915: Why Government Wants to Control Social Media | THE HIDDEN TRUTH

Brian Nichols  0:05  
All right, and with that, returning to the Brian Nichols show from netchoice. Carl Zabo, welcome back, my friend. How you doing, doing

Carl Szabo  0:13  
well, doing well, getting ready for some some fireworks, some debates and hopefully an election very soon, so we can all move past it.

Brian Nichols  0:24  
I love how you put the caveat, hopefully an election. Um, because, yeah, things have gotten a little weird specifically. And by the way, elephant in the room. Reason you're on the call or the call on the show today, can tell I'm still in work brain, um, the reason we're on the show today, Carl, is because we've watched over the past 612, months, there seems to have been a much more, almost a ramping up of the government's attack. The government's not favoring of tech in general. And right now, we're seeing that, you look at the antitrust cases that were levied against Google, and then the entire country of Brazil, banning X and saying you are no longer welcome here. So Carl, there's a lot to unpack in our world today, but how about this before we get there, it's been six months since you were on the show back in March. A lot's happened since you were on the show. Candidly, we're talking about that before we hit the record button. So just for the audience, that's new here. Maybe didn't catch your march appearance there. Just quick introduction to the Brian Nichols show audience, who's net choice? What do you guys do? And then we'll dig into the meat and potatoes for today. Yeah.

Carl Szabo  1:29  
So quite simply, net choice is a trade association that fights for pre expression, pre enterprise on the internet. It's pretty simple. Mandate, Vice President, General Counsel there. I also teach at the George Mason Antonin Scalia law school. But most importantly, you need to know that you can like, follow and subscribe on x at netchoice, n, e, T, C, H, O, I, C, E, and like, follow and subscribe to my x feed at Carl Zabo, C, A, R, L, S, Z, a, bees. And boy, it was in October. But yeah, we've been we've been fighting hard since I last saw you. We had a win at the US Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds. We had a win at the Ninth Circuit against state of California, where they tried to engage in censorship. And, oh yeah, by the way, there was two political conventions and a whole bunch of other activities since then.

Brian Nichols  2:25  
Yeah. And by the way, one of them is like a current presidential front runner, slash former president of the United States, assassination attempts. Like, yeah, Carl, there's been a lot going on behind the scenes. And by the way, said assassination attempt, if you weren't on X, you might not realize that it happened eight weeks ago, as we're recording here today, on the ninth of September, like that just blows me away. And you mentioned, go follow you. Follow you on x. I mean, yeah, unless you're living in Brazil, right, which, I mean, obviously we want them to still follow you. But there might be some difficulties there. Carl, so how about this? We'll jump head first into our conversation, starting out with x being banned in the entire country of Brazil. Because Elon Musk said, Fine, Brazilian government, you can take your fist and shake it at my Starlink satellites. Carl, talk to us. What is going on with this whole x being banned by Brazil thing.

Carl Szabo  3:18  
So let's be clear. Governments do not like free speech. Governments do not like free speech because there's any Yeah, I don't know if that's a secret or if I'm letting the cat out of the bag or something. Saying the quiet part out loud. Governments do not like free speech because it allows people like you, people like me, people like the listeners to actually express their views, to actually hear alternative ideas and concepts, and maybe hear that, oh, I'm not alone if I think that maybe covid came from a lab in China, and government likes to control the narrative. That's why our founders baked into the US Constitution, into the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment, the right to free speech for you and me, because they knew government, if given the chance, will seize control. Well, that's exactly what has happened in the country of Brazil. Basically, some people were talking about the political opponents of the President, you had the online equivalent of Joe Rogan. You had a Brazilian senator, a Brazilian congressman, all of whom the government decided were spending quote, misinformation and demanded that Elon Musk and X terminate those accounts. Will Elon Musk said, No, I'm not going to do that. That's free speech that violates my principles. No, I'm not going to terminate these political accounts just because you Brazilian President don't like him. So what ended up happening is, typically what would happen in this situation, is the. Brazilian government would actually arrest the employees of x in Brazil? Well, Elon Musk got his people out before that happened, so instead, they just banned the operation of x in the country. And any Brazilian who uses a VPN or tries to do an end run around the the systems in place to actually access X. If you're caught, you get fined $9,000 a day. So yeah, the government, government is not playing around because they recognize, hey, free speech means Brazilians might actually realize that some of the stuff we're doing isn't too good and isn't too popular.

