EZRA LEVANT ｜ Media's Trump Derangement Syndrome triggered Big Tech censorship
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Summary
Big tech companies helped sway the election for Joe Biden in 2020. Will they help free the vote for Trump in 2024? We talk to Alan Bokhari about this and other things on this episode of The Ezra LeVant Show.
Transcript
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Hello, my friends. What a great conversation today with really one of the smartest guys in tech,
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Alan Bokhari. He used to be a journalist at Breitbart.com. Now he's the head of an online
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freedom activist group. We're going to talk about everything from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg and
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the election. You don't want to miss it, but I'm going to show you a bunch of clips and I want you
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to see them with your eyes, not just hear them with your ears. To get the video version of this
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podcast, you got to sign up at rebelnewsplus.com. Just click rebelnewsplus.com, hit subscribe. It's
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eight bucks a month. That might not sound like a lot of money to you, but boy, it sure adds up with us
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because as we'll talk about with Alan, we have been demonetized by big tech, so we rely on you.
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Tonight, big tech companies helped sway the election for Joe Biden in 2020. Will they help
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free the election for Trump in 2024? We talked to Alan Bokhari about this and other things.
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It's October 22nd, and this is The Ezra LeVant Show.
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You know, I saw this amazing graph the other day, and I almost didn't believe it, but
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in my bones, I think it's true. It shows the donations by senior tech executives over the
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last few election cycles. Now, you would think that people in tech are engineers and doers and
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builders and entrepreneurs and problem solvers. You would think that by nature, those folks are
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right of center or conservative. I remember when I was a student at University of Calgary,
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whenever I was with the Young Reform Party handing out flyers, our best departments were
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engineering and management. We stayed away from the soft social sciences. But over the last
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generation, you can see how tech became colonized by leftists, and that's because the tech bros,
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the engineers were soon replaced by HR specialists and sensors and other more, I would call them more
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feminine activities. And I think this was crystallized by a series of those day in the life
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at Twitter videos that caused Elon Musk to purge 80 percent of the staff when he arrived.
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If you don't know the videos I'm talking about, here's one that just showed who started to work for
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tech with massive six-figure salaries over the last decade. Take a look.
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Hey guys, come to work with me at Twitter and Atlanta. This was my first time going into the
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office in such a long time, but it was nice to have a change of scenery from my apartment.
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Look at my co-worker Bree. She's so cute. For lunch, we decided to go downstairs to Bar Vegan. If you
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haven't tried it before, it's a black-owned restaurant inside of Ponce Market. We ordered the
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quesadillas with tots and then also got a fancy pants cocktail, and they were all really good,
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so I'll definitely be back. After lunch, we came back upstairs to an extremely empty office,
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but honestly, we were just so proud of our productivity. After work, we went back downstairs
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to Monero's to reward ourselves with some after-work margaritas. We stayed at happy hour
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until around 7 p.m., and then I finally headed home to enjoy a well-deserved bubble bath. Bye, guys.
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Yeah, when Elon Musk came aboard, he fired 80% of the staff, and I would put it to you that the
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product is stronger than ever, but my point is tech was colonized, and a lot of it was on purpose.
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For example, George Soros himself bankrolled various NGOs designed to change the terms of
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service for using tech platforms. He actually created an NGO called Change the Terms, which was
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to get tech companies themselves to ban and censor political activists on the right. Well,
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things are snapping back. You can see it in big tech investors, including that all-in podcast. These
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are billionaires who have made their money in Silicon Valley and have historically voted Democrat,
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but they are swinging back to the right, partly appalled by the state of San Francisco, which has
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become a drug-infested, woke meltdown, and partly by Donald Trump. And I don't know, I think that
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there's just something going on out there, and the personification is Elon Musk, who himself has gone
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all in, not just campaigning grassroots level with Donald Trump, but setting up his own PAC called
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America PAC and giving away a million dollars a day to people who sign up to his
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petition to support the First and Second Amendments. A lot going on. And when I want to think about the
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state of tech and politics, there's really only one name that comes to mind. We met him when he was
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a senior tech writer at Breitbart.com, and we've kept in touch with him as he's moved on to a different
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project. He's now the managing director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. You know who I mean,
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our friend Alan Bocari, who joins us from Austin, Texas. Alan, it's great to see you again.
