Mark Zuckerberg declares that the era of censorship on Facebook is over. I can't believe it. Here's the video of him saying so, and we'll talk more about it with Alan Bocari, who's been leading the fight against internet censorship for a decade.
00:04:14.880Hey, everyone. I want to talk about something important today, because it's time to get back
00:04:19.100to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to
00:04:24.900give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting
00:04:29.840free expression, and I still believe this today. But a lot has happened over the last several years.
00:04:35.580There's been widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy
00:04:40.880media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there's also a lot
00:04:46.740of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take
00:04:52.580very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly. So we built a lot of complex
00:04:57.540systems to moderate content. But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes.
00:05:03.100Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people. And we've reached a
00:05:09.300point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like
00:05:15.240a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we're going to get back
00:05:19.780to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free
00:05:25.480expression on our platforms. More specifically, here's what we're going to do. First, we're going
00:05:31.560to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the U.S.
00:05:37.880After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a
00:05:44.780threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters
00:05:50.340of truth. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more
00:05:55.680trust than they've created, especially in the U.S. So over the next couple of months, we're going to
00:06:00.800phase in a more comprehensive community notes system. Second, we're going to simplify our content
00:06:07.040policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of
00:06:12.620touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly
00:06:18.620been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far.
00:06:24.240So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.
00:06:29.760Third, we're changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast
00:06:35.880majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation.
00:06:41.760Now, we're going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations. And for lower
00:06:48.300severity violations, we're going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action.
00:06:53.920The problem is that the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn't.
00:06:58.680So by dialing them back, we're going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.
00:07:04.760We're also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content.
00:07:10.920The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we're going to catch less bad stuff, but we'll also reduce
00:07:17.460the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.
00:07:22.460Fourth, we're bringing back civic content. For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed.
00:07:29.460So we stopped recommending these posts. But it feels like we're in a new era now, and we're starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again.
00:07:38.000So we're going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
00:07:45.000Fifth, we're going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US-based content review is going to be based in Texas.
00:07:55.000As we work to promote free expression, I think that it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.
00:08:05.000Finally, we're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.
00:08:14.000The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world.
00:08:20.000Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.
00:08:27.000Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down.
00:08:33.000China has censored our apps from even working in the country.
00:08:36.000The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government.
00:08:43.000And that's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship.
00:08:49.000By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.
00:08:55.000But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.
00:09:01.000It'll take time to get this right, and these are complex systems. They're never going to be perfect.
00:09:07.000There's also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove.
00:09:12.000But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus primarily on removing content,
00:09:19.000it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice.
00:09:27.000I'm looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there, and more to come soon.
00:09:31.000Well, I will stay good out here. It's a very surprising thing.
00:09:35.000Maybe there was a premonition this was coming.
00:09:37.000I saw an announcement by Facebook that they were appointing Dana White of the very macho, very Trump-friendly,
00:11:28.000He's talking about politically biased fact checkers.
00:11:31.000He's talking about the whole censorship pressure, the whole censorship ecosystem of the last 10 years,
00:11:38.000the last decade being driven by political bias.
00:11:42.000I mean, it's a bizarre yet good feeling to hear my own talking points, you know, the talking points we've discussed here on this show for the last decade,
00:11:51.000repeated back to us by the by the CEO of Meta.
00:13:09.000That was a that was a funny little wrinkle.
00:13:11.000I think there's actually a long history there, because if you go all the way back to I think it was either 2017 or 2018,
00:13:17.000right when the censorship industrial complex was really in full steam and getting going in the first ever appearance of Mark Zuckerberg before a congressional committee.
00:13:51.000And that's sort of a culmination of that that that logic and that pressure that Meta and other Silicon Valley companies have always been under from Republicans and from the conservative media that their employees lean to the left, that they're part of the very left wing culture.
00:14:07.000They're they're based in the most possibly the most left wing place in the United States in the San Francisco Bay Area.
00:14:14.000And I think him moving the trust and safety team to Facebook is a good is, you know, a very big symbolic move as well as like a real move, because if it means there are going to be more Texan employees that will that will change things as well.
00:14:28.000It also means they'll be subject to the laws of Texas rather than the laws of California.
00:14:33.000And, you know, another thing, I'm sure the the trust and safety employees will will be happy that they're much less likely to step on a a heroin needle walking down the street than they would be in San Francisco.
00:14:48.000Yeah, you're right. I mean, there are some left wing places in Texas, as hard as that is to believe.
00:14:52.000Austin, for example, is a little bit lefty, but the Texan culture still is dramatically more freedom oriented than California.
00:15:00.000So it's interesting. I mean, I've been extremely critical of Mark Zuckerberg.
00:15:05.000I mean, I know you you're the expert in this field.
00:15:07.000I think he's part of me thinks he's just trying to move with the times as any wise businessman would.
