Making Sense with Sam Harris - #307 — Twitter, Elon, & Free Speech

Episode Date: December 30, 2022

Sam Harris discusses Elon Musk's behavior on Twitter and the illusion of "free-speech absolutism." If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, the end of the year is upon us. I'm going to talk a little bit about Twitter and Elon and free speech here. The end of my year was marked by, among other things, my deleting my Twitter account,

which has been surprisingly significant. I've talked about this a little bit on the podcast and on other people's podcasts, but it was really like leaving a bad relationship. And psychologically, it was a pretty interesting thing to do. But Twitter has been everywhere. I'm still seeing the signs of its chaos everywhere in the press, so I feel like I should take a few minutes to reflect on what I think is happening there and how it relates to what's happening in American society generally. Twitter is in many ways the seat of our societal dysfunction. Social media is surely the seat of that dysfunction. But Twitter in particular because journalists and politicians appear immovably anchored to it. But as I'm going to say a few things about Elon, let me just confess my uncertainty about doing this. As I've said or implied before, Elon has been a friend. I'm not sure what the status

of that friendship is now, frankly, and that has a lot to do with Twitter. And I've had to confront this problem before. I've had many friends and now former friends who have large public platforms and who have said and done things in public over the years that I have found fairly reprehensible and have had to figure out whether to say something about that. And I'm still uncertain about the ethics of all of this. I don't know what having a friendship or a form of friendship should count for at moments like this. My default is certainly to more carefully calibrate what I say, or even whether I say anything at all in these cases. Whereas if it's a stranger out there doing the analogous thing, I'll say something without much reflection about that, and I'm not sure which way the balance should swing. Should I be treating strangers more like

friends? Should I be treating friends and former friends more like strangers? I honestly don't know what the answer is. But in the case of Elon, he's taking up so much bandwidth culturally that I feel like I have to say something. I just wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't comment on what he's doing over there at Twitter. So for better or worse, I'm going to do that now. First, the underlying politics of the moment. In my view, there's a needle you really had to thread over the last half decade or so

if you're going to be politically honest and ethically sane. And not that many people managed it. On the one side, you had to recognize how bad Trump was and is, not just as a person, but as a cultural phenomenon. You had to see how appalling it was that we elected such a person to the presidency. And then you had to be further appalled when we almost did it again, even while he was disavowing and openly violating the most sacred principle of our democracy, a commitment to the peaceful transfer of power. His behavior before, during, and after the events of January 6th, amounted to a direct attack on the rule of law in this country.

This was the first time in our history that a president has sought to hold onto power in this way. It was absolutely obvious at the time, but it has only become more obvious on the basis of subsequent investigations, that Trump knew he lost the 2020 election, and he put our democracy at risk by attempting to hold onto power, by perpetrating a conscious fraud of election denial, and among other things, attempting to force his vice president, Mike Pence, to overturn the results of the election on January 6th. The real Trump derangement syndrome was not to have seen how bad all this was. Indeed, to not have seen how demonic Trumpism was and is in its cultic embrace of one man's mediocrity and mendacity and narcissism.

of one man's mediocrity and mendacity and narcissism. I mean, it is just astounding that a person like Trump got anywhere near the Oval Office. To have missed that, and to have thought all the concern about Trump was exaggerated, that it was just ordinary partisan politics, that was, in my view, the greatest political mistake anyone could have made in my lifetime. And if you made that mistake, if you persist in that mistake even now, well then everything I've said on the subject must seem like some bewildering form of performance art.

On the other side, you also had to see that in many important respects, the left, and therefore the Democratic Party, lost its mind and succumbed to an identitarian moral panic. Of course, some of this was in response to Trump, and some of the justification for Trump was a reaction to the hysteria and dishonesty of the left. Each side, by being crazy and dishonest, seemed to justify, or at least explain, the excesses of the other. But to not have seen, or cared,

that our mainstream cultural institutions were being vitiated by woke nonsense and thought policing was to have been blind to the second most important political phenomenon in recent years. And the crucial piece, and this really is the crucial piece, is that an awareness of one of these problems, however vivid, did not compensate for one's ignorance of the other. Many, many people had half the story and made a lot of noise about half the story. And by focusing on only half the story, they carried water for the liars and grifters and maniacs on the other side. There are many, many people with enormous platforms who have spent years railing against wokeness, appropriately, but they've never made the most basic concessions to moral and

