Tech Panic

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0:00:07.8 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:09.7 Aaron Powell: And I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:11.4 Trevor Burrus: Joining us today is Robby Soave, a Senior Editor at Reason. His new book is Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn’t Fear Facebook and the Future. Welcome back to the show, Robby.

0:00:20.5 Robby Soave: Thank you for having me. Great to talk with you.

0:00:24.7 Trevor Burrus: So who is panicking about “Big Tech”? I’m putting that in scare quotes, right now. We’ll have to constantly have that in [0:00:28.1] ____. But who is panicking?

0:00:30.3 Robby Soave: Basically, everyone. There is just tremendous across the board fear about big tech and interest in doing something to combat the menace among, pretty much everyone. Democrats, Republicans, everyone from Donald Trump to Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren and Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, every major political figure you can name virtually, wants to take steps to regulate social media more aggressively, if not break up these companies entirely. So it’s a tremendous moment of bipartisan panic actually. And one that the more I look at the problems and the solutions, the zanier I think it is to be reacting in this way.

0:01:18.3 Trevor Burrus: Because while I agree that there are certain challenges posed by social media, there are some issues with the platforms, there are things I think they’ve not handled well, other problems are just wildly overstated, and then the solutions offered are terrible will not work or will make things much, much worse or make other problems worse. So that’s… In a nutshell, that’s what my book attempts to do. It attempts to walk through exactly why that is, and I feel like I’m arguing against everyone on earth. Not against my fellow Libertarians who are the only people with same views on this subject, but everybody else.

0:01:52.3 Aaron Powell: So I noticed, Trevor asked about big tech, and you began talking about big tech, but then about half way through the answer, pivoted to talking about social media or switched terms to using social media. And so I wonder, does big tech in this case mean social media, which is a lot of the… The companies that sit atop the Nasdaq, a lot of those are not social media companies, Apple and Google, but those sometimes seem to be ones that people are mad at as well. So is this a panic about technology companies that are large, or is it a panic specifically about social media platforms?

0:02:25.7 Robby Soave: The book is specifically about… Is primarily about social media, it’s primarily about Facebook, Twitter… Google is a social media in some sense. The Google search function is not really exactly social media, but YouTube is owned by Google, YouTube is kind of social media a little bit. You know these definitions get a little tricky. You’re right, the book is not exhaustively about Amazon from how Amazon… Is Amazon hurting small businesses or something, that kind of thing. That is another component of the panic, it’s kind of touched on the book, but I’m mainly taking on the… ‘Cause I’m a free speech guy. I’m a speech and content person, so I’m mostly taking on the arguments that tech in its speech-​related function is either spreading this information or harming democracy or silencing people or radicalizing people. So it’s those kinds of harms are the… Or are causing addiction among teenagers, which is actually, right now, probably the major bipartisan concern, but that’s the focus of the book.

0:03:41.7 Trevor Burrus: You start off by listing a bunch of people who are terrified of past technologies. It introduced me to a Twitter account, the Pessimists Archive, is that what it is?

0:03:53.0 Robby Soave: Yes, it’s fantastic.

0:03:53.6 Trevor Burrus: That tweets out scares about everything from bicycles to Penny novels. So this is not new in terms of being afraid, like the older generation, being afraid of the technologies that are being used by the younger generation. But it does also seem that when you get to social media, this is a very, very different world than going from, say, newspapers to magazines, to television.

0:04:23.3 Robby Soave: It is different, I don’t know if it’s very different. Going from having no written word to the written word or going from having people, scribes compiling information by hand to the printing press is a massive innovation, going from only words on paper to people, to television and radio was pretty dramatic. Is this more dramatic than that? I don’t know, maybe it is in some ways, it’s probably not in others. It also can be dramatic in ways that are primarily good. As we panic about about tech, about social media, we often… Even if there are some problems, we often miss that the benefits, I think, are tremendously better. I think it’s broadly great that it’s easier to communicate with people all across the world, instantly. If you go back, you don’t have to go back that long. You only have to go back to my high school years where I was having these same kinds of conversations, social experiences were in AOL instant messenger chat rooms, which were more limited and more constrained and less reliable, or the tech was less reliable than Twitter is for me today, or YouTube or…

0:05:42.0 Robby Soave: I’m now the host of a YouTube show, I can be watched by hundreds of thousands, if not more people every day, and this is… I would have had to be on TV or something, or even from just the writing core function, if I objected to something someone wrote in the newspaper, I would write a letter to the editor, I would send them smoke signals. I don’t even know how you would do it. Now, I can instantly, instantly send them information, have some kind of dialogue, and that’s just in terms of the kind of professional class or what have you. The ability to disconnect in a leisurely social way with people all over the world is great, it has downsides as well. But it is also great and we forget that it’s good. Especially during the last horrible two years that we have endured where we were… The government literally forbid people to socialize, to gather, to do the most normally human things where humans crave socialization. The government said, “Don’t do that.” We are… And it was horrible. I thought it was horrible.

