Rebel News Podcast - EZRA LEVANT ｜ Facebook gives death blow to online censorship, embraces freedom

00:00:00.000 Hello, my friends. I don't know if you heard the news, but Mark Zuckerberg has declared

00:00:03.300 the era of censorship at Facebook over. I can barely believe it. I want to show you the video

00:00:09.420 of Mark Zuckerberg saying so, and we'll talk more about it with Alan Bocari, who's been leading the

00:00:14.700 fight against internet censorship for a decade. So I'd like you to get the video version of this.

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00:01:33.000 You're listening to our latest podcast.

00:01:43.460 Tonight, Mark Zuckerberg declares that the era of censorship on Facebook is over. It's January 7th,

00:01:50.800 and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.

00:01:55.540 Shame on you, you censorious bug.

00:02:07.700 Well, you've heard the phrase red pill and blue pill. It's from the movie The Matrix. To take the red

00:02:12.500 pill means the scales fall from your eyes. It's like eating an apple from the tree of knowledge.

00:02:17.700 You see what the world is really like, and maybe you wish you didn't. The blue pill is,

00:02:22.740 no, I want to go back to the Eden times where I'm unaware of how troubling the world can be.

00:02:28.020 Well, there's two other pills that the kids talk about. Being a white pill means something that gives

00:02:33.040 you a lot of encouragement and hope. And being black pill, well, that's just, things are futile. 0.95

00:02:39.300 It's a fatalistic end of the world. Anyhow, I'm a little bit too old to be using slang like red pill,

00:02:45.240 black pill. But I have to tell you that two years ago, I was feeling rather black pill about the 0.58

00:02:50.240 state of freedom, because I felt like it was a ratchet. Once you lose it, you'll never get it

00:02:54.400 back. Especially as machine learning and AI overtook human decision making. I mean, if you program AI

00:03:01.160 to be evil, to be censorious, how can you ever undo that? And everything in our lives was through the

00:03:08.280 focus and the filter of our phones. I was black pill, that's for sure. And then Elon Musk bought

00:03:15.800 Twitter. And then he started to bring back, literally from the social media grave, people

00:03:21.900 who were regarded as too far beyond the pale. Alex Jones being the most prominent example.

00:03:27.160 Donald Trump, I suppose, being even more prominent. And now we have news from Mark Zuckerberg,

00:03:32.620 the owner and founder of Facebook, that he's actually going to pull back from the brink to

00:03:38.260 reject censorship and overregulation, and that he's going to follow Elon Musk down the path of

00:03:44.020 freedom. Now, I'll believe it when I see it, but you got to take the guy at least at face value.

00:03:49.940 Let me play for you a five and a half minute announcement by Mark Zuckerberg. But I want you

00:03:55.800 to watch the whole thing, and then we'll talk about it afterwards with a guest who knows this subject

00:04:00.280 better than anyone else in America, I think. I'll reintroduce Alan Bocari to you in a moment.

00:04:05.920 But first, here's a video statement by Mark Zuckerberg that'll make anyone pessimistic

00:04:11.960 white-pilled. Take a look.

00:04:14.880 Hey, everyone. I want to talk about something important today, because it's time to get back

00:04:19.100 to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to

00:04:24.900 give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting

00:04:29.840 free expression, and I still believe this today. But a lot has happened over the last several years.

00:04:35.580 There's been widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy

00:04:40.880 media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there's also a lot

00:04:46.740 of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take

00:04:52.580 very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly. So we built a lot of complex

00:04:57.540 systems to moderate content. But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes.

00:05:03.100 Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people. And we've reached a

00:05:09.300 point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like

00:05:15.240 a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we're going to get back

00:05:19.780 to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free

00:05:25.480 expression on our platforms. More specifically, here's what we're going to do. First, we're going

00:05:31.560 to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the U.S.

