Welcome, Sally. Hello, everybody. Welcome to dead cat tom Dutton from insider joined by Eric newcomer newcomer, thanks for joining us in the chat today. So today we're gonna do it. We're gonna talk about Twitter content moderation and the internal documents released by Elon Musk, maybe is the only reason he bought Twitter. It's not clear. So we're gonna talk about how content moderation is done, and we're gonna like it. So joining us to talk us through this is Alex Stamos, former CISO at Facebook, he is also the director of the Stanford internet observatory. And he is now apparently an Elon Musk nemesis, where he runs a propaganda platform. So says Elon, but first of all, Alex, welcome back to dead cat. Thank you so much for joining us to talk about all this.
Thanks for having me that
returning guests always love him.
Yeah. Okay, so we're gonna do the jacket?
How many do I have to do this? Before I get the Masters jacket? You're behind Aaron Griffith.
And who else is like a tech Teddy. Teddy. Yeah, so whoever gets the five first definitely get some swag. So we're gonna do this, and we're gonna do it in good faith. And I'm even, I'm even gonna call it the Twitter files, which is what Elon wants us to call it. So basically, let me just summarize what has happened. So far, there have been two stories, all of which have been posted on Twitter, which as a side point, I think is really lame. As a journalist, these stories exist entirely on Twitter. And it's all because Elon is controlling these documents. And I think it's part of his, you know, yeah, with a journalist read to publish them on Twitter. Yeah, but these are good journalists, independent journalists who have done it, but I think that particular concession is lame. But anyway, here are the two tweet storms that have come out so far. The first one is from Matt Taibbi, who is a sub stacker and longtime investigative journalist. And he's writing about Hunter Biden. And in the tweets, and you know, from the internal documents, he showed the internal deliberations around pulling down the content that came from Hunter Biden's laptop that were initially leaked to the New York Post Via Rudy Giuliani, some of this word deliberations inside Twitter about the decision to block all the links from the New York Post, which was a pretty big deal at the time. And I still think kind of crazy. And some of it was just about pulling down pictures of Hunter Biden stick.
So that's why we didn't make that clear. But yeah,
yeah, so So Part one was all about Hunter Biden, and that whole story that turned out not to push the election towards Trump. And then the second one, which came out yesterday, or last week when you guys will hear this. That one is from Barry Weiss, also at substack. And she's dealing with the topic of shadow banning, which is basically the curtailing of the reach of certain users. And her tweets she showed that Twitter had flagged and D boosted certain accounts like Dan bond Gino, they have on China emoji now. That guy, a Stanford professor J. Bot, a Chara
none of us know which speaks where
I just don't spend enough time on Facebook to get the full bunjee now are in China. So they're also a Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya who had some anti lock down content, it appeared that he had also been D boosted in certain ways. And then there's HireRight chick aka lives of Tik Tok. And it showed that all of these accounts have been flagged and in some way kind of D distributed in a way that they had been expecting, removed from trending topics and search. And then also in various tweets. There were internal debates about the use of spam enforcement policies as a Trust and Safety cudgel. And there's also this question now about whether Twitter was being genuine in its previous claims that it did not shadow banned people, which then of course, gets into the very exciting semantics of what shadow banning means.
All right, so we want to bend over backwards. To be fair to these people. I think that's all all our inclination. Alex, I've seen you trying to steal man, the argument of these tweet storms? Is there a piece out of it that you would say is the best critique or what's the most substantive piece to come out of these two tweet storms in your view?
So I feel like the first tweet storm that TV one, which focused on specifically the Hunter Biden situation, has a kernel of truth in the recognition that there is a problem with government and political interference on these big platforms. The truth is, is when you're working with these companies, everybody is constantly trying to work the refs to get you to change their content, moderation strategies, in a way they like, everybody wants their enemies taken down, and everybody wants their political friends and fellow travelers to stay up no matter what they do. And so that is a problem that companies are always dealing with. And it is true that if you have a officials in the US government pushing for content to be taken down, then that would be in the United States, possibly a First Amendment violation. In this specific Hunter Biden case. There's actually no evidence in his threat. said that anybody who is a actual employee of the US government, and therefore covered by the First Amendment did anything. The one example was the Biden team that they could find, saying, take down these nude pictures of Hunter. They didn't even say anything about the New York Post story itself was subsequent tweets that had specific nude videos and photos, which Twitter has a policy that you can not put naked photos up of somebody without their permission. We call this MCI in the industry non consensual, intimate imagery, but your revenge porn, right? revenge porn is like the the term that people use, we try not to use in the industry because revenge implies that the victim did something wrong. The majority of the time, it is not the 40 year old son of a presidential candidate. It is a 19 year old girl who right whose boyfriend did something bad, right? So like, we try not to use revenge porn, because the median victim here is absolutely innocent of doing anything.
And in terms of the government meddling to take something down, a lot of people forgot that Trump was in the White House when the Biden team was asking. So these there were people just saying the Biden administration when it's like the Trump administration was in office. So there isn't even a question there of whether you know, the right people within Biden world were making this question are not there weren't a
Joe Biden was unemployed during this period of time, right? The DNC is not a government actor. There's no First Amendment analysis that covers the DNC is actions, and tidy, admits that he could not find any evidence of the government being involved. And then also hints towards that there were emails from the Trump administration, which actually could be a First Amendment Coalition doesn't have any of those, right. So if we want to steal man, this if we want to the opposite of strongman, if we want to seriously, government interference and platforms is a real deal. But tie EB one did not show that and to specifically ignore the possibility of actual government interference. And Musk giving very selective data to a couple of very politically biased journalists, is not the kind of transparency we would need if we wanted to be confident that there was not interference on this platform by government.
Alright, so tweetstorm, one, pretty weak, I think that sort of
its weak, but there's a fundamental, I think there is a real kernel of truth there. And from my perspective, the kernel of truth is that every government on the planet, including ours in the United States of America is trying to manipulate Twitter and all of the other major platforms. And so I proposed, here are things you can do if you're musk, you can have an open database of moderation decisions. There are some interesting privacy law issues there. But you can work around those you can commit to releasing instead of just releasing emails from the Biden team, the DMC, not government actors, you could release all communications from all government actors globally. So the Modi campaign, the Indian government, I think, really important for somebody whose net worth is tied up in China, like musk, communications with the Chinese Communist Party is the kind of thing that if you really cared about this, you could release but Musk apparently doesn't like that idea.
Right? We want to talk about that more. Certainly,
while we're still on this topic, what you're saying is maybe the most legitimate criticism or insightful revelation from the tie up thread, when you were at Facebook, and you were probably in the middle of a lot of these discussions, generally, do you think internet platforms handle it? Well, we have the internal discussions, or at least some of the internal discussions around what was happening around Hunter Biden, it all seems fairly chaotic, it feels a little bit arbitrary. And you know, there is a certain amount of well, I guess, within the arbitrariness people's inherent biases, and maybe what they would prefer to see happen if they are, you know, donors to the Democratic Party or whatever, informing some of their decisions. So like, generally, how good of an actor do you think the platform's are in these situations? And is there anything from the Twitter specifically that you thought that kind of stuck a little bit,
so in this specific situation, and in parallel, Facebook made a lesser mistake, but I think Twitter and Facebook did make a mistake here, and that they took on responsibility for something that should not be their responsibility. If we go back to 2016. They're two totally different propaganda campaigns by Russia and Russian affiliated groups against the campaign. There was the campaign on the platforms, which was mostly private actors in Russia Internet Research Agency, and other firms owned by giving me precaution mostly in which they were trolling on the platforms. That I think is absolutely responsibility of the companies, Facebook and Twitter should not allow a handful of people in a building in St. Petersburg to run 1000 accounts that pretend to be real Americans and get hundreds of millions of views. That should not be allowed.
