TRIGGERnometry - Do We Need to Censor Hate Speech? - Imran Ahmed

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

Imran Ahmed is the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a British not-for-profit NGO company that aims to stop the spread of online hate speech and disinformation. Imran is a former political strategist for the Labour Party, serving under Andy Slaughter and then-shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn. With Angela Eagle, he co-authored the book, ‘The New Serfdom: The Triumph of Conservative Ideas and How to Defeat Them…’ available here: https://www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/the-new-serfdom Find Imran on X: https://twitter.com/Imi_Ahmed Start earning A Yield on Silver, Paid in Silver with Monetary Metals. Click here to find out more: https://bit.ly/3Rs8Rv2 SPONSOR: To get your new 3-month premium wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to https://mintmobile.com/TRIGGER Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer. follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. You know, your sort of thing of, well, I'm willing to tolerate the normalization of anti-Semitism. because some people were banned for saying that men can't be women.

Imran. I disagree with you. You can't disagree with something I didn't say. Should you be able to call for an armed revolution on social media? No, do you think they should? If we were living in the social media age in 70, 76, this country never would have been created. In what way is Donald Trump? Well, he was banned from all the social media platforms.

Were you worried about his ability to get his message out? Well, his ability to get his message out was definitely reduced. significantly, as you said yourself, when you ban people from something. You said it yourself. They lose reach, right? But it's sad to me that you can't defy it. No, no, no, sorry. Hold on a second. You're misrepresenting what I'm saying. Again, rewind and just listen.

Good. I hope people do that because they'll see what you're misrepresenting what I'm saying. For the main part, it's fucking obvious. I tell you what, you are being disrespectful to the people who do receive hate speech. Like me. I warn you that most of your listeners will think themselves, actually, Constantine's being a bit of a dickhead right now. And calling me a dickhead might be considered hate speech. No, no, it's not hate speech. It's just good observation.

Imram, welcome to Trigonometry. Great to have you on. You are the founder and CEO of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which is an organization that has, you know, some people love it, some people, it's like Marmite, some people love it, some people hate it, some people think it's very important, other people like Elon Musk are suing you. So we want to get into all of that. First of all, tell us a little bit about your background. What made you want to do that?

How did you even get to starting it? Sure. So the genesis of CCDH was in 2015, 2016. I was a political advisor to the right Honorable Hillary Ben MP, who at the time was the shadow foreign secretary. And of course it was that time when Jeremy Corbyn had taken over. the Labour Party. So in the winter of 2015, there was a decision taken by Parliament as to whether or not to join the United States and its allies in military action against the Islamic State

in Syria. Jeremy opposed that decision. Hillary supported it. I remember being in the office with him, talking about it, the reasons why. What really motivated him, what really motivated me, and I come from a Muslim background myself was reading and seeing the intelligence reports and the reporting by brave journalists about the murder of Yazidi women who were too old to rape in Mount Sinjar and Hillary gave what was, by all accounts,

a highly acclaimed speech. It led to that standing ovation famously in Parliament, which is quite unusual for those viewers that don't know how Parliament works. You're not allowed to clap, really. And the next day we received a mountain of abusive anti-Semitic comment saying, why are you fighting the Jews war for them? Which was bizarre, because what did it have to do with Jews?

This was actually a war of Muslims killing Muslims. And, you know, a ton of abuse and phone calls and everything else. And it seemed coordinated. In fact, we knew it was coordinated, and we could find the spaces where people were coordinating, the very specific ideas that they were promulgating on Facebook groups in other spaces. A few months later, like a piece of chattel, I was traded to Alan Johnson for,

when you're an advisor, you are basically chattel. I was given to Alan Johnson. He liked the look at me. He asked me to be powdered and brought to his office to be his advisor for the referendum campaign because, of course, Jeremy didn't want to lead that. And Alan stepped up. And during that campaign,

we saw a really high prevalence of hate. of conspiracy theories. There were stuff about election denial. There were people saying that if you voted in pencil to remain, to leave, that the election agents had been told to rub that out and put remain in pen. And so when people were walking into the election booths, they were literally waving their pens and people, you can't rub out my vote, mate.

But also there were much more pernicious lies being spread on social media platforms, including the lie that the EU was trying to bring in Muslims and black people. to rape 14 year old girls and destroy the white race. It's a variant of the Great Replacement theory, which we know has led to the massive loss of life in Christ Church of Muslims, in Pittsburgh of Jewish people. And then, of course, there was the assassination of Joe. So that's Joe Cox?

Yeah, I mean, Joe Cox was a 35-year-old mother of two who represented the constituency of Batley and Spen, and she was, I say the words every time, and I say them because it's important to remember just how inhuman the loss of her life was. She was shot, stabbed and beaten to death on the streets of her constituency by a man who believed these conspiracy theories and lies and had imbibed for years and years the lies that underpin hate. And he thought it was right to take the life of a young woman and did.

And at that point, I just thought, thought something is wrong. Something's profoundly wrong with our politics. Now, when he was killing her, it was reported at the time that he shouted Britain first death to traitors. Death to traitors was something that these groups like, you know, the people who are promulgating the Great Replacement Theory, they were saying that these people are traitors to Britain. But Britain first really struck a chord with me because about a year and a half earlier,

I'd been told that Britain first was the first political movement to achieve a million like on Facebook in the UK. When that happened, my response was, who gives this shit? They've got a million clicks, we've got half a million members. They've just got clicked to this. They're nothing.

And I was wrong. And what really came to me in that moment was the realization that conventional institutions like politics, like journalism, like the government, had forgotten, had not realized

that the primary locus of information exchange in 2016. The primary locus of where we set our social mores, our norms of attitude and behavior, where we negotiate our values, even where we negotiate, the corpus of information that we call facts had shifted to digital spaces,

and they worked to different mathematics than the normal world. The way that amplification works, the way that 50 people can create 5,000 notifications in 10 seconds, and create social proof from, nowhere, even though they are fringe and a disproportionately small number of voices. And I wanted to understand better how bad actors were weaponizing those spaces.

So I spent two years working on that. I quit my job, I did it, didn't get paid, I went and worked with the platforms. I said to them, look, guys, I'm finding all this stuff. And they were saying to be brilliant, come on in, tell us everything you've learned. It took me two years to work out that the entire policy-making process and stakeholder engagement process at the social media companies was an elaborate gaslighting scheme. And at that point...

What does that mean exactly? It just meant that it was never going to go anywhere. Like they were just, they were pretending to care and pretending to listen. The actual moment where it happened where I realized it was an elaborate gaslighting scheme is when I went into Meta with my friend Rachel Riley and we brought in a dossier of extreme, extreme anti-Semitism, which we'd found in a group that we had found in a group that that was named, it was called Truthers Against Zionism or something. And we took it in, we showed them, and they said, wow, this is amazing.

