Tim's videos are online.
ian crossland
But if you do, take a screenshot and tweet it to me or something.
unidentified
Yeah, prove it.
tim pool
Prove it, guys.
I've been getting people sending me these emails.
They're like, Tim, you're not blacklisted.
unidentified
Look.
tim pool
And they show me a Google that doesn't include my channel.
And I'm like, can you Google YouTube.com slash TimCast?
Just that?
Because I can't.
And people are sending me screenshots of not that saying they did.
lydia smith
I was really hoping you were wrong, Tim.
tim pool
Well, I'll check it out later.
unidentified
Yes.
tim pool
That's a nice way of putting it.
The system controlling everything, I prefer to call it the collective consciousness.
It's not an AI in itself, but functions as one. It is a combination of technology
and ideological zealots operating in both real and digital worlds.
Yes.
allum bokhari
That's a nice way of putting it.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
All right, let's see.
Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.
lydia smith
Our audience is sharp, I think.
tim pool
Oh yeah.
Luke Lennon says, you should interview Jay Dyer or Jonathan Pago.
They make content on YouTube and are brilliant.
They could have an angle on this cultural situation that could be interesting to your show.
lydia smith
I will write these names down.
tim pool
Airstrike, Rstrike says, Tim Pool, creator of a fleet of remote-controlled zeppelins and ultra right-wing YouTube channel, Timcast.
What is this?
Sly Breed says, Yo Tim, have you heard about what's happening to Sony PS5 about Hong Kong?
I have not.
Is something going on?
What's going on with PS5?
unidentified
I have no idea.
tim pool
Corey Abshire says, Is it maybe showing up for some people because they already subscribed and they're signed into their browser?
I don't know.
I think people are not actually seeing it and they don't understand the difference between a playlist of my videos.
I've gotten a bunch of emails where they're like, here's a screenshot proving you're not blacklisted and the screenshot has none of my channels on it.
ian crossland
So you could sign out of Google, clear your cache, search for it, sign back into Google, search for it, clear your cache, search for it.
Just try troubleshooting.
tim pool
Galandro Glade says, your channel blacklisting might be regional.
Ah, it could be in America only.
That's one thing that you... That's a good point.
allum bokhari
For sure.
The New York Post story was not censored in England.
It was not censored.
unidentified
Interesting.
How fascinating.
ian crossland
On Twitter in England it wasn't censored?
allum bokhari
I believe not, no.
Check this out.
I'm pretty sure I remember people on Facebook saying they could see it, people on Twitter saying they could post it.
tim pool
OGboxer says, AOC streaming to over 400,000 on Twitch.
Is this the future of reaching voters?
ian crossland
Yes.
tim pool
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.
You know what I mean?
allum bokhari
Again, Roman Empire, do representative democracies, representative republics inherently decay over time?
Maybe they do.
lydia smith
Sure do.
tim pool
Wow, man.
And you know what I think?
Maybe the internet has sped up our decline.
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.
A minute from a year.
ian crossland
And they can have it on video chat.
They don't even need to text it to each other.
tim pool
They could be talking to each other like, yo, you know, screw me, screw you!
No, screw you, I declare independence.
You can't declare independence, I am.
Well, I'm gonna send people down there.
We'll be there in two days because we can fly now.
allum bokhari
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.
tim pool
So I just got a super chat here.
Someone said, just tested.
Not blocked in Australia.
Switch to VPN.
Blocked from Austin and Seattle.
Not blocked in Denver.
Possible according to region.
Could you imagine if Google has blocked me from certain blue areas so people can't see what I have to say?
But it'll appear outside the country and it'll appear in red areas.
ian crossland
That's astute, my friend.
tim pool
That would be interesting.
allum bokhari
I think we were talking about this earlier, you know, we think we're so different to China, but you know, here we have, you know, regional firewalls.
tim pool
Yeah.
And think about it.
I get a lot of views on my videos.