Brian Nichols  5:39  
Well, okay, now, Carl, I'm gonna put my devil's advocate hat on for a second, because this has been an argument I've heard from a lot of folks, specifically on the political left. They say, well, Carl, who the heck does Elon Musk think he is? Oh, my principles. You're just gonna completely stand against a country's ruling saying, hey, Elon, let's not have these folks on a website. Granted, it's your website, but it's in our country. And this is the argument, by the way, I've heard Carl presented, and they really try to steel man this, and I want to hear your take here. They steel man, it by saying, Well, Brian, what if there was child endangerment? We'll just use that word for we all know what happens in the world, but what if that type of video or content was on x and the Brazilian government, or name your favorite government here, was like, Well, no, we can't have child endangerment on these platforms. Elon, delete that. That's the steel man. Carl, where are they getting it wrong?

Carl Szabo  6:48  
So there's a lot to unpack there. First of all, the argument of, well, you just need to follow the laws of the country. You can't possibly have a different opinion when it comes to free speech. Let's use a different example. Let's presume these were Russian dissidents who wanted to get the message out about the atrocities being committed by Putin. Let's presume these are Iranians who are trying to talk about how women are mistreated, and trying to talk about overthrowing the Shah. Well, that would be okay, wouldn't it, absolutely so why is that allowed, but not this? Well, then you've got people like Elon Musk being yelled at because now you're picking winners and losers and deciding what speech should or should not be allowed, and in this case, they are Brazilian dissidents who are speaking out against government. Now let's go to your straw man argument of child abuse, child sexual abuse, material, stuff like that. I will tell you right now that x spends 10s, if not hundreds of millions of dollars every single year identifying, removing and referring that material to law enforcement. But here's the sad part, less than 1% less than 1% of all reports of child sexual abuse material online even get investigated here in the United States of America, less than 1% so yeah, it's a depressingly alarming statistic that means 99% don't even get investigated. They go straight, they go into the trash. Holy Hell, that's scary. It's it is as apparent. It is terrifying. Yeah, yeah. Their straw man argument isn't doesn't take into account that, yes, we are detecting it, yes, we are reporting it, yes, we are removing it. But yet, the bad guys don't seem to suffer any jail time. In fact, Senator Ron Wyden has a bill sitting in the Senate that Chuck Schumer refused to take up. It's called The invest in Child Safety Act, which would give law enforcement more resources to actually investigate these reports of child sexual abuse material. So yeah, the straw man argument falls apart real fast in the face of facts and reality. And so I know, I know, you know, authoritarians hate facts and reality. That's why they tried to control the speech. But that's exactly what's going on here. They'll, they'll pull up this, this bowl argument, and we've heard this before. So if listeners Remember, a couple years ago, the Department of Justice was demanding that Apple create an encryption backdoor that's right back door to encryption. And it was either the head of the Justice former the FBI I forget which was before Congress, and he was saying, Well, what if there was a child trapped in the trunk of a car and the only way to find him or her is by getting access to this device? Okay, it's a worthwhile concern. And then let's say it was the head of the. FBI just for sake argument, the head of the FBI was asked by a member of Congress, so tell me once, when that has happened and they had no examples. And that's probably that's part of the problem is too often people pull out these straw man arguments. They dive into hypotheticals because they don't want to accept the reality that, yes, encryption is really useful if you're a journalist and you want to make sure your source and an authoritarian regime isn't literally strung up for reporting what they're seeing. You want end to end encryption, and in this case, if you want to be able to hold your government accountable, because maybe they're not doing exactly what you want or what they say they're going to do, or they're engaging in authoritarian actions. You want that pretty much speech. But Brian, one last thing, and this is also really scary, it's not just Brazil. So right now in Britain, they actually have police monitoring what Britain's and the British are citizens are posting online, and if you say something that's not right, that the government doesn't like, they are literally sending police to people's doors to help correct them. I mean, that's that's like straight out in 1984 where you have to have, you know, the newsfeed for those and you get sent to the Ministry of Truth and stuff like that. That's the type of thing that we're seeing. And then finally, it's coming here. You start a couple years ago with the disinformation governance board with scary Mary Poppins. I don't know if anybody remembers that about her, yeah, she's terrified, and she was so extreme, she was so over the top, that that idea kind of died on the vine, but it didn't go away. This monitoring has been happening. And unfortunately, if you look at, for example, Vice President Harris's campaign site, she just today announced her platform agenda free speech is completely missing. And so not only is it missing from her platform, we're hearing nothing but crickets out of this administration for the censorship activities going on in Brazil, in Britain, and even here at home,

