Social Media Censorship

2019-04-24 · Guest: Bill Ottman (Founder of Minds.com) · 50:59

Filed under: Free speech and civil liberties
Topics: Censorship · First Amendment · Privacy · Section 230 · Social Media

Censorship and surveillance on social media platforms

Bob Zadek interviews Bill Ottman, the founder of Minds.com, about the pervasive nature of censorship and surveillance on mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. They discuss the shift from open-source ideals to algorithmic manipulation, the legal implications of Section 230, and the growing movement toward decentralized, privacy-focused alternatives.

Topics: Social Media, Censorship, Section 230, Minds.com, Privacy, Algorithms, Surveillance, First Amendment, Shadow Banning, Open Source

Speakers:

• Bob Zadek: Host
• Bill Ottman: Founder of Minds.com
• Caller (Michael): Listener

Introduction to Minds.com [00:18]

Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. Thanks so much for listening this Sunday morning. I’m happy to welcome back to the show this morning for a full hour, and for a bonus hour on our YouTube video channel, Bill Ottman. Bill is the founder, the creator, the driving force behind Minds.com. Minds.com is an open-source social media network, the details of which Bill will explain.

Bill and Minds.com have found themselves, whether by accident or that’s the way the world turns, at ground zero of all, not some, but all of the major philosophical, social, political, legal issues that profoundly affect our country, if not the world. Who controls the conversation in the universe? Who gets to say what voices get drowned out, what voices get heard? Who gets to decide what information you will be exposed to? The founders all knew that it was essential for an informed public to have access to information, to be informed, and to make the decisions which drive our country and ultimately the world. However, if the information is filtered, if you only get some of the information or the wrong information, and you don’t even know you’re getting the wrong information or only some of the information, how can you possibly make an intelligent decision? There’s nothing less at stake than the democratic functioning in our country. To help us understand all that’s going on—the battle in Washington, in the state houses, in Brussels, throughout the world, the battle for the minds of all citizens of the world—I’m happy to welcome back to the show, Bill Ottman. Bill, thanks a lot for joining us this Sunday morning.

Bill Ottman: Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Bob Zadek: Now Bill, I introduced the show with somewhat a lot of hyperbole, and I did that intentionally, although I don’t think I overstated the case. In order for us to function as a country, as a society, we have to at least have access to quality information, unfiltered, uncensored if you will, so we can process the information as best we can and make an intelligent decision. And it is that very access to information that is at stake here. Now tell us, right now we have the large social media platforms—we all know the names: Facebook and Twitter and all of the other, and YouTube of course—all of these other platforms. Now right now, we have these platforms that have billions of members. And the members, I dare say, believe, if they’ve thought about it, that when they subscribe and they pick their friends and people they want to listen to, they are getting a steady stream of information from these sources and it is unfiltered, uncensored, so they can decide. How far from the truth is that belief?

Bill Ottman: It’s drifting further and further every day. It’s interesting that you were talking about in terms of the founders. And it’s funny that we call them the founders because, you know, it’s not that different from a company. I mean, obviously a country is different, but the scale of the big social networks now is far beyond the size and number of people that the founders of the country were dealing with. But they understood that if you block the free flow of information, then that’s just the type of thing that’s going to cause a revolution to happen within that system. So, the same theories sort of apply to major social networks, and it’s starting to happen. I mean, we’re seeing the beginnings of revolution/evolution with new platforms popping up, with protests happening. So this is all sort of expected.

The Mechanics of Algorithmic Control [02:41]

Bob Zadek: Now what are the—what are the mechanical devices, and let’s just use Facebook as both as its own entity and as a surrogate for all of the others because a lot of the analysis applies across the board. What are some of the devices that Facebook is doing to affect the quality of information that you and I might receive as Facebook subscribers? What are some of the tools in their toolbox that they use, kind of without telling us, to make sure we’re not exposed to certain points of view?

Bill Ottman: Sure. Well, the hard part is that we don’t know what’s in their toolbox. We have an idea. We can guess. But we have no access to the actual blueprints, the source code. So, the algorithm is based on thousands of variables, but we know that they’re using machine learning and AI, and it’s all driving towards what they think is going to get you engaged the most based on your behavior, based on your location, based on the language that you’re using in private messages and in public messages. All the data that is being input on your phone is being used to target certain material to you in your newsfeed. And when you scroll on your Facebook newsfeed, really there’s no obvious logic to it. It’s not even chronological. It is just an amalgamation of something that we don’t understand. And we need to understand it. It is really dangerous for society to not have access to that information because, like you said, billions of people are communicating on these platforms and our thoughts are being molded by the newsfeeds that we’re checking every day. And Facebook has done repeated experiments proving that they can affect people’s moods, they can affect people’s behavior by feeding you certain types of content.

