Episode 1909 Scott Adams: Elon Musk Buys Twitter And Nothing Will Be The Same, Including Ukraine War
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
139.74745
Summary
Join Scott Adams as he talks about the latest in the Trump administration, the latest on AOC and CNN, and much, much more. Scott Adams is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, CNN, CNN Opinion, and the Wall Street Journal, and is one of the most prolific anti-Trump critics on the internet.
Transcript
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to a highlight of civilization and one of the most
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fun days that you'll ever have on Coffee with Scott Adams.
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Today, Neo has entered the Matrix, and I don't think anything's going to be the same.
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Would you like to enjoy coffee in not only this dimension, but higher dimensions as well?
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Well, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice, a stein, a canteen jug or
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a flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid I like, coffee.
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It's the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
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It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
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Everything you can identify by its initials is working for its own interests, not yours.
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Now, how would you like a little persuasion tip to kick off your morning?
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Everything you can identify by its initials is working for its own interests, not yours.
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Do you know me well enough to know that, of course, I know there are exceptions.
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But the fact that I make you think about it is what binds you to the tweet.
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So what you were supposed to do is say, well, this can't be true.
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Well, it can't be true that everything that you can identify by its initials is working for itself, not you.
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Somebody said most, somebody said every business is identified by its letters on the stock market.
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So, yes, every single company that's listed on the exchange is working for itself.
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So, just so you know, you can be on the inside.
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Of course I did not believe there were no exceptions.
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How many of you spent extra time because I said there were no exceptions?
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That would be the intentional error persuasion trick.
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Well, I continue to watch CNN to see if they are turning toward the middle.
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For example, we did see that even CNN people, I saw several of them, question whether Fetterman should have given, even done the debate.
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I'm not sure they would have done that a year ago.
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I feel like that that was, you know, clearly a move to the center.
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And Smirkanish, I think, was the one who said it directly.
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You know, which has nothing to do with the disability.
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I think you can be, you know, perfectly appropriate and still say maybe next time was better for him.
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So along that theme, Chris Silliza, who writes for CNN, and had been one of the most prolific anti-Trump opinion people.
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It's just this weak little opinion piece that looks like he dashed it off in 10 minutes.
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He says, with less than two weeks left before the November midterm elections,
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all signs are pointing to a strong Republican showing that would result in a switch of party control in the House and possibly the Senate.
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He goes, that's very good news for Donald Trump.
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You know, the part where, OK, now he's going to get him.
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And he just goes on to say that Trump will do what he always does, which is take credit.
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If the midterms go Trump's way, do you think Trump will take credit for the fact that a lot of people that, let's say, the observers didn't think had a chance,
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Not only will Donald Trump predictably try to take credit, but let me ask you, he deserves it, right?
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I wouldn't question it at one moment, would you?
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If Trump took credit, wouldn't you say, yeah, that's warranted?
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Because I believe that even the people who are doing things sort of independently from Trump are still conforming to Trump.
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There's nobody who's out there completely independent of Trump if they're a Republican.
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If you're a Republican, you're running under a Trump set of parameters, whether you say it out loud or not.
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Trump would get complete credit for this, in my opinion.
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But he does say that Trump campaigned for, you know, some of these semi-underdogs and that they might actually win.
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But, yeah, I do see a genuine shift toward the middle for CNN.
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The big story you all want to talk about is Elon Musk carried a sink into Twitter headquarters yesterday.
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Now, and then he tweeted, you know, that he was in Twitter headquarters, let that sink in.
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Now, was that the most brilliant thing that anybody ever did?
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See, you think that Elon Musk is mostly smart with technology.
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But you really miss that his understanding of persuasion is as good as it gets.
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Who else would have carried a sink into Twitter headquarters?
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And I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why.
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How many of you spent a lot of time thinking about it and trying to figure out why exactly a sink?
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Well, I understand that everything but the kitchen sink, but how does it...
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The beauty is that you all interpreted it however you wanted to.
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Didn't you all simply put whatever interpretation you wanted on that?
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So, he created a picture that could capture the concept.
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Because everybody was going to talk about the concept of him buying it today.
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But there's no picture of a person doing a contract to complete a transaction.
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He actually created a visual to basically capture that story.
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And, of course, he guaranteed that that would be on every media outlet.
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So, he had to do something that was visual, but visual in a surprising way.