I think like a video from last week is over a million, a video from two or three days ago is 900,000.
People are getting this somehow.
But what if what they're doing is making sure in big cities you can't get it unless you directly look for it or it's shared with you?
allum bokhari
Yeah, and social credit scores.
So the social credit score, you know, it ranks you based on how well you conform to the values of the Chinese Communist Party.
That's happening in Silicon Valley.
tim pool
No, no, no, it's happening right now on Google.
allum bokhari
Yeah, Silicon Valley ranks you based on how well you conform to their values.
tim pool
No, no, no.
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.
Ads pending, ads are gone.
ian crossland
When you do ad spending, can you put it up in a pending state, and then it waits until it gets approved, and then it goes live?
tim pool
But my videos are all news, so I don't have that luxury.
ian crossland
You can't put them up 20 minutes early?
tim pool
I do.
And then it takes an hour or two sometimes to actually go through the process.
unidentified
Yeah, it takes forever.
tim pool
And for some channels that have really bad review ratings, it's like, it'll take five hours.
allum bokhari
Yeah.
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?
Are you posting malware and spam?
That's what will determine your score.
Now it's how well do you conform to the values.
Disinformation, hate speech, etc, etc.
tim pool
This is really interesting.
People are super chatting right now, and it looks like there's a bunch of places where I am blacklisted and a bunch of places where I'm not.
Someone says, just searching Cognito Mode, TimCast YouTube channel, your channel is first, IRL second, Playlist Next 3, then your wiki in East Texas.
Someone said, doesn't show up on Google in Tennessee.
Just checked, and you're blocked in Canada as well, or at least Vancouver.
Your newest videos do not show up under latest for Timcast when you search for Timcast.
Just FYI.
This is amazing.
I am censored in Maryland.
So the blacklist is regional.
ian crossland
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.
unidentified
Interesting.
allum bokhari
I'd like to see that.
You should see where you are in Germany, because Germany, the government's really bullied the social media companies into censoring a lot over there.
tim pool
Wow.
I wonder what the reason for the different regions of censorship is.
lydia smith
I don't think it is predominantly blue areas because my friend in Pennsylvania just sent me, she's able to see everything you have.
You're not censored at all.
You're not censored at all.
tim pool
Where in Pennsylvania?
lydia smith
I'm not sure what part.
tim pool
It's crazy how many people are saying you are and how many people are saying you aren't.
lydia smith
Isn't this weird?
allum bokhari
With Canada, my theory would be, well, it's simply the government.
The government pushes around social media to censor whoever they want.
tim pool
But why, like, in Maryland it would be, in Texas it wouldn't be?
That's so weird.
allum bokhari
That is strange.
tim pool
Maryland is not reaching out to Google saying, get rid of Tim Bull.
lydia smith
Strange.
tim pool
It could be the people at Google who control certain regions, maybe, saying, I don't like this guy's blacklist.
lydia smith
We'll figure it out on Twitter.
tim pool
Timcast IRL is relatively new, so it has no restrictions whatsoever.
lydia smith
Yeah.
tim pool
But my main channels are also, you know, I have been restricted.
Blocked in Virginia.
That's interesting.
lydia smith
Weird.
tim pool
Shows up in East Tennessee.
Interesting.
Someone said, let's see, Matt Michalak says, you should get in touch with Crowder.
He had the same issue you're experiencing and he took screenshots of it when they blocked him by region.
I think I already did talk with Crowder about this a long, long time ago.
Because it's not just me who's blacklisted.
There's a whole group of people who are still active YouTubers who are blacklisted on Google.
Yep.
IRL isn't though.
This one isn't.
Let's see.
Censored in Oklahoma as well.
Rudy G dropped off the allegations.
Switched to Texas on VPN and Timcast came up.
Clicked the link and goes to YouTube channel.
Interesting.
Did we just expose regional firewalls in the US?
Yes.
