Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / PREMIUM: "Free Speech" On Twitter with Andrew Lowenthal

Transcript

PREMIUM: "Free Speech" On Twitter with Andrew Lowenthal · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, who dangerous ideas are a diamond
• 0:08
  dozen on the interwebs, floating around all over the place, hate speech, bigotry, misinformation,
• 0:14
  disinformation, but the most dangerous idea of them all perhaps is the idea that we should
• 0:20
  let those dangerous ideas float around willy nilly without trying to crack down on them
• 0:25
  fired governments. Andrew Longthall, today's guest, has spent his life fighting for free speech,
• 0:32
  mostly from the left, mostly in developing countries around southeast Asia, where he's defended
• 0:37
  dissidents and dissenting opinions from the purview of the state and from being suppressed.
• 0:44
  And now he's found himself kind of flipped onto the opposite side of politics in many people's
• 0:49
  minds because he worked with Matt Taibi on five of the Twitter files investigating what was going
• 0:55
  on inside Twitter when they were essentially cooperating, collaborating with the US government
• 1:01
  during the pandemic and that era to suppress or kind of secretly blacklist or gray list certain
• 1:09
  ideas and certain speech. With Michael Schellenberger, Andrew has created something called the Westminster
• 1:16
  Declaration, which is signed by many many and illustrious sort of heterodox thinker saying that
• 1:22
  social media companies should not be putting their thumb on the scales of particular ideas,
• 1:26
  but should allow all ideas to flourish and should have a commitment to the greatest number of ideas
• 1:33
  in the widest possible sphere. Andrew now runs a digital civil liberties initiative called
• 1:38
  libernate. He doesn't live in Australia, but he is Australian. He was back in town. He saw me on
• 1:43
  Q&A on national television arguing with Australia's e-safety commissioner and thought,
• 1:49
  you know what, we should have a chat and they found it fascinating to dig into exactly where
• 1:54
  the boundaries of, I don't know, appropriate discourse should be on social media and in real life,
• 2:00
  enjoy it as much as I did for one and only Andrew Longtop. So where are you based?
• 2:10
  This is going live. So I've been based in Barcelona and I grew up in Hobart,
• 2:16
  being was back here, was living in Southeast Asia for like 10 years in the U.S. for four,
• 2:21
  came back during the pandemic from Bangkok based, then went to Barcelona and have come back on a
• 2:30
  what's happening in Australia? What is happening in Australia? Yeah, exactly. Well, I'm kind of
• 2:35
  I'm looking at that. Yeah, I mean, I'm asking you seriously, what is happening in Australia?
• 2:39
  Well, we're recording, obviously. Australia is very unique, particularly once you kind of go
• 2:49
  outside and you look back in and you talk to people and the image of Australia internationally
• 2:57
  has radically shifted post-COVID, I think, where the crocodile Dundee kind of era is well and
• 3:05
  over the Steve Irwin era like that, that kind of rough and tumble, you know, we can, you know,
• 3:10
  we can not fragile. Well, the rest of the fragile Australia is kind of over and fragile Australia seems
• 3:18
  to have well and truly landed. I mean, I suppose it depends who you talk to, but yeah, I'm sure
• 3:23
  in Tucker Carlson's mind it has the crocodile Dundee is over, but maybe not in the average person
• 3:29
  wandering around the streets of London. Oh, well, I think that's the contrast where they're going,
• 3:34
  wait, I don't understand, like what happened during COVID, we would have thought that you would have
• 3:39
  been the people who would just be like, ah, yeah, no problem. We've got this kind of thing and it'd be
• 3:44
  more like the Brits or some, you know, slightly more sensitive types to calm and carry on. Yeah,
• 3:51
  you would have struggled a little bit more. And that obviously leads into the kind of speech question
• 3:58
  where the same thing seems to have happened where, I mean, obviously, where we were at before
• 4:04
  was a bad, if we talk about the 1950s, was not a good place. And the question is.