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Don't mind me rambling on there, but I really think there's movement. For the first time in memory,
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big tech is, if not leaning to the right, certainly showing its skepticism towards the woke left. That's
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new, isn't it? That is. It's new in a sense, because, you know, tech used to be somewhat balanced
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between Democrats and Republicans. But there was sort of a, I would say, a counter-revolution
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between 2016 and 2020, when tech, along with, you know, every other major sector of the economy
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and society and institution, just became completely radicalized. They bought into the media hype,
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which painted Donald Trump, who won in 2016, as, you know, the second coming of Hitler.
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And they just shifted massively to the left. And that's when you saw the peak
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of censorship in Silicon Valley. You saw the peak of left-wing attitudes in Silicon Valley.
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And I think that was partly because of the media scaremongering around Donald Trump. It was also,
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as you said in your opening remarks, you know, the fact that Silicon Valley had become bloated
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with all of these non-technical employees who leaned to the left.
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Yeah. Now, there still are major tech players who are obviously hard left-wing. I think of Benioff
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from Salesforce.com, even Mark Zuckerberg, who poured hundreds of millions into get-out-the-vote
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strategies last time, which he claimed were neutral, but were so obviously designed to boost
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the Democrats. He has shown a little bit of remorse, I think, or embarrassment. I think he's tried
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to rebrand himself as a regular guy. And he wrote a letter a few weeks ago where he basically said,
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I'm not going to meddle this time. People took it the wrong way, and I'm going to be super neutral.
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I didn't believe a word of it. And I see in your old stomping grounds, brightboard.com,
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a story basically highlighting James O'Keefe's latest sting, where a senior engineer at Facebook
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Meta admits that Facebook demotes anti-Kamala Harris posts and shadow bans conservatives.
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So Mark Zuckerberg might be telling the truth about his personal ideology, but his company is so large
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and it's so infested with leftists, they seem like they're censoring like it's 2020 again.
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Yeah. And that goes to the point you made earlier about Elon Musk coming into Twitter,
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formerly Twitter, now X, and cutting 80% of stuff. Mark Zuckerberg, while he personally may not be
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planning to interfere in the 2024 election on the side of Kamala Harris, maybe his personal
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political viewpoints have changed. Maybe people around him at the top of Facebook, it's the same
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story. But I think censorship became so deeply ingrained in every major tech company between 2016
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and 2020, you know, spread out across their content moderation departments, their trust and safety
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departments, as well as all the NGOs and government agencies that they relied on for censorship advice,
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which are all pro-censorship. We cover them a lot at the Foundation for Freedom Online.
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That's so deeply ingrained that unless you do the kind of cutting we saw with Elon Musk and X,
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those systems are still going to live on. Those people in the content moderation department are
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still going to be there and they're still going to be doing the same things. And I think that's why
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you see stories like the one you mentioned at Breitbart about the Facebook employee.
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Yeah, that Breitbart report was basically unpacking a video by James O'Keefe. Let's play a little bit of
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that video. This is Jeevan Gyalwali, a senior software engineer at Meta. Let me show you the
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primary source. I was crediting Breitbart because that's where I saw the video, but it's actually
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James O'Keefe, the renowned undercover investigator. Here, take a look at the primary video with your own
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Paul in like Ohio said something about like Kamala Harris is unfit to be a president because he doesn't
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have a child. That kind of shit is automatically developed.
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Are they doing a good job protecting our democracy?
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Because I can see these like right-wing groups like setting up Instagram accounts or Facebook
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accounts for that matter, right? And just start posting this information to be like, oh, like
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That's all going to be demoted 100%. The civic class is very strong.
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Would the person who posted that be made, would he be notified that...
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The person would not be notified, but there's these things that we, what you collect is like,
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if a bunch of items that, like if at least a couple of items that a person has created,
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has violated civic classifier, then they're also red-listed.
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But so they will see a dip in like impressions and engagement, but they would not be like
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I think it was so ubiquitous, this censorship and the phrase disinformation and misinformation
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and the community standards, this whole censorship industry and its related fact-checking industry,
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If you had the wrong opinions, you would be checked.
