The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Trump, Jack & Zuckerberg Heat Up Fight Over Social Networks & Posts

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

Trump, Jack & Zuckerberg Heat Up Fight Over Social Networks & Posts

Hi folks, it's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast we want to share with you. Kind of some timely interesting news that is going on right now. You know, for a long time, Twitter, Facebook have all been fraught with divisiveness, and there's been issues between them and Donald Trump. And honestly, the way Donald Trump has, of course, behaved on Twitter has been, if any of us created an ounce of what he did, we'd be kicked off. Some interesting developments are coming from the other ones that we talked about earlier

in the prior show. Right now, we have Facebook, delete Facebook trending on Twitter. There's a Mark Zuckerberg who's come out and called out Jack. Jack has made some responses. So let's get into what's going on with the big Twitter Jack Zuck Trump feud. Technology, this is very interesting because Trump right now is threatening to shut these platforms down if they don't bend his will and let him do whatever he wants on them. So this impacts the Christmas show on technology and what we talk about and what we do.

And me present a huge sort of showdown, if you will, of wills. So there you have it. So let's talk about where this all began. If you listened to the prior podcast, there is a bad conspiracy thing that has been passed around 20 years old about Joe Scarborough, who runs Morning Joe of MSNBC. The allegations and stuff that Trump called out or made up or pushed in conspiracy theories, uh, were very hurtful to the family. Kara Swisher wrote a great article, uh, calling out for Jack and Twitter to do something,

uh, to either shut him down or regulate him in some way, shape or form. Twitter, of course, over the past couple of years has been trying to come up with different ways to deal with his, with his divisiveness and misinformation. Clearly, there's a lot of misinformation and lies going on. And, you know, Jack always tries to run this thing where they're not the arbiter of truth, but they try and just make sure everyone has all the facts, if you will, which is kind of a weird position to be in. There's been a lot of discussion about these platforms, about how they were built for basically to generate engagement and getting people talking and arguing or discussing issues back and forth. What it's really become now is it's become a Pandora's monster that's gotten out of the

box and now it's just running rampant. And it's created a huge device in this, not only in our country, in our politics, around the world, lots of anger and issues. And the platforms have been used for complete disinformation campaigns, et cetera, et cetera. Truth is under fire and under attack more than ever. So if you listen to the podcast, I believe from yesterday, we talked about some of the details of this. For the first time, Twitter put on Trump's tweets these moments that take and link to the opposing or the reality details of what he was trying to say about mail-in ballots. Today, he refused to apologize. He refused to even show any care for the widower who pled for Jack to take down the tweets,

the lies, the conspiracy lies, the misinformation about his past wife. And he just showed callous disregard. Mitt Romney came out and said, this is enough. I believe Liz Cheney has come out and said, stop it. It's time to end this sort of thing of attacking this poor family and their memory. And so what you have now is Trump calling out what's going on with this. So they put the notifications on Trump's tweets. There's two tweets he had that were misinformation about mail-in voting. So they put a thing on on them so then Trump calls out and says that the conservative right-wing are being you know stifled by Jack and them

they're they're trying to steal the election from them you know all this BS if you will and you know calling up the right wing to take and protect him, etc., etc. Then Jack comes out. This is very interesting. Jack comes out, and he makes this statement across three tweets of his Twitter. He says, per our civil integrity policy, the tweets, and he put a link to them, the tweets yesterday may mislead people into thinking they don't need to register to get a ballot. Only registered voters receive ballots. We're updating the link on Donald Trump's tweet to make this more clear.

This does not make us an arbiter of truth. Our intention is to connect the dots on conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions. Fact check. There is someone ultimately accountable for our actions as a company, and that's me. Please leave our employees out of this.

We'll continue to point out incorrect or dispute information about elections globally, and we will admit to and own any mistakes we made. I thought that was a very brave statement from Jack. It was very forceful coming out and not taking body blows from Trump. Trump, of course, responded that they're going to take some sort of executive action and attempt to shut down these platforms. This is kind of interesting that we have. I mean, this is a real authoritarian type rule.