00:05:37.880 After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a

00:05:44.780 threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters

00:05:50.340 of truth. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more

00:05:55.680 trust than they've created, especially in the U.S. So over the next couple of months, we're going to

00:06:00.800 phase in a more comprehensive community notes system. Second, we're going to simplify our content

00:06:07.040 policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of

00:06:12.620 touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly

00:06:18.620 been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far.

00:06:24.240 So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.

00:06:29.760 Third, we're changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast

00:06:35.880 majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation.

00:06:41.760 Now, we're going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations. And for lower

00:06:48.300 severity violations, we're going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action.

00:06:53.920 The problem is that the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn't.

00:06:58.680 So by dialing them back, we're going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.

00:07:04.760 We're also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content.

00:07:10.920 The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we're going to catch less bad stuff, but we'll also reduce

00:07:17.460 the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.

00:07:22.460 Fourth, we're bringing back civic content. For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed.

00:07:29.460 So 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.

00:07:38.000 So we're going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.

00:07:45.000 Fifth, 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.

00:07:55.000 As 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.

00:08:05.000 Finally, 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.

00:08:14.000 The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world.

00:08:20.000 Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.

00:08:27.000 Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down.

00:08:33.000 China has censored our apps from even working in the country.

00:08:36.000 The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government.

00:08:43.000 And that's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship.

00:08:49.000 By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.

00:08:55.000 But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.

00:09:01.000 It'll take time to get this right, and these are complex systems. They're never going to be perfect.

00:09:07.000 There's also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove.

00:09:12.000 But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus primarily on removing content,

00:09:19.000 it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice.

00:09:27.000 I'm looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there, and more to come soon.

00:09:31.000 Well, I will stay good out here. It's a very surprising thing.

00:09:35.000 Maybe there was a premonition this was coming.

00:09:37.000 I saw an announcement by Facebook that they were appointing Dana White of the very macho, very Trump-friendly,

00:09:44.000 ultimate fighting UFC to the board.

00:09:47.000 And I thought, gee, boy, he sure is trying to ingratiate himself with Trump.

00:09:50.000 And I know he met with Trump, and he made a million-dollar gift to the Trump inaugural.

00:09:54.000 I thought, well, those are all symbols. What about the substance?

00:09:58.000 Well, today, we heard the substance.

00:10:00.000 And who better to talk to about this than a man who has literally written the book about it?

00:10:05.000 I'm talking about my friend Alan Bocari.

00:10:07.000 He used to be at Breitbart.com.

00:10:09.000 That's where we first became buddies when he was their senior tech editor there.

00:10:13.000 But now he's the managing director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.

00:10:17.000 What a pleasure to be joined again by our friend Alan Bocari.

00:10:20.000 Alan, great to see you again.

00:10:21.000 And thanks for joining us.

00:10:22.000 I feel like these are momentous times for social media.

00:10:26.000 I don't know if you heard my talk about black pill, white pill,

00:10:30.000 but I'm feeling for the first time since 2017, I'm feeling hopeful about freedom of speech online.

00:10:37.000 How about you?

00:10:38.000 I'm feeling very hopeful.

00:10:40.000 And, you know, I've been quietly white-pilled on Facebook for a while

00:10:44.000 because even last year I was hearing rumors from inside the company

00:10:50.000 that there was a shift in direction or a planned shift in direction.

00:10:54.000 I guess the company was waiting for the outcome of the election to really solidify that

00:10:59.000 and take it to the next level.

00:11:01.000 And, wow, how have they really done that?

00:11:04.000 That statement from Mark Zuckerberg is really quite comprehensive.

00:11:07.000 I wasn't expecting, even though I was optimistic, I wasn't really expecting Meta to go that far.

00:11:13.000 It's a little bit of a bizarre feeling.

00:11:17.000 It's a good feeling to hear, you know, you hear the language before we even get to his policy changes,

00:11:22.000 but you hear the language Mark Zuckerberg is using there.

00:11:25.000 He's talking about the legacy media.

00:11:28.000 He's talking about politically biased fact checkers.