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I think it became so ubiquitous that people just accepted that's how it is.
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It's sort of like, if I may refer to another debate, global warming.
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It's so ubiquitous that unless you're actively trying to dissent, it's like a fish that doesn't
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It's so completely infused in everything, you have to be a real willful skeptic to oppose
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And I think maybe to defend some tech leaders, it's just everywhere they went, everyone was
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It's all government asked them about when they would go to Congress or Parliament.
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And these engineering nerds who think they're sophisticated masters of the universe, I think
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they got totally manhandled by the politicians.
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And I think they were scared that if they didn't comply, they would be absolutely destroyed
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So I think they entered into a sort of partnership.
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And by the way, you can see some of the emails that are being disclosed through litigation
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that even big tech companies like Facebook were appalled by the censorship demands put
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They were scared that if they didn't do what the FBI, CIA, Congress were demanding of them,
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So to cut them a little bit of slack, I think it was absolute peer pressure.
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There was a, it was a velvet glove, but there was a steel fist underneath it.
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I think that it takes genuinely dissenting thinkers like Elon Musk and some of the other names
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I mentioned, David Sachs, Mark Andreessen, Bill Ackman, Peter Thiel, that unless you are
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by nature a disrupting contrarian, it's, it would be hard to fight against the censorship
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And, you know, as you said, the pressure between 2016 and 2020 on tech companies was
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It was coming from activist organizations and NGOs.
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It was coming from big advertising companies that would repeatedly threaten to boycott the
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tech platforms if they didn't come down hard on censoring political opinions.
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You had media companies, big media companies that encouraged those advertiser boycotts.
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And then they did it again against, against Twitter just recently when Elon Musk took over.
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So you had that, that, that, you know, really powerful force of advertiser pressure on the
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tech companies, all of which rely primarily on ad revenue to, to make a profit.
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On top of that, you had every, as you said, every single government around the world telling
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the tech companies that they need to do something on disinformation.
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government agencies, because 2016 to 2020 was this very strange period where Donald Trump
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But many of the government agencies were a law unto themselves, and they were kind of
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working to undermine him, including by encouraging tech platforms to censor his supporters.
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CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at DHS, was a big culprit involved
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We've covered it a lot at the Foundation for Freedom online.
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So all of these, all of these sources of pressure, advertisers, activists, NGOs, universities,
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the media, and government agencies, not just the U.S., but around the world, all of these
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like combined, create this extraordinary pressure on the tech companies between 2016 and 2020.
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It was hard to see how any tech company could avoid caving in.
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And, you know, that remained the case until just recently, where we had the simultaneous
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factors of Elon Musk taking over X, and the House Judiciary Committee and other congressional
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committees investigating the censorship apparatus that the U.S.
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You know, while you were saying things, I just checked, I just looked something up very
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In Canada, there was an edgy online journalist, sort of like in your country.
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I forget the journalist for The Washington Post who was their tech correspondent against.
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That wasn't just a Joe Biden moment for me there, Alan.
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Taylor Lorenz, who's, by the way, well into middle age, positioned herself as sort of the
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And I'll tell all you folks at The Washington Post what the kids are up to.
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It was sort of like that Steve Buscemi meme, hello, fellow youth.
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And anyway, Taylor Lorenz offered to be the guide for boomers through the world of the internet.
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But what she really was, she engaged in sort of gotcha style, terrorizing activism journalism,
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where she would call up a big tech company or call up an advertiser and say, hey, you
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Let me know if you're going to continue carrying this hate message or I'm going to get you.
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It was extortion journalism that would serve to terrify, like it was, everyone was scared
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And these bottom feeding fake journalists were part of it.
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In Canada, our version of Taylor Lorenz was Rachel Gilmore, who was fired from Global.
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And then she went to work as a journalist, but not for any news outlet, for some US based
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NGO whose entire purpose was to terrorize advertisers on right wing sites.
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But if you're a massive platform like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, et cetera, you can't
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So between government regulation on the one hand, ideological entryism and colonization,
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especially of your HR department, and then pressure from advertisers, it's a miracle that
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A couple of months ago, Elon Musk, through Twitter X, launched a lawsuit against some advertising
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sort of, I'm not going to use the word cartel, but it was like a group of advertisers who
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And he sued them, alleging bad faith that they were basically trying to put Twitter out
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After Elon Musk's lawsuit, this coalition was disbanded.
