Making Sense - Sam Harris - #310 — Social Media & Public Trust

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:32.500 therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers so if you enjoy

00:00:36.540 what we're doing here please consider becoming one today i'm speaking with barry weiss michael

00:00:48.840 schellenberger and renee di resta barry is the founder and editor of the free press

00:00:54.480 and host of the podcast honestly from 2017 to 2020 she was an opinion writer and editor at the new

00:01:02.680 york times and before that she was an op-ed and book editor at the wall street journal and a senior

00:01:08.760 editor at tablet magazine and i highly recommend that you sign up for her newsletter and check out

00:01:13.820 what she's doing over at the free press and you can find that at the fp.com michael schellenberger

00:01:20.120 is the best-selling author of san francisco why progressives ruin cities and also apocalypse never

00:01:27.360 why environmental alarmism hurts us all he's been called an environmental guru a climate guru

00:01:34.240 north america's leading public intellectual on clean energy and a high priest of the pro-human

00:01:40.380 environmental movement he is the founder and president of environmental progress an independent

00:01:45.680 non-profit research organization that incubates ideas leaders and movements and a co-founder of

00:01:51.580 the california peace coalition an alliance of parents of children killed by fentanyl as well as

00:01:56.720 parents of homeless addicts and recovering addicts and he also has a newsletter over on substack titled

00:02:03.160 public and finally renee di resta is the technical research manager of the stanford internet observatory

00:02:09.500 a cross-disciplinary program of research teaching and policy engagement for the study of abuse and

00:02:15.640 current information technologies renee led an investigation into the russian internet research

00:02:20.340 agency's multi-year effort to manipulate american society and she has studied influence operations and

00:02:27.520 computational propaganda in the context of pseudo conspiracies terrorist activity and state-sponsored

00:02:34.480 information warfare she's advised congress the state department and other academic civil society and

00:02:41.620 business organizations on these topics she also regularly writes and speaks about these issues and is an ideas

00:02:48.400 contributor at wired and the atlantic and she appeared in the netflix documentary you might have seen

00:02:54.240 the social dilemma so this is a conversation about what i consider to be a very important issue

00:03:02.140 we focus through the lens of the so-called twitter files but it really is a conversation about

00:03:09.320 the loss of public trust in institutions and the way social media seems to have facilitated that

00:03:16.620 and one thing you might hear in this conversation at various points is a tension between what is often

00:03:24.200 thought of as elitism and populism and i should say up front in that particular contest

00:03:31.960 i am an unabashed elitist but that doesn't mean what most people think it means for me it has

00:03:39.220 nothing to do with class or even formal education it has to do with an honest appreciation for

00:03:46.540 differences in competence wherever those differences matter now when i call a plumber i have called him

00:03:53.920 for a reason the reason is i have a problem i can't solve right i don't know a damn thing about

00:04:00.620 plumbing so when my house is flooding with sewage backing up from the street and the plumber arrives

00:04:08.600 that man is my god jesus never received looks of greater admiration than i have cast upon my plumber

00:04:16.960 in a time of need and so it is with a surgeon or a lawyer or an airline pilot whenever there is an

00:04:25.780 emergency there is such a thing as expertise and we are right to want it because the alternative

00:04:34.100 is ignorance and incompetence and needless suffering and untimely death without plumbers

00:04:42.460 we live in our own filth and we've been doing that online for many years now and it's getting

00:04:50.460 disgusting of course i'm not saying that we should blindly trust experts and i'm not saying experts

00:04:58.140 haven't failed us in shocking ways but we are shocked against a background assumption that expertise

00:05:05.500 is a real thing and that our institutions have a responsibility to provide it if you didn't think

00:05:11.400 expertise was real then there would be no basis to be disappointed when our most esteemed institutions

00:05:17.360 fail to function and of course there are whole fields of pseudo expertise i've often criticized

00:05:24.440 organized religion for this me ask a catholic bishop about the holy spirit or about the problem of human

00:05:30.700 evil and you will get a lot of fake knowledge aimed at your brain we could add a few branches of the

00:05:37.440 humanities here along with scientific results that don't replicate but are still widely believed

00:05:43.140 and there are surely situations where real experts thinking about real problems can have their thinking

00:05:49.520 distorted by bad incentives it is absolutely true that institutions become corrupt all of this is

00:05:57.900 true and yet none of this suggests that the solution to our problems is for everyone to just quote

00:06:04.480 do their own research of course now we have chat gpt which would seem to make doing your own research

00:06:11.320 more promising eventually i think it will i think that many things will become like chess

00:06:17.020 what's the best next move in a game of chess should you ask the best human player on earth or should

00:06:23.640 you ask a computer the answer now is you should ask a computer and that will be the answer for as long as

00:06:30.020 computers are computers and we remain apes i think many other areas of human intelligence will be toppled

00:06:37.980 in just this way but not yet someone on my team asked chat gpt why i left twitter and it produced the

00:06:46.860 following paragraph sam harris quit twitter in december 2018 i wish i had quit in december 2018 it took me

00:06:56.100 four years longer than that he cited the platform's inability to handle discussions about controversial

00:07:02.180 topics without devolving into toxicity and harassment as the main reason for his decision

00:07:07.660 i agree with that but that's not really what i said at least i'm not aware of saying that anywhere

00:07:14.720 in a blog post harris wrote quote twitter is now one of the worst possible forums for the exchange of

00:07:21.100 ideas and that he had grown quote increasingly disturbed by the way the platform quote amplifies

00:07:27.780 the very worst aspects of our culture i'm actually not sure if those are accurate quotes from somewhere

00:07:32.740 or not but i definitely didn't write anything in a blog post he also expressed his dissatisfaction

00:07:38.820 with the way twitter is used to silence dissenting voices and spread misinformation after quitting

00:07:44.420 twitter harris continued to communicate with his audience through other means including his website

00:07:49.000 and podcast okay well it appears to know that i have a podcast but it seems that our robot overlords

00:07:56.340 haven't quite arrived yet and so we still need to rely on human experts for a while this point

00:08:02.740 between elitism and populism comes down to the following claim not everyone's opinion is valuable

00:08:12.420 on many many topics my opinion isn't valuable i shouldn't even have an opinion having a strong

00:08:21.940 opinion when you know nothing about a topic it's your political right sure but it's also a symptom of a

00:08:29.580 psychological problem and having a society filled with such people becomes a social problem and social

00:08:37.320 media has been a vector of strong divisive unfounded opinions and lies for over a decade i mean really

00:08:47.040 you just have to react to that thing that aoc said about that thing that tucker carlson said about that

00:08:53.740 thing the cops may or may not have done in a city you've never been to and will never go to even if you

00:08:58.380 live a thousand years and then you need to respond to all the people who didn't understand what you meant

00:09:03.200 or who were just pretending not to understand what you meant and you're going to do this a dozen times

00:09:07.880 a day for what the rest of your life oh you're not going to do that you're just going to watch other

00:09:12.840 people do it every day and then what you're going to find your real life in between all of that

00:09:18.560 scrolling what an astounding waste of time that was but the social consequences of our spending time

00:09:27.020 and attention this way are well worth talking about and the question of whether it's possible to build a

00:09:32.700 social network that is genuinely good for us is a very important one and those are among the topics

00:09:38.500 of today's podcast but i want you to keep a few distinctions in mind because there's been an

00:09:44.820 extraordinary amount of misinformation spread about what i think about free speech and content moderation

00:09:50.940 and censorship online so i just want to put a few clear landmarks in view the first is that i