• 4:09
  Question speech. Not a lot of pandemics, but in terms of free speech was good. I mean,
• 4:18
  in terms of you're looking at think something like hate speech, obviously, there was a lot of,
• 4:21
  you know, very coarse rough speech that I think a lot of people would not want to see the return of.
• 4:26
  But there also wasn't a lot of free speech. I mean, in the sense that try arguing for communism in
• 4:30
  Australia or America in the 1950s and see how far that gets you. There's no political ideology
• 4:35
  that you could argue for today that would be as, that would get you as persecuted as you would have
• 4:40
  been in the 1950s. Totally. Totally. Totally. I mean, I guess in that sense, I'm thinking about more
• 4:44
  on the kind of hate speech question that the way people would have spoken about, you know, anyone
• 4:49
  who's, you know, not straight white that it are, would have been at a level that no one wants to kind
• 4:54
  of go back back to this. I'm saying there was a kind of correction was was required. The question
• 5:00
  is, well, when I would, and I would propose that we've over corrected essentially. What does that
• 5:04
  look like? What's the over correction? The over correction is the cancel culture. The over
• 5:08
  correction is the safety commissioner kind of kind of from the kind of nanny state trying to
• 5:14
  police every kind of out of reach of the internet to kind of keep everything safe. I mean,
• 5:21
  we're the safest society, I think, in Australia. Now, I mean, and I, where I remember people would
• 5:26
  say that 20 years ago, this is, yeah, whatever. I mean, we've always had a role. We've always,
• 5:31
  I was these love a rule. We like to pretend that we don't. And that's the thing we love a rule.
• 5:35
  We love rule. We love rules. We crave them. It's crazy. But do you think that we're more hostile
• 5:41
  to free speech than the UK? Um, yes. Really? Because because because UK has a really strong pushback.
• 5:54
  And Australia doesn't. I mean, you could probably name 10, um, you know, podcasts with large
• 6:00
  audiences in the UK, like that, that talking about these issues. And openly and who would be
• 6:07
  apart from you, not to blow smoke, but who, I mean, there'd be people on the, on the right,
• 6:11
  but people in that kind of heterodox space, right? Who is it? Who is there in Australia?
• 6:15
  We're taking a small, a liberal kind of sort of, you know, center left progressive, but free speech
• 6:20
  you think. Yeah, there's not a lot. We're a bit lonely. And also the, the, the right here is,
• 6:27
  I mean, there's some amounts of it that are that are pushing back, but Peter Dutton is not,
• 6:32
  right? I don't get free speech vibes. No, no, that's true. The right in Australia is more
• 6:36
  sensorial and, you know, big sea conservative than we have less of the libertarian strain of
• 6:44
  anti-authoritarian right wingers than the US. Well, I mean, and the e-safety commission
• 6:49
  or, and the, the, and the original missing disinformation bill were ceded by the liberal party.
• 6:56
  Well, yeah, they're not party. Yeah, so they're not, they haven't come out of, so maybe the
• 7:00
  Twitter files is the best place to start here since that's, you know, where, you know, you're
• 7:04
  sort of claimed to fame in this space. What, can you remind people who aren't very online,
• 7:08
  like what Twitter was doing pre-Elon Musk and what the Twitter files are? Sure. So what Twitter
• 7:17
  was doing pre-Elon Musk and, and who knows, in their new Elon Musk era is a, isn't telling
• 7:22
  Tali another question was, and what the Twitter files discovered, which was essentially him
• 7:27
  opening the door to a whole bunch of journalists, Matt Teibi, Michael Sheldon-Gurtberger, Barry Weissley,
• 7:32
  Fang, etc. And I, I worked for about four months with Matt Teibi on this, was a huge amount
• 7:38
  of collaboration essentially with the security state and, and other government agencies to
• 7:44
  censor legitimate first amendment protected speech on Twitter. And that sense, what a
• 7:49
  sense of mean in that context. So, deep platform, so literally take people off the, the platform,
• 7:59
  like I'll experience it again, you might not agree with all these people, but what they were saying
• 8:04
  was kind of legitimate, legitimate speech, Martin Kordoff, Harvard epidemiologist, J.