Commercial Models and Surveillance [05:40]

Bob Zadek: Now Facebook is a profit-making venture. Therefore, and their business model is ultimately to build a model where advertisers can promote their product, their service, their ideas, and their advertising will be very focused to people who are more likely than not to be interested in their product. There’s nothing wrong in the commercial world, there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, I find myself liking it as a consumer because if I’m not interested in riding a motorcycle, I don’t want to get motorcycle ads. On the other hand, if I don’t have young children, I’m not interested in getting diaper ads. And I like the fact that people are sending me information about stuff that I might care about. So on a purely commercial level, isn’t that either benign or a positive good? And we’ll get to the political area, the marketplace for ideas in a moment. But breaking it down if you will, commercially, that’s a sound model that everybody ought to encourage, isn’t it? Or is there more subtlety that I’m not aware of?

Bill Ottman: I mean, it’s definitely useful to people to receive ads that are relevant to them and us. We really need consent though in that process. We need to be a part of that process. So, it’s equally as creepy when you’re scrolling on your feed and you see an ad for, you know, a new stereo that you were just looking at on another website. So, I think that there’s a way to opt in to targeting that doesn’t compromise your privacy and freedom. But this is sort of an inverted ad model that is essentially a little bit less profitable because Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, all of them behave on a surveillance-by-default model and there’s really no way to opt out. So the ethical way to do it would be to have your users agree up front: “Look, we’re going to have these cookies, we’re going to be taking this data, it’s going to be anonymous, it’s not going to be creating this massive scary profile about you, but we want to make sure you’re receiving relevant ads and hey, maybe we even want to compensate you for it.”

There’s another similar crypto project called Brave Browser which has a token reward system similar to Minds, where you actually earn tokens for your attention. It’s called the Basic Attention Token. And so you earn for viewing ads and it’s sort of a surveillance-free ad world. The ad network on Minds where you can boost your posts with tokens that you earn and get more exposure, more views on your content, it’s not using any surveillance. So, yeah, you can make money spying on people, but in the long run, people are going to feel violated by that and ultimately I don’t think it’s a sustainable business model.

Bob Zadek: What’s not sustainable about it? Because doesn’t it benefit everybody so long as people voluntarily agree? You can share my profile with your advertisers. It would seem to me it’s sort of like commercial television versus cable television. In commercial television, which is a failed model now of course, but when it wasn’t a failed model, the deal you made was you endured the commercials but the content was free. The opposite was of course HBO in its infancy where you paid for the content and it was commercial-free. And people made a choice; some preferred one, some preferred the other. Isn’t that model in social media still viable? Either you decide you will endure commercials because you want them, in this case they’d be selective, and the content is free, or you pay to be a member of Facebook, you pay a monthly fee, and you are not subjected to any ads. That seems to be a viable model.

Bill Ottman: Yeah, that would be sustainable. But that would be much better. If the user has a choice to pay a monthly fee to not be spied on, yeah, that would be better. Or the ads just should not be compromising your freedom and privacy. And they’re going to have to figure out a way to deal with that because people do care about this. I think they’re not willing to abandon ship because the apps and the messengers are so integrated into our lives that it’s not going to be that easy to just leave them. But people do want this to get better. They want to not feel like they’re being listened to or spied on. That’s just a dystopia. And it’s actually sad that we just feel like we have no other choice and that we’re just going to keep using these apps even despite all of the obvious consequences of it, that there’s this social pressure and that’s really scary.

The Rise of Alternative Tech [13:41]

Bob Zadek: And of course people do have a choice. You’ve given them a choice with Minds.com. So in point of fact, you have detected a need. Like cable detecting a need for commercial-free television, you have detected a need and you are filling it, and I dare say for a youngish company quite successfully in filling that need for those people who want to preserve their privacy and yet have the enormous benefits of social media of having access to the world. So you’re living proof that if you build it, they will come, so to speak.