0:06:50.5 Robby Soave: But how much more horrible would it have been without Facebook and Twitter and Google and Snapchat and TikTok and everything else that is popular among the platforms that are… I’m an older person now, the same age to you, I do discuss these newer and younger platforms to the extent I can understand them, but I think the advantages of being able to communicate in this way have become only more evident, which is why I’m kind of… It’s kind of funny that the panic has not abated at all, in fact, it’s kind of sped up despite the fact that, thank God we had social media for the last two years, is my perspective. Maybe somebody disagrees, but that’s my perspective.

0:07:32.9 Aaron Powell: This does seem to get at the core of… I guess there’s an asynchronous nature to the panic because this is the core of what sounds like more of the lefts or the progressives, the Democrats. Part of the panic is exactly what you’re describing is a problem in the idea that, yes, before we all could have [0:07:53.8] ____ or we could write letters the editor or whatever, but there were gatekeepers, and even if there weren’t gatekeepers, there were economic limits that meant that… I could self-​publish a book in the ’80s, but it was never gonna get the reach of a major publisher. Or I could record something on my camcorder and maybe get it on public access television, but it was never… It was structurally impossible for it to get the reach that it would get elsewhere, but now those barriers no longer exist.

0:08:24.7 Aaron Powell: Like the big media and the traditional publishers are still popular, but they don’t have that structural advantage, because theoretically, my tweet or my YouTube video could reach just as many people as an NBC show does. And that does seem like, particularly from the left’s perspective, a problem because it means that bad ideas, and we all have been on social media and we all have seen how many bad ideas, even a non-​partisan [0:08:54.5] ____ terrible ideas or crazy people circulate at very high numbers on social media, and that then anyone else can find it, and because of the nature of the medium, there’s no…

0:09:08.5 Aaron Powell: A tweet from NBC News looks the same as a tweet from some random person, except for the profile picture, and that this has led to a… People can find weird information that is misleading or dangerous and surround themselves with it, but then interestingly the right, their objection to at least social media is that they imagine social media is at the beck and call of the forces that wanna restrict that stuff and want to limit their ability to send their ideas out into this medium. So in that regard, it does seem like the very things that you just raised as benefits are in fact what half of our partisan electorate or their leaders think is actually the problem.

0:10:01.7 Robby Soave: Certainly. They think that’s the problem. They’re wrong. I say, good riddance to the gatekeepers. You say that you can find misinformation, very recklessly, wrong, bad information on social media, because there isn’t that same amount of gate-​keeping and you’re absolutely right. But you know what, you can find bad information on the front page of the New York Times. The decision to invade Iraq was produced by elite media newspapers, television, etcetera. There’s a kind of small-​minded liberal consensus that is manufactured and produced by traditional media that is right about some things, I’m not a crazy person, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. But it’s also wrong about a lot of things, and I don’t think… Social media, there are fewer guard rails, so maybe there’s more even crazier stuff, but there’s also good alternative perspectives that are healthy and are correcting a lot of the toxic, the un-​thinkingly, one-​dimensional sort of narrative you get from the mainstream.

0:11:18.5 Robby Soave: And also you have misinformation on television and on radio and on all sorts of… It’s funny when I guess the left, the liberals, Democrats, progressives, whoever, they wanna say that Facebook or something is The reason Donald Trump got elected. And I’m like, “Have you listened to Fox News? Have you listened to talk radio?” Or the other side. These media, these media are 24/7 commercials, like propaganda for or against a certain political cause. At least on social media, you get a wild range of views. And as someone whose views are in many ways alternative to what you find in either political tradition, I think probably those of us who have contrarian or alternative ideas are much better served by this media ecosystem where a lot of different ideologies, a lot of different alternative media organizations have been able to flourish. So I see it as positive.

0:12:33.2 Robby Soave: Now you’re right, there are completely opposite concerns here from right and left. Left says and not left… As in progressives say, “Yes, social media allows way too much stuff and must clamp down more on speech we don’t like.” And conservatives say, “Social media clamps down way too much on speech we don’t like and they should do less of that.” It’s kind of hilarious because you see Zuckerberg and Dorsey and all the rest at these show trials before Congress, and they’re just getting completely opposite demand. So even if they wanted to do what the government wants, the various members of the government want completely contradictory things, so there is no way for them to really handle this. And frankly that reflects in how they’ve approached it, because there are many moderation decisions and social media companies have made that I think are bad, and I criticize them all the time.

0:13:29.6 Robby Soave: I don’t think it follows from that whatsoever that the government needs to be more involved in setting these policies, or that punishing these companies would benefit conservatives who are saying that, “Yeah, we need to smash big tech, hurt Facebook, hurt Mark Zuckerberg, punish them for taking down speech we don’t like.” Makes absolutely no sense because the right, again, an alternative perspective, perspectives outside that narrow liberal orthodoxy you get from the New York Times, benefits from the existence of social media, has clearly benefited. So just like hurting these companies because they made you mad would be like the most self-​defeating strategy of all time. I understand…

0:14:12.2 Robby Soave: So in summary, I understand better why progressives want to regulate social media, I think they’re wrong, and I think they’re overstating a lot of the problems and they’re missing a lot of the benefits. I don’t actually even understand. And I have tried to understand, I think it’s like a pure rage or an un-​thinking rage, why many Republicans are interested in regulating social media, it’s revenge, but it is tactically self-​defeating.