00:11:31.000 He's talking about the whole censorship pressure, the whole censorship ecosystem of the last 10 years,

00:11:38.000 the last decade being driven by political bias.

00:11:42.000 I 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,

00:11:51.000 repeated back to us by the by the CEO of Meta.

00:11:55.000 Yeah, it's great.

00:11:58.000 It's positive.

00:11:59.000 It feels like a massive, massive victory.

00:12:02.000 You still have to keep an eye on Meta to see how they implement this, how successful they are, how well executed it is.

00:12:10.000 But the policy changes Zuckerberg announced are very, very clear and very, very significant.

00:12:16.000 It touches on every single aspect of the censorship regime.

00:12:20.000 You're so right to point out the use of language that you just did,

00:12:23.000 because embedded in that language is a bunch of assumptions that someone who was still dedicated to censorship would never say.

00:12:30.000 And to say we're going to work with President Trump,

00:12:32.000 that's something that a typical Silicon Valley Democrat could not force their mouth to make those words with a straight face.

00:12:39.000 I also got a chuckle out of one of the things he was promising was to move the word regulation from California to Texas.

00:12:48.000 I mean, that's a slap.

00:12:50.000 I mean, there's no reason for that other than he's basically condemning California censorship culture and embracing Texas freedom culture.

00:12:58.000 Like that's that that to me stood out as a quirky thing.

00:13:02.000 But everyone who would think about freedom would understand exactly what he means.

00:13:07.000 Wasn't that a funny little wrinkle?

00:13:09.000 That was a that was a funny little wrinkle.

00:13:11.000 I 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,

00:13:17.000 right 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.

00:13:29.000 I think it was a Senate committee.

00:13:31.000 You can see him getting grilled by I think it was Ted Cruz on the left wing biases of his employees.

00:13:37.000 And Zuckerberg's response back then in 2018 was that, yes, Silicon Valley is a very left leaning place.

00:13:44.000 That's why so many Facebook employees vote for the Democrats and donate to the Democrats.

00:13:50.000 So he recognized it back then.

00:13:51.000 And 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.

00:14:07.000 They're they're based in the most possibly the most left wing place in the United States in the San Francisco Bay Area.

00:14:14.000 And 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.

00:14:28.000 It also means they'll be subject to the laws of Texas rather than the laws of California.

00:14:33.000 And, 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.

00:14:48.000 Yeah, you're right. I mean, there are some left wing places in Texas, as hard as that is to believe.

00:14:52.000 Austin, for example, is a little bit lefty, but the Texan culture still is dramatically more freedom oriented than California.

00:15:00.000 So it's interesting. I mean, I've been extremely critical of Mark Zuckerberg.

00:15:05.000 I mean, I know you you're the expert in this field.

00:15:07.000 I think he's part of me thinks he's just trying to move with the times as any wise businessman would.

00:15:14.000 He's even got a bit of a makeover. He's got that, you know, new hairstyle.

00:15:18.000 He's wearing a chain. He's sort of cool.

00:15:21.000 And and and part of me wants to be skeptical because I don't want to be easily tricked.

00:15:28.000 But I think you have to be open minded to your opponents changing their point of view.

00:15:32.000 You have to meet them. You have to at least start off thinking, OK, he's doing these things in good faith.

00:15:39.000 And I mean, as they say, the test of the pudding is in the tasting. We'll see how it really goes.

00:15:44.000 But he talked about some issues. He talked about gender.

00:15:47.000 He didn't say transgenderism in sports and bathrooms, but that's that is a really hot front line battle now.

00:15:54.000 And that used to be one of the most censored issues.

00:15:57.000 I remember on the old Twitter, if you misgendered someone, if you called a transgender person by their biological gender, you would be suspended.

00:16:07.000 I don't know how they did it so quickly, but you would be suspended immediately if you dead named someone.

00:16:13.000 So 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.

00:16:24.000 I think part of it is getting with the times.