Something weird's going on.
lydia smith
That is weird.
tim pool
Why are some people restricted from seeing my channel?
Think about it.
Let's say you watch my video, and I'm like, here's a news article that says, mail-in ballots are being rejected.
And then I say, share this.
And so you tell your friend or your mom, like, dude, you gotta watch this video.
Google search Tim Pool on this.
And it doesn't come up.
And they say, I don't know what you're talking about.
And you're like, just Google it.
What do you mean?
Nothing's coming up.
What do you mean nothing's coming up?
Let me send you the link.
allum bokhari
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.
But apparently that's not how it's working.
tim pool
Weirdly weird.
I even asked about it and they didn't do anything about it.
Anyway, let's do this.
Let me ask you one last question.
What do you think is going to happen with all of this?
Do you have a vision of the future, Elam?
You've been following a lot of this.
Well, mention your book and then tell me your vision of the future.
allum bokhari
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?
No, it's only the American executive branch.
Not the Senate, not Congress.
They're just talking.
They're grandstanding.
It's only the executive branch.
It does come down to this election.
tim pool
The Borg is trying to take over and it's just Trump holding on with one hand off the side of the cliff and everyone else hanging on to his leg.
And we're hoping he pulls us up and it's going to be real tough.
ian crossland
And Mike Pence is like his jet pack.
tim pool
Mike Pence is just like on his back.
Well, we'll see how that plays out, I guess.
My fingers are crossed that something can be done.
And, you know, James Lindsay, who is at Conceptual James on Twitter, talks about critical race theory all the time.
He tweeted that he's going to unhappily vote Republican, including Trump, for the time being.
And then he linked to this image where it says leftists should abolish the Constitution.
And he's like, until this stops, I hope more people feel that way.
allum bokhari
Anyway, one final thing.
We're talking about dystopia.
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.
Not just in America, but all around the world.
So, that's the pessimistic vision.
tim pool
An influence policy.
allum bokhari
An influence policy.
tim pool
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.
Well, hopefully that doesn't happen, but Alan, thanks for hanging out.
Do you want to mention your social media?
allum bokhari
Sure.
So you can follow me on Twitter, at LibertarianBlue.
Also follow me on Parler and Gab and Mines.
Just search for my name.
I'm usually at A or at AB, because I got onto those platforms early, so I got the nice little two-letter handles.
You can find my articles on Breitbart News and you can find the book at deletedbook.com.
Please don't buy it from Amazon.
Buy it from Barnes & Noble.
You can buy it from Amazon if you want.
tim pool
Cool.
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.
And of course you can follow at Ian Crossland.
ian crossland
Yes!
Anywhere.
everywhere, but subscribe to this channel, too, and click the notification bell, because that'll make sure you see it.
tim pool
Share it.
unidentified
I mean, this conversation was pretty good and important, too, especially with... Share it, subscribe, do all that stuff.
tim pool
Yeah, man.
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.
lydia smith
You can.
I would love that.
Follow me at Sour Patch Lids.
L-Y-D-S.
tim pool
All right.
And we're back tomorrow, right?
unidentified
We are.
tim pool
We're back tomorrow!
We do have a cool guest.
ian crossland
You know what else I'd like to ask people to do?
Make a video and upload it.
unidentified
Ooh.
ian crossland
Talking about what you feel about this.
unidentified
Interesting.
tim pool
Yeah.
Engage.
Create content.
unidentified
Yeah.
lydia smith
Do stuff.
tim pool
Post stuff.
And then when you get banned, you can tell your friends.
I got banned!
Can you believe this?
Because they... Man.
Anyway, we'll be back tomorrow at 8 p.m.
with apparently a cool guest.
I don't know who it is.
lydia smith
We do.
unidentified
We do.
Okay.
lydia smith
It's awesome.
unidentified
Okay.
tim pool
We'll see you guys tomorrow.
Thanks for hanging out.
Export Selection