political sanity in their comments about Trump. And of course, there are countless people in the mainstream media who had the opposite problem. The truth is, I remain completely mystified by both sets of people. It seems to me that social media, and Twitter in particular, has always been at the heart of this confusion. People got radicalized by their own audiences. Nothing gets the dopamine going like dunking on the other side. Though I closed my Twitter account a few weeks ago, people have been sending me things

they think I should see. As I said, I bump into the evidence of Twitter everywhere in news articles now, and I've also looked at some of the Twitter files releases that are only available on Twitter. Now, apparently Elon was dunking on me after I closed my account, and obviously misunderstanding my views about Trump and the Hunter Biden laptop story, along with everyone else. He said something suggesting that though I wrote a book against lying, I now believe that it was ethical and even necessary to lie to try to deny Trump the presidency. He surely got that impression from the two-minute clip from the Trigonometry podcast that went viral in right-wing circles.

Of course, this is symptomatic of the very problem at issue. I believe that clip was made by an anti-vax lunatic and then spread to the ends of the earth by a Pizzagate lunatic, and it misrepresents what I clearly meant in the context of that interview. In any case, I've never suggested that it was ethical, much less necessary, to lie to resist Trump. All I said was that I understood the impulse to ignore the Hunter Biden laptop story until after the 2020 election, because it had been dropped as an October surprise, purposely close to the election, so there would be just enough time for the controversy over it to detonate and have its intended effect, and not enough time to debunk it, if it could be debunked.

The emergence of the laptop definitely looked shady. It looked like it could be disinformation, and there was every reason to be circumspect about it. This wasn't a choice of consciously withholding the God's honest truth, much less lying about it, in order to sway an ordinary election. It was a choice to ignore a very murky story for a few weeks in the face of an election that was already being disputed, even before it was run, by a sociopathic president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power. Waiting on this story did not in any way entail lying.

And in any case, all I said on that podcast was that I was undecided about the propriety of ignoring that story. And frankly, I still am. And I was even more uncertain about the propriety of ignoring that story. And frankly, I still am. And I was even more uncertain about Twitter actively suppressing it. In fact, I agree that in retrospect, that was obviously the wrong call. But this is obvious only in retrospect. However, it was troublesome even at the time. And the leaked Twitter files showed that Twitter employees were conflicted about it at the time. And the leaked Twitter files showed that Twitter employees were conflicted about it at the time. And the rationale they used, that the New York Post story may have relied on hacked information,

was pretty weak, even at the time. And I completely understand the outrage that people feel over Twitter suspending the New York Post's account. That has always seemed qualitatively different to me than other journalists simply deciding not to take Rudy Giuliani's bait and just ignoring the story until after the election. But now the laptop story has been fully aired, hasn't it? The contents of that hard drive have been picked over by everyone, certainly everyone right of center. Have there been any bombshells? Did it prove some terrible level of corruption on the part of Joe Biden? It certainly doesn't seem that way. What's the big story? Now that our democracy isn't hanging in the balance, I would love to hear it.

I've clarified my position on all that repeatedly, and yet Elon can't figure out what it actually is. Because like most people, he's seen a two-minute clip from a podcast, and he imagines that its meaning is self-evident. This simply is one of the problems with Twitter. And now Elon, through the journalists Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss and others, has been releasing internal Twitter documents, the so-called Twitter files, which show that certain political entities like the DNC asked Twitter to block various tweets, including material related to Hunter Biden. Not the laptop story itself, but nude pictures of him taken from the laptop. I don't think it's been reported that anyone outside of Twitter urged them to block

the New York Post story. Taib even said that there was, quote, no evidence that I've seen of any government involvement in the laptop story. Of course, most people on the right, including red-pilled Elon, are acting like the opposite is the case, that there was clear government suppression of free speech. In fact, Elon tweeted that Twitter had acted, quote, under orders from the government to suppress free speech with no judicial review, end quote. That appears to be just false. And from what I've seen, Elon's editorial comments on the Twitter files more or less reliably misrepresent the information that is actually leaked. Anyway, it does seem relevant to point out that Biden wasn't president at the time,

so requests for the removal of tweets were not coming from the people in power. And when the FBI contacted Twitter and other social media platforms, warning that there might be some Russian disinformation coming that was related to Hunter Biden, and this is being perceived as a smoking gun on the right, this was Trump's FBI, run by a Trump appointee. Surely that muddies the picture of a hyper-partisan deep state seeking to undermine an election. And the background fact is that it was totally plausible to be worried about Russian hacking at that moment, because there was a ton of it. And there was pushback at Twitter. There was a lot of communication between Twitter and the FBI. The Twitter files journalists have now moved the goalposts in response to this. profiles journalists have now moved the goalposts in response to this. First, it was a story of how corrupt Twitter was. You're not going to believe how corrupt. But now it's a story of how corrupt and Orwellian the FBI is. And Twitter's resistance to the meddling of the FBI is now evidence of

