Elon Musk has a 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him the company s biggest shareholder. Is this the beginning of the end for censorship on social media? Ezra Levant asks if this is good news for freedom of speech.
00:05:49.620This is in December when Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, left and someone named Parag Agarwal took over from Jack Dorsey.
00:05:58.660That is a Stalinist picture, obviously replacing faces with Agarwal and with Jack Dorsey, disappearing a political rival by removing him from an old photograph.
00:06:09.680They did that a lot in the Soviet Union.
00:06:11.840Long before Photoshop, they would just cut out persona non grata from photos.
00:06:26.920Here's a New York Post story summing it up.
00:06:29.420In a 2018 interview, Agarwal said Twitter should focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.
00:06:38.820Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard, he went on.
00:06:44.220And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content, how we direct people's attention.
00:06:53.780Just to translate into plain English, what he means is you can have all the free speech you like on Twitter, but Twitter will decide whether anyone hears you.
00:07:01.060If anyone's allowed to see what you have to say, you'll be muffled.
00:07:05.700You'll think you're talking to the world, but you're just talking and no one else is hearing you.
00:07:11.660Whereas the new favored people, that is, think alike leftists, will have their voices boosted, recommended.
00:07:20.580Boosted is a phrase they use so everyone gets the right to speak, but Twitter will decide who is heard.
00:07:26.620It's about the least free thing you could ever say or do.
00:07:32.440Anyways, that's not how Twitter always used to be.
00:07:34.940They used to say they were, quote, the free speech wing of the free speech party.
00:07:40.140Here's the former Twitter executive who was sometimes quoted as having said that way back in 2012.
00:07:47.820Tony Wang is his name, but he's no longer with Twitter.
00:07:50.660But here's what he had to say in October of 2020 when Twitter had silenced the New York Post, one of the most venerable newspapers in America, suspending their account, stopping people from reading their scoop about Hunter Biden's laptop.
00:08:05.260Here's what Tony Wang said back then about the free speech quote attributed to him, free speech wing of the free speech party.
00:08:10.680Tony Wang said, I don't think this is embraced by current execs like Vijaya, but that's understandable.
00:08:20.760Companies like people evolve and learn.
00:08:24.000Companies are not perfect and they certainly are not born perfect.
00:08:28.440It's important to allow companies to adapt as the world around them changes.
00:08:34.000So Wang said it was important to give free speech to dissidents trying to speak truth to power in certain countries.
00:08:40.220He chose places where I think most people would agree that's really necessary.
00:09:36.540First of all, do you recognize that there is this real concern that there's an anti-conservative bias on Twitter's behalf?
00:09:43.920And would you recognize that this has to stop if this is going to be, Twitter is going to be viewed by both sides as a place where everybody's going to get a fair treatment?
00:09:55.840We made a total mistake with New York Post.
00:12:17.920Here's what Jack Dorsey said about that, actually.
00:12:21.700He said, I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban Donald Trump from Twitter or how we got here.
00:12:29.520After a clear warning we'd take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety, both on and off Twitter.
00:13:06.180If you can de-platform a sitting president, you can de-platform anyone.
00:13:10.580Get ready for what they're going to do to try and save the Democrats this November in the states.
00:13:16.100And that's nothing compared to what they'll do in 2024 when the presidency is up for grabs.
00:13:20.380You can see what they'll soon do in the United States by looking to see what Justin Trudeau is doing up here in Canada.
00:13:26.780His censorship plans, regulating social media, appointed boards of censors, giving government the power to destroy.
00:13:34.380I remember this from Stephen Gilboa, who drafted the censorship bills now being debated.
00:13:40.100He said it's to stop criticism of politicians.
00:13:44.580We've seen too many examples of public officials retreating from public service due to the hateful online content targeted towards themselves or even their families.
00:13:54.620And if you don't stop, they'll, quote, drop a bomb on you.
00:14:01.460I mean, that's maybe it's not, you know, it's it would be it would likely be a last result, last result, nuclear bomb in a in a toolbox of of mechanism for for regulators.
00:14:21.020Yeah. And back then, they hadn't even discovered the thrill of seizing their opponent's bank accounts either.
00:14:53.000Elon Musk, the world's richest man and a bit of a iconoclast, a bit of a dissident and someone who says that free speech is very important.
00:15:01.780And actually, I believe him when he says he feels that way, started musing about Twitter, the social media company that really is the host of so much public debate.
00:15:12.100I mean, Facebook is great and it's huge.
00:15:14.800But Twitter really is where a lot of political discourse happens.
00:15:18.080And it's one of those rare platforms where both liberals and conservatives go really to fight, although conservatives more and more have been restricted.
