The Charlie Kirk Show - Exposing the Dark Plot Against Free Speech Online with Allum Bokhari

00:00:00.000 Thank you for listening to this podcast one production.

00:00:02.000 Now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast One, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.

00:00:08.000 Hey, everybody, happy Labor Day.

00:00:09.000 Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, we have Alam Bukhari, who is the senior tech editor at Breitbart News, does a phenomenal job at Breitbart.

00:00:18.000 He has a new book out called Hashtag Deleted, hashtag deleted.

00:00:23.000 He is a great mind, an important mind.

00:00:26.000 In this conversation around big tech tyranny and what it can represent to the destruction of a free society, we have a very honest and I think very healthy conversation around tech tyranny and steps that need to be taken to challenge big tech.

00:00:40.000 This episode is brought to you by those of you that support us at charliekirk.com slash support, charliekirk.com slash support.

00:00:48.000 Alam Bukhari is here, everybody.

00:00:50.000 Buckle up.

00:00:51.000 Here we go.

00:00:52.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:54.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:00:56.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:00.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:03.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:04.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:05.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:01:13.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:22.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:25.000 Hey, everybody.

00:01:26.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:28.000 I am joined by Breitbart's senior tech writer and editor, Alam Bokari.

00:01:34.000 Alum has a new incredible book called Hashtag Deleted, Big Tech's Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election.

00:01:43.000 I've had an opportunity to read a couple chapters from this book, and I want to read one part in particular.

00:01:48.000 But before I get started, I just want to reinforce how important this issue is.

00:01:53.000 This is probably the biggest issue in our country that the ruling class does not want to talk about because they actually benefit from the censorship happening in digital social media.

00:02:02.000 And I really believe it is the greatest attack on first principles and freedom of speech that the West has ever seen.

00:02:08.000 Alam, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:10.000 Hi, Charlie.

00:02:11.000 Great to be on.

00:02:12.000 And I just want to agree with what you said.

00:02:13.000 It is really the biggest threat.

00:02:15.000 We are sort of barreling towards a future where there's going to be no free speech because it's controlled by these unaccountable tech giants.

00:02:22.000 There's going to be no privacy because we've signed away to these tech giants.

00:02:26.000 And all of our behavior, all of our beliefs are going to be manipulated by these all-powerful companies because they know so much about us and can essentially flood us with propaganda without us even realizing it.

00:02:39.000 That is exactly right.

00:02:40.000 So I'm going to read from your book here.

00:02:42.000 It says, quote, and it's really well written the way that you put this through.

00:02:46.000 And I just, I have a, I'm very partial towards a British vocabulary, I have to say.

00:02:50.000 Just the diction is terrific.

00:02:52.000 In November 2016, a disturbance in the force hit Northern California.

00:02:57.000 It was as if millions of trendy, high-income Silicon Valley leftists suddenly cried out in terror and haven't stopped crying since.

00:03:04.000 No, I'm not badly quoting Star Wars.

00:03:06.000 I'm describing the actual reaction of the tech nerds who had, for a previous decade, spun an image of themselves as the smartest people in the world and now felt that they had been let down by their alleged galaxy-sized brains, just as it had done to the election pollsters and journalists.

00:03:21.000 The U.S. presidential election outcome had utterly confounded Silicon Valley's predictions.

00:03:26.000 The impossible had happened.

00:03:27.000 The reckoning was here.

00:03:28.000 Donald Trump was president.

00:03:29.000 Can you expand on this?

00:03:30.000 It's just an opening shot in your book.

00:03:33.000 The tech giants really kind of felt as if they let their team down.

00:03:38.000 Is it almost as if they were vested to be the vanguard or the bulwark of kind of globalistic, globalist philosophy, and they felt some form of guilt.

00:03:49.000 Is that right?

00:03:50.000 Absolutely.

00:03:51.000 And, you know, Silicon Valley, much like other, You know, parts of elite America were, you know, convinced Hillary Clinton was going was going to win.

00:04:02.000 So they got complacent.

00:04:03.000 They thought they didn't have to do anything to stop Donald Trump, that he was going to lose by 10, 20 points.

00:04:08.000 They believed the polls.

00:04:10.000 And obviously, they were completely shocked on election night.

00:04:14.000 You know, back in 2018, I got my hands on an internal video from inside Google.

00:04:19.000 And this video showed the leadership of Google, the co-founders, the CEO, their top leadership team, a couple of days after the election reacting to Donald Trump.

00:04:29.000 And it's exactly as my sources describe in the book: a complete sense of panic and dismay.

00:04:35.000 You even had the co-founder of Google saying the election result, the decision of the American voters personally offended him.

00:04:43.000 And then they go on to describe, you know, the things they need to do.

00:04:47.000 You had one Google executive talking about how he wants to make the populist movement a blip or a hiccup in history.

