The Highwire with Del Bigtree - ZUCKERBERG CONFESSES TO CENSORSHIP COLLUSION WITH WHITE HOUSE

Episode Date: September 7, 2024

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerburg, finally addressed the censorship the social media giant engaged in through an open letter to House Representative Jim Jordan this week, outlining the pressure he received from the Biden White House and the media to remove COVID-19 and Hunter Biden laptop posts. Many are questioning why he is coming clean and apologizing now.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

As we're coming out of this, again, still coming out of this COVID fog, we're still seeing these rhythms and these rhymes of other lockdowns, curfews coming in here. And the good news is these are getting highly visible for people. Communities are still standing up saying we don't want anything that looks, it looks like a curtailing on our freedoms. But the biggest curtailing on our freedoms is happening and has been happening. COVID really kicked it off and supercharged it. And that is the freedom of speech. And something happened this week that involves Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg came out and made some pretty fascinating, pretty fascinating admissions when it came to Facebook.

So as we have been reporting, in 2021, there was a lot of censorship in Facebook. The White House was pressuring them. We now know this because of documents obtained by Jim Jordan. And this is a Washington Post article. It says Facebook bowed to White House pressure, removed COVID posts. Jim Jordan received internal emails from Mark Zuckerberg, and they said this. You can actually read them. He posted this on X.

He said, this is one of their engineers in Facebook talking to Mark Zuckerberg. He said, we are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content. Remember, a lot of that was true content. It was people's stories, as we reported at the time, saying, I think I got a vaccine injury from this thing. Nope, you're gone. Facebook's going to remove that.

But then Facebook did something different. Right before that, on the run-up to the 2020 election, they censored a story from the New York Post on basically Hunter Biden's laptop, as Joe Biden's son. And one of the headlines there, Mark Zuckerberg appears on Joe Rogan's podcast, reveal by Facebook censored New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story. We covered it at the time. And all Mark Zuckerberg said on Joe Rogan's podcast was the FBI came to him and said, look, you've got to be on the lookout for Russian disinformation on the run-up to this election.

there may be a dump. That's all he said. So now Mark Zuckerberg writes to Jim Jordan as part of an investigation, and we're going to go right to this. Jim Jordan posted this on the X account. Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things. Biden, Harris administration pressured Facebook, Facebook censored Americans, Facebook Thrill the Hunter Biden laptop story. Big win for free speech. So let's look at Zuckerberg's letter. Let's see exactly what he said, because there's actually some new information in there. He said in 2021, senior officials, from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for month to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of

frustration with our teams when we didn't agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions in including COVID-19 related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. It's the first time he's really fully addressed this. Before it's just been internal emails, but he stepped up. He, he addressed this. And, you know, he regrets it. That's great. Says, probably not do that next time. We'll see. But then he goes on and he gives more information here. He says in a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma.

Now, that's interesting because that's not what he told Joe Rogan. So we're now finding out that the FBI came to him directly and told him about the Biden family's dealing with Burisma. This is this Ukrainian energy company. So there's a big question there was the, what did the FBI know? Why did they plant that story with Mark Zuckerberg? So it goes on to say the Biden family of Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election that fall, when we saw the New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's family. We sent the story to fact checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation. And in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story. So here, you have Mark. Zuckerberg and Facebook, among others, but Facebook, interfering with the two biggest socially relevant, politically relevant stories of in the United States during the last four to five years. And being on the wrong side of history, big time. Well, and involved in election interference. I mean, if we look at this now, you were using a platform and saying that this has been investigated, were the arbiters of truth.

And as it turns out, we were being pressured by a government to lie to you. and we demoted, you know, information around that lie. And now after the fact, years later, we are recognizing, you know, we shouldn't have done that. I mean, it's really, it's really quite amazing. When I think about, you know, Richard Nixon and Watergate, you know, listening in on someone's phone call, just seems like a far cry from using the CIA, the FBI, like 30 or what, 50 of them, to all write a letter that there's Russian misinformation going on, puts out an article, they pressure all social media.

Don't let this laptop story out. Joe Biden in a debate then says that that's a Russian hoax. All like not a hoax, something you knew wasn't a hoax, something that you use government agencies to cover up. And now you have, you know, basically, I don't know, we call it a news agency, a communications system admitting, I think, yeah, we kept you from knowing the truth. Exactly.

Wow. So a lot of people are saying, well, why did he do this? I mean, he was part of an investigation, but he knew that letter was going to be public. So why did he do this? Does he know something that's coming down the line? Does he, did he just have a change of conscience? What's going on here? Is he trying to avoid any type of possible jail time if this moves forward?