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Do you know anything about that lawsuit or its status?
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We did a major report on this at the Foundation for Freedom Online.
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The cartel was called, as it was in the past tense, the Global Alliance for Responsible
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They ceased operations shortly after that lawsuit was filed.
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Also, shortly after, we published a report on the government contracts that many of their
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members have in the US, totaling over $1 billion to many of the big advertising agencies.
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That were a part of this cartel that boycotted X or encouraged boycotts of X and went to
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tech platforms, you know, with, you know, helpful advice on their content moderation policy and
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And that happened shortly after the lawsuit from X and also after investigations by the
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But what that organization was, it represented, I believe, because it was a part of the World
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Federation of Advertisers, which represents over 90 percent of all advertising spending
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So it's basically the entire advertising industry that was involved in this group.
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And it had one purpose, which was to create uniform standards of censorship on social media
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They would go to platforms like Spotify and say, hey, did you know that Joe Rogan, your
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And it's kind of extraordinary because the platforms and the personalities that they complained
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Joe Rogan, the number one podcaster in the world.
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And they were complaining that, you know, about one episode with a vaccine skeptic.
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They also, in communications that were obtained through congressional subpoenas, you can see
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them admitting to targeting conservative media, targeting media they didn't like by, you know,
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watching them like hawks for any transgression of their principles.
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So, I think they specifically mentioned the Daily Wire and Breitbart News, how they specifically
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watched those sites for any violation so that they could go to their clients and say, you shouldn't
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So, they admitted to, you know, unevenly applying their own standards to websites that they didn't
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But I'll say another thing about the advertising boycotts related to what I just said about
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And you can see how ideological these people are when you look at their internal communications,
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because many of the platforms and personalities that received the most advertiser boycotts were,
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you know, extremely popular platforms, Tucker Carlson, almost all his advertisers left when
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You see this massive advertising conglomerate complaining about his guests.
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So, these are huge audiences that advertisers should want to be in front of.
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And yet, these advertising agencies and these advertising cartels are telling them, well,
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the risk to your brand is so great that you shouldn't be on there.
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But there's never been any sign of a consumer backlash.
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The only backlash against advertisers for advertising in these places has come from the media.
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It's come from a minority, a vocal minority of, you know, journalists and activists.
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No, there's never been a mass consumer boycott of any brand because their advertisers appeared
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on conservative media or appeared next to an offensive post on X.
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It's all been from journalists and the activists.
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Plus, the only time, actually, in the last five years where you do see massive consumer backlashes
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against brands come from the brands being too woke, like in the case of Bud Light or in
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the case of Gillette in 2019 when they did their toxic masculinity act.
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That's where you see brands actually losing customers and losing market share over a consumer
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backlash, not because they advertise on platforms that are too free speech friendly.
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You know, that's what happened to us at Rebel News in early 2017.
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I've seen internal documents at Google, YouTube, where they say, oh, yikes, Rebel News is pretty spicy.
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So they were activists within YouTube, Google that were trying to block us.
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But before we were shut down, we were on track to make a million dollars a year from YouTube ads.
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We're still on YouTube because they haven't deleted our account.
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But that has cost our company coming up on $10 million, which is a lot of crowdfunding we've
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There was nowhere to go until Rumble came along.
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And it's still only about 1% the size of YouTube.
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But they've had a real dedication to free speech.
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And, of course, Elon Musk buying Twitter was the biggest thing of all.
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I see Guy Verhofstadt, who's a big European Union bureaucrat.
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He's tweeting just today about how delighted he is that some investment firm estimates the
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I mean, just the glee with which the European Union bureaucrats want to destroy Elon Musk.
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It's not just—I mean, I saw the other day that Elon Musk was saying he's worried about
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Like, he's worried about traveling there because you have politicians there calling for
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his arrest over Twitter, speaking candidly about some of the mass immigration and the
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I mean, I don't know if this is just—if he's just being dramatic, but the world's
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most industrious man, the most prolific entrepreneur, the space adventurer, the electric car builder,
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the essential, indispensable man, perhaps the most creative man, certainly the largest wealth
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creator in history, he just drops the comment that he is afraid to travel to the United
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Kingdom for fear of being arrested, not for any crime, but for his opinion.