00:09:58.380 absolutely support the right of anyone anywhere to say almost anything i don't think people should

00:10:05.360 be jailed for bad opinions so for instance i don't think the laws against holocaust denial

00:10:10.660 that exist in certain european countries are good as much as i agree that it's insane and odious

00:10:17.140 to deny the holocaust people should be free to do it now the question of whether they should be free

00:10:23.440 to do it on a social media platform must be decided by the people who own and run the platform

00:10:29.580 and here i think people should be generally free to create whatever platforms they want

00:10:33.840 so elon now owns twitter i think he should be free to kick the nazis off the platform

00:10:40.280 if that's what he wants to do i might not agree with his specific choices

00:10:44.380 he kicked kanye west off the platform for tweeting a swastika inside a jewish star

00:10:49.360 i honestly doubt i would have done that i mean can you really have a terms of service

00:10:54.180 that doesn't allow for weird swastikas that seems impossible to enforce coherently but the point is

00:11:01.140 i think elon and twitter should be free to moderate their platform however they want conversely i think

00:11:07.740 a nazi should have been free to buy twitter and kick all the non-nazis off the platform twitter is a

00:11:15.560 company it should be free to destroy itself and to inspire competitors and many people think it's in

00:11:22.960 the process of doing just that and it remains an open and interesting question what to do when the

00:11:29.520 nazis or the semi-nazis start using your social media platform and similar questions arise about people

00:11:35.980 who spread misinformation or what seems to be misinformation where is the line between necessary

00:11:43.080 debate which i agree we should have about things like how to run an election or vaccine safety

00:11:48.940 but where's the line between debating these things and simply making it impossible for people to

00:11:54.660 cooperate when they really must cooperate for instance after an election when you have a sitting

00:12:00.520 president lying about the results being totally fraudulent or during a global pandemic when the

00:12:06.780 healthcare systems in several countries seem on the verge of collapse there is a line here and it might

00:12:12.660 always be impossible to know if we're on the right side of that line it's simply not enough to say

00:12:18.800 that sunlight is the best disinfectant because we have built tools that give an asymmetric advantage

00:12:25.280 to liars and lunatics we really have done that social media is not a level playing field

00:12:33.260 and the idea that we are powerless to correct this problem because any efforts we make amount to quote

00:12:40.420 censorship is insane it's childish it's masochistic and it is demonstrably harming society

00:12:49.620 but this is a hard problem to solve as we're about to hear as i said we take the twitter files release

00:12:57.140 as our focus because both barry and michael were involved in that release but the four of us speak

00:13:04.960 generally about the loss of trust in institutions of media and the government we discussed barry and

00:13:11.160 michael's experience of participating in the twitter files release the problem of misinformation the

00:13:17.380 relationship between twitter and the federal government russian influence operations the

00:13:22.440 challenges of content moderation hunter biden's infamous laptop the need for transparency

00:13:28.640 platforms versus publishers twitter's resistance to the fbi political bias jk rowling the inherent

00:13:38.560 subjectivity of moderation decisions the rise of competitive platforms rumors versus misinformation

00:13:45.840 how twitter attempted to control the spread of covid misinformation the throttling of dr jay

00:13:51.600 bhattacharya the failure of institutions to communicate covid information well the risk of paternalism abuses of power

00:14:00.800 and other topics and now i bring you barry weiss michael schellenberger and renee di resta

00:14:13.520 i am here with barry weiss michael schellenberger and renee di resta thanks for joining me thanks for having us

00:14:19.200 uh as i said i will have introduced you all properly in the beginning but i was hoping we could have a

00:14:25.360 discussion about the the twitter files and social media generally and the failures of of the mainstream

00:14:33.520 media and the government and other institutions to maintain public trust uh and and perhaps the failure

00:14:40.320 of them to be worthy of public trust but i i think the the twitter files is the right starting point here

00:14:47.120 uh as uh as luck would have it we have barry and michael both of whom were um part of the uh the

00:14:53.520 journalistic effort to reveal these files barry let's start with you perhaps you can

00:15:00.320 really take it from the top and give us the the high level description of what the twitter files

00:15:04.880 are and uh how you came to be um part of the the release it's funny because this is one of those

00:15:12.000 stories where i feel like for half of the country it was the biggest thing that has happened in the

00:15:18.320 past decade and the other half of the country had no idea it even existed um and it was interesting to

00:15:24.480 kind of test my family in pittsburgh to find out which news sources they were reading and could tell

00:15:28.640 you everything about the way they viewed the story so basically what it is depending on how you look at

00:15:33.600 it is elon musk the new owner of twitter trying to in his words have a kind of informal truth and

00:15:42.240 reconciliation commission he understands that the platform that he just bought has lost a tremendous

00:15:47.520 amount of trust with the public was claiming to be one thing and actually in secret was something

00:15:53.200 quite different was also probably as he would frame it cooperating with the government in ways that

00:15:59.040 would make americans if they knew about it extremely uncomfortable was blacklisting people without

00:16:03.760 their knowledge and all kinds of other details along those lines and so another group of people would

00:16:08.880 say this is all about elon musk buying twitter and trying to shame the previous owners of twitter and

00:16:15.600 the previous top brass at twitter and really what this is all about is embarrassment and vengeance and

00:16:21.360 where you fall on the answer to that question tells you a lot about where you stand politically i would

00:16:25.520 say in general so basically what the mechanics of it were that elon musk decided to make available

00:16:34.640 the inner workings of the company to a number of independent journalists the first one that he reached

00:16:40.560 out to was the journalist matt taibbi who has a very popular newsletter then he texted me and reached

00:16:48.000 out to me then i reached out to michael schellenberger and then the group kind of grew from there and

00:16:53.920 came to include journalists like abigail schreier lee fang layton woodhouse and a number of other

00:16:59.920 people associated with my company the free press what was said on twitter publicly by elon musk is that

00:17:06.240 we had unfettered access to all of the inner workings of twitter everything from emails private slack

00:17:14.640 messages group slack messages and on and on and on and that was sort of the headline that was trumpeted

00:17:21.040 all over twitter and all over the press in fact what we had and michael can explain this probably

00:17:26.320 in better detail than i can because he's has a meticulous memory we basically were able to do

00:17:32.240 highly directed searches on at most two laptops between at times up to eight journalists in a room

00:17:41.520 so what we had the ability to do was to say to a lawyer working through a laborious e-discovery

00:17:47.440 tool and it came to include two different tools tell me everything that happened between the following

00:17:53.760 six c-suite level employees of twitter on the dates between january 6th and january 10th basically the

00:18:02.240 dates that trump got kicked off of twitter and basically over the course of a few days it would

00:18:06.560 spit back to us information and what came out of that was a number of stories that depending again on how

00:18:14.240 you look at it were either enormously important bombshell confirmation of what a number of or of

00:18:20.480 what a lot of people in the country had thought was actually going on on twitter what they denied

00:18:24.560 and if you're on the other half of the country and again i'm being crude here it was you know nut

00:18:29.600 picking uh it was cherry picking it was finding it was going sort of searching for anecdotal stories

00:18:37.760 that would confirm the political biases of the independent journalists involved in the project i

00:18:43.600 think the really really important thing for people to understand and i think that this wasn't explained

00:18:48.080 well enough by any of those of us who were involved is how unbelievably laborious these searches were

00:18:54.400 and how if we had the choice like it's not as if we walked into a room with organized files according to

00:19:01.760 covid masking myocarditis the election in brazil modi israel palestine like then we could have really

