The Vergecast - TechFreedom's Berin Szóka on bad tech policy

Episode Date: August 13, 2019

This week on the Vergecast interview series, The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel sits down with Berin Szóka, the president of TechFreedom. TechFreedom is a tech policy think tank based in Washington, DC that “digs deep into the hard policy and legal questions raised by technological change.” Berin and Nilay have differed on a few issues regarding tech policy, like net neutrality, but what they do agree on is the state of the tech policy conversation — it’s bad. Szóka says Republicans he has previously worked with are now getting important topics like Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act wrong, and bad-faith politicians are misinterpreting it to try to score points and pass policy in their favor. Hear Berin talk about what’s happening now with legislation like Sen. Josh Hawley’s platform moderation bills, why it’s weird for conservatives to want to directly regulate speech on the internet, and how this might play out in the future. Below is a lightly edited excerpt of the conversation. Subscribe to Waveform with MKBHD at http://bit.ly/WaveformVergecast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hey, everybody, it's Nealai from the Vergecast on this week's interview episode. It's a little bit of a wild ride. I'm joined by Barron Soka.

He's the president of Tech Freedom. Tech Freedom is a tech policy think tank in D.C. I'll be honest, Barron's a little bit more of a libertarian than me on some of these issues. He and I have disagreed about things like net neutrality in the past. But right now we agree on something big, which is the state of the tech policy conversation is really, really bad. And the folks that he's worked with on the Republican side of the aisle are getting things like Section 230, how platforms should moderate speech on the internet, really wrong. And he thinks it's incredibly dangerous. And so I thought it would be interesting to bring Baron on, talk about what is happening right now and why it's so weird for conservatives to want to regulate speech on the internet directly.

Barron is a firecracker. He went for it. I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation. It's Baron Soca on the Vergecast. Baran Soca, welcome to the Vergecast, my friend. Thanks for having me. So for our audience, I think it is worth noting. Baron, you and I have been, I would say, around each other on Twitter for a long time,

around each other and sort of the net neutrality debate for a long time. Historically, we have not necessarily agreed specifically about net neutrality. Is that a fair characterization? Depends what you mean by net neutrality. I think we agree more than you might think. Well, I mean Title II. Right. Well, that's not net neutrality.

But I think we agree that nobody wants their broadband providers to block or throttle or make decisions for users. And if that's what we meant by net neutrality, we could have resolved this debate 10 years ago. Yet, and yet we have not. But when I want to go read the sort of smartest arguments against Title II, when I want to read the smartest arguments that maybe don't agree with me on other tech policy issues, I generally turn to you, Barron. You're out there. We've had, like I said, a respectful disagreement between you and lots of folks on the other side for a long time. And what has struck me lately, and I saw you gave an interview to our old friend Sarah Jong, who wrote a piece for the Times, about what is going on with Section 230 and however one keeps getting it wrong, which is something we talk about in the Virchcast all the time. It seems like the entire tech policy world in D.C. is like turned upside down because of what Republicans like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are saying about 230, are saying about regulating software companies, particularly platform companies, are saying about just how involved the government.

should be in speech on the internet. And that just seems totally upside down. And it seems like you, you absolutely agree that we've, we've gotten something really wrong here. Yeah. So my views have not changed. The world has turned upside down around me. And on the highest level, I think that Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn and Donald Trump and the other Republicans who have been demagoguing against big tech are essentially trying to replicate the political success that they have seen people on the left have with the cause of net neutrality, they're trying to create their own net neutrality. That's what this is on a rhetorical level. And I can show you some of the examples of just how directly they're copying the playbook of radical activists on the

other side. But they've been very successful at it thus far. The Media Research Center has clearly made this their number one issue. They're raising huge amounts of money on it. And they're essentially turning the old wars against the big networks that Republicans fought for many years, they're now turning this into the digital realm. This is their way of fighting the cultural wars in the 21st century. And on a purely political level, it's genius. And you and I are going to talk about the substance today, but for them, the substance does not matter. And that's why when Sarah wrote that great piece in the Times debunking Josh Holly's proposal, he did not respond in any substantive way. He responded with a totally Trumpian tweet

about how the left is sold out to big tech and their big money. And she's just quoting some crazy left-wing expert, i.e. me, which everyone found very amusing. Yes. It doesn't matter. He doesn't want to talk about substance. He just wants to play politics with this. That's what this is about. So real quick, you work for an outfit called Tech Freedom. What is Tech Freedom? So I left the practice of law 11 and a half years ago to join a think tank that was the original free market tech policy think tank. That was the Progress and Freedom Foundation. And I did that until 2010. PFF closed in the economic downturn. And I started tech freedom to continue the work that we did at PFF.

So we're a think tank. We're a small organization. We're a bunch of lawyers who try to think hard about tech policy issues and explain them in a substantive way and to look beyond the normal. red team, blue team shit that most policy debates turn into in D.C. And I think it's fair to characterize, when you said free market, it's fair to characterize tech freedom and your work is being very market oriented. Yeah, I mean, I don't even know what any of these words mean anymore. That's a good word to use.

I don't really like to use the word libertarian anymore because so many people who use that word have turned out to just be populist, trumpist hacks. So, you know, classical liberal, market-oriented, skeptical, whatever, I don't really think the label matters all that much. But our basic priors are the rule of law really matters, getting right, the legal analysis matters. The precedent that you set with any regulation is going to allow other people to do things that you do not intend. So you really have to ask yourself hard questions about what the framework that's going to be set up could be used to do. That's why we were so concerned about Title II regulation, for example, which could be used to do a lot more than just the core of net neutrality. So that's our philosophy.