00:16:27.000 But those are pretty key parts of the Democrat message bundle.

00:16:31.000 That's quite an astonishing thing. That's very specific, isn't it?

00:16:35.000 He's not going to crack down on transgender stuff anymore.

00:16:38.000 That is one of the things that struck me about Zuckerberg statement and really impressed me, actually, was the level.

00:16:44.000 It wasn't just a vague commitment to free speech.

00:16:46.000 We're going to be more free speech friendly was very, very specific.

00:16:50.000 He mentioned immigration. He mentioned gender.

00:16:53.000 And he said specifically that they've been used as excuses.

00:16:57.000 The speech controls around those topics have been used as excuses to shut down political debate.

00:17:02.000 That's a very specific and a very specific commitment to get rid of those speech controls specifically.

00:17:08.000 That 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.

00:17:23.000 You know, things like he didn't, you know, child exploitation and things like that.

00:17:27.000 AI 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.

00:17:38.000 And that is a that is a really significant technical change that he specifically referred to as well.

00:17:44.000 Not 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.

00:17:53.000 And 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.

00:18:05.000 Zuckerberg saying they'll only be reserved for the most illegal content.

00:18:08.000 That that's a huge move.

00:18:10.000 Yeah, I found that very encouraging.

00:18:13.000 Another thing, one of my favorite things about Twitter these days is what they call community notes.

00:18:20.000 And I've had two community notes.

00:18:21.000 That's when viewers say, hey, not so fast.

00:18:24.000 You got an error here or you're leaving this context out.

00:18:27.000 It's a way that ordinary viewers can fact check you.

00:18:30.000 And I sort of love it.

00:18:31.000 The two times I've been fact checked in that way, I'm slightly miffed, but I have to concede.

00:18:36.000 There's some good points there.

00:18:37.000 I love the fact that you can put a community note.

00:18:40.000 Again, it's sort of like voting by the public to correct.

00:18:44.000 You can correct anyone.

00:18:45.000 You can correct the New York Times.

00:18:46.000 You can correct Elon Musk.

00:18:47.000 I think he has been community noted almost 100 times.

00:18:51.000 And there's something wonderful about it that it's sort of grassroots.

00:18:55.000 You got to make sure it's not games like Wikipedia is.

00:18:58.000 But for Mark Zuckerberg to say he's going to revert to a popular community notes based system rather than an AI system.

00:19:06.000 First of all, that's kudos to Elon Musk, who pioneered that at Twitter.

00:19:11.000 And second of all, it's just it gets it out of the hands out of the Silicon Valley leftists.

00:19:16.000 I you know what?

00:19:17.000 I don't want to be overjoyed.

00:19:19.000 That's not the feeling.

00:19:20.000 It's sort of a relief.

00:19:21.000 And like you've been shot at by a gun and they missed and you feel like you have a second chance.

00:19:26.000 Yeah, I was talking to Alex Jones earlier today of Infowars.

00:19:31.000 I remember when he was canceled by 14 different social media apps on the same day.

00:19:36.000 And I know you you watch that moment, too.

00:19:39.000 I mean, even iTunes deleted his old work.

00:19:42.000 Even LinkedIn.

00:19:43.000 How do you get canceled by LinkedIn?

00:19:45.000 Pinterest.

00:19:46.000 I don't know.

00:19:47.000 How does Pinterest?

00:19:48.000 14 on the same day.

00:19:50.000 And there was a real collusion and a real cartel.

00:19:53.000 Some of it was ideological.

00:19:54.000 But in fairness to Mark Zuckerberg, some of it was coming from the government.

00:19:58.000 One 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.

00:20:06.000 So I don't want to be I want to be mean to these tech oligarchs.

00:20:10.000 They deserve it.

00:20:11.000 But they don't deserve 100 percent of the odium because some of it was basically threats by the Biden administration.

00:20:18.000 Do this or else.

00:20:20.000 Yeah, as we look back on the censorship era, which now thankfully seems to be, you know, fading quite quickly into the past.

