This Week in Startups - All-In E10: Twitter & Facebook botch censorship (again), the publisher vs. distributor debate & more

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

Follow the crew: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast

Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody welcome. Besties are back. Besties are back. It's another all-in podcast, dropping it to you, unexpectedly, because there's just so much news. A surprise bestie pod. But dropping a bestie, it's not a code 13. We're not dropping any Snickers bars today. Just dropping a bestie. Oh, no, he's got a megaphone. Oh, no. He's got two. It's a special censorship edition. Warning, warning.

We hit a new law in terms of people needing to be heard. Oh, my God. By the way, Tramoth, Sax's agent and his chief of staff called me. He felt like he only got 62% of the minutes in the last two podcasts versus the rest of us. And so I'm dealing with his agent a little bit. It's like the debates where they count the number of minutes. Who, Daniel? Is Daniel grinding you for more minutes?

I go for quality over quantity. Absolutely. Okay. Well, this week's going to be, I mean, what a complete disaster of a week. Is there no other way to explain what is happening right now? Every day is a dumpster fire. It's a huge dumpster fire. So here we are.

we're three weeks out from the election and somebody's emails have a democrat's emails have been leaked again potentially but last time um we had an investigation by the FBI and then that might have impacted impacted the election this time we have a whole different brouhaha apparently hunter Biden who loves to smoke crack and has a serious drug problem. This is, you know, he's a seriously, obviously troubled individual. But he brought three laptops to get them fixed and never picked them up. According to this story in the New York Post. So the New York Post runs a story with an author who is kind of unknown.

And this, these laptops were somehow the hard drives, he never picked. them up. That's a little suspicious. The hard drives wind up with Rudy Giuliani and the FBI. And anyway, what they say is that Hunter Biden, which we kind of know is a grifter who traded on his last name to get big consulting deals. I don't know what board anybody here has been on that pays $50,000 a month, but it's obviously gnarly stuff. But the fallout from it was the big story. I went to tweet the story and it wouldn't let me tweet the story. So the literal, York Post was banned by Twitter. At the same time, Facebook put a warning on it. So let's just put it out there. You know, Sacks, your guy's losing pretty badly in this election. And so we'll go to our

token, GOP. What do you think is this? Let's take this in two parts. One, what do you, what did they think the chances that this is fake news or real news or something in between? And then let's get into Twitter's insane decision to block the URL. Yeah. I mean, so first of So I think this whole thing is a tragedy of errors on the part of sort of everyone involved. I think the New York Post story stinks. I don't think it meets sort of standards of journalistic integrity. We can talk about that. But then I think, you know, Twitter and Facebook overreacted.

And I think that the story was well in the process of being debunked by the internet. And it was like Twitter and Facebook didn't trust that process to happen. and so they intervened. And now I think there's going to be a third mistake, which is that conservatives are looking to repeal Section 230. We should talk about that. And so there's been a cascade of disasters that have led to this dumpster fire. But starting with the story, it is very suspicious.

First of all, these disclosures about Hunter Biden's personal life, they didn't have to go there, was completely gratuitous to the article. it was sleazy. And then, of course, this story about how the hard drive ends up with the reporters makes no sense. Even today, Giuliani was making up new explanations for how it got there. It's now being widely speculated that this was the, that the content came from the result of a hack,

maybe involving foreign actors, that this whole idea that it came from this sort of hard drive that he left at a repair shop and forgot to pick up. I mean, so that that's now, you know, I think that would have been. the story today if it weren't for Facebook and Twitter making censorship the story. And then the final thing is, you know, this story wasn't a smoking gun to begin with. I mean, the worst thing it showed was that there was a single email between a Burisma exec and Joe Biden.

And the Biden campaign is denied that Joe Biden never met with this guy. And so it wasn't ever this smoking gun. And that makes it all the more. apparent why Facebook and Twitter sort of overreacted. It was almost like they were trying to overprotect their candidate. That's the thing that obviously looks crazy. They now have given the GOP, the right, the extreme right, the belief that the technology companies are now on the side of the left, whereas last time they were on the side of the

right, I think, right? Facebook was supposed to be on the side of the right last time. So, Shabat, you worked at Facebook famously for many years. What are your thoughts? Well, Jack came out last night and basically said that the reason that they shut down distribution was that it came from hacking and doxing or some. I think that was basically a combination, yes. A combination.

