Joe Rogan Reacts to YouTube Demonetizing Steven Crowder

That's the thing, right? It's like, are you responsible for the people who also comment on your post? And this is where we're getting to this like Vox thing that's happening with Steven Crowder right now. Right. Are you responsible for the reaction to what you post? Because if you look at what Steven Crowder said, to that, if we don't, people don't know the story, Steven Crowder got into it with this guy who is a writer for Vox, who, who is, he's gay, his Twitter handle is gaywonk. Carlos Maza. Yeah. So it's not that he's hiding that he's gay, talks about it all the time. He's kind of a feminine and Steven Crowder mocked that. And he mocked that in these videos where he was criticizing Carlos's position on Antifa, specifically what I saw. In doing that, he called him this queer Mexican. He's doing it in a ribbing way. He's doing it in a joking way. And then Carlos Maza posts all these horrible tweets that came his way. And apparently he got docked, so people got his phone and they were saying debate Steven Crowder. He was getting all these text messages in and all this hateful stuff that was coming his way. So the question is, who's responsible for that hateful stuff? If Steven Crowder calls him queer, is, what is queer? Okay. Is LBGTQ, what do we do there? What do we do if the Q is, is he, is, is it okay to call someone gay who identifies as gay if he calls him the gay little Mexican? Is that, is that bad? Like what is, how bad is that? Like what is that? You know what I'm saying? But so do you feel what I'm saying here? It's like, I do. Yeah. Let's zoom out a little bit. Right. And then we'll, we'll get into this. Man, where do you even start with this? Cause there's a lot to unpack here. If we will analyze the specifics in a second, maybe, but first, if you look at the policy, the terms of service of YouTube, there's a verge article from yesterday before a few days ago, earlier this week, before YouTube had made the decision to demonetize Steven Crowder. Well, they made the decision to not act. Initially. And just say that it didn't violate the terms of services. And then today, as I got in here, Jamie informed me that they made a decision to demonetize. That's right. So in the article where they made the decision not to act, they actually put what YouTube's terms of service are with regard to bullying and harassment. My reading of it, and we could go through them. If we could pull them up, we could go through it line by line. If we wanted, my reading was that the, that definitely did break the terms and conditions. That was my view as I looked at what it was that was done by Steven Crowder and what the terms of service are. Just matching it up, not looking at the comments. What was it specifically? It was specifically targeting an individual on the basis of sexual orientation. But he wasn't targeting him on the basis of it. He was mentioning that with his bad ideas, he was targeting his bad ideas in regards to Antifa. A lot of the. That he was dismissing Antifa. But if you look at Crowder's video, and I can't believe I spent so much time doing this, but I spent like a whole hour on this two days ago. He was talking about how Carlos just dismisses Antifa as being not that big a deal and that there's bias in the media whenever there's anything negative that happens. But if you look at the overall picture, and then Crowder goes on to talk about all the assaults, all the murders, that there was sexual assaults, there was rapes, there was all these things that happened with Antifa. He was talking about all these different people that got maced in the face, all these people that got hurt. And he's highlighting all like this is not something to easily dismiss. Sure. And that the FBI had labeled Antifa a terrorist organization. So far it's just politics. It's just what does he think? What do I think? So far it's just that part of it. And along the way, he's like, yeah, but the queer little Latino says this. Yeah. And when he does that, that's where it's like, okay, what is he doing? Is he mock? He's kind of mocking him. Right. And he's mocking him by saying he's queer, but he says he's queer or he says he's gay. Yeah. But that's like saying, I mean, listen, just because the N word is gay. Because the N word is in rap songs, it doesn't mean that any that it's defined to go. Right. But the N word is not in like, it's not like the LBGTN. You know what I'm saying? It's not like a part of their their organ. I think the principle though, is you're suggesting that because a certain word is sometimes used self referentially by members of a group, that any use of it from the outside is by definition not problematic. And I'm just saying it's more complicated and you've got to look at specific. Certainly more complicated. Yeah. You do have to look at specific. I'm going for memory, but wasn't Steven Crowder also wearing a shirt that said fags with the A with an asterisk? Figs. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It said socialism is for figs. Okay. While he's calling a gay guy. A is a fig instead of an I. As he's calling a gay guy a queer Mexican. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I mean, in total, it's not crazy. No, it's simple. There's certainly an argument that, well, I don't necessarily think the t-shirt is for Carlos Meza. I think that's a t-shirt that he just has because he thinks it's funny. And because Che Guevara, who's on the shirt is, that is one of the weirdest things that people worship that guy. He was a horrific human being, a mass murderer, a terrible sociopath, a psychopath. And because he looks good. He looks in the Cuban revolution. Looks good with a beret on, you know, he's, he became for a long time. I mean, it's kind of died off, but he became like the woke poster boy. I'm from Argentina. I know. Oh, you're really? Yeah. Were you born there? Yeah. No kidding. Yeah. So, I mean, listen, here's the thing. Welcome to my country, bro. I made it. So listen, I think that. I do appreciate what you're saying and I agree with you to a certain extent. I believe that when YouTube yesterday said we looked at the content in total and we don't think it violates our terms and conditions. I disagreed with them. I thought it very clearly violated their terms and conditions. Where I am thinking about it now is the application of those terms and conditions violations because a similar thing happened with Alex Jones as well, which was there's lots of way smaller players that are violating these same terms and conditions, but nobody knows about them. YouTube doesn't know about them. They don't get any attention because they have no audience. So I think there's the question of the application of these terms and conditions in a way that's sort of fair and is not ultimately going by the public blowback or reaction to situations because that's how adpocalypse 1.0 happened. I think it was a Coke ad appeared on an obviously racist video on a channel with like 800 or a thousand subscribers. The Wall Street Journal, I think it was, did an article saying, look at these screenshots of these advertisers on these crazy racist videos that led to blowback because YouTube didn't want to lose money. And ultimately, that's what this is about. I know that there are people who say YouTube has an inherently left wing bias. Others say YouTube has a right wing, but whatever. YouTube's bias is towards corporatism and profit. Yes, that's fundamentally what it is. And as a company, they have a left wing bias. I don't know that. In what sense? Well, in the sense that the woman is the CEO of YouTube has talked about it pretty openly, like the fact that she doesn't. What was it that she had gotten into? Well, first of all, was the James DeMoor thing. She was talking about the Google memo and she was talking about how it was incredibly damaging, the damaging, damaging stereotypes against women, which it just wasn't. It's not accurate. Is Home Depot a right wing company because the CEO supports Trump? That's a good question. I'm basing it on that they're a part of Facebook and Facebook is pretty clearly left wing. Who's a part of Facebook? Google. Oh, sorry. Google. They're a part of Google. I'm at Google. Google is a very, very left wing group and it's all Silicon Valley, which is almost entirely left wing biased. So I think we have to distinguish between the personal political biases of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the broader place that Google has in the sort of corporate sphere. Google is part of the group of huge multinational corporations that lobbies for particular tax policy to avoid paying taxes legally. That is not a particularly left wing thing to do. Google is part of the large tech companies that in order to avoid serious regulation of their businesses have come up with this idea of regulating themselves. Okay. Which I know is a topic, self-regulation that's come up before on your program in a variety of ways. So those are not left wing things. And if you want to make the case that as a company, it has a left wing politic in the outward facing world, you have to have something more than just a lot of their engineers live in Palo Alto and are hipsters who go to coffee shops. What do you think? I think that in the, in terms of the place that it occupies within the economic system we have, they are not very different from all of the large corporations that are pushing against regulation, pushing for ways to avoid taxes, period. So in terms of economic decisions? Yeah. I mean, listen, if, if we want to talk about how the personal politics of the employees translate to policy, we can do that, but we need to be able to make some specific claims about how, how it does. What I'm saying is we know the way in which the structure that Google is a part of leads to it advocating for things that are center, right. Most capitalist, the status quo of tax shelters, havens, and not paying taxes, regulating ourselves, et cetera, et cetera. Well that's what's interesting about this Crowder thing is there ultimately the decision was to allow him to have his freedom to post videos on there, but the punitive aspect of it is they're going to reduce his ability or eliminate his ability to make money from it. Well, I should say reduce, right? Because he could, couldn't he put videos, put ads up in his video? Yeah. I mean, you can, sure. So like we, one, one thing that I do is we, uh, we kind of