00:19:09.760 told you the comprehensive story instead we had to make some very difficult choices based on the kind

00:19:17.760 of tools we were using to go looking for certain stories where we knew the public story that had been

00:19:23.280 told and we wanted to see what had actually gone on behind the scenes and again in my view you know the

00:19:28.960 story of the decision to kick off trump very important story is it the number one story that was interesting

00:19:34.400 to me not at all covid was far more interesting to me but i knew that if we looked at those set of dates

00:19:40.880 that we could come out with that we could come out with some information that would be worthy of the public

00:19:46.720 interest um and we also knew that we're dealing with someone who is in many ways a mercurial person you know

00:19:54.560 any source that gives you information has motivation you have no idea when their motivation

00:20:00.320 or incentives might change and so we wanted to harvest as much information as we possibly could

00:20:05.200 in the days that we were there yeah i hadn't thought to talk about these details but now i'm interested so

00:20:11.040 i just a couple of follow-up questions so when you when you would perform a search or have someone perform

00:20:16.560 a search for you there wasn't some layer of curation from lawyers or anyone else who was telling you

00:20:23.280 who are deciding what could be released and what couldn't be released if you said give me every

00:20:28.000 email that contains the word trump between certain dates they just spit out those emails

00:20:33.280 no one of the ways that i knew that sam i just don't know how much detail you want me to get into

00:20:37.920 here but what one of the in the first few days that i was there with my wife nelly who also works with

00:20:45.760 me and building the company matt wasn't there was just the two of us elon musk and lawyers that we were

00:20:52.560 communicating with over the phone and i would ask them to do a search let's say for covid or cloth

00:20:59.760 masks or fauci or whatever and what i was getting back was garbage information it was such garbage

00:21:06.400 information that it and i'm not a paranoid person i would say michael shallenberger is way more suspicious

00:21:12.240 than i am in general i'm pretty naive but it was so bad that nelly was saying this cannot be right

00:21:18.000 this cannot be right and that's when i came to discover that the lawyer who was actually doing

00:21:23.840 the searches worked for twitter and was one of the people that we were hoping to do searches on

00:21:30.160 which is this guy jim baker who became a sort of flashpoint in the story later on and maybe michael

00:21:35.200 i can hand it over to you if you want to explain sort of the mechanics of how this worked the reason

00:21:40.400 it can be maybe a little boring the reason i think it's significant is because i think it will help

00:21:44.960 people understand why we did the stories we did right right yeah michael jump in here what was

00:21:50.560 your experience extracting information from twitter yeah i mean i think it's really fun conversation i

00:21:56.000 love i love talking about it and i was a little annoyed after that that just a lot of people wrote

00:22:01.680 stories about how they thought the process worked without just asking us because we would have said so

00:22:05.440 and i've always have taken all the time to explain it but you know as barry mentioned um barry brought me

00:22:10.720 in i do not have a relationship with elon musk i've only criticized elon musk in the past um i

00:22:17.920 criticized him in mother jones i wrote about him in apocalypse never and just obviously when barry was

00:22:23.600 like we can get access to the twitter files i was like hell yeah i mean there's no for me there was no

00:22:28.720 just it's a chance to go and get this incredible information i met when i met elon he said he did not

00:22:35.760 know who i was i you know and and basically it's just like what barry said if there was any filtering

00:22:42.720 or curation or removing of any emails we saw no signs of it and i would be shocked because the size

00:22:49.760 of the searches we were getting i can just tell you some of them we would be like you know a lot of like

00:22:56.320 all the emails for this person over this period of date and we would get you know email boxes of

00:23:01.920 2000 emails 890 emails 2000 emails 1800 emails 1800 emails 2300 emails so it's just for somebody

00:23:10.720 like we i consider myself an extremely fast reader and i'm able to process a lot of information very

00:23:15.280 quickly it took me a very long time to go through these emails i couldn't see anybody being able to

00:23:19.920 have done that and then when the emails populated in our inboxes there was no that we never saw any

00:23:25.680 evidence anything had been removed i don't think anybody i mean i'm not saying i can't prove that nothing

00:23:31.120 was but i just saw no evidence for it and i didn't see anything in elon that suggested that he cared

00:23:35.920 about that although michael it sounds like that cuts against what i was understanding barry to be

00:23:41.280 saying which was initially the search results were so crappy that you thought somebody this nefarious

00:23:47.680 lawyer was throttling the results that was before i i should clarify that was before michael had gotten

00:23:54.320 there and as soon as elon found out that that person was involved okay so the process changed

00:24:00.640 he's operating at the highest level of the company he had until i told him hey do you know that jim

00:24:05.920 baker is the one doing the search he had no idea that jim baker was the one doing the search right

00:24:10.240 then the the the people involved change he was fired and like michael said the files we got subsequent

00:24:17.600 to that there was no evidence at all that they were tampered with the thing i should add is

00:24:21.600 one of the one of the criticisms of the story of the twitter files is that we focused an inordinate

00:24:27.840 amount on a person who had been at one time the head of twitter's trust and safety this guy yoel

00:24:33.840 roth and the reason for that is that yoel roth was a very loquacious person he talked a lot on slack

00:24:40.240 and on email and in other places so it's not as if we weren't interested in other people it's just that

00:24:45.520 you know like any story you're looking for the person who's going to share the most information and he

00:24:49.760 spoke openly and a lot on platforms like slack to his colleagues it's not like we were actively

00:24:55.840 going out to interested in yoel roth i barely knew who he was before i walked into twitter right now

00:25:01.280 were either of you concerned about the optics of this process that you would appear to be at least in

00:25:08.800 part doing pr for elon uh rather than actually engaging in in journalism that was you know a more

00:25:17.120 normal sort i mean there were other constraints releases had to be done on twitter itself uh which

00:25:22.800 i think it could be argued was not the best platform for actually discussing this and really

00:25:27.920 anything at length i mean what were your concerns going into this and and is there any residue of

00:25:33.920 those concerns not for me really i mean for me it was just like we get the access to the date and

00:25:39.680 i just am not i mean people say things but i'm just not i'm not that concerned about but for

00:25:45.200 instance what i noticed before i left twitter i mean i have to admit now that i'm no longer on

00:25:49.760 twitter i don't consider myself even minimally informed about what it's like there now but when

00:25:56.160 i was there and the first drops were happening more or less everything elon said about what was coming

00:26:04.000 and what had dropped was wrong right and he was lying or just delusional about what he was releasing

00:26:10.400 you know you know the level of government but he wasn't releasing it so isn't that kind of the

00:26:14.880 point it was the frame around it i mean he was saying here it is and and and his summary of what

00:26:19.280 taibbi was saying was was just not in fact accurate in fact it was the in the case of one of taibbi's

00:26:24.960 drops it was the opposite of what taibbi said yeah i mean so i didn't bother you at all i mean it

00:26:30.720 bothered me when he tweeted my pronouns are prosecute fauci it bothered me when he said that thing about

00:26:37.120 yoel roth i've i told him that you know we we've i think barry criticized elon when he de-platformed

00:26:44.880 those journalists i retweeted it we don't control elon musk i mean we were invited into a smash and

00:26:51.680 grab situation to be able to look at as many emails as we could and we're thrilled at it and

00:26:57.440 it's super important what came out of it but no i mean i just kind of i i'm a big gen xer i'm a

00:27:03.840 breakfast club type i go on tucker carlson i talk to tucker carlson i talk to people that

00:27:10.400 my family thinks it's terrible i talk to them and i don't believe i'm not i don't have like a