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There's a lot of—I mean, although we've got quite a lot of bureaucracy here, but in Europe,
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they've got country-level bureaucracy, and then they've got EU bureaucracy on top of that.
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You know, I mean, the EU headquarters in Brussels is a monument to bureaucracy.
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You know, and they don't—unlike America, they don't have a First Amendment.
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You don't actually have freedom of speech in Europe.
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So, you know, but we're kind of like a pretty rare situation having freedom of speech.
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So, you know, like there's crazy stuff happening in the U.K. where, you know, people are getting
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like two, three-year prison sentences for Facebook posts.
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Yeah, like I'm like, I don't think I should go to, you know, visit Britain, because I'm like, they're going to, like, drag out some, you know, tweet and say two years in prison for this tweet or something bullshit like that, you know?
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So, anyway, I think that's, you know, it's Trump elected.
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We can put a stop to that stuff and say, like, ah, no way.
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No throwing people in prison for random social media posts.
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No, I mean, it's so crazy in Britain that they were—they actually have released convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for making social media posts.
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I just got to throw one more thing at you, Alan, because I know you're originally from the U.K.
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But there was this conference that the new labor government of the U.K. had trying to attract foreign investment.
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But they specifically did not invite a man who's building factories everywhere, who's ramping up.
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And Trevor Phillips, who's a very interesting British commentator, was grilling the labor cabinet minister about that.
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Three times he went back to him, why not Elon Musk, why not Elon Musk, and the labor government just refused to say why.
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You're desperate to get a company which sacks its employees by Zoom.
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But you're sniffy about the biggest carmaker in the world because he put something on social media he didn't like.
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Look, I'm not going to comment on particular invitations for a particular person.
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It is Elon Musk, biggest carmaker in the world, richest man in the world.
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Look, I'm not going to comment on the reasons for any specific person.
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But I can tell you we have 300 of the most significant investors, business figures, people who can bring significant amounts of capital to the UK.
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Big names, things that will make a big difference to working people's lives.
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You're happy to talk to me about DP World, who sacks their workers.
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You're happy to invite the Saudis, who authorise the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
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This is about who can bring the kind of investments that will make the biggest difference to the UK, to working people's lives.
00:28:20.440
Oh, Musk hasn't got a bob or two that he could put into Britain.
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And I'm not going to be right to go through the individual decisions for individual people.
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But this is about what will make the biggest difference.
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Yet the one person who probably has got more money to burn and would probably like to invest in Britain.
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In fact, he says so publicly when he didn't get the invitation.
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If people have an investment proposition for the UK, of course, I will talk to them about it.
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Look, thousands of people, Trevor, wanted to come to this summit.
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I'll simply say that the people coming, you'll see the scale of the investments.
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You'll see the kind of quality and depth of the engagement this new government has.
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And I think to individually talk about a certain person here or there, look, that's not right on them.
00:29:37.300
The California Coastal Commission recently cited his tweets for a reason why they won't let more spaceships take off from Vandenberg in California.
00:29:46.020
They literally said we don't like his tweets, so we're not going to let him fire spaceships.
00:29:50.540
Even Gavin Newsom, the governor of California who is at odds with Elon Musk, said that's nuts.
00:29:57.840
And when I was at Davos, Switzerland, last year for the World Economic Forum, the two words that people hated were Trump and Musk.
00:30:05.120
Those were the two names on everyone's list, Trump because the threat he poses to the global order, and Musk because people see that he will allow Trump to succeed if Trump is able to succeed.
00:30:19.420
You know, they say that graveyards are full of indispensable men, as in there's no such thing.
00:30:24.760
But I think Elon Musk is as close as it gets to an indispensable man in this moment.
00:30:29.440
That's right, and he's similar to Trump in that, you know, the media loved him, celebrities loved him, you know, left-wing politicians loved him because of all the...
00:30:42.440
Because of, you know, the green car revolution, the electric car revolution.
