Companies Are Doing "Background Checks" on People's Social Media w/Andrew Doyle | Joe Rogan

We know from the history of censorship that it never works. It never works. It always drives people towards something. But that doesn't matter. People are stupid. Just because you say you know it and we do know it, it doesn't mean people are going to think that way and operate that way. That requires restraint. It requires foresight. It requires some sort of an objective understanding of history. Well, I'll give you an example. So in the UK, there was a far right party called the British National Party, which does technically still exist, but no, there's like 10 people in it. And the leader of that party, there was a moment where they were winning millions of votes, right? Because there were a lot of people who were disenfranchised, particularly in working-class areas and they were desperate for some kind of... And the head of that party, Nick Griffin, went on to our main political discussion program. It was called Question Time, BBC One, Prime Time, and he was humiliated. And as soon as that happened, the BMP were over within a matter of months. It exposed to those normal people the ludicrous and absurd nature of his viewpoint. And that I think is a really heartening idea that actually if you hear more from these people, they are self-discrediting, right? But if you ban them, you're almost giving them a kind of glamour, a kind of martyrdom status that they don't deserve. And that I think attracts a lot of people to their worldview. There's definitely something to be said for that. Yeah, there's definitely something to be said. I mean, look, I'm not in favour of banning these people. But I'm also not in favour of these people being able to espouse hate speech everywhere they go and to be able to indoctrinate people as well. It's like, I don't know what the actual... Well, do you trust... Well, I'll put it as my view. I do not trust the state to decide what constitutes hate speech. I don't either. No. I don't believe that... I mean, in the UK, they've proven that they're not capable of doing that. But the same is Canada. Right, exactly. Absolutely, clearly. So in that case, I'm for abolishing the idea of hate speech as a practice. We have... I don't know how much you know about the UK with this, right? We have a thing where the police will investigate you for non-crime if it's offensive, right? Non-crime? So there's a website, the government's website on hate crime has a paragraph on non-crime hate incidents, okay? And what they specifically say is if you've heard some... If someone said something and it's offensive to you and you believe that that person said something because of... You were one of the protected characteristics because of race, gender, sexuality, disability, whatever, then you report that to the police and it gets logged in the hate crime statistics as a hate crime, even though there's no crime. I'll give you a very specific example of this. There's a famous case in the UK at the moment, a man called Harry Miller. He was a docker from Humberside. And he retweeted a poem that was perceived to be transphobic and people were upset about the poem. He didn't even write the poem. The police investigated his retweet and he said to them, have I broken the law? They said, this isn't a crime, this is a non-crime hate incident. And the actual phrase the police officer used, I'm not joking, was we have to check your thinking, right? Whoa! Now that's sinister. And then when the police, Humberside police were challenged on this in the media, it turns out this is standard practice in the police. It isn't just one rogue police officer going a bit mad. This is standard practice. The commissioning guidelines from the College of Policing actually stipulate that this is what you're meant to do. This has now finally been challenged in the courts, but no one stood up to this stuff. You know? Just a phrase, check your thinking. Check your thinking. By a police officer, no less. Yeah, well the police... Who's qualified to check your thinking? I mean, you should be... It's crazy. It should be difficult. Well, yeah, quite. I mean, the College of Policing who teach the police what the police officer actually said is, he said, well, we've had a workshop and what you don't understand is that babies are sometimes born with a male brain when they've got a female body. I mean, literally he was trying to lecture him on this stuff. Well, that might be true, but that doesn't mean that the police should be able to tell you that you can't retweet something that you agree with. Right. And we have people in our country who have been... Do you know how many people are arrested in the UK? I'll just ask, how many people do you think are arrested every year in the UK for offensive comments they posted online? What would you guess? I mean, it's not a trick. I'm just interested to know what you would assume. Arrested for offensive comments online. Let me say 300. 