• 8:11
  Ben Tariya. And these were mostly COVID era discenters from public health. I think the COVID
• 8:16
  ones are probably the more, more famous one, but you could go through a whole kind of litany of
• 8:19
  other, other people that were being taken off or being shadow banned essentially being downranked
• 8:26
  in terms of what, you know, their visibility on the platform so that the content didn't go,
• 8:31
  didn't go viral. And again, these aren't, I mean, they were fringe people who were doing this
• 8:34
  was happening too. And it's not to say that only because you're credentialed, you're allowed to
• 8:38
  speak and if you're un-credentialed, you, you don't. But the fact that they went up to, oh,
• 8:44
  you know, Professor at Harvard, we can take you down, Professor at Stanford, we can take you down,
• 8:49
  tells you how kind of large, how the scale of what was going on was. And we can talk about
• 8:56
  the Hunter Biden laptop as well, now completely confirmed, Mark Zuckerberg just put out a letter saying
• 9:02
  yeah, we, we suppressed that story and we shouldn't have and it was certainly suppressed on, on Twitter
• 9:08
  as well. So one of the kind of more famous, well, what should be more famous incidents that
• 9:13
  happened there was that the Aspen Institute organized a hack and leak tabletop exercise two
• 9:21
  months before the release of the laptop. What's a hack and leak tabletop exercise? So the hack and
• 9:27
  leak tabletop exercise was a exercise, the Aspen Digital put together that was basically a response,
• 9:34
  a day by day plan that they had created to how they would they respond if a Hunter Biden laptop
• 9:40
  related to the barisma energy company in Ukraine suddenly appeared a few weeks prior to the election.
• 9:47
  So at this, this exercise was in New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, people from Stanford,
• 9:54
  anti-disinformation organizations like first draft, Twitter, Facebook, and essentially have a
• 10:00
  day by day game plan where they say, what, what will we do if this happens? And then what happens?
• 10:05
  They specify that it was a Hunter Biden laptop. Yes, Hunter Biden. That sounds like bullshit.
• 10:11
  That sounds like no, no, no, no, so you can look it up. You're saying that before the Hunter Biden
• 10:15
  laptop was found, we're not found release because it was found in 2019 when it was taken to the FBI.
• 10:22
  Right. Okay. So the FBI knew about this, but the New York Post story didn't come out till two
• 10:27
  months afterwards. Right. So the suggestion was that someone from the FBI had leaked to somebody that
• 10:33
  this thing existed and they used it as a. And then they coordinated. So this, so this was a
• 10:38
  Twitter file that Michael Schellenberg put out. Right. The first tweet on that Twitter file is 100
• 10:42
  million impressions. So a huge sway of, I guess, probably red or red-pilled America knows about
• 10:49
  this story, but this is not made into the mainstream at all. It might be because Vivian Schiller,
• 10:55
  who is the head of Aspen Digital, happens to be on the Scott Trust, which is the entity that
• 11:00
  owns the Guardian. Right. But the Guardian isn't going to influence what the New York Times
• 11:06
  knows. No, but so the point being that the people who kind of one of the reasons the Twitter
• 11:11
  files didn't kind of take off I would argue in the kind of left or progressive media space was that
• 11:17
  the argument was not just the collaboration with the security state. It was that all of these
• 11:22
  anti-disinformation organizations and academic institutions were involved in acting as proxies
• 11:29
  between the government and big tech to censor. And so my kind of credentials, so to speak in
• 11:36
  terms of working on the Twitter files, was that I had, I ran an NGO, a freedom of expression
• 11:42
  NGO that worked in Asia for, I worked there from 18 years, it continues on. And we did a
• 11:48
  little bit of anti-disinformation work, but we also essentially did a lot of digital free expression
• 11:53
  work. And so when people came and said, oh, we fake news, law and Malaysia, fake news, law and
• 11:58
  Singapore, like we would work with local campaigners who are saying, no, no, that's probably just
• 12:02
  the government trying to crack down on dissenting opinion. And then there was this switch to like,
• 12:07
  oh, no, actually, we do need the government to take more control of what's happening on the internet
• 12:13
  because there's a lot of very, very dangerous things happening out there. And I would argue that
• 12:18
  there are, but the biggest sources of missing disinformation are governments and big business.