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These are two of the, you know, probably if you listed your top ten rules of persuasion,
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When you see him persuading, he's doing it right.
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Like, he's actually using the best technique of persuasion.
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All right, so, I tweeted that Neo has entered the matrix.
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Now, I always tease people when they make matrix, you know, references,
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But, I'm going to make an exception for myself, like everybody does.
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I'm going to make an exception for myself because it's too perfect.
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Because, he actually is entering the, you know, not exactly the matrix,
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but once he has access to the algorithm, he actually controls reality.
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And, he's not just controlling, you know, an important media enterprise.
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I mean, this is as close to a literal as you can get.
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But, it's as close as you can get, you know, in our world.
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Now, do you think this marks a turning point, or is it just going to be another ownership of Twitter?
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And, he'll do some funny things and nothing will change.
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Do you think this changes everything, or changes nothing?
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Maybe not right away, but faster than you think.
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Now, I saw somebody very smart on Twitter, Brian Rommeli.
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But, he was speculating that this is just the first part, and that Elon might have his eyes on acquiring Rumble.
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Now, I own stock in Rumble, so full disclosure.
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I don't want to start a rumor that benefits me financially in some non-disclosed way, right?
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That I acquired because Rumble acquired locals, and I had a small investment in locals, so I went over to Rumble.
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It does actually feel like a natural extension, but it feels like, you know, who knows.
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So, I'm not going to predict that, but I'll note that somebody else has predicted it.
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One, what would happen, just hypothetically, if Twitter ends up changing the algorithm such that Democrats see real news for the first time?
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What would happen if Democrats saw real news for the first time?
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Because I'm here to tell you that there's a mental health element to this that is underappreciated.
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Have any of you ever had the experience of thinking something was true, let's say about your own life,
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only to learn that what you thought was always true, or had been true for a long time, was completely untrue?
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Suppose you worked for Enron, and you'd worked for Enron for years, and then later you found out that Enron wasn't even a real company.
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Like, what would that do to your mental health?
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And she had been with a guy for years and years, and they were very close.
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Didn't feel like getting married necessarily, but it looked like it was heading that way.
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And one day, her boyfriend had some major health problem.
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So the boyfriend goes to the hospital, and she visits him in the hospital.
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And there's another woman in there visiting her boyfriend in the hospital, and they see each other.
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And she said, I'm his girlfriend of five years.
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And they learned for the first time he had two lives, two complete lives.
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Now, what happened to her mental health when she found out the last five years of her life were not what she thought?
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I mean, you can imagine what that would do to you.
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Your whole life, your whole life would be altered by that.
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Because everything you saw would be, I don't know if I can trust that.
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So, one possibility of Elon buying Twitter is that Democrats will see real news for the first time.
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Also, people on the right will see things from the left that they've never seen before.
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Because I think the initial impact will be to make us disoriented.
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If everybody gets disoriented and they can't find their base anymore, like their team doesn't make sense, they're not sure which team they're on now, what happens?
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When people are disoriented, they don't thrive in chaos.
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Cognitive dissonance may give them some escape.
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The scarier thing is that when nobody has anything to latch on to, the first person who provides that thing to latch on to, they'll latch on to it.
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So, in other words, they'll be looking for a new truth.
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Whoever provides the new truth owns them, right?
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They'll be broken free from their old truth and floating free, and they're free agents.
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You hope it's somebody who has some principles and not somebody evil, but somebody's going to do it.
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A lot of free agents will be created by this, I think.
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Now, that assumes that the algorithm changes in some dramatic way, but which might not happen.
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What would happen if Elon Musk finds out that Twitter was actually, let's say, being influenced by foreign forces and everything was corrupt?
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But things could look real different, because we don't know.
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Well, so, you want to hear a good example of some fake news today?
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Wall Street Journal had some excellent fake news.
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And I don't really blame the Wall Street Journal of fake news often, do I?
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In fact, I don't know if I've name-checked them before for fake news.
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So, the Wall Street Journal had an article that China is considering interfering in our elections.
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I don't know if that's true or false, but probably true.
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And it reports that they may have changed their mind about interfering in the 2016 election, or was it 2020?
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But they haven't interfered recently, because they didn't have a preference of who was president.
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So, they didn't think that their interests would be served by either president, so they didn't interfere.
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But now, the thought is that they might interfere.