That's why we work with Democrats on, usually on issues of civil liberties and free speech and why we have in the past work with Republicans on regulatory policy. But that's changed. The people that were long our allies that we thought cared about the things that we cared about, people like Ted Cruz, smart, thoughtful lawyers who even, And in his case, worked at the Federal Trade Commission, people who we thought really embraced our values clearly do not care. They have run screaming away from those basic positions of free markets and constitutionally limited government when they have found some politically expedient reason to start demagoguing this issue set.

So you mentioned Holly tweeted Sarah's piece and said, you know, this is a Google-funded expert. Ted Cruz retweeted me the other day and said, this is just a job. just left-wing talking points. Just address it head-on, well, we have the chance, and then we should definitely talk about 230. But how much of your funding comes from Google? Is it, I mean, Google funds everybody, but specifically how much of tech freedom? Yeah, I'm glad you asked. So tech freedom is a uniquely broad tent, or has a uniquely broad tent of corporate support. So we get about a third of our money from foundations, and the rest is corporate money. And that money is split between

the tech companies like Google and Facebook. We've got money from Yelp, get money from Duck, Duck Go. So those sorts of companies on the one hand, and broadband companies on the other hand. Those companies hate each other. Even the cable and the telephone companies hate each other.

Right? They are not... So this idea that we are doing some corporations bidding makes no sense because our donors do not agree on anything other than that it's worth it to them to have a principled free market voice in these debates. So I it's just it's rankling to me on a personal

level that this is the attack that I've gotten for many years from people that I disagree with disagreeably on the left. And now I'm hearing it from people on the right who for many years I've been invited five times to testify before congressional committees by Republican chairman, by including Ted Cruz. And now for some of those same people to turn around and pretend that that, oh, I've been some sort of left-wing Google shill all along is crazy. And also, by the way, totally inconsistent with everything that Republicans say about campaign finance reform. Remember, these are the people who say that money goes to people because of their views. It doesn't drive their views.

And yet, when they want to attack someone on the outside, they say just the opposite. They claim that somehow I'm only doing Google's bidding because Google is one of our donors. It's insulting, and frankly, if I wanted to work for a company, I would go work for a company or go back to the practice of law and have private clients who paid me and make multiple times when I make now in the nonprofit world. It's just, it's insulting. And it's particularly galling from someone like Josh Hawley who has spent his career defending the rights of corporations. This is the guy who became a national political figure by arguing. the Hobby Lobby case, by taking that to the Supreme Court and convincing the Supreme Court that corporations have religious exercise rights under the First Amendment, right?

And now he's the one saying, well, private companies shouldn't exercise their First Amendment rights. He's the one whose career, he went from being a law professor to starting as the Attorney General of Massachusetts, excuse me, of Missouri. And he was given $300,000, which is a staggeringly large contribution by, one of Google's chief antagonist, Peter Thiel, someone who has made a career for all sorts of twisted philosophical reasons out of attacking big tech companies as his own personal interests in this. He's on the board of Facebook, on the board of Palantir. He gave a staggering amount of money to Josh Hawley to, I don't know, but it's not an accident

that just after that happened. Josh Hawley, so he becomes, he's elected as Attorney General of Missouri. He gets more campaign finance contributions from Peter And then he announces this big probe of Google that never goes anywhere because he had no legal case. But he uses that probe to get himself in part to elected to the Senate. I mean, you could make these same sorts of attacks against Josh Hawley, right? Yeah.

And yet he hasn't disclosed that he's gotten money from critics of tech or people have raised these questions about him. And frankly, I don't give a shit, right? I would rather engage him on substance, but he refuses to. He did not respond to Sarah's piece. he's never responded to any of the pushback against his ideas in any substantive way. He simply attacked those of us who are asking questions. And the most insulting piece, the most insulting tweet from him when he first debuted his

end social media censorship act, he said, oh, there's so much pushback coming, this orchestrated pushback by Google and Facebook, all these supposedly, in scare quotes, libertarian groups who are pushing back against this, as if with the only reason that all these, quote, supposedly libertarian groups would be pushing back against his idea to have the federal government decide who was adequately politically neutral, who would be effectively allowed to operate a social network, as if that's somehow inconsistent with libertarianism. It's just crazy. And, you know, frankly, I'm sick of it.

I miss the old days when I could at least spend my time disagreeing with people on the left generally about substance. Josh Hawley is not interested in that. This is what I'm saying. You and I have often disagreed, especially. entitled to, but that conversation has always been pretty substantive, right? In your disagreements with the folks I know from public knowledge, for example, has always been very respectful. And we had G.G. Sown on the Vergecast recently. I know you guys have disagreed. Very respectful

relationship. So, yeah, we're friends. I mean, because we actually respect each other, we're lawyers and we can parse our differences out, Josh Hawley, despite going to Yale law school, having clerked for Chief Justice, having been the Attorney General of Missouri, holding himself out. His Twitter bio is a constitutional lawyer. He doesn't give a shit. And the reason that he avoids media discussion about this is he knows he's full of shit and he doesn't want anyone to call him out on it because it's not about substance. It's about stoking resentment and, frankly, technophobia and a persecution complex among conservatives

that, as he says, cosmopolitan elites are out to get ordinary Christian people in the real America. That's what this is about. Yeah. Well, I'm a guy from Wisconsin, so I have a lot of thoughts about that. But let's do substance. Let's not rile ourselves up over his posturing, although the posturing is important. Let's talk about his ending Internet censorship act.