But that was relatively small. Next, next one.
Right. But that was a relatively small impact, I think versus the hacking leak campaign, which was actually the government itself Gru Russian military intelligence, break into DNC, breaking the John Podesta, Z mail bunch of other people's email, and then leak information to change the overall media environment. Now that target of that, while there are online components here, the target of that is the US media. And in the reaction to 2016. And with all the pressure, as you know, we have all discussed about
this was everybody go back and listen, we dug into this, yeah, we dug into this,
I think it's a little unfair to completely blame social media companies for Trump. But that is effectively I think the feeling of the companies was the entire center left media. And I think that there is a kernel of truth in all of this criticism of that is effectively kind of The New York Times consensus is Facebook created Trump. And if you push companies that they are responsible for something like that, then maybe they'll take on responsibility. They did it. And I do think the company should not have taken on responsibility for that second class, the hacking leak, because
basically, everybody else primed from the last election were sort of late breaking information, helped tilt things for Trump and social media companies have been blamed for fueling pro Trump message. So then we get towards the end of the second Trump election. And all of a sudden, we have this New York Post story about the Biden laptop, it might be hack and leak material. And so Twitter decides, I think we all think that's wrong now, but Twitter decides for reasons that we can all understand to try and block the story. Now the story is still plenty wide,
wider, right? There's a massive Streisand effect, where because of Twitter's action, and to be fair, Facebook also did a thing where they kind of downlinked it a little bit, so it didn't show up and recommendations and such until it was fact checked. And then they released that as well. But it was allowed to be posted on Facebook. But because of that action, there's a massive Streisand effect, and people pay way more attention to it. And it completely dominates the discussion in the last weeks of the campaign.
And Democrats were somewhat dishonest about this whole thing and tried to make it seem like the laptop was like probably fake when it seems like clearly it was truly fake
or Russian. Right. And I think that figured also into I imagine some of Facebook's or sorry, Twitter's decision making was that we don't want to be seen disseminating something that could have been, you know, Russian in origin or have some kind of Russian involvement. And we've got a retread of everything in 2016. Right.
I mean, I think these companies did not want to spend another four years of being blamed for being propagated. But I think this is where Twitter did not have the fortitude to stand up and say, Look, if the New York Post publishes something that is hacked, or obtained illegally, that is on them, right. Like, I don't think that Facebook and Twitter should substitute their editorial discretion for the editorial discretion of journalistic outfits, even if those journalistic outfits don't have necessarily great ethics, right. But I do understand how they got here, because it was incredibly sketchy, right? Like the post is the only outlet that has it. Right. They do not share the harddrive with anybody else. So no other journalist I mean, the entire journalism world had this huge problem of how do you cover this when you cannot authenticate the documents, or authenticate the drive, it took months and months and months for The Washington Post to get a copy. Later, the Washington Post had forensic experts who I really trust look at it, and they find that the hard drive has been modified. But none of this comes out. In that time, the other media outlets don't know how to handle it. Twitter doesn't know again, I think Twitter made a mistake. And so if you want to say the outcome of this whole thing is Twitter should not take responsibility for stuff that might be a hacking leak. I think that's true, because just this is just the reality of living in a free society is we have a free media. We do not have a national secrets. We don't have like a Secrets Act, an Official Secrets Act. There
are free societies that say before an election, you can't release a bunch of like dramatic new information. And even if the federal government doesn't have that principle, it's not crazy that social media companies would say, listen, we're not doing a great job sorting truth from falsity. We don't invest enough in it, we're bad at it. We don't want to be the vehicle for a bunch of false information right before the election. So we're basically gonna say we don't moderate enough. We don't want to create this sort of like chaos, right before an election like that, to me would be a reasonable stance. I don't know if it's the one
you're talking about, are they taking down a link from the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the New York Post? That that's where the problem is, there's a difference between them being responsible for the organic content that is on their platform, where people are using, if you're on Facebook, and you say, I'm Joe Schmo, I actually live in Wyoming and you really live in Beijing, then Facebook has some responsibility there. If somebody's posting the link from the Washington Times that I think the Washington Times is responsible for that and like, you're right, other societies have this in France, there's a news blackout. I believe it's 48 hours before the election and this exact thing came up, and that there was a Russian campaign called McCrone leaks where they had real stolen documents and then they inserted fake documents into the real ones to try to confuse people and they released it hours before the deadline because their goal was to get online sources to cover the quote unquote McCrone leaks and then not allow the mainstream media to rebut it failed in France, right? But we don't have anything like you will never have anything like that in the US. And so as long as the Pope, you know, there's not a rule around the actual media, I don't think Facebook or Twitter can invent that rule themselves. I want
to move on to the Barry Weiss thing soon, but like to structure the Hunter Biden laptop argument, I think the liberal position would be okay, maybe Twitter mishandled it. But it doesn't undermine all top down decision making, they should still have processes for deciding what to put out. And then there's sort of a conservative position, which is just look how much the experts fail, whether it's the laptop, whether it's COVID disinformation, every time you have a top down censorship model, there are major failures. And so we should sort of abandon the exercise altogether. So that is like musk kind of,
vibrates between these two states, of there should be no content moderation, and then we're going to do lots of content moderation, but based upon Musk's opinion, because the truth is, is he's he's really wrapped around the actual by like three or four decisions. The Hunter Biden laptop, the D platforming, the Babylon B lives, if Tik Tok probably lives of tick tock, those are like four things that are very public. That happened in the United States, they do not represent 99.99% of what you have to do every day to keep a platform like Twitter actually useful, right. And that is where things are starting to fall apart at Twitter, is that their basic ability to stop spam, for example, is really getting bad. We're actually publishing a blog post the next couple of days on this on in China, like knowledge about the protests in China have been buried by spam. And it looks like it might not really be the Chinese government. It looks like it's just spammers take advantage of the fact that there's almost no anti spam team left at Twitter, right like, and so if you decide we're just not gonna do content moderation at all, you will end up with a chan you will end up with something that is unusable at the scale at which Twitter wants to
operate. Yeah, and we'll link to that blog post in the episode description, because there's been a lot of talk about that. Last thing on this before we move on to the very wise thread. In terms of new revelations that came out of what Tybee had posted. It seems fairly thin to me. I mean, even on the topic of you know, not linking or not allowing links to the New York Post story. I believe Jack even came out while he was CEO of Twitter to say, in hindsight, that was an extreme decision. That was the wrong decision. There's already been some level of MIA culpa on the part of Twitter leadership to say, we don't agree with the way this played out. In the end, we would take a different tactic that happened this way. And so the idea that this was a huge gotcha, or at least some kind of like confirmation of suspicion on the part of conservatives and Elon Musk. I don't think it was really there, right? Anyone who's been following us, right?
Nothing he said was different than what you all Roth said on stage was Kara Swisher right? You well, who was in charge of the trust and safety team, straight up said we made a mistake. Here's how the mistake was made. This is what I do differently. And everything that Toby posted back that up. And most importantly, Toby said, there's no evidence of government intervention in Hunter Biden's laptop. And there is evidence of the Trump campaign sending other stuff and then just kind of left that dangling out there. But it doesn't matter. Because what's happening is people are framing it up and saying this proof something and having all this anger and rage at you know, all those liberals at Twitter, without any real evidence, it's honestly I mean, I used to be a big TV fan back and like The Rolling Stone day, I loved the phrase that like
the vampires were on the face Empire Squid Face to be human about Goldman Sachs. Yeah.