Brian Nichols  12:12  
because they love it, let me, let's, let's break it down as black and white as we can, because they want it here to your point, right? And the folks that will cry for liberty and freedom, or what Kamala say freedom. Okay, there's her freedom of speech was complete BS, and it was ripped from, I think it was Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King. It was one of those stories that she had, clearly just copy and paste it into her own story. But it's those folks right who clamor for freedom and liberty the most, who, in this case, they're gonna do their darndest to leverage government to take away liberty and freedom just because it's from the folks that we don't like. And that right there, Carl, that's where I get a little apprehensive when I look at where our government's heading. And I say a little apprehensive, a lot of apprehensiveness, apprehension, because you look at how quickly the slippery slope just, I mean, you mentioned over in the United Kingdom, what we see are happening over there. We mentioned down in Brazil, we're seeing happening there. It can happen overnight. And that's the part I think a lot of Americans really got to start waking up to, is that this isn't just stuff happening overseas. This isn't just stuff happening down in, you know, foreign countries that are 1000s of miles away. No, this is stuff that can happen in your your backyard. And actually, a lot of the states that we have here are, well, I say a lot of the states, a lot of the blue states, are more than happy to become test cases for putting these practices in place. I mean, you mentioned Brazil, it's down to the south of us, we got England over across the pond, and then right above us we got Canada, and Canada's implementing this stuff left and right as well. So it's not a matter of if right. It's a matter of when. And I guess to that Carl, what can we do? What defense Can we can we play? And then on the flip side, what offense can we play to help push back?

Carl Szabo  13:59  
Yeah. So the first thing is, when you see something like the New York Times publishing an op ed entitled The First Amendment, has gone too far from a former Biden White House official, when you see the New York Times publishing an op ed just the other week entitled, The constitution is the greatest threat to American democracy. I'm serious. These are these are their titles. We need to push back. We need to call out those absurd statements. We need to call out those absurd authors. But we can't stop there. So there's a bill that passed out of the house of representatives from Chairman Jim Jordan. It's called the protecting free speech from government interference act, and it's sounds like a fancy title, but what it does pretty simple. It says, If you are a government employee, you cannot use your official position to censor political content online. So. Uh, kind of, kind of no nonsense. We've actually had a law on the books for makes sense for 4050, years ago, called the Hatch Act, which basically says, and I'm a former federal employee, and this was beat into us, you cannot use your government position for political purposes. So if, uh, when I was working for the federal government, I couldn't go around campaigning for the Democratic campaign, or the Republican campaign or the independent campaign, you can't do that that that makes sense. So all this is saying is you can't do it online. Well, that bill, it passed out of the house, but it was straight party line vote, all the Republicans in favor, all the Democrats against, and it has sat in the US Senate for over a year now. Let's presume President Trump wins in November. The Democrats would be pretty excited to have that level of protection against a Trump administration, but for some reason, a lot of people can't think more than a month ahead and can't possibly conceive that they would be out of power. So that's one thing that we can do, is get that enacted. Second is President Trump, just the other day, actually, on the campaign trail, said, as soon as he takes office, he will sign an executive order to terminate any federal employee engaged in online censorship and who engaged in online censorship. Great idea. These should be non controversial ideas. Government employees should work for the American people. And I can tell you this, when I became a government employee, I took the same oath that every president takes, and that is to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. And within those pages is the First Amendment. So every time a government employee takes it upon themselves to not only violate their oath of office, in this case, you know, general employee and their duty to the American people, they should get they should be booted immediately. So that's the step that we can take. We can start getting rid of the driftwood and the political messing with the federal government and get them out of the censorship business. The last thing I'll say is that's ultimately not only good for, you know, liberals or Republicans or people in the middle, when the other party's in power, it's good for America writ large, because it will reinstall faith and confidence in the system. Because right now, everybody thinks it's politically rigged against them, and this will help to provide a proof point that government works for all Americans, not just the political party in office.