This is an act that would reform Section 230, which I subject Vergecast listeners to endless conversations about. By now, Vergecast listeners, listeners should know, there's no such thing as a platform publisher dichotomy that's all fake. But giving your view of 230 and what Holly's bill would do. Yeah. So you have to understand that he starts this conversation with this false claim that he says tech companies get a sweetheart deal that no other industry enjoys, complete exemption from traditional publisher liability in exchange for providing a forum free of political censorship. So he's picked this talking point up from Ted Cruz. And that started about two years ago. This, uh, the first congressional hearing on

this topic was April of last year. I was invited to testify by the Republican chairman, who didn't seem to think I was a Google Schill, about section 230. And that was the hearing, you may remember this, your listeners may remember this, where Diamond and Silk were held up as the poster children of anti-conservative bias. These are two black women who support President Trump and who alleged that Facebook had censored them. I think what happened was really more of a confusion about, let's say, a customer service fail. But that entire hearing consisted of Republicans repeating this talking point that now Josh Hawley has adopted, that somehow Section 230 treats Internet companies in a special way that no one

else can enjoy, gives them some special subsidy. And this is just not true. I mean, it's put it this way. There is a difference between traditional media and these tech companies, and it is true that the law treats them somewhat differently, but for a very important reason. So if you publish letters to the editor, you as a traditional publisher, you have to screen those letters and you are responsible for what people say in them, just as you would be responsible for the content that your own staff writes. Congress understood in 1996 that if you applied that principle to the internet, it would be impossible to host user-generated content at scale. Because there is no way to screen content at the level, even that it existed in the 1990s, even online bulletin boards or comment sections on websites to say nothing of huge social networks. It would be impossible to scale up to that level.

And so that's what Section 230 does. It says that you're not liable for screening that content. And furthermore, that you do not make yourself more legally liable when you take measures to moderate content on your site. Because Congress understood that if you made people liable for being good Samaritans, that you would get no content moderation. And they specifically wanted to encourage websites to, A, host user-generated content, like comments, and B, to take measures to moderate it. So the entire purpose of 230 was that websites were not supposed to be neutral. They were supposed to exercise editorial discretion. And what Ted Cruz is doing here, he's trying to make it sound like he's not arguing for government regulation. So that's why he's fixated originally on 230 because he thought that he'd come up with a clever way to say, oh, well, this isn't regulation.

This is a special favor that the government is doing you. and there's a quid pro quo here, you're supposed to be politically neutral. And the only leg that he has to stand on in making that claim, it's a very weak leg. But if you look at Section 230, and I would invite your listeners to do this, everyone should read it. It's not a long statute. He focuses on one finding clause in that law, where he says that the Internet and other interactive computer services offer a forum for a true diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development and myriad avenues for intellectual activity. And he blows that up into, you see, it's right there in the statute, Congress expected you

to be politically neutral, and you have not lived up to that bargain. That's such horseshit. The entire purpose of the statute was to encourage websites to exercise their discretion and to not have the government second guess what they do, to, as the statute says, in a purpose statement, to keep the internet unfettered by government regulation. That's the kind of statutory interpretation that the federalist society is supposed to hate. The idea that you pick out one sentence in a finding statement

and you blow it up into essentially turning the statute on its head, that's not something that any Republican would ever have been okay with until this brave new world where Trump has demonstrated to people that they can say anything they want, and the substance doesn't matter. So just go ahead and make whatever bullshit claims you want.

And what's funny to me about that is we also endlessly talk about competition on this show. That was designed to encourage competition. So you might have an extremely left-wing website that moderates according to its own rules, and you might have an extremely right-wing website that moderates according to its rules. And the Internet as a whole would net at neutral, but it certainly was not, at least from anyone I've talked to, including Ron Wyden has been interviewed on the verge who co-wrote the thing, anyone thought this would apply the goal of the sort of neutral public forum piece would apply to an individual website. That was never the goal.

The goal is the Internet as a whole. Yeah, yeah. It's complete bullshit. And, you know, Ron Wyden was the original co-sponsor, but I just want to correct one little factual detail here. Because when Breitbart talks about this bill, they talk about this as Ron Wyden's bill for 19. Because of course, they want to make this sound like some left-wing, cosmopolitan, coastal elite Democrat wrote the bill. This bill was written by Chris Cox, the Republican, on a plane after the Stratton versus Oakmont decision. He wrote the bill.

He figured this out on his own as a lawyer. And then he got Ron Wyden on board as a co-sponsor. But this is a Republican bill that achieved broad bipartisan support that is now being attacked by Republicans who should know better. And on your point, you really put that very well when you said that, you know, no one would have thought that this was a mandate for ensuring neutrality in any particular website. I just want to just give you one other rhetorical framing that I think is important for understanding what a flip-flop this is from Republicans, which is I've compared this to the fairness doctrine. Yeah. You can talk about what that was. But, you know, high level from 1949 to 1987, the Federal Communications Commission required.

a sort of fairness in how broadcasters covered the news. And that had the effect of enforcing a very bland neutrality in radio and television, one that really favored, well-established orthodox left-of-center views, and conservatives hated that. So President Reagan, his FCC, studied this issue. They recommended repeal. They repealed it. Democrats in Congress tried to restore the fairness doctrine. And President Reagan vetoed that bill.

And here's what he said, because he really put this very well. He summarized what was the Republican view on keeping the government out of media all the way through 2016. This idea kept occurring in Republican Party platforms through the 2016 election. And what he said here, I think, is exactly what I believe and what free market people are supposed to believe. He said, we must not ignore the obvious intent of the First Amendment, which is to promote vigorous public debate and a diversity of viewpoints in the public forum as a whole. not in any particular medium, let alone in any particular journalistic outfit. So that's exactly the point that you were just making, right? So diversity overall, not getting involved in what any particular outlet does.