00:27:15.360 view that if i talk to somebody that somehow i'm legitimizing all of their views or that if i go take

00:27:22.480 these if i go and like look for these emails that somehow i'm agreeing with elon musk i've criticized

00:27:26.560 elon musk about his policies around solar in china i'm not going to stop doing that i told him exactly

00:27:32.960 what i thought and have told him exactly what i thought and i'm just with elon the way that i am

00:27:37.760 with everybody and so no i mean and people talk shit but it's like i don't like people say things

00:27:43.920 but they're not true so i can't i'm you gotta have a stoic attitude about it which is like i'm

00:27:48.160 responsible for the things that i do i'm not responsible for what other people do i just i just

00:27:53.440 think that this is as old school as it gets like a source had documents that he wanted to leak to the

00:27:59.360 public and journalists who felt those documents were in the public interest jumped to go look at

00:28:06.000 them and any source who leaks documents or leaks a story to the new york times or the washington post

00:28:12.480 always has an agenda like that goes without saying i think the unusual thing in this case

00:28:17.280 is that the source was public about it and he made his agenda entirely transparent the entire time

00:28:24.320 so like and you know as as michael just mentioned i i think i well proved that i was not in the tank for

00:28:32.480 anyone on this matter i'm just on the side of the public knowing more information and people can decide

00:28:38.960 for themselves whether or not that information was in the public interest i certainly think that it was

00:28:43.920 and i frankly think a lot of people are resorting to sort of criticizing journalistic practice or you know

00:28:50.000 standing in or other sort of like technicalities of that sort because they don't want to confront

00:28:56.880 what the actual story is right well i definitely want to get to the story but renee i want to bring

00:29:01.600 you in here do you have anything to say at this point but just the process and the optics yeah it's

00:29:07.760 very interesting so i um for you know your audience members you probably don't know i started off talking

00:29:12.960 about social media kind of as an activist on the outside in 2015 moved into academia in 2019 and in

00:29:20.640 the intervening time the relationship between platforms and government and researchers changed

00:29:26.720 very significantly over those four years we can talk about why and how perhaps i was part you know

00:29:32.160 i'm at stanford internet observatory we we are we're i don't know part of something that was called

00:29:37.040 the twitter moderation research consortium that i think no longer exists because everybody got laid off

00:29:42.080 but it was a process by which twitter could actually share data sets with researchers and

00:29:48.160 this is relevant because we did all of our research was done independently we would receive data sets

00:29:54.080 from twitter we would do research independently and sometimes we would actually go back to them and

00:29:57.840 we would ask why is this account included why is this this doesn't feel like it fits if we're going

00:30:02.960 to tell a story to the public about this chinese network this irania network this saudi network this

00:30:08.000 russian network we want to make sure that we're doing an independent analysis and we are only going

00:30:13.040 to to say what we think we can support as researchers and what we would try to do was

00:30:18.480 look at and enrich the story with as much of a full picture as possible so the twitter data set

00:30:23.360 was almost a jumping off point to a significant process that would involve also looking for these

00:30:28.160 accounts on facebook tick tock twitter you know you sorry um youtube you name it and we what we would

00:30:34.000 try to do was not tell an anecdotal story but we would always include both the qualitative you know

00:30:40.160 here's what these accounts are saying here's what we think they're doing but we would try to include

00:30:44.000 something in the way of summary statistics here's how many of them there are here's the engagements

00:30:48.640 they're getting here's where they are situated in the public conversation relative to other accounts

00:30:54.400 that talk about these things and the reason for that is because one of the problems that i think

00:30:59.520 has been you know one of the problems with a big driver in the public conversation around content

00:31:04.000 moderation whether that's related to the kind of foreign influence campaigns or domestic activism

00:31:09.360 or anything else is that it is so anecdotal and so when the twitter files began as somebody who has

00:31:15.920 worked with platform data and also you know testified in front of congress critiquing platforms

00:31:20.560 and their lack of transparency and who has written about that for the better part of seven years now

00:31:25.360 what what has been interesting to me in the files i think i think they're very interesting just to kind

00:31:29.680 of to start with that i i'm not a person who says oh this is all a nothing burger this is not interesting

00:31:34.320 but i had kind of three issues with the process and the first was that i think a lack of familiarity with

00:31:40.640 that that multi-year evolution of content moderation policy meant that for me as an observer there were

00:31:46.720 some of these like wet streets cause rain moments you know the gelman amnesia phenomenon where

00:31:51.120 the person doesn't fully understand what is happening in context a specific example that i

00:31:57.520 that i said on twitter was uh one comment in which you see the senate intelligence committee engaging with

00:32:02.720 twitter asking it if it responded to some sort of tip from the fbi and that was very interesting to

00:32:07.760 me because i had done a bunch of work on twitter data for the senate intelligence committee in 2018

00:32:13.520 and as a researcher running that process in 2018 with no engagement with twitter whatsoever

00:32:19.520 what i knew was that the senate intelligence committee did not have very high confidence

00:32:24.240 in twitter's ability to find anything so reading that interaction was fascinating to me because they

00:32:29.520 were in my opinion essentially saying did you find this yourself or did somebody have to hand it to

00:32:34.400 you again but what the reporter who wrote that thread construed that as was are you taking direction

00:32:39.600 from the fbi and marching so this was the kind of wet streets cause rain experience that that i had in

00:32:44.480 a number of these threads where i thought gosh i wish that somebody who had either been there you

00:32:49.280 know in a in an abstract sense not in the company but who understood the evolution of that stuff

00:32:53.520 had perhaps like weighed in or been consulted and then i think the second critique was the was how

00:32:58.800 anecdotal it was and that made it feel a little bit cherry-picked and this kind of ties into maybe

00:33:04.240 point three which is that the trust and the public confidence in whether or not you believe in a

00:33:09.760 framing around an anecdote is entirely dependent on whether you trust the reporter or the outlet at this

00:33:14.720 point and that's a function of polarization in american society it is not a critique of barry or

00:33:20.080 michael or anybody else's thread it is i think the reality and so with some of the in my opinion

00:33:26.800 over emphasis on anecdote and and i recognize you know this is the process this is what you had

00:33:30.560 available to you what made that troubling to me is that it did feel like there were opportunities for

00:33:37.360 score settling and things or searching for things that you you know that a particular reporter

00:33:42.320 found problematic or wanted to dig more into but that didn't necessarily get at the scope and scale

00:33:47.680 of the phenomenon overall and i'll point specifically to something like shadow banning right fascinating

00:33:53.600 topic lots of you know many of us have looked at it over the years and made arguments that i don't

00:33:58.800 think it's something that the platforms shouldn't be able to do and we can talk about why but i do think

00:34:03.200 it should be transparent so that's that's sort of where i sit on the shadow banning question

00:34:06.800 but what we didn't get was how many users were receiving these labels in what country during what

00:34:12.960 time period how many of those who received a label were mentioned in a government request that's

00:34:18.320 absolutely kind of crucial this question of what to what extent does the government actually exert

00:34:23.040 influence over the platform it's not simply filing a report it's did the report lead to an action

00:34:29.040 and this is the sort of thing again maybe this is my bias as you know as somebody in academia

00:34:33.120 where i say like god i'd really love to get my hands on the summary stats you know can you request

00:34:36.880 those can you say like in this moderation tool you know can we connect the dots here between here's the

00:34:42.800 fbi over submitting in my opinion litanies of accounts you know really just sort of stupid process

00:34:48.720 but then what happened next and and that was like the the kind of connecting the dots there