00:04:54.000 Those are his words.

00:04:55.000 And, you know, the sources I've interviewed in this book, people from inside Facebook, people inside Google, and people who used to work for Twitter, all of the tech companies had exactly the same reaction.

00:05:06.000 First, complete shock and then anger and then guilt.

00:05:10.000 Guilt that they didn't do enough to stop Donald Trump.

00:05:13.000 And that's been the story of the last four years in Silicon Valley: how to make sure 2016 doesn't happen again.

00:05:20.000 What's been really interesting, Alan, and I think we need to start framing it like this.

00:05:25.000 These tech companies are not companies.

00:05:26.000 They almost operate as governments.

00:05:29.000 They have more powerful than our power than our government.

00:05:32.000 They seem to have more authority to suppress dissidents than most governments.

00:05:37.000 They can make decisions that most governments never could even imagine.

00:05:40.000 They're actually more financially solvent than most world governments.

00:05:45.000 So I guess, can you kind of just dive into more detail?

00:05:48.000 Who's actually staffing these companies?

00:05:51.000 What are their worldviews?

00:05:52.000 And what's to prevent them from using this incredible amount of power to try and silence the opposition and try to put forth a political agenda that very well might be at odds with most of our country?

00:06:08.000 Absolutely.

00:06:08.000 These Silicon Valley companies are dominated by an extremely far-left ideology.

00:06:14.000 My sources inside Facebook and Google, you know, everything we're seeing, we've seen over the past three months, corporations going woke, you know, hiring Robin DiAngelo to lecture their employees on so-called white fragility. 0.82

00:06:28.000 That was happening in Silicon Valley years and years ago.

00:06:31.000 They were very much ahead of the curve on this woke, far-left, progressive, sort of anti-American, very racist ideology.

00:06:39.000 That is the ideology of Silicon Valley.

00:06:41.000 And you can't speak out against it because if you're a conservative in one of these companies and you speak out against it, like James Daymore did, like Palmer Lucky did, then you just get fired.

00:06:50.000 You get ostracized.

00:06:51.000 So it's completely dominant and it's going to go on to influence these technologies that control so much of our lives.

00:07:00.000 You know, our businesses are going to be dependent on those technologies.

00:07:02.000 Our elections that are going to be dependent on these technologies.

00:07:05.000 Everything we do is dependent on these technologies.

00:07:08.000 And if you don't conform to their ideology, you simply won't be allowed to use them, or you'll be allowed to use them and you'll be covertly suppressed.

00:07:18.000 You compared these companies to governments.

00:07:20.000 That's something Mark Zuckerberg has actually admitted to.

00:07:22.000 He's even set up a so-called Facebook Supreme Court to judge as a kind of a way to almost reinforce that sense of Facebook being a new government.

00:07:36.000 But there's no checks and balances.

00:07:38.000 There's no constitution.

00:07:39.000 There's no First Amendment.

00:07:40.000 You don't have any rights on these platforms.

00:07:42.000 They can do what they want to you.

00:07:44.000 It's always struck me as incredibly bizarre that, you know, if you're the owner of a business and your landlord, you know, renting your commercial property decides to evict you for an arbitrary reason, you can take them to court and they have to follow a very clear due process for evicting tenants.

00:08:02.000 But if your entire business depends on a YouTube channel or a Facebook page or a Twitter account or an Instagram account, you have no recourse.

00:08:10.000 You have no rights whatsoever.

00:08:12.000 You can take these companies to court, but they have special legal immunities given to them by the government that will make your efforts almost completely futile.

00:08:21.000 So you have no outcomes whatsoever.

00:08:25.000 A lot of conservatives have said these are private companies and we shouldn't do anything.

00:08:29.000 I think this is an excuse, either because they like their dogmatic ideas more than actually what's right for our country, or they're purchased by the tech companies.

00:08:38.000 I kind of put them into two brackets if they give that excuse.

00:08:41.000 And the people that just hide behind their ideas, I think that eventually they're going to come around as soon as they realize these tech companies are more powerful than the Pentagon.

00:08:50.000 The people that are purchased by Silicon Valley, though, are in some ways more dangerous.

00:08:55.000 I haven't finished the book.

00:08:56.000 I've read a couple of chapters.

00:08:57.000 It's terrific.

00:08:58.000 Can you just quickly comment on how some people in the free market movement have taken millions of dollars from these tech companies, and they actually might be publishing pieces of literature that they themselves don't actually believe, but they're nothing more than intellectual guns for hire?

00:09:15.000 Yeah.

00:09:16.000 So, what Google's strategy has been, and Facebook's to some extent as well, is to flood Washington, D.C. with money, and they fund both sides of the aisle.

00:09:24.000 They fund liberal think tanks and they fund conservative think tanks.