00:20:30.000 You know, I think a good sentiment is, you know, forgive, but don't forget.

00:20:34.000 Never forget how bad it was.

00:20:35.000 Never forget that they censored a sitting president of the United States, even sparking global outrage.

00:20:41.000 Never forget, like you said, they shut down independent journalists, banning them on every single platform.

00:20:46.000 And 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.

00:20:54.000 And this happened to so, so many people in this era.

00:20:57.000 And, you know, when it comes to people like Mark Zuckerberg, I try and separate Silicon Valley into three categories.

00:21:05.000 Right.

00:21:06.000 On category number one, you have the true heroes who stood up for free speech from the beginning,

00:21:11.000 who stood up for ideological diversity from the beginning when censorship was at its worst.

00:21:16.000 And they often paid the price with their careers and being canceled.

00:21:20.000 James Damore, the Google whistleblower from well, not even a whistleblower, just the Google dissenter whose name was leaked to the media back in 2017.

00:21:29.000 He's a great example of someone like that.

00:21:31.000 And 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.

00:21:41.000 Right.

00:21:42.000 Right. These weren't they weren't like super ideologically committed to censorship, but they blew with the wind.

00:21:49.000 They 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.

00:22:00.000 There were advertiser boycotts and they caved into it.

00:22:05.000 It 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.

00:22:13.000 He took a big risk doing that, really.

00:22:15.000 They did. But they didn't. But many in Silicon Valley didn't stand up to it.

00:22:18.000 They were pragmatist. They saw all this pressure.

00:22:20.000 They succumbed to this pressure and they only stopped when that pressure started to to dissipate.

00:22:30.000 Those guys, you know, forgive them.

00:22:32.000 They responded to incentives.

00:22:34.000 They responded to outside pressure.

00:22:36.000 Don't forget what they did either.

00:22:37.000 That's very, very important.

00:22:39.000 That's a very good.

00:22:40.000 Yeah.

00:22:41.000 Also, don't forget that they only started changing.

00:22:43.000 I think after around 2022, when Republicans took back control of the House and started launching all these investigations into the censorship industrial complex.

00:22:53.000 And 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.

00:23:10.000 And, you know, the nonprofits that are funded by the government and the advertiser boycotts.

00:23:15.000 It was a collective effort that that finally defeated and put the censors back on the back foot.

00:23:23.000 And 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. 0.99

00:23:33.000 They don't have to listen to these people who are pressuring them over the last 10 years.

00:23:37.000 Yeah.

00:23:38.000 Hmm.

00:23:39.000 There was an interesting line in there, if I if I recall it right.

00:23:41.000 Zuckerberg said he sort of needs the help of the U.S. government to defend against censorship efforts by foreign regimes.

00:23:48.000 He mentioned Latin America.

00:23:50.000 I know Brazil is being particularly harsh.

00:23:52.000 I 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.

00:24:06.000 It 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.

00:24:21.000 All these Eurocrats and other others around the world are saying Elon Musk must be silenced.

00:24:30.000 Maybe 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.

00:24:40.000 It's an interesting battle.

00:24:41.000 As Zuckerberg said, America has the strongest free speech protection in the world.

00:24:46.000 I think that's true.

00:24:47.000 Wouldn't it be something if that empowered global companies like X, Facebook, et cetera, to push back against censorship in other countries?

00:24:58.000 I suppose other countries could ban American firms.

00:25:02.000 But if Trump was ornery enough, he could sort of react to that, too.

00:25:05.000 Help 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.

00:25:14.000 I think that's why the Europeans are being cautious, too, because they're thinking, how close is this guy to Trump?

00:25:19.000 Why don't you talk a bit about that?

00:25:22.000 Yeah, this could be potentially one of the most significant things that the incoming administration can do.

00:25:29.000 My colleague Mike Benz, who founded the Foundation for Freedom Online, has got a great word for it, free speech diplomacy.