00:15:25.640Of course, Twitter having a very fundamental role in the last U.S. presidential election, deciding in the late hour to block and ban discussions of Hunter Biden's laptop, even though the New York Post published them.
00:15:40.260Huge censorship that likely swayed that election.
00:15:43.480Anyways, Elon Musk started doing interesting things.
00:15:46.040He asked his viewers, his readers, his followers to vote in a poll.
00:15:53.260He started dropping hints and then, bam, today it's announced that Elon Musk has acquired 9.2 percent of the shares of the company, an enormous stake and perhaps a signal of things to come.
00:16:06.920Joining us now via Skype from Austin, Texas, is our friend Alam Bakari, senior tech writer for Breitbart News.
00:16:30.980You know, the one criticism I've heard of Elon Musk is that, you know, he signals to conservatives a lot, but he doesn't really put his money where his mouth is.
00:16:39.880I don't think he can really be accused of that now, unless, of course, he sells his stock.
00:16:44.660You know, the value has gone up by, I think, over 30 percent just today.
00:16:48.120So we'll we'll see what happens with that.
00:16:51.260The other thing to point out is that it's a he bought a passive stake.
00:16:56.000So what he bought does not give him the ability to directly influence the company, take a day to day role just yet.
00:17:02.860But analysts are saying this is sort of just, you know, getting the foot in the door down the road.
00:17:08.320He could buy an even bigger stake that gives him more sway over the company or even buy out Twitter altogether.
00:17:16.160You know, Elon Musk is worth over, you know, 250 billion.
00:17:20.200So it's well within his means to buy the entire platform.
00:17:31.120I mean, I see that Jack Dorsey, the founder and really the spiritual leader in many ways of Twitter, just the other day expressed regret that the glory days of the free Internet are no longer around.
00:17:43.640And he and he says he takes some blame for that.
00:17:46.760The first generation of tech people always claim they're for freedom.
00:17:51.160I mean, the Google guys, they actually had the motto, don't be evil.
00:17:55.200And then they made the decision to remove that as their motto.
00:17:58.980I think they had enough self-awareness to realize they couldn't say that anymore.
00:18:03.080The success of generations are always worse.
00:18:06.140I think the corporate culture of these places is absolutely colonized by woke leftists who really don't know much on the tech side, but they know a lot on the woke politics side.
00:18:16.780I mean, these early guys were computer engineers, math guys, computer guys, you know, nerdy guys.
00:18:25.540But they've been all pushed aside by a wave of people who couldn't program to save their lives.
00:18:31.920But boy, do they know about microaggressions.
00:18:34.980To me, that's probably a quarter of the staff at Twitter, YouTube, Google, just a quarter of the people are just the censors in the school these days.
00:18:42.420I don't know what the math is, but they really have been transformed, haven't they?
00:18:48.780And I've always said, you know, it's very easy to, you know, direct all your hate towards the most public figure at the company, which is the CEO in Twitter.
00:18:59.460Facebook, you know, it's Mark Zuckerberg.
00:19:01.400But in my opinion, these guys are nowhere near the worst people at the company.
00:19:05.720You know, Jack Dorsey, I've heard from people who work for Twitter that Jack Dorsey was nowhere near the worst guy at the company.
00:19:11.980He was actually holding back some of the crazies at the trust and safety department, which is where all the censors congregate inside these tech companies.
00:19:23.600And of course, when he was replaced by Parag Agrawal, there was an immediate purge of conservatives.
00:19:29.000You're right, I described this in my book, Deleted, about how Silicon Valley went from these ideals of decentralization, of just allowing people to say what they want, and giving people a platform, rather than taking an editorial role to these very, very censored platforms that they've now become.
00:19:49.420It's a complete inversion of the ideals that the Internet was founded on.
00:19:53.820And actually, this was something that Google admitted.
00:19:56.200I obtained a document from inside Google in 2018 published on Breitbart News called The Good Censor, in which they admit that the Internet was founded on principles of free speech, but that this was all changing after 2016 in response to political events.
00:20:12.680So this is something that Google, arguably the most powerful tech company in the world, admitted in its own research.
00:20:19.060So it's absolutely exactly as you described what's happened to Silicon Valley over the past decade or so.
00:20:24.200Yeah. You know, Elon Musk has certainly got his foot in the door, and you're right, he has enough wealth to take things over.
00:20:30.560But the thing is, let's say he was even more free speechy than Jack Dorsey.
00:20:36.000I don't know how many people work for Twitter.
00:20:39.900And you can be the boss, but frankly, my observation of these companies is that there's this internal culture.
00:20:51.320If you were to say we're for free speech now, it would either be ignored or subverted or sabotaged.