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And simply by changing his political opinions, all of these people, the same people turned against him and completely forgot about, you know, all these other things.
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The California Coastal Commission being like the craziest, the fact that they say it openly.
00:31:00.220
Normally, there's a sense of plausible deniability, you know, as that Labour MP was very unsuccessfully trying to do, trying to pretend that the reason he's being ostracized is for some neutral, non-political reason.
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And what's funny about the California Coastal Commission is they came out and said it openly.
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But we all know that's the case with the European Union and its investigations of Musk's company.
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We all know that all of these reasons they come up with for investigating Musk's companies or, you know, denying some permit for a space launch, it's all just every supposedly neutral reason they come up with is just a fig leaf for a political retaliation, political retribution.
00:31:43.460
You know, I was in the UK and I was in Ireland over the weekend, Alan, and I bought a bottle of water and I discovered this new regulation.
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I don't know if it's in the UK or just the EU, but when you unscrew a bottle from the top of the water, it doesn't come off completely.
00:32:01.280
There's this amazing innovation that the bottle cap, the cap stays on when you're drinking.
00:32:09.000
So it sort of squishes against your face or your nose and it's got that, it's a little bit prickly, right, where you broke it.
00:32:17.680
I'm sure it's done in the name of environmentalism because you can't drop the cap separately from the bottle.
00:32:28.080
I thought in America you've got Elon Musk who's sending 90% of the Earth's payload into space, 10 times more than every other country in the world combined.
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He's landing rocket ships vertically, being clasped by those big, huge robot arms.
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He's giving internet to the world through Starlink.
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He's got this Neuralink program, which I don't know much about.
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But the European Union, what's their great innovation?
00:33:07.020
They've got that irritating little bottle cap that scratches your nose when you drink water.
00:33:17.240
On one hand, you have Elon Musk going to the stars.
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On the other hand, the European Union with their regulations about bottle caps.
00:33:24.400
I thought that was, I just, I thought that is the state of the world today.
00:33:33.800
Now, you're right, that probably is because of regulation that the caps don't come up the bottles.
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I always wondered why that was the case, because it's the case in the UK, it's the case in Europe.
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The other thing to remember is, I think, there is a sort of insidious relationship between the EU, Brazil and other foreign governments that are going after Musk and Musk companies and the United States.
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Because a lot of United States soft power organizations and NGOs and companies that have worked with the U.S. government to promote anti-disinformation research or to monitor disinformation online.
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And they're very active in places like the UK and the European Union and Brazil, pushing for more regulation of social media platforms.
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And the State Department, which is supposed to stand up for American companies when a foreign government is threatening heavy handed regulation, didn't do much to stop the Digital Services Act or even to water down the Digital Services Act, which is the European Union regulation that's being used to go after Musk companies.
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The State Department should have done that, and they didn't.
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And I think the reason they didn't is because the U.S. government probably quite likes it when the European Union forces American tech companies to go after disinformation and hate speech.
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It's something they can't do directly themselves because of the First Amendment, even though they'd like to.
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But a massive jurisdiction like the European Union doing it is the next best thing.
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Yeah, we were down in Sao Paulo, Brazil about a month ago for the massive rally after their authoritarian regime banned Twitter.
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Elon Musk revealed that publicly, so they banned the whole app.
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I went down there because I wanted to see with my own eyes, is it really a rally about free speech?
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Because that would be very unusual for people to rally for something so abstract.
00:35:40.820
You know, it just seemed like I've never seen a rally for freedom of speech in my life, actually.
00:35:49.260
Their signs were about Twitter and free speech and Elon Musk.
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Just for fun, here's some of the streeters we did with Brazilians.
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Brazil is a very mixed race society, different classes.
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And everyone was using the vocabulary of freedom.
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It was really one of the most astonishing rallies I've ever been to.
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And the fact that 200,000 people were there was just the punctuation mark at the end.
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Here's some of the streeters I did in a massive pro Twitter rally in Brazil.
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We help you because the Brazil needs you and the world needs you.
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The Brazilian people ordinary, how do they feel about Elon Musk?
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You know, most of the people are with Elon Musk.
00:36:51.120
And that's why we think that we, and we support him.