We'll leave the politics for the we'll leave the politics for uh the resistance radio.com you can go follow over there if you want to see that stuff and of course you can go to the cvpn or chris foss podcast network to follow on that podcast um so this set up another thing so then mark zuckerberg appears on fox news which was interesting. He picked that platform to go on Fox News. As you know, Fox News has been under pressure from Trump to let more of the conservative groups rule over there, and there's been a lot of problems with their groups, anti-Nazis, deniers of Holocaust, et cetera, et cetera.

We're going to get into some of that here in a bit. And Facebook actually criticized Twitter and Jack for fact tweeting a tweet that Trump had said. And he basically said, we have a different policy, I think, than Twitter on this. He basically said that they, you know, I strongly believe that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. And general private companies shouldn't be, especially these platform companies shouldn't be in position of doing that which is really interesting because Facebook does have a arbiter of truth

panel they they have a panel that is up that looks as tweets that assesses stuff they're actually establishing a third party sort of panel that will oversee them and their decisions they make, et cetera, et cetera. So they actually have this. I mean, they're working, Snopes and a bunch of other fact-checking sites work with them in this setup to do them. So I was really surprised they did this. But like I say, Zuckerberg has been on the rails for a while. He's got, of course, Peter Thiel, which is a huge Trump supporter, firing him up. And he's got, you know, almost all the GOP AGs across the nation. I believe everyone's in on it now. And I think this starts from the New York Attorney General pushing for a monopoly look into the activities of Facebook,

everything they own, et cetera, et cetera, and how they behave. So that's where we're at in this drama. The next shoe we're waiting for to drop is the rest, I think on Thursday today, this morning, it's very early. This morning we're waiting for the rest of the Zuckerberg interview to drop and it's kind of interesting he's critical to Jack I mean if anything they should stick together but we'll get into some more of Facebook's issues etc etc and this is what I want to focus on you heard me mention the prior podcast episode so, so he's now, uh, you know, he's trying to, he's trying

to flip it the other way, play nice with Trump and everything else. And if you've read and heard some of the things we've talked about on the Chris Voss show, uh, there it is. Now, one of the things that of course, Mark Zuckerberg is trying to deflect from is the damning wall street journal article. And if you haven't got a chance, you need to check this out. It's entitled, Facebook Executive Shutdown Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive. This is from Jeff Horwich and Deepa Sitharaman. Hopefully I pronounced this correctly.

The social media giant internally studied how it polarizes users, then largely shelved the research. Basically, I'll give you the overrun of the story in 2016 or after 2016 people became aware that Facebook had been used to pretty much throw the election Donald Trump by Russian trolls and failed apps that had given away millions and millions of people's data and had been used to micro-target with that stolen data and just basically was abused. And so a lot of people felt horrified that they may have flipped an election to Donald Trump. And that was, of course, not the intent of the platform. That was not the intent of the people there. They were just trying to have a social media website, making some money. And so they conduct all these internal studies, consultants,

et cetera, et cetera. They had people come in. They looked at their platform's ability to aggravate polarization and tribal behavior and everything else. And more and more they talk about it. There were different meetings. There were different slide presentations that the Wall Street Journal had gotten a hold of. And pretty much basically what happened is Mark was initially concerned about sensationalism and polarization, but in the end his interest was fleeting. Zuckerberg and other senior officials, according to the article, largely shelved the basic research, according to previously

on the report of internal documents and people familiar with the effort. And he weakened or blocked efforts to apply its conclusion to Facebook products. They felt that these were more paternalistic sort of issues and they were maybe being overreaching. Keep in mind, here's the thing. Facebook doesn't make money by having a nice, calm platform where everyone gets along and goes, Hi, how are you doing today?

Because there's no real engagement in that. What it gets is when people are fighting arguing going back and forth constantly logging in constantly like yeah constantly making uh tons of comments you know doing their social standings and et cetera et cetera uh but basically they went through this whole thing and um they found that uh according to a pew research center study, 60% of Americans think the country's biggest tech companies are helping further divide the country, while only 11 people believe they are uniting it, according to a Gallup Night survey in March. So they went through the soul-searching period after 2016, wondering if they messed with the world, and then finally they just went, well, fuck it. We don't care. We're a business. You know, they had these Facebook groups that were swamped with conspiracies, racism, pro-Russian content, these groups that were Holocaust deniers and everything else. And Facebook wasn't willing to do any of it until they got called out in the media. Then they started shutting the groups down and regulating them.