00:20:57.780Who knows? Maybe a lot of people would quit.
00:21:00.080But I just I sometimes wonder if these companies are even under the control of the CEO.
00:21:06.400So if there was a directive, whether from the board of directors or if there was a resolution passed at the Twitter annual shareholders meeting to to reembrace free speech.
00:21:18.500OK, that looks nice on paper, but you've got a thousand little, you know, critters burrowed into Twitter and they're there on a mission.
00:21:31.920They see it as a mission and they're not going to give it up.
00:21:34.460I think that there's going to have to be a purge or there's going to be sabotage.
00:21:37.360I think that's likely, but I think it's a lot more possible to do these kinds of employee turnovers at private companies compared to, say, Washington, D.C.
00:21:48.700You know, Trump struggled with this as well.
00:21:50.340He had put out an order and then the bureaucracy would just ignore it or subvert it.
00:21:54.760But it's a lot harder to fire a bureaucrat than it is to fire an employee of a private company.
00:21:59.160And we saw we've seen examples of of this where I think it was coin was Coinbase, the Coinbase CEO.
00:22:07.560He said he no longer wanted politics to be discussed in the workplace.
00:22:12.840And he gave employees who disagreed a very generous deal to leave the company if they disagreed.
00:22:19.320And a lot of them did. So it's been it's been done before.
00:22:24.000And another thing to remember is that while the the social justice warriors, if you will, have a lot of influence inside these companies because they're the most vocal minority and they have the media on their side.
00:22:38.680There are lots of other employees who simply just don't agree with the craziness, but keep their heads down because they don't want to be targeted.
00:22:46.080I wouldn't underestimate how big that cohort is.
00:22:50.160They may not all be conservatives, but a lot of them think the social justice nonsense in Silicon Valley has gone far too far.
00:23:01.440Well, I tell you, you use the word white pill.
00:23:04.200I mean, from the movie The Matrix, the red pill is to have the scales from your eyes and to be, you know, to lose your Garden of Eden in naivete.
00:23:14.780And the blue pill is, no, I want to go back to that, you know, lack of knowledge.
00:23:19.660It's like the red pill is when you eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge and you see how things really are.
00:23:24.840It's a pessimistic view, but it's a realistic view.
00:23:27.640The kids say black pill is that you're just you think there's no hope.
00:24:20.140Maybe Elon Musk simply wanted to boost the price of Twitter and then sell his stake.
00:24:24.140Who knows? He doesn't really need more money.
00:24:25.860Yeah. But we've got to wait and see to see if he'll buy more shares and obtain the influence he needs inside the company to actually change things.
00:24:32.700He hasn't done that quite yet because of the passive stake.
00:24:47.000I think he's really got a quirky sense of humor.
00:24:49.540I don't know if that's him or if he is a writer.
00:24:51.260I have to think it's him because in interviews, he's got that sort of mischievous grin and he says and does things that are a little quirky.
00:25:15.680Has has Washington, D.C. condemned this or something?
00:25:19.520I'm not sure they know how to how to take it at the moment.
00:25:24.980I think they're also going to see where this goes.
00:25:30.040But, yeah, as you said, there could be exciting things down the road if Elon Musk increases his shares.
00:25:37.340You know, I know that Musk, even though you might think he would be in league with Joe Biden and the Democrats because he's really a green energy pioneer.
00:25:45.940He's repeatedly said he himself did not ask for the subsidies.
00:25:49.180That was his competitors, GM, et cetera.
00:25:51.820And he had the courage to say, well, the way to solve this problem in Ukraine and Russia is to produce more oil in America.
00:25:58.840Like he really for a guy who you would think, all right, you're a leading green tech guy.
00:26:27.100But it is nowhere near the importance of, say, a Google, the world's largest search engine or even YouTube, the world's largest search engine for videos.
00:26:35.740It having this is like taking over a niche.
00:26:39.500Like it really is a niche market for political discourse.
00:26:44.820It's it's far less important than infrastructure, things like Google or or YouTube.
00:26:54.540Facebook is absolutely huge for for news in particular and political news, which is why they'd be relentlessly targeted by the left that wants to control that information flow.
00:27:06.880But but let's not underestimate Twitter.
00:27:08.780You know, Trump was an avid Twitter user.
00:27:11.220He used Twitter to, I think, maximum effect politically just to get around the media and get his message out.
00:27:16.040So it's still a very, very important platform.
00:27:18.000If we can just have one of those big platforms that's ready to free speech, that, in my view, would be a game changer, even if it's not on the level of Google or Facebook.
00:28:39.280Someone named Rand says, I've been following Alex Epstein for years, common sense, and tons of facts backed by detailed research about energy reality.