00:34:54.640 was in my opinion kind of underdone candidly and it led to an opportunity for innuendo to drive

00:35:00.880 the story and whether or not you believe the innuendo is entirely dependent on whether you

00:35:05.280 believe or trust the outlet and the person covering the story so in the interest of

00:35:10.400 informing the public writ large that's where i felt like you know and as barry notes you

00:35:16.240 depending on i think we're saying the same thing which side of a political spectrum you sit on you

00:35:20.880 either trust or do not trust at this point i don't know that it's political spectrum so much as like

00:35:24.800 you know institutionalist populist maybe right um but but there is i think that that tension for me

00:35:31.760 was was it was where i felt and and i wrote this in the atlantic that i felt that there was a little

00:35:36.320 bit of a missed opportunity there how could we perhaps get at more of those like holistic or

00:35:40.800 systemic views informing an opinion and platform moderation that are less anecdotal and less

00:35:45.520 dependent on trust in a reporter's narrative right yeah i mean just to echo part of it it's hard to

00:35:50.880 capture kind of like how chaotic the situation was i mean it was like getting searches back at

00:35:56.400 midnight working till three in the morning the owner of twitter coming in at 12 30 wanting to schmooze

00:36:02.320 like you know i second everything renee's saying i got meaning on the question of should these

00:36:08.720 platforms not just twitter be more transparent do we have a problem with private companies that have

00:36:15.440 sort of unaccountable power over the public conversation and to what extent are they

00:36:22.240 you know doing the bidding of organizations like the fbi like that's something really important that

00:36:28.480 every citizen has a right to know not just me and michael schellenberger and matt taibbi but i just

00:36:33.440 can't emphasize enough like that the idea of going in and saying give me a report or a summary on xyz

00:36:40.400 that just wasn't something that was possible while we were there okay well let's get to what was

00:36:45.840 found out or what has been found out so far i guess as preamble i just want to say i think the

00:36:52.160 big story here which is certainly beyond the case of twitter is um our ongoing struggles to deal with

00:37:00.480 misinformation and this is something that renee obviously knows a lot about but um it seems to me

00:37:05.760 that this is the kind of thing that may never be perfectly solved in the absence of just perfect

00:37:11.280 ai and when you look at what imperfect solutions will look like they will always throw up both type

00:37:19.440 one and type two errors so you know any attempt to suppress misinformation is going to suppress real

00:37:25.920 information and that'll be embarrassing and cause some people to be irate and to allege various

00:37:32.640 conspiracies and it also you know it will fail in the other way and lots of misinformation will get

00:37:38.720 through and fail to be suppressed and this isn't merely just an engineering question this is a it's

00:37:45.040 an ethical question it's a political question and even in the simplest case where we know what is true

00:37:51.680 and what matters and what we should do on the basis of these facts and we're i would say we're

00:37:58.640 very rarely in that situation at this point but even in the best case where we know what's true

00:38:04.000 it can be very difficult to know what to do in a political environment where great masses of people

00:38:11.680 believe crazy things it's a question of how to message the truth in hand to great numbers of people who

00:38:19.200 as we've already said and no longer trust certain institutions or certain people and

00:38:27.280 will um reach for the most sinister possible interpretation of events and you know anchor

00:38:34.400 there and are you know that seems to be the the state of discourse we have on more or less everything

00:38:38.640 from public health to the very topic we're talking about so uh with that is just kind of the frame

00:38:44.480 around this perhaps um bearing michael you know either of you can start i'd love to know what you

00:38:50.880 think we have learned so far and what has been the most interesting slash concerning facts i'll say maybe

00:38:57.680 one thing and then kick it to michael i think that there are two main stories here story number one

00:39:03.840 is about the way that an extremely powerful tool that has influenced elections that has led to

00:39:11.040 revolutions claim to have a particular mission and gaslit the public as it secretly abandoned that

00:39:19.120 mission in critical ways and it shouldn't matter what your politics are like that to me is a really

00:39:26.640 important story if you believe as i do you don't need to go all the way and believe that twitter's a

00:39:31.200 public square to believe that has an enormous influence on the public conversation on deciding who is

00:39:36.240 a hero and who is a villain on on any number of things the second thing that i think is the headline

00:39:42.800 story is the way that this sort of very close relationship between the federal government and

00:39:50.720 one of the most powerful tools of communication in the world i think those are kind of sort of like

00:39:55.520 the two core stories that that came out of all of the reporting i don't know if we're on twitter files

00:40:01.280 number 121 or whatever but those those to me are the two biggest headlines and around around which

00:40:08.960 topics yeah which topics do you think i mean you're most concerned about the messaging around

00:40:15.040 covid or hunter's laptop what do you consider to be the center of gravity here on the cultural i'll

00:40:22.480 leave the government conversation to michael because he did much more on that to me it's the way that

00:40:28.320 twitter actively narrowed we can i don't know if we want to get into hunter yet but yeah i mean i

00:40:34.560 certainly think that when a private company decides to lock out a newspaper doing truthful reporting

00:40:43.440 weeks before an election on the on the spurious grounds that it was based on hacked material as

00:40:49.520 if that isn't what is printed in places like the new york times and the washington post every day yeah

00:40:53.280 i have a huge problem with that but i think one of the core things that came out of

00:40:58.320 what we what we saw especially in the the shadow banning of people like dr jay badacharya was the

00:41:04.400 way that it people inside twitter actively worked to make things untouchable to make people untouchable

00:41:14.960 to make particular viewpoints that have turned out to be very vindicated untouchable and therefore

00:41:21.680 profoundly shaped the public conversation about something like covet and the right way to respond to it

00:41:28.240 i think that is a really significant story michael i would say there's three areas i would say the

00:41:34.080 first had to do with the crackdown on misinformation bleeding into a crackdown on a free expression which

00:41:41.920 i think you alluded to sam and i'll give i'll give one big example which is facebook under pressure from

00:41:48.160 the white house censoring accurate information emailing the white house to say we are censoring this

00:41:54.640 accurate information because we view it as encouraging vaccine hesitancy now they didn't exactly black it

00:42:02.000 out it was a they repressed the spread of it but it is a form of censorship twitter did a milder version

00:42:08.560 of this with jay badacharya and and with martin kildorf who just simply said not everybody needs to get the

00:42:14.640 vaccine and they put an interstitial on it which is a kind of like warning thing saying official twitter

00:42:21.040 censors say that this is not this is not right um that was a case where uh in the case of kildorf he

00:42:27.840 was expressing an opinion and he is a harvard medical doctor not to stoop to credentialism but

00:42:33.360 he certainly i think had a right to weigh in on that question and then in the case of facebook there

00:42:37.840 was no transparency here and i should actually pause and just say how however much we disagree on many

00:42:43.600 things i've had the pleasure of being able to have an ongoing conversation with renee over the last few

00:42:47.840 weeks and we all we both very strongly support transparency that i think i agree with renee

00:42:55.760 and others that argue that transparency would solve a lot of these problems if facebook had simply done

00:43:01.360 if there was something somebody said that facebook said we are suppressing these views because we are

00:43:06.800 encouraging vaccines and we're going to allow this debate on in some way this is no so technical

00:43:11.520 obstacle to allowing that to occur so that's one number two is the laptop i think there is a very

00:43:20.720 clear pattern of behavior i cannot prove that there was an organized effort but nonetheless i think that

00:43:28.320 my thread on the hunter buying laptop shows that there was a very strange pattern and again maybe it was a total

00:43:35.680 coincidence for both existing intelligence community officials and former intelligence community