Right. And I mean, actually, he should be pretty embarrassed by this. I don't see how you come back. I mean, one, the fact that he's like, doing all this work on behalf of this incredibly rich and powerful person, I feel like it's incompatible
for Tucker Carlson just to get mad. I mean, it's sort of it feels like all pretense, there's
no evidence to back what he's saying. It's crazy. It's just like it from a basic journalistic perspective. You can't have like 60 tweets that are all breathless. And then the actual evidence you show resin demonstrate
the government, he didn't see any evidence that the government interfered, even though everybody around him wants to basically keep suggesting that it did, and he does nothing to clean up that record at all.
No, no, he in fact, his thread is inconsistent on this right of like making claims that that he can't back up later in the thread.
Let's talk about Barry. So this one felt a little bit Meteor to me in terms of showing off what could arguably be a disingenuous stance on the part of Twitter when it comes to shadow banning. So like I kind of summarized at the outset, there were internal looks like screenshots, really, of certain accounts mentioned lives of tick documents about Gino we mentioned J bot a Chara from Stanford, where it did show that they had tags affixed to their account saying they were to be penalized D boosted whatever term you want to use and not made as, you know, their content not made as distributed. I mean, I don't know what do you think about every And that came through various tweets.
So I think the if we're once again going to take the best possible version. I think this is a situation where Twitter's executives were not very specific in their language, right? Everything she is talking about is both in the terms of service, and I've been in multiple blog posts on Twitter, that Twitter will allow certain speech to exist, but will decide that they will not amplify it themselves. I think this is a good thing. In fact, you know, who agrees with me on that? A guy named Elon Musk agrees with me, and that he specifically talked about
freedom of speech is not freedom of speech.
Right. So that is a that is a paraphrase of my colleague, Rene de resta, of what people have talked about for years, which is a middle ground for these platforms is allowing certain speech to exist and to be findable by people who specifically search it out. But not to use the features of the platform that recommend stuff or provide amplification to push that stuff out. Right, that basically Twitter is saying, there's some middle ground, if you're really, really bad over here, you're just off, if your speech is just fine, you're over here. And we're going to have to deal with a middle ground where we will allow you to exist, but we're not going to ever recommend you and we're not going to push you on other people. And that is effectively what these different settings do is that people who are multiple repeat offenders, that instead of taking them completely off, they allow them to exist. They allow their followers to see all their content, but they don't recommend them because
like some of the debate on the very wise thread is semantic. It is what is all semantic. What is Shadow banning, because Twitter basically said, we don't shadow banned, but then Twitter defined shadow banning as no one but you can see what you do. And other people clearly see shadow banning is I'm not getting as much reach as I thought I should. But Twitter was very clear that they were fiddling with reach of accounts that violate their policies. So it feels like there's just like a total semantic war going on here. Right?
There's a 2018 blog post where the people in charge at Twitter said, What is Shadow banning? The best definition we found is deliberately making someone's content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster, right? So they are taking the most extreme version of what people talking about shadow banning where somebody is effectively in a complete jail where they think they're on the platform, but nobody sees it. Right? They then say in that post, what we do is we take people out of search and we downrange stuff. And so yes, it is all
right. I mean, let's let's get into the definition of that. I mean, down rank basically means if you're looking at trending topics, it won't appear if you have the algorithmic fee that puts in accounts that you don't normally follow, but it just wants to highlight something of, you know, trend and excitement. And people are talking about, they'll put that in there even if you don't follow it. So that is like a kind of algorithmic boosting that Twitter engages with that they basically push these people out of
right, they effectively say, the places where we are putting content to you that you did not explicitly ask for, we consider that our editorial responsibility, and we will make editorial decisions within that. And that includes both the algorithmic feed, like you said, as well as trending topics and other kinds of recommended, you should follow this account. Here. There's three or four interfaces at Twitter that will recommend content to you.
I'm sort of conflicted. There's sort of the COVID case study where Twitter seems to be going after somebody for saying, Oh, COVID lockdowns are gonna hurt our children, because learning loss or whatever, with the benefit of hindsight, to me does seem like some, you know, censorship around this sort of prevailing ideology. On the other hand, downvoting, or whatever they did to libs of Tiktok. I don't know, if I ran a platform, I did all this hard work. I founded like a tech company, I built it up. And I'm like, distributing it to the world. I don't know if I'd want to look back on my work product and see that like, this account, like harassing sort of the most marginal people in our society, and just sort of making fun of them, even if it doesn't violate sort of, I don't know, Red Line rules that I can dream up. Why am I using this great tool that I created to distribute that, like, what's my obligation,
which is why this kind of feature exists to allow that account to exist. Like, if you want it to be able to be there, then you need to have some kind of mechanism where you're not making things worse. And the thing you always have to remember that is that all of trust, and safety is adversarial. Any decision you make the person who you're making, the decisions about their content will adjust. And what has happened is you have these effectually these kinds of professional trolls, like lips at TIC tock who understand exactly where the line is, and they'll go up to a millimeter of that line. And the outcome is children's hospitals get bomb threats, right? And so if your Twitter and your like the real life impact of this account, is that people are getting death threats, but they are super careful not to violate one you might just make it go away totally and say like, we're just not gonna take this risk. Or you might do something like this. We're like, Okay, well, you can exist, but we're not making it. We're not going to try it, you know, or whatever. So the argument a number of people are making Is it legit tick tock probably got actually a good deal here and that they violated multiple times, right.
And they got custody. Right, it was adjudicated against them, it needed to go to the highest levels,
they effectively got what was then a scandal when Facebook had it called cross check, which is, which is actually pretty common in something you have to do with these companies is when you have a very large account, you end up marking it so that just a normal day to day content moderation worker can't take it down like you, you can't run a social network where the president united states can have their password reset by any contract. Right, right. But this they protected, they protected the account that normal content operations, people could not take impact on it. So certainly, it looks like Twitter went out of their way to allow two limbs a tick tock to continue to exist.
Do you think there is any positive outcome to the broader public in showing the way internal deliberations happen at social media platforms? Because, you know, I do think there's something interesting about the fact that these were big stories at the time, or there was like a lot of attention paid to the claims by conservatives of shadow banning, and reporters did not manage to get these documents, and right kind of the, you know, whatever, mainstream media reporters did not get these documents and write the stories that are you know, are coming out now, because of Elon. I mean, you think there's some positive aspect to at least that happening?
Yes, I mean, I think one, this is something I've actually been saying, for years, I have a talk in which I talked about how these companies act in a quasi governmental manner. By they just do and they are making decisions about people's political speech, they have to, if they want to run these kinds of platforms, and the platforms to be usable, and they do not want like really bad outcomes, like people dying, then they have to act in a quasi governmental manner. But they do so without democratic legitimacy or transparency. And so for years, I've been talking about these companies to be more transparent in their decisions. One of the ways you could do that may be a positive outcome. And something I proposed to Musk before he called, you know, attacks me for it was they could run a database for the last 30 days, these are all the content moderation decisions we've made. And you could, they're interesting privacy issues, but you could provide that for people so that he could see whether or not there's a bias because he is he's making the assertion that these decisions were politically biased, but he's not providing any evidence of that all he's doing is allowing
the Trump people ask for you know, it's just like, look at these case studies. And we won't tell you about any of the other case studies, let alone actually provide you data that would allow you to sort of analyze it.