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I hope so because he has a lot of power, a lot of money, a lot of everything.
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If you had one message for the owner of X, Elon Musk, what would it be?
00:37:20.980
I didn't hear a peep from the State Department about a massive American company being blocked
00:37:34.940
They went after Elon Musk's other unrelated holdings.
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They went after Starlink, which is completely unrelated to Twitter.
00:37:41.820
And you would think that the U.S. State Department, by the way, here in Canada, the most terrifying
00:37:52.120
If the U.S. trade representative thinks that Canada is engaging in monkey business in
00:37:57.460
softwood lumber, in mining, in environment, holy moly is that terror because there's trade
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sanctions, there's tariffs, there's litigation in these free trade agreements.
00:38:10.980
I mean, they stand up for American rights in the economy.
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Absolute silence when it was Elon Musk that was being basically expropriated by these other
00:38:27.460
Actually, I'll just show one more thing because we've been interested in the case of Tommy
00:38:31.860
Robinson, and not everyone shares my taste for Tommy Robinson.
00:38:36.960
He's a little bit rambunctious and rough around the edges, but I believe that he is a warning.
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He is the canary in the coal mine, just like Alex Jones is in America.
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You don't have to agree with everything about Alex Jones.
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But when he was canceled in a 24-hour period by 14 different social media companies on the
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same day, including LinkedIn, and I think Pinterest, they're banning.
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It was just real, you know, Spotify, YouTube, all his accounts, 14 different accounts suspended
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That was a test drive to see what they could get away with.
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I know you know this, but I want to show our viewers again.
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This is from a parliamentary hearing in the United Kingdom a few years ago where Google
00:39:38.300
YouTube's senior global executive in charge of counterterrorism was meeting in London's
00:39:47.380
So this guy's job was tracking how real terrorist groups like ISIS or Al Qaeda would use YouTube
00:39:58.260
He had an extremely serious and grave job where he was dealing with life or death matters.
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And I've got to think he was spending a week in advance preparing for this extremely important
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You're there to answer questions about terrorism and YouTube.
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They were MPs complaining that they had to see Tommy Robinson videos and that the algorithm,
00:40:36.880
when they typed in Tommy Robinson, kept stirring up more Tommy Robinson.
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We are working to make sure that videos that promote hate or promote violence, if they violate
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If they walk right up to the line, we have also, at the encouragement of this committee, developed
00:40:54.780
a new enforcement mechanism to limit the features that these have.
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They should not be appearing in our recommendation engine.
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If they are, I will take this back to our team and see what the problem is.
00:41:08.160
They are in my recommended timeline at the moment.
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So because I've been searching on my iPad for national action videos, I, as a result,
00:41:17.480
have the first two videos recommended to me by YouTube.
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When I just click on, as I've just done with this afternoon, I click onto YouTube, the first
00:41:31.500
So the Tommy Robinson that was identified as part of the Finsbury Park online radicalization
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I can't speak to these particular videos personally.
00:41:48.880
It causes me a lot of alarm, but I will take this back to our team and see why this has
00:41:53.720
It's not even just about the individual videos.
00:41:56.840
I have got up here, it is coming up as my recommended channels, that one of the recommended channels
00:42:09.260
I've got a series of other, you know, quite sort of extreme things that are coming in.
00:42:15.320
up, but I have specifically Tommy Robinson recommended channel.
00:42:21.980
It's important for the company and for our bottom line, for the recommendation engine
00:42:26.480
to work as it is intended, to make sure that people can find quality content that they are
00:42:32.480
It should not be serving up videos that incite or inspire hate.
00:42:37.280
If it is, there is a problem and I will take it back to the team and see that it's addressed.
00:42:46.900
I do not believe this is the first time you have heard this.
00:42:50.200
Allegations and concerns that your algorithms are promoting more and more extreme content
00:42:56.500
Whatever they search for, what they get back is a whole load more extreme recommendations
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You are the king of the search engine and yet your search engines are promoting things that
00:43:12.380
Whatever they search for, they get something more back.
00:43:14.780
And that woman who was leading the charge, Yvette Cooper, is now the Home Secretary, basically
00:43:21.860
the Minister of the Interior for the UK in charge of censorship.