Bill Ottman: Yeah, I mean, it is true. We would not exist if there wasn’t this need and this desire from a certain group of people on the internet. And this is really how the internet began, as more of a decentralized, open-source, transparent, secure world. It was only later when we started all hanging out in these silos of servers controlled by very few companies. You know, everyone used to have their own email server. But then AOL came in and everyone started going into these central hubs because it was more convenient. And convenience is important to people, but usually convenience comes with a big sacrifice that you have to make. So now our responsibility as the alternative now, all of us alternative networks need to deliver on making the apps as user-friendly and popular as the big apps. And it’s happening. I mean, millions and millions of people are using Minds and using DuckDuckGo, which is a privacy search engine, and Mozilla and Tor and all of these different transparent, secure apps. There’s sort of a movement emerging where—your operating system, like, people don’t usually ask themselves, “Does it make a difference what operating system I use? I boot up my Mac, I boot up my Windows, like, does that actually have an effect on the world?” It does. It has a huge effect. It’s much better to use an operating system like GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, which is essentially just as good of a user experience as like macOS. It doesn’t have a handful of the apps that come with it, but it respects your freedom. It’s totally transparent. The people who care to inspect it and make sure that it’s not abusing people’s freedoms, there are people out there doing that. So all you have to do is install that on your machine and then every time you turn on your computer, you are then—the network is detecting that, and the internet is detecting that, and that is what is feeding the growth of the new alternative.

It’s the same on the browser level. There’s no reason to be using Chrome or Safari or Microsoft Edge if you don’t have to. It’s not to say you’re never going to have to use those browsers or operating systems at all, but giving your energy to these apps, at least, you know, maybe half the time you use Brave or Firefox instead of Chrome, you are then feeding the transparent alternative. And that is what is making these companies grow because our growth and our ability to earn revenue and grow is all based on the traffic that we’re getting. So logging into apps, it matters. Like every time someone logs into Minds, that helps us grow. That helps us show better metrics and get more people interconnected. So it’s these micro-movements online every day, the 50 times we probably all check our phone every day. Each one of those 50 times you check your phone, you’re feeding a corporation. So if you can change that behavior on an individual level and then replicate that to a whole culture, the world is going to change fast. It is changing.

The Marketplace of Ideas and Censorship [18:16]

Bob Zadek: Now, we talked a few minutes ago about the commercial applications—selling goods and services, targeted marketing—all that is a sensible way to run a business. However, far more important to me is the marketplace for ideas. And what I found to be most scary and what really started to get my attention is when I was told, when I learned through investigation, that Facebook and others does this massive—and as you said, we don’t know how much, but you will help us understand a bit—massive amount of, and the word is an obscenity, the word is censorship. That I might post an idea to my followers on Facebook, I might post an idea which I think is a sensible idea that I would like to get exposure, and Facebook will make sure that that idea, because it flunks some test, doesn’t get the exposure it needs. Basically, my ideas have been snuffed out at its infancy. How much of that goes on? Why does it happen? And how does anybody learn what you’re not learning because Facebook has denied you access? How does Facebook operate, as best you can tell, to deny others exposure to your ideas?

Bill Ottman: Right. So what they’re doing is called shadow banning. And based on the people you’re subscribed to, the content that you’re posting, the links that you’re sharing, the language that you’re using, all of this is being tracked and it is then filtering your profile and your account into a certain list—call it a blacklist, call it a gray list. There’s a whole spectrum of these different lists for how they’re categorizing their user base. And so if there’s certain words that they don’t like or certain websites that they don’t like and you’re found to be in connection with those words or websites, then you’re going to be punished in the background. It’s not going to be known to you at all. You know, sometimes they will deliberately flag a post or take down a post and you’ll see the visible side of the censorship that is happening, which is immense. I mean, you could get banned from Facebook for—one time I was banned from Facebook for like three months for an optical illusion image that simultaneously looked like a hallway but also looked sort of like a woman’s legs. But not even in a sexual way. It was just like a cool optical illusion image. So clearly their machine learning algorithms messed up and thought that it was a nude image. But so this is how primal these tools are. And when you give the algorithms the control to essentially be punishing certain content, banning certain people without a level of human oversight and really no recourse for the people who are being targeted, that is a demented experience and it’s really going to have long-term consequences.

Bob Zadek: Bill, why does Facebook do that? It doesn’t cost them anything to publish content that they might find, if you can use “they” to describe Facebook, offensive or flunking some test. Why do they do the filtering for the individual? Couldn’t I design my profile to say, “Here’s my sensitivity, I don’t want to be exposed to the following”? So the user, the recipient of the information, could be their own censor. It’s like I don’t choose to see X-rated movies, so I don’t go to the movie theater. It doesn’t mean the movie theater can’t show them, it’s just that I elect not to go. How did we get to a model where Facebook and the other social media decide what’s best for me as opposed to simply giving me the choice and letting me decide? How did we get there?

