The Highwire with Del Bigtree - ZUCKERBERG FLIPS, NOW ANTI-CENSORSHIP

Episode Date: January 12, 2025

ZUCKERBERG FLIPS, NOW ANTI-CENSORSHIPBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

It seems as we're sitting here, it seems like suddenly it's easier to speak to you. And the current of censorship that we're used to swimming against is become a little less. And I don't know, maybe it has to do with something. Perhaps this is it. It's formerly Facebook and now meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tried on a brand new look. See what you think about this. Take a listen. All right.

Hey, everyone. I want to talk about something important today because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today. We've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes

and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free experience. expression on our platforms.

More specifically, here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the US. Second, we're going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far.

We're gonna move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US-based content review is gonna be based in Texas. Woo! Amazing, I mean, first of all, you know, thank God, but it's what we were saying, right? We had literally in this country

a political battle between one party, I'm sorry, that was saying, we are going to censor you. We are gonna censor you. We are going to censor misinformation. We're going to censor malinformation. We are going to control the Internet and the truth that is there. This video would never have happened.

And this isn't a political show when we're past it. So I think it's a nonprofit I'm allowed to say now that the players have been chosen. One thing is for sure. And he said it because of this election, because of who is just elected. So for all of you Democrats out there, I'm glad you still watch the show because it is very important information. And I've said it before. I am with you. I grew up a progressive liberal from Boulder, Colorado, but we were staring the end of free speech in the face. And this, I think, is the crowning blow on the fall from grace of the Democratic Party and the liberals that decided to go against what had been a party that believed in free speech.

Completely and totally, that's what my parents marched for in the 1960s as hippies. they lost their way. And I think that this video right here is the crowning blow that that party no longer even exists. They now have to be rebuilt back into an American party that cares about our Constitution. So thank you, Mark Zuckerberg. It must be weird having to bounce back and forth between whoever's leading the country. Am I free? Do I have to censor? Am I free? Do I have the censor?

You know, it'd be nice if he was a little bit more like Elon Musk and just held his ground all the way through. And hopefully Elon Musk sort of stays on that. but what an incredible video. What a moment. Yeah, it's an interesting story because a lot of people are torn, including myself. I don't trust this guy at all. Being a victim here at the high wire, being a victim of his censorship on that platform. But not in that whole speech, did he say anything about the health space? And the health space, especially the last four years, he censored viciously, his platform visually censored people that were trying to share their vaccine injuries.

When people are saying this is a safe and effective COVID vaccine under emergency youth authorization, authorization. People are saying, no, I'm getting injured. Sensor, you can't even tell your story because that may lead to vaccine hesitancy. So, and even before that, here's a 2019 article. Before COVID even happened, Facebook vows to crack down on anti-vaccure groups spreading misinformation to parents. Now, revisiting that misinformation, we're finding that those are facts that they were just censoring. And here's Facebook 2020 in November for questioning at the time with the facts we had. The lab leak, the origins of COVID, Facebook took us down. We had about 100, 1st, 1st, 1.5 million views on our show is a major platform that we broadcasted from just gone overnight,

never to come back. And that's that's Facebook for you. So if he can get out of the way long enough for free speech to take the initiative, I think this is a great thing. And it's not not necessarily about him. But Facebook itself has it goes, it's kind of like pong that that very first video game with the two paddles and you have the ball in the middle. I see Facebook as that ball in the middle. it's going to go wherever the political winds shift. Yeah. And so in 2021, you had at the time, President Biden saying things like this. Biden says platforms like Facebook are killing people with COVID misinformation.

And then just in 2024 here, Trump says metastock sinks after Trump calls Facebook the enemy of the people. So you have president playing this playing Mark Zuckerberg in his platform like a ping pong ball. And I think history is going to show that Mark's courage and integrity will change with the political wins. I guess that's fine, but you saw this kind of, remember. Let me just make this point, Jeffrey, just to interrupt you for a second. This is why this show exists. The only power there actually is is the power of the people.