And then Facebook today came out and said, you know, before we could take it down, it had been distributed or read 300,000 times. I mean, look, if we just take a step back and think about what's happening here, there are more and more and more examples that are telling, I think, all of us, what we kind of already knew, which is that this fig leaf that the online internet companies have used to shield themselves from any responsibility, those days are probably numbered. Because now, exactly as David said, what you have is the left and the right looking to repeal Section 230. And by the way, two days ago, I think it was, Clarence Thomas basically put out the

entire roadmap of how to repeal it. And if you assume that Amy Coney-Barritt gets, you know, put into the high court in a matter of days or whatever, it's only a matter of time until the right case is thoughtfully prepared along those guardrails that Clarence Thomas defined. And it'll get, you know, fast-tracked through to the Supreme Court. But if I was a betting man, which I am, I think that Section 230 is their days are numbered. And Facebook, Twitter, Google, all these companies are going to have to look more like newspapers and television stations. Okay. So before we go to your Friedberg, I'm just going to read what Section 230 is. This is part of a law basically designed to protect common carriers, web hosters of legal claims

that come from hosting third-party information. Here's what it reads. No provider, a user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. So what this basically means is if you put a blog post up and people comment on it, you're not responsible with their comments. Or if you're medium and you host the blog, you're not responsible for the comments of that person. It makes complete logical sense.

The entire internet was based off of this that platforms are not responsible for what people contribute to those platforms. That's how publishing works. If you look at the Internet's paper. But again, let's build on this. When that law was originally written, we had no conception of social distribution and algorithmic feeds that basically pumped content and increased the volume on those things.

So what you have now is really no different than if, you know, you created a show on Netflix or HBO or CBS and put it out there. If that stuff contained, you know, something that was really offensive, those companies are on the hook. Did they make it? No, did they distribute it? Yes. And it's the... But here's the difference. It's the active...

But it's the active act of distributing it. You cannot look at these companies and say they are basically holding their hands back. They have written active code. And there is technical procedures that they are in control of that are both the amplifier and the kill switch. But isn't this a bad analogy, Netflix? Shouldn't it the analogy be the person who makes film stock? Or the person who makes the camera?

where the person who develops the film, not the person who distributes. No, because that, a limited amount of shows on Netflix. You can police all of them. You can't police everything written. Netflix is making editorial decisions about which shows to publish,

just like, you know, a magazine makes editorial decisions about which articles to publish. They are clearly publishers. But the, the communication DCX section 230, the original distinction, I mean,

if you want to think about like an offline terms for a second, You've got this idea of publishers and distributors, right? That's a fundamental dichotomy. A magazine would be a publisher. The newsstand on which it appears is a distributor. It shouldn't be liable. If there's a libelous article contained in that magazine, you shouldn't be able to sue every single newsstand in the country that made that magazine

available for sale. That was the original offline law that was then kind of ported over into Section 230. It made a lot of sense. this, I mean, I think it was a really visionary provision. It was passed in 1996. Without that, every time that somebody sends an email that, you know, potentially created a legal issue, you know, Gmail could have been liable. Freiburg, is it, what's the right analogy? When people post to the internet, is that the, is the analogy paper or film stock? Is it the newsstand or is it the publisher? So remember, like what Sachs is pointing out is this was passed in

1996. So think back to 1996, when you would create some content, right? And the term around that time was user generated content, right? You guys remember this, like the early days. It was like the big sweeping trend. UGC. And it was like, the big sweeping trend was like, oh my God, all this content is being created by the users. We don't have to go find content creators to create, you know, a reason for other consumers to want to come to our websites. So users could create content. You know, blogger was an early kind of user generated content service. You could create a blog post. You could post it and people would show up.

The problem with blogger or the challenge was distribution or syndication, right? How do I, now I've posted my content. How do I, as that content creator, get people to read my content? And you'd have to send people like a link to a website, a link to a webpage, and you click on that link, and then you could read it. What Chimatha is pointing out is that today, Twitter and Facebook make a choice about, and YouTube make a choice about what content to show. And so, you know, I think the analogy in the offline sense via the algorithm is what you're saying to be clear. By the algorithm.