We've never seen this before. This is very serious. This is criminal level stuff. We're going to have to spend some time studying it. We can't take it down because otherwise we'll lose all this vital data. The thing is, I knew that they'd seen that group six months earlier, the very same executive, because Hope Not Hate it taking it into them. And a year earlier, because the Community Security Trust, the primary body that defends the physical security of Jews in Britain, had taken it into them.

So they were lying to me. And at that point, I just thought, well, this is going nowhere. So it's time for us to change tactics. And that's why we launched CCDH. We launched CCDH to create transparency, to create public awareness of the ways in which those platforms were being weaponised by bad actors, but also, crucially, that the platforms were in it too, that they were unwilling to do anything about it, because frankly, it was making them money. And at that time, we were developing our economic analysis and economic theory

of why hate and disinformation have become so profitable for both the producers and the disseminators of hate and lies. And why is it that they've become so profitable? Because they grab attention. And it's just as simple as that. Look, a social media company is, is just a billboard company. That's all it is.

It's nothing more sophisticated than that. 98% of the revenues of meta come from advertising. And, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is younger than me. He may be your ages. He's worth $100 billion. That's a depressing thing. He's built an amazing business model.

And the business model is amazingly clever. It's really parasitic. It doesn't actually produce anything. Everyone else produces the content. They just have an algorithm that reorders it. Because of course you can't see what 5.5 billion people are saying, right? Because that would just be nuts to have all those voices in your head. So instead, what they do is they reorder it.

And they reorder it based on engagement. And engagement really is driven by, you know, what gets more engagement is more violative content. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg himself once presented a chart, a graph, that showed on the x-axis was how violative the content was, essentially how close to breaking the rules. And the y-axis is engagement. And what you get is, as it's low, as it's innocuous content, very low engagement,

stays flat, stays flat, stays flat, and then you get to violative and it shoots up with an exponential curve. So they know that basically the most contentious content, the most near-violative content, the stuff that's breaking the rules, actually gets the most engagement. Now, if you amplify that, if you amplify based on engagement, you are therefore amplifying the most violative content, So you've got a mechanism that constantly is shifting the norms of our society because of frequency bias, because of how frequently we're seeing this content, towards the most violative content. And that has a net effect on societies over time. It changes them.

It makes them more fearful, more angry seeming, more brittle, more polarized, more hateful. And it undermines the values that underpin democracy. And for me, CCDH is one of the first of the breed of organizations that's looking at the macro level impact of these organizations, these companies, and the way they reorder our information ecosystem and saying, well, crumbs, what does that mean for democracy? What does it mean for our ability to just rob on us people and, you know, have a happy, cohesive society? Because that's a good thing, we think. Yeah, look, I agree with what you're saying. I guess my point is, who determines what is

towards his extremist content because let's go back to I didn't say extremist content I said violative this is their own definition so of course when you join any platform you sign up to their community standards right? Right. So I mean they have

community standards that say you can't promulgate hate you can't promulgate disinformation you can't do this you can't do that you can't do that and so they have made the definitions in fact with for example Facebook you know there's been discussions over time about whether or not Holocaust denials should be violative on their platform. And they've decided over time, I remember five years ago speaking to a very senior executive at

Facebook and he was saying absolutely never will we make this, abandon our platform. Because unless you ban it in the real world, we can't ban it on our platform. Now, that's not true. They have an absolute First Amendment right in the US to decide what's on their platform and what's not. But they made the choice over time to actually say, well, nope, we've changed our minds, we're going to ban it. And so they decide what's violative on their platform.

And of course, what defines for them what's violative is what advertisers will tolerate. And that is the crucial point, of course, is that advertisers are the one moral voice in there going, not really sure if we want to place adverts on a stream of Nazi videos. So it's the advertisers essentially who are in control is what you're saying, because it's the advertisers that hold the purse strings? Well, they have a considerable voice in it, but the control is held by, it's a negotiated thing, right? That's how civil society works.

I have my voice. I say it's disgusting to be giving a megaphone to hate an extremism and disinformation. They have their voice saying, well, people should have the right to speak out. The advertisers have their voice. Garments have their voice. That's the way that civil society works.

And generally speaking, when people, platforms have gone off the rails, you've seen those elements of society work together to try and change things. So, for example, when Elon Musk took over X. Now, Elon Musk, brilliant engineer, I certainly a very, very good CEO. I admire the way that he runs his companies, the way that he engineers processes in a really intelligent way and eeks out every bit of efficiency and value he can from them. But when he took over that platform, he said, it's a free speech zone. And he hadn't thought about it. He said, it's a free speech zone. You say whatever you want.

He let tens of thousands of people who've been banned from the platform under the previous regime, which is an incredibly lax regime, frankly. I would push back on that. I know plenty of people who got banned off Twitter, as it was then known, for saying things like men can't be women and women can't be men. That, to me, doesn't seem lax. That is a direct infringement of freedom of speech. I'm sure you can find a couple of people who, or maybe even thousands of people.

There's a lot of people. And Imran, just to make the point as well, there were a lot of people who were shadow banned as well. But let Imran also make his point first. I don't know how shadow banning works. And it's one of those things that I'm not quite sure if it's just a made-up thing or if it's real thing. But I mean, so with banning the people,

there are lots of people who are undoubtedly hate actors, spreading hatred against black people, LGBT-plus people, blah, blah, et cetera, et. And so when you let them back on the platform, we did a study to have a look at what happened, on the platform when he came in and signalled that what would be acceptable on his platform is hate content. There was a 202% increase in the use of the N-word on Twitter in the week after he took over compared to the daily rate for the year prior. Now, what that showed was that people had come on there and thought, well, I can get away with this. He'd actually shifted

the social morals, the norms of attitude and behavior. Now, we did a people who, of research that showed that to be true. We quantified it. It went on the front page of the New York Times and advertisers flooded out of his platform. He says it cost him $100 million in advertising loss. And he sued us for it. He sued us saying that we had the temerity to, he didn't actually sue us for defamation because we were right. What he sued us for was doing the research itself and then publishing the research. And that case was dismissed by the courts as a violation of First Amendment rights. And he has, in fact, in America, the way that civil litigation works is, if you sue someone and you lose, they still have to pay their own costs. In this instance,