• 12:23
  And that's who you should be keeping your eye on. That's a true statement over the grand
• 12:28
  arc of human history. It may not be a true statement at any given point in time.
• 12:32
  Well, in terms of volume, maybe the case that in the United States in 2020 and 2021 at the
• 12:39
  heart of a pandemic, the main source of misinformation is not the government, but is
• 12:43
  podcasters or something. Well, that would be the, that would be the argument. You could,
• 12:48
  you can watch innumerable video compilations of say, uh, government officials saying the vaccine
• 12:53
  will stop transmission, right? Now we know that wasn't true. That was that was that that that
• 12:58
  was misinformation. Yeah, I mean, that was that turned out to be untrue, but isn't there a
• 13:02
  difference between information that you have reason to believe since generally vaccines for
• 13:07
  respiratory viruses do impede transmission. That's true. That's true. That is true. It impedes
• 13:15
  stops. So this, this, you know, but I was literally claims that it would stop transmission.
• 13:20
  We're getting in the weeds about this. No, the official line was never that it would stop transmission.
• 13:24
  Rachel Maddow and people like that said like the vaccine will stop with you, right? And that was,
• 13:30
  yes, that was basically misinformation because that was an exaggeration of the official
• 13:33
  position. But the official position was always like that it's going to, I mean, it doesn't even stop
• 13:39
  you from dying, but vaccines, most vaccines don't completely. But the, the official, I mean,
• 13:45
  Joe, but I was saying pandemic of the unvaccinated, right? Which is largely true, epidemiologically.
• 13:52
  I mean, yeah, it didn't turn out to be true at all, I think. I mean, I have a plenty of people
• 13:56
  who had a proportion of people who died three, four times. Yeah, we have to go and look at some,
• 14:01
  but the point here was more about the transmission, right? So that there was an error. We're not safe
• 14:08
  to everyone safe. No, there's an issue with scale here, right? So I mean, my point, my claim was
• 14:14
  that in 2020 and 2021, it may have been the case that the greatest threat of misinformation was not
• 14:20
  from the government. You can't then just point to a few things that the government got wrong in
• 14:25
  the chaos of a, of a, of a brand new pandemic. And then say that that means that the government's
• 14:31
  misinformation was worse than the misinformation that was coming out of, well, I wouldn't, I
• 14:36
  wouldn't stand or Bret Weinstein's man. Well, I would, well, you would have to do a pretty
• 14:41
  huge study to kind of work out, which was more, I guess more generally, my claim would still be that
• 14:47
  the people who have the most power are not, you know, podcaster with half a million, 200,000,
• 14:52
  occasionally 10 million followers. It's the government that has the absolute biggest platform.