that, right? So this is a very mixed picture. Even if Biden had been president at the time and the requests came directly from him, it matters that they were just requests, not ultimatums backed up by force. If Biden, as president, called Twitter and said, if you don't take those naked photos of my son down, I'm going to destroy your company. Okay, now we've landed in First Amendment territory. Nothing I've seen related to the Twitter files amounts to coercion from a government source. Also, Taibbi reports that the Trump administration made similar requests, and Trump was president at the time. Again, if Trump was just making requests, as much as I'd love to say he was stifling free

speech, I can't, because he wasn't. This is not government censorship. The Twitter files definitely revealed less-than-optimal ways in which Twitter employees were stifling conversation on the platform. For instance, they throttled the tweets from Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford doctor who was skeptical of school closures and other COVID policies. And they did this to many other doctors. That just seems genuinely dysfunctional. And I completely understand how millions of people who have felt gaslit by the government and by the mainstream media, and by Twitter itself, with respect to COVID information, especially the many people who were abandoned and shunned undeservedly. I get why many of them now view Elon as a white knight riding to the rescue. But think of what

was actually happening when these doctors were getting de-boosted or even suspended by Twitter. First, their tweets were being flagged by bots designed to detect COVID misinformation, of which there was a veritable deluge. And then when flagged, these tweets got reviewed by outsourced reviewers, often in the Philippines, who were simply not qualified to judge the veracity of medical information. Almost no one was qualified to do this at the time, inside or outside of Twitter, because COVID has been a moving target for years, and what made perfect sense one month made much less sense a few months later, and vice versa. Now, I will fully grant that some of Twitter's editorial decisions, along with the government's urging of those decisions, now seem suspect. But what did you expect these institutions to be doing

during a time of total information chaos, when we had people with enormous platforms and even a sitting U.S. president trafficking in lies about everything. And the lies and half-truths were coming down in torrents, day and night, for months on end. And we really did have a global pandemic that was killing millions of people. And we really do have a global pandemic that was killing millions of people.

And we really do have a continuous problem of cyber attacks and disinformation campaigns to deal with. And we really do have people saying that vaccines are microchipping us, and that COVID itself is just a pretext for the crashing down of some new world order. And there really was an early expectation that the mRNA vaccines would prevent disease transmission. And there really was uncertainty about how lethal the disease actually was. And it really does seem, even now, that vaccine hesitancy was killing a lot of people. What do you expect compassionate and responsible people in institutions to do at that point. There will always be edge cases, especially during a public health emergency. And edge cases will be, by definition, very hard to deal with.

That's why they're edge cases. So from what I've seen of the Twitter files, the general picture was of people at Twitter in way over their heads trying to steer a dangerous machine that really can't be steered without causing a fair amount of pain and controversy somewhere. But it can't be allowed to fly freely either. We have a persistent problem in determining valid sources of information, and especially doing this quickly when it matters. And if you think the solution is to just let the cacophony unfold, algorithmically boosted by a business model that is preferentially fueled by partisan outrage and crowdsourced hysteria, where medical misinformation spreads faster than real science,

where election denialism spreads faster than any patient debunking of it ever could. That is where we have been, and it has been a disaster. So, at the moment, I still haven't seen anything in the Twitter files that rises to the level of an infringement of the First Amendment. anything in the Twitter files that rises to the level of an infringement of the First Amendment. What is clear, however, is that with each subsequent release, Elon and his hand-picked journalists are spinning the information in fairly tendentious ways. From what I can tell, Barry Weiss has been the exception to this. She was careful to not seem like she was just doing PR for Elon. And for that, Elon seems to no longer like her. But if Elon's goal was simple transparency,

he should have just released the files and let journalists everywhere draw their own conclusions. However, the deeper issue is that this whole controversy seems basically fake. Twitter simply isn't the public square. It only seems like the public square to people who are addicted to it, and basically every journalist is addicted to it. Ask yourself, is Reddit the public square? Is Instagram? Is TikTok? If someone gets kicked off of Reddit, have they been unpersoned? If the U.S. government bans TikTok as a nefarious piece of CCP spyware, as it almost certainly is, will that be the end of our democracy? Not being on any of these platforms, I think it's obvious that they're

not the public square. Again, if we want to change the laws and designate one or all of these services to be no longer private and to make them analogous to some digital street corner that everyone has a legal right to inhabit, we are free to do that. And there may even be an argument for doing some version of that. But that is not where we currently are. Anyway, recent weeks have shown that the so-called free speech absolutists, including Elon, can't possibly take their own absolutism seriously.