the court actually awarded us costs as well. So it's an extraordinary judgment. Now, he is appealing it, which I'm very much looking forward to, because we raised a lot of money by saying that Elon Musk was suing us. And he'll have to pay our costs if he loses the appeal to. But that just goes to show you that these free speech, absolutists like Elon Musk, actually a very thin skin when it comes to us holding up a mirror to them, we weren't even criticizing. We simply held up a mirror. Advertisers took the action that they did because of course they absolutely have the right to say that we don't want our brands appearing next to the N-word or, you know, abuse of women or abuse of gay people or abuse of Jewish people or whoever else. And so that's the

way that this system works. Now, the problem is that, of course, what's become more difficult for this system, which is not self-regulating, but is systemically regulating, is that the platforms have been shutting down the primary means by which we're able to create checks and balances on them, and that's transparency. So whether it is Facebook, for example, buying the only system that was able to do systemic analysis of their platform, and then shutting it down, whether it's Twitter suing its critics or suing people that research it, whether it's TikTok, which in response to a study that we did showing that 13.2 billion people had viewed eating disorder content on their site using their own statistics. They shut down the area of their site that provided

those statistics. We know that these platforms are incredibly unwilling to actually engage a free and open discourse about how they run their platforms and the impact on society. I'm really glad we're having this conversation because, as we mentioned before we started, I think we're probably coming at this from different positions initially. But I think the one thing I've been saying for a long time is, first of all, no one who's in charge of a platform can be a free speech absolutist is not possible, because once you're in charge of a system where there have to be some rules, then absolutism is impossible.

Number one. Sure. Number two, I think my view is, I think we will look back on this period, of the the emergence of social media in a similar way to the way that we looked at tobacco companies

telling people that their product was good for them and they should be taking more of it and it doesn't cause any cancer. Hold on. That was another perspective.

But at the same time and I think this is really important for us to discuss I have definitely noticed since Elon Musk took over Twitter X, whatever you want to call it, that there's been more anti-Semitic content in my feed and in replies to me, et cetera, right?

And generally speaking, I have to say I'm pretty comfortable with that because what I've also noticed is that a lot of people who otherwise were not able to say things that they should have been able to say, in my opinion, were being censored, were being banned, et cetera. Those people are now back on the platform and able to say, whatever it is, men can't change sex, women can't, whatever it is. Right. So I think what we're talking about is how do you negotiate the conversation between that tension that's always existed in human communication between safety and freedom. You're grinning in me in a way that tells me you don't agree with what I'm saying. Oh, I just think it's remarkable that you're willing to tolerate the normalization of anti-Semitism to make a point about trans people.

I'm willing to tolerate people being hateful towards me. Towards Jews, you just said. Yes, I'm Jewish. Right. In order to make a point about trans. Not in order to make a point about it. That's not what I said. In order that people do not get banned off the platform for expressing what is a reasonable opinion about biology or sex or anything of that kind. I'm not personally aware of anyone being banned from any platform. Megan Murphy.

Megan Murphy is a gender critical feminist who was banned from Twitter. What is she banned for? For saying men can't change sex or women can't change sex. Okay. I accept that. And there are many other people like that. And if that was not in breach of their own rules, and they have the right to set their rules, right? Every platform has the right to those rules.

If it was not in breach of their rules, that's the wrong decision to take. It's one of the reasons why, for example, in our... So, just to be really clear, I mean, I think you've come at this from a very weird perspective when it comes to CCDH. Like, we don't want to send... I'm not having a go to... No, no, it's okay. I'm trying to explore the argument. I'm just finishing my argument.

So the problem is that we understand that people have a... I actually do think that people have a First Amendment... right to say whatever the hell they want. I don't have a right to say whatever I want on your program. So if I started chanting swear words right now, presumably you wouldn't broadcast it. How do you know? Well, we could give it a go if you'd like. Go for it. I'd rather not. Okay. I mean, I have somewhat of a reputation to uphold here. But, you know, the point is that in any space, a platform has a, can take decisions about what they accept what they don't. The problem is that the rules are badly enforced. Yes. Yes. If enforced at all.

And so here's our agenda. What we say is when it comes to these platforms that, and I agree with you, I think in 20 years time, we'll look at them like, you know, we looked at the way that tobacco companies lied about how they operated when, you know, when people said that having seatbelts would be an impingement on my freedom as a human being. And of course, they are now deroguer in all cars that that come out, that if you look at the damage that these platforms can do, both systemically in terms of the normalisation of hate and extremism, but also the most important work that we do, which is on children, and the damage that's been done to their mental health, and we've done enormously important studies on things like eating disorder, self-harm content, and also the

recommendation of steroid-like drugs and unachievable body images to young men, I think that we will look back on that and kind of think how on earth did we expose our children to an unregulated psychological experiment that's led to a global shift in mental illness amongst young people. But I do think that if you come back to the way that these platforms operate, there's no transparency in how they take decisions on how they enforce their rules. So the three components of transparency we want are algorithms. How do you choose which content wins and which content loses? Because that's what the algorithm is.

It decides who wins and who loses. And we know that what they want to win is the most contentious content, the most egregiously harmful content, hate, disinformation. Second thing is we want to have transparency on the advertising. So we understand how advertising vitiates the decision of what to present, how the advertising is presented within the system as well, because of course, increasingly what you get is a system which tries to mask advertising as organic content. The third thing that we want transparency on, and I think this is the most important one,

what are your rules, how do you enforce them, what rule did you apply to take this decision, and why did you come to that conclusion? Because anyone that's banned from a platform or have their post removed should be told you broke this rule. They don't do that. No, they don't. No, I don't. Which is what we were talking about, right? And I think that's dumb as hell. So I think that, you know, your sort of thing of, well, I'm willing to tolerate the normalization of anti-Semitism because some people were banned for saying that men can't be women.

I disagree with you on that. You can't disagree with something I didn't say. I disagree with you on men and women. But that's fine. And we can talk about men and women if you like. You just said that I said I'm willing to tolerate the normalization of anti-Semitism. That is not what I said. What did you say?

What I said is there has been an increase in anti-Semitism. It's not like there wasn't anti-Semites on Twitter before, right? I have seen more of that type of thing on my feed. There's not normalization. I'm not saying it's normal. What have you said after that? What I didn't say is I want the normalization of anti-Semitism because I want people to be able to be bigots against trans people,

which seems to be slightly what you're saying. I think if people go and rewind right now, they'll find that's exactly what you said. Here's the point. Here's the point. You don't have to balance. Imran, you got to let me finish the point. You don't have to balance. They can enforce their rules in terms.

There's no filibustering here. You're going to get plenty of time. You've got an hour more of our conversation. Let me finish my point. Let's actually discuss what you're saying and what I'm saying instead of these straw men that we make up. So I don't want the normalization of anti-Semitism, nor do I want people to be bigot against trans people.