0:14:37.6 Trevor Burrus: How much do you think the… As you described the legacy media, what Aaron had talked about with the gatekeepers, it seems that there might be some self-​interest there, if you do write for the New York Times and you pen some sort of op-​ed that says, “There’s a huge problem with all these people online saying things that aren’t true, and they’re not being vetted by legacy media, and they’re taking eyes away from what we do.” And so do you think there’s a lot of self-​interest there for the established media who say, “We should be the ones who influence the course of human history, not QAnon.” Which… I don’t want QAnon to influence the course of human history either, but, “Not fringe elements that say things that are not vetted by our establishment.”

0:15:26.8 Robby Soave: No, that’s exactly it. In fact, I’ve described the book, I say that the mainstream media in particular, the New York Times is the villain of the book. Because then when you look back through, as you were saying, the Pessimists Archive, which I give many examples of in the book, there are countless examples throughout history of the New York Times in particular, yes, trying to foster some moral panic about whatever the emerging rival communicative technology is, everything from radio to the phonograph, any way of communicating and TV, of course, video games. These are things that obviously other traditional media companies fostered panic about as well, but yes, it is self-​interested and they’re not transparent about how its self-​interested. Many…

0:16:13.2 Robby Soave: Newspapers in particular have… The industry has crashed in many ways, the New York Times still doing okay, still doing quite well, but other places have crashed because these are competing ways of getting information, and also they’re doing… They’re doing the same thing, this idea that algorithms are manipulating you or that kind of thing, all news organizations can see the analytics now and they know how to specifically craft articles or frame articles or what subjects to pick, or how to headline them, or what picture to… All of that stuff to keep your eye balls in their direction, and they’re all doing that. And so yes, Facebook is doing that, Twitter is doing that, YouTube is doing that, but so are all traditional media companies, so is television, it’s just…

0:17:06.4 Robby Soave: If you think it’s… It’s not just nefarious or something, what social media does, it’s what all companies are trying to do. So it’s an industry battle that is not being acknowledged as such. And this was particularly evident, the New York Times was so freaked out about Clubhouse, which was this… It’s kind of gone down hill, it was really a.

0:17:30.6 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, just about 20 seconds, yeah, yeah.

0:17:32.0 Robby Soave: Yeah. It’s not got a lot of juice left in it, but you’d be talking… It was a platform for voice chat without video, that was really popular during the pandemic, and The New York Times had this article like, “Oh no, but how can you fact-​check it if there’s no… ‘Cause it’s just audio, it’s not producing some transcripts, so people will be hearing things that could be false. Oh no!” It’s just this utter panic that people would be consuming information without the traditional news media being able to filter that for you. And I don’t think that’s a very healthy way to approach human… Human conversations happen without the New York Times permission and have for thousands of years. So it’s just kind of odd.

0:18:18.1 Aaron Powell: Part of what’s motivating, this seems to be almost like a myopia of influence, in that… Trevor has talked in the past about campaign finance regulation, and one of the conceits of campaign finance regulation is that essentially the voters are these non-​critical blank slates who will do whatever the most frequently seen campaign ads say, and so therefore, we need to regulate campaign ads and other political speech because they’re nefarious-​ly influencing the voters. And traditional media, and this narrative of like, “Trump would not have been elected if it weren’t for social media,” and so on, has this view that the American public are these mindless blank slates who will do whatever the media they’re consuming tells them to. And so if we’re in charge, they’ll do what we the New York times tell them to, but now that we’re not in charge or that they can get it from elsewhere…

0:19:15.5 Aaron Powell: Politicians tend to have a similar kind of view. And like we have data on, Trump wasn’t necessarily elected by social media because he got really high votes in places with low social media usage to begin with, and so on. So I guess, how much of this is like people who you tend to… There’s always a tendency to think whatever it is that you’re doing is really important. I’ve sometimes laughed at like the DC Policy world, every single person is like… Like when we had the financial crisis, it was like every policy area had a paper that came out that was like, “My policy area was the most important thing in influencing this financial crisis.” And so how much of this is just people really wanting to think that they are incredibly influential when they’re not. And so what social media is doing is less influencing people in new ways, but more just exposing the pluralism of influence and the relative lack of concentrated influence.

0:20:15.3 Robby Soave: Yeah, there is no kind of more indicative example of this then… So in a middle chapter of my book, I really take aim at the idea of that it’s spreading addiction and anxiety and… Oh, and right, they’re gonna convince you to buy things and scary, it’s mind control. A mindset that is most popular, that is most believed by tech people, by ex-​employees of tech companies, by people who left Google and Facebook in panic. And they’re coming to the public with the alarm of Manhattan project scientists talking about this horrible global extinction event weapon that they, the most brilliant people who ever existed, in their brilliance created. And now they are warning you, you must listen to them.