3000. Every year, right? Wow. And that's not including all the many thousands of non-crime hate incidents that are logged. Wow. 3000 people arrested. Some of them will be horrible, by the way. I've been clear about... Some of those comments will be horrible, nasty, racist, awful. Right. Some of them are between rival football gangs and stuff like that. But some of them are jokes. One guy served three months in prison for a joke about Madeline McCann. And it was a joke that he cut and paste from some website and put it on his own Facebook page. Three months in prison for that. Jesus Christ. What was the joke? I don't know. I hope it was good. I hope it was laughing for three months when he was eating terrible food. Yeah, exactly. Better have been worth it. Right? Now he's a felon, right? Yeah. He has a record. The famous one in the UK at the moment is the Count Dankular case. Yes. I don't think he's the Nazi publicist. I do know that one. And because I stood up. Explain it to people that don't know that story. So there's a guy called Count Dankular. His real name is Marcus Meakin and he's a YouTuber. And he created his dog. Sorry. His girlfriend's dog is this cute little pug dog. Right. And his girlfriend was always going on about how adorable the dog was. So he trained the dog to jump about enthusiastically whenever it heard the phrase gas the Jews. And he trained it to do a little Nazi salute whenever it heard Zeke Heil. Right. Those phrases out of that context are unpleasant. You can see why someone would be offended by that. Right. But the joke was that this cute little dog is behaving this vicious. In fact, the joke is predicated on the idea that there's nothing worse than a Nazi. Well, also the joke is predicated on the fact that we all know the dog has no idea what it's doing. Quite exactly. Yeah. So that's him doing the Zeke Heil there. So that's Buddha the dog. Now, now look, I accept that people can be offended. You know, I might be offended by all sorts of things. And that's fine. But no, three million people saw that video before YouTube took it down, you know, and a three million people, not one complaint, no one complained. The police actually went to the Scottish Council of Jewish communities and said, do you find this offensive? And understandably, they said yes. And the police are great. Now we can prosecute this guy. Two year investigation found guilty in a court of law, ultimately fined 800 pounds. That was what happened. But he's got a criminal record now for whatever you think about the joke. It's it's it is clearly meant to be funny. But not only that cybercrime intelligence unit investigated all of his tweets, emails, his entire background to find any remote connection to a fascist group or a firework group. Nothing. They found nothing. So there's no evidence. So basically they prosecute in the UK. We now have someone who has been prosecuted because the judge believes that he knows what secretly going on, what his secret intention is. And the the actual phrasing of the law that under which he was prosecuted is that it is deemed grossly offensive, which is a very subjective idea, something that is grossly. Well, particularly when the fact that you have 3000 different view or three million different views and no complaints, no complaints. Right. This is that's that's crazy. And I know that because I I I defended him at the time. And then of course, people said that I'm a Nazi apologist because I you know, that's which is utterly, utterly ludicrous. But I know the guy now he's he's a nice guy. He's not at all. I've seen him interviewed. Yeah. What's up, Jamie? Well, you guys are talking about this. I found the story that happened last week. This is a tweet that I've kind of gone through it to verify it a little bit. I don't want to say it's 100 percent accurate. But this guy got a job interview and I guess he signed up and they found this on his on their own. He said he did not give them his information. They sent him 351 pages of every tweet he ever liked that had the word fuck in it. Wow. He said I had to get a background check for my job. And it turns out the report is a 300 plus page PDF of every single tweet I've ever liked. Liked with the word fuck in it. Enjoy your dystopian B.S. Like there's a bunch of tweets showing it. But I looked at the company that does this. Hold on. Go back. Sorry. Was it say update? I came home to a package containing a print out of all 351 pages of it. Obviously, the dystopia cares about wasting paper. Here's like a for instance of what it looks like. And have they used this to justify not giving him the job? Is that the I don't know. I don't know what happened to that. OK. He liked this tweet. Merry Christmas to the toddler. I saw running across Trader Joe's with a giant bottle of peppermint vodka and mom running after him like no no no no no no no only. So flag type bad flag reason alcohol. Yeah. Post type liked. Yeah. So