00:43:41.920 officials to pre-bunk the hunter buying laptop and we can get into the details of this but i think

00:43:48.720 suffice it to say i think it merits more investigation i strongly support congressional investigation on it i

00:43:53.920 don't think we've gotten to the bottom of it i find it extremely suspicious and i think other people do

00:43:59.360 too when they really look at it and again maybe it's maybe i'm overly pattern recognizing here i hold

00:44:05.520 that as a possibility but i think there's there's something really interesting there that has to be

00:44:10.080 talked about more and then the third thing is just this grotesque inflation of the threat of russian

00:44:15.920 influence operations it was being used as a way as a cudgel to basically start to de-platform de-amplify

00:44:26.080 censor demonize disparage discredit people that did not deserve that that's sort of what matt talks about

00:44:36.000 today and and i thought renee over email we had a there was an exchange about this but it's not it's not just a

00:44:42.160 single thing i mean it was being used as justification for all sorts of things including censoring this laptop it

00:44:49.360 became a kind of boogeyman and you know i think one one thing i wanted to do on this podcast and say

00:44:56.400 very clearly is i do think that yole roth turns out to be a more complicated character than i think he

00:45:02.960 had been perceived as in the beginning i see him he repeatedly would point out that various things were

00:45:09.280 not violations including the thing that trump was de-platformed for he said very explicitly that

00:45:14.400 trump had not broken had not violated twitter's terms of service and they then worked to create

00:45:19.920 a justification for de-platforming him same thing with the hunter biden laptop they said that it had

00:45:24.720 not violated twitter's terms of service they were very clear on this and there was there were other

00:45:29.280 instances of it now then yole roth was then uh basically overruled by the people above him so he

00:45:36.880 was a good company man but i don't think that the demonization of yole roth that had occurred

00:45:41.680 perhaps earlier in the process of looking at what happened at twitter was fair but i do think that

00:45:48.000 this you know and i think i mentioned him here in this context because he was the one that was often

00:45:52.400 pushing back against the abuse of this russian uh influence operation you mean it wasn't fair when

00:45:58.960 elon branded him pedophile in front of 120 million people that was no that was obviously wrong that was

00:46:04.800 obviously wrong absolutely 100 i i no hesitation obviously announcing that so renee feel free to

00:46:12.240 say whatever you want here but i i would love to get your take on the uh russian disinformation piece

00:46:17.600 too yeah sure so i think that where i come down and you know michael and i have been emailing about so

00:46:24.800 many of these issues over the last couple weeks i i really come down in a place where i feel like

00:46:29.920 there are nuanced moments here and as we as we talk about for example yoel pushing back about

00:46:35.360 against some of the things that happen content moderation is the story of people trying to make

00:46:40.000 decisions the best possible decision in line with a particular policy that a company has written

00:46:44.800 and then some sort of sense of even-handed enforcement you know so you have the policy

00:46:48.720 and then the enforcement these are sometimes two different things the policies what you then have is

00:46:53.440 people in the most high stakes volatile situations trying to figure out what to do so what winds up

00:47:00.000 happening on twitter ironically is that all of these things are reduced down to do you think this

00:47:04.480 person is bad do you think that decision is bad if you think that's bad obviously there was some sort

00:47:08.640 of malice behind it and that i think is a flattening of what is actually happening there is some

00:47:13.680 interesting dynamics and uses of the word censorship that i've been intrigued by as we have moved through

00:47:21.680 the evolution of some of those policies over the last seven years and for just to just to help

00:47:28.320 make sure the audience understands content moderation is not a binary take it down leave it up

00:47:33.280 so that is the i'll use facebook's terminology here they have a framework and they call it remove

00:47:38.400 reduce inform remove means it comes down reduce means its distribution is limited and inform means a

00:47:45.680 label is put up there is some sort of interstitial you you know a pop-up comes up or there is a fact

00:47:50.400 check under it or youtube has a little like context label down at the bottom of the video

00:47:54.640 sometimes it'll take you to a wikipedia article so in that moderation framework remove reduce inform

00:48:01.040 when something is reported there's a policy rubric that says this thing may violate the content and

00:48:06.000 then the enforcement whether to remove reduce or inform is based on some sort of internal series of

00:48:10.800 thresholds i am not an employee of these companies i don't know what those are so for me one of the

00:48:15.600 interesting things about the files has been seeing those conversations come to light and

00:48:19.760 my personal take on it my interpretation has been largely that you have people trying to decide within

00:48:25.600 the rubric of this policy what they should do so there were a couple policies that i think are

00:48:31.520 relevant to this conversation and what's just been said the first on the subject of the hunter biden

00:48:36.400 laptop was the creation of a policy following a lot of what happened with the gru there so when we

00:48:42.800 talk about russian interference i'll connect it to russian interference for you you and i spoke back

00:48:46.640 in 2019 about the work that i did on a particular data set for the internet research agency so that

00:48:52.080 is the sort of troll factory when people think about social media interference and they think about

00:48:56.400 trolls or bots the internet research agency is what they're thinking of but there was another component

00:49:01.200 to russian interference in the election which was russian military intelligence hacking the dnc and

00:49:06.720 the clinton campaign and then releasing files at opportune times for example to distract or change

00:49:13.600 the public conversation to make them cover these files i think the first transfer not mistaken was

00:49:18.240 dropped the day of that access hollywood pussygate tape coming out right so um the media is talking

00:49:23.360 about pussygate all of a sudden here's this trance of secret documents media conversation changes so this

00:49:28.960 is a you know in response to things like this and also to hacked materials more broadly the platform

00:49:35.200 implements a hacked materials policy that says despite the fact that again journalists may have

00:49:40.560 a particular point of view about how to treat hacked materials the platform does not necessarily

00:49:44.720 have to share that point of view because sometimes hacked materials turn out to be sex pictures or

00:49:50.160 nudes that are sitting on your phone or a variety of other types of private conversations that get

00:49:54.960 dropped so this policy covers things beyond you know the contents of a wayward laptop from a

00:50:00.960 presidential son and so again they're not writing the policy for hunter biden's laptop they've written

00:50:05.920 the policy and then you see in the conversation them deciding whether and how to enforce it and

00:50:11.040 this is where the conversations with the fbi come into play again no personal you know i felt like the

00:50:16.960 enforcement on the hunter biden laptop by twitter was quite foolish i thought this is one of these like

00:50:21.600 the horse has left the barn you know you're doing more you're creating more problems for yourself by

00:50:25.520 trying to censor particularly an article as opposed to the contents of the laptop itself right there's

00:50:31.120 one thing you can enforce your policy on hacked material by taking down the nudes that were going

00:50:36.240 up and saying that violates our terms of service without saying that also the new york post article

00:50:41.280 digesting the contents of the laptop violates the terms of service this is where you see some of the

00:50:45.760 debates about the enforcement there but the actually just just to linger on that distinction if i'm not

00:50:52.160 mistaken this was true when i last looked but perhaps something has come out since biden and

00:50:58.160 his team never asked for the story to be suppressed on twitter that weren't they just asking about

00:51:05.360 the contents of the laptop like nude photos of hunter biden to be so my understanding from when that

00:51:12.160 twitter files thread went out you know i and others went to the internet archive to go see what the

00:51:17.600 substance of those tweets had been and they were in fact nudes does that mean that they were all nudes

00:51:23.280 no because again we have a very particular filtered anecdotal view of what happened with regard to

00:51:28.720 those requests you know we're told the trump campaign requested take down sorry the trump