• 14:57
  And this has been a shift in in that kind of digital free expression space where the focus used
• 15:04
  to be kind of, you know, up like who, who has the most power in this situation? Who's got the
• 15:09
  most capacity to misinform? I mean, the idea that suddenly politicians were kind of bearers of
• 15:14
  the truth and that we should essentially go, well, we'll trust those guys and let's make sure we
• 15:19
  get these kind of little podcasters out there. That was, that, that was a big change, I think. And
• 15:24
  that it's not to say that there aren't people spreading misinformation, but I think the big
• 15:29
  players are, you should focus on the people with, with the absolute most, most power and not go around
• 15:35
  kind of finding the kind of tiny infractions. And so I'll give you an example of what happened in
• 15:40
  in Australia in that regard. So the Department of Homeland Affairs set up a kind of table in
• 15:45
  in its extremism and social cohesion division. So this Department of Homeland Affairs is essentially
• 15:52
  our Department of Homeland Security. You could say if you want to map it. And they were flagging to
• 15:59
  Twitter, people with as few as 20 followers and saying this person we think has violated your
• 16:05
  terms of service and their content should be taken down. And I see this was someone who said
• 16:10
  that we're a doctor suggested maybe steroids could be useful in treating, which I think actually
• 16:17
  did it not being part of the protocol. But the point is, what's our kind of intelligent services
• 16:25
  doing following people with 20 followers and flagging that content to Twitter? Surely there are
• 16:31
  more important things that they should be doing. So that's my point. The point is that the focus,
• 16:36
  I mean, I won't make an argument of like exactly the quantity of terabytes and terabytes of
• 16:43
  misinformation flowing in all different directions. But that kind of cultural shift changed where
• 16:49
  a kind of I think skepticism of government and people in authority, a healthy skepticism got
• 16:57
  pause at a moment that maybe it shouldn't have been pause and it should have just kept on.
• 17:02
  We should have maintained our general level of skepticism. I mean, look what's got
• 17:05
  Morrison did with like appointing himself to all these ministers. This was the prime minister at
• 17:10
  time during the pandemic who decided to anoint himself secretly the treasury secretary,
• 17:17
  the secretary of state. And we should have been paying attention to that.
• 17:22
  So can you just clarify for us the risk of getting of talking in generalities instead of specifics?
• 17:28
  Is there another category of thing that we should think about in terms of your concerns about
• 17:34
  censorship here in addition to COVID? And like what are some other things that people were being
• 17:39
  punished or de-platformed or shadow banned for? There was obviously trans stuff as well.
• 17:44
  There were people saying like women aren't men or something or men aren't women or something like
• 17:49
  that and they'd get accounts. Well, funnily enough, it doesn't go both ways in the taboo,
• 17:54
  does it? That's as much. You don't see people marching with signs that say trans men are, sorry,
• 18:01
  trans women are men. It's only when women have to put up with trans women
• 18:09
  being part of their group. Well, because I guess it's considered more. Yeah.
• 18:15
  Yeah. I mean, I'm also mass and bone density and size can't be something.
• 18:19
  Yes, that's right. But I mean, I also think that the most extreme, highly ideological trans
• 18:25
  activists know that it's easy that women will put up with it more than men would because if they
• 18:31
  kept on banging on about how trans women are, sorry, about how trans men are men,
• 18:36
  a lot of bloats would be like, I mean, not really. Whereas women are nicer and go,
• 18:42
  oh, okay, we're supposed to accept biological males as part of our group. I also think
• 18:45
  that trans men, who's five foot five, who goes into a bathroom and there's a bunch of bloats
• 18:51
  who are like six foot, they're not particularly going, oh, this is going to be true.
• 18:55
  That's true. This could potentially be something here. So in addition to so there's trans,
• 19:00
  there's covert, is there anything else you want to throw on the table that you thought went
• 19:04
  crazy over the past five years in terms of getting people in control?
• 19:06
  I mean, there are ones that I don't have as much expertise as obviously if you go from
• 19:10
  friends, you don't just so kind of go gender and LGBT more broadly. Ukraine, Russia,
• 19:18
  gate would be one of the, some of the other ones, but I see that you mentioned.
• 19:23
  And the laptop would be another one. But I mean, again, if you look at the, you know,
• 19:27
  what did Mark Zuckerberg think he had to make a statement about what's interesting,
• 19:30
  why do you think he had to make a statement? And so this was a letter that he put out that
• 19:34
  essentially said, my bad, we did sensor on COVID when we shouldn't have, we did, we did suppress
• 19:41
  the Honda buying laptop, we shouldn't have done that. So he sees that as the kind of two big ones.