00:15:14.000He's even got a bit of a makeover. He's got that, you know, new hairstyle.
00:15:18.000He's wearing a chain. He's sort of cool.
00:15:21.000And and and part of me wants to be skeptical because I don't want to be easily tricked.
00:15:28.000But I think you have to be open minded to your opponents changing their point of view.
00:15:32.000You have to meet them. You have to at least start off thinking, OK, he's doing these things in good faith.
00:15:39.000And I mean, as they say, the test of the pudding is in the tasting. We'll see how it really goes.
00:15:44.000But he talked about some issues. He talked about gender.
00:15:47.000He didn't say transgenderism in sports and bathrooms, but that's that is a really hot front line battle now.
00:15:54.000And that used to be one of the most censored issues.
00:15:57.000I remember on the old Twitter, if you misgendered someone, if you called a transgender person by their biological gender, you would be suspended.
00:16:07.000I don't know how they did it so quickly, but you would be suspended immediately if you dead named someone.
00:16:13.000So if you were to call Mark Jenner, Caitlyn Jenner or vice versa, that would get so to to give up that front line in the culture wars and immigration.
00:16:24.000I think part of it is getting with the times.
00:16:27.000But those are pretty key parts of the Democrat message bundle.
00:16:31.000That's quite an astonishing thing. That's very specific, isn't it?
00:16:35.000He's not going to crack down on transgender stuff anymore.
00:16:38.000That is one of the things that struck me about Zuckerberg statement and really impressed me, actually, was the level.
00:16:44.000It wasn't just a vague commitment to free speech.
00:16:46.000We're going to be more free speech friendly was very, very specific.
00:16:50.000He mentioned immigration. He mentioned gender.
00:16:53.000And he said specifically that they've been used as excuses.
00:16:57.000The speech controls around those topics have been used as excuses to shut down political debate.
00:17:02.000That's a very specific and a very specific commitment to get rid of those speech controls specifically.
00:17:08.000That is huge. And the way he discussed the technical implementation of it as well, he said that automated AI censorship would now only be reserved for the most extreme illegal content.
00:17:23.000You know, things like he didn't, you know, child exploitation and things like that.
00:17:27.000AI will be used for that, but it won't be used for the the the more minor rules around civility and hate speech battle that have to be a report first.
00:17:38.000And that is a that is a really significant technical change that he specifically referred to as well.
00:17:44.000Not just getting rid of the speech controls over immigration and gender debates, but also changing the way the technical enforcement of all the rules is implemented.
00:17:53.000And it's very, very positive, like you said earlier at the start, very blackpilled about the idea of these AI censorship algorithm being used to monitor and censor speech automatically.
00:18:05.000Zuckerberg saying they'll only be reserved for the most illegal content.
00:19:54.000But in fairness to Mark Zuckerberg, some of it was coming from the government.
00:19:58.000One of the things we've seen in recent litigation is that the government was threatening these guys to go further than even their own political ideology wanted them to go.
00:20:06.000So I don't want to be I want to be mean to these tech oligarchs.
00:20:35.000Never forget that they censored a sitting president of the United States, even sparking global outrage.
00:20:41.000Never forget, like you said, they shut down independent journalists, banning them on every single platform.
00:20:46.000And not just the speech platforms, but also the payment platforms, trying to cut them off from the economy, trying to destroy their livelihoods, their business.
00:20:54.000And this happened to so, so many people in this era.
00:20:57.000And, you know, when it comes to people like Mark Zuckerberg, I try and separate Silicon Valley into three categories.
00:21:06.000On category number one, you have the true heroes who stood up for free speech from the beginning,
00:21:11.000who stood up for ideological diversity from the beginning when censorship was at its worst.
00:21:16.000And they often paid the price with their careers and being canceled.
00:21:20.000James Damore, the Google whistleblower from well, not even a whistleblower, just the Google dissenter whose name was leaked to the media back in 2017.
00:21:29.000He's a great example of someone like that.
00:21:31.000And then, you know, the category I would put someone like Mark Zuckerberg and even Jack Dorsey and some of the other CEOs from the era in would be the pragmatist side.
00:21:42.000Right. These weren't they weren't like super ideologically committed to censorship, but they blew with the wind.
00:21:49.000They were pragmatist. They saw all this pressure coming from the media, coming from the government, coming from government funded NGOs, coming from foreign governments as well, coming from advertisers.
00:22:00.000There were advertiser boycotts and they caved into it.
00:22:05.000It would have been great if they they had they had a collective backbone and stood up to it, as Elon Musk did two years before Trump even won.
00:22:13.000He took a big risk doing that, really.
00:22:15.000They did. But they didn't. But many in Silicon Valley didn't stand up to it.
00:22:18.000They were pragmatist. They saw all this pressure.