0:21:09.3 Robby Soave: But the thing they’re describing is the Like button, not a bomb, the like button. And you’re listening to these people talk, and I get the idea, and I think, okay, “I get that you’re pretty addicted to tech and to social media because you’re a weirdo who worked on this for years, but most people are not weird like you.” Most people are consuming these things basically in a healthy way, maybe we could all stand to put our phones away a little bit less, just like I could have stood to play a few hours, fewer of video games when I was a kid, and even still today, to be completely honest. But it’s not out of the realm of my brain to deal with this. They act as if the fact that Facebook knows what products you buy, can recommend things really, and then it just… And then it gets you… And then you have no choice. It’s just wrong.

0:22:02.2 Robby Soave: It actually goes back to my colleague at Reason, Nick Gillespie, told me about this book, The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard. It’s like a Mad Men era book about how people in the advertising industry had mastered how to hack the human brain, and there’d be subliminal advertising and you would have no choice over what you’re buying or consuming anymore. Now, we know today that that was… In fact, even at the time, people in the advertising industry knew that that was totally b.s. That there was no truth to that whatsoever, no validity. You can influence human behavior on the margins, but the idea that you just have total mastery… This hacking of the human brain thing does not… We have not cracked it yet, we’re not there. Subliminal advertising is banned in some countries, it doesn’t even exist, it’s not a thing. No one was doing it, no one was trying it ’cause it’s not real. This is more real than that, but it’s not the level of…

0:23:01.1 Robby Soave: And in some ways it’s better. Isn’t it better that I see advertisements on Facebook that kind of reflect my interests? Like you see… On tv, I see advertisements for products completely irrelevant ’cause it’s not… They don’t have some… On some streaming services now, they do have things that are relevant to you, but it’s like for years, it’s been cars and I was not gonna buy a car. I am now gonna buy a car, but not because I saw the car commercials, the circumstances of my life have changed. But for years, these ads have been irrelevant to me. On Facebook, I might see an ad for a sweater or a board game or something that, you know, I might buy. So it’s better. It’s not nefarious. It’s only nefarious if you think like the entire process of capitalism is nefarious, which is I guess something some people on the left think, but I don’t think that.

0:23:47.1 Trevor Burrus: After off of Aaron’s point, because that was a realization I had about campaign finance, in many ways, it’s discussed that people are automata who are beholden to the ads you put it in front of their faces and… It was the same realization I had say when I was in high school and you had some punk rock dude saying, “Well, you can listen to what the corporate record labels want you to listen to, that they’re just making people like Britney Spears or Lady Gaga, or you can be authentic and listen to real music.” And they’re both coming from the same place, which is this inauthenticity of choice and disrespect of other people that, “They are addicted to social media, but I’m not addicted to social media. They get radicalized by social media, but I don’t get radicalized by social media.”

0:24:37.1 Trevor Burrus: Nevertheless though, and you talk about it in the book, I saw the social dilemma, it did seem pretty damning in terms of the concerted effort. And as you said, it’s more real than the perpetual myth of subliminal advertising, which is words flashing instantaneously behind the screen or something like that. This doesn’t work, no one’s ever figured this out. But there are people at these companies spending a lot of time, and these companies are spending a lot of money to try and make sure that you look at your phone for as long as possible, so it’s a little different.

0:25:12.9 Robby Soave: Yeah, and some people struggle with it. Some people look at their phone too much, but there are some people who, they go to the casino and they would gamble away their life savings. I don’t do that. I can go to the casino and gamble, like a very reasonable amount. Most people are like that. Some people are addicts and they should not… They should not drink alcohol, they should not do drugs, they should not gamble, etcetera, etcetera. We don’t make policy or we shouldn’t make policy as a libertarian, I believe that we should not make policy at the level of the most addicted or suffering or incapable or the person whose choices maybe should be… Who might rationally restrict their choices. We don’t make policy, we don’t think policy should devolve at that level.

0:25:54.5 Robby Soave: I think something quite similar for smart phones and social media. Right now, we’re talking about internal research came out from Facebook exposed by this whistle blower about how some young women were having a negative experience on Instagram, owned by Facebook, having to do with body image issues, that sort of thing, so it was like two… I think it was two and five, something like that, women were self-​reporting, young teenage girls, negative feelings correlated with their… Best they could tell, this is self-​describing their mindset in a survey. And look, that’s something to be aware of and Facebook might be well advised to think about this, or we can think about. But again, even if you think this is a problem for the government to solve, what is the solution? What are they… A lot of the… Limiting their ability to use these platforms are going to fall into, I think pretty immediate first amendment problems, right. We had…