And then President Reagan went on to say, history has shown that the dangers of an overly timid or biased press cannot be averted through bureaucratic regulation, but only through the freedom and competition that the First Amendment sought to guarantee. Well, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and President Trump and the rest of the Republican Party that engaged on this issue, have just completely forgotten that lesson and have turned that on its head. Because they use this rhetoric too. They talk about Section 230 as the particular legal vehicle for their ideas. But they also claim that somehow the First Amendment protects Marsha Blackburn's right to spread bullshit on Twitter. And so they have now effectively adopted what we call media

access theory, the idea that was developed in 1960s by the far left, that the First Amendment is not a shield against government, but a sword by which politicians get to decide whether media is treating them fairly and then meddle accordingly. So that's the fucked up, twisted, upside-down world that we lived in. So this leads right into the Holly bill, which I think you've called the fairness doctrine for the internet to highlight the sort of absurdity of conservatives for years fighting against the fairness doctrine, getting rid of it. And now Holly is proposing the Federal Trade Commission will every so often review Twitter's moderation policies, Facebook's moderation policies, and say you're fair enough. And that seems, even to me, and again,

I'm like Title II, we should tell Comcast what to do. Disclosure Comcast is an investor in Vox Media. Everybody knows this. I don't love me, but there it is. Right. Like, that's something I would say, but it seems wild for a conservative to say the FTC is going to regulate moderation policy in this way. Yeah. So now the hook here is, per the discussion we were just having about 230, what Holly would do is say that you only enjoy your special subsidy, your special immunity from liability for third-party content if you're politically neutral. And that certification has to be reissued by the Federal Trade Commission every two years. And critically, you need four out of five commissioners to vote that you have been politically neutral, which

as a practical matter means that even in the minority, even under a Democratic administration, where there would be only two out of five Republican commissioners, that those two, if they voted against a company, they could deny that company what is effectively the reassurance of a license. That's really what we're talking about here. It's a licensing regime because if you don't get that, you're effectively out of business. You're not going to be able to host user-generated content

because all of a sudden, anybody can sue you for anything that any of your users say. And I just want to point out the fundamental disconnect here, right? these two things have nothing to do with each other, whether you should be able to sue me, the host of user-generated content for something that's one of the users on my platform has said that defames you, has nothing to do with whether my platform is politically neutral. So that's the first and most dishonest thing about this whole idea. But the only reason that they're doing that is because Ted Cruz has zeroed in on that idea that there was this quid pro quo here, that this 230 required neutrality. And I you know, once you proceed from there, you get this whole crazy idea that it inevitably leads you to something like the Hawley Bill, which in practice, as I say, is a licensing regime, but a licensing regime that is based on the inherently arbitrary assessment of whether you were fair enough, right? And this is where, I've called this the Fairness Doctrine for the Internet, it's actually far, far worse than the original Fairness Doctrine.

So some of your listeners may be those crazy left-wing people that I referred to earlier who actually think that we should bring back the fairness doctrine for for radio and broadcasting. But even if you think that, this is so much worse than that, right? The fairness doctrine was problematic. Let's just say that its intentions, I think, were pretty good. I would prefer a much healthier, fair media environment. And that's what the fairness doctrine aimed for. It just had these unintended consequences of putting the government in the decision-making role of, were you adequately deciding which were the major or significant opinions that required a response and then having the unintended consequence of controversial viewpoints being screened out in favor

of what the FCC at the time called, the dreary blandness of more acceptable opinion, right? Those were unintended consequences. But this idea, the Josh Hawley idea, this would be far more dramatic. This would be that the federal government, two federal trade commissioners, having the ability to say, yeah, you know what, I just think you were just too mean. I just didn't like what you did here or there. And then being able to say, and so, you know, for the next two years, anybody can sue you for anything that any of your users say. I mean, that's crazy. And when you start looking at the specific examples of what people alleged to be unfair treatment of conservatives, you start to understand why this is inherently arbitrary. There is no way to draw a line here.

this is not like net neutrality, where you could say, you know, look, the broadband providers hold themselves out as being politically neutral. They say they're not going to block content, and they did. Well, you know, that's where you and I agree on net neutrality. I think pretty much everyone agrees about that, right? Yeah. But that's holding companies to their promises, and the promises are really pretty clear. You either did or you didn't. Whereas here, what we're talking about is websites who, yes, they may say when they're brought up to the hill, they may say, we don't discriminate politically. But they also run a business where they also have terms of service.

And they tell everyone up front, we enforce these terms of service. And that requires them to exercise editorial discretion to decide, did someone go too far? Was that comment inappropriate? Where should they draw the line on hate speech? There is no way to draw clear, bright line rules for any of these things. It is inherently subjective. and you may be uncomfortable. I think a lot of people are somewhat uncomfortable

with those decisions being made by private companies, but it's a billion times worse for the federal government to get involved in second-guessing that and second-guessing it specifically along partisan lines, where they say, you know what? I just think that you were not fair to pro-life speakers, you did X, Y, and Z,

and I'm going to withhold your license effectively. That's what we're talking about here. You know, it strikes me, you're saying it now, I hadn't really thought about it, that this does give the two minority commissioners far more power than I had thought, right? If you have three Republicans, the two Democrats can just say no, right? And there's no real reason for them to get peeled over. If you have three Democrats, the two Republicans can say no, and there's no real reason for them to get pulled over and for one of them to vote. Exactly.