00:28:49.660He is a beacon of sanity in the climate discussion.
00:28:53.380Trudeau or any of his minions should debate Mr. Epstein.
00:28:57.720You know, I've known Alex for, I don't know, at least 10 years.
00:29:01.020And what I like about him is that he doesn't concede the ethics of the morality of energy to the left.
00:29:10.740You know, a mistake that too many conservatives make is saying, yeah, it's bad, but I mean, it's almost like a self-loathing tobacco executive saying, well, fine.
00:29:21.480Well, we have a bad product, but will you let us sell it to adults or will you let us sell it with plain packaging?
00:29:27.740Or what, like they're sort of bargaining with you, they acknowledge, like some, I'm saying, you know, a self-hating person.
00:29:33.880A lot of woke oil companies and politicians on the right are, well, fine, energy is bad, but please, can we have some?
00:29:41.380Epstein takes a different point of view, saying it's not bad.
00:32:45.500Can you tell us what happened after that incident?
00:32:48.760After that incident, there was a lot of online chatter going on.
00:32:52.360Certain prolific troll who had been encouraging followers with my name, my security number and the number of LRD to give them a call, make mass complaints, frivolous, vexatious complaints.
00:33:04.240And from there I was called by police, I was told that they weren't really pressing charges, asked me to come in for an interview and I declined the interview and I thought that was the end of everything.
00:33:16.520But things turned a little bit weird at some point because it became very bizarre when you hadn't heard anything from police, but Lance was on there online saying that your house had been raided and that your firearms had been confiscated.
00:33:35.000It turns out, lucky you Lance was right once again and you've now been raided and had your gun license suspended.
00:33:41.680I saw that pop up online and he had mentioned, which I thought was funny because nothing had happened, I'd had no word.
00:33:47.760He'd mentioned my house had been raided, which it had not.
00:33:50.440There was no reasonable cause for police to ever enter the property anyway.
00:33:53.800But he was boasting about how my firearms, I'd been raided, my firearms had been taken and, which at the time of the boasting simply wasn't the case.
00:34:03.080Now, you've got to ask yourself, how do I know that Daniel Jones had been raided and had his gun license suspended?
00:34:18.760Because I'm Australia's most prolific snitch.
00:34:20.660There was no way anyone knew about what was to come.
00:34:24.760Police hadn't even contacted you, so you didn't know about it.
00:34:27.840But Lance Simon was online, boasting about how your house had been raided and your guns had been confiscated before police even reached out.
00:35:44.260Well, since then, and I'd like to thank that lawyer, he is the best and he did an amazing job.
00:35:51.420And since then, he did get the firearms license reinstated with no reason.
00:35:58.060The plastic was just returned in the mail with a letter basically saying, you've got it back, that's it.
00:36:02.620After months of communicating with LRD, they produced no evidence for their claims.
00:36:08.940And eventually a letter was sent just saying that all charges or investigation had been dropped and the license was clear.
00:36:15.800Which is fantastic news because I remember when this all went down, I promised you one thing is Rebel News will have your back no matter what.
00:36:22.300I told you our supporters, if they hear what's happening, you know, the targeted campaign to try, get you really to get at me.
00:36:30.840The people will support you no matter what.
00:36:46.440But we use those funds to get you the best line.
00:36:48.900And we're purposely not mentioning his name, not to turn him into a target because we've got him in our back pocket ready for each and every time.
00:37:00.140The, you know, obviously those, that campaign was illegitimate.
00:37:05.660Are you doing anything about going after those who tried unlawfully to create that and to have you cancelled like that?
00:37:15.220I'm certainly talking with lawyers about the options on the table and what we can do about that insofar as what we can pursue and what we can do.
00:37:24.360I think it is important that we pursue each and every person who is behind that campaign.
00:37:29.700And we're going to make sure we do do whatever we can to hold them accountable.
00:37:34.240We're going to use the best lawyers each and every time.
00:37:37.320That's what we've learned at Rebel News.
00:37:38.660Use the best lawyers and you get the best outcome.
00:38:11.980I'd like to thank everyone from the bottom of my heart because it's just humbling and amazing that people would support me in what's happened.
00:39:24.380We're just winning with you, Daniel, and we're going to keep winning with you because we know that as long as we fight for you, that means you're going to fight for me and you're going to always be there by my side.
00:39:34.060And I feel, you know, I feel safe and protected when you have my back.
00:39:38.160Thank you so much, brother, for everything.
00:39:39.880It's an absolute pleasure to know that everybody at home and our team, we will leap to your defence every time in the exact same way you've leapt to my defence several times already over the years.
00:39:53.860So thank you, everyone at home that has helped us at standwithdaniel.com.