split off the ad sales from my show into an ad agency and we're doing ad sales, not just for my show, but for other shows as well. And those include ad placements that are not like the pre-roll ads on YouTube. It's the host is actually talking about a product or whatever. It's a re you know, a live read sort of thing. Unbox therapy does a lot of that. Yeah. That's where I first saw those. He does some pretty extensive ones. Okay. So of course you can do that. I mean, yeah, that there's nothing. So he can do that, but he can't just collect revenue. Like I assume he's been doing before. He has a significant number of followers. I think his, uh, his YouTube subscribers are more than three and a half million. It's like, it's, it's very high. Yeah. More than me. And Dave just eliminated his income that comes out of YouTube. And this was their decision based on his, his way of talking about Carlos Meza. That's, that's what happened. Yeah. I mean, so what, what are the concerns to me? It's not that he didn't violate terms and conditions. Like I said, I think he pretty clearly did. The concerns to me are, um, is, is YouTube only going to even look into these circumstances or instances when there is a public outcry? The answer is probably yes, because why would they look into stuff? Nobody's paying attention to it. It seems like they changed their decision based on public outcry based on Carlos Meza's reaction to their initial decision. I happen to think their initial decision was the wrong one, but I have a sort of broader concern here, which is about the fairness of the application and also the distinguishing between, uh, content that is promoting whatever falls under any of our definitions of hateful or whatever content. And those who are fighting against it. So is it because he mentioned his sexual orientation and that he called him a lispy little queer or whatever he called him or queer Mexican. And if he just called him a fucking idiot and he received the exact same amount of hate, would you still think that that was a good move? No. I mean, I think that it would not fall under what they are now claiming is the justification for the demonetization. It would be different because it would have the same result. The only difference would be they wouldn't be attacking his sexual orientation specifically because of crowd. That's the only difference. It's policing speech. You know, it really is. Here's a, so who gets to decide if not the private businesses, what their rules are? That's where the real question comes up, right? Tulsi Gabbard believes that it's a first amendment issue and she believes that everyone should have the freedom of expression. That as long as you're not doing anything illegal, you're not putting anyone to danger by giving up their address or doxing them or something along those lines or making overt physical threats that you should be allowed to do that because that's what the freedom of the speech is all about. And freedom of speech when you eliminate social media in this country is your freedom is basically just yelling out in public. I mean, we're in this weird place. It's a weird place. As a culture. It's unprecedented really in terms of the waters we're navigating right now. There's a couple of different things to, so I like the principle. Like my principle is we do almost no moderation on any of our platforms that my program is on. My only thing that I tell my team is if you see something that really seems to be illegal, it's calling for violence, it, whatever. These are, we have a very, very high bar before we will remove anything. And quite frankly, we're just too busy. What do you mean by that? I'm confused. Like who's not your videos? Who's videos? Yeah. So if we find out that on our videos, someone is posting endless comments. Oh, in the comments. Yeah, in the comments. My personal view is if it's not illegal, I just let it all be there and sit. That's my personal view. And that's a great principle to have. Well, we don't touch them. We leave them alone, even though we get accused of it. But the question is YouTube at one point in time had thrown out there that they were going to make people responsible for the things that were in their comments. I vaguely remember that, but it didn't ultimately happen. I think they backed out a bit very quickly when they realized that places like yours, which like your average video gets how many thousands of comments? A lot and many of them anti-Semitic. And how would you, yeah, and how would you even be able to look at all those? I mean, you would have to be 24 seven monitoring them because you've also got people that are watching your videos from overseas at all times of the night. Yep. So I think that the principle of only illegal content will be removed is great. That's my personal principle. However, I think that there is no serious case to be made that a private company can't say these are our terms of service. And if you want to, I mean, it's sort of almost a conservative principle, right? The idea that unless illegal things are going on, we are not going to tell a business how it is that it should be run. And that's where I think a lot of right wingers start to stumble on this issue because they're calling for a very invasive form of government regulation. They're calling for the government to step in and even break up these organizations because they've gotten too large. But you're hearing that from the left as well. Yeah. Well, I think there's a difference though, between Elizabeth Warren saying we should separate the social platform, Facebook from the ad sales revenue generating piece of it. That's one thing that falls under antitrust. That's different than saying the government should come in and it should tell anybody who runs a social network that you can't even, you can't do anything unless the content is illegal because there are financial considerations, right? I mean, there's lots of content that would not be illegal, but it would make a platform, a video platform like YouTube, not financially viable because advertisers would see it and they'd say, oh, we're not going near that. So I have a very hard time taking what is a very authoritarian perspective that the government should come in and say, this is how social networks should be run. Now if you want to change the law, here's the way it could be done. If you want to change the law and argue that these platforms have gotten so big that they represent more of a town square, so to speak, then, okay, maybe you could pass a law that changes how they would be regulated. But that's typically the type of stuff the right is against because it is more regulation. It is more regulation, but it's regulation to keep a private company from regulating against free speech. You see what I'm saying? It's a sneaky kind of regulation. It's a regulation that's enforcing the first amendment and the people's ability to freely express themselves. If we're admitting or if we're agreeing that we are entering into this new world where this, that's my position is it is a town square. I feel like everybody should be able to communicate. The really unfortunate, unsavory aspect of it is when someone gets harassed like Carlos Mesa was because of this, where people are sending him all these homophobic tweets and all the, and he's getting text messages and all this shit. That's the unsavory and unfortunate aspect of it. How do you stop that? I don't know how you stop it. I don't know exactly how you stop it, but I think it would be useful for, I mean, one thing is when does a platform get big enough in your mind that it would qualify for this like town square designation? Well for sure. YouTube. Let's talk about that one because that's the one we're on. I mean, God damn it. It's huge. It's gigantic. So are there other types of businesses through which communication happens that you think should be regulated in the same way? That's not really clear. So I'll give an example. If you start regularly sending people via UPS, similar things to some of the content that exists on YouTube and UPS says, we're getting reports that you're sending people harassing stuff. We don't want you as a customer. Here's a question though. Isn't there a difference between someone sending something to a physical address and someone sending something, let's say to you when your social media apps are on the third page of your phone and you have to swipe all the way over to get them and open it up and you have to read them if you want to find them. You don't necessarily have to read them. There's a difference in a practical sense, but I guess the question is, would you similarly want the government to enforce for telephone companies if you are getting harassing texts and you report it and report it? That's a different thing I think. I think when it's coming to your phone and the phone is ringing, I think that's another step. Another step towards invasive. It's a big gray area. Yes. Is the phone ringing? Is it a phone call? Is it a text? Is it a WhatsApp message? You don't have to read that text. Right. Yeah. No, I feel you. I guess where I hesitate, and again, speaking as someone from the left who believes regulation of businesses is an important thing, I would want to be really sure about how exactly it is that the government would step in and mandate essentially that their view has to be listened to over the terms of service that a private company would wish to have. Yes. I feel like when you give people a gun, they start looking for targets. That is a very common thing. If you give people the ability to censor, and if you give people the ability to censor based on their political ideology or based on what they feel is offensive or other people don't, it's a slippery slope. And I think that that can lead to all sorts. Look, that woman, what is her name again? The one who tried to get you fired? Amy Siskind. Imagine her being in charge of a social media platform. She tried to get you fired from Boston College for something that was incredibly polite. Right. That is what I'm talking about, is that very action, that very same type of thinking that she tried to impose on you. That's what I'm worried about. And I'm worried about people that are really strictly trying to promote their ideologies and what they think is okay and not okay. And it's very slippery, because there's a lot of weird people out there that believe a lot of weird things and want other people to conform to those weird things. And we sort of have to decide. That's why I'm bringing up this Crowder thing. Do I think that what he said was good? No, it's not nice to call someone a little lispy queer. It's not nice. It's kind of mean. And especially when that guy wasn't even engaging with him. But he's making fun of him. He's a comedy show. He's mocking them. And that question becomes like, when is that mocking considered homophobic? And when is it just ribbing? Right? And that's his position. His position is that it's just ribbing. This is the problem with a discussion that is only about the principles. So like a lot of our conversation for the last 15 minutes has been, what is our principle about what types of business regulation is okay for the government to do and is not okay? Right. Or when we talk about free speech, what should, do we have a principle of anything short of illegal content versus something that is more strict? The reality is that there's more gray area. Yeah. We're trying to sort of regulate the way people communicate with each other. So it's not, it's like, if someone said that to someone in a bar, a cop would not arrest them. Like, yeah, you lispy, a little queer. You know, that would be like, oh, that guy's an asshole. But the bar would be perfectly within their legal right to say, we don't, we don't want you in here. You're making our customers uncomfortable. And nobody would say that it would be against the law for the bar to say, you got to go. That's a good point if they were doing it to their face. But what if he was in a corner talking about this guy that wasn't there and he was saying, yeah, so he's talking about Antifa, this lispy little Mexican queer. If you came along and decided to kick the guy out of the bar, then it would, I mean, listen, at some bars, if you go into the corner and you yell about a lispy Mexican queer, they're going to ask you to leave. And it still would not be illegal and the bar would still not be doing anything right. But that's a bar, right? That's a private business where people are physically there. Yes. Isn't there a difference between that and something like YouTube, which again, falls more in line with like a town square. Maybe that's what we need to revisit because so much human communication is now happening across these platforms. I would imagine most of it. Or most of it. Yeah. We need to maybe stop drawing this arbitrary distinction that in person is a completely different thing. Yeah. Over the internet. I mean, maybe it's not increasingly, maybe it's more the same. No. So I'm torn here, right? On one side I say, well, it seems like they still allow him to have his freedom of expression because he's still on YouTube. He still is able to upload his show on YouTube. He will have to find other ways to make money. Sure. So one part of me looks at it that way. And no one has a right to monetize on YouTube. Right. Right. So in a sense, they haven't violated his first amendment rights because he's still able to express himself. But then you go as a company, they've made a punitive decision to eliminate his ability or is radically reduce his ability to make an income off of their platform. That seems like, and I'm not supporting that they did it, but that seems more reasonable as a decision, right? To say, we're going to demonetize you. That seems more reasonable. The problem is there's no alternatives. There's nothing remotely like YouTube. There's no alternative to YouTube for him to regain that same level of monetization. Yes. Or for people that share his viewpoint and share his ideology and share his positions. There's no right wing YouTube is my point. I would challenge the idea that YouTube is left wing. I mean, in terms of enforcing its policies. How so? Just this particular issue. But this isn't a left wing. How is this a left wing enforcement? I mean, they have a- Well, I think it is because Carlos Mays is progressive and because the argument that he was making is a very left wing progressive argument. And this is what Crowder was going after. He was going after the argument in the process of going after the argument, he mocked his sexuality and his appearance. I can assure you if it was focused merely on how much of a problem Antifa is, this would not have happened. I mean, I think we both agree to that. Oh yeah, for sure. No, it's all about mocking the guy's sexual orientation and looks. If Carlos Maza were a gay Republican and the exact same thing happened, do you think the outcome would have been different? Yes. Why? I just don't think people would be interested. Oh, well, that's a dip, but so that gets to the real crux of it, which is my real concern with this is YouTube only getting involved in even publicly saying what they're doing about a channel. Right. And it becomes very public and it starts to have the possibility of impacting their bottom line and brand saying, yes, this is too hot. We're getting out. Well, in that sense, what Carlos did once it was revealed that YouTube was not going to take action was very effective. Absolutely. I mean, he started tweeting like crazy and people jumped on board. He connected it to the LBGT movement and then it became this thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.