00:25:36.000 The 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.

00:25:55.000 And again, you look at Mark Zuckerberg's statement, you look at its specificity.

00:25:59.000 He specifically mentions Latin America, Brazil, he specifically mentioned secret courts in Latin America.

00:26:05.000 That, 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.

00:26:16.000 Right. 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.

00:26:31.000 And Zuckerberg also mentioned Europe, the Digital Services Act, this mammoth piece of social media regulation that came into force last year, the European Union.

00:26:43.000 We've done some reports on this at the Foundation for Freedom Online.

00:26:46.000 If 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.

00:27:04.000 And 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.

00:27:20.000 But 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.

00:27:38.000 So 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.

00:27:56.080 Yeah. You know, listening to you describe those non-military levers, the word soft power comes to mind.

00:28:04.440 Hard power, I suppose, is military power.

00:28:06.880 But 25 years ago in Canada, the liberals in particular talked about soft power.

00:28:10.940 We may not have a military anymore, but we've got soft power.

00:28:14.560 People listen to Canadians.

00:28:16.020 I'm not sure if it was ever quite true around the world.

00:28:19.100 We were a little bit into peacekeeping back then.

00:28:21.360 I don't think it was ever really true.

00:28:23.760 But that's what you're talking about.

00:28:25.060 You're talking about America using the bully pulpit, using trade access,

00:28:30.200 basically saying to other countries, if you enjoy interacting with America financially, diplomatically, militarily, we now have some demands on you.

00:28:41.700 And it's shocking to hear those.

00:28:43.100 Like, I mean, even Canada has not been spared.

00:28:45.260 Donald Trump is making great demands of Canada.

00:28:47.200 He's making enormous demands of Panama.

00:28:49.000 He wants the canal back.

00:28:50.560 He's talking about taking Greenland.

00:28:52.020 But that's the Trump way, by the way.

00:28:54.340 I repurchased The Art of the Deal, and I started rereading it because I wanted to understand how Trump negotiates again.

00:29:01.180 And he makes dramatic claims to reset the balance of things.

00:29:07.280 And 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.

00:29:16.460 I'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,

00:29:26.560 and say you're not going to infringe the freedom on our companies.

00:29:31.040 By the way, that applies to Canada, too.

00:29:33.480 What makes me sad about this announcement, Alam, is that I think Zuckerberg said it's starting in America.

00:29:38.740 That doesn't mean Canada.

00:29:40.640 In Canada, I don't know if you know this, you can't even post a news story to Facebook.

00:29:46.460 Because Trudeau passed a bill called C-18, where Facebook would have to pay $100 million a year to news companies that it linked to.

00:29:54.900 So now if you're a Canadian like we are, you post one of our stories to Facebook, it says this story unavailable in Canada.

00:30:01.020 So that's really damaged independent journalism, but more importantly, it's damaged individual freedom.

00:30:06.460 So I wonder if Trump will be able to wash away that bill from Canada.

00:30:10.180 We need some saving up here, too, Alam.

00:30:11.920 Yeah, and that's a very sad situation for the independent media in Canada.

00:30:17.160 It's entirely the government's fault.

00:30:18.620 I was actually on Meta's side when it came to that issue.

00:30:21.640 Because, of course, I mean, if you're forced to choose between propping up the legacy media,

00:30:25.980 paying them hundreds of millions of dollars and banning them, I think banning them is the way to go.

00:30:29.780 Of course, the legacy media should not be bailed out with hundreds of millions of Silicon Valley dollars.

00:30:36.840 And I'm pleased to say that I was pretty heavily involved in stopping a similar bill in the United States,

00:30:42.880 which would have done similar things called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act.

00:30:48.280 Similarly to the Canadian bill, it would have funneled all of these ad dollars to legacy media companies.

00:30:54.220 And it was written in a way that excluded the independent media from any of those benefits.

00:30:58.820 There'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.

00:31:09.440 So I'm glad we blocked that in the United States.