they they changed what he was saying. Right. He's he's making a joke about a toddler that he saw running across Trader Joe's with a giant bottle of peppermint vodka. That it had taken from its mom and the mom was like no no no. Give me that. Give me that. Give me that. So they flagged it because there was alcohol in it. The baby had a bottle of alcohol. There's nothing offensive about that whatsoever. I actually don't understand why that would be an issue. Because they want you to be scared as fuck. They want to be able to control your thinking and they don't want you to ever do anything that could come back to hurt the company in any way and and mess with their bottom line. I mean, that is crazy. But even liking a tweet. Yes. Not not just writing the tweet. Right. Liking it. Crazy. I like things by mistake sometimes. Crazy. Fat thumbs. I just say the wrong thing. Here's another one. To this day, this is still the most in all caps big dick energy I've ever seen in a video. I don't know what that is. The guy that like called his dad when he was about to win, who wants to be a millionaire, right? Like celebrate that. I know the answer. I'm going to win. Right. OK. So he called his dad, tells dad that he's going to win because he knew he was going to win. Now, look at this flag reason language bigotry sexism. What's the bigotry and the sexism there? I don't understand it. I don't see any bigotry bigotry and protect sexism that he's a man. And he's showing big dick energy because he's big dick energy is an expression and it's an expression for someone who is super confident. And the idea that you say, well, it must have a big dick. That's the joke about that. Sex is. No, it's a joke. It's an Internet meme. Big dick energy is an Internet meme and that this is flag type bad language. Big entry sexism. And here's the best part post type liked. He just liked it like he saw it was like, ah, because it is a big dick energy move. But to phone your dad, call your dad and say I'm about to win a million. Dad, is that what that that satisfies? Big dick energy. It's not it's not a phrase that we commonly use. It's in the UK. We're too refined for that. I get that's vulgar. Yeah, it's vulgar. It's a new American thing over the last four years or so. Like two, maybe two years. It's having a big dick sexist then. Is that the I guess that's what they're saying. And it's bigotry is the hilarious part. I'm well scour that motherfucker forever and try to find some bigotry there. You know, a gentleman's name, if you want to read this, folks, you want to read along with his internet name is K M L E F R A N C K M L E Frank F R A N C K M L E F R A N C on Twitter. Bruce Bruce, Almighty hilarious. So he's a funny guy. By the way, they don't know what bigotry means. I'm really sick of this word being thrown around, right? That's a real problem right there. I mean, he should be able to sue for that one. There's nothing bigotry about that big. Bigotry is the dictionary definition of bigotry is an intolerance to those with different opinions. Yes. And more often than not. Sorry, I didn't mean to patronize him, but it's just that whenever I hear the word being used, it's always by bigots who can't tolerate your opinion. So you're a bigot. You don't agree with everything I say and therefore you're a bigot. No, that makes you just undermine your whole point. It's gross. But liking tweets. I mean, it's bad enough that people sort of troll through everything you ever wrote. But liking them. And what's crazy about that is this is a company that's doing this. So there's a company that they hired that's willing to do this. And the company labeled it bigotry. So is the company woke? Is this the company? Fama, the smartest way to screen toxic workplace behavior? No, they'll be. Fama is a talent screening software. OK, so it's software. That's part of the problem to help identify problematic behavior among potential hires and current employees by analyzing publicly available online information. Wow. Boy, would I have a hard time getting a job? We just looked up, said that another company used this company to get that information. So I like a background check. Yeah, a company that was creepy company. Insane. Like that's really sinister. Well, it seems like it's just software. It's just like, yeah, it says talent screening software. So it's basically they just scan you to make sure that you pass their purity test, which no one will know with any sense of humor. I mean, if that guy, the big dick energy guy, that gets you flagged. You're a bad person because you thought that that guy who knew he's going to win a million dollars would call his dad. I mean, that's that's funny. Is there anyone like there is no way that there's anyone on the planet who couldn't be canceled if you had unlimited access to their private? No way. Texts, tweets and like. But that's part of why people want to cancel people, because they know it could come back at them.