00:51:32.480 administration requested take downs the biden campaign requested take downs and then we have a

00:51:36.560 list of like four or five different tweets and so that again is where depending on your your

00:51:40.400 framing and your perception this was either uh egregious jawboning or somebody trying to get nudes taken

00:51:46.160 down off a platform but from what i have seen it was it was the latter but don't we think that the

00:51:52.320 scandal is that the scandal was the fact that twitter locked out the new york post yeah yeah i'm not in

00:51:58.320 any way saying that i thought that that was a good decision that was what i meant when i said that the

00:52:01.680 suppression of the article was bad facebook did something different i don't know if you remember

00:52:05.840 what facebook did at the time but facebook actually used reduce and facebook said we are going to

00:52:12.160 throttle the distribution of the story while we try to figure out what is going on here

00:52:16.000 now the question of is that throttling censorship is a subsequent label censorship is where we've

00:52:22.800 really moved very very far in our use of that term in the context of social media moderation my

00:52:29.040 personal feeling on that very strongly is that it was political the first labeling is censorship

00:52:35.280 articles began when twitter began to fact check tweets by president trump it did not take them down

00:52:40.640 it did not throttle them it put up a label a fact check account i think that's counter speech and

00:52:46.160 contextualization this is my personal view on it but we began to see a again a flattening of the

00:52:52.480 conversation where remove reduce and inform were all contextualized as egregious overreach and censorship

00:53:00.640 and so where i come down on a lot of these questions is i recognize the complaint i acknowledge

00:53:05.440 that things were not handled well and i ask what do you want done instead yeah if you do not want the

00:53:11.600 label if you do not want the reduce and if you definitely don't want the takedown then is the

00:53:16.880 alternative simply a viral free for all at all times with every unverified rumor going viral and the

00:53:23.280 public being left to sort it out and i'm very curious about that particularly because journalism

00:53:28.960 is supposed to be about informing the public a recognition that journalists themselves

00:53:33.920 serve a filtering function serve a fact-checking function and you know we can debate the the

00:53:39.600 you know whether that's partisan or biased or this or that but there is a i think a core

00:53:45.200 believe at the center of the profession that there is such a thing as the best information that we have

00:53:51.200 in this moment and how do we convey that in a particular information environment that's where i

00:53:56.320 think a lot of my work has been but you know i'll stop talking there because i think that the

00:54:00.240 complexities of content moderation are too often viewed as right versus left takedown versus leave

00:54:06.400 up they're really filtered through the context of the american culture war and this is a global platform

00:54:11.520 trying to figure out you know what the hell do you do when modi's government requests a takedown

00:54:14.480 you know this is a this is the policies which elon just agreed to yeah you just you just capitulate

00:54:19.840 and hope no one notices all right so i just want to add something to what you said renee because it's

00:54:25.520 what people are reacting to is so people are acting like they want just everything to rip however

00:54:33.200 the algorithm sees fit and any curation is nefarious and yet we know we have an algorithm

00:54:41.360 or a set of algorithms that preferentially boost misleading and injurious information so the truth

00:54:50.160 is always playing catch up to the most salacious lies and if that's going to be the status quo there's

00:54:57.920 no way you build a healthy society and a healthy politics on top of that so i think anyone who

00:55:02.720 thinks about it for five seconds knows that they don't want that and therefore you have to get your

00:55:07.440 hand on the wheel at least a little bit and whether that hand is is some other algorithm or it's it's

00:55:13.920 actual kind of the conscious curation of monkeys you you need to intrude on on what what we currently

00:55:20.000 have built and it comes back to how transparent those intrusions are and then what people make of

00:55:26.800 those efforts based on there are divided politics and our tribalism and i think that the transparency

00:55:35.120 piece is the you know the common ground and the area where we can actually move forward there are you

00:55:41.600 know google has a interesting all the platforms have transparency reports most of them are aggregated

00:55:47.040 stats they're not particularly interesting google actually will say here's a government takedown

00:55:52.080 here is approximately the request you know here here's what we received here's what they asked us

00:55:55.760 to do and then here's what we did it's very you know very um one sentence summary two sentence

00:55:59.600 summaries but i really love that i think of that as like this is a best practice there's the lumen

00:56:04.880 database which does this for dmca takedowns which are usually companies uh sometimes others

00:56:10.000 requesting uh takedowns related to copyright violations again here is the request here is the

00:56:15.680 um you know here's what we did and i think that is an optimal path forward for saying you cannot have

00:56:23.440 a wholly moderation free environment every algorithm just speaking of curation has a weighting in some

00:56:29.120 regard there is no such thing as neutral there is no you know even reverse chronological is a particular

00:56:35.520 value judgment because they're weighting it by time and you can see this actually quite clearly

00:56:40.320 now on twitter if you look at the for you page i think they're calling it or you know for you versus

00:56:45.440 following you see different types of things you can go and you can look at a chronological feed

00:56:49.520 you will see that for you is often bait right it's it's the most you know outrage inducing you're

00:56:56.800 going to go click into this you're going to go fight with that person that's great for the

00:57:00.000 platform the chronological feed is not necessarily as engaging it's not necessarily going to keep you

00:57:05.360 there but it is a different mechanism for surfacing information and so what we're ultimately talking

00:57:12.480 about here is incentives it is a system of incentives it is a system of judgments and that is in

00:57:17.520 algorithmic curation as well as content moderation and i do think that the public does not actually

00:57:22.160 understand the extent to which the extent to which an algorithm deciding to curate and surface something

00:57:29.520 shapes their behavior shapes what they do next and this is a thing that yeah i feel like i'm like

00:57:35.120 trying to scream it from the rooftops just saying it's not just about is this person being censored

00:57:40.000 is that person being censored it's actually what is being amplified and that is potentially the far more

00:57:44.880 interesting question as we think about how to build a system that vaguely mimics a public square

00:57:50.880 you know i'm i've run the simplest algorithm over here which is to delete my twitter account

00:57:55.280 and it's impossible to exaggerate the effect it has had on my mind and life not to be on twitter i mean

00:58:02.720 it's just i recommend it to anybody and when i have checked back on twitter just to prepare for this

00:58:09.040 conversation i am just fucking aghast that i spent that much time there it's a uh a mortifying glance

00:58:16.800 backward over the previous 12 years and uh i mean for you know even even the good stuff it's for the

00:58:23.600 same reason i'm not on tiktok now or some any of these other platforms because it would just be a

00:58:28.080 time incinerator when i look back at my engagement with twitter it's amazing to me and so there's

00:58:33.600 something pathological about i think every variant on offer and it's not to say that it would be

00:58:41.440 impossible to build a social media network to everyone's benefit but it twitter ain't it and

00:58:46.320 um it's just very interesting to have unplugged you know i've done podcasts about facebook without

00:58:51.840 ever being on facebook because it's of enormous importance to society it's you know both what it

00:58:56.800 does uh appropriately and and badly and hence this conversation michael do you have anything you want

00:59:03.040 to insert at this point well i mean i guess so i would say the three things i raised which was

00:59:10.000 the need for transparency and content moderation because there is some amount of censorship of

00:59:16.320 justifiable opinions going on and accurate information that's kind of the big social

00:59:21.760 media thing the other two i mentioned i think really have more to do with um fbi and do we think it's

00:59:27.200 an apolitical law enforcement organization and the third is around this inflation of the russia threat which

00:59:33.280 doesn't is not specific at all to social media but i think is extremely important because

00:59:38.400 we all know it's a a terribly dangerous thing to underestimate a threat but in fact exaggerating