• 19:46
  But I mean, in Australia, it's been the, the kind of a safety. I think the missing
• 19:53
  disinformation stuff, well, particularly with the, with the state of the current
• 19:58
  Albanese government being quite fragile, seemingly they seem to have put that on the back burner
• 20:03
  and they seem to be putting more their eggs in the e-safety basket. So, and the thing there was,
• 20:08
  you know, that the footage of this stabbing in Western Sydney was obviously horrific. I would
• 20:14
  have actually quite like the non-auto play and here's some unpleasant content. Do you want to,
• 20:21
  are you sure you want to watch this? I think that would have been, would have been good.
• 20:25
  But her essentially going out and saying, actually, you know what, I can make you take this down,
• 20:31
  not just in Australia, I can make you take it down in the whole world. Like, I think that was
• 20:38
  a kind of a grievous act. This was an attempt by the Australian regulator, the e-safety commissioner,
• 20:43
  who Elon Musk calls our censorship commissar to require Twitter to, because Twitter complied right
• 20:50
  to take it down geo-blocked in Australia. She tried to say it should be a global take down,
• 20:56
  Twitter took it a court, Twitter won, and yeah, Australia obviously has no right to dictate that
• 21:02
  the entire world, the entire world's, what the entire world can see on Twitter. But isn't that
• 21:08
  sort of evidence that, I mean, it was our, of course, it was our justice system that gave,
• 21:11
  that handed that to Twitter, doesn't that sort of reassure you? Well, no, because why,
• 21:16
  why does the e-safety commissioner think that that's a good idea to begin with? So the fact that
• 21:21
  there's someone in that position who already thinks that that is within her remit, I'm going to
• 21:26
  try this, I think I can tell you, and imagine if that had happened in Germany or the US or any
• 21:31
  other country and said, actually, you know, we can, our country can tell your country what your
• 21:36
  citizens can and cannot see. So the fact that there's someone in that position who seems to have
• 21:41
  maybe there's a, maybe there's a kind of vendetta each way going, I don't know, but they
• 21:46
  seems to be a lot of ill feeling between both and mask and seems to be gotten, have gotten two
• 21:51
  personal, both in both directions. And I think someone in that level of position needs to be
• 21:59
  quite neutral in the way and quite clinical in the way that they're dealing with this stuff,
• 22:03
  because I think what has happened is a lot of people in Australia have, or she's gotten a lot of
• 22:08
  blowback essentially, and a lot of trust in institutions, which we're already lacking,
• 22:15
  has grown further because of that kind of overreach, and she also did some overreach as well on
• 22:21
  the gender question as well. So when you say that, when you're sort of trying to figure out why the
• 22:27
  left wasn't more agitated by things like the Twitter files and by stuff like government interference
• 22:33
  in social media companies, I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that we're still
• 22:39
  trying to figure out how social media companies should be dealing with misinformation and disinformation,
• 22:44
  and it's not entirely clear that the government should not be a player in this conversation at all.