00:09:27.000 And the purpose of this funding on the conservative side is to essentially say, as you put it, that if we interfere with these companies in any way, then we're interfering in the free market.

00:09:37.000 Obviously, it's a completely bogus argument because, as I just mentioned, these companies owe a lot of their dominant position in the marketplace to the fact that they got government handouts in the 1990s.

00:09:48.000 But even if that weren't the case, these companies are so dominant and so threatening to liberty that the government would need to do something about them anyway.

00:09:56.000 It's exactly what Teddy Roosevelt did at the turn of the 20th century.

00:10:00.000 You can't allow these, you can't allow unaccountable private actors to grow so large that they're a threat to American liberty.

00:10:07.000 And that's the point of the free market.

00:10:10.000 But certainly, if you hear someone making the argument that, you know, we're that there are many arguments.

00:10:17.000 First, they say, you know, you're inferring the free market, you're inferring free enterprise.

00:10:20.000 They also compare any regulation of the tech giants to the fairness doctrine.

00:10:24.000 Almost all of these arguments come from these Google-funded conservative think tanks.

00:10:29.000 So this is, and you know, many Republican politicians take money from Google and from Facebook as well.

00:10:35.000 So this is really something where the grassroots will have to make this, you know, unacceptable in their movement.

00:10:42.000 I think taking money from these tech giants needs to be as unacceptable to an ordinary Republican voter as taking money from Planned Parenthood.

00:10:51.000 They shouldn't tolerate their politicians and their representatives doing it.

00:10:56.000 I couldn't agree more.

00:10:57.000 I love that comparison.

00:10:59.000 No Republican would tolerate a primary competition between a Republican who took Planned Parenthood money and someone who didn't.

00:11:09.000 Same as if they took money from Bloomberg's gun group.

00:11:12.000 I think that's how big this issue is.

00:11:14.000 And I actually make the argument that all of these issues that we as conservatives care about-sovereignty, immigration, firearms, abortion-none of them actually are able even to be discussed if the issue of speech is not handled correctly.

00:11:30.000 I mean, it is a first freedom for a reason.

00:11:32.000 If you can't talk, if you can't have the marketplace of ideas, then are you even able to discuss whether we should have firearm ownership?

00:11:40.000 In the second chapter, I want to dive into this.

00:11:42.000 I love this sentence you have.

00:11:44.000 The internet promised to be the greatest leap forward for individual freedom since the Bill of Rights.

00:11:49.000 With blogs and newsletters, we are all printing presses.

00:11:53.000 With webcams and podcasts, we were all broadcasters.

00:11:56.000 With websites and online payment processors, we could all start businesses without getting up from our couches.

00:12:02.000 Reddit founder Alex O'Hannon summed it up best in 2013 in an interview with Forbes: To join in the Industrial Revolution, you needed an open factory.

00:12:10.000 The internet revolution, you just need an open laptop.

00:12:13.000 Alam, can you tell us how the internet was lost?

00:12:16.000 Because this actually promised to be a phenomenal source of creative energy and to use a free market term of the people that are bought by Google, creative destruction, which I like in theory.

00:12:27.000 I just don't see it happen very often anymore because of many different reasons.

00:12:30.000 How did we lose the internet?

00:12:32.000 Yeah, this is what I think should make people really angry because the internet as it existed 10 or 15 years ago was this genuine great leap forward for free expression, for the marketplace of ideas.

00:12:48.000 It was this democratizing thing.

00:12:49.000 Everyone had access to this global audience for their messages.

00:12:54.000 It was a huge threat to the old gatekeepers of information.

00:12:58.000 And that's in part why the establishment had to destroy it.

00:13:02.000 But it's really gone from this fantastic expansion of liberties to this extremely dystopian control thing.

00:13:11.000 We've gone from absolute, you know, a great, you know, a giant step forward for liberty to a giant step backward.

00:13:19.000 I think it's getting to a point where it's even worse than the pre-internet age, because now these tech companies are using their power not just to suppress our speech, but to manipulate us into certain behaviors and certain belief systems.

00:13:33.000 I've heard from sources inside Facebook who say these companies have to sort of develop models of changing people's political opinions and they're going to use that to move people away from the right to the center.

00:13:46.000 That's how bad it is.

00:13:47.000 We've gone from this promised utopia of free expression and democratized information and free information to an absolute dystopia controlled by a few unaccountable technological behemoths.

00:14:00.000 And now these technological behemoths are staffed with the very same people that are burning down our cities.

00:14:05.000 They're staffed with all the very same people that find, let's say, an intellectual home with the Nicole Hanna-Jones of the world.

00:14:16.000 That's basically who staffs Google and Facebook.

00:14:18.000 And if you dare disagree, you dare go work at Facebook as an electronic, you know, as some form of an engineer or at Google or at Twitter, and you dare say there are only two genders.