00:59:44.480 a threat has very serious problems associated with it both the ability to abuse that which we saw

00:59:51.360 in terms of de-platforming de-amplifying people that were innocent in other words saying russian

00:59:57.280 influenced as opposed to russian and i i think that's that needs to be that we need to kind of get to the

01:00:04.160 bottom of the fbi issue and the treatment of the of the russian laptop and also i think have a real

01:00:10.160 honest conversation about this issue of of russian threat inflation but i'm not sure you know and i

01:00:16.400 think if we all agree on transparency that's great i just think we should acknowledge that you know for

01:00:22.240 example some of the misinformation a lot of the misinformation is coming from you know the sources

01:00:27.200 that i think you might think of as the people that are not the sources of misinformation and and

01:00:31.120 that sometimes it's innocent so we all thought that if you got the vaccine that you were either

01:00:37.680 not going to get sick or that you were not going to be transmissible those two things both turned

01:00:42.080 out to be wrong seems to me that like having a conversation about those edges of science is

01:00:47.840 exactly what you would do on something that we call a platform and so i think it resolves a little

01:00:53.200 bit if you say look if you're a platform you have this incredible privilege which is that you're

01:00:57.040 going to have this light in this these limited liability basically but that means that that

01:01:01.840 you're also but the flip side is that those platforms are also curating and so you get yourself in a

01:01:07.600 funny position which is like okay well then how do you resolve that and it seems that you have to

01:01:11.600 resolve it which is that if you're going to have this amazing privilege to be a platform rather than

01:01:16.160 a media content producer then you must be transparent about how you're making those decisions right and

01:01:22.640 there must be a place for people to appeal if they're being censored or just throttled or reduced

01:01:29.920 or even if there's an interstitial you know i i have a i have an ongoing conflict with facebook about

01:01:37.360 the cause of high intensity fires in california i have the top scientists in california saying high

01:01:43.840 intensity fires are caused by fuel wood load rather than temperature changes i am not allowed to express

01:01:51.360 that on facebook i have been severely so severely throttled by facebook that it's basically a dead

01:01:56.960 platform to me the chance they asked my demand for an appeal to the fact checker was they said go

01:02:02.320 talk to the person that censored you you know it pisses me off needs to be resolved that it's due to

01:02:07.120 jewish space lasers you might have an open lane on facebook you've got some nice followers i want to

01:02:13.520 drill down on a couple of points you just made so it seemed to me that the story was changing in real

01:02:19.760 time as the files as the twitter files were dropping initially the story seemed to be

01:02:25.840 that uh the meddling on the part of twitter's ultra woke employees was just horrific and horrifically

01:02:33.200 biased but then it seemed to shift and it was more of a picture of twitter resisting an intrusive

01:02:41.840 uh fbi and actually resisting fairly professionally or or or at least i mean they they eventually caved

01:02:50.640 i guess but they they seem to surprise some of you in in how much they in fact did resist and so you

01:02:57.200 know from viewing it from the outside it seemed like the goalposts kind of moved a little bit like

01:03:02.320 first we're just meant to be astounded by what the back room of slack looks like at twitter but now we're

01:03:10.560 seeing that no actually they were quite tied in knots over following their own policies and we're

01:03:15.760 just really getting worn down by the fbi's requests how do you view it there and then i guess the other

01:03:21.760 piece i would add is here we're obviously talking about trump's fbi right what run by a trump appointee

01:03:29.600 so that does kind of muddy the picture of you know frank political bias being the reason to suppress

01:03:36.960 or pre-bunk a a hunter biden laptop scandal yeah i mean so i think yeah i definitely think that

01:03:45.360 my perception of what was going on changed over time i i of course you know we were all only

01:03:51.920 responsible for the threads that we wrote so you know by the time i came in it looked like yoel was

01:03:58.160 doing more pushing back at the same time on both of the two issues that we that i looked at and was

01:04:03.840 involved in the decision to de-platform trump and the decision to bounce is the technical language

01:04:10.960 the technical word the new york post account in both cases yoel and his team had decided that there

01:04:17.040 was no violation and then they reversed themselves now to some extent you go well you know you're kind

01:04:23.600 of i think renee articulated this a little bit before which is you know the rules are evolving over

01:04:29.040 time as they deal with real world cases so you can't be too much of a you know like well we wrote

01:04:33.920 the rules and we can't change them but it did it there wasn't transparency about how that was happening

01:04:40.800 and hence hence another reason for transparency and in the case of the hunter biden laptop i find jim

01:04:47.600 baker's behavior extremely suspicious he is clearly a deep anti-trumper he is the person that hillary

01:04:57.920 clinton's attorney came to michael sussman came to to share false information about an alleged russian

01:05:06.000 bank that was wiring information potentially the trump campaign triggering the investigation he then goes

01:05:13.680 to twitter and appears to have played a major role in reversing the initial conclusion by yoel roth's

01:05:22.480 team that the laptop had not violated any of twitter's terms of service and that the laptop

01:05:28.880 appeared to be authentic rather than a product of russian disinformation again i i got you get to a

01:05:36.160 point with this stuff where you kind of go i've done all i can in terms of going through the data i've

01:05:42.080 i've made a strong of a statement about this pattern of behavior appearing to be a pattern of behavior and

01:05:47.840 appearing to be organized and now i just think it's in the hands of the congress that it needs to get to

01:05:52.400 the bottom of what was going on over there and they may never do it but there was stuff going on sam that

01:05:57.280 was weird like why in the world did aspen institute do a tabletop exercise with the national security

01:06:06.480 reporters from the new york times and washington post the safety officers from facebook and twitter

01:06:11.200 to talk about a potential russian hack and leak operation involving hunter biden why did they do

01:06:17.280 that in august and september keep in mind that fbi had the hunter biden laptop since december 2019

01:06:23.280 that they were listening to giuliani's calls i find the whole thing extremely suspicious now of course

01:06:28.480 hunter biden was in the news and that was what trump got impeached over yes and it may be that i am

01:06:34.400 again engaging in a pattern an overly pattern trying to recognize a pattern here that's not there

01:06:40.640 and that's possible but i do think there's something very strange going on that we haven't gotten to

01:06:45.280 the bottom of and we should and the fact that uh you know trump had his appointee there doesn't mean

01:06:51.360 that the that there wasn't potentially some effort by both existing and former intelligence community

01:06:57.920 operatives to basically engage in a pr campaign or what we used to call psyops or now it gets called

01:07:04.560 influence operations to basically pre-bunk the hunter biden laptop so that i personally and my

01:07:12.080 entire liberal democratic family and all of the democrats i know thought that it was russian

01:07:17.120 disinformation yeah i mean i didn't even really know that it wasn't until pretty recently i just sort

01:07:22.080 of assumed it was russian disinformation i didn't take it seriously so i think partly i kind of go i know

01:07:28.160 how i experienced that episode which was to go i don't know sounds like it was probably russian

01:07:32.640 disinformation and it wasn't and they knew at the time that it wasn't and that seems to me quite

01:07:37.600 important well let's just close the loop on that if we can has now this laptop has been studied

01:07:44.080 certainly by many many people right of center for many months is there anything there that was

01:07:50.560 important oh my gosh yeah is there anything that ties back to his father that is is a big deal yes

01:08:01.040 like what well oh i i'm still in a bubble i still haven't heard i mean this story apart from a

01:08:07.120 single line in an email saying i gotta give 10 to the big guy and we assume the big guys

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - February 01, 2023

#310 — Social Media & Public Trust

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