I'm just thinking about sort of the political mechanism of that now, and it seems to vest a lot of power into, unelected people from the minority party in a way that I really hadn't considered yet. See, when you put it that way, someone might think, well, at least it's politically neutral. It could be abused by Democrats just as much as it could be abused by Republicans. So it's true. It could be. And you might see people like the Tulsi Gabbards of the world certainly could try to do stuff like that. But I think this is a very brilliantly calculated move on the part of Republicans who understand that that structure would benefit them far more in the long.

term for the very simple reason that, and this is what Republicans more than anything else, don't want to hear. This is what I said in that New York Times piece, that there is a well-documented asymmetrical polarization of American politics. That is to say that, yeah, there are a lot of crazy people in America, and there are plenty of crazy people on the left. But the right-wing, especially online media ecosystem, has become such a fever swamp of Bullshit, misinformation, disinformation, hate speech, incitement to violence. It is just not symmetrical to the craziness that exists on the left. And when you understand that, and I would encourage you all to look at the book Network Propaganda,

which does a really thorough job of documenting what that looks like and the way that it's been reinforced by Breitbart and Fox News and a bunch of other insane outlets on the right, once you understand that the media ecosystem and the way that people use social media is not symmetrical, then you look at this bill and you ask yourself, well, what would it mean for sites to be neutral? How are we going to measure that? Is it by the results? Because if you're measuring, if you have two different samples, if you have a significantly different kind of behavior on the right than on the left, even with a truly by any measure neutral content moderation approach, you're going to get different outcomes. it's going to look like conservatives are being, quote, censored more.

And that's the whole point here. Because the Holly bill sets things up so that the crazier the right becomes, the more ugly and violent and racist, homophobic and sexist and bigoted they are, the more it looks like they're being oppressed. That's the central genius of what Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are proposing here. It's an infinite political reward mechanism for their tribe and a way to continue stoke. resentment among conservatives who are becoming uglier and uglier, frankly, on the whole. This is really interesting to me. We talk about it a lot. We've asked ourselves, are there examples on the left of people who feel like they're being censored for their opinions? And there are. They're out there. You know, like if you monitor the trans community, like a lot of

turfs basically feel like they're being censored for their views. But that on the whole is a tiny fraction compared to like racists on the right. And it just seems like this constant own goal where conservatives are always saying racist speech is conservative speech. And your point is that it's on purpose. Right. Well, let me give you an example of how they, they don't ever want to say that racist speech is conservative speech. They want to say that conservatives are being censored and they don't want to talk about exactly who it is they mean. because if you actually drill down into who they're talking about, you would see that who they're talking about are the worst of the worst,

the most truly deplorable people. So the best example of this I could give you is if you look at the so-called study that Richard Hanania did about Twitter, this has gotten a lot of attention among Breitbart and conservative Republicans. It comes up in congressional hearings. His bombshell finding was that Twitter was 21 times more likely. to censor conservatives than so-called liberals. So that's the takeaway.

But if you take the time to look at the data set where he lists all the accounts of the people he's talking about, you realize immediately why. The people he's talking about, it's David Duke and Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor and a whole bunch of white nationalists, Milo Yanopoulists, and their enablers. So, you know, you will hear conservatives cite those numbers, but they're, They will avoid getting into the who it is we're talking about exactly because they want to, it's a bait and switch. They want to pretend that it's normal non-racist conservatives who are being censored when that's

just not the case. And that allows them to convince the conservative masses that they're being persecuted, which further radicalizes them and pulls them towards the crazy MAGA right. That's the big picture of what we're talking about. And that dynamic is only getting worse. And so you see conservatism as a whole moving towards this kind of racism and using this war against platform companies to accelerate that process. Yeah. And, you know, racism is part of this.

There are a lot of forms of bigotry here, but it's also just about pure bullshit. So I'll give you a different example. And this is the example that actually you hear most often when this subject comes up in Congress. everyone says, oh, poor Marsha Blackburn, she was censored for her pro-life views when she launched her Senate campaign. Every single time this topic comes up, that's the example that Republicans lead with. Well, what actually happened was she launched her campaign with a video that she rolled out on social media, claiming that Planned Parenthood was selling baby body parts and that she had personally stopped them from doing so. Now, that claim has been debunked.

It's just not true, but truth no longer matters. In the post-factual world, she expects to be able to make any claims she wants and get away with it. And what happened was not even that her video was taken down, certainly not her account. Her account was never taken down by anyone. The video was never taken down. But a variety of these online platforms declined to allow her to pay to advertise that video, making a false claim, spreading a conspiracy. theory to people that she wanted to advertise to, people who were not her own followers, they weren't getting that content organically.

Right? That's what happened. And she has turned that into this myth that she has been censored. And that's one example of where the issue is not racism or bigotry. It's just bullshit. It relates to another example, which I think is really worth considering because it gets wrapped in with that example, which is pro-life groups have said, oh, yes, we also have been censored, just like Marsha Blackburn for our pro-life content. Well, what they actually did was they

tried to run ads showing abortions and insert those into people's news feeds. Well, unsurprisingly, Facebook and Google and all these other platforms, they have policies against paying to show medical procedures as ads because nobody wants to see that shit in their news feed. I mean, whether it's an abortion or any other sort of medical procedure. So that is a good example of a politically neutral rule that has been alleged to be biased against conservatives because they're the ones who are trying to break a term of service to show people that content. And then they allege that this is an example of censorship against them. And every time they do that, they raise more money and they get more attention for their cause. So they keep doing it.

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and instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. So there's another Holly bill he actually put out this week, which is just wild. It's the smart act. We talked about it on our chat show earlier. this week. Basically, it's there to fight social media addiction if you agree that such a thing

exists. The science and that is pretty shaky. But if you agree such a thing exists, the smart act is there to fight it. It prescribes an enormous amount of behavioral regulation on platform companies. My favorite is every social media platform would have to monitor how much time you spend on it with a 30 minute time limit and block you after 30 minutes a day. And if you change it, so you get more time a day, they are required to automatically read. reset that timer on the first of the month. That is an enormous amount of, we're going to tell you how to design your product, run your business for a conservative.