And, you know, YouTube realized that if they showed you videos that they think that you'll click on, they'll keep you on YouTube longer and make more money from ads. So it keeps the cycle going. And so they optimize content. And it turns out that the content that you need to optimize for to get people to keep clicking is content that is somewhat activating to the amygdala on your brain. It's like stuff that makes you angry or makes you super pleasured, not just boring, ordinary stuff.

And so this sort of content, which the New York Post sells a lot of, is the sort of stuff that rises to the top of those algorithms naturally because of the way they operate. Now, if a magazine stand were to put those newspapers using the offline analogy on the front of their magazine stand and told people walking by the street, hey, you guys should check these out. You know, top of the news is Hunter Biden's spoken crack with a hooker. People would, you know, probably stop. But I think the question is, should they be liable?

Now, in I think 2000, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed, and that act basically created a process by which folks who felt like, and it was related to copyright, but I think the analogy is similar. If you thought that your content was copyrighted and was being put up falsely or put up without your permission, you could make a claim to one of those platforms to get your content pulled down. And I think the question is, is there some sort of analogy around liable content or false or misleading content that maybe this evolves into law, where there's a process by which

platforms can kind of be challenged on what they're showing, much like they are with the DMCA takedown notices. So, I think the problem, the problem comes back to the code. If you explicitly write code that fundamentally makes it murky, whether you are the publisher or the distributor, I think that you have to basically take the approach that you are both. and then you should be subject to the laws of both. If, for example, Twitter did not have any algorithmic redistribution amplification, there were the only way you could get content was in a real-time feed

that was everything that your friends posted and they stayed silent. You could make a very credible claim that they are a publisher and not a distributor. Which, by the way, is the way it originally worked, and it was why they were falling behind Facebook, as you well know, because you worked on the algorithm. You cannot claim that you're not a distributor when you literally have a bunch of people that sit beside you, writing code that decides what is important and what is not. You can debate which signals they decide to use, but it is their choice.

Well, but if the signals are the user's own clicks, then I would argue that's still just user-generated content. No, no, it is a signal, David, but that's not the only signal. For example, I can tell you very clearly that, we would choose a priori stuff that we knew you would click on. It wasn't necessarily the most heavily clicked. We could make things that were lightly clicked, more clicked. We could make things that were more click, less clicked. My point is, there are people inside the bowels of these companies that are deciding what

you and your children see. And to the extent that that's okay, that's okay. Wait, wait, maybe we've actually solved this problem, Sacks, in that if we said, if you deploy an algorithm that is not disclosing how this is going, then you are, ergo, a publisher. And if you are just showing it reverse chronological, our chron, as we used to call back in the day, with the newest thing up top, that would be just a, I mean, so maybe we should be not getting rid of 230. We should be talking to these politicians about algorithms equal publisher. So the publisher at the New York Post is the same as the algorithm.

them. I like this as a better framework. Well, yeah. So Senator Tom Cotton, you know, who's a Republican, he tweeted in response to the New York Post-censorship, look, if you guys are going to act like publishers, we're going to treat you like publishers. So that's not modifying Section 230. That's just saying you're not going to qualify for Section 230 protection anymore if you're going to make all these editorial decisions. I would argue that these decisions are making about censoring specific articles. And by the way, it's a total double standard because, you know, when Trump's tax returns came out the week or two ago. Where was the censorship of that? That was wasn't that

hacked material. I mean, that was material that found its way to the New York Times without Trump's consent. By the way, so were the Pentagon papers. I mean, you cannot apply this standard, this idea that we're going to prohibit links to articles. But you're proving the point. These people are publishers. Well, well, hold on. I'm saying, I'm saying if they make editorial decisions, their publishers. I think there's a way for them to employ speech neutral rules and remain distributors. So I would have a little bit of an issue with you. I would say the reason why they're going to fall into this traffic coming publishers is because of their own desire to censor, their own biases. They can't- I don't think that's what it is. I think it's purely market

cap-driven. If you go from an algorithmic feed to a reverse chronological feed only, I can tell you what will happen, in my opinion, which is that the revenue monetization on a per page per impression basis will go off by 90%. 90% for sure. People wouldn't. That is the only reason why these guys won't switch because they know that for every billion dollars they make today, it would go to $100 million in a reverse chronological feed because you would not be able to place ads in any coherent, valuable way. There would be zero click-throughs and the ads would be just worthless. Otherwise, they should do it now. If you could keep all the revenue and you could be reverse chronological, right, and have the same market cap, just do it and be under safe harbor so that you're not attacked every day. How fun is it to be sitting there and being attacked every single day? By both sides.