00:31:11.800 There's also a similar one in Australia, of course.

00:31:14.380 But, 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.

00:31:26.380 I know what the censorship industry is going to say.

00:31:28.400 I know what the, you know, the diehard supporters of the old woke pro-censorship regimes are going to say,

00:31:35.640 especially in places like Europe and the United Kingdom, where Keir Starmer's in power and Canada, where the liberals are still in power.

00:31:41.440 They're going to say, this is U.S. imperialism.

00:31:44.220 This is the U.S. imposing its will upon us.

00:31:46.540 You know, this is, you're unpatriotic if you support these U.S. efforts.

00:31:50.920 Well, hold on a second.

00:31:52.100 For the last 10 years, the U.S. government has been using its soft power for the opposite purpose.

00:31:57.980 They've been using their soft power to pressure other countries to censor even more.

00:32:02.920 In Brazil, the U.S. government funded counter disinformation researchers.

00:32:08.100 The 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.

00:32:19.360 So they were actually training Brazilians on how to censor American social media platforms.

00:32:25.320 They 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.

00:32:38.100 So 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.

00:32:46.860 But in Europe, in Europe as well, Biden's State Department actually supported the Digital Services Act.

00:32:53.680 Silicon Valley tried to get the State Department to lobby Europe to, you know, dilute that act a little bit and make it less aggressive.

00:33:00.460 The Biden State Department did the opposite.

00:33:02.520 They hailed it as a great step forward.

00:33:04.620 And 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.

00:33:18.220 So, 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.

00:33:26.840 Yeah. Well, hopefully this will cut off a lot of the money to so-called fact checkers and so-called disinformation experts.

00:33:35.280 Canada is just full of them.

00:33:38.460 I want to talk about just one more thing.

00:33:40.060 You've been very generous with your time, but you and I have a mutual friend, Harmeet Dillon.

00:33:44.900 She's a lawyer in San Francisco.

00:33:47.080 Harmeet is great.

00:33:47.640 She's amazing.

00:33:48.620 She's actually done some work for Rebel News to help us when we were canceled by a cruise ship company.

00:33:53.120 I first heard of her when she helped James Damore.

00:33:56.620 You mentioned him earlier in the interview.

00:33:58.640 He was the Google staffer who just objected internally to some conversations about feminism, and he was fired and she helped him.

00:34:07.440 Harmeet was just nominated by President Trump, if I've got this right, to be the Deputy Attorney General for Human Rights.

00:34:14.140 You correct me if I've got that title wrong.

00:34:15.920 It's something like that, civil rights or something.

00:34:18.580 What do you know about that?

00:34:19.820 And Harmeet basically fought for freedom and fought against cancel culture by the hands of big tech.

00:34:27.220 I think she is single-handedly perhaps the most active American on this file who's a lawyer.

00:34:33.820 I mean, you do this full-time for a living, so I'm taking nothing away from you, and there's some politicians.

00:34:39.240 But in terms of on the ground, boots on the ground, I think she's the number one.

00:34:42.900 And when I saw Trump name her, I was absolutely thrilled because she knows, like, there's no way she'll be co-opted by the department.

00:34:52.180 She's there for a mission.

00:34:53.880 Tell me your thoughts on Harmeet and what that appointment possibly means for America.

00:34:59.460 I think that's a fantastic appointment and should be perfect for that role.

00:35:03.720 I'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.

00:35:12.540 She sued Google back in 2017, that very, very high-profile class-action case, actually.

00:35:18.720 There were other Google employees part of that lawsuit that made a very strong case, I thought,

00:35:24.040 that Google discriminated against its employees on the basis of their political viewpoint and on the basis of their race and gender

00:35:32.080 because DEI policies at the time across many, many companies clearly discriminated against white males

00:35:40.920 and, to some extent, Asian males as well.

00:35:43.040 That was another part of Dillon's lawsuit.

00:35:45.860 And that ended, I believe, in arbitration.

00:35:48.420 And the National Labor Review Board, which is this D.C. bureaucracy, refused to take the case.

00:35:55.040 But now Harmeet Dillon is going to be leading civil rights. 0.97

00:35:59.780 Civil rights is sort of, you could say it's the heart of darkness when it comes to the government DEI regime,

00:36:07.020 this promotion of anti-white discrimination across all of society,

00:36:11.940 these promotions of diversity quotas.

00:36:14.380 Really, if civil rights means anything, it should be that everyone is protected from discrimination.

00:36:21.140 But we know across the corporate sector that discrimination against white people, against white males,

00:36:27.340 even against Asian people to some extent, it was endemic.

00:36:30.820 It was rife.

00:36:32.060 And now we've got someone at the Civil Rights Department who really, really understands that issue,

00:36:36.640 who did the first big, high-profile case on this very issue.

00:36:40.400 So it's fantastic news, really.

00:36:42.500 I can hardly wait to see what she does.

00:36:44.120 I mean, I couldn't believe she did so much work.

00:36:46.560 She was also a senior personality in the Republican RNC.

00:36:51.160 So I don't know how she found the time, but she was great.

00:36:53.640 I'm glad you share my view on that.

00:36:55.280 Well, Alan, it's great to catch up with you.

00:36:56.740 I truly am feeling hopeful.

00:36:59.000 And like you say, forgive but don't forget.

00:37:03.520 Mark Zuckerberg presided over a lot of terrible censorship.

00:37:07.340 But for whatever reason, he seems to be coming around, and I agree with you.

00:37:10.800 He's using language and specificity that suggests perhaps he means it.

00:37:15.180 And I think Donald Trump is blunt enough that if he feels Zuckerberg is a problem, he'll certainly say so.

00:37:21.320 I think Zuck is getting ahead of the curve.

00:37:23.540 And you're right.

00:37:24.180 If I was Google, I would be a little bit concerned.

00:37:27.560 Last word to you, Alan.

00:37:28.320 Keep an eye on the personnel as well.

00:37:30.240 Personnel is policy, and the promotions at Facebook are really, really good.

00:37:33.620 Nick Clegg, big supporter of censorship, is out.

00:37:36.560 And people like Kevin Martin, who a former FCC chairman, is being promoted.

00:37:41.020 He opposed censorship apparently throughout the entire era of censorship.

00:37:44.820 That's great news as well.

00:37:46.460 Yeah, Nick Clegg for sure.

00:37:47.620 That was such a strange hire.

00:37:48.740 He was a politician from the United Kingdom who did not share First Amendment sensibility.

00:37:54.340 So I'm glad he's out.

00:37:55.520 Alan, great to see you.

00:37:56.500 Congratulations on—because you yourself have some paternity over these things.

00:38:04.280 You've documented—tell me the name of your book again.

00:38:06.080 I don't want to misquote it.

00:38:06.960 What's the name of the book?

00:38:07.920 It's Deleted Big Text Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal an Election.

00:38:12.100 It came out in 2020, just before that election, which Silicon Valley did indeed play a big role in stealing.

00:38:18.420 Yeah, your book really is what made me so sad.

00:38:23.400 So now I feel happy that the pendulum is swinging back.

00:38:28.680 Keep in touch, my friend.

00:38:29.460 We've been talking with Alan Bokhari.

00:38:30.660 He's the Managing Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.

00:38:33.840 And today is definitely a day for freedom.

00:38:36.000 Take care.

00:38:36.320 We'll talk to you again soon.

00:38:38.120 Thanks, Ezra.

00:38:38.900 All right.

00:38:39.520 There you have it.

00:38:40.240 Well, I mean good spirits as much as you can be.

00:38:43.340 That's our show for today.

00:38:44.720 Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.

00:38:49.080 And keep fighting for freedom.

Rebel News Podcast - January 08, 2025

EZRA LEVANT ｜ Facebook gives death blow to online censorship, embraces freedom

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