00:14:30.000 You brought up the point of James DeMoray or DeMore, I can never pronounce his name correctly.

00:14:36.000 You get run out of the company and you get basically thrown at as if it's a college campus.

00:14:42.000 In the third chapter of your book, it's called The Panic.

00:14:46.000 You say, quote, censorship never happens in a vacuum.

00:14:49.000 Certain historical conditions are always present.

00:14:53.000 Whenever there's a crusade to restrain a new form of expression, be it a book, a song, or a video game, or an entire medium of communication, it is always accompanied by its inseparable sibling, moral panic.

00:15:05.000 What do you mean by this?

00:15:07.000 So, in order to constrain something and prevent public backlash against your censorship efforts, you normally have to convince at least a large section of the public that there's a grave threat that you have to contain.

00:15:19.000 And that's exactly what we saw with the fake news panic after 2016.

00:15:23.000 We saw the mainstream media in alliance with Democratic politicians and groups like Media Matters convince their side that there's this huge problem of fake news on the internet or misinformation or Russian propaganda.

00:15:37.000 And if we don't do something about it, we're all going to be convinced into voting for more people like Donald Trump.

00:15:45.000 It's a very infantilizing ideology.

00:15:48.000 It basically says that if we don't control free speech, then voters are going to be manipulated by Russian propaganda on Facebook.

00:15:58.000 That's what they used to justify the censorship of these platforms.

00:15:58.000 That was their argument.

00:16:02.000 But behind that propaganda effort, I want to go a little bit deeper here.

00:16:06.000 The reason the establishment panicked so much at the election of Donald Trump was that it showed what the internet could do.

00:16:14.000 I genuinely believe that Donald Trump wouldn't have won in 2016 without the internet.

00:16:18.000 The margins in those swing states were very, very low.

00:16:21.000 And obviously there are multiple factors that led to his win.

00:16:24.000 But if he took away the internet, which was, I think, one of the biggest factors, he would not have won the election.

00:16:30.000 So what the establishment finds so threatening about the internet, I think, is this concept of virality, of emergence.

00:16:40.000 Obviously, we've seen over the past four years the big tech companies trying to erase the Trump movement, banning prominent Trump supporters left, right, and center.

00:16:48.000 But they're also doing something far more insidious and far harder to notice, which is they want to prevent the emergence of new movements.

00:16:56.000 And they do that by shadow banning, by covertly suppressing conservative content in their algorithms.

00:17:02.000 And they're threatened by a specific type of conservative.

00:17:07.000 They're not threatened by the old establishment conservatives who only talk about low taxes and deregulation and foreign awards and endless foreign wars, exactly.

00:17:17.000 But they are threatened by populist nationalists who talk about cultural issues, who think it's important to discuss thorny issues like race and gender.

00:17:25.000 They're the ones who get banned.

00:17:26.000 So they're almost preventing the next generation of conservatives from emerging.

00:17:31.000 They're preventing them from going viral.

00:17:33.000 They want conservatism to be stuck in the past, useless, growing less and less relevant.

00:17:38.000 That is their goal here.

00:17:39.000 So we're barreling towards a situation where one side of the political aisle, the left, is allowed to use these powerful technologies to go viral and spread their message and allow their own grassroots to form new movements through these platforms, whereas the other side is completely shut off from that, unable to connect with each other, unable to spread their message.

00:18:02.000 And that advantage is just going to be so huge for the left that it's a real threat to, I think, political liberty and to free and fair democracy.

00:18:13.000 I think that's well said.

00:18:14.000 And they do want to keep conservatism kind of in the warmongering pro-corporate approach.

00:18:20.000 And I think, Alam, what's really interesting about what you said, and I wrote it down, the internet elected Donald Trump.

00:18:24.000 I completely agree with this.

00:18:25.000 And the president had almost no choice because he was running up against their traditional establishment.

00:18:32.000 He didn't have a Jeb Bush-style war chest to be able to go on television.

00:18:35.000 Because he wasn't owned, he had to take his message straight to the people.

00:18:39.000 So I have two thoughts on this.

00:18:40.000 The first of which is a question.

00:18:42.000 But before I get to the question, I just want to kind of re-emphasize something you've said, which is the president has changed the Republican Party for the better.

00:18:49.000 During the Republican convention, you saw repeated points of praise that the president is ending foreign wars, is standing for freedom of speech, and is now the middle-class president, and also is corporate skeptic, which I think is the proper approach in modern America right now, because a lot of these corporations act as if they're governments and they don't believe in liberty or freedom and they only care about globalist vision of destroying the American middle class, where the Democrats are now the party of endless foreign wars,

00:19:16.000 anti-free speech, the destruction of the American middle class and their pro-corporate party, which I think is really interesting.