Good. The point I'm trying to make to you is there is a relationship which has been acknowledged throughout the centuries, not just online, obviously, but in all sorts of communication about the relationship between the amount of freedom that we have on the one hand and the amount of safety that we have on the other hand.

When we open up the range of things that people can do or say, we necessarily decrease the amount of safety. That's the relationship that those two things have. So what I'm saying to you is someone like me was not comfortable with the amount of censorship that we saw on Twitter in the past. That does not mean that I'm also not against showing kids eating disorder content. We just had psychologist Jonathan Haid on the show to talk about the dangers of social media. We've had many people on the show to talk about that.

So when it comes to kids, when it comes to genuinely hateful content where it's like people are being cited to commit violence, etc. But I don't want somebody to be censored from saying, you know, you're a Jew and therefore you support this cause or whatever to me. And as a result, creating an environment in which people are really, really prevented from having debates about things like, you know, the trans issue, having debates around things like vaccine safety and efficacy. and having other conversations that really matter to our society.

That's the point I'm putting to it. And I agree with you. I think people should be able to have those debates. The question is whether or not these companies should be able to amplify particular voices to make them win or make them lose based on an algorithm which rewards only one thing which is engagement. You know, the freedom of speech is not the freedom of reach. It's not anyone's God-given right to be given a megaphone, nor is it anyone's God-given and right to be paid for that either. And with the way that platforms work, both the monetisation

of this content, and then the revenue sharing of that content, what you actually are incentivising is things like people who are performatively offensive. Agreed. Yeah. For the purposes of generating attention. You know, I think about the effort that you guys have put into putting this together, right? Both of you, you've, you put in thought and care into selecting your guests. You're trying to have a debate, an actual extension of human understanding. We're trying to have a conversation. A conversation, extension of human understanding and knowledge, bringing two people together and creating something bigger than just the sum of our two opinions, trying to create

insight, those flashes of things that really matter. That's admirable. That's not the game they're in. Don't for a second let Elon Musk persuade you that he's in the game of trying to extend human consciousness when it comes to Twitter. He's in the game of trying to make some money from advertising and he's failed catastrophically at it because he just didn't peg that it wasn't just about the number of eyeballs. He thought if I can optimize the number of eyeballs, I can make even more money. If I turn this into an ever-moving car crash, he thought, right, it's a billboard. company. I know what. I'll have car crashes. I'll put billboards on them. Everyone will watch them.

Bob's your uncle. Loads of money. It turns out people don't want to put adverts on car crashes. And that's what Twitter's become. It's become the equivalent of a billboard attached to a slowly unrolling brutal car crash in which the rights of thousands, millions, billions of people, women, gay people, Jews, Muslims, black people are constantly being diminished to amplify the voices of a small fringe of, frankly, lunatics. Who cares about your poops? Ali does? That's why Ali's science-backed gut health lineup helps support your family's regularity.

From daily probiotics to fiber gummies your kiddos will love. Find it all on ali.com. That's OLL.L-Y.com. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, care or prevent any disease. So the thing that I get really quite uncomfortable with in these conversations is the term disinformation, because we know, for instance, when we look at the pandemic, what was classified as disinformation at one point then becomes either accepted or scientific

consensus in a few years' time, particularly the issue of masks, for example, where it was proven that if you have a mask that is not an N95, it's a paper mask. It is of not a number. It is of no use. Of no use whatsoever. So that is my issue in round. That's something that I have real problems with going, this is disinformation within certain reason because you go, how do you know at this point? So let's break this down to three types of disinformation. And now I'll tell you what CCDH focused on as an organisation. So when I left school, I went to medical school. In 1996, I went to UCLMS, I did preclinical medicine there, the two years of theory, and then I quit before I did clinical because I hated it.

While I was there, up the road was Andrew Wakefield, writing the paper that said that MMR, the measles mumps, rebella vaccine, causes autism, which we know to be untrue based on fabricated data, and at the time he was being paid, was being paid by personal injury lawyers hoping to bring autism cases against vaccine companies on behalf of autistic parents. That paper caused real devastation, real damage, especially in the northwest of England where I come from. And kids were harmed immeasurably. Measles is still one of the biggest killers of children in the world today. Still.

And so I've had an interest in how lies a spread about vaccines for some time. When the pandemic kicked off, we saw three types of disinformation flowing. One was the stuff about whether it was China or a lab leak, don't care. Personally, I don't care. And we did not ever classify that as disinformation or not. It was just idle ramblings, as far as I could see. And mainly sort of like people, you know how people do on Twitter where they start talking about geopolitics? And they're not really talking about geopolitics.

They're just talking about whether or not they think China's mean or not. All right. The second type was people saying, you know, asking about things like school closures, masks. That stuff all seemed like, well, there's people who are complaining about the decisions taken by government. I think in a moment like this, I know how difficult it is in government. I've worked in politics. And I think to myself, it's kind of shitty and mean on those politicians who are having to make decisions based on insufficient information at pace. And I thought some of it was unfair that criticism, especially the sort of the with hindsight criticism of it.

It's a little bit unfair. Where we were really concerned, where all of CCDH's effort went in, was people who were fundamentally spreading untruths about vaccines or about the deadliness of COVID or about the intent of medics who were coming up with it. one of the biggest spreaders of disinformation about vaccines, for example, prior to the vaccine launching, were that left in the US because they were all calling it Trump's vaccine.

They said Trump's vaccine cannot be trusted. One of my favorite bookmarks on my thing is a press release that came up from the Trump administration decrying the Democrats for being vaccine deniers and anti-vaxxers because they said that they had done everything they could. So the truth is that that vaccine, you know, it was the disinformation. It was things like saying that the vaccine wouldn't work and so therefore you should take nebulized hydrogen peroxide. Now that might nebulize hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide is bleach. It's what you used to, I used to have blonde hair when I was 18. That's how I got my hair blonde. And nebulizing is if you're an asthmatic or you've ever had a lung condition, you will know

it is where you inhale particulates, so droplets. So they were saying, inhale droplets of bleach to cure yourself. That's the number one anti-vactor in America was suggesting that guy called Joe McCola. Joe McCola was working with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. very closely. Now, when we did a study showing that of that kind of disinformation,

12 people were behind it, and quite often they were profiting from that disinformation. So they were saying, don't trust a vaccine, nebulized hydrogen peroxide, and here you can buy it from my web shop, that was clear stuff. Those were snake oil salesmen, spivs, who were lying for personal

profit. And that I think is quite different to idle I think it's bollocks speculation. I think it's meaningless. It's like worthless mental effort. And I know that some people like doing it about whether or not it came from a lab or whether or not it came from a wet market

or whether or not, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. May I interrupt you very briefly? Just on that point. And Francis, sorry, I'm interrupting you. flow as well. I just think on that point, we ought to just take a moment to consider what we're saying here. COVID-19 killed more people than anything since World War II in terms of a single event. If it came from a lab in China, it's almost certainly came from a lab in China because they were doing gain of function research. You're messing around with viruses, including to make them more lethal, more viral, et cetera. You don't think we ought to know where this came from?