Brian Nichols  17:42  
And by the way, you mentioned that they can't seemingly look one election ahead. Look at Google right now, right we've talked about this beforehand. Google's currently facing not one but two antitrust suits, and Google's not exactly known to be some bastion of right wing integrity or support. They're very much known to be more politically leaning left. And you could just go to the Google homepage on Easter and which is the default Google image, and then you go on whatever name your rainbow color celebration of the day, and they'll have like, you know, explosions and fireworks, and, of course, all types of different silly I'm just gonna use the word silly cartoons there, but talk to us about that Carl, because that's where I think again, this preconceived notion it's only the folks on the right who are gonna get attacked, right? No, but that's not the case. Give us some context of what's going on with Google right now. Yeah.

Carl Szabo  18:37  
So this is part of a bigger threat that we've seen, especially out of this administration. And it is this fundamental belief that success is sinful, that in America, anyone can make, make it as long as they don't make too much. The whole redistribution, communism, socialism, you know, rather than trying to, you know, pull myself up by my bootstraps, or earn that that fancy car or that nice house, I have to take that fancy car, nice house from somebody so that they can give that money to me. The pie is only so big. It never grow Exactly. It can never grow Exactly. And that thinking has, uh, weaseled its way into what's called antitrust law. Antitrust law was originally created to make sure that there is competition in the marketplace in a way that doesn't hurt consumers. So think about it this way. Imagine there's only one store, one store, so we have to go back decades, because right now you can access 1000s of stores online, right? Anywhere? Yeah, we have the dilemma of choice, almost. But you know, the idea is, they're one store, and they have no competition. So they could set the price of a can of Coca Cola $100 which, of course, you know, because they're the only one that. So that's what it was originally created for. But since then, we've gotten. Smart, and we realized, you know what, just being a monopoly in and of itself isn't bad. If you're constantly innovating, developing, keeping prices low, that can actually be a good thing. So what did we decide? We decided you need to have something else. It's called consumer harm. So ultimately, if consumers are being harmed, then it's a problem. So going back to my my grocery store, example, right at the grocery store, because they are so big, they get what's called economies of scale. They can buy in bulk, right? It's like going to Costco. They could charge a penny for that can of Coca Cola, and that's way below any price. We would normally say, well, that's not really a problem for anybody. In fact, you're getting the benefits of growing business, and eventually somebody would come into the marketplace and disrupt but if they're charging $100 for a can of Coke, call it that is a problem. So that's consumer harm, right? Our consumers being harmed. So there are two trials right now against against Google, and they're both arguing consumer harm and monopoly. So the first is on search. So the first argument is, well, Google has monopoly on search. Okay, well, the judge not only ignored the existence of AI and any other competitor, they basically said, well, in the marketplace of Google, Google is a monopoly. Okay, thanks. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, they are monopoly. What's the harm? I don't know about you. Google has the best search engine, and their products give the best results. If I don't like them, I go over to DuckDuckGo, or I go over to Bing or something else. So where's the consumer harm? It doesn't exist. But nonetheless, the administration doesn't like Google, so they brought that to second suit is most recent. It's actually starting on September 9. Monday is the first day of this suit, and this is over advertising. And the argument, once again, is Google has a monopoly on advertisements. Well, cnn.com uses over 100 different ad networks. New York Times uses about 15 different networks, and the average publisher uses about six different ad networks. So I don't know. I suspect these individuals didn't study any basic Latin or anything. Because to be a monopoly, you have to be one, not one of many. So, mono, mono. Yeah, exactly. Monopoly, exactly. So what is this really about? Well, ultimately, it's about sending a message to American businesses that are succeeding, because it's not only Google that's being attacked under these antitrust suits. You have Amazon, meta, Microsoft, geez, who else famously Albertsons is being attacked right now for for groceries,