Where is that coming from? A very deep-seated loathing of the internet. I mean, Josh Hawley genuinely believes that we would be better off without social media. And, you know, when you talk to people about Section 230, I've had this conversation recently, when I use the analogy of letters to the editor and I say, yeah, but it just would never scale. You couldn't screen online user-generated content the way you could screen letters to the editor. Journalists, some conservatives, some people who are not conservatives, they say to me, yeah, exactly. So if you can't handle that responsibility in the way that traditional media have, you shouldn't exist.

Same attitude here. These are people who fundamentally are attacking modernity. They fundamentally think that the internet is bad for us, and the government should start essentially undoing as much of a digital revolution as it can. Do you think it's going to work? It's not going to pass, if that's what you mean. I mean, well, let's think about your question. Is it going to work?

Well, the question is, what's his objective, right? His objective is to further galvanize people against technology. And in that sense, I actually think that will work politically. One of the things that is fascinated me most is seeing how certain people on the left, people like Matt Stoller, who, as you know, is a major critic of big tech, have been just gushing about Josh Hawley. You know, they say, oh, yeah, you know, he's maybe a little bit of a racist and maybe has, you know, I'm a little concerned about some of his slight fascist leanings, but he's got a real point about technology, right? Josh Hawley's building bridges with people like them, that they're building this alliance that transcends left and right. and that unites people who are fundamentally unhappy with the way that the world has changed.

And in that sense, I think he is effective, both at galvanizing the conservative base and at building those alliances. And frankly, I think you're going to hear a lot more of this sort of stuff from Democrats. So just for the listener. Frankly, we have in the past. You know, Ed Markey has been saying stuff like this for many years, and he's been focused on children. He keeps wanting to raise the age ceiling for the Child Online Privacy Protection Act. But he would do some of these kinds of things for teenagers, and so would Jay Rockefeller have done before him. This is not an idea that's limited to the right.

Once again, these are left-wing, man-state government ideas that, Josh Hawley is appropriating. So just for the listener, you heard Baron say Matt Stoller, Matt Stoller works at the Open Markets Institute. He's quoted in the verge all the time. He's an antitrust proponent. And it just seems this is a very convenient alliance, right? He wants to break up big tech companies.

He wants to reform the market system in a variety of ways. Josh Hawley hates the tech companies. That's an alliance. It seems very narrow, but it is true that you would not expect that in any other circumstance. Well, I think that they actually have more in common than you realize. They are both fundamentally at war with the dynamism of the digital world, right? They want a nice, static, safe environment where they have control. And the government has a leading role to play in that. That's a pretty well-established mindset. I don't think it's not just about a short-term convenience. And that's why you see such affinity. between them. Someone recently said on Twitter, find someone who looks at you the way that Matt Stoller looks at Josh Hawley. I mean, I think that nails it. I think you're going to see more of that kind of left-right alliance as this debate goes on. And, you know, this is going to be an issue in the

Democratic primary. We haven't really gotten there yet. We've seen little whiffs of it. But I will not, put it this way, I will be surprised if in six months we're not talking about Democrats It's getting much, much more detailed about exactly what they're going to do to, quote, fix tech companies. And we're going to see some of this. It may be this kind of thing that Josh Hawley is proposing is limited to kids in the 13 to 18 age bracket. But of course, even if that's all it is, once you start down that road, you're imposing these restrictions on all sorts of services that are used by adults. Yeah. So there are a lot of people in this country who are really fundamentally illiberal, who do.

do not think that adults can be allowed to make their own decisions for themselves. So one big question I have, it does seem like the big tech companies have accumulated an awful lot of power. They don't have a lot of competition. And they are not, I would say, well run, just as a blanket fact. And some of them are run slightly better than others. But the level of unhappiness people have with YouTube, roughly the same as the level of unhappiness people have with Facebook, roughly the same as Twitter. And somewhere on the margin there's differences. But they're huge, powerful companies. Folks are unhappy with them all the time. They don't make particularly great or transparent moderation decisions. We run stories from Casey Newton about the lives

of actual content moderators on these platforms. They're miserable. They pay a lot of money. They work. They're contractors. They're even full employees of the companies. They're treated quite disposably. So a lot of problems with the tech companies. Isn't it appropriate for were there to be a broad sort of bipartisan consensus that we should go make some changes to how they operate and how they work and their relationship to the everyday American? Yeah. There are lots of honest questions to be asked, and we can have an honest debate about any of those. Josh Hawley is not interested in having an honest discussion.

There's nothing honest about any of his proposals. He is approaching this from a purely opportunistic political perspective. So, you know, that's, I mean, we just can't pretend. he's operating in good faith. He's never once been willing to get into the substance and he continues to make completely false and absurd claims like that Section 230 was intended to require neutrality or that having the federal government decide that wouldn't create a host of problems. So that's point number one. Point number two, to some extent, some of the complaints that people have raised about how content moderation works today, particularly on the left, particularly

people who are upset about, let's take the particular example of YouTube, not doing more to protect LGBT users, I think a significant percentage of what they're complaining about is, in fact, a response to conservative demagoguing on this issue. In other words, to the extent that this is the new culture wars, and I really think it is, Josh Hawley and other conservatives are working the refs. They are trying to force these companies. Even in the the absence of a legal mandate, even the absence of having to prove their neutrality every two years, they are forcing them to change the way that they handle abusive content on their platforms. And it seems very clear to me that Google in particular, but Facebook and Twitter

and other companies as well, have been less likely to take action against people on the right who break their terms of service, who abuse other users, who spread bullshit, conspiracy theories, et cetera, because they're afraid that they'll get attacked for it by conservatives on the hill, but also have gone out of their way to crack down on people on the left so that they can claim, oh, look, we've also taken down these users' content. We've suspended their accounts, shadow ban them, whatever. So in other words, it's a mistake to think that Josh Hawley's goal is just to pass legislation. He's already having an effect. He's already changing the way that content moderation works. And it's really hard to know how much