And by all the libertarians in the middle. The reason they don't do it is because of money. Let's just be honest. That's the only reason they don't do it. It's all market cap driven. maybe they should go back to just kind of the straight reverse con feed and maybe you're right that the algorithm i mean i think you probably are right that the algorithms um are make the situation worse because they kind of trap people in these bubbles of like reinforcement and they just keep being fed more ideological purity and it and it definitely is fueling the polarization of our society so i'm not trying to defend i mean i think maybe you have a point that we should get rid of these algorithms but but just to think about like the publisher aspect of it going back to the news

stand example. Let's say that the guy who works at the newsstand knows his customers and pulls aside every month the magazines that he knows that his clientele wants. And in fact, sometimes he even makes recommendations knowing that, oh, okay, you know, Chamath likes, you know, these three magazines. Here's a new one. Maybe he'll like this and he pulls it aside for you. That would not subject him to publish her liability, even though he's doing some curation. He's not involved in the content curation. I would argue that if the algorithms proceed in a speech neutral way, which is just to say they're going to look at your clicks and then based on your own revealed preferences, suggest other things for you to look at, I don't think that makes you a publisher

necessarily. And I think if it was that. But if you do, if you do put your finger, if these engineers are putting their thumb on the scale and pushing the algorithm towards certain specific kinds of content, that may cross over. No, no, no, no. You're being. you're being too specific. And it's not that extreme and it's not as simple as you're saying. The reality is there are incredibly intricate models on a per person basis that these companies use to figure out what you're likely going to click on, not what you should, not what is exposed to you, not what you shouldn't, but what you likely will. And that's part of a much broader maximization function that includes revenue as a huge driver. So the reality is that these guys are making, publishing,

decisions. And you are right, David, that, you know, the law back in the day, it didn't scale to the newspaper owner. But you know what? In 1796, you know, colored people were three-fifths of a human. And we figured out a way to change the law. So I'm pretty sure we can change the law here, too. And I think what's going to happen is you should be allowed to be algorithmic, but then you should live and die by the same rules as everybody else. Otherwise, that is what's really anti-competitive is to essentially lie your way to a market advantage that isn't true, just because people don't understand what an algorithm is. That's not sufficient to me. But they're not actually in the content creation business, right? And so what's the definition

of a term publisher in that context? Because in all other cases, publishers pay for and guide and direct the editorial creation of the content versus being a kind of discriminatory function of that Here's the problem. Let's take, for example, Instagram Reels. Can you manipulate content through reels? Yes. Now, as the person that provides that tool to create content that theoretically could be violating other people's copyright or, you know, offensive or wrong or whatever, and then you yourself distribute it to other people knowingly, the reality is that the laws need to address, you know, a mature way, the reality of what is happening today versus trying to harken back to the 1860s and the 1930s because things are just different. And we're smart enough as humans to figure out these

nuances and that sometimes we start with good intentions and the laws just need to change. Well, ironically, Chmoth, you're making a point that Clarence Thomas made, Justice Thomas made in his recent filing, where he said that if you are acting, as both a publisher and a distributor, you need to be subject to published reliability, which means peeling back Section 230. And moreover, you may not even be the primary creator of the content. If you're merely a secondary creator,

if you're someone who has a hand in the content, then you are a creator, you're a publisher, and therefore you should lose Section 230 protection. That is basically what he said. If your argument is that the algorithms make you a content creator effectively, And the tools. Algorithms and tools. Well, the other thing is, you know, you have the algorithm.

Because David, you have the tools, but you also have monetization, guys. There's monetization involved in the YouTube example. They are helping you make a serious conversation, Jason. Let's not, let's not go off on that. No, I'm just kidding. No, but Jamath, I mean, this goes back to the politics makes strange bedfellows point. I mean, I think a lot of the conservatives are actually making the point you're making, which is that these social media sites are involved.

in publishing. I don't want these guys involved in any of this shit because I don't trust them to be neutral over long periods of time. So do you trust their decision to pull down QAnon groups and what they call hate groups? Just like it took years for us to figure out that Holocaust denial was wrong.