0:26:54.1 Robby Soave: It is sort of similar to the violent video game thing, where the Supreme Court says pretty decisively that this is speech in a protected way that you can’t just because there are some potential or theoretical harms to young people, you the state can’t step in here. And also, the harms are pretty theoretical still. Like, survey a bunch of young, not even young women, just young people in general, ask them, “Does school make you feel negative?” I bet 90% of them would say, ” Yes.” Because being a teenager is hard and you’re emotional and it’s difficult. And I’m not saying that flippantly, it’s legitimately difficult, but there’s also…

0:27:36.0 Robby Soave: There’s evidence that social media makes it better for a lot of kids, you can find… It’s easier for them to sort themselves into… Outside the oppression and sometimes literal physical intimidation of high school, you can find communities of like-​minded and supportive people on social media. You can also find dangerous and unhealthy communities, but it’s more likely you’ll find the other thing. It’s more often occurring that it’s some benefit to you. So if you really wanna turn kids into angry, scared, bitter loners, take away their phones entirely, that’s what that’s going to do.

0:28:08.4 Robby Soave: So there’s some happy middle ground, and I haven’t been convinced yet that the government needs to be the one to set that. I am totally in support of parents taking somewhat more control over what their teenagers are doing, how much time they’re spending on social media, just as my mother limited my video game playing as a kid. I understand why it’s a little bit harder to do that, ’cause it’s a smaller device, you can hide it under your pillow. But I mean, kids could have hid and did hide comic books under their pillow that kept them up all night. Then you don’t get enough sleep and you go to school and you’re tired and you’re depressive, like this is… It’s kind of like that, it’s within the realm of, “We can confront it,” I think. I’ve not been persuaded that it’s something that it has gone so wrong, it is so necessary for the government to do it or to fix it, and also that there would be a solution that overcomes rather obvious First Amendment issues.

0:29:04.0 Trevor Burrus: There’s also, I think just an angle of every generation thinks they invented everything. My seventh grade daughter is, I believe of the opinion that her and her friends came up with the idea of acid wash jeans with rips in the knees. But I think there is part of that is like, “Oh my god, teenage girls are reporting body image issues.” Which is not a… It didn’t happen before social media, obviously, that was never a problem until Facebook came out.

0:29:31.7 Robby Soave: You’re being facetious.

0:29:34.1 Trevor Burrus: Yes, I’m being facetious. I think there’s that, but I wanted to turn because we have been talking largely about… We talked about how there was this asymmetry in the nature of the panic from the left and the right about social media or what their grievances were, and I think we’ve been talking primarily about what the left is upset about, so I wanted to turn to the right is upset about… And it does seem like… So Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, and then… Or Facebook, Twitter and Google, and then the various platforms that each of them runs, control an incredibly large overall portion of online discourse, and you can set up… You can set up alternatives, but they don’t seem to do very well, in part because it seems like whenever a conservative try to set one up, they just can’t get competent tech people to work for them, and so they immediately get hacked or crash or whatever.

0:30:31.9 Trevor Burrus: But it is the case that if you get kicked off of… If one of those three companies decides to de-​platform you, you’ve lost the bulk of your potential audience, and conservatives do seem, they do seem to believe that even if these companies say it’s not the case, they do ban more… It feels like they ban more conservative accounts than progressive accounts. We hear more about conservative politicians being having their account suspended than progressive politicians. Is there any truth to that? Is it the case that Facebook and Twitter and so on, have it in more for conservatives than they do for progressives?

0:31:14.7 Robby Soave: It’s a difficult question to answer succinctly. Certainly the people who staff these companies skew uber progressive, and their political biases are toward the left, 1000%, there’s no question there. And that’s true again of the employees, even versus their own management, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. Unfortunately, Jack Dorsey is no longer gonna be charge of Twitter and I’m quite worried about that. Those two were much more committed to free speech principles, to having a diversity of ideas, to not being too heavy-​handed about censoring ideas they disagree with or muzzling ideas they disagree with. Those two are far more committed to it than everyone else who works at the company.

0:31:58.0 Robby Soave: So it is a concern and yes, you have plenty of examples… There are examples on both sides, but you have… And then also some of it is just the user base leans to the left, or at least the user base, the complaints about other content leans… Lefty people are snitches, I don’t know. There there’s more complaining about content being done, and that’s the most important thing to understand, because this isn’t filtered upfront, everybody posts whatever they want pretty much on social media, and then later it might get flagged by an algorithm or by a user might report it, if they don’t like it, and then maybe the platform takes action. So if more people, more progressives are reporting, there will be more action taken against conserve speech.

0:32:43.5 Robby Soave: And then people will go, “Well, this is not fair. Why is thing A still on the platform, but not thing B., even though they’re roughly equivalent in my opinion.” Well, nobody complained about A yet. It will never look perfectly equal because it’s not moderated that way. So there are significant examples, like the Hunter Biden laptop story is a very good example of… So Facebook and Twitter took action against this very, somewhat damaging story in the New York Post about Hunter Biden with kind semi-​dubious sourcing, although it’s turned out the sourcing, as far as we know was completely accurate. And then the central point of the story, if not its broader implications, are basically like no one contends now, are false. But immediately was taken off Twitter such that you could not tweet the link to the story, and Facebook didn’t… Facebook turned it down so that you’d be less likely to encounter the story in your News Feed, and then they apologized for doing that because they realized that was wrong action.