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And they would interfere in a general, mucking-up society way, as opposed to picking a winner.
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So, they try to sow civil war and, you know, and make us doubt the elections and stuff.
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Now, that part, I'm willing to believe, is all correct reporting by the Wall Street Journal.
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That China had not risen to the level of Russia, and they said also Iran, in interfering with their elections, as Russia and Iran have alleged to have done.
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Now, specifically, they were talking about bots and fake users.
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So, nothing about hacking emails or steal dossier or anything like that.
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I'm only talking about trolls, where you're sending social media trolls.
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Now, do you think that Russia influenced our elections in the past with their trolls?
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Is it real or fake news that Russia tried to interfere with our elections with bots?
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It was like a $100,000 ad spend for some memes that we got to see eventually, and the memes
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I can tell you, as somebody who has studied persuasion, they didn't have any persuasive
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So do you think the Wall Street Journal gave you a straight report by saying that China
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might try to get up to the level of interference of Russia, or should they have said nobody has
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They might, but even Russia has not done anything of substance yet.
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It just didn't make any difference and couldn't have at that size.
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It's fake news to suggest that Russia had an impact with the bots.
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Elon Musk tweeted that citizen journalism is one of the big benefits.
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He said, a beautiful thing about Twitter is how it empowers citizen journalism.
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People are able to disseminate news without an establishment bias, which, of course, caused
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critics to stream in and say, but those citizens will not be fact-checked.
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Now, does that sound like the dumbest criticism you've ever heard in 2022?
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Let me say it again just so you can laugh at it.
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You can't have citizen journalism because who would do the fact-checking?
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Who believes there's any fact-checking on the actual professional news?
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It's like way beyond the level where it's a conspiracy theory that it's fake.
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It's obviously demonstrably factually proven to be fake.
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How could citizen journalism be worse than that?
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Yeah, in a sense, every tweet is fact-checked in real time by the rest of the comments.
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All right, here's some more fake news that's real news.
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You remember PayPal said that they were going to fine people $2,500 for spreading misinformation.
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And then the world rebelled and said, no, you can't do that.
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And then, after you were no longer paying attention, they published their new terms of service.
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And the $2,500 fine is, according to Twitter users, not Twitter, but users on Twitter,
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they put that $2,500 back in there as soon as the outcry died down.
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That PayPal put the $2,500 back in there after they said they'd taken it out.
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They did take out the spreading misinformation part.
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So the $2,500 part apparently was always in there, but it was related to other bad behavior.
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So, for example, if you were using their service to promote, I don't know, Hitler or racism or something,
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So the $2,500 is still there, but it was there always, and it wasn't related to spreading misinformation.
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So first of all, it's fake news, because they didn't put in the spreading misinformation part.
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Because let's look at what part they did leave in.
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So they do not have spreading misinformation as one of the triggers for the $2,500 fee.
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But here are some things that I think these have been in there before, I think.
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So one of the things that you can't do is collect money for products that represent a risk to consumer safety.
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So you can't be doing something that would present a risk to consumer safety.
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So what would be some things that would be a risk to consumer safety?
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Is ivermectin a product that, in somebody else's opinion, could be a risk to consumer safety?
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Because even if somebody said, well, ivermectin is well-tolerated,
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then could not PayPal say, it doesn't matter that it's well-tolerated.
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If you're promoting this, you're sort of anti-vaccine, and that's misinformation, or that's harmful.
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So don't they still have a way to say that you're doing stuff that's harmful related to a product?
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I mean, I'm not a lawyer, so I'm just speculating here.
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Do you think TikTok is a product that presents a risk to consumer safety?
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If you collected money for something on TikTok?
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Apparently, TikTok was spreading around something called the Blackout Challenge,
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in which children were encouraged to strangle themselves.
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So the algorithm of TikTok delivered to a 10-year-old girl,
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so it decided that she would be interested in seeing this,
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a challenge to strangle herself, which she did, and then she died, allegedly.
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Now, this story does have a little bit too much, a little bit too on the nose.
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information that somebody could say was dangerous.
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So we're in murky territory if products that are a risk to consumer safety
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are a trigger for, you know, getting in trouble.
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You could also get in trouble, according to PayPal,
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if you're collecting money for sale of products or services
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said, well, AI might take some of your factory jobs,
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but the last thing AI will be able to do is art?