Right? No, and I guarantee you've got, like, maybe, you know, BLM protesters who say things that could be considered violent against police officers getting the same kind of limit, I totally expect you have an Tifa and other kinds of like, far left folks and our guests,
there have been tons of complaints by pro Palestinian protesters that claim that they are constantly getting, you know, whatever D boosted shadowbanned. And I mean, that's the really frustrating thing about the tape that came after, you know, Barry's tweets was like, this is only happening on one side. And it's like, well, you're gonna say it's only happening on one side when it's reported by someone whose goal as a reporter right now is to show that the left is censorious and that the left's goal is to make sure that conservatives do not get the read through mainstream channels, you're not gonna get an even handed hearing from Barry Weiss when it comes to, you know, leftist, true leftist, not like center left, but like actual Antifa or I'm gonna say an Tifa. Because that's loaded. But you know, like Palestinian rights, any any sort of
it's also Muslim I easier, bad behavior can be asymmetrical, like these people just assume that there's necessarily symmetrical bad behavior. And I just find it a totally absurd claim,
which if you had a database here, you could get different groups, analyzing that data, and then publishing their methodology and doing peer reviewed work on we think they're biased or not it and you're totally right, Tom, like there are other groups that have a lot of complaints here. I think the Palestinian pro Palestinian groups have pretty legitimate complaints. And it goes exactly to the first thread. You know, the State of Israel runs what's called an internet referral unit, they have a full time employees of the State of Israel whose entire job it is to tell Twitter and Facebook to take content down under Israeli law. And, well, I think that is something that is going to exist. And so what we should have is complete and total transparency, and what content was taken down because a sovereign state said it should be taken down. Right. And that's the kind of transparency that if they want to provide would be great, I'm not sure if Barry Weiss believes that that would be appropriate. But if she really cared about the things she thinks she's caring about, then complete transparency of what is being moderated and in what situations that was because of an external request, I think is required and
this is what is lost in I think the bad faith nature of these debates because it's just so hard to differentiate, you know, a suppose that absolutist stance on free speech, and the particular political viewpoints that you have that you feel are being, you know, kneecapped by the people that are in charge. Because if you truly did believe in these things, you being you know, the Free Speech absolutist, Elon Musk, David Sachs, all these people that are bitching and moaning on Twitter, they would not have released it to specific journalists who were given specific instructions on how to disseminate this information. Jack Dorsey even publicly, asked Elon you should release all of these document As to all the journalists who had to provide full transparency, which you were saying at the outset would be the only way that you can have like a true and fair reckoning of what was going on inside Twitter during this period. Right?
These guys are definitionally useful idiots. Here they are targeting reporters who want to see the world a certain way really want to Professor independence, but are clearly aligned with delivering the message that Elon Musk wants. I mean, it's very similar to some of the Iraq war reporting. And you know, you would think Tybee, would be sort of terrified of becoming that person, I just find it ridiculous. And the other thing I wanted to flag is just and I think we've all hinted at this is just the sort of American narcissism, they're like, the great sort of political speech challenge of our time is going to revolve around libs of Tiktok rather than China nation states fascism, like the big questions like just the narcissism of it is mind boggling to me.
Hope this is okay. So if you want to take their argument seriously, that has been true of kind of the American Center left as well, is that all of the discussions were about Trump and about the fact that 95% of Facebook's users are out outside the United States. 80% of Twitter's users are outside the United States. But those people are facing much worse, because one, they live in states that have massive censorship and propaganda outlets, and to their countries that don't have a First Amendment. And so if you live in India, Hunter Biden, his laptop just seems quaint. Because right now, the Indian state is the most censorious democratic state on the planet, they send more requests than any other government to take down stuff on Twitter, a lot of that, yeah, it's on Twitter and Facebook,
according to the how much is Twitter, India, and then get to China? Like what? How much is Twitter dealing with India and China right now? Like, how important are those platforms in those countries?
Right, so Twitter is blocked in China, right? When you think about the risk from China, it is that the People's Republic of China has a very large and growing propaganda capability that targets Twitter. Traditionally, the Chinese propaganda capability was focused on Chinese and on Chinese platforms. And two incidents has changed over the last five years. First of the series of uprisings in Hong Kong, the PRC found themselves totally at a disadvantage versus these highly online, very good English speaking Hong Kong students who were able to get their side of the story out. And then the second was COVID, was that, you know, with everybody blaming China, you know, either at some level, whatever you believe, about Wuhan, I think you could say, you know, obviously, COVID came from China, whether it was natural or not, that they wanted to distract from that and also push the idea that China's response to COVID was appropriate. And so our team SEO, we do a bunch of reports on this kind of stuff. And we've seen a huge growth in Chinese capabilities over the last several years in English and German and Spanish. They've also really pushed to their state media outlets like CGTN are now huge in a way that Russia today, for example, never will, and Elon
Musk will say a fucking word about China. Right? Has he said anything about it? People are directly asking him about it. He has no stream sensitivity, like he has factories in China, right? There are obvious pressure points that he's sensitive to. And he won't say a word about
almost all of his net worth is in Tesla stock. Tesla has a massive giga factory in Shanghai, from which they will be producing cars to be shipped around the world, but especially in Asia, I believe. And China is already 25% of the revenue. Clearly, if you look at like discounted cash flows for the future, China's going to be more than 50% right of their stock price. And so yes, the PRC has huge leverage over him. It's like, if Mark Zuckerberg, instead of having all his money in Facebook stock is money was like in a Chinese pharmaceutical company. Right? And it's like, this is how this is something never really faze me. Republicans
were sincere. They would be going insane over this. I mean, this is any national security serious person would be terrified of this situation. Yes. Yeah.
Right. Because the team. So right before the election, this got very little play. But we wrote this up at ei partnership.net. If you look at our blog, for 2022, right before the election, there were five disinformation networks taken down in a coordinated work by Twitter and Facebook. We did the write up in the analysis of who they were. And it was the Iranians and the Chinese. Most of it was anti Republican. In fact, one of the groups was a they created an entire fake anti Rubio group in Florida fast and the Chinese did. And so
what and this because they think Republicans are hostile to China or Yes,
right. No, I think I think actually, you are starting to the the idea that foreign influence is something that is only pro Republican is a very 2016 idea. What's happened is American democracy has become the World Cup of disinformation, where everybody cares about our elections, even our house and Senate elections,
where they don't get to vote in them and impacts everybody.
Right? Right. And so, if you're a government, you've got your political leader saying, Hey, why are we not playing? Here too, if the Russians are playing there and the Chinese and so you're arann and China, we're running disinformation campaigns, they're talking about Twitter, that entire team at Twitter that did that work is gone. Every single one of them, not a single person that we used to email to work on this stuff together is still there. And Republicans should care about that. Because a bunch of disinformation on Twitter is anti Republican, right is anti GOP is sometimes anti Trump, but in many cases targeting in this case, like Rubio, very specific kind of mainstream Republican politicians, because they see them as not beneficial to Iran or China. And so yes, I do think like, we're stuck in this weird 2017 moment where Republicans don't care about foreign influence, and Democrats do. And therefore you can play to the right of saying that none of this stuff is real. But that just does not match the facts on the ground, as documented, and that we will not be able to document very much anymore if nobody at Twitter is minding the store.
So this is kind of a soft target. But I feel like we have to deal with it to an extent. We've seen as Elon has, you know, spent a little more time on Twitter, there is a creeping arbitrariness behind his own moderation decisions. He has banned Kanye from the platform for posting a swastika, which is actually fine. I would
think like it's and he could release the process behind that.