• 22:49
  Oh, you know, I would say the government has a role, but it's like, so it's where the boundaries
• 22:55
  are. So I'm not a 100% absolutist at all. It's like where is the boundary, but also what
• 23:01
  happened to the left. So I mean, my background again was like 20 years working on digital free
• 23:06
  expression in the progressive space again, like we were working with progressives constantly pushing
• 23:13
  back on government attempts to overreach into digital free expression, and that was the bread and
• 23:20
  butter of like hundreds of thousands of kind of, you know, people on the NGO payroll essentially,
• 23:26
  and then the switch started happening essentially Trump, and then people were like, well,
• 23:33
  maybe the internet's a bit too dangerous and look what happened. We had free speech and now this
• 23:39
  dangerous guy has gotten in power. Maybe free speech isn't actually so good. Maybe free speech
• 23:46
  doesn't work for us as progressive. Let me just unpack free speech there, right? Because then
• 23:50
  what you're talking about is not, I think we get confused when we don't differentiate between
• 23:55
  free speech, like the public square, allowing people to express any idea they want to in the public
• 24:01
  square versus allowing social media companies and people on social media to deploy algorithms in
• 24:11
  any way that is going to confront us with whatever reactionary or aggressive bullshit
• 24:19
  they choose to and us interpreting that as the same thing as allowing a public square, like the
• 24:27
  the amplification and extremification mechanism of social media algorithms that are being
• 24:33
  intentionally designed by people to capture our attention the way that slot machines do.
• 24:39
  Is that the same thing? Is that synonymous with free speech?
• 24:43
  But also, I would say, Twitter, once Twitter, once X, Twitter was completely left leaning,
• 24:52
  right? So it was, if its algorithms were working in that way, it was not working in a pro-Trump
• 24:57
  kind of capacity. No, it was two things, pre-Elon. It was both a left leaning cohort of people who
• 25:04
  thought they knew better than everybody else when they were willing, when they were intentionally
• 25:09
  analyzing content and trying to willfully deprioritize things and ban people and make actual
• 25:16
  editorial decisions, right? As an editorial entity, it was a progressive entity. But the algorithm,
• 25:22
  the mindless, brainless, amplification machine was agnostic to left or right. But what it did do was
• 25:30
  select for extreme content, content that arouses you, content that reinforces things that you already
• 25:35
  believe, content that demonizes things that you don't believe, content that gets you to spend more
• 25:40
  time on the site, that gets you to like, to share, to comment, right? And that does benefit
• 25:47
  demagogues, trumps. But also far right, the far left. And the far left, far left series.
• 25:52
  It's totally agnostic, but you can understand it. Whatever gets you going. Whatever gets you going,
• 25:56
  right? And so it is a chaos machine. Yeah. And then so it's both things, right? So I can understand
• 26:03
  that the, the left whilst maybe whilst they may have been in control of Twitter editorially,
• 26:07
  may also have been terrified by what the algorithm was doing to society.
• 26:11
  Yeah. And I'm also not a fan of Big Tech more, more broadly to kind of like put that a bit more
• 26:17
  front front and center. My work for the past 20 years or running that that NGO was like building
• 26:22
  open source tools to so people had open non commercial platforms to distribute content outside
• 26:29
  of those algorithms and without having to essentially go onto these quasi monopolies. And so
• 26:34
  I think part of the problem is that we're fighting over half a dozen platforms that are trying to
• 26:38
  be everything to everyone. Well, too, really. Yeah. But and yes, half a dozen is probably generous.
• 26:44
  Yeah. And so and that doesn't work. Like you cannot be everything to everyone. And I think we'd
• 26:50
  need to kind of eat kind of much more diverse ecosystem of hundreds of different platforms.
• 26:56
  So how do you connect that with your anti-sensorship sensibility? Like I want to understand how your
• 27:01
  anti-sensorship sensibility shows up in the space of a whole of mirrors that's deranged by the
• 27:08
  algorithm inside Twitter. Like what are we supposed to do about that as a society and a culture
• 27:12
  and a demos and a government that would satisfy you? Well, I mean, one is to have people who are
• 27:19
  much more impar. To hear the rest of this conversation, go to uncomfortable conversations dot
• 27:23
  substac.com slash listen and you will get your own personal premium podcast feed with at least
• 27:31
  three extra episodes of the podcast every month and heaps of extra stuff, including the remainder
• 27:36
  right now of the fabulous conversation you've just been hearing. If it was worth listening to this
• 27:41
  much of, don't rob yourself of the rest. Well, let your phone right now and search for uncomfortable
• 27:47
  conversations of yourself.