Brian Nichols  22:56  
Jimmy spirit, right last

Carl Szabo  22:58  
time? Yeah, it's, you know, another day, another antitrust suit, because at the end of the day, the government wants to send the message, success is sinful. Oh, that's right, the latest one on the chopping block, Nvidia, which you roll back the clock two years. Nobody knew who Nvidia was, unless you're a gamer like me, and you need a GeForce graphics card or or you weren't paying attention. And we actually what? Government created $40 billion to get more chips out there, and now we're attacking Nvidia for being too successful and creating microchips. So this is the, yeah, this is the problem. It's, it's an, it's an attack on American innovation, American success. And that's going to be more of the same under a Biden, under a second Harris administration, because she's gone out there and said, you know why everything's so expensive? It's because of big meat and big grocery store and not the inflation that we have injected into the economy. So that's that's what we're seeing here. Is a war on American success. And what's really scary for all of us looking to the future is it is sending out giant flashing lights and warning signs to every business, every entrepreneur, every investor, saying, Don't build here. Don't come here. Take your technology and innovation to another country. And just like we've seen every great idea or great company fully California, New York and head for the border, we're going to see the same thing across the United States. Of this antitrust crusade against American businesses continues

Brian Nichols  24:35  
well, and to a point you raised up earlier, Carla, it's like, we can't pretend that the Internet doesn't exist like i i have the ad or the the Advent advantage. There we go. I can say that word advantage of working remotely, right? And that's all because of the internet. We have the ability to have this conversation even though we're hundreds of miles apart because of the internet. So like just to pretend. And that the internet and the the just insane amount of opportunity that's created and options that's created just pretend doesn't exist like It's ignoring reality. And I guess that's where I get stuck, Carl, and this will be my final thought before I turn things over to you. Like there is it seems to be a war between common sense and idealism in America right now. And I don't know if this, this battle has, has really been going on be behind the scenes for for generations, and like every so often, it peaks out to say, I'm still here, but that's just what it feels like today, where I see there's so many people who they acknowledge the elephant in the room. And that elephant in the room is that whatever we have right now, it's not working, and that we need to go back to more basics, right? Go back to some some just basic supply and demand in a free market. Let's go back to the basics of freedom of speech, maybe. Let's start to pull back some regulation. We saw this during covid. People were like, Hey, we need to go ahead and get things to go faster. What should we do? Oh, get red tape out of the way. Brilliant. Why didn't we think about that before covid? Right? So I think covid was really kind of like the the elephant in the room, more like a bull in china shop, if we're gonna be real, like, covid just broke so much stuff, and it opened people's eyes to like, Oh, it doesn't have to be this way. There are other ways of doing things. And once we talk about this in sales, once you see it, you can unsee it. So I'm hoping Carl that for all the folks out there who are starting to wake up, they're starting to see it, that they will stand up, they will speak out. Because as many of folks that are the common sense extremists. There are also the idealistic folks out there, who they it makes me think of, is it Life of Brian? Is it money Python, but father the little, yeah, the prince, who's he's all prim and proper, like, I want to sing like, that's what it feels like, is, you have a group of folks who they're in this flowery, made up world where it's like, Whose Line Is It Anyway, the points are made up and or the game's made up, the points don't matter. Whatever it is like, like, that's what it feels like. And I'm hoping Carl, that enough of us, common sense extremists can speak out, hopefully make some changes. But be aware, right? Be aware that there's a lot of these idealistic folks out there who they don't believe in meritocracy, they don't believe in the idea of hard work. They don't believe in the ideas of competition, um, or success, to your point, Carl, like they're allergic to this idea of success. Uh, somebody else succeeding means that somebody else must have gotten hurt, right? Not that somebody's succeeding and another person succeeding, not in spite of each other, but hear me out, maybe because of each other, right? Maybe I created an industry or a solution that opened the door to other solutions, right? Like there that happens, um, and it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when, like, those kind of just things that we never thought of just come out of the marketplace. Um, looked at again what we're doing right now. Some guy didn't sit down back in 1865 and said, Why are you know, what would be nice one day is to have this little device that would connect everybody everywhere, and they could talk to each other like he didn't sit down and map this out. And then one day we had the internet. That was Al Gore, but no, what happened was a bunch of different people who were like, oh, there's something we could do with a computer, and then, oh, there's something we could do with telephone lines. And let's juice those up. Oh, there's something we can do with. And it's that mentality, there's something we can do with. And all of a sudden, you and I are on a stream yard account using high speed internet on a computer hundreds of miles away from each other, having a great conversation and and nobody's said like, Oh, we're gonna plan for Brian and Carl in 200 years to be able to do this. Here's the plan. It just happened, right? So in that spirit, things are just gonna happen. And instead of trying to put the genie back in the bottle, let's embrace change and understand that that's the ever constant in life, is change. So I'll get off my soapbox now, Carl, and with that, I'll turn things over to you to bring us home final thoughts, sir,