Anti-vax was marginal. Q-Anon was crazy. Like wearing masks was a good idea, right? I don't want these people. in charge of any of this stuff and to the extent that they are, I want them to be liable and culpable to defend their decisions. So, Chmach, your ideal non-profit social media service would be a chronological feed of any content anyone wants to publish that anyone can browse and read. That's not what I'm saying, David. What I'm saying is that you have to be able to live with the

risk that comes with, you know, playing in the big league and wanting to be a 500 plus billion dollar company, there is a liability that comes with that and you need to own it and live up to the responsibility of what it means. Otherwise, you don't get the free option. What if they didn't take a hand in it and they follow the dig, the Reddit model, and it's just upvoting that decides what content rises to the top? I suspect that. So Reddit has just a different problem, which is a sort of like, you know, a decency problem and a different class of law. Who are we to judge decency, right? I mean, like, in the vein of like editorialism, like they're taking no hand in in what content rises to the top.

Well, they did ban certain topics. They did recently, but like, assume they didn't, right? And it was just purely like upvoted consumer and not algorithmic. I think it's very hard to pin. I think it's very hard to pin. I think it's very hard to pin a Section 230 claim on Reddit as easy as it is, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. And so if YouTube reverted to just, hey, what people are watching right now rises to the top,

and that was the only thing that drove the algorithm, you would feel more comfortable with YouTube not being. It's not comfortable. This is what I'm saying. All I want to know is what am I getting when I go here? And if what I'm getting is a subjective function where they are maximizing revenue, which means that I can't necessarily trust the content I get, as long as I know that, and as long as there's recourse for me, I'm very fine to use YouTube and Twitter and Facebook. What I think is unfair is to not know that there's a subjective function.

confuse it with an objective function, go on with your life, end up in this state that we're in now where nobody is happy and everybody is throwing barbs and you have no solution. Maybe I just want to be stimulated. Like I remember the day

when I would go to Facebook and Twitter and it was boring as hell. It's like just fucking random shit that people like here's a picture like, show me the best stuff. You know, like I now I go to Facebook and I'm like fucking addicted because it's showing me this.

And there's like shit that I've been buying online and the ads keep popping up up and I'm like, oh, this is awesome. And I keep buying more stuff. I think all of that is good, but it all should be done eyes wide open, where in these corner cases, the people that feel like some sort of right or privilege or has been violated or some overstepping has occurred, they should have some legal recourse and they should be on the record a mechanism to disambiguate all that. Wait, hold on.

Let me just ask this one question, David. Would this be alleviated if the algorithm was less. of a black box. If we could just say, hey, we need these algorithms to be. So that's not a solution. And then what is this? And I want to hear David is about, you know, about that algorithm and then also labeling because Facebook labeled stuff. And if labeling stuff, hey, this is disputed from a third party, that feels to me like that would have been a better solution in the Twitter's case. All right. Let me get in here. So I half agree with Tramoth. Okay. So the half I agree with is I don't want any of these people, meaning the social media sites, making editorial decisions about what I see,

censoring what I can look at. I don't trust them. I don't want that kind of power residing in really two people's hands, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. I don't trust them and I don't want them to have that kind of power. But where I disagree is if you repeal Section 230, you're going to make the situation infinitely worse because section two, what is the response to these companies going to be? Corporate risk aversion is going to cause them to want to hire hundreds of low-level employees, basically millennials, to sit there, making judgments about what content might be defamatory, might cause a lawsuit, they're going to be taking down content all over the place. And you know what will happen?

That's going to be a worse world. No, you know what will happen? Those companies will lose users, lose engagement, and new things will spring up in its place around these laws that work. How will they lose audience? I mean, I think what will happen is you have a torrent of lawsuits. Anytime somebody has a potential lawsuit. based on, you know, this reminds me of like trying to police speech at a dinner party.