It's because of shows like this, because our viewers have been sharing this no matter what, Facebook couldn't stop them, YouTube couldn't stop us. We kept sharing. We moved to our own internet platform on our website. We built our own tools, But it's you, the audience out there that has made this happen. You change the political wins.

So this is why it's so important to never think, oh, I'm safe because I finally got my guy in office. How long does that last? How quickly can those political wins shift if we don't do our job? If we don't stay diligent, demanding attention on our First Amendment rights, Mark Zuckerberg is only going through with the flow. That flow is created by us. we, the people, the United States of America have spoken, we must continue speaking now. It's peddled to the metal time.

We've got to make sure that we, you know, reinvigorate and stimulate the power around our constitutional rights right now while we've got someone in our favor and make sure we cannot slide back in and get into that moment again. But this is a victory for the people more than anything else. And well said, and we saw Mark Zuckerberg come out. And remember, Facebook, these organizations, even X and Elon Musk, they have at their fingertips artificial intelligence that's data mining all of our posts, all of our thoughts, all of our feelings, everything. And they can predict a lot of, we went over this on the shows before, but they can predict very intricate stuff about individuals that only those individuals know just by their posts.

And so you saw Mark Zuckerberg come out when, you know, maybe internally there was something that he saw that show Trump may be taking an initiative lead in the presidential run. And he came out and said this, Zuckerberg says he regrets, can't. to white house pressure on content. So he stepped up and said, I'm sorry. I censored you on behalf of the White House, the administration that was in there, but I regret doing that. Then as Trump becomes president-elect,

you see Mark Zuckerberg actually going to Mar-Lago after years of strained ties, says the headline. So he meets with him. And now we're seeing these kind of statements by Mark Zuckerberg, a lot stronger with less than two weeks of the election. But as you mentioned before, how would he be acting? Mark Zuckerberg be acting if Harris won the election.

We have to ask ourselves that, but it's that flow that we have. But the real story here is not Mark Zuckerberg. It's the fact-checking disinformation expert ecosystem that popped up in 2015 that we've been dealing with. And it was shoved into the forefront, funded, government put a lot of effort behind that. This is what Wired magazine reported. Meta's fact-checking partners say they were blindsided by decision to ax them. It says meta didn't owe fact checkers anything, but it knows that by pulling this partnership

is removing a very significant source of funding for the ecosystem globally, says Alexios Martin Zilos, who helped establish the first partnership between fact checkers and Facebook between 2015 and 2019 as director of the international fact checking network. So you have these experts who really, there's nothing that makes them experts because they're presiding over everyone's information saying, we know better than you. they're in a big problem here because organizations like Facebook is one of their main funders, they're influence peddlers. And now we have the Biden administration who love to use fact checkers out leaving the White House. So that paradigm, that ecosystem, hopefully is dying on the vine right now

because of the lack of funding and the lack of political support, which is a really good thing. And then just for good measure, we have Dana White, who has been very outspoken about free speech and about the vaccine mandates, about all of the kind of inhuman and anti-science stuff that was going on during COVID. He was very, I was spoken about that, he has joined the board of META. And this is the headline, Mark Zuckerberg's second key, they're calling him a right-wing appointment in a week. So that's having people in Mark Zuckerberg's organization really making their head spin. But that, you know, I think that's a good thing. I mean, you know, I think about Nick Coton and his family, the MMA,

fighter and in you know, many of our, you know, stories around MMA fighting, they've been on top of health freedom. This is a group of people that have been really so focused on being healthy, being at the top of their game in order to have those fights. You know, I, you know, I wonder if we should probably really do an investigation, Jeffrey, just on how the MMA has affected Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, we may owe them a debt of gratitude because I know he's been training for MMA. You see the images with him with MMA fighters. Clearly they must have to reach out to Dana White and said, hey, we think we're changing his mind in here.

Why don't you hop on his border, do it? Let's get this, you know, all the way through. So just a very interesting connect. I just realized, thinking back to all the images we've seen with, you know, Zuckerberg, with his hands all taped up, you know, practicing for MMA. And here comes the king of MMA to save Facebook. Really a wild story.

It's absolutely fascinating.