Elon has admitted that Twitter will be throttling negative speech under the rubric that freedom of speech doesn't entail freedom of reach. Great. This is identical to my observation that algorithmically boosted speech isn't normal speech. No one has a constitutional right to have their speech algorithmically boosted. I obviously agree with Elon's apparent policy on this point, but it is an absolute repudiation of what many people were hoping for from his tenure at Twitter, and it's a repudiation of the results he claimed to be delivering. That's worth noticing. If you have

the wrong political opinions, like maybe you're a Nazi, Elon intends to make your speech virtually unseen and unheard on Twitter. Or he might just kick you off the platform. He decided to kick Kanye off Twitter again because he tweeted a weird swastika inside of a Jewish star. Honestly, that was further than I would have gone. Elon said that this violated Twitter's policy about calling for violence, but I don't actually see a swastika in any form as a clear call for violence. So I think it'd be more of a free speech absolutist than Elon in this case. Anyway, the deeper point is that Elon knew that Kanye was an unhinged anti-Semite when he made a great show of letting him back on Twitter. What did he think

was going to happen? Admittedly, it was surprising to see Kanye show up on Alex Jones' crazy show in a gimp hood, praising Hitler. Even Alex Jones appeared shocked by that. But still, we knew where Kanye stood on the Jews a long time ago. And then there was all the craziness around Elon suspending the accounts of the kid who was tracking his private jet, along with the private jets of other celebrities. This college kid had created a bot, which did nothing more than aggregate publicly available information. The problem was, Elon had previously used this kid as an example of his unalloyed commitment to free speech.

He said, look, I'm even protecting the speech of this guy who is tracking my plane and increasing my security concerns, only to then suspend the kid's account, along with the accounts of real journalists who had merely reported on the story. I'm totally sympathetic with Elon's security concerns here. Having the exact GPS coordinates and arrival time of his plane continuously published vastly increases his personal security risks, as well as those of his family. I'm not sure why this information is publicly available in the first place. I think it probably shouldn't be. But Elon is making himself look ridiculous by trumpeting his free speech absolutism,

only to then rescind it without acknowledging the apparent hypocrisy. And the resulting ad hoc policy that he's now supposedly implementing, that no real-time information about the whereabouts of people will be tolerated, just seems impossible to enforce or even to adequately define. I mean, there's obviously a ton of celebrity coverage that is publicity or legitimate journalism or just random fun information, which could suddenly look like the, quote, real-time doxing that Elon is

worried about. Anyway, despite the fact that he is being hailed as some kind of radical champion of free speech, and he's hailing himself that way, Elon is finding that he simply has to make the same judgment calls that any platform has to make if it doesn't want to turn into 4chan. And he's not playing 4D chess here. He's quite obviously making everything up as he goes along, which honestly is fine. It might be impossible to make Twitter a good place for communication. I'm not going to fault Elon for failing to do the impossible. What I do fault him for is for being intellectually and ethically unserious, which is

to say totally reckless, when he touches real issues in front of 120 million people on the platform. One of the first things Elon did after taking over Twitter was tweet an article that claimed that the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband was not at all what it seemed. It was rather a gay tryst gone wrong. And then when it became obvious just how crazy his source was, I believe it was a website that had previously claimed that Hillary Clinton was dead and that a body double was campaigning in her place, when it became embarrassing to have tweeted that, he just deleted the tweet without comment. Delete the tweet, fine, but when you see that you have amplified a crazy conspiracy theory

that turns a savage attack on an innocent person into a Trumpist meme and punchline, you should apologize and correct the record. He did the same thing when he brought Kanye back on Twitter. He tweeted some meme where he was high-fiving him, and then deleted that meme without comment, once Kanye's anti-Semitic podcast tour fully ran off the rails. Again, Kanye's anti-Semitism was already obvious, and Elon was signal-boosting all that lunacy

by celebrating his return to Twitter in the first place. That was a totally irresponsible thing to do. And speaking of doxing and security concerns, Elon publicly vilified his former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, in a way that was objectively dangerous. This is from the news. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. This is from the jury. Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.