00:19:22.000 And I could see why they don't want that message to spread, because a lot of the Bernie Sanders supporters could be very quickly turned into Trump or conservatives if they just understood that kind of paradigm shift.

00:19:32.000 And so I think that there is an incentive structure for the tech companies to try to prevent that kind of distribution of information.

00:19:39.000 Here's my question, though, which I think is, I'm a little uncertain on how this one plays out.

00:19:48.000 At the current trend of where the internet is headed with the tech companies ruling with this capacity, do you think it's long past time for Congress to implement some form of a internet fairness doctrine or at least some speech regulation?

00:20:03.000 Because it seems that they see their power grab right now and they actually feel morally convicted to do this to suppress opposing views.

00:20:11.000 What do you think is actually a policy prescription to this?

00:20:14.000 Well, I certainly wouldn't describe it as a fairness doctrine.

00:20:17.000 That's the word the conservative think tanks love to use because they know it will convince grassroots conservatives that any kind of regulation is a bad idea.

00:20:27.000 But I would certainly say that there are several solutions that need to be considered.

00:20:32.000 You need a solution with a social media censorship.

00:20:35.000 And I think the solution there is to simply give ordinary Americans the right to take these companies to court if they're suspended for arbitrary reasons.

00:20:43.000 And you really have to narrow the bounds by which these companies are allowed to suspend people or ban people.

00:20:50.000 I think the ultimate end game that would maximize consumer choice is simply say that social networks aren't allowed to ban anyone or anything that's First Amendment protected, but you can add optional filters.

00:21:04.000 So Google for a long time has had a safe search button that you can turn on or off, and that'll filter out exceed content from your search results.

00:21:12.000 And they've had that for a long time.

00:21:13.000 So they have the technology to give people optional filters, but they don't want to use that for things like so-called hate speech and so-called misinformation, because that would take away their power to control the flow of information.

00:21:27.000 It would give it to users.

00:21:28.000 So I think any regulation has to aim at that end result of consumer choice.

00:21:32.000 That has to be the industry-wide standard.

00:21:35.000 Filters not bans.

00:21:38.000 Yeah, I think that's well put.

00:21:39.000 Sorry, continue.

00:21:41.000 But also, as I said, if anyone who has been banned, I think needs to have the ability to take these companies to court.

00:21:48.000 And that's essentially what the Trump administration is doing now with Trump's social media censorship executive order.

00:21:57.000 There's now a petition before the FCC written by Adam Kandayev, who's very, very good on these issues, by the way, to narrow the bounds of that crucial piece of legislation that the tech companies use to give themselves the power to ban anyone for any reason whatsoever.

00:22:15.000 I believe it's the fifth chapter, it's just called Deleted, which is the title of your book.

00:22:20.000 You talk about how many conservatives have been banned from these social media companies.

00:22:24.000 And then you go on to point out the double standard.

00:22:26.000 Can you talk about this, about how some of the liberals have been trying to incite harm against minors, such as the Covington Catholic example, and they don't lose their accounts, but conservatives dare speak in favor of the president and they lose their social media accounts?

00:22:40.000 Indeed, this is where you can see the huge double standards.

00:22:43.000 You look at some of the reasons that tech companies have used to ban conservatives or lock themselves out of their accounts.

00:22:51.000 Andy No, I believe, was locked out of his Twitter account once for mentioning actual crime statistics about transgender murders.

00:23:00.000 This was Twitter locked his account for hate speech.

00:23:04.000 When the George Floyd riots were happening and you were doing those very good videos, by the way, on crime statistics, I was wondering, wow, is Charlie Kirk going to get banned?

00:23:12.000 They have this function now.

00:23:16.000 It's not just hate speech, it's hate facts.

00:23:18.000 If you say the wrong facts, you'll get banned.

00:23:20.000 That's the standards.

00:23:24.000 But liberals, meanwhile, they get, you know, we thought in the Covington high school drama that they were able to, you know, these kids with violence.

00:23:33.000 Someone said in all caps, you know, lock these kids in a building and burn it down.

00:23:41.000 And he still has a Twitter account, not banned for that.

00:23:44.000 Amazing.

00:23:44.000 Kathy Griffin suggested that people should dox the kids, wasn't even asked to take the tweet down.

00:23:52.000 And what are some other examples of people who've been banned for posting facts? 0.53

00:23:57.000 Tommy Robinson was banned for pointing out that most of the grooming gangs in England are, you know, Muslim Pakistani men. 0.99

00:24:05.000 That's a fact. 0.87

00:24:08.000 Laura Luma was banned for criticizing Ilhan Omar, saying she's been sympathetic to Sharia in the past.

00:24:15.000 So many examples of conservatives being banned either for posting facts or for criticizing the wrong politician.

00:24:21.000 Meanwhile, the left can get away with threats of violence.

00:24:25.000 It's a complete double standard, absolutely.