00:43:26.680
By the way, shortly after that hearing, they banned Tommy Robinson from basically all social
00:43:35.280
Elon Musk brought him back to life online and same with Alex Jones.
00:43:39.800
I think, Alan, that Rebel News would probably be dead meat by now if things had continued
00:43:47.320
And if it weren't for Rumble and Elon Musk and Twitter and this revelation by independent
00:43:54.380
thought leaders like Peter Thiel and others in Silicon Valley that, whoa, we're headed in
00:43:59.240
I think that we were going in a very bad way and I really think this election, as Elon Musk
00:44:07.360
said, is a do or die moment for America because if Kamala Harris, the most left-wing candidate
00:44:13.060
in American history on a major ticket, if she wins, she'll do what she says she'll do.
00:44:19.980
Tim Walls himself has talked about censoring misinformation.
00:44:23.860
I just got to throw one more clip at you, Alan.
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Here's Tim Walls, the vice presidential candidate, saying misinformation should be illegal.
00:44:34.520
There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy.
00:44:40.260
Well, Alan, I mean, I don't mean to be dramatic, but it's not just the fate of America in the
00:44:47.200
It's the fate of so many other countries that take their lead from America.
00:44:50.080
And frankly, it's the fate of our company, Rebel News, I'm sure of it.
00:44:58.500
Maybe I could overconsume social media and so I've been radicalized.
00:45:03.020
But I really think that everything is at stake this election.
00:45:08.960
Certainly when it comes to free speech, I think things might start getting worse if the Democrats
00:45:13.580
win, because, you know, as I was saying, so much of this was encouraged by the U.S.
00:45:20.860
And it's only stopped because of congressional investigation.
00:45:24.520
The same people who encouraged big tech companies to come down so hard on disinformation are still
00:45:33.900
They're going to be promoted, I think, if if if there isn't a more pro free speech
00:45:45.140
And, you know, I would like the Democrats to become a more pro free speech.
00:45:48.920
I would like it not to matter if a Republican or a Democrat is in office.
00:45:52.820
I want I would I would like for, you know, both major parties in the U.S.
00:45:59.000
That doesn't seem like it's happening at the moment.
00:46:00.880
There are a few a few Democrats who aren't as bad as the others, but most mostly they've
00:46:08.740
There are some, you know, moderate establishment Republicans who supported the disinformation
00:46:15.260
But certainly this election will change a lot when it comes to U.S.
00:46:22.120
As I as I said, it's, you know, quietly encouraged censorship in foreign countries.
00:46:31.160
embassy in Brazil for itself, they put out a very mild statement saying Brazil should
00:46:35.980
respect free speech back when the judiciary was going after X for having too much free
00:46:44.400
embassy had up till then been hosting events on how to combat disinformation online and how
00:46:56.600
government to support social media companies taking measures against disinformation.
00:47:02.600
And, you know, that is that is that could be very much affected by the election.
00:47:11.800
Imagine how bad things would go three or four years into it.
00:47:15.140
I mean, I'm really three or four years of judicial appointments, three or four years of regulatory
00:47:23.380
I saw a graphic in The New York Times the other day of all the lawfare against Elon Musk and
00:47:29.880
They I believe four years from now, if there was a Harris win, Elon Musk would be in trial
00:47:36.640
as much as Donald Trump has been on trumped up charges.
00:47:40.200
And and if you could take on Trump, you can take on anyone.
00:47:46.260
Well, listen, Elon, it's great to catch up with you.
00:47:47.960
I'm delighted that you are the head of the Foundation for Freedom Online dot com.
00:47:53.300
Managing director is always nice to chat with you about these tech things.
00:47:57.040
And I sign off my show every day with the same slogan.
00:48:01.760
I've been using it nine years here at Rebel News and at Sun News Network beforehand.
00:48:09.780
That's the tagline I've used for really almost 15 years.
00:48:13.480
And you have to, because these freedoms were hard fought over centuries, even over millennia.
00:48:25.080
And it's easier to keep them than to lose them and fight to get them back.
00:48:30.740
And I really think that we're at that key inflection in history.
00:48:39.360
There you have it, Alan Bakari, managing director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.
00:48:46.280
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home,