00:22:20.000They succumbed to this pressure and they only stopped when that pressure started to to dissipate.
00:22:41.000Also, don't forget that they only started changing.
00:22:43.000I think after around 2022, when Republicans took back control of the House and started launching all these investigations into the censorship industrial complex.
00:22:53.000And of course, the reason they were able to do that was, you know, because of the work of people like you, Ezra, because of the work we've done at the foundation to research and expose the various tentacles of the worldwide censorship regime.
00:23:10.000And, you know, the nonprofits that are funded by the government and the advertiser boycotts.
00:23:15.000It was a collective effort that that finally defeated and put the censors back on the back foot.
00:23:23.000And it's a it's we should savor the victory that that Meta has decided they don't have to listen to the online censors anymore.
00:23:33.000They don't have to listen to these people who are pressuring them over the last 10 years.
00:23:50.000I know Brazil is being particularly harsh.
00:23:52.000I actually flew down there for a pro Twitter rally in Sao Paulo when the governments of Brazil was cracking down on its opponents and ordering Twitter not to reveal anything.
00:24:06.000It was like it was it was quite I won't try to explain what was going on, but but around the world and you see even in recent days, Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the UK, President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor of Germany, the leader of Norway.
00:24:21.000All these Eurocrats and other others around the world are saying Elon Musk must be silenced.
00:24:30.000Maybe Elon Musk is so bold because, as Mark Zuckerberg alluded to, they're going to have the backing of Donald Trump to not roll back their First Amendment.
00:24:47.000Wouldn't it be something if that empowered global companies like X, Facebook, et cetera, to push back against censorship in other countries?
00:24:58.000I suppose other countries could ban American firms.
00:25:02.000But if Trump was ornery enough, he could sort of react to that, too.
00:25:05.000Help me figure that out, because I think one of the reasons why Elon Musk has been so bold in the last week is I think he knows he's got Trump, Trump has his back.
00:25:14.000I think that's why the Europeans are being cautious, too, because they're thinking, how close is this guy to Trump?
00:25:22.000Yeah, this could be potentially one of the most significant things that the incoming administration can do.
00:25:29.000My colleague Mike Benz, who founded the Foundation for Freedom Online, has got a great word for it, free speech diplomacy.
00:25:36.000The United States using its global clout, using the clout it has with its allies specifically to roll back some of these assaults on free speech, not just the free speech of their own citizens, but also the free speech of Americans by trying to destroy free speech platforms like X.
00:25:55.000And again, you look at Mark Zuckerberg's statement, you look at its specificity.
00:25:59.000He specifically mentions Latin America, Brazil, he specifically mentioned secret courts in Latin America.
00:26:05.000That, I believe, is a reference to Brazil and their very, very powerful judicial system that has been used in the past, not just to go after X, but also to go after WhatsApp, which is a meta property.
00:26:16.000Right. WhatsApp has been shut down in Brazil multiple times because Brazilian judges see it as a way for Brazilian citizens to evade censorship, to share alternative narratives, alternative information that isn't in the mainstream news there.
00:26:31.000And Zuckerberg also mentioned Europe, the Digital Services Act, this mammoth piece of social media regulation that came into force last year, the European Union.
00:26:43.000We've done some reports on this at the Foundation for Freedom Online.
00:26:46.000If you go and search our website for our report on the 2024 censorship blueprint, we found the architects of online censorship in the United States, people who were involved in that government, in those U.S. government led efforts between 2016 and 2020.
00:27:04.000And today they're talking about the European Union as their last hope, you know, the last really powerful government, that really powerful institution that's on their side and has the clout to really threaten companies like X and other free speech platforms.
00:27:20.000But as powerful as the EU is, they are aligned with the United States, they have a lot of trade relationships with the United States, there are a lot of levers of pressure that the United States can use on Europe, and even more so on Brazil, also on Canada, on the United Kingdom.
00:27:38.000So that if these jurisdictions start going after American companies, there are a lot of tools in the U.S. government arsenal to a lot of, you know, trade pressure, diplomatic pressure, all sorts of things that the U.S. can do to blunt those assaults on American free speech, if not completely reverse them.
00:27:56.080Yeah. You know, listening to you describe those non-military levers, the word soft power comes to mind.
00:28:04.440Hard power, I suppose, is military power.
00:28:06.880But 25 years ago in Canada, the liberals in particular talked about soft power.
00:28:10.940We may not have a military anymore, but we've got soft power.
00:28:25.060You're talking about America using the bully pulpit, using trade access,
00:28:30.200basically saying to other countries, if you enjoy interacting with America financially, diplomatically, militarily, we now have some demands on you.
00:28:54.340I repurchased The Art of the Deal, and I started rereading it because I wanted to understand how Trump negotiates again.
00:29:01.180And he makes dramatic claims to reset the balance of things.