Well, I will say this, like you're alluding to, Facebook is not, is something, and social media in general, is this new anomaly. And it's almost like a digital crystal ball. So I'm going to go a little different direction with this conversation here. So in 2014, 2015, you had artificial intelligence, was really starting to come online, get its sea legs, standing up. And in 2016, Facebook put out this press release, introducing FB learner flow, Facebook's AI backbone.

So at that point, every engineer in Facebook had access to basically state-of-the-art algorithms, AI algorithms, machine learning, had it all at their fingertips. And what does that do? What did it do? Well, going back to that press release, it says FB Learner Flow is a system that ingests trillions of data points every day trains thousands of models, either offline or in real time and then deploys them to the server fleet for live

predictions. So again, this is like a really high-tech digital crystal ball. And you have to think that Mark Zuckerberg, his engineers, have access to this, have access to this information. And by as early as 2013, just on Facebook likes alone, you had this study, private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. They took 58,000 volunteers and they just looked at their likes. That's it on Facebook. No AI backbone, no machine learning. And they found this. They write, we show that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of

of highly sensitive personal attributes, including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personal traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. It could tell if you're Democrat or Republican in 85% of the cases. It could tell if you're heterohomosexual man in 88% of the cases. So it's extremely accurate.

But the study goes on to say something, it hints at something else. It says a similarity between Facebook likes and other widespread kinds of digital records, such as browsing histories, search queries, or purchase histories suggest that the potential to reveal users' attributes is unlikely to be limited to likes. So they're saying, if you combine,

if you start to look at likes and maybe someone's banking history or purchase history, you can really get a great view of what this person thinks, how they live their life, their deepest andermost secrets. So just a couple of years after that study, we have Wall Street Journal, and this is the headline, Facebook to Banks, give us your data, we'll give you our users.

Facebook has asked large U.S. banks to share detailed financial information about customers. So the picture I'm painting to you is we have Mark Zuckerberg, free speech hero, maybe, but you also have this person saying, sorry, we regret we censored you. And on the back end, you have this person, in his company, aggressively trying to find out every single detail of your life, predict what you're going to do. And I'm going to say it's probably not just to sell products to people. So this is the conversation is free speech, free expression, and a major bombshell happened just a couple days ago during this conversation. One of the largest online platforms focused on free speech and privacy. Telegram had its CEO arrested in France. This is Pavel Dirov.

He left Russia, he left Russia because of government pressure because they were trying to get back doors into Telegram, this encrypted messaging app, one of the few left in the world. And you see there are Reuters that the arrest of him just a couple days ago. But now just yesterday we find out that he has been indicted in France. And it says the indictment against Duraf, the founder of CEO of a prominent social media platform, is also extremely extraordinary and unusual since holding executives at social networks criminally liable for content that appears on sites was until now considered almost unthinkable. So if you go to the French, the judiciary tribunal of France, they put out basically his charges.

And so he's being held and indicted on what other people are doing on his platform, money laundering, sharing pictures of miners. I mean, this would be like taking a phone company and throwing the phone company in jail because two thieves, you know, called each other and planned on robbing a bank. Like, you know, you're literally just the communication company that, you know, that had the device that this happened on. It's really outrageous. Yes, yes, absolutely. And you're seeing this now new push. You're seeing this in Brazil, France, the UK,

this push for free speech that is now going above and beyond what we normally is seeing. But what's interesting is the French, the Judiciary Tribunal of France, published his indictments, basically. And among those charges I was just listing are these charges at the bottom. Providing cryptology services, aiming

to ensure confidentiality without certified declaration, providing a cryptology tool, not solely ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration. What they're saying there is he's providing encryption to ensure confidentiality without certified declaration, basically without allowing the government to have control, without having to be able to watch what you're saying. Like he's clearly saying to somebody that's asking him, no, I'm not letting you listen in on their conversation. this entire purpose of my app.

Exactly. And so what we're seeing here is a shift. Previously, we had de-platforming, we had shadow banning, and then we had this trajectory going into COVID where there's government White House to top of down pressure. Now we're literally seeing the arresting and imprisoning of people that work or own social media companies. And at this point, there's already been calls for Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg,

these type of people to stay out of the European Union, because this now has become hostile for social media people to be traveling to these countries. And how is it happening in the United States? Well, Dura actually sat down with Tucker Carlson to talk about his treatment when he was in the United States. This was just from a couple months ago. Take a listen. We get too much attention from the FBI, the security agencies, wherever we came to the US. So to give you an example, last time I was in the US, I brought an investigation, an engineer that is working for Telegram, and there was an attempt to secretly hire my engineer

behind my back by cyber security officers or agents, wherever they are called. The US government should hire your engineer? That's my understanding. That's what he told me. To write code for them or to break into Telegram? They were curious to learn which open source libraries are integrated to the Telegram's app on the client's side and they were trying to persuade him to use certain open source tools that he would then integrate into the telegram's code that in my understanding would serve as

backdoors would allow the u.s government to spy on people who use telegram the u.s government or maybe any other government because a backdoor is a backdoor regardless of who is using it I personally experienced similar pressure in the US. Whenever I would go to the US, I would have two FBI agents greeting me at the airport, asking questions. One time I was having my breakfast at 9 a.m. And the FBI showed up in my house that I was renting. And that was quite surprising. And I thought, you know, we're getting too much attention here.