that's happening because it is a bit of a black box. But it's certainly happening to some extent. And that's part of why Black Lives Matter, gay activists and other people on the left are feeling disproportionately burdened because they are actually, I think, being consciously targeted by these platforms who are just eager to try to pretend that the two sides here of the American political spectrum are more symmetrical than they are. That's my second point. Third point, this is really important. Almost no one who's proposing these many ways of cracking down on tech companies really seems to think about the way that those crackdowns might actually help to entrench the power of incumbents. Anytime you create a large regulatory structure with a lot of uncertainty, arbitrary enforcement,

tied to political influence, you're favoring big companies. They're the ones who can manage this. The small companies can't, right? Reddit suffers a lot more. If the government gets involved here, then does a big company like Facebook. Facebook and Google can handle these regulatory burdens. Twitter, smaller sites, not so much. So I think we need to think very hard about those unintended consequences and ask ourselves whether something like, not to get into an unrelated topic, but this newly announced $5 billion settlement between the Federal Trade Commission and Facebook, you know,

to me, that just raised the stakes for everyone in a way that Facebook can absolutely comfortably handle and almost no one else can. That's the kind of thing that I think needs to be part of our analysis. We have to think about how to avoid entrenching the power of the very companies that we're complaining about. This is the thing to me that really strikes me, right? I don't know how much I agree with if you impose some regulation you entrench the incumbents. Like, that's a big idea. Economist, political scientists argue about it for years and years. and years. We have sort of one proxy, which is the GDPR in Europe. You know, it's only been a year, we'll see. But it seems like a lot of, and I know you're saying Holly isn't a good faith,

but it seems like Cruz, Holly, the rest of the conservative world, they are taking for granted that Facebook and Google and Twitter and whatever will be there at their scale to be directly regulated in this way forever, right? And that maybe you think that's true. Like they're big companies, they have a lot of money. They have a very little competition. So sure. But that is also a very classical sort of, well, we'll just give AT&T all the telephone lines, and then AT&T will, like, be an extension of the government, and that'll be fine. And that seems utterly backwards to me as well. Yeah.

I mean, this is the idea of a regulated monopoly. This is what we have with the telephone network. This is what Title II is all about. It's the idea of saying, you know, competition's not going to work. We're going to have one provider do X task, and we're going to regulate the heck out of them, right? That is the very thing that Republicans have spent the last 15 years arguing against in the telecom space, saying that common carrier regulation is a self-fulfilling prophecy, that it makes competition impossible and prevents new entry. So you asked me at the outset how I would define myself, market-oriented, whatever. Actually, the word that I would really prefer to use is to talk about dynamism.

What I really believe in is we want the most dynamic world possible. We want one where new companies can emerge, new ways of doing business can emerge. The disruption is going to come out of nowhere by someone who completely changes how something works. They're not going to build a better version of Facebook. They're going to do something completely different. And if that's what you want, you need to be very careful about entrenching incumbents. And it's not that all regulation is bad. It's more that you have to really avoid arbitrary regulation, that if you wind up with

a situation where nobody knows what's politically neutral and it's up to two federal trade commissioners to make that decision. Well, you've just recreated the world that we had for 80 years with the Ma Bell monopoly where the regulator was just a political feel to fight in, where you, how much you got out of the market depended on your level of political influence, right? That's the kind of regulation that I think is bad. And we should be focusing on how to regulate in a less arbitrary, more predictable, but also more innovation-friendly way, one that allows for the market to be dynamic and for, you know, the next Facebook to come and disrupt Facebook just as MySpace disrupted the mess of sites that came before that. And then Friendster came along and then Facebook, right?

I mean, we've had this, the internet has been a history of digital disruption. And that's a good thing. I think that's the single best protection that consumers have. That doesn't mean we need no consumer protections. Of course we do. But we should ensure that they are enforced in a non-arbitrary, sensible and predictable way. So you've said you've testified in front of Congress. You've been invited by Republican, members of Congress.

Have you actually gone and talked to them or their stabs in the past, their policy folks? Has there been a change? Oh, yeah. It's night and day. I mean, I spent many years talking regularly to some of the very staffers for the very members who are now leading this bullshit. I train them on what they knew, what they know about tech policy. We work together very closely on issues like fighting the FCC's overreach through Title II. And the changes come from the top down.

Their bosses have decided that they can make political hay out of death. amagging on these issues. And so everything that we talked about, all the principles that I thought we shared have gone straight out the window. And I find it impossible to talk to them because those relationships are now all dead. I've realized that I don't have anything in common with those people. They don't care about the principles that I've just spent the last half hour talking to you about. And once you realize that, there's no point in trying to talk to them. All you can do is expose their hypocrisy and explain why, what they're proposing, would lead to the federal government having arbitrary power, to politicians being able to demagogue.

You know, the way that I like to think about the Josh Holly bill fundamentally is that think about how this would get implemented. You'd have this every two years. It would be another, you'd have it like right before the election. And you'd have it just be another grievance festival. It's an opportunity for the MAGA masses to come together and share their rage against this left-wing scapegoat. Google, Facebook, pick your company. Once you're operating on that level of peer politics, there's no point talking to people about the substance of law or policy, which is what we do. We're not a political organization.

I don't want to get involved in those fights. This is not why I came to do what I do here at Tech Freedom. What makes it better? It's not going to get better, frankly. I'm about as pessimistic as you could get. I don't see any reason for hope among Republicans. And frankly, I don't really see any leadership here from Democrats either. with the occasional exception of the very clear-eyed, thoughtful person like Ted Liu, for example.