I'm pretty sure that that's going to be discovered through some of the best forensic pathologists, virologists and intelligence sources in the world. It will not be come up with by Barry from the pub down the road on Twitter. I am absolutely certain they have no insight. But that's not he was being censored. So that's why I say it's not disinformation. It's just idle speculation on Twitter, on social media. You're saying you don't care about it is interesting to me because on YouTube there were Harvard scientists who were saying it and being. I don't care what people say about it on social media.

I think that the eventual, the way that the process will work to derive the truth on that does not at any point involve a Twitter debate, a Twitter flame war between one side or another. Do you not think that the silencing of certain discussions on social media has an impact of what is happening in the real order. I don't think they should be silenced. Oh, you don't? Of course not. Yeah.

Why should people silence that discussion? Yeah. People can have... Look, I've sat in a pub and talked about nonsense before. I don't think people should silence you for talking nonsense. Even if I think it's nonsense, they might find it important or interesting. And they might find it satisfying to sort of, to be able to sort of point to a villain on it. That's not none of my business.

My business comes in when that impacts other people. fundamental human rights. You know, in America, there was, well, some people make this kind of, Elon Musk always says, like, your most fundamental and first right is your right to free speech. It's not. It's the First Amendment to the Constitution buddy. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Above that in the Constitution.

Life, the right to life. If your lies spread with intent, telling people not to take a vaccine that could save their lives, In order to sell them some janky pill that you sell on your web store, that to me is an act of absolute moral evil. There's just no doubt in my mind about it. And I think that platforms that say that you can't spread health disinformation should enforce their rules and ensure that snake oil salesmen,

and there is a tradition of that in the US, should not be able to weaponize that moment, that moment of incredible anxiety for many people, when they are vulnerable. But do you know what, Imran, the same, look, and I'm in agreement with you. I think those people are willfully doing that, and look, that's one thing. But your argument could be used against people, for instance, like the US government who were pushing out vaccines and saying, everybody needs to take the vaccine,

when the data was showing that if you were a young man of a certain age, you didn't, or a young person of a certain age, the risks of COVID were negligible. And actually, it was probably more dangerous to take the vaccine. They were saying to take, you know, the AstraZeneca vaccine was completely safe. It has now been withdrawn because of blood clots. Do you see what I'm saying? What can be seen as disinformation at one point can be changed at another point. Again, I mean, I make the point that I'm talking about the spreading of deliberate health.

And you're talking to me about things which I think that, you know, really, really exercise you when I get that. I don't see what that's got to do with the work that we've done. I think the very nuanced and careful way that we differentiated between disinformation and just discussion is really, really vital. I think people can take a lesson from the way that CCDH did it, because actually we focused on the people who are profiting from the pandemic by spreading disinformation deliberately that would lead to the loss of life for millions of people. You know, 200,000 people in America were calculated by Microsoft AI and Johns Hopkins University. Professors that I know there very well, incredible specialists.

200,000 people died unnecessarily in the US because they failed to take a vaccine that would have saved their lives, that they were too late. Many of them died in ICU's in America, choking to death, begging for a vaccine that they had once thought would harm them, but in fact would have saved their lives. but it was too late for them to take it because they were already on the cusp of death. And they did go on to die. That to me is an atrocity that simply, you know, if you think about 9-11, so one of the signal moments in my life, it was the day before my 23rd birthday in 9-11. I used to work for Merrill Lynch. I used to work in banking.

You know, after I quit med school, I just wanted to go and make some money. And that was the first time I ever felt. morally motivated to do something with my life beyond for myself. So I quit my job. I went to Cambridge. I studied politics. I worked in politics for 10 years after that, hoping to make sure that we didn't have a world in which these kinds of things happen again.

That was off the back of 7,000 people being killed on 9-11. 200,000 died after COVID. And our perspective, you know, we have done very, very little to clean up the fact that the way that those lies were spread was intermingled along legitimate debate, legitimate debate, debate that people should be able to have about where it came from,

gain of function research, whether or not masks are a good idea or not, whether or not the evidence supports, whether or not kids should be off school, whether or not young people should be encouraged to take the vaccine, I think on balance probably they should have been because there is the risk of transmission to adults

and that can kill the adults, or certainly elderly people, And so like on those, but when it comes to spreading lies deliberately, I think that we showed, we showed exactly how to have that, how to differentiate between the two. Because the other problem with this is, and I'm finding out here for myself, like people go, well, look, they banned Alex Jones. They bound Alex Jones off every single platform. Has that reduced Alex Jones's reach?

Alex Jones has a huge audience that he influences. The same with Andrew Tate. Elon brought him back to X. But apart from that, Andrew was banned off every single platform and he has found a way in order to put his content out there. So I guess my question to you is this. Does banning people off social media actually reduce their reach because the two examples that I've given you would say otherwise?

Yeah, well, every empirical study that's ever been done shows that it works, whether it's the US government studying the de-platforming of ISIS or CCDH's own research. Sometimes we have to do this research to go and check as to whether or not we're having an effect. And so we accidentally, we put out a report on

who's the guy from Liverpool, David Ike. Yeah. A couple of four years ago, just sort of laying out what he says. Yeah. And how he was monetizing it. And the next day, Facebook and a few of the platforms banned him.

And we looked at his reach and his reach collapsed catastrophically. There's no way of them replicating it. Tate's a very interesting example. So Tate has really innovated a system whereby he's built a cadre of people who will go and post his content for him. So he's finding ways around it. It's quite smart.

I mean, he's a very organized and intelligent man. Yeah. You know, spreading hate against women. And some really, I think it's hateful against men too. because it's so desiccated his worldview of how men and women should interact. You know, I'm married and I got married later in life. I don't think I've ever understood

how joyful it is to be in something that's more than the sum of its parts as much as a marriage is. And he's trying to steal that from every young man out there because he's telling them the only way to be in a relationship is to dominate. It's a zero-sum game of domination versus submission. Go fuck yourself. The fuck is wrong with you. Why would you tell young boys that?