0:33:52.8 Robby Soave: So that kind of thing was bad, like there’s no way around it, it was bad. But my sort of broader response to the right would be the right is still benefiting and getting more out of social media than anyone else right now. So even the Hunter Biden laptop story… So let’s say there’s no social media. Okay, so then noone reads the Hunter Biden laptop story. We had social media, they took really clumsy action against it, and then which produced like 100 articles on other media sites, and everybody’s sharing and talking about how the story was being suppressed from you. Sometimes when used suppress something, you make people more interested in reading it, it’s like Streisand Effect territory.

0:34:29.0 Robby Soave: So I am 100% convinced that the bad actions Facebook and Twitter took against this story ended up amplifying its reach or amplifying people’s awareness of it. So while it was bad, it doesn’t call out for a solution again, because this is still conservatives are getting more… Check Facebook. At any given day, the top 10 articles, you will see articles from Dan Bongino, Fox News, The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson. They’re not all 10 every day, but yesterday I checked, they were… There was some of the half of those people were in there. So again, I get why progressives want to destroy these countries, they are platforms that are not controlled by the mainstream media, and conservative views are being shared. And Elizabeth Warren doesn’t like that. Joe Biden doesn’t like that. But conservatives should not give in to that impulse, it’s very… Yes, social media does take action against conservatives. Some of those actions I think are wrong. I have criticized them.

0:35:40.8 Robby Soave: I think the right thing to do is to criticize them, but it does not call out for regulatory solution because any regulatory solution will end up either crippling or either have no effect so who cares. Or it’ll end up crippling these platforms, some of the specific regulatory actions sought by Republicans and Democrats, for instance, changing Section 230 being the main one. This is the liability shield for social media, that if you post something on social media and it’s defamatory, you can be sued, but the social media company cannot be sued because of Section 230. And everybody describes this as some kind of unfair advantage enjoyed by tech companies. I’m not even interested in arguing whether it’s an unfair advantage, but the implication of it, it’s what creates the internet, as we know it. It’s what allows people to post without them like having to review the post ahead of time. That is obviously benefiting non-​liberals right now.

0:36:38.7 Robby Soave: So why we would get rid of it, we as Libertarians, conservatives, even like far leftist, anyone outside of the middle liberal kind of consensus, we benefit from this. So we don’t wanna change it.

0:36:52.4 Trevor Burrus: Do you have a theory about why some Libertarians who you think might know better or would usually know better in terms of calling for regulation, have started calling for regulation saying, “We should make these companies regulate, moderate in a politically neutral way.” It’s been a little bit befuddling to me. I think that for some people, they are actively afraid that conservative views would be entirely censored if left to the druthers of these tech companies, and then they could work to effectively drown out counter view points, so they’re afraid of that. But beyond that, the regulations, if we put them in place, would A destroy, could destroy the internet, and B would greatly benefit the big tech companies and possibly entrench them.

0:37:45.6 Robby Soave: Facebook supports the regulation. Facebook has come out in support of this regulation, knowing that it will hurt Twitter, Twitter being Facebook’s main competitor in this specific… In this specific function that Facebook performs as a social media site, it’s competitor is Twitter. Twitter is smaller, Twitter employs fewer content moderators, so if you force the companies to do more content moderation because you raise their liability for each individual post, you would advantage Facebook over Twitter, the same way that if you raise the minimum wage, you end up helping Walmart in some weird warped way because you hurt Walmart’s competitors more, you put them out of business, and then Walmart comes out ahead. It’s very similar to that dynamic. I don’t know… I’ve tried to argue with them. I’ve tried to challenge people who are sort… The Libertarian right or people kind of connected to us who are like, “Yeah, smash, big tech,” because it doesn’t make sense to me.

0:38:40.4 Robby Soave: And I think maybe they don’t mean it, or maybe they’re just so angry and vengeful about the couple things that social media has done that seems wrong. There’s something kind of performative about it when you’re railing against the big tech monopolies and you’re doing so on Twitter. And your whole view is that they are just crushing every dissent… Wouldn’t they be… If they were really interest in that, wouldn’t they be crushing your criticism of them, which they almost never do. And I don’t wanna sound like a schill for these companies or something, I think they do a lot of… I think they do some bad things, but when I hear from my friends and allies that we’re in this moment of silencing, this great silencing is occurring, like what planet are you living on? The conversation is more unfiltered and free-​wheeling and broader and wider and deeper and in every direction than it has ever been in my lifetime, in human history.