Like our job has never existed at a scale. This has never existed at the scale. I don't think the goal is to work backwards from how do we preserve a trillion dollars of market cap. So what if that's what happens. I don't think that's what we're doing. So for me, I'm trying to work back from how do we preserve the open internet? But I think this is exactly what it's saying, which is here's a clear delineation in 2020

knowing what we know. you know, person, entrepreneur who goes to Y Combinator or to launch to build the next great company, here are these rules, pick your poison. And some will choose to be just a publisher. Some will probably create forms of distribution we can't even think of. Some will choose to straddle the line. They'll have different risk spectrums that they live on. And that's exactly how the free markets work today.

There's nothing wrong with that. Maybe the only disagreement here is that I think that code can be written and now can be written in a speech neutral way so that the distributors don't cross over the line to becoming publishers. I fully agree with you that these sites should not be publishers. The reason why the New York Post story has really taken off. They should be platforms. And they cross the line. I would say that this New York Post story is the reason why people are up and arms about it is because what Twitter and Facebook have done is basically said they're going to sit in judgment of the media industry.

And if a publisher like the New York Post puts out a story that doesn't meet the standards of Twitter and Facebook, they're going to censor them. That is a sweeping assertion of power. They're picking and choosing who they don't want to give distribution to. We all agree on that piece. They should not be the arbiter. That is what is triggering. But that is what is triggering the conservatives in particular, but everybody, but especially conservatives, to say they want to repeal Section 230. Nobody is safe.

nobody is safe. And it's less about, I actually think that there's a nuance point to this, which is it's less about what they think is legit or not, as much as what they think is important or not. They chose to make this an important article. They chose to kind of intervene in this particular case, when every day there are going to be hundreds of other articles that are going to be actively shared on these platforms that are by those same standards,

false with some degree of equivalency, false and shouldn't be on the platform. Absolutely. And it is the simple choice that they chose an article to exclude, regardless of the reason in the background, because there are many articles like it that aren't being excluded. And that alone speaks to the hole in the system as kind of sax is because they have too much power and they're unaware of their own biases. They can't see this action for what it so clearly was. It was a knee-jerk reaction on the part of employees at Twitter and Facebook to protect the Biden campaign from a story that they didn't like. I mean, because if they were to apply these standards evenly, they would have blocked the Trump tax returns for the exact same reason. By the way, just so you know. Jay Cal's about to block you so he can keep the Biden campaign strong and not have your I would say.

I've been red-pilled actually. The last 24 hours have been red-pilling for me. I got to say, David, I agree with you because like I thought, I thought that both things were crossing the line. Like, meaning either you publish them both or you censor them both. and there are very legitimate reasons where you could be on either side, but to choose one and not do the other, it just, again, it creates for me uncertainty,

and I don't like uncertainty, and I really don't like the idea that some nameless, faceless person in one of these organizations is all of a sudden going to decide for me knowledge and information. That to me is just unacceptable. The journalistic standard becomes a slippery slope to nowhere, right? Like at that point, you're just like what is true, what is not true, what is opinion, what is not opinion,

And what is, you know, how do I validate whether this fucking laptop came from this guy or this guy or this guy? It says slippery. How are you ever going to resolve that across billions of articles a day? Standards would be the answer. Yeah. New York Coast has lower standards. Right. And so let's look at how slippery the slope has become just a week ago.

I mean, literally a week ago, Mark Zuckerberg put out a statement explaining why Facebook was going to censor a Holocaust denial. Why he really went out on a limb, huh, David? Well, it's, look, I think, wow. No, no, no, no, no, no, but my point is, no, no, no, but my point is, no, but you're missing my point. My point is he actually put out a multi-paragraph, well-reasoned statement. Multi-paragraph. Your three paragraphs about the Holocaust is bad? Wow, congrats, no, no, no, no, what I'm trying to, you're not listening.

My point is that he took it seriously that he was going to censor something. And I think, you know, people can come down. You could be like a Skokie, ACLU liberal and oppose it. Or, you know, you could say, look, common sense dictates that you would censor this. But he felt the need to justify it with, you know, like a long post. And then one week later, we're already down the slippery slope to the point where, you know, Facebook's justification for censoring this article was a tweet by Andy Stone. You know, like that was it.