What a terrible thing to tell them. So yeah, I think he's a piece of shit. And I think that his voice has been diminished somewhat, but he has found ways around it. And of course, I find that vexing. I think that if he does break the rules, that he shouldn't be allowed on those platforms. And platforms should do their utmost to make sure that this guy who monetizes hatred is not rewarded for it. You know, I almost wouldn't care if the algorithms didn't amplify his stuff deliberately. We found that, for example, if you set up an account on TikTok as a 14-year-old boy, within 2.4 minutes it was serving up Andrew Tate content. That's a deliberate editorial decision by the algorithm and by the company to actually to advantage that discourse, to advantage

his speech over other speech. So, yeah, I mean, I'm quite pleased that he was de-platformed. I'm I think he has found ways around it. And I think platforms should be working harder to make sure that he can't profit from his nonsense. Let me just make a point, I think, where there is an element of us talking past each other, which reflects the broader debate on these issues, actually, I think, of us talking. Sorry for swearing. It's all right. You're allowed to swear.

We won't censor you on here. But my mum might be watching. I like my mum. She turned off a long time. She does. She really does. She sends me little memes of what I've been saying. Like little WhatsApp messages like, Imran Armand says.

Because it keeps interrupting. You didn't raise them well. She knows that. You really do. Sorry, Imran. So the bit where I think people are talking past each other in this conversation, this debate more broadly, is this.

You're making some very good points that we agree with, which is there are certain types of content that should not be on platforms. They should be banned. And at the same time, what we are bringing to your attention, I think, is that there were other types of content that you don't focus on at this. CC, you don't focus on your organization, you don't, right? But there were also being censored. They were being prevented from being talked about.

And the concern of people like us is that sometimes when people are keen to make sure that the internet is, quote, as safe as possible, they go very far and they censor things that should never have been prevented from being discussed. A lot of that happened during the pandemic. A lot of things should have been banned during the pandemic from being spread around. I agree with you. But at the same time, a lot of things were prevented from being discussed. On cultural issues, there are people who are being prevented from expressing perfectly

reasonable mainstream opinions that we should be able to talk about. And on and on a go. So I think part of the reason we're having this disagreement is kind of where we are in society. You've got one group of people saying, there's all this terrible things on the internet. This should be banned. And actually, most people agree. And then there's also the other angle, which is we should be able to discuss most things in a sensible way. And this isn't specifically about the Centre for Countering Digital.

Hey, we're having a more broad philosophical discussion here. I do recognize some of the sort of the hysterical kind of like, you know, performative virtue signaling of those people who want to shut down voices. I see them with a de-platforming at universities and stuff like that. I do, you know, I had the privilege of going to Cambridge and hearing voices from every part of the political spectrum in my education. I read everyone from the chief jurist of the Third Reich, you know, through to Marx when I was studying politics there. And it all contributed to my education and understanding of the world around me.

So I'm a great believer in free and open discourse. Let me square the circle for you. So you and I agree, or we agree, that there are some voices that are being silenced, which we think are unfair, arbitrary, you know, vindictive decision, making, we think that there are some voices that should be because they're clearly out with the rules of those platforms and definitely out with, you know, 99.9% of the norms of our society. But we want to have visibility of that. We want it to be actually, what we're talking about is fairness. We're saying we want a fair system. The fair system is not going to be created in this

discourse here. I think that we'll get closer to understanding what fairness is. Let me just profit to you our solution as an organization. So this is what CCDH stands for. CCDH's primary goals are to ensure that every country legislates what we call the star framework. So the star framework says that if you have transparency of the algorithms, the enforcement decisions and the advertising, that allows for meaningful accountability in which you can ask them tough questions based on hard data and get real answers back from them. And you probably need some sort of body to do that accountability work. So whether it's offcom in the UK, the Digital Services Act implementation bodies in the European Union,

or Elizabeth Warren and Lindsay Graham, two people from very different parts of the political spectrum have an idea for an FCC for social media in the US. I think it's a grand idea, if they can get the data that can actually allow them to meaningfully hold them accountable. And then where they create harms that actually do impinge on other people's fundamental rights in a tortious, way, that actually might harm them, for example, whether it's eating disorder content or its content

about a hate content that leads to a terrorist attack, that they should be subject to the same laws as any other company or publisher, which is negligence law, defamation law. At the moment, these platforms under US law, under something called Section 230 of the Communications Decency at 1996, are not subject to those laws. So we're saying that they should be subject to the laws. So transparency, accountability, meaningful accountability, based on data with people who can ask them questions and get the answers back, and then where they actually cause harm, they should be subject to the same laws as everyone else, which is negligence law, which is defamation law, etc. In doing those things, what you actually then end up with is a safety by design culture. So a culture that thinks about, not just about maximizing their revenues, but also about creating healthy spaces for discourse, in which, which real discourse can happen.

And by having that transparency, you ensure that they don't go too far either in the wrong direction. So you end up with actually good spaces in which real discussion can happen. I read the newspapers every day still. I read a lot. And it's not like newspapers can't feature

banana's opinions that I would find repulsive, you know, politically, personally. That's good. That's healthy. If I hadn't read bonkers' opinions, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't feel as empowered as I do to be able to reject them in the first place or to give you a cultured and intelligent critique of them. So I do see the value of that discourse.

But we don't want, and we don't want, by the way, the platform, we don't want governments to give you a list of things you can and can't say on those things. That's nowhere in the Star Framework. What the Star Framework says is, let's have more informed speech about how these platforms work so that we can have a healthier spaces for those discourse and have a healthier society to fulfill the original promise of social media,

which was to create a truly global conversation in which humanity can actually extend its understanding and insight collectively, you know, negotiate a better understanding of who we are, where we, you know, and what's good and what isn't. So, Enron, I guess one of the things that I wanted to ask in that, and look, I think everybody is in here is in favor of greater transparency for these social media. social media companies. Too many of their choices are opaque. You can't get any answers from them.

And look, we're all in favor of that. I guess my question to you is, is how do you define harm? How do you measure harm? The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. At blinds.com, we've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs. We've covered over 25 million windows and have 50,000 five-star reviews to prove we deliver. Whether you DIY it, or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, we have you covered. Real design professionals, free samples, zero pressure.

Right now, get up to 50% off with minimum purchase, plus get a free professional measure at blinds.com. Rules and restrictions apply. In the people who are ingesting or being exposed to this concept. So the responsibility in the US, responsibility would be defined by negligence law. It's really, really simple. Every single company in America is subject to negligence law.

If, for example, the coffee company that, you know, you brought me a very kindly brought me a cup of coffee. If the coffee had been negligently, it was poisonous, say, right? And it kills 100 people. If it could be showing that they'd been negligent in the way that they'd put together their systems, put together their quality assurance, and they could be held liable for it. If, for example, TikTok knew that within 2.6 minutes of setting up an account as a 13-year-old girl, it was serving those content, it was serving themselves harm content.

within eight minutes eating disorder content every 39 seconds on average and that when you open an account with a name like Susan it gives you a lot of self-harm content if you call it Susan Lose Weight it gives you 12 times the amount of self-harm content because it knows that you're vulnerable which is actually the results of a research study

that CCDH did called Deadly By Design and if that leads to a child taking their own life and I have at this point met far far too many parents who've lost their children that way Ian Russell, the father of Molly Russell, the 14-year-old girl in England who took her own life, is on the board of CCDH. And, you know, if at that point they knew about it, they did nothing about it,

they can be held legally liable for it. That is where they could be held liable. Or, for example, if someone could show that a terrorist attack was plotted on their site, this is another real case. This is a real case of Israelis who took one of the platforms to court because of the way that a Hamas bomb, had been planned on their, Hamasatak had been planned on their site, operationalised on their site, fundraised on their site, they'd be able to proselytized their hatred on their site, and it led directly to someone being killed. At the moment, under US law, they can't be held liable.

The problem that we have at the moment isn't that these companies aren't being held liable, is that they've got specific get-out-of-jail-free cards saying they can't be held liable. And I don't understand why social media companies should not be subject to the same pressures that any other company are, which is that you have to abide by American negligence law. So who will decide it? The courts. What will they decide it based on? The entire corpus of decision making in negligence law, which is a very well-established, an extensive set of law that doesn't say that if one cup of coffee is poisonous, I can't sue them until they bleed. But if they do this on a systemic basis, because they just don't give a shit about the people that buy their stuff, then they can be held liable.

That's how negligence law works. Why can't they be subject to that? Or product design law, which says that if you create a product that is designed to be harmful, that you can be held liable for it. Well, I think that's what most sensible people would agree on, particularly those two examples that you gave. The serving up of harming harmful content for children and the other example. Well, not hate, but the example you gave is terrorism, actually.

There's a big difference between hate and terrorism. Let me give you an example, which I think is much, more difficult to adjudicate. Should you be able to call for an armed revolution on social media? I don't know. Do you think they should? Well, wouldn't that cause harm? Do you think you should? Would, let me ask you this question. We can play the argument forward logically. Should you be able to call for an... It depends on the context. It depends on the context. Well, wouldn't an armed revolution? Should an individual be able to? That's up to the platform. I don't know. I mean, should people be able to call for violence? Probably.

Probably not. If you can't do it on the street, should you be able to do it on Twitter? Should Twitter enforce the same rules as you would have anywhere else? Probably. The reason I asked the question. But the test that they will have to have is do we think this is likely to lead to real harm in the real world? Correct. And therefore, are we willing to take the legal risk tolerance of allowing that? So here's the reason I'm asking you the question. Undoubtedly, a large numbers of people calling for an armed revolution would lead to real world harm. In other words, people will be killed. There will be a civil war potentially or a revolution. And yet we're sitting here in Washington, D.C., in a place that was created by lots of people

getting together and publishing pamphlets and speaking in the town square and saying, we want to resist the tyranny of King George and we're going to have our own country and they fought a war in which many people died in order to get there. So if we were living in the social media age in 7076, this kind of She never would have been created. What do you mean? Would you mean what do I mean? People would have still said it, right?

No, they used the printing press to spread their message through pamphlets and all of this other stuff, which is exactly what social media is now. And people will still use social media to do that. Look, in the event of a tyranny, you know, of course people use social media to expose the tyrant, to call for action, to call for things to happen. Now, the question is whether or not platforms should enable that, should amplify that, should, whether or not, they should enforce their rules. That's up to the individual platforms themselves, but people will find a way to get the message out. We're talking about social media as though it is perfectly elided with the internet itself. People will be able to set up websites. They'll be able to use SMS, be able to use WhatsApp, be able to use signal, be able to use social media to presellatize

why the tyrant is a tyrant to be able to give that. Now, the question of whether or not in that moment, they'll be able to say, everyone come down here with an AK-F, 47 and start killing people. Eh, I don't know. I'm not advocating for that. I'm just saying I think it's not quite as simple as, you know, ban harmful things. Because many of the things that have created the world we live in today were at the time considered harmful by the powers they're being. I also don't think that people saying that we should overthrow the tyrant should be something that you should ever get rid of from your platform.

The question of whether or not, you know, so around January the 6th, that became a real question for platform. Yeah. So, I mean, I live five blocks from the capital, or I used to until two days ago, when we moved. But, you know, the question there is whether or not the spreading deliberately of lies, which were amplified by algorithms, normalizing the idea that the election was stolen, should be permitted on a site in the context of potential real violence in an established democracy over an election result. people can decide for themselves those platforms can decide for themselves but I think most of them concluded that it was unacceptable which is why they took action to ban those people and I disagree with

are you comfortable with the sitting outgoing president of the most powerful country in the world being prevented from speaking in public yeah in what way is well he was banned from all the social media platforms did you stop hearing from Donald Trump were you worried worried about his ability to get his message out.

Well, his ability to guess his message out was definitely reduced significantly, as you said yourself when you ban people from something. You said it yourself. They lose reach, right? So you can't make the argument both ways in one conversation. And the other thing I would say is the precedent that said, I think is very dangerous. And if you talk about people being able to criticize a tyrant, well, the tyrant would always say this is misinformation. Look at what Justin Trudeau did in Canada.

On Trump. He took away people's bank accounts. On Trump, I have to admit it was a marginal, I think it was one of the most difficult cases that we've ever come across. He did spread disinformation deliberately that undermine the values that underpin democracy and deliberately cast doubt on the electoral system despite knowing better. So did Hillary Clinton? And a lot of politicians do that. Did she get banned? No.

So this is the double standard that people talk about. If I may finish, I think that the decision. that was taken by companies was actually primarily to do with currying favour with the incoming administration who felt that they'd been, who'd felt that they'd not been treated well by those companies rather than a decision that was taken on principle. Again, again, it's why transparency on content enforcement decisions on whether or not people are, you know, I want to know whether or not shadow banning actually exists. I'm not convinced it does, but maybe it does. What exists? Sorry, I didn't catch it. Shadow banning.