It's probably not the best environment to run. Why would the, had you committed a crime? No. They were interested to learn more about Telegram. They knew I, you know, left Russia. They knew what we were doing, but they wanted details. And my understanding is that they wanted to establish a relationship to, in a way, control Telegram better.

Wow. So I guess that's how they treat people that don't just fall into the arms of government like a jellyfish like Mark Zuckerberg day during COVID and actually want encryption, want protection for people's speech. This is how they treat them. They want surveillance. They want to be allowed to have surveillance over us, which is, I'm sorry, that does not fit the promise of freedom in the United States of America. You know, to each his own. and you're supposed to be leaving us alone. It's really disconcerting in the fact that these people now that are involved in this,

you know, I even, you know, said to people around me, can I go to France? I mean, have I said something? Have we gotten any emails that we, have we checked all of our emails? Did we, like, do a show that maybe pissed Macron off? I can think of a couple at the top of my head. And you're just like, you're just flying through all of it says, oh, we got one, we got another one. I mean, it's crazy out there right now. Yeah, this is a flashpoint.

for this freedom of speech conversation across what we call democratic states around the world. This really has to be focused on and the outcome of this will really determine what direction. And this is right after the UK, which has been imprisoning people for social media posts. So we're at a new high watermark in the dangers of what happens when governments get involved, when trying to take away free speech. And it seems like we really have to make this one of the biggest points at this point, because obviously if we don't have that, we don't have anything. Very important. I absolutely agree. We talk about it a lot on this show just because this show is only possible

because of our right to free speech and frankly, I know that this show is not in certain countries it's not available in because they don't have a right to free speech we're wondering how much longer lasts in England and Europe when we're seeing people being arrested for you know sharing a photo of a riot going on on their street and they're being arrested for things like that and You know, we've had those crazy lunatics from the government, I think, was in UK or Ireland, somewhere saying, we are going to come out and get you if you're in another country. Don't think you're safe if you're breaking our laws, we're coming after you. And this is what's so scary about a global government, right?

When you think of global governance, there are people inside this country now that really speak, you know, glowingly about the idea of like, let's all be a melting, well, let's, you know, a one-world government. Well, what, that like works like the Europe does? where they're arresting people on the street and think about it, why would we want to be a part of a one-world government? We're the only ones with a constitution.

We're the only ones that, like have said from the beginning, we don't agree with the rest of you. We believe in the right to free speech. We believe that God has endowed us with our rights and our government works for us. That's the way this thing works. I don't care about the rest of us. Can you imagine if we join a world government

that thinks the exact opposite, like France, you're guilty until proven innocent? I don't want that one-world government. going to continue to fight for sovereignty here in the United States of America. And you're doing such a brilliant job of exposing all of what's going on, Jeffrey. It's courageous. It really is journalism now, for those of us that are telling the truth, is now requiring, I think, more and more courage. So I'm glad you haven't bailed them yet. Not planning on any time soon.

All right, Jeffrey. Keep up the good work. I'll see you next week. Thank you. All right. Well, look, there's so many. great podcasters and alternative media that have stepped up to the cause and and help fight for truth. But see if you can find one that brings lawsuits. I don't know if anyone else does that. I don't know if anyone talks the story. Everyone else can report to you, say, oh my God, look what's happening, have no idea what we're going to be able to do about it. Well, we do. We bring lawsuits. We have one of the most powerful constitutional legal teams the

world has ever seen. We don't just report on issues. We go out and we fight for them. We had a little victory this week. Just a few weeks ago, we're talking about Texas. Lindsay had her access to the CDC shut down, couldn't get to them online. We said, well, that's a government agency. You can't block a citizen from the government agency. Well, here's the breaking news. Ican's attorneys file suit against CDC to end its illegal blocking users on X. And now here it is. August 28th, brand new. Hot off the presses. I can back lawsuit produces quick results. CDC, quickly unblocked ex-user after sued restoring First Amendment rights. I believe Texas Lindsay posted about this.

She went on to say, good news at CDCGov finally unblocked me. My lawsuit is still moving forward since they've shown they can block American citizens at any time for simply pointing out factual inaccuracies or inconvenient truths in their social media posts. The First Amendment is worth fighting for. Texas Lindsay, we love that you're fighting and we love joining you.