Bill Ottman: Unfortunately, that’s never what they cared about. There was never any point of Facebook that existed which was totally pro-free expression. I mean, even like Twitter is more open in terms of content policy than Facebook, but Twitter has obviously been getting much worse over the years. I mean, their slogan used to be “the free speech wing of the free speech party.” And I came across marketing materials of Twitter’s from 10 years ago and they were just bragging about, “We don’t do—we hardly moderate content, we want you to say anything you want.” And then now they’ve been dragged into this new policy where it relates to advertisers, there’s political interests involved. I mean, their policy is political. Because the controversial thing about hate speech policies is that what’s hate speech to one person is not hate speech to another person. And it’s all about how we define these things. So, I don’t know if you or anyone out there caught the Joe Rogan interview with Tim Pool and Jack Dorsey, but it was a really interesting conversation. And Tim was pointing out that it is against Twitter’s policy to misgender somebody. You could be banned for misgendering them. And, you know, obviously no one wants—I certainly wouldn’t want to offend someone who was transgender. But for someone who believes that it’s a biological fact that a man is not a woman, you can get banned from Twitter for—people have been banned for saying a man is not a woman on Twitter. So, this gets into the political polarization, the identity politics game that is being played. And it’s just too bad. I think that—I don’t know how they can last doing this because it’s so inconsistent. And the hypocrisy is showing itself. And I just don’t think that’s a good PR optic.

Section 230 and Legal Liability [24:20]

Bob Zadek: Well, you heard it—I don’t think the model can last at all. Free speech ultimately will prevail. I don’t know how we’re going to get there exactly, but the subject and you raised a subject which we’re going to get into in depth after the break, which is the whole concept or misconception of hate speech and how it finds its way into the conversation. This is Bob Zadek, I’m talking to Bill Ottman. Bill is the founder, the creator, the force behind Minds.com, a truly censor-free social media network. We’ll be back with Bill in 30 short seconds to discuss hate speech, political speech, who gets to decide what you can listen to or not. Lots more to follow, please stay tuned.

(Sponsor break removed)

Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. Thanks so much for listening this morning to my conversation with Bill Ottman. Bill is the founder of Minds.com, the driving force behind Minds.com. It is the other social media platform. The platform that is not afraid to have its users be exposed to the widest range of ideas, uncensored in any way. And censorship is, of course, one of the really sinister words in a democratic society. And the question is, should voters be protected from bad ideas? Of course, the founders said resoundingly no. We don’t have to be protected from bad ideas; we should be exposed to them so we can discuss them and learn how bad an idea is. The founders—the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment protects our freedom of speech in the broadest sense of the word. Of course, the First Amendment, being part of the Constitution, only limits the power of government to censor us and protect us from hearing bad ideas. The Bill of Rights does not in any way prevent a private business such as Facebook, such as Twitter, YouTube, etc. The First Amendment has nothing to say whatsoever about what a private business can do or choose to do. So there is nothing unconstitutional about Facebook, if it chose to do so, adopting a pro-progressive point of view and filtering out all conservative or libertarian ideas and just blocking them out and blocking out those people who espouse those ideas. There’s nothing per se wrong with that. The question, of course, is should there be something wrong with that? Should Facebook et al. be given so much power over our ideas? Well, of course, that is nothing new; that has always been the case.

And it’s interesting that one of the earliest examples—earliest examples of censorship goes back, little-known fact, to the debate over the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, when the states were deciding whether to ratify the Constitution, whether to breathe life into our soon-to-be country. There were votes in all 13 colonies, and the powerful, the moneyed forces, if you will, especially in the Northeast, strongly favored ratification. There were many others who opposed ratification. Well, the moneyed interests would prevent newspapers and broadsheets, as they were called, from publishing articles against ratification under the threat of pulling their advertising. So when I learned that, I found it to be quite interesting that snuffing out ideas goes back to the very birth of our country. So it is obviously a very big deal. Now Bill, as a policy matter, I don’t think you would argue that there “ought to be a law” that what Facebook is doing is somehow either is or should be illegal. So isn’t the cure for what Facebook is doing a marketplace cure?

Bill Ottman: Well, there arguably is a law that they’re violating, which is I think it’s called Section 230B, and it has to do with the platform versus publisher debate. And if you become a publisher like a newspaper with a specific slant, then you actually lose a certain degree of immunity from being liable for user-generated content. So, for instance, currently Facebook is not liable if somebody uploads an illegal copyright image because they have that protection, unlike the New York Times, which would get in trouble if it posted an image violating copyright, because it’s a platform, not a publisher. That’s what they have been trying to say. But when they start to modify the algorithms to favor one polarity of political thought and they start taking down certain ideas, they are now entering into the world of being a publisher. It’s a new kind of publisher; it’s a publisher on an algorithmic level as opposed to having people write articles like a big media company. But this is where they are starting to get some heat with regards to the law.