0:39:40.8 Robby Soave: It is easier to share and to share ideas and to reach other people, and to do so without the permission of the authorities or the government, or really even the companies themselves or elite people in general, this vast silencing is not… Even if they’re trying to do it, they’re doing a really bad job because alternate perspectives are getting out and I’m glad about that. I think that’s a healthy thing. I think that’s a good dynamic, I’m in favor of that. That’s what’s happening. Maybe the situation could be even further improved, I’ll concede for the sake of “what if” maybe there’s some alternative regulatory regime that makes it even better. But I’d have to be really persuaded that it could be better if we’re gonna make these tweaks because it could very well be worse. And the immediate implication of raising the liability threshold for social media seems to me like it would make it worse.

0:40:37.0 Robby Soave: What if Twitter could be sued? Just for instance, if Twitter can be sued for everything that everybody posts on Twitter, won’t they immediately… The first thing they would think to do would be to go to a verified only system where you can only post on Twitter if you have a blue check mark? If you’re only a kind of respectable media person who carefully writes allegedly and purportedly in their tweets, so they are not inviting that kind of… Like a journalist. So if your perspective is, you don’t… And that is through the company, it agrees with, but you’re gonna tip the scales, so we only hear from more of those people? How is that… Again, how does that benefit Josh Hawley? How does that benefit Ted Cruz? How does that benefit Donald Trump, who was on the platform for almost his entire presidency, occasionally tweeting crazy things, and Twitter was sued by left wing activist who said, “You have to take down Donald Trump’s tweets because they are harmful and they’re dangerous.”

0:41:34.3 Robby Soave: And Twitter cited Section 230 and said, “No, we don’t. We are not liable for these.” And the court agreed, and so they left up his tweets. Donald Trump is tweeting about how we need to get rid of Section 230, yet it’s the thing that allowed his often unhinged social media presence to exist for most of his presidency, until he finally crossed a line that even they thought was too far and had been crossed and they had to do something, which a decision… I think it’s fine to have a variety of opinions about, but I do not think was at all a crazy decision on their part.

0:42:12.5 Aaron Powell: So maybe not regulation. And so where we are setting the rules by which all platforms must decide what content can appear on their platforms. But maybe concentration is the issue then that we should… We should hook on to. And this, you get a lot of people, particularly on the left, but the right does this too. Josh Hawley does this, of breaking up these companies. And I don’t know off the top of my head how much of online, call it social media speech appears on the two biggest platforms or the various sub-​platforms they control, but my guess is it’s a significant portion of it if not a majority of it. And if we as libertarians, if we said we would be like, if the the newspaper landscape was… Or the print commentary landscape was, there are two or three major publications through which all political commentary and journalism goes, we’d say, “You know, that seems like in a functioning market, you would have lots and lots of competitors and it would be thriving and it would be more diverse, and you would have more of a marketplace of ideas and that would be good.”

0:43:28.1 Aaron Powell: And so maybe the issue is, we shouldn’t have a handful of companies controlling all of this, but we should put in place an anti-​monopolistic regulatory regime that instead says, “You can’t have that much of the market, there’s gotta be 25 competing Twitters and 100 competing Facebooks, where people can talk and then you can find the one that matches your niche, and you can find the one where the corporate structure is most amenable to your ideological perspective, or at least the least hostile to it.” Is that a better way to approach it, or should we just not even be concerned about that degree of concentration?

0:44:07.7 Robby Soave: I don’t really see how that gets around a lot of the problems people are discussing, right. So if you’re issue with social media with big tech is that it’s just too big and it’s just wrong for so much capital to be concentrated in just one or two companies, there’s more than one or two of them, and you think that’s like a threat to democracy or that’s really bad. I ideologically disagree, but probably on some level, we’re just like, we’re gonna be talking past each other. If that’s your ideology, I guess I’m not sure what to say to you. I would try to raise practical issues with that kind of, I guess, reliance on government to solve that problem. Also, so we do have to, first of all, concede that existing anti-​trust law, the existing theory of monopoly does not at all match, it is not sufficient to handle the problems we’re talking about. The theory of monopoly, and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you guys this, you know it, is harm to the consumer.

0:45:09.9 Robby Soave: It’s the idea that Standard Oil, they have all the oil, there’s no one who can compete with them, they raise the price and they hurt you, the consumer. That is not… Even if we’re agreeing that Google is a monopoly or Facebook is a monopoly, they’re clearly not a monopoly in that capacity because they’re not charging you for their product, they’re not going to raise… What, Facebook raises the price. We would just not use Facebook. They’re not cornering some good. The way in which they’re operating like a monopoly, if they are doing that is really harming competitors or squeezing out competitors, immediately crushing competitors in the cradle, that kind of thing, or putting the pillow over them, whatever you do to kill people in the cradle. This went in a really dark direction, you get what I mean?

0:45:58.3 Robby Soave: They are doing that, but that’s not illegal under our current law, there’s no law that says you have to be nice to your competitors or your potential competitors. So maybe we change that, but if you want to do something about that, you have to create an entirely new anti-​trust understanding. What we have now is not sufficient to do it, and I think the problem you have… So for the left, if they’re concerned about misinformation or the incentive, the platforms have to just whip up the algorithm to turn everyone into a frenzy to wanna keep your eyeballs on the page by sending you crazier and crazier stuff. Well, if there’s 25 companies, then wouldn’t each of them want to do that more than the other to again, to keep you focused, to keep you alert. So the lack of competition they face in that way might actually clamp down on some of that activity.