We've seen the mass slaughter come from like the incel groups of facebook we've seen um the white nationalist killings uh from facebook groups uh and everything else um all these different places that they've given dark harbor to we saw the uh we saw the people who work for the um for the uh national um uh for i forget the um it's the it's the group of people who were uh take care of the immigrants when they uh crossed in this country um the nhs the national health uh services whoever it is the immigration uh services uh basically they had an own private facebook group where they're posting pictures of dead immigrants that had died in the rio grande river and stuff they were mocking them and and talking about how

and just basically racistly saying awful things to them about uh about them just uh subhuman basic uh data if you will so uh they talk about a lot of this, but basically how Facebook just said, fuck it. We're here to make money and we don't care about this thing. And that's it. It's not our problem. So this is the biggest thing where people can come onto these platforms. They can generate hate. They can tap into people's darkest sort of efforts. And they can basically end up screwing everyone over. And now these platforms are being used by Donald Trump and potentially other political foes coming up in the next election to throw this election, especially as they get more desperate where it appears Trump might lose. And I'm just quoting polls here.

So he definitely seems to be more interested. So next up in the volley is we're waiting to see what they're going to try and draw up in this executive order from Donald Trump. I don't know what it is, but he's threatened on his thing that he will shut down Facebook and Twitter. I don't know that you can, but he's threatened on his thing that he will shut down Facebook and Twitter. I don't know that you can do that with an executive order. I mean, if you talk about constitution, privacy, laws, corporation, law, it's pretty amazing. I don't know.

And even then, any sort of executive order can still be fought in a court of law, prevented from being enacted. But a lot of it is to rile up his base and to get people excited about him. I'm interested to know what you think. Go to twitter.com at Chris Voss and let me know. Say we heard it on the show, Chris, and this is what we think. But it definitely looks like it's going to be a showdown. And someone's going to have to either back down or there's going to have to be the taunt of some type i suppose um but uh it would be crazy to see

an executive order that says you know uh twitter has to let me do what i want um and then maybe jack responds by kicking him off twitter or suspending his account for 30 days. Can you imagine what the fallout would be? Oh, my God. You know, it was even funnier. Jim Jordan, one of the acolytes from the House Committee, posted today that his account is currently being ghosted and blocked so that people can't see it on Twitter. And I don't like him. I don't follow him't follow him i respond i'm like you're an idiot i can see everything you're doing and i really don't want to i really wish someone ghost you off my feed but no i can see you buddy i can

see you just fine this whole victimization shit you're pulling is whatever anyway if you want to discuss the politics of you can go to the Resistance Radio. We try not to get too much into those weeds on the Chris Voss Show. You can follow the Chris Voss Show at theucvpn.com, thechrisvossshow.com, or chrisvosspodcastnetwork.com, or you can go to youtube.com, 4chatschrisvoss, and see the videos of this. Anyway, I appreciate you guys tuning in. We'll be talking about some tech news and some other guests that we have coming on for book authors, etc., etc.

We've had some interesting people come on. We had the gubernatorial candidate for the state of Utah. We might have some other folks that are going to be running at high levels. I think these are interesting to us just from an aspect of what they've learned, what they've done, and what they've achieved, which has always been what the Chris Voss Show is about. But we'll leave most of the politics over on the Resistance Radio, so you can go over to see that as well. So there you go. I'm interested to know what you think. Go to Twitter, forward slash at Chris Voss, and tell me how you think this standoff is going to,

what's going to happen next. It's kind of crazy watching the things. I should also say that as of today we passed, or today, last night, we passed the 100,000 mark of deaths of the COVID-19 coronavirus in America. A very solemn, dark, sad moment for our country's history. Um, the, it's hard to enumerate the loss of, of those people. Uh, this virus hit us and this is accumulation of just like three months, uh, which is, um, just, uh a horrifying thing to have to think about.

And also in the future as we're seeing cases rise, the city's open. Anyway, my thoughts and hearts go out to those who have been lost and the families that are grieving who have survived that loss. And our hopes and best be with you be blessed. And, uh, hopefully we can get through this time. And as we come through this, hopefully we can be come better Americans together and unite in what is another dark moment in the history of the, this country over 250 years or almost 250 years. And anyway,, be blessed, wear your masks, stay safe, protect one another, and we'll see you next time.