Bob Zadek: So, but that’s of course—they’re getting some heat because they’re exposed to liability if they violate the statute. My question is more basic than that because it’s a pure conceptual issue that I have. Would you prefer a world in which—or do you oppose Facebook having the right to censor? And would you want to somehow prohibit Facebook from acting as a censor, which they do now? They shadow block certain content, they don’t publish certain keywords, they try to avoid hate speech, whatever they do—we don’t really know for sure, we can make a good guess. But should Facebook have the right to do that? After all, it’s their company. And I think, of course, they should have the right. And I would much prefer perhaps the required publication of their standards, so we know what they are filtering out and we can then shop for a social media site such as Minds.com that doesn’t filter. In effect, it’s reading the abridgment and let the marketplace decide because Facebook will lose out in the marketplace.

Bill Ottman: I agree with that. I mean, I don’t think anyone should be forced to say something that they don’t want to say, whether it’s a corporation or an individual. But these companies are marketing themselves as open public forums for free expression. So if they’re going to enact these censorship policies, then they need to stop marketing themselves as these open global platforms for communication, because they’re not. They should make clear that, “Hey, we are the censorship platform for communication.”

Bob Zadek: Of course you’re right. And if they want to say, “We are PG-13 rated, and if you are afraid of extreme ideas, don’t worry, we’ll protect you,” so that at least you know what you’re signing up for. But Facebook right now creates the illusion that when you sign up—and by the way, I used to be an active user of Facebook, and I have all but stopped using it. I just can’t stand the thought that some of my ideas that I thought actually were quite brilliant might not get out there to my friends, and other people’s ideas who also I thought were quite brilliant I might never receive, and I have some machine deciding what I’m going to be exposed to. I found that to be so painfully offensive I said I cannot cooperate in this activity anymore. And I have all but, other than to send out routine communications about my life to my friends, I have stopped using Facebook 100% as a source of information. It’s like subjecting yourself to a totalitarian regime. Once you give Facebook your mind, you’re dead.

Bill Ottman: Absolutely. And once you become aware of it, you start to feel dirty when you’re using it. It’s like a drug addiction. And because it’s so obvious when you’re scrolling through that you’re being programmed so deliberately and you’re being manipulated to become more addicted, it’s just not something worth supporting. And there’s other places you can get a similar experience which aren’t doing that. And it’s going to take some time, but for everyone out there who’s listening and sort of is maybe a little bit disillusioned by the idea of starting up a new social media presence, it’s just not a big commitment. I think that what’s important is to just set up a page on some alternative, download some new transparent browsers, and just use them once in a while and ease into it. We have a life to live and there’s time, and it’s not like a big catastrophic apocalyptic scenario where if you don’t fully switch over right away that everything’s going to come crashing down. But we do need to start voting with our attention.

Caller Segment: Constitutional Limits [38:20]

Bob Zadek: For sure. We have a caller, Michael. Are you still with us, Michael? Good morning.

Caller (Michael): Bob, thanks as always for your show. I did have a question about something you said about the Constitution. You said that there’s nothing that Facebook does that’s unconstitutional. But please correct me if I’m mistaken, but it’s my impression that the Constitution just limits the government. It doesn’t say anything about private people or private businesses, so there is nothing that Facebook could do that’s unconstitutional. Do I have that wrong?

Bob Zadek: No, that was my point, Michael. My point was that a lot of times individuals will complain, like if people boycott a movie because they don’t like Susan Sarandon’s point of view, Susan Sarandon might complain, “You’re violating my free speech rights by boycotting my movie.” And of course we’re not doing that at all. As I pointed out in my piece that you picked up on, Michael, is that the Constitution only affects the relationship between citizens and government, not between citizens inter se. So you said it exactly right.

Bill Ottman: Right, but there was a constitutional issue with the NSA spying under the PRISM program that Edward Snowden exposed, where basically the NSA had revolving-door relationships with Facebook and Yahoo and all of these big tech companies where just firehoses of data were getting sent directly to the NSA. So there are some Fourth Amendment issues at hand.

Bob Zadek: And that involved—you’re exactly right, Bill—that involved a very specific holding by the court, which was involved when you give data—you, an individual, give your data to a third-party carrier like a phone company. Now that phone company, you have now surrendered your privacy to a third-party holder, and therefore the prohibition on the government accessing that data through a third-party holder is diminished as opposed to privacy held by you directly. It was a very specific provision that got exploited at that time by the NSA. Michael, thank you so much for being a listener and for your question and to helping me clarify.