00:24:28.000 So in chapter number six, you've talked, so I kind of want you to dive into this.

00:24:34.000 We have listeners of all ages.

00:24:35.000 We have 15-year-olds and 50-year-olds and people that are in their 80s.

00:24:38.000 And that's one of the things that makes our program unique.

00:24:41.000 Can you dive into this idea of robot sensors?

00:24:43.000 And can you also just reinforce the significance of this?

00:24:46.000 Because sometimes when I talk to people in their 60s or 70s and 80s, they kind of consider this to be a little bit of a fringe issue, that it's just not that important.

00:24:56.000 The tech companies, it'll sort itself out.

00:24:58.000 So can you start with the sixth chapter?

00:25:00.000 You talk about robot sensors.

00:25:01.000 You say your first sentence, one of the most common questions I get is, what is an algorithm?

00:25:06.000 So answer that question.

00:25:07.000 And then can you just reinforce and kind of just complete the circle of why this is not just some inconsequential kind of peripheral issue?

00:25:16.000 So an algorithm, essentially, you know, people have seen these are complicated.

00:25:20.000 They're not that complicated.

00:25:22.000 An algorithm is simply a program that's written to take in a set of inputs and analyze them and reach conclusions.

00:25:30.000 So if you can have an algorithm for sorting apples from oranges and it'll look at pictures of apples or oranges, that's the input.

00:25:38.000 It'll analyze them.

00:25:39.000 You know, is the object green?

00:25:42.000 Is it orange?

00:25:43.000 And then it'll reach a conclusion.

00:25:44.000 This is an apple or this is an orange.

00:25:46.000 That's an algorithm.

00:25:46.000 That's a very basic algorithm.

00:25:49.000 A hate speech algorithm would look at various posts on social media, look at the post you make on Facebook or Twitter, and it'll decide, well, what words are in this post?

00:25:59.000 Are these examples of hate speech?

00:26:00.000 And then it'll reach a conclusion.

00:26:03.000 Now, the problem you get is when the people who are training these algorithms, telling them how to recognize hate speech, are all radical leftists.

00:26:12.000 You're going to get a situation where these algorithms go further and further to the left.

00:26:18.000 The way these programs understand hate speech will mirror how a Berkeley gender studies graduate understands hate speech.

00:26:27.000 And this is really, really powerful and threatening because we're going to be in a future very soon where every single one of our posts, everything you post on social media or on the internet is going to be scanned by these algorithms and used to either suppress you or promote you.

00:26:43.000 So if the algorithm sees so-called hate speech in your post, you're going to be buried down in the search results.

00:26:50.000 You're not going to appear on trending topics.

00:26:51.000 You may even be banned.

00:26:53.000 It may countergain to the secret scores that these technologies, these social media platforms have, sort of similar to a social credit score.

00:27:01.000 If you post hate speech too many times, your score will go down.

00:27:04.000 Your post will go less viral.

00:27:06.000 You'll be suppressed.

00:27:07.000 This is really a formula for censoring an entire movement at the same time.

00:27:12.000 Because as I said, these algorithms scan people's posts automatically.

00:27:17.000 So it's a way to censor not just big, big names by the big names who have been banned, but everyone.

00:27:24.000 And so can you reinforce the other part where some older listeners don't quite understand this issue?

00:27:29.000 They don't have social media accounts.

00:27:31.000 How important is this for the distribution of information, especially with younger voters?

00:27:36.000 So imagine you're an undecided voter and you're using the internet.

00:27:40.000 So you're on Facebook, you're on Google.

00:27:43.000 If every conservative is being suppressed for hate speech, those messages that might persuade undecided voters will never actually reach them.

00:27:52.000 We're getting to a situation on the internet where undecided voters, big tech is flooding undecided voters with a stream of propaganda from the mainstream media.

00:28:03.000 They're flooding it to them in search results and they're flooding it to them on social media platforms because the only sort of trending topics that trending is like what you'll see at the top of your screen.

00:28:15.000 So if it's trending, it's right at the top.

00:28:17.000 You'll see it right at the top.

00:28:18.000 And we're going to get to a situation where undecided voters will never see a conservative post at the top of their screen.

00:28:25.000 They'll never see a conservative article at the top of their search results.

00:28:30.000 They just won't find it.

00:28:31.000 So they'll only see the left propaganda.

00:28:34.000 And that's how big tech can steal elections.

00:28:36.000 It's not by persuading conservatives to become left-wing.

00:28:40.000 It's by persuading those undecided voters.

00:28:44.000 It's so incredibly dangerous what we're playing with right now.

00:28:48.000 And I can't communicate the severity of this enough.

00:28:51.000 You have a 16-year-old who all they see is anti-American, anti-conservative, pro-socialist propaganda on all these tech companies.