The thing is there's no evidence. Again, opaque systems that don't tell you what's going on. Like one of the few times that we've ever been told what works on these platforms and what doesn't is when Elon took over and it all turned to shit and everyone realized that Elon had actually demanded that his content be amplified over everyone else's because he was pissed off that

Joe Biden's tweet about the Super Bowl got more views than his tweet did about the Super Bowl. Do you remember that? No. He deliberately instructed engineers to come in all night and work out how to ensure that his tweets never got less visibility than Joe Biden's because Joe Biden's tweet saying that he was going to be

supporting one team or another got more views than his tweet saying, go Eagles or something. I mean, that's how bonkers this guy is. So we know that they can put their thumb on the scale. We know that they had an active promotion list. The question of whether or not they have an active shadow banning list. Anyway, with the Trump decision, I actually think it was a marginal case. I'm not quite sure what I would have done. It's a really difficult decision to take. I think that if they felt that there was a specific instance in which he'd broken their rules in such an egregious way that they had to ban him, they should have explained that much more clearly. And they didn't. And again, it's because they are judge, jury, and executioner with no oversight, no checks and balances.

And I mean, ultimately, I do, you know, I, I mean, it's funny being someone who very, very strongly believes in something, but not in everything, if you know what I mean? I very, very, very strongly believe in checks and balances. I very strongly believe in being able to sort of, to be able to see what decisions people have taken and be able to criticize them. But I don't have a particularly strong opinion on what decisions they should have taken, especially when it comes to something like Trump. I think when it comes to something like banning anti-Semitism, I'm really pro it. I see the way in which lies have underpinned in enormous, enormous human damage, cost over millennia.

You know, I'm very interested in how lies have underpinned hatred against Jews. At the moment, I'm rereading Elaine Pagel's book, The Origins of Satan, where she explains how decisions taken on which gospels support in the New Testament were actually, and the creation of Satan as a concept as an equal and opposite force to God was actually there to demonize Jewish people, to create this idea that Jewish people were the perfect enemy of godliness. So I am interested in all that stuff and I do think you should ban certain types of hate. I think hate is a pernicious virus underpinned always by lies that has an enormous human damage,

does enormous damage to lives, to livelihoods, to people's ability to enjoy their full rights. and that every time you give free speech to haters, you actually reduce the fundamental human rights of the people who are victims of that hate. But I do think that when it comes to this kind of discourse, you should, you know, I'd rather have more discourse about and more informed discourse about the way they operate and the impact they have on our societies

and the individual decisions they take because these are important decisions. Banning a president, fucking hell. What a huge thing to do? Correct. Enormous decision to take. Why him and not the Ayatollah Khomeini? Exactly.

I mean, seriously? Exactly. That guy is spouting nutty bollocks all the time. Hate against Jews. Utter lies about democracy. Utter lies about what he's doing in his own society. Why is he allowed to have a platform on it? And funding terrorist organizations which destabilize the Middle East.

Completely. Completely. Guys, we're running out of time. So, wrap. So this is a point that I wanted to make, and I'd be interesting to hear your thoughts on this. The reason in Ron, I'm so suspicious of governments is because I think, especially post-pandemic, governments have taken a more authoritarian turn when it comes to free speech. I'll give the example of Scotland.

Scotland have introduced hate speech laws, which criminalises public performance. So if you do a public performance, and for instance, in the example, they use his plays. But it will also be other types of performance like stand-up comedy. And you say a form of hate, they define hate as something that a reasonable person would find hateful. That is now a criminal offence. And I am very worried and very suspicious of governments who introduce hate speech laws, which are excessive in this instance. I wouldn't trust, for example, the SMP to run anything, and I certainly wouldn't trust them to dictate or to start implementing what we can and can't say online. Look, I mean, I think I'm an old, I'm a lefty.

Like, I don't think governments should be telling us what to say or think. I think that, you know, governments have balanced, you know, balanced things in the past. Like there are, of course, rules on hate speech in the UK. And I think of the case of Alison Chablos, who was jailed for publishing a song in which she went beyond offensive into grossly offensive. And she published a song which was mocking. the victims of the Holocaust, you know, making fun of them and the families of those victims and the survivors. And that was deemed to be illegal, malicious communications and she was jailed for it.

I think about public order offences. And of course, we've got that balance right over time, I think, generally speaking. And where there's been extensions of those to deal with, you know, some of it's kind of virtue signaling policymaking. And it's like, well, look how liberal we can be. and they're actually being incredibly illiberal. I tend to think the SMP will end up being kicked out of office for that, to be frank. But the law will stay on the books.

That's the problem. Well, it depends on who's in power next, right? It's probably going to be Labour, and I can't see, in all honesty, Labour wanting to repeal that. I think, you know, honestly, I'm not familiar with this, with what's happening in Scotland. I really haven't kept up with British politics in the last four years, apart from the online safety act, which I was very, very involved with.

But I can see why people would be very, very concerned about those rules. I know as well with C63, which you're talking about in Canada. There's concern about that as well. And I'm going to be going to also give evidence on that in due course in the next few months. So that you have to be cautious about, and I think that they're almost dealing with the symptom, rather than the cause. The cause is, of course, the hyper-acceleration of the most defensive speech, the normalization, which is causing the ressocialization of our societies to make normal the idea that hatred

against other people is acceptable. And where people think that hatred is acceptable, they will start to mobilize into other forms of action as well beyond just speech. And I think that when you have a society in which hate is given more, given an advantage over tolerance, bad things will happen in that society over time. And so the question of how platforms work at a systemic level, I think is absolutely open, you know, open for going and attack them, have a look at the algorithms, demand transparency, do all that stuff.

But banning individual bits of speech, dumb shit, dumb thing to do, ends up in very, very bad places, ends up with people like me being told I can't hold certain opinions about things, or you and other people. And then you're in the tyranny that you're trying to avoid. Correct. Yeah. on a note of agreement, we're going to go to locals for our supporters questions. Where we're going to disagree again? In a second. It's a platform where we post bonus content

go there in a second when we wrap up. But before we do, we always end with the same question, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that you think we should be? That's a no. I'm not really very opinionated about these things. I don't know. There we go. Head on over to locals where we ask him around your questions. But it's sad to me that you can't defy it, that you can't see hate speech normally. Hold on a second. You're misrepresenting what I'm saying. Again, rewind and just listen. Good. I hope people do that because they'll see what you're misrepresenting what I'm saying.

For the main part, it's fucking obvious. I tell you what, you are being disrespectful to the people who do receive hate speech. Like me. I warn you that most of your listeners will think themselves, actually, Constantine's being a bit of a dickhead right now. And calling me a dickhead might be considered hate speech. No, no, it's not hate speech. It's just good observation.

Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile, with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Up front payment of $45 for three-month plan equivalent to $15 per month required.

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