Caller (Michael): I have another question for Bill if I may. Bill, is Twitter any better than Facebook in this regard? I haven’t heard you say anything about Twitter yet.

Bill Ottman: Not really. Their code is all closed-source, so there’s no access to the algorithms. It seems they’re involved in surveillance as well. Their content policy is totally inconsistent. They’re banning people all over the place. I think that maybe they’re a little bit better, and it seems like the only credit I’ll give Jack Dorsey is that he seems to be having deeper conversations about these issues and he seems like a generally thoughtful person. And maybe it’s possible that he doesn’t even have the power to implement these radical changes in their policy and their transparency. But the fact is that the censorship and the surveillance and the lack of transparency exists on Twitter too. So, it’s really not much better in my mind. I try not to use it.

Caller (Michael): Okay, thanks a lot.

Minds.com as the Antidote [42:04]

Bob Zadek: Michael, thanks so much for your call. Bill, it is so interesting when we talk about the censorship of Facebook and the other social media sites. I was smiling to myself and I’m going to make one of the few times I’m going to expose parts of my own psychology to my friends out there and listeners, is that growing up through school, when the teacher would ask a question, I was always the first to raise my hand. And I would wave my hand back and forth and the teacher wouldn’t call on me all the time. And I would wave my hand back and forth and finally I would stand up so the teacher would see me. And when I go to conferences and the speaker makes a point, I try to sit in the speaker’s line of sight so when the speaker takes questions at the end of the conference, they can see me raise my hand. And the thought of not being called upon makes me nuts. And Facebook constantly refuses to call on me. They block—every time I raise my hand and wave it so Facebook can see me, they don’t call on me. So when you were discussing censorship, I flashed to Bob Zadek, the public school student, never being called upon, and now Facebook is now my new teacher not calling on me. And not being called on, not being heard, would make any citizen who is active—would make you crazy. And that’s what Facebook is doing; they’re not calling upon you.

Bill Ottman: Yeah, it’s a suppression of our voice, literally. In an empirical way, they’re not allowing your friends and followers to even see your posts. Right now on Facebook and Instagram and others—Google and YouTube do this too—you’re only reaching 5% of the people who subscribe to you, which is bonkers because the basic premise of social media is: I subscribe to you, you post, I see your post. You subscribe to me, I post, you see my post. That is it. That was the original concept.

Bob Zadek: Social contract. That was the social contract.

Bill Ottman: Yes, that was the social contract. And that was then degraded by 95%, which is just a totally different product. And there are lawsuits in the works about this because—is that social contract valid? Is it false advertising? They brought in millions of people under one premise and then they shifted it. And they took away what many brands paid for. A lot of brands paid for new followers under the premise that “I’m going to be able to reach these followers.” But then they took away the ability to reach the followers that people bought. So what is that? It’s like if you buy a football and it loses 95% of its function after a year of owning the football by design. Okay, that’s an issue.

Bob Zadek: And to me, what’s happened is I see a parallel between—and I made a parallel earlier in the show to commercial television versus cable. Facebook as a commercial model, as a way to have targeted marketing, is magnificent. Facebook as a way to be a marketplace of ideas is an abject failure. It’s a failure. And anybody who uses Facebook either to acquire ideas or to share ideas is kidding themselves. And it is a total waste—it’s the wrong platform. And just as commercial television has now become a bunch of commercials with scattered content, Facebook now is a bunch of advertisements with scattered content as well. And that will be ultimately, I believe, its demise. It’s lost its function of connecting the world together because the world, as you pointed out, is becoming only connected in a way that Facebook chooses to do so, not the way the individuals choose to do so. It’s as if somebody is picking your friends and deciding when your friend speaks, which words you’re going to hear and which words you’re not going to hear.

Now Bill, tell us about—we have a few minutes left and then we’re going to go to the Bob Zadek YouTube channel, we’re going to continue our conversation for a bit. Listeners on the YouTube channel at youtube.com/bobzadekshow will be able to text in their ideas to continue our conversation for a bit. But Bill, in the few minutes we have left, tell us how—we have complained bitterly about Facebook—how is Minds.com the antidote for the censorship of Facebook and Twitter et al.? We have a couple of minutes to go.