00:29:00.000 And TikTok aside, which is a Chinese communist propaganda tool, which is incredibly left-wing.

00:29:05.000 A lot of teenagers use it.

00:29:07.000 And the content there is, let's say, shallow at best.

00:29:11.000 But on YouTube, on Google search results, on Facebook, they see nothing but content that makes them feel and think a certain way, where the Overton window is so far moved by the time you're even able to contact these people as voters.

00:29:27.000 The basis point when they're 18 is not whether or not America is a racist country.

00:29:34.000 They've already made their mind up by the time they're 18.

00:29:36.000 It's what are we going to do to destroy America because it's a racist country?

00:29:41.000 It's as if their question is their decision-making matrix politically is no longer, oh, maybe I should chose search other sides.

00:29:49.000 Their basis point is this is a non-negotiable.

00:29:52.000 Every left-wing dogmatic belief is built into them by the time they want to go make a political decision, where the idea of even voting a Republican is so incredibly, it's so distant to them, it's never going to happen or a conservative or any of that.

00:30:06.000 Can you talk about how conservatives and Trump supporters generally have actually had more viral content?

00:30:12.000 You've mentioned this before, but we as conservatives actually have better content and actually resonate really well.

00:30:18.000 But if we were given the kind of internet we had back in 15 and 16, where these tech companies were caught a little bit flat-footed, we're actually able to win arguments that we actually are able to make viral content better than the left.

00:30:32.000 So YouTube has actually had to change its search results because pro-life content was doing too well in search results for abortion.

00:30:41.000 They've had to take down videos criticizing the Federal Reserve because when people were searching for the Federal Reserve, they were finding lots too many videos from conservatives and libertarians criticizing that whole system.

00:30:52.000 So YouTube is a great example because I remember back in 16 and 17, political YouTube was dominated by right-wing content creators.

00:31:04.000 Even PewDiePie, one of the most popular YouTubers in the world, whenever he does a political video, it tends to be on the right.

00:31:11.000 He tends to lean right in his political opinions.

00:31:14.000 So, you have so many examples of this.

00:31:17.000 But it's so dangerous because big tech companies now are the most powerful brainwashing tools that have ever been invented.

00:31:25.000 They're more powerful even than the indoctrination you'll find in left-wing college campuses because these tech companies have models of human behavior.

00:31:33.000 They collect all this data on us.

00:31:34.000 They know our interests.

00:31:36.000 They know how to prod us and nudge us in certain directions.

00:31:39.000 And they're absolutely going to use that power to influence our political beliefs.

00:31:44.000 Exactly, as you said, by the time people reach 18 in America, it's not going to be about whether America is a racist country or not, whether America's evil or not.

00:31:52.000 They'll already have made up their minds, and the tech companies will be one of the big culprits to that.

00:31:58.000 In closing, here, can you kind of add some more insight into where the tech companies are going to go next?

00:32:04.000 Do they view this speech issue?

00:32:07.000 Are they nervous about it?

00:32:08.000 Are all the tech companies the same?

00:32:10.000 Are some better than others?

00:32:12.000 Meaning, is Facebook better than Google?

00:32:14.000 Or is it just basically you're talking about such marginal points of better, it's not even worth mentioning?

00:32:21.000 What is their game plan moving forward if they are not stopped?

00:32:25.000 Well, what the tech companies want, and I think the establishment is prodding them to do this as well.

00:32:29.000 Democrat politicians are prodding them to do this, is as I said earlier in this show, prevent the emergence of new movements that pose a real threat to the establishment.

00:32:40.000 I think that's what they want to do.

00:32:41.000 That's what all of their efforts over the past four years.

00:32:44.000 I mean, if you read my book, you'll see sources inside these companies confirming this and explaining how it's happening.

00:32:51.000 All of their efforts on so-called election integrity, so-called fake news and misinformation-words that, by the way, only became popular inside these companies after Trump was elected.

00:33:02.000 All of these efforts are focused on preventing the emergence of new movements that are genuinely dangerous to the establishment and keeping politics controlled between this old battle between neoliberals and neoconservatives that has been going on for 30 or 40 years and doesn't offer any real change to the voters.

00:33:21.000 That's their end game.

00:33:22.000 In a bizarre way, though, Alam, is that now those of us that are a little bit critical of the neoconservatives in the Trump movement, in the populist movement, now we're assuming neoliberal values by saying that we want to be able to speak?

00:33:36.000 It's as if there's no one that represents the old marketplace of ideas.

00:33:40.000 In a very bizarre way, it's the left has become anti-liberal and almost very leftist or fascist in nature.

00:33:46.000 And there's very few, if anyone, that represents the ideas of contrarian or controversial ideas.

00:33:53.000 So, the book is called Hashtag Deleted.

00:33:56.000 It's very well written.

00:33:57.000 It's a very easy read.

00:33:59.000 And so, let's just, in closing here, Alam, can you just talk about actionable steps?

00:34:03.000 What can people do?

00:34:04.000 We're going to get thousands of emails from this episode.

00:34:07.000 People are going to say, okay, I got it.

00:34:09.000 What now?

00:34:10.000 Should they search?

00:34:11.000 Should they try to find search engines that are not Google?

00:34:14.000 Should they try to be very protective in how they share their data?

00:34:18.000 What are some actionable steps?

00:34:19.000 I get this question all the time.

00:34:21.000 I would separate it into three big steps.

00:34:24.000 First, I would get active in politics in the real world, send letters, phone your representative, and talk to undecided voters that you know in real life, because as I said, they're going to be flooded with propaganda on these tech platforms.

00:34:37.000 You can't rely on tech platforms to give them a balance.

00:34:39.000 You have to go and talk to undecided voters yourself.

00:34:42.000 That's how you get around this in the coming election.

00:34:45.000 Just don't use the tech platforms.

00:34:47.000 Talk to as many undecided voters as you can.

00:34:50.000 Second, absolutely develop a presence on alternative platforms.

00:34:54.000 Use DuckDuckGo, make an account on Gab, make an account on Parla, make an account on BitChute if you do videos and so on.

00:35:03.000 But don't leave the existing platforms because then you're essentially self-censoring yourself.

00:35:08.000 You're banning yourself.

00:35:09.000 You need to be on there.

00:35:10.000 You need to be challenging the narratives.

00:35:11.000 You need to be finding undecided people on those platforms.

00:35:15.000 Two.

00:35:15.000 Third, this is very crucial.

00:35:18.000 You can't play into the algorithms.

00:35:19.000 The algorithms are trained to, you know, be hyper-aware of anyone who's even suggested to be a so-called racist or a sexist or a bigot.

00:35:28.000 So don't play into it by, you know, calling people racists or calling people bigots on the internet because you're playing into the algorithms.

00:35:36.000 You're making them stronger.

00:35:39.000 Don't buy into cancel culture for any reason.

00:35:42.000 And yeah, so those three things.

00:35:48.000 Use the physicals there.

00:35:49.000 Talk to people in real life.

00:35:50.000 Talk to undecided voters.

00:35:52.000 Build a presence on alternative platforms, but don't leave the existing ones and don't play into the algorithms.

00:35:58.000 Well, Alam, thank you so much for joining us.

00:35:58.000 Very good.

00:36:00.000 Again, it is the book is called hashtag deleted.

00:36:03.000 Everyone go pick up a copy.

00:36:04.000 I don't know if you Google it, it's going to show up or not.

00:36:07.000 So where can people find this book if it's not going to show up on Google?

00:36:11.000 Well, you can go to deletedbook.com, type that into your web browser.

00:36:15.000 You can also, you can find it on Amazon, but you can also find it on Barnes and Noble if you want a less evil company to buy the book from.

00:36:22.000 Here you go. 0.74

00:36:23.000 Well, Alam, thank you so much.

00:36:24.000 Such an important issue.

00:36:25.000 We deeply appreciate you joining the Charlie Kirk show.

00:36:27.000 Keep fighting.

00:36:28.000 This is the number one issue in our country.

00:36:30.000 And I just wish our political and ruling class took it seriously, but they won't because it actually protects them.

00:36:36.000 But for Republicans and conservatives out there, you got to get this issue right and stop giving money to politicians that take money from these companies.

00:36:42.000 So, Alam, thank you so much.

00:36:44.000 We deeply appreciate it.

00:36:45.000 Thank you, Jelly.

00:36:46.000 Great to be here.

00:36:46.000 See you soon.

00:36:47.000 Bye.

00:36:50.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:36:51.000 I encourage you to get involved with Turning Point USA.

00:36:54.000 Go to tpusa.com, tpusa.com at turningpointusa.

00:36:57.000 We are fighting to win America's culture war on over 2,000 high school and college campuses across the country.

00:37:02.000 We are fighting to keep America free and America strong.

00:37:05.000 So go to tpusa.com, tpusa.com.

00:37:10.000 Email me as always at freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:37:12.000 And please consider supporting us at charliekirk.com/slash support at charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:37:19.000 If you chip in $5, $10, $15, $20, $100 a month, you guys are added to an exclusive supporter call where you can meet with me once a month at charliekirk.com/slash support at charliekirk.com slash support.

00:37:32.000 Thank you guys so much for listening.

00:37:34.000 We'll be back with two more episodes tomorrow.

00:37:36.000 As always, that's our pledge to you.

00:37:37.000 Two episodes a day if it's a weekday.

00:37:39.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:37:41.000 God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - September 07, 2020

Exposing the Dark Plot Against Free Speech Online with Allum Bokhari

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