00:29:07.280And I think that's his way of saying, I don't always want to go to war, and I don't want to be pushed over either.
00:29:16.460I'm going to use these soft power tools, and what better way than to basically call the bluff on the world's either real dictators or little dictators,
00:29:26.560and say you're not going to infringe the freedom on our companies.
00:29:31.040By the way, that applies to Canada, too.
00:29:33.480What makes me sad about this announcement, Alam, is that I think Zuckerberg said it's starting in America.
00:30:18.620I was actually on Meta's side when it came to that issue.
00:30:21.640Because, of course, I mean, if you're forced to choose between propping up the legacy media,
00:30:25.980paying them hundreds of millions of dollars and banning them, I think banning them is the way to go.
00:30:29.780Of course, the legacy media should not be bailed out with hundreds of millions of Silicon Valley dollars.
00:30:36.840And I'm pleased to say that I was pretty heavily involved in stopping a similar bill in the United States,
00:30:42.880which would have done similar things called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act.
00:30:48.280Similarly to the Canadian bill, it would have funneled all of these ad dollars to legacy media companies.
00:30:54.220And it was written in a way that excluded the independent media from any of those benefits.
00:30:58.820There's podcasters, new news websites, any news website, in fact, that didn't have sort of legacy publication numbers that all the old media companies do.
00:31:09.440So I'm glad we blocked that in the United States.
00:31:11.800There's also a similar one in Australia, of course.
00:31:14.380But, you know, a very important point because on, you know, the use of U.S. pressure, because I already know what the legacy media is going to say in response to this.
00:31:26.380I know what the censorship industry is going to say.
00:31:28.400I know what the, you know, the diehard supporters of the old woke pro-censorship regimes are going to say,
00:31:35.640especially in places like Europe and the United Kingdom, where Keir Starmer's in power and Canada, where the liberals are still in power.
00:31:41.440They're going to say, this is U.S. imperialism.
00:31:44.220This is the U.S. imposing its will upon us.
00:31:46.540You know, this is, you're unpatriotic if you support these U.S. efforts.
00:31:52.100For the last 10 years, the U.S. government has been using its soft power for the opposite purpose.
00:31:57.980They've been using their soft power to pressure other countries to censor even more.
00:32:02.920In Brazil, the U.S. government funded counter disinformation researchers.
00:32:08.100The U.S. embassy in Brazil even held workshops on combating online media disinformation that included pressuring social media companies, American social media companies, to censor.
00:32:19.360So they were actually training Brazilians on how to censor American social media platforms.
00:32:25.320They even funded groups that worked with the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court, the same court that's gone after Elon Musk's companies and ordered WhatsApp to be banned.
00:32:38.100So the U.S. government, you know, if you want to call it U.S. imperialism, U.S. imperialism has for the past 10 years been promoting online censorship in places like Brazil.
00:32:46.860But in Europe, in Europe as well, Biden's State Department actually supported the Digital Services Act.
00:32:53.680Silicon Valley tried to get the State Department to lobby Europe to, you know, dilute that act a little bit and make it less aggressive.
00:33:00.460The Biden State Department did the opposite.
00:33:02.520They hailed it as a great step forward.
00:33:04.620And I'm sure there have been similar efforts in other countries, U.S. government dollars flowing to arms of U.S. soft power abroad to promote online censorship, to promote what they call combating disinformation.
00:33:18.220So, you know, just because the shoe is about to go on the other foot doesn't make it U.S. imperialism because you're going to have to say the same thing about what happened before.
00:33:26.840Yeah. Well, hopefully this will cut off a lot of the money to so-called fact checkers and so-called disinformation experts.
00:34:53.880Tell me your thoughts on Harmeet and what that appointment possibly means for America.
00:34:59.460I think that's a fantastic appointment and should be perfect for that role.
00:35:03.720I'll tell you what, if I were Google, if I were Alphabet, I'd be pretty nervous right now because Harmeet Dillon, as you mentioned, was James Damore's lawyer.
00:35:12.540She sued Google back in 2017, that very, very high-profile class-action case, actually.
00:35:18.720There were other Google employees part of that lawsuit that made a very strong case, I thought,
00:35:24.040that Google discriminated against its employees on the basis of their political viewpoint and on the basis of their race and gender
00:35:32.080because DEI policies at the time across many, many companies clearly discriminated against white males
00:35:40.920and, to some extent, Asian males as well.
00:35:43.040That was another part of Dillon's lawsuit.
00:35:45.860And that ended, I believe, in arbitration.
00:35:48.420And the National Labor Review Board, which is this D.C. bureaucracy, refused to take the case.
00:35:55.040But now Harmeet Dillon is going to be leading civil rights.
00:35:59.780Civil rights is sort of, you could say it's the heart of darkness when it comes to the government DEI regime,
00:36:07.020this promotion of anti-white discrimination across all of society,