Bill Ottman: So we are fully committed to always maintaining the social contract that you will always be able to reach your community, your friends, your followers 100%. We’re never going to interfere with that. And as long as content is legal and not inciting violence, then it can exist and it can flow. And what we didn’t have much time to get into was all of the studies that have been done on prohibition and censorship and if that even actually can solve problems. Because if you put yourself in the shoes of Facebook and Google, they must be saying to themselves, “Okay, well we have a problem with this type of speech and we think that if we take it down that we’re making the world a better place.” Perhaps that’s their rationale. Otherwise it would be a much more malicious intention. Because the data actually shows that if you censor content, then the people posting that content will often be driven to greater degrees of radicalization, extremism, and even potentially violence. People do not like to be silenced. And bad ideas don’t become worse ideas in open forums; they become worse ideas when they get drowned out and then they feel like victims and they feel like they may need to do something about it. So dozens of studies point to this. And I’m trying to facilitate an open, respectful conversation with these big platforms that if we want to make the internet a better place for everyone without these little pockets of extremists, then we all need to get on the same page with regards to content policy. Because Facebook bans a user—it’s whack-a-mole. They get driven out of Facebook, they go pop up on other networks, and it’s just like this game that everyone’s playing with each other. So if we think about the internet as a community, then we need to create an alliance of networks that understand the data and the research and understand that we need consistent policy between networks.

Bob Zadek: So Minds.com is the antidote. We are able to—we are empowered to protect ourselves if we choose to do so from ideas, concepts, words, images that we find offensive. Just like we’re able to select the movies we watch and the books we read, we can select the content. Bill, thank you so much for what you’ve done on Minds.com. This is Bob Zadek, we’re going to continue our conversation on our YouTube channel for a bit—youtube.com/bobzadekshow. I’ll be live with Bill Ottman and we’ll take your questions if you text them in. Thanks so much for listening. Bob Zadek switching over to the YouTube channel for a bit. Be back again next Sunday live. Thanks so much for listening.

Show prep notes

Bob’s own preparation for this episode.

Bill Ottman, Minds (social media network) - 4/28

Phone Number:

Planning call unscheduled.

Notes:

• We have a Minds.com account: minds.com/bobzadek.

• Direct people to the “aftershow” from 9-10am PACIFIC, on The Bob Zadek Show YouTube channel, we will be streaming live.

• Direct people to the new book *The Bubble: How Higher Education Became America’s Most Overrated Product* on Amazon, via BobZadek.com

• Just after your last show with Bill, Overstock’s Blockchain Unit Invests $6 Million in Crypto Social Network ‘Minds’ (Overstock was one of the first big online chains to accept payment in Bitcoin).

Medium Article, 4/28/19

Old Medium Article Oct. 18 2018

Find his Work at:

• Minds.com/ottman - co-creator

BIO:

Bill Ottman pursued English and music at the University of Vermont. In 2010, he worked as director of marketing at Gathering of the Vibes Music and Arts Festival.

In 2011, Ottman co-founded Minds, an open source social networking platform that launched to the public in June 2015. He is also an advisor at Code to Inspire.

Ottman’s speaking engagements and media appearances have included Tucker Carlson Tonight, The Keiser Report, Redacted Tonight, Wired, GQ, Forbes, CNET, IBTimes, Breitbart, VentureBeat, Business Insider, Techcrunch, MarketWatch, Barron’s, Bitcoin Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Huffington Post and the Voice of America.

General Videos/Articles

20 Minutes - Paul Joseph Watson Talks With Bill Ottman of Minds.com - YouTube

3 Minutes - ‘Google Was Always Kind of Evil’ - Minds.com CEO Bill Ottman Interview on Tucker Carlson

• Being banned from google’s ad platform can be death for certain companies.

• Keywords trigger algorithms to ban some advertisers. Google and Facebook control 90% of the ads.

• The future of social media will be a network of networks, with no single point of failure. No way to shut it down.

Constitutionality of Social Media Censorship

Marsh v. Alabama :: 326 U.S. 501 (1946) :: Justia US Supreme Court Center

Is the Internet like a company town? The privatization of the public sphere followed by the monopolization of the public square.

Decided January 7, 1946

Primary Holding

The First Amendment prohibits a law against distributing religious literature in a company-owned town without receiving permission from the town’s management because this is essentially state action.

Facts

The Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation owned Chickasaw, Alabama in its entirety as a company town. It resembled any other American town in other respects. Marsh distributed literature supporting her beliefs as a Jehovah’s Witness in the streets of Chickasaw without obtaining permission from Gulf. Under the Alabama law of criminal trespass, she was prohibited from remaining on the premises of another private party after having been warned to leave, which she had been. Appealing her conviction, Marsh argued that the state law violated the First Amendment.

…

Any municipal ordinance that prohibited distributing religious literature in a public street clearly would violate the First Amendment. A company town does not have the same rights a private homeowner in preventing unwanted religious expression on his property. While the town is owned by a private company, it is open for use by the public and thus becomes limited by the constitutional rights of the people there, who are entitled to the freedoms of speech and religion. Conflicts between property rights and constitutional rights generally must be resolved in favor of the latter.