Carl Szabo  29:19  
yeah, and it's actually something I never thought about before. But listening to your your soapbox during covid, you seem to there were two schisms, two schools of thought. One is kind of this infantilization, and the other is a demand for freedom. And what I mean by the infantilization is, well, the government will just take care of me. They'll give me lots of money. They'll pay me to stay at my house and not do anything. And the government can do it all, and I can just sit here and be fat and marry watch Tiger King on Netflix, exactly the other side of. The aisle is the no government stay out of my life. I want to be able to go outside. I want to be able to go see my family. I want to go to a sporting event. I want to actually live my life the way I want. And so you saw this schism, and you saw a lot of people in Florida or Montana just really succeed, and those states have taken off the freedom loving states, the clamp down the government can do it all. States of New York and California, they're suffering, and so unfortunately, what we need is for a collective wake up in those government is the answer to our problems, not the cause of our problems. Realization from those states, and hopefully they figure it out before they completely collapse, because right now, their trajectory for all those blue states, it's not looking too good. And as much as it's nice to have shouting Freud, where you look at the failure of the blue states, I'd rather have them realize that we all need to succeed to your point, than just to have them crash and burn. And so they better figure it out soon, because their trajectory is going the wrong way. And the better answer is less government, more money in our pockets, and more freedom

Brian Nichols  31:21  
here, here. And by the way, if you are in one of those not so great blue states right now, like I was back in covid, Get out right while, while you still can. I'm not trying to be morbid. But like, if you have the chance to move to a red state, do it nothing stopping you. Or maybe there is just if that's the case, let's have that conversation. But like, if you have the opportunity take it, and if you are not in that, that ability to take that change Be the change you want to see right, go out of your way, start being, you know, the person going to the meetings, raising up the concerns, and saying, maybe what we're doing isn't working, and maybe we should do things I don't know differently. And let's look at the states who aren't doing too bad. Let's look at them as an example. I don't know just the thought. Carl Zabo from net choice, it's always a pleasure having you on the show, my friend with that being said, where can folks go ahead learn more about net choice. And of course, you did drop your x handle there at the beginning of the show. Go ahead, drop it again so they can go so they can go ahead jot it down and make sure you go ahead and check out all the people things you're talking about.

Carl Szabo  32:27  
Yeah, you gotta like, follow and subscribe. So you can check out what netchoice is doing@netchoice.org N, E, T, C, H, O, I, C, E, net choice.org, and you can follow netchoice on x at net choice, and you can follow me at Carl Zabo, C, A, R, L, S, Z, A, B, as in, boy oh is in October on x.

Brian Nichols  32:48  
And by the way, folks, I hear you all asking, no, Carl is not asking Disney to do the acolyte season two. I know you all see the Star Wars stuff in the background. He has told me ahead of time he was not a fan. I'm just kidding, Karl, I don't know if you are there

Carl Szabo  33:03  
are only three movies, although I will allow Rogue One to also enter the lexicon, because that movie was amazing. Oh, incredible.

Brian Nichols  33:12  
I would watch Rogue One over any of the new movies that came out over the past nine years now at this point, which makes me want to throw up to think that it was Force Awakens nine years ago that launched this just cataclysmic destruction of Star Wars and the entire IP along with it. But unfortunately, Carl, that's a different conversation for a different day. I know we're going to talk about next time with that being said. Carl, thanks for joining, folks. Thank you for joining. And with that being said, I'm going to go ahead said, I'm gonna go ahead wrap things up here on a solo So Carl, thanks for joining us. We'll talk to you next time. Have

Unknown Speaker  33:48  
a good one. Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai