Joe Rogan & Kyle Kulinksi Social Media Platforms Purging Alternative Media

Look at him, he's an expert over there. What do you have to do with this? He loves it. He gets crazy. He'll come back and tell you who's dating who. Yeah, you gotta... They run Twitter and all the memes off Twitter. Where it all comes from. They run Twitter? What are you saying? Yeah, 25% of Twitter memes and everything is coming out of black Twitter. 25%? Did you do the math? It's... No, in fact, bro. I've done the math. It's been like, bro. I didn't pull that stat out of my ass. Okay. Speaking of social media, have you seen all these purges recently? There's a new round of it that just happened. No. I think 800 or more accounts were purged from Facebook and Twitter and they're all, almost all, alternative media accounts. So some of the sites are... Snowflakes was one, I think on Facebook. There's another one called Anti-Media. That was purged. They're an anti-war media thing. Free Thought Project is another one. Oh, I did hear about this. And there was Copwatch. Police the Police was one of them that was both. And what they're saying is such a bullshit argument. They said, oh, the reason we pulled this is because it's inauthentic behavior. We're pulling these accounts because there's inauthentic behavior on those accounts. What does that mean? I don't know. That's the point. And they never clarified. So what I think it means is, hey, these are, you know, these are alternative media outlets and we want to get rid of them. So we're just going to get rid of them. Because Facebook, I know, met with the Israeli government and Israel told them, hey, listen, if you're going to be in our country, you're going to get rid of certain accounts. And Facebook went right along and said, sure, we'll do that. They've done that with China, with Google. Right. But now I think they're doing that in the US. Now I think they're, yes, I think they're working in cahoots with the US government. And so you have all these alternative media accounts that are specifically, you know, anti-war or what have you, anti-corruption. Some of these are, and they're getting purged. No. The argument was inauthentic behavior. Yes. That was one of the reasons they cited as to why they got rid of them. Is inauthentic behavior, does that mean that they're talking about instances that they're misrepresenting? No, I think it means more like bots. That's how I interpreted it. Like, oh, you know, you're posting it and you're directing people to your own, you know, stuff and, but I thought everybody does that on Facebook and Twitter. Is it possible that that's, that was going on? I don't know. I'm just asking. Is it possible they were using bots and perhaps directing them towards revenue creating sites or? My, my whole thing is why shouldn't that be allowed? Well, I'm not saying that shouldn't be allowed, but is it possible that they were using stories that were taking place in the news, distorting those stories to get people to click on things that would have links to ways that these people can make money? So instead of it being some sort of political activism website that really was just a revenue generating bullshit site that was trying to drum up artificial outrage. I think for some of them it's certainly possible, but certainly not for the Free Thought Project. What is the Free Thought Project? It's another one of these. They describe themselves as like an anti-establishment or anti-corruption thing where they cover all these stories related to government corruption, kind of like a WikiLeaks type thing, except they don't do the, a WikiLeaks does more of the original reporting stuff and they'll just cover it after the fact. And how many Facebook deleted them? Facebook, I think got rid of them. I think there was an article in The Guardian, Jamie, if you're interested in pulling it up. It's Facebook and Twitter purge, you know, 800 sites. Yeah, when you mix, it was like, I think it was mostly on Facebook, like 600 or so on Facebook and then 200 or so on Twitter that they did. And a lot of them were very, like one of the accounts had over 3 million people who liked it. Now the Free Thought Project, what has their response been to this? I don't know. I don't, because I only saw the original article. I haven't seen anything after it. You know, this is a discussion that I was having with Ari the other day. We were talking, here it is. First they came for Alex Jones. We told you you were next. We were next. We were. This is on their website. But they did cover in The Guardian and some other outlets in case anybody's thinking that this is BS. Yeah. Hmm. That's not good. It is a scary time because you see that this can impact, you know, really anybody who's not toeing the line, if you will, like police, the police, are we really going to like, do we really think that they pulled that down? Not for the obvious reason, which is that you're sowing discord and the police don't like it. As part of its purge, Facebook has removed the pages of several police accountability, watchdog critic groups, including Cop Block, the Free Thought Project and Police to Police. They've also apparently severely restricted the activity for the photography is not a crime page. Huh. So do you think they're getting pressure from law enforcement? I don't, I don't know, but I never usually believe in smoke filled backroom conspiracies, but they're starting to get hard to avoid because there's so many of these things, man. Scroll down, please. Here's what we need. And how does this poem end again? It says, first they came for Alex Jones and Infowars, but I wasn't race baiting transfer of conspiracy cultists, who claims to murder children in Newtown, our hoaxes, and admitted in court that I'm just an entertainer who makes shit up. So I said nothing. Yeah, they're just trying to be flipping about how Alex Jones was pulled. The problem was once you bought into the principle of Alex Jones being pulled, well, then what you're saying is people who are executives at these companies can willy nilly decide whoever they want to pull down. Now, my answer to that has always been we should take Twitter, Facebook, these giant social media pages. They can still be private companies, but we should regulate them like their public utilities. Yeah, that's the argument that Ari and I were discussing. That's the only answer because you need to default to free speech. Now, I'm not saying if somebody's doxxing somebody or if somebody's directly threatening somebody and stuff like that, there should be a process set up where you can ameliorate that and do it quickly. But having said that, people forget, man, the ACLU used to defend the KKK in court. That's also what Ari brought up. Yes, and they said, hey, in Skokie, they said, hey, listen, we don't agree with these people. We think they're heinous. We think they're terrible. We think they're dead wrong, but they have a right to say what they're saying because once you get rid of it for them, what people don't realize, Joe, is that these things will always come back against people who are powerless and marginalized. It's not like when you censor, everybody gets together and we all go, okay, so it's just the Nazis, right? Yes, it's just the Nazis. No, first of all, who's running these organizations? Obviously, they have their own opinions and their own vested interests and their own power dynamic issues and they're going to take down whoever threatens their power. Now, are all these organizations still up on YouTube and Twitter and Google? I don't know. To my knowledge, the only one that totally got pulled down everywhere, I think, was Alex Jones. He still has his own website. Here, we'll get up here. It says, all but proving the case that this was a coordinated attack by the tech giant community shortly after the purge on Facebook, Twitter, follow suit. They're wiping out our profiles on there as well. They gave absolutely no reason for the suspension. We had close, the Free Thought Umbrella had close to six million followers. Wow. Isn't that crazy? And they just decided overnight? What's crazy is I didn't even hear about this. Well, that's why I'm here. Yeah, I appreciate you. I had heard that it was 800 different pages, but the way I had read it and I had, unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time, and I was flipping through something. I had read that it was a lot of anti-police pages. Some of them were anti-police, but I think a lot of them were not. A lot of them were anti-establishment, anti-corruption. They've always had it out for WikiLeaks, for example. WikiLeaks has ... Mike Pompeo, one of the top Trump administration officials, says they're like a non-state terrorist actor. Think about that. That's nuts. That is pretty nuts. Because basically what they do is what reporters should do. Yes. Reporters should say, hey, here's what the bad guy ... Here's what the people in the government are doing, and this is the stuff that they're keeping secret that they shouldn't keep secret. And our government goes, oh, that's terrorism. Now when Twitter or one of these people, one of these organizations bans something like the Free Thought Project, do they make any statements or they just remove them? All I saw was on the Guardian's article, and on the Guardian they said it was inauthentic behavior was the reason why they were pulling them, and maybe one or two other things that I'm forgetting at the moment. That is a fucking weird statement. Inauthentic behavior. Yeah. Yeah. It's fucked up, man. Because they could just do it to anybody. That's the point, and that's what's so scary. Well, that is what's scary, right? Is that they are private companies, and these people are allowed to post on them until they decide they're not allowed to post on them because they violate their terms of service. But when your terms of service are that open-ended, inauthentic behavior, like what the fuck does that even mean? They leave the terms of service purposefully vague so that they can get away with knocking off wherever they want to knock off. It's just weird that they all agreed, that Facebook agreed and Twitter agreed. What would be the incentive of Twitter to follow suit? What would be the incentive of Facebook? Smoke-filled back room. Right, but what do you think is given to ... If you had to speculate, what do you think would be given to them that would give them the incentive to want to pull a site? I smell like the Jack Dorsey guy seems pretty socially progressive. I think they are meeting, just like what we said, we know they did this with Israel where they pulled down pro-Palestinian human rights pages to allow Facebook to function in their country. They said, you have to do X, Y, and Z. I think that there are meetings with, I don't know exactly who it is, our intelligence agencies, law enforcement, FBI, I don't know, somebody like that, maybe CEOs of various corporations where they say, hey man, listen, these people are a problem, these people are a problem, these people are a problem, let's do the right thing here. I would like to hear a contrary argument. I would like to know, what is the contrary argument? Is there anything that we're missing? If we want, we could try to find the Guardian article and read what they said. What Twitter said. What Twitter and Facebook said. Let's see if you can find that. The Guardian article, it's not coming up, they pulled it off the Internet. Guardian, what was the headline? I searched it and went on news and there was no articles from the Guardian. By the way, the only two things I found, the only two things I found, I don't know. I found it on RT and the Guardian and nothing else, which is why you didn't hear about it, because mainstream media didn't talk about it, because guess what? These outlets oftentimes are competition in mainstream media. What the fuck, man? That is, so the Alex Jones thing is really like a test run almost. Pretty much. I'm searching on their website. On the Guardian website? Free thought project. I'm using Google to do it and the top article is something about food in 2013. Okay. Well, when we get off air, I'll do a search and we can see if we can find the statement. Yeah, but when we get off air, it's not helping all those people that are listening to us right now. Well, they saw from the Free Thought Project. I'll find it on Twitter. They saw the article from the Free Thought Project and that says the same information. We just don't have the exact statement from Twitter and Facebook on it. That's the only thing. See if you can just Google statement from Twitter regarding removal of the Free Thought Project. That wasn't in the article. No, I know that. It was like Facebook and Twitter purges accounts for, I don't know if it's an authentic behavior in the title, but it was in the article somewhere. So you really think that there's some sort of smoky backroom deals where they say, listen, you guys are making tons of money. We've got a bit of an issue here. Let's work through this. This is what we want removed. These people are causing us a bunch of problems. I don't know, but I do know they did that in Israel. I do know they do that in all these countries where the government say, hey, in order to function here, you have to do X, Y, and Z. So why wouldn't they do that in the US? That's what I would say to that. But what groups would want the Free Thought Project or police to police removed? Well, you got to remember a lot of these. So the police accountability groups, I mean, it's pretty easy. Law enforcement would want them removed. Right. But do you think law enforcement has the kind of poll to go to Twitter and say, hey? Not like the, you know, whatever the police department in Toledo, but if the FBI maybe, sure. Or the CIA or, you know, whoever, major law enforcement, central law enforcement. The thing that people kept going to with Alex Jones was Sandy Hook. Sandy Hook, he said children didn't get killed. You don't have to defend Alex Jones on the merits of that point because he's dead wrong on that point. I understand. What you're defending is the principle of letting somebody speak. I understand. Yeah. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is there's no thing that they're going to on this. So it's like there's already been a precedent set that could just remove people. So they remove him and they got this really clear. It got sloppier. It got sloppier. Yeah. Well, it got more clandestine because there's no, there's no big smoking gun. There's no nothing. It's just all of a sudden they're yanked. Yep. That's right. And again, no major mainstream media outlet in the US reported on it. RT is Russia today. Jamie's got something here. Okay. This is of alt media by Facebook is pushing back just to beginning censorship insider. They may cite the guardian article in this article. I was looking, I'm looking at it. This is more about because I saw this article when I did it. That came out. It's us pushing back today from today. This is from today. Okay. I saw a different RT article on the same scroll down and make that a little bigger, please. Hmm. So that's so people are starting to catch on to it. Scroll left so we can see. There we go. Um, the latest and apparent of an apparent censorship of political speech online, US based tech giants. This month shut down hundreds of user accounts. Some belong to well established alternative media outlets with hundreds of thousands of followers like the free thought project or anti media senior fellow with German Marshall Fund leading think tank advocating US global supremacy seems to have at least partially taken credit for this. It says in quotes, Russia, China and other foreign states take advantage of our open political system. Jamie fly said they can invent stories that got repeated. And spread through different sites. So we are just starting to push back just this last week. Facebook began began starting to take down sites. So this is just the beginning. Okay. So what they're saying is that these websites have been infiltrated by people from China and Russia. Is that what they're saying? But scroll back up again, please. Stop. It said China and other foreign states take advantage of our open political system. Russia, China and other foreign states. So that is that is somebody from the German Marshall Fund, a leading think tank advocating US interests, saying that because we're so scared of Russia, Russian, Chinese, Russian and Chinese infiltration, that's why we got to pull down. So in other words, they're saying, hey, maybe these accounts like the free thought project are run by people who are trying to destroy America. So we have to pull them down. Exactly. And that's beyond a preposterous argument. This is what they're saying. They're saying they can invent stories. They get repeated and spread through different sites. So we're just starting to push back just this last week. Facebook again started to take down sites. This is just the beginning. So they're they're blaming the influence of Russia and China and that they're saying that this is their excuse for taking down these pages because these pages are being compromised by foreign agents. It's the oldest trick in the book to say, oh, these foreign entities are sowing discord in the United States. So therefore we're not going to allow this dialogue to happen. In fact, I remember they blamed Russia for Black Lives Matter Facebook pages during the 2016 election. But what's fucked up about this is there's not even any smoking gun. There's not only there's no evidence. They just say it. Right. They're not but they're not even pointing to a specific example. Yeah, that's right. Any example. Yes, you're correct. Scroll down and see if there's anything in this that makes any sense. According to the account fly complained that any person with an email could set up an account on social media and potentially reach a wide audience. You're complaining about long global struggle to fix the situation. Jesus Christ. Oh, great. He started his careers in US political circles as an advisor to George W. Bush administration. Oh, you always trust those people. Right. Also a foreign policy and national security consultant for the Senator Marco Rubio. Yeah, these are the geniuses who should regulate the internet. Right. These guys have been wrong about everything. Reliably. Well, this is the thing if you could just say, oh, the Russians have influenced this. The Russians are a part of this. The Chinese. Okay, pull it. It's hacky and it's partisan and it actually works on for on the left and the right sometimes. It works on corporate Democrats and people who want to blame Hillary's election loss on the Russians and it works on. Play that. Play that. Let's hear them talk. I can see a little bit of it. Can I jump go to the bathroom real quick? Yeah. Okay. Let's hear them talk. Principles, values as one of our greatest strengths and therefore one of the best ways to weaken us. So I think that that's one of the key things to understand here is Putin's acting actually out of weakness. And why have we Jamie not come to understand or at least the consciousness in this country does not necessarily view Putin aligned with other strong men figures. This has been a long running problem in American foreign policy. This is not just a problem that started with President Donald Trump. I served in the Bush administration. President George W. Bush tried to form a relationship with Vladimir Putin to get certain things to advance U.S. national security. President Obama tried the same thing with his reset of Russian, U.S.-Russian relations. So it's not unusual that you have an administration that maybe doesn't necessarily view Russia as the threat that it is. I think the politics of this, the public opinion right now, it's very interesting because you've actually seen a shift over the last several years. More Democrats now actually view Russia and Putin as a threat compared to where they were four years ago. Okay. Stop it. Stop it. Boy, this gives you, it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. The idea that these people are just deciding to remove pages and they're going on television giving these interviews saying that it's because of Russia and Putin without any evidence. It's so creepy. Maybe they didn't share the evidence. Why? You got to say something, man. I mean, if you want to believe, if you believe in a free society and you believe in freedom of speech and freedom of expression and you censor people, oh, shit, bro, what's going on here? I'll fix it. I would only go with that and maybe that, um, what happened? Nothing. Something going on. They don't have a fix for the, for the way that it's happening. So if you show the evidence, then you're, you're literally like showing the criminals how to, how to do this and it could just run more rampant and they got to plug more holes. Well, that would be the devil's advocate position. But in order to take people down, the thing is if they're doing it and no one's pushing back, you're just going to be able to do it with anybody that disagrees with you or anybody that's going to be an impediment to your political campaign or anyone's getting the way of anything you're trying to push through. And this is, this is a giant issue with people that have that kind of power that can influence Facebook or Twitter. And if that's the case, and look, we don't know, we haven't talked to Zuckerberg. We haven't talked to Jack Dorsey. We don't know who's, who's pulling strings or who's asking them to do things or what evidence they presented to them. But that's just very uncomfortable. It's very uncomfortable to see that guy talking and bringing up Russia and Putin because people bring them up like they're the boogeyman. You know, this is what's the Russian. They're interfering with our democracy, interfering with our issues here in America. And they want to ruin democracy and bring our country down from the inside. Yeah, it was like the internet went through a phase of like just totally free and open wild, wild west type thing. And now it looks like they're trying to reel it back in. And it's like, that's the view to the public square. It's supposed to be that these social media outlets, which are so gigantic and so powerful that this is now the public square. So to be able to censor people in these in these forums should be considered unconstitutional. Coordinated inauthentic behavior. Oh, you found it. You found the article. And spamming. But again, the like the websites that they actually pulled down, that totally destroys their argument. Even if you buy into the premise that these are this is a good reason to pull somebody down. I mean, some of the people, the pages they pulled down were so well established and there are, of course, not inauthentic in any way. It's people who are running these pages that really deeply care about these issues and want to get this news out to people. Fuck. This is a good quote here. Drawing the line between real and inauthentic views is a difficult enterprise that could put everything from impartial political parody to genuine but outlandish views on the chopping block. And by the way, you there are politicians in the US. This happened during the debate between Ted Cruz and Beto O'Rourke all at the exact same time with the exact same hashtags. There were pro Ted Cruz things tweeted out at once. So what that is, their bots that they bought to help Ted Cruz win the election. That's election interference. That's inauthentic behavior. And nobody is talking about pulling down those accounts. Look at what it says here in a statement post to online newsroom. Facebook says it purged those pages because their owners were using fake accounts, sharing the same content between multiple pages and linking to ad supported websites. It calls ad farms. So what? That doesn't even is that even controversial. This is where it gets interesting. It says but what the social network calls spam. The owners of these pages call standard procedures for operating on Facebook. Yeah, that was like I don't even think if the argument from Facebook is correct that that really is a reason to pull them down. Look what it says here. Nearly all the page owners contacted by the Guardian say they use backup or fake accounts along with their real ones. They do it in part to protect themselves from being targeted by political opponents and having their real accounts end up in Facebook jail. Reaver Press, a left leaning news site whose Facebook page disappeared yesterday. So this is on the left and the right. They're censoring people because you got snowflakes on the right. There's another one right wing news that was pulled down. Stop scrolling, please. But but look at this. This is really interesting. They're so they're admitting to disingenuous behavior, though. They're using fake accounts to protect themselves from being targeted by political opponents. Well, it's so but that's if that's the case, they are violating Facebook policy. So I've seen this on Twitter. I know people who have gotten their accounts banned on Twitter, but they create a new account and they stay on Twitter. And that's technically a violation of terms of service. But it also is something that I don't think is egregious at all. Right. But there's a big difference between someone getting banned and then starting a fake a second account. This is not that they're using multiple accounts at the same time. And some of them are fake. Look, I'm not I'm not justifying they're being banned, but I am saying that they violated certain procedures and they did so in order to public publicize their ideas and they did it to try to make their ideas more, you know, just more project them more, have more, more bandwidth. But according to Facebook, should you not be allowed to have like three or four accounts where you tweet the same stuff or post the same stuff? Because it seems like Facebook said, though, what Facebook said, if you scroll back up to the beginning, scroll back up to the beginning, please. That's part of the top. The top. The top top. See what it says a coordinated inauthentic behavior and spamming. So they were spamming. And that does sound like coordinated inauthentic behavior if they have a bunch of alternative fake sites and fake pages that they're using to spread their stuff. Look, I'm not saying that they should have been. This is I think better would be to say, hey, you can't do that. You got to remove these fake pages that are publicizing your ideas and just have your real authentic page. But what they're saying is that they're they're leaking to ad farms and that they use this to publicize their pages and that everybody does it. So why everybody does it? You're not supposed to do it. So why wouldn't they pull that? So let's say the Free Thought Project had three or four other things where they were posting the same stuff under a different name. Why would you not pull down the three or four other things and leave up the Free Thought Project? I think they're saying because the Free Thought Project violated their terms of service. You're not supposed to do that. They don't want them to do that. I don't know. So here's the thing. Would they have pulled the Free Thought Project down if they hadn't engaged in any of these forbidden behaviors? My opinion is I think yes. Maybe that's what I think. Maybe. But that is gross. You're not supposed to do that. And I'm not saying that they should be pulled. They shouldn't be pulled. But maybe they thought this is what they have to do to get the word out. And maybe Facebook is like, hey, you fucks are spamming and you're linking to these ad farms. And these ad farms have been known to be influenced by Russia and China and all these other organizations. You're doing it just to promote your sites. But we're saying that we can't allow that kind of behavior. It just strikes me as very strange that when you have examples like the one I just gave where you're in the Ted Cruz beta or Roark debate, they all tweeted the same thing at the same time. It was obviously paid for by some right wing think tank. You never hear the story of something like that if it's benefiting US politician or something like when Mitt Romney bought like a million fake followers on Twitter in the 2012 election. You never hear about like, OK, we targeted that. It's always like, oh, it just happens to be these independent alternative media outlets that are spreading information that the government doesn't want people to know. Well, it could be that these people are saying, hey, look, everybody does this. We're going to do this. And they're saying we don't like them there. Oh, and look, we caught them doing something we we don't allow. Yeah, let's let's sweep them. But that's possible. Is it possible that they wouldn't have been removed if they hadn't done this shit? They're not supposed to do. It's possible, but I don't think it's likely. I don't know, though, because here's the thing. How look, if it's only people who have engaged in these forbidden behaviors. That get removed, then Facebook has a very good argument. But if Facebook is saying this, but then people are removed who are straight, above board, doing everything the right way, just have their own page, posted information on their own page, and they were never removed. But these are all political and alternative media, which is interesting. So they were targeted. Yes. Right. So they're targeted. But in the targeting them, they found a bunch of shit that you're not supposed to do. And that's what got them removed. I think that there is a good argument that Facebook could make, which is very much a nuanced troll terms of service argument. But I think it's more of a veneer or facade than the real heart of why they did what they did. But again, that's just my opinion. I'm not stating that as a fact. I agree with you. I mean, surely what they should have done, especially given the popularity of these sites, is warn them and say, hey, you've got to stop doing this because if you don't, we are going to remove you. You are violating our terms of service. You are linking to ad farms and you have posted from multiple fake accounts. Stop doing that. Just use your one authentic account. We support free speech. That's what we both like. Right. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. I mean, it could be also that they feel like the right wing sites do this. We have to do this, too. This is how people do it in 2018 is how you really get the word out. True. Yeah. You know, I just I found it interesting that it was all alternative media and political accounts and right and left. It was just the main thing that seemed to be the connecting tissue through it all was relatively anti-establishment. You're right. Right. Right.