It was a tweet. That was the only explanation they gave. By the way, one of the reporters pointed out that if you were going to announce a new policy, you probably wouldn't want it done by a guy who's been a lifelong Democratic operative. You know, this was just so, and so it just shows that once you start down the slope of censoring things, it becomes so easy to keep doing it more and more. And this is why I think these guys are really in hot water. Whatever, whatever, you know, whatever controversy there was about Section 230 before and there was already a lot of rumblings in D.C. About modifying this, they have made things 10 times worse.

I mean, as someone who's actually a defender of Section 230, I would. wish Dorsey and Zuckerberg weren't making these blunders, because I think they're going to ruin the open internet for everyone. Super blundered. I'll tell you, what was an even bigger blunder for, or an equal blunder for me last night. I don't know if you guys had this experience, but I was trying to figure out what the consensus view on the Hunter Biden story was. And I went to Rachel Maddo and the last word and Anderson Cooper.

And there was a media blackout last night. I couldn't find one left-leaning or CNN, if that. is even in the center. I don't think they're the center anymore than the left. I couldn't find one person talking about Biden. I was like, all, let me just see if I tune in to Fox News.

And Fox News was only discussing the Biden story. And so this now felt like, wow, not only if you were one of these folks on the left, who's in their filter bubble on Twitter and Facebook, they're not going to see that story. And then if they tuned into Rachel Maddow or to Anderson Cooper or you go to the New York Times, it's not there either.

And then Drudge didn't have. it for a day. You're bringing up something so important. So think about what you're really talking about, Jason. There was a first order reaction that was misplaced and not rooted in anything that was really scalable or justifiable. Then everybody has to deal with the second and third order reactions. The left-leaning media outlets circle the wagons. The right-leaning media outlets are up in arms. Nobody is happy. Both look like they're misleading. And then now if you're a person, person in the middle, for example, what was frustrating for me yesterday was, it took me five or six clicks and hunting and pecking to find out what the hell is actually going on here. Why is everybody

going crazy? But that bothered me, you know? And so I just think like, again, it used to be very simple to define what a publisher was and what a distributor was in a world without code, without machine learning, without AI, without all of these things. I think those lines are bird. We have to, rewrite the laws. I think you should be able to choose. And then I think if you're trying to do both, by the way, the businesses that successfully do both will have the best market caps. But if you're trying to do both, you have to live and die by the sword. Yeah. It would be interesting also if, I don't know if you guys have done this, but I switched my Twitter to being reverse chronological, which you can do in the top right hand corner of the app or on your desktop, because I just like

to see the most recent stuff first. But then sometimes I do miss something that's trending, whatever, but I just prefer that because I have a smaller follower list now. But to Friedberg, your point, you kind of like the algorithm telling you what to watch. So a potential solution here might be... I'm not saying I like it rationally, by the way. I'm just saying, like, as a human, humans like it. I like it. Like, I like to be stimulated with titillating information and, you know, interesting things that,

for whatever reason, I'm going to, you know, want... Click on again. You like that experience and jumping down the resume. Well, my point is all humans are activated, and the algorithms, the way they're written, they're designed to activate you and keep you engaged. And activation naturally leads to these dynamic feedback loops where I'm going to get the same sort of stuff over and over again that it identifies activates me because I clicked on it. And therefore, I'm going to continue to firm up my opinions and my beliefs in that area. But I think showing me stuff that I don't believe, showing me stuff that's anti-sci— I mean, because I'm a science guy, showing me stuff that's anti-science, showing me stuff that's bullshit that I consider bullshit.

it, I'm not going to read it anymore. So if I'm reading just random blurtings by random people in reverse chronological order, it is a completely uncompelling platform to me and I will stop using it. And that leads back to kind of the, you know, Tumov's point, which is the ultimate incentive, the mechanism by which these platforms stay alive is the capitalist incentive, which is, you know, how do you drive revenue and therefore how do you drive engagement? And that's to give consumers what they want.

That's what consumers want. All right. Let's give Sacks his victory lap. he predicted last time that there was a possibility that Trump would come out of this like Superman and would do a huge victory lap. And sure enough, he considered putting a Superman outfit on under his suit. And he did a victory lap literally around the hospital. To listen to the rest of the podcast, search for All In with Chumath, Jason, Sax, and Friedberg,

available across all major podcasting platforms. Thank you.