When I testified before the House Judiciary Committee last year in the first hearing on this topic, frankly, all the other Democrats just wasted their time trying to get into the mud with diamond and silk about whether they'd been paid by the Trump campaign and whether the $800 that they received was an expense reimbursement or a payment or whatever. And Ted Liu alone on that committee, which is the judicial. committee, you would think. It would be, these are the people who handle impeachment. Just think about this for a minute. This should really disturb everyone who's listening here. The only serious lawyer on that, on that dais that day, was Ted Liu, who had the presence of mind to say, this is a stupid hearing. The federal government has no business regulating here. Why are we even talking about this? And they went

into a little back and forth with me about how if Facebook or Twitter decided only to show cat videos, would that be a violation of the First Amendment? Well, of course, not, right? You know, I'm just trying to illustrate how few people in Congress are capable of thinking clearly about substance anymore. And that's becoming rarer and rarer. You're not going to see a lot of that from Democrats. And I just fear that this topic is going to become ever more politicized. You're going to hear from people on the left. People like Tulsi Gabbard will decide that they can make hay out of it themselves. You've already seen Elizabeth Warren and another leading Democrats make a career against big tech a central part of their platforms, you see Democrats imposing

completely insane things like Amy Klobuchar, very thoughtful lawyer. Somehow, her takeaway from the last few years is that we should flip the presumption in antitrust cases so that you have to prove that your merger will benefit consumers. Well, we already know how that works. We know that, because that's how things work at the Federal Communications Commission today, and we We already know that that allows the FCC under both Democrats and Republicans to hold companies hostage, extract from them whatever concessions the company will give them for whatever pet issue. That has nothing to do with the merger. Just think about how the Trump administration would use that. Think about how they would have used that power when AT&T was trying to buy Time Warner and the administration was clearly trying to put the hurt onto CNN.

Well, they clearly used that power to extract. some kind of change at CNN or maybe require CNN to be spun off, right? So you would think that Democrats would be asking themselves, well, you know, how would Trump abuse this power? And yet they're not. And that, I just find that so discouraging that, you know, these are people who should be talking about as one of their articles of impeachment, the abuse of the antitrust laws against CNN. And instead, they want to help Trump abuse the antitrust laws. I just, I have no reason to think that we're going to see any adult leadership here from anyone. Yeah.

I usually try to end on a hopeful note, but I feel like... There's no hope. That was about as much the opposite as you can get. So how should people think about this conversation going forward? What's your recommendation for the listener who is going to hear a lot more shit from the dead cruises of the world, whose relationship to language, I have to say, is getting increasingly abstract. What's a good framework to sort of approach all the stuff that's coming out?

Yeah, that's a great question. So the first thing is just to calm down. So tech policy has become ever more hysterical. And it's led to people just not thinking these things through and thinking that the sky's about to fall, the internet's about to die because of some, you know, whatever change is being made. And once you start down that road, you've set up a dynamic by which anybody can demagogue any issue. So I think the first thing would be to just calm down, turn off the short comments that you get from headline that you see. from one sensationalist writer on whatever topic. And try to listen to content like this, right?

I think what you do is the sort of long-form discussion, especially where you have two people on from different sides of an issue to talk it through. I think that's really the only way to understand what's really going on in these issues. And anything else is inevitably just going to be high-level partisan, sensationalist bullshit. And I've been doing this now for almost

12 years. And I really have seen our field be on the cutting edge of the way that the media landscape has changed more generally. And I think it's going to get even worse for us than for other areas of tech policy or other areas of policy, other areas of debate. And yet we do have some other media we can turn to, right? We don't have to just listen to the sort of debates that you get very, very high-level soundbites that we've heard at the Democratic debates, where the format of cable news forces everything to be, you know, 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 30 seconds, just whatever you do, do less of that and listen to more long-form discussion. And wherever you can, seek out people that you don't think you agree with.

Try to hear out both sides. A show like the communicators on C-SPAN does a really good job of that. And I just, I love the fact that you're making an effort to do that. Well, it is a strange time. And it's funny, you know, we've been covering tech policy on the verge. on the verge cast for, I think we've been doing some form of the verge cast for a decade. And it is absolutely wild to be that net neutrality or, you know, tech policy like it has gone from being the thing I annoyed everyone with and bored everyone with because I was interested

in it and everyone had to sit through it to being the thing. And that, again, to me is, okay, great, you know, a decade worth of work has paid off. But very surprising and a little bit concerning. But, you know, maybe it's not entirely bad if people are paying more attention. Baron, where can people find you in Twitter? I'm Baron S-E-R-I-N-S-Z-O-K-A. You can follow us at Tech Freedom. We also have our own podcast called The Tech Policy Podcast, easy to remember. And we really make a point of having people on from all sorts of perspectives.

So you're not just going to hear me. You hear people from all over the political spectrum talking about a wide range of tech policy issues. And we try to have people on from both sides of an issue where we can to discuss it or do two separate episodes on a topic. So my colleague Ash hosts that show. She's great. Follow us there. Follow us on Twitter. And you can subscribe to our email list if that works for you.

But just remember that we try always to come out not with a hot take or the quickest take, but to cut to the heart of an issue and to dig down deeper than other people will. All right. Well, we will have to get back together and actually do an entire show, whether on yours or ours on that neutrality. Because I think that's a fruitful discussion. but I've kept you for so long. I really appreciate the time. We've got to get out of here.

Thank you so much, Baron. Thanks. All right, my thank you to Baron Soka, president of Tech Freedom. That was a great conversation. I'm actually off the chat show this week. Taking a little break for the end of the summer. But the chat show with Dieter and Paul

will be on Friday and we'll be back next week, Tuesday with another interview, within a chat show, then an interview, and we're just going to keep going right into the heart of gadget season. It's coming. Talk to me. I'm at Reckless on Twitter.

Love to hear from you. We'll see you soon.