I mean, there's simple there, he is not allowed Alex Jones back on the platform. Because he believes that, you know, everything that he said about Sandy Hook was, you know, disgusting and harmful, and he doesn't want to be running a platform that's like that. So there's obviously a huge amount of hypocrisy blatant in the way that he's approaching content moderation decisions. Where do you see this going with him? Like if he's still in this kind of 2017 mindset, he's starting to come to terms with the fact that a free for all absolutist stance on free speech is not actually what he wants, let's even take the economic pressures from what advertisers want off the table. Where do you see Elon progressing in terms of building up or rebuilding some of the content moderation structures that he took down?
I really don't know. Other than the thing I said the day he closed the deal was he you know, kind of bought himself into a world of pain here, because one, he is exposed to all these countries, you know, he sells products all around the world. He is somebody who has, until this moment maintained a kind of bipartisan respect for him. Another company, he owns SpaceX, I believe 80 90% of the revenue comes from the US government, they are effectively a defense contractor to NASA and DOD. And so he's kind of ruining his reputation with half the people who vote on budgets that give him billions of dollars. And then by saying I am the decider, there is no policy mechanisms. There's no Council, there's no discussion, you only have to lobby me, he has made himself kind of personally, if not legally, morally responsible for everything that happens on Twitter. And I think, one he seems to be kind of spinning out of control a little bit in his own interactions, like it's getting more and more like. Yeah, he said, I run it. Right. And so like I proposed to him, you know, that they should have these transparency mechanisms, which is a totally nonpartisan, you know, idea. And he said, I run a propaganda platform, which, you know, we've got a couple of grad students, I've got like four full time employees and a bunch of real smart kids who work for me, I'm not sure I would call that a platform. But that's cool. Like, if you want to see that. But like he's, he's kind of spinning out of control in his interactions with people. And I think he's gonna find this is not fun. It's also really affecting the stock price Tesla stock has plummeted. Even worse than all these other companies, I think part of it is he is destroying the brand of Tesla, and he is going to find that doing this for the lols is going to have real long term economic impact on him. I think in a year, he's not going to own Twitter, because I think it's not going to be fun dealing with these issues. They never stop, there will never not be a moderation controversy on Twitter, it is going to massively distract him and it's destroying his brand. And I say this, it's like, I drive a Tesla, I have a Tesla roof. I have power walls behind me back here. So I I think Tesla has built incredible things. And I don't think I'd ever buy a Tesla product. Again, I've got 20 years of depreciation now on the roof that I'm gonna have to live with. But I'm never buying a car again. And that's true for like a, you know, when you think about the people who buy Tesla's you're talking about kind of urban and suburban college educated people with high incomes. He's not playing to that base. Right.
Right. Right. And I mean, yes, I've heard this this argument from a lot of other people that it's like, if you are and this is just the general issue I think the Republican Party is maybe running into is as you fight entirely on culture, war, it matters but you are yourselves you know, a well off group of people. You kind of got to think about who your audience is, at a certain point. And that's fine. If you feel like you were the voice for you know, middle America, but you're also selling hell of expensive cars, that I mean, good for you if you can make cars for those people. But by and large, you really aren't.
I know this is getting psychological but like, what do you think is going on? Sometimes I'm like, it's their children. Their children are all like so left that they can't even understand it and the culture that they're facing with their children is alienating to them. Why is he like huffing this sort of like libs of Tik Tok content to such a degree that he has been so radicalized He totally vacillates between saying that he wants to like, be on the side of the middle 80%. And then as he says he's gonna support Ron Santas. And every, every account he's validating is some weird right wing account. Well, that's
where the business side gets really interesting too, because you can see the rationalization starting to come together over there that because they are taking this quote, unquote, absolutist free speech stance, they're starting to lose advertisers. And now they're blaming woke capitalism for all of this, because, you know, these advertisers don't want to be associated with a platform that is, you know, Riven with hate speech. But if you are an advertiser, you know, are a big brand, you are trying to sell the most amount of products as possible. And you see, like the sentiment that most of the country has, which is most people don't like seeing these things on their timeline. And most people don't want to be surrounded by, you know, this level of hate speech. And so, you know, they can't even like rely on the free market argument, in order to prove that what they're fighting for is like what the most of the country wants?
Yeah, he is definitely, Twitter is definitely cashflow negative at this point, right, like Twitter's never been a great business it is over the last 10 years, it's only had a couple of quarters of profitability, but effectively, it was making as much revenue as it spent. So it was going to be an ongoing concern for the foreseeable future. And what he did was he did reduce his costs by laying off all these people. But he also was massively destroyed his revenue, I'm sure he's increased engagement with all this craziness. But that is the supply of advertising, right. So he's increased the supply in the marketplace, every time you see an ad on Twitter or any other platform, that is the outcome of a real time bidding war between advertisers. And I guarantee the price of those Twitter ads have gone through the floor. Because the big brand advertisers who are willing to spend the big money on those CPCs are CPMs are not are mostly gone, a couple are left like Amazon, and then you saw that daily Stormer guy, when you go through his feed the Amazon ads are on there. So we just saw, you know, a quiet letter to advertisers from twitter saying we're coming up with more brand safety stuff. So you can block certain accounts and such, I don't know if that's going to be good enough. But I am sure they're losing a bunch of money. And that doesn't only include the fact that he he borrowed a huge amount of money, and he attached to the new Twitter Corporation over a billion dollars in interest payments per year. And so yes, he could massively cut the staff and keep Twitter running. Because all a lot of the hard engineering has been done. And it's now in like a sustained engineering mode. But he's not gonna be able to make serious changes. And so he talks about these big ambitious things about building the everything app, building payments, building this building, that you can't do that on a skeleton crew, at least not safely, once you already have a base of hundreds of millions of users. And so I think he's, he's gonna find himself in this weird trap, where he's going to have to continue to subsidize it out of his personal net worth, which again, because of his actions, is dropping, right? And so like the people who are really should be angry here, probably Tesla shareholders, because his continued sale of Tesla stock, plus his erratic behavior is tanking Tesla stock in a way that is great for the shorts of which I'm not in they have made the shorts have made billions. But for normal Tesla stock holders, they're the ones holding the bag, you think liberals
have set too low of a bar? For you on Twitter? Like, do you think this whole thing, the website is just gonna start like going down? Or it felt like there was a moment where, I don't know there was just like a panic over like, oh, this could all end like tomorrow? Or how do you see that playing out?
I mean, he's just running more risk, right? Like, you could run Twitter with 300 400 people. So Twitter has about 500,000 servers in three main data centers, as well as a couple dozen pops, right. So you need your data center operations people, you need your infra people who manage the hardware and software remotely. And then you need your DevOps people who keep it running. That's your minimum, right? So you know, probably maybe 400 people, 500 people, you can keep it up and running indefinitely. If you want to actually build this incredibly complicated app that is effectively the American version of WeChat, then you're going to need hundreds and 1000s of engineers, designers, product managers and the like. And so is it just going to go down? I think he's taking more risk because the depth of their engineering talent has decreased. I think one of the crazy things he's done is he's done the layoffs in a way that is incentivized people who have other options to leave the craziest from like a just a complete, take the politics out from a Harvard Business Review organizational management perspective, sending the email that says, Click this button, if you're so hardcore, you want to have a horrible life. If you don't, I will automatically pay you 90 days of severance going into the holidays. Is just selecting for people who don't think they can get a job by January and people who have like h1 B visas and such so a bunch of people who believe
or people who believe in whatever you know, political project, he is trying to advance through Twitter,
which I don't think is a majority of the of the L seven engineers at Twitter. I guarantee that the majority of them do not think he's doing a good job and And then those people, there have been a lot of layoffs in tech. But if you're like an L seven at Twitter and you've operated at the scale, you will have a job in two weeks.