0:46:58.7 Robby Soave: I don’t think 25 companies solves the political censorship issue because probably one company run by Mark Zuckerberg is going to have more favorable speech policies or policies for alternative or conservative speech, then if you broke up his company and each was staffed by one of his under secretaries, for diversity and inclusion. Like each of those people is more hostile, I can tell you is more hostile to free speech than Mark Zuckerberg is. The kind of way it is now, it seems like it could get a lot worse if we artificially tinkered with… I’m fine with the market tinkering with it, if alternatives arise, that’s one thing, maybe they’ll be better, maybe they’ll be worse, but we’re talking about bringing in some kind of sweeping government, break them up into several companies. Probably the best argument you can make for the government doing something is that in the future, the government should not allow maybe additional large acquisitions or the role that the FTC would…

0:48:02.8 Robby Soave: The FTC approved the Facebook Instagram merger without a second thought, it didn’t even occur to anyone that worked there to fight that. Again, I’m a libertarian, so I’m kind of ideologically against the government telling them not to. But if I were going to steelman the case for doing so, I would say that is the most obvious and that’s part of the FTC’s traditional oversight role. Probably stop… I don’t know, if Google acquired Facebook, that… The best case you could make for the government doing something would be the government to stop that kind of merger, I would say.

0:48:37.2 Trevor Burrus: Given this weird both the agreement and disagreement as we discussed that everyone seems to hate big tech, but the conservatives say they’re censoring too much and people on the left, they’re not censoring enough, and they can’t ever agree on what the hell’s going on. Is there… Do you think regulation is inevitable to some extent, because there aren’t many bipartisan agreements in this town, and so the regulation of some sort is inevitable, and that maybe we should try to make it the least harmful. Or are they just gonna sort of sit at odds with each other, ’cause they’re disagreeing about the fundamental problem, and so we really won’t see any massive change to the internet?

0:49:16.4 Robby Soave: So far, we haven’t seen anything, nothing has come on the regulatory front, despite all the talk. Thus far, Republicans crusading against big tech have basically been okay with just ranting about it off and on social media, hilariously. Josh Hawley, talking about how there’s a Twitter… It’s like if there was only one grocery store and like he’s talking about Facebook, but he’s on Twitter when he’s making this analogy. That kind of level has been what we’re experiencing so far. And maybe Josh Hawley would actually… He’s proposed actual regulations, haven’t gone anywhere, Republican leadership has not been inclined to support this, even if the Democrats wanna do it and some Republican members. I think the reform Section 230 moment might be passing. I think it’s possible that enough people like me or people who have the ear of some on the right have maybe persuaded them that again, the immediate impact of your policy change would be the vast silencing you are concerned is happening right now.

0:50:29.3 Robby Soave: So the anti-​trust break-​up, big tech seems to have become the preferred approach, but it hasn’t gone anywhere so far. What we will see is without any additional… Without any legislation being passed, we will see the kinds of people that the Biden administration has staffing the FTC and the FCC. Lina Khan, this new commissioner, very much has a, “Nope we can use existing anti-​trust law to go after these companies.” That is her view. She will be able to to do a lot of stuff before it ever gets to the point of a court case when she gets slapped down and said, “No.” And I always say this to conservatives as well, the people who end up doing the regulating, the bureaucrat who works in the FCC, the FTC, those people are ideologically the most progressive people you can find, they’re government employees, they’re government regulators. Even if what you want them to do is investigate and punish Facebook and Twitter for bias against conservatives, even if that’s the explicit mission you give them, they will not do that.

0:51:41.6 Robby Soave: They will investigate these companies for anti-​monopolistic or for monopolistic practices. They will be mad that Apple’s default search engine is Google, and you have to… They’re mad about that. They’re worked up about that even though that everyone who has an Apple device wants Google to be the default search engine. If you didn’t audit… Pre-​load Google onto Apple phones, everyone would be like, “How do I put Google on my phone?” This is what customers want. The people have spoken in terms of their purchasing, they love these companies, they love Amazon, they love Apple products. Tech companies are more popular than Congress, the people like these things, and the politicians are saying, “My feelings were hurt, I want to destroy them.” It’s very much a self-​created problem by the government to some extent.

0:52:34.7 Robby Soave: So I think we will see subliminal regulatory efforts by bureaucrats, by people in these agencies without a lot of action on congress’s part. But that could do tremendous harm and it will not be to the benefit of anyone. It will not be to the benefit of conservatives who worry about censorship, it will not be to the benefit of people who just enjoy using social media. It’s something that’s very much a part of this unique moral panic. I mean, not unique, ’cause moral panics are never unique. But palpable moral panic, we’re living through and that we’re just hearing about constantly that everyone is so exercised about.

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0:53:35.2 Aaron Powell: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.