Social Media’s Censorship Is a Disaster with Free Speech | National Review by David French

On the dangers of designating certain people as speech police. French makes the campus free speech/online censorship connection (similar to our book), because both are semi-public squares where the semi-private nature allows the organization to claim a right to censor certain points of view.

French, a lawyer, has defended college students against administration when they ban “generalized sexist remarks” “acts of intolderance,” etc.

“And here’s my personal favorite, from Shippensburg University, a state school in Pennsylvania: “Shippensburg University’s commitment to racial tolerance, cultural diversity and social justice will require every member of this community to ensure that the principles of these ideals be mirrored in their attitudes and behaviors.” (Emphasis added.)

One of the most outrageous cases involved a young Christian woman named Emily Brooker, a student at Missouri State University. She refused to participate in a classroom assignment that would have required her to engage in public advocacy in support of LGBT rights. She was immediately brought up on academic charges and then required to “close the gap” between her faith and the values of the university’s social-work program. She sued, she won, and the university disciplined the offending professors.

…

Why bring this up now? Because it’s worth reflecting on the utter failure of previous social-justice censorship regimes when evaluating the newest attempts to put a bunch of (mainly progressive) smart people in a room to socially engineer the marketplace of ideas. I’m speaking of course about the social-media speech wars.”

Social media companies employ in-house censors who have to rank grievances and create special protections for some categories of people.

“There are inherent costs when any company (or campus) that is intent on creating a marketplace of ideas turns its back on the accumulated experience of centuries of American free-speech traditions and jurisprudence. There are reasons, for example, why there is no “hate speech” category in American constitutional law. There is no workable definition that does not sweep too broadly. There are reasons why viewpoint neutrality is the hallmark of First Amendment jurisprudence. Censors can behave in unpredictable, arbitrary, and capricious ways — and no one has a sufficient monopoly on truth to serve as philosopher king over speech and debate.”

Carl Szabo, a GMU Scalia Law School Professor, has a number of articles on the Daily Caller arguing that there are no free speech rights on Facebook or Twitter. He says the public square argument doesn’t hold since Facebook is squarely a private company.

This supports the Minds.com strategy, but I think it’s debatable.

Censorship Practices

Deplatforming

Apple, Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter Subvert the US Constitution, Free Speech, and American Liberty, by Paul Craig Roberts - The Unz Review Aug. 2018

Very polemical article documenting instances of de-platforming people from social media for “hate speech.”

Paul Craig Roberts suggests abandoning Google, YouTube, etc.

For now, we are going to continue to use it, but perhaps we should be preparing for a future in which we do not have a voice on these platforms. Many libertarians have already been banned – not just Alex Jones.

Suspensions

The Crackdown Continues: Twitter Suspends Libertarian Accounts, Including Ron Paul Institute Director | Zero Hedge

In response to his warning from Twitter, Antiwar.com editor Scott Horton writes:

“As Dan McAdams was saying yesterday on the Liberty Report, Twitter has demanded that we hit their Soviet BF Skinner button to delete our terribly offensive tweets, which at least in my case have been deleted from my feed by Twitter already, in order to begin the 12 hour countdown to having our access to our pages restored.

But I don’t like it when people tell me what to do. If they go ahead and unblock me because of the complaints, I’m still going to do my best to avoid going back. I’ve been wanting to quit Twitter anyway. It’s a worse cesspool of whining about bullshit than it’s always been and I have wasted way too much time on it. Instead I’m going to work on Antiwar.com, the Libertarian Institute, and start knocking out a ton of books I’ve been needing to catch up on for interviews. Yall can still find me here, at the Libertarian Institute, and at scotthorton.org.”

Removing Followers, Shadowbans, Etc.

Are people being taken off Trump’s follower list? Is it harder for conservatives to build an audience? I wouldn’t be surprised – I’ve seen in real time Twitter unfollow me from certain accounts that dissent from liberal orthodoxy.

The twitter account behind a controversial film about abortion was having its followers removed immediately after they followed them: Twitter Throttled Account of Pro-Life Film ‘Unplanned,’ Users Say Epoch Times

Are Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. free market companies?

Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance — Quartz, December 8, 2017

Tl;dr – social media companies are an extension of government, not private companies:

“Two decades ago, the US intelligence community worked closely with Silicon Valley in an effort to track citizens in cyberspace. And Google is at the heart of that origin story.

The intelligence community hoped that the nation’s leading computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with what would become known as the internet, and begin to create for-profit, commercial enterprises to suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public.

…