And his vision isn't even clear. Like even if you're a die hard. He alternates. So it's hard. You're really sort of going with the, I don't know, dear leader sensibility where you're supporting whatever Elon capriciously wants to do.
I mean, it's worked for him in the past because Tesla had a mission. We're going to make electric cars real. We're gonna save the Earth SpaceX, we're getting humanity off this planet, we're reinvigorating America. Those are incredible missions that are missions that people will take less money and work 80 hour weeks for. There's no what is the elevator pitch of Musk's Twitter, it's we're going to run this for the personal gratification of musk. That is not the kind of thing you're like, Oh, I'll never see my kids and I'm fine with it. That's gonna motivate you for that.
So this gets to the kind of interesting question at least interesting to us. And maybe question about the journalists that are at the center of all of these quote unquote revelations, because, you know, we have with Barry Weiss, well, she's more or less, you know, become a partisan to the certain types of people that believe that the left is an anti free speech group. And they're, you know, they are out there to cater to the whims of the blue haired pronoun people. And you have people like Matt Taibbi who I think is a great journalist. I'd love to have him on Matt, if you if you hear this, we're down to chat. But I think there is something very strange and almost insidious happening with the non mainstream journalists, the ones that are contrarian, basically by nature, and that they are trying to rebel against, you know, the the mainstream argument that's been pushed forward over the last couple of years and the overreaction, I would say overreaction by the New York Times to things like Russia gate, or you know, Facebook content, moderation, all this other stuff. And they have ended up in a place like Eric mentioned earlier, in which they are willing to be mouthpieces, and there's really no other word for it mouthpiece is for the richest person in the world, in which he can, you know, release selectively released documents that are being pushed through the platform that he owns that if nothing else is going to bring like this fucking thing. But from a journalistic aspect here, how did we end up here? Is there anything positive to say about deciding to carry water for Elon Musk in an extremely untransparent way,
my personal view on this as I'm just very skeptical of like the conservative media project, my first job out of college, I worked for the Washington Examiner, which was sort of a Republican billionaire funded outlet, but I, you know, I took the job because I was covering DC City Hall. And, you know, it was fairly straight news sensibility. But ultimately, like, I found who like the conservative involves to be like, pretty sloppy, willing to, like, throw up, you know, headline numbers of like, budget deficits without sort of much thinking about the context. And it was very similar to like, what we're seeing now where it's, can it be truthful enough, that it's something that we can all get, like angry about and score points on and I don't quite know, culturally, why, like the right hasn't been able to build up great conservative media like dispositional II, but I just, I've never seen them successful. And that's part of why I sort of have cheered for like a musk Twitter, it's like, okay, make the right actually govern as they say they want to, but I mean, I think as we've all sort of said they, I've seen no evidence that they can, I don't know are Alex, are you as cynical as I am? Why can't the right wing deliver sort of a coherent argument here?
Well, it's interesting. When you talk about TV, I think, unfortunately, he's trending towards Greenwald, who the biggest enemy for Glenn Greenwald is West Wing, Normie, Democrat, right, like West Wing watching Obama voters, even though he has moved to a country that has a semi fascist dictator, who is now fighting against your Bolsonaro, who Greenwald hates is now fighting against being democratically elected out. And you know, who's going to support him in that it looks like musk Musk has been tweeting things positively saying about he's looking into whether Bolsonaro was improperly tweeted by tweet by Twitter, that no matter what the facts are, that the worst people are just normally Democrats. I feel the same way about Ed Snowden is like, if one day Ed Snowden is going when he is no longer useful, something horrible is going to happen to him in Moscow, by the FSB. And his last thought is going to be the real enemy is Brock Obama. Right? Like, it's just you have these people where it's they they've got such anger that they have to then realign everything else around the these like basic ideas of, you know, basic center level and of normal, you know, government in the United States is the worst thing ever. So somehow either Trump as president or, you know, populists around the world, are really the representatives of the people.
I do sadly think that the common denominator in a lot of this ironically is Twitter. That the Twitter engagement mechanism for a lot of people especially contrarians is just to get into fights with people is just to score points in the midst of some sort of Twitter argument. And that, by definition is going to push you into taking very bizarre stances and into strange corners. And I see someone like Greenwald, you know, journalistically it the stuff that he's pushing out through his substack. And, you know, if he's still publishing articles anywhere else, it's still pretty strong stuff. I mean, you mentioned Brazil, you know, he was responsible for the dissemination of a lot of files that were leaked in Brazil, that helped exonerate Lula, who is now maybe going to be the president there. So again, like when it gets to the moral compass, I still think it's pointing in the right direction. But because Twitter has dominated so much of the way journalists view their job, and and the way to establish their brand, that it's just going to end up in this place where really good journalists are willing to make concessions to some of the least good faith actors out there, and ones that in every other way, they do not agree with them politically, just that they can, you know, score points against Normie Democrats. And it's super depressing. There's no other word for it, because I do respect these people. But this is not the answer.
I think, yeah, the interesting thing I was talking about yesterday, too, is the strategy of bringing these people in to look through your files, it's okay to let you know, I don't think it's journalistically appropriate to only do it for two, but if you're going to let people look through your internal communications, but Musk has a legal responsibility to protect user data. So if we continue down this path, where now Ty, EB and Weiss, and they're kind of political, those kinds of political actors are able to go look through user data, then Musk is in a world of hurt. And then just while we're recording this, it was announced something that I predicted yesterday it has happened, which is the Irish data protection commission is now looking into what kind of access Barry Weiss had, because having access to these internal interfaces is exactly the thing that got Twitter in trouble over and over again, because outside hackers or people who are working for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had access to user data. And so Twitter has agreements with the FTC to not allow random people to get access to Twitter user data. And they have such agreements with the Irish DPC, which is the most important regulator for them. And what's
what sort of data in specific is the most sensitive? I mean, DMS, obviously, but like outside of that, what do you think is of major concern to regulators.
So in the US, DMS, for sure, because that is the only data for which there's like a straight black letter law, that Twitter is responsible for something called the Stored Communications Act, which is a pretty old law was signed by Ron Reagan, it really was meant to apply to the phone companies, and very early email systems. But the Stored Communications Act 18 USC 2702 specifically says that if you have if you're a holder of Stored Communications with people, you can not release it to anybody, except under certain circumstances. And we're having a lot of fun for the lols is not turns out, not in the law Ronald Reagan signed, that you can't you can't release SCA cover material for trolling for the FTC is gonna be a much broader set of IP address, phone number. Anything that has nonpublic information is covered by the FTC consent decree, which already some of the stuff that's in the interfaces that Weiss looked at that it's not clear whether Weiss was actually hands on keyboard or whether she was just looking over the shoulder. But in either case, probably that was a violation of the FTC consent decree
that's gonna put journalists on a weird side here, we're going to be rooting or at least some of us are going to be rooting for reporters, quote, unquote, to get in trouble for violating Twitter's data security.
There's a difference between a leaked email between employees or a document inside and user data, right. And for the most part, we talk about like the Facebook files in such situations where journalists have cheered leaks. Those are generally internal correspondence between employees that, at least where I saw were generally those journalists who have been very careful to take out any PII. But in this case, like, I think, like the fear is that the next step of like musk on this path is he's just going to let these people get access to DMS. And he does so he is just straight black letter violating federal
law, lunacy. I mean, we, yeah,
I mean, I have a lot of the stuff that's happening today, we will see a month right? Well, I
mean, you know, the legal parameters around what Twitter should be doing is already getting brittle. Because we saw Elon, very publicly fire was named James Baker. The company's was like Associate General Counsel or whatever, like the high up, sorry, Deputy General Counsel, who I believe was vetting these documents around the time that, you know, Barry Weiss was looking at them. And this was depicted as some sort of nefarious act where I imagine I imagine his argument this is James Baker's argument is like, we're about to dump a whole bunch of internal shit here. I think I'd want to know whether or not this is going to be in violation of federal
statute. Elon is just like, I didn't know he worked for me, like, you know, like, that's sort of builds his credibility. It's, I mean, it was that it's one of his top lawyers, if not top lawyer and the Elan doesn't know who they might have been
what did I mean? There's no general counsel. So apparently his personal lawyer who I am shocked Quinn Emanuel still has him as an employee, but I guess he's created a huge amount of litigation business for QE. But apparently, his personal lawyer is effectively the GC now. And I don't know how the GC would not know who their Deputy General Counsel is, we're generally considering Baker's background. I don't know him. I don't know exactly what he did. But every tech company has got somebody like that who came from either like the National Security Division of DOJ, or FBI, because when you operate the scale, you get legal requests from governments around the world continuously. And so you need an entire legal department that thinks about those things. And so yes, I guarantee one of the things that Baker's internal analysis would be, we have SCA EPA, as well as FTC and Irish data protection commission commitments that we need to follow when doing this, when they're like, Oh, that's a bunch of legal gobbledygook you're fired. Right? So I mean, you can YOLO through this. But the truth is, is when he bought Twitter, Twitter was already had already twice made a deal with the FTC. So he purchased a company that is already kind of, under a consent decree that has been looked over by a federal judge, his ability to fight any of this was effectively already given away by previous administrations of Twitter, that's part of the liabilities he purchased. So if he thinks he can just be like, Oh, it's a reset, because I bought it. That's not how any of this works. And more importantly, that Baker is on the same day, his Chief Information Security Officer, Chief Compliance Officer, and Chief Privacy Officer all resigned. And that happened to be the day that they were supposed to sign a letter to the FTC. So I think it is highly likely there's already a quiet FTC investigation going on, because Twitter already missed a deadline under their consent decree. And all of the people that the FTC used to integrate us to work with to make sure that Twitter was protecting user data are gone. And if
you violate the terms of your consent decree, I mean, what are the penalties for that? Is it a fine? Is it you know, do you lose your your tweeting license, like what exactly happens?
I mean, I believe the only things I've ever heard of is FTC can find you. But the amount that can do so can be pretty significant. You know, the largest right now is 5 billion to Facebook, to Facebook, that was nothing $5 billion to Twitter, which is now losing two to $3 billion a year probably would be disastrous enough, that would that would be more than that. I mean, $5 billion, would be more than all the cash equivalents, all the liquid wealth of Twitter. So if the FTC matched the Facebook fine, Musk would have to go sell Tesla stock. And then recapitalize the company to keep it a going concern
are fines based on the value of the company or fines based purely on sort of how egregious the infraction was.
It is based upon the politics and the negotiation and the judge, and it is where it is based on the size of the companies in Europe. And there are limits to how much you can be fine. But also, they could be ordered to cease operations in Europe, that would be a possibility
to get super reflective on this. I mean, our premise of the conversation going in is like, Okay, we want to take them as seriously as possible. I mean, it's amazingly hard to actually engage with like the Elon Musk camp directly. I mean, Elon is not out there, giving tough interviews and even like getting proxies for him is very difficult. You know, we had Jason Calacanis on, he wouldn't talk about it. So anyway, we started this conversation off with the premise that, you know, we want to sort of take them seriously. I wanted to just raise like, is that a mistake? Like, do you think there's a point where we just need to sort of just stop taking them seriously, if if these arguments are so sloppy,
I think you have to take must seriously because he has incredible power. Now, like his ability to shape the conversation in the middle American political class, he is now the most important person,
but you don't have to take him as sincere. In fact, he gives lots of evidence he's not he contradicts himself every other day. And yet you see reporters, sort of constantly taking him at his word. I don't know. At some level, we have to say somebody's not trustworthy. They're not straightforward. I think
you're right, Musk, like it's hard to take him completely seriously. Now, even though he's got this global power of more interesting, you mentioned Calacanis not being willing to engage on this. I'm putting down a marker now, the musk bubble in tech is going to pop right that right now it has become trendy, to be seen as counterculture to be seen on Team musk. And there's a bunch of people who people who I used to work with people who I've interacted with socially, who are smart, serious people who are now kind of waving the musk flag. And just like with Trump, just like with FTX, that bubble is going to pop. And you're going to see all these people all of a sudden try to rewrite history that they were just oh, you know, yeah, I invested a little bit money or I gave him some suggestions, because like Musk is accelerating his kind of breakdown here. And if you end up with Twitter, going out of business, him having to give up that Twitter to the bondholders or that the debt holders, if you see him having to step down as CEO as Tesla, if you see some kind of Massive moment or you know, if there's like a horrible violent act that happens publicly if there is, God forbid, something of the level of a Christchurch shooting or something that gets attached back to Musk's moderation decisions. All of a sudden, all these people who thought it was real cool to be on Team Musk are going to reverse themselves. And so I hope people are taking screenshots because it's just a very scary like there's a scary impulse in the valley right now, like a lot of what the New York Times wrote about people in Silicon Valley in 2018, was not that correct. But now a bunch of the things they said then are now applying to 2020 to write about the politics of individuals. And the fact that he has become this Pied Piper for otherwise serious people whose I've been to their house, I've had dinner with their family. And now they've turned into it feels in Silicon Valley a little bit. Like in the, you know, after Trump was elected and family's got kind of river, it feels a little bit like that in the valley, in that a bunch of otherwise serious smart people are now in this kind of orbit and are going to have to, it'll be interesting to see when, like, Calacanis being that quiet about it, I thought was the start like because he's very smart about his public image. And I think that is the start of an indication that people are going to start,
I took him as being quiet because anything he says gets attributed to Elon and then Elon gets mad at me. We sort of saw it in the DMS, the text messages. Yeah, sorry, the text messages were Calacanis is getting chided for being too loud. So I took it that way, honestly, as much as we enjoy Jason, I mean, I feel like he's pretty much rolling over. I mean, if you listen on, all in, he's not sort of defending sort of the Democratic line. He's just sort of letting he's he's pretty pro Elon, he, I think he's, he's very much sort of capitulated to his co host, who loves sort of the musk party and love to shit on Democrats right now.
I mean, by the way, if I if I were an editor, the idea that, you know, Elon is the new Trump when it comes to dividing families in Silicon Valley and that comfortable conversation at the table. Excellent story. Yeah, just through that. Smart. That's very smart. But
if the New York Times wasn't on strike, they could write that. It's the perfect New
York Times Style section. Story. VCs always
want to be optimists. I mean, that's, they feel like I mean, it's, it's been a winner to be pro Elon, you know, I mean, I mean, Marc Andreessen was somewhat defensive of Elizabeth Holmes, for a period like a feel like the positioning over and over again, has just been defend sort of crazy optimists.
Well, Andreessen is one of those guys, I'm very, I'm very sad about because I used to work for him at loud cloud. I reported to him on the board. I'm an LP and Andreessen Horowitz. I got a k one every year from him. And he blocked me on Twitter, and then was subtweeting me last night, and it's gotten kind of
forced to deal with Marc Andreessen. What's the deal?
I mean, he's never been the most kind of empathetic guy, like one of my first negative Marc Andreessen moments was after I joined low cloud, it was during the dot bomb. And we were doing a layoff and Ben Horowitz, who actually is like, who he says he is, was up there in tears talking to the company about how he had to lay people off. And how horrible was to do this to the family. But it was necessary to move forward. And Mark was over on the side on his Blackberry, typing out an email, like not even paying attention, right. And I was like, that's an embedded mark. And so yeah, I mean, he's never he's, I think he's one of the things is that money is disconnected from the world. Like, he lives in like a palace in Atherton with high walls. And I don't know if you saw but you know, he was part of the group trying to keep
that whole episode. Yeah, we were very interested in Bill house. Yeah.
$3 million per condo, right, like cheap housing, which is
they have to they have to hire around the clock security now. Because there are, you know, people moving in low rent people moving into Atherton. It's pretty dangerous. Yeah. And so
he's, I think, like, you know, there's these people in the valley. To me, the moment at which you start to completely lose touch is when you have enough money to fly private, that that's like the last situation in which you ever have to mix with normal people is like in an airport. And so if you're like going in a armored SUV, to the airport, and you're flying private, and you're going to Davos, and you never have to kind of interact with normal people, there's a bunch of people in the Valley who are at that level, and
they're making that their ideology, you know, Balaji is out there, don't give interviews don't reply to comment, you know, they, they sort of convinced themselves that non engagement is sort of principled. And so then they make their sort of self isolation, complete. I don't know, I just wish they'd communicate an essay format. Like I feel like for people who claimed to be so smart that all their arguments emerge in like, tweets, is just
there's also like an inability to, like, accept the L. I mean, you saw that after the midterms, you know, the people that were the loudest in terms of, you know, woke people or destroying America, that campaign tactic didn't work nearly as well as you would have expected it to. And instead of saying, hey, maybe we should recalibrate because our viewpoints aren't as popular as we thought they were. You know, they just avoid the topic right?
I know the midterms. I felt like a moment where yeah, in Silicon Valley, He's sort of the sense that the based crowd or the, you know, these meme warriors, we're gonna like when it just seemed totally out of touch with an America that clearly was very worried about Normie lib stuff. Yeah, to zoom
back at the midterms, I think the positive thing here is that finally, a significant part of the professional Republican Party is starting to understand that telling your voters that voting is rigged, that voting early is a bad idea that they should not, you know, Carrie lake was telling people not to put their ballot in the backup box, if the local scanner, that kind of stuff is going to become dispositive in these elections, where it's 15 or 20,000. Right. And so that is the what I think the positive thing that came out of the midterms was that finally, people have figured out election denialism is actually in a democracy is a losing, you can fight it, but in the long run, it is a losing battle, because you're telling people to be politically dissident. Right. And,
and also, you know, just to bring this back to the Twitter files, you know, I think if these stories, you know, are the revelations do not end up getting the purchase and reach that they were hoping to, because they decided to they being Elon Musk, and that whole crowd decided to completely circumvent, you know, the mainstream media's role in, you know, the national discussion, that maybe you should think, you know, they're not exactly always going to be the enemy. And you have to at least position this in a somewhat neutral way that, you know, the broader public at least as far as the broader public that reads, The mainstream media will want to engage in this stuff. So you know, if you guys didn't end up getting what you want it through all of this, maybe some self reflection would be an order.
Are you surprised that Marc Andreessen still on the Facebook where
I am, but you know, Peter Thiel made it to,
you think it's just been a loyalist is great, and why we must get rid of somebody else, just like, even though like, clearly, Andreessen disagrees with Zuckerberg on how he's governing, that at least he's like, super deferential.
Right. Like, I think in the situations in which the board could have put some controls on zakah, there have been multiple situations in which Slack has asked the board to kind of stamp his corporate, you know, the creation of ultra voting, stuff like that. And
after such a incident, yes. Yeah. So
whatever they disagree with politically, you're right. And every situation we're Zuck needed his vote, he got his vote. So, yeah, I think at this point, he never sucked us and get rid of him unless he does something. Like to go so politically outside. But what's happened is, unfortunately, the board is much more subservient to suck than it was during my day. Like there were really independent directors. Erskine Bowles, you know, for example, who asked lots of questions and such. And I feel like the Facebook board has become a rubber stamp, which is, you know, I mean, the upside for Zack is, yo, see looks incredible. Compared to like, like the bar has been set low, so low, but like the fact that he is not, you know, personally trolling people that he has
structural, kind of his Oversight Board
has an oversight board and other internal structures for making decisions, that he isn't out there personally, going back and forth, back and forth on things, makes it look really good. And it makes the, you know, people thought the oversight board was a crazy idea. He Zuck hated being the guy that was responsible for content moderation, so much he spent $200 million to build this oversight board. And then Musk spent $44 billion to become the guy that tried to get out. Right, very well.
Here's my last question. And we can, you know, try to spin it forward or at least as broadly as possible. Is there anything that can be learned about content moderation, by the other platforms by the debacle that has been playing out here in terms of Elans approach to moderation? Is there something that can be said, at least reaffirming those who felt that building content oversight board is meaningful, you know, that the dialogue between platforms and countries, which, you know, I think that's a fascinating thing, that not enough people have written about, I don't know, just try to give me some sort of optimism about a positive outcome from, you know, the the implosion that we're witnessing here.
I think I think the lesson has been that having procedural mechanisms around content moderation, where you set a standard, and then you have a bunch of smart people argue about whether certain content violates that standard or not. Well, that seems like the worst way to do it is the worst way to do content, moderation, except all the others, right, has demonstrated that there's a real value to not creating a situation where lobbying one person is responsible. Traditionally, Twitter's smeared this responsibility over dozens of folks, none of whom could then be said, This person is responsible for what happens because I don't think Musk understands the people he's dealing with are, there's going to be violence, right? There's going to be violence tied to the speech that is happening on Twitter that has a constant challenge of balancing real world violent impact versus trying to protect political speech, and he's gone very hard to one side, and that violence will be personally if not legally attached to him. morally attached. And it might be legally attached because there's this case, Gonzalez in the Supreme Court where effectively section 230 protections around certain kinds of violent acts that are encouraged by platforms would be attached to the platforms as a responsibility. And so like he right now, he's got some section 230 protections, but that might not make it past the Supreme Court,
especially when Republicans are in favor of repealing section three as the nuclear option.
Do you think do you think we will see any legislation? I mean, do you think I mean, we could solve this transparency problem instead of just like, you know, selectively leaking things? Yeah. Do you think there'll be a legislation?
Right? So my, my colleague, Nick personally, has put out a platform Transparency Act that has gotten bipartisan co sponsors. So I'd love maybe this is an opportunity. I'd love to see Musk support, require transparency that he could, he could voluntarily do it. But then it gets backstopped by law, that his competitors have to have transparency. For the most part, I don't think there'll be regulation in the US, this will be what we most important for Twitter is going to be FTC now. Right? Like they are pretty clearly in violation of their consent decree, whether they can cure that or end up getting fined will be an interesting question. And then in Europe, Twitter is now the number one target of the Digital Services Act. The Europeans are so happy, because they wanted would have would fail the GDPR is they didn't beat somebody up on the first day of prison, right? So like GDPR was this real slow burn, where they tried to make they wanted to punish a Facebook or Google, but for a bunch of procedural reasons they weren't able to do so quickly. But DSA I think now that he is acting, so kind of out of the norm, and he's also fired all the people that would normally fight the DSA for him.
I know, everybody wants to make this about the Democratic Party, but then we've got the Europeans over there. Where are you to the left of the Democrats.
Right, right. Well, as Ilan would say, popcorn emoji popcorn emoji. Anyway, Alex,
thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, thanks. This
