Joe Rogan - Social Media Cultural Bias

I told Sam about this, but it bears repeating. I was having a conversation with someone as an executive at YouTube and I asked them why someone got a community guidelines strike on their account because they posted up a video on their playlist that they enjoyed of Sam Harris and Douglas Murray engaged in a conversation. I went, I go, why would that get you a community guidelines strike? And this woman said, because it's hate speech. I got a problem with the last name Murray, apparently. I got Charles Murray and Douglas Murray causing me problems. Is he somebody who worked at YouTube? Yes, she was a big executive at YouTube. She said it's hate speech. And I told her, I go, did you listen to it? I go, you didn't listen to it. I go, this is stunning that you would just say it's hate speech, that you would just be so dismissive of it so quickly. And she talked to me as if I was her employee. Like I was not allowed to question her and she was just going to say what she said and I was going to shut up. And it was a fascinating conversation. Was this here on your show? No, no, this is in Hawaii on vacation. No, but it was, I did a podcast with Douglas and apparently it got flagged. Someone else put it up on their account and it got flagged as hate speech. And so there's a community guidelines. So in strikes, you can get your account removed. So I've got a phrase for this and I've been rallying for it on social media for a couple of months now. And I call it a digital blind spot. There's a cultural bias on social media where because of, and it's intellectually lazy, because, because social media is essentially a Californian invention, right? And we're in the home state of where most of this came from. It's got a very Californian based worldview, which cares a lot about white supremacy and doesn't care about many other forms of bigotry that exist out there in the rest of the world, which by the way is the majority of the world. So on Twitter right now, of course, there's, Milo Yiannopoulos has been banned. Tommy Robinson has been banned as in taken off. Now Twitter is a private company. Tommy Robinson. He's the former leader of the British English Defense League, which was at one time Europe's largest anti Muslim street protest group. I helped him leave that organization. He's still got many views I completely disagree with, but nevertheless, he doesn't support or nor advocate for terrorism. Why was he removed? Well, so Twitter is a private company. It can choose to remove whoever it wants for whatever reason. And we will judge it for his inconsistencies. But he was ostensibly removed for hate speech, as was Milo Yiannopoulos. Now the point being that still till this day and before people misquote me and completely say that I'm now defending hate speech and their right to speak with hateful views on Twitter. This is my actual point that till this day, did you know that Hezbollah, which is a known and recognized terrorist organization. So forget hate speech for a moment, a terrorist organization that believes in actually killing civilians and Hamas, a known and recognized terrorist organization that believes in bombing babies on buses as a form of resistance. They still have accounts on Twitter. And my point is this is the blind spot, you know, and I flagged Twitter about this on many an occasion. This is the cultural blind spot. This is the digital blind spot that the dude sitting in California in wherever who is monitoring this stuff and it's probably more than one person. They don't give a shit that there's some brown person in the Gaza Strip that believes it's okay to kill Jewish babies. They don't give a shit because it's a brown person saying it in the name of Islam. What they care about is a nonviolent yet says stupid things guy because he's white called Tommy Robinson in England or Milo Yiannopoulos saying stuff that they obviously that touches their sensitivities. And it's so intellectually lazy to flag that immediately and to bar it from social media because you're comfortable with it. You recognize white supremacy. It doesn't take any effort to recognize it. You don't have to invest in studying this stuff to know what white supremacy is. It takes a bit of effort to study brown people's ideas that you're unfamiliar with and recognize here's a terrorist organization that's freely operating on social media. I know specifically on Twitter I've actually pulled up their handles. I think one of the concerns that Twitter has and I think this is a valid concern is that when you have people that are saying hateful things and you have people that are saying whether it's white supremacy or whatever, even if it's stupid. The problem is there's a rallying cry of trolls that follow behind them and it builds up momentum and it gets pretty stunning. And that was what was happening with Milo and by silencing Milo off Twitter, they have essentially removed him from the public discourse. You don't hear about him anymore because of this because of these things. But imagine what that does in Arabic with the terrorist groups. Yes. Everything you've just said, by the way, I agree with and multiply that for groups that have infrastructure in multiple countries with actual organizational hierarchies and planned means of distro distributing their ideas across entire populations, physically fighting in wars right now, such as Hezbollah in Syria, killing Sunni Muslim rebels. And so imagine that and the way you were able to rally a mob in Pakistan on blasphemy as an example. What it takes for some person on social media to accuse another person of blasphemy and they're probably going to get killed the very next day. And it happens all the time. But because these Californian based social media companies are unaware of the of the cultural implications of those sorts of organizations and groups and listed terrorist groups, mind you, they are there's completely no no barring on any of their activity. There's also the same thing that you have with YouTube and with a lot of these other social media organizations and companies is they don't have to respond or give you any reasons they can say it violates our terms. But what are those terms? Those terms aren't even listed. It would be vague, like no hate speech. Okay, well, what's hate speech? Like what what do you say? Like what is what are you what is your clear policy? What are your guidelines? How does someone avoid violating your guidelines? They don't say and how is the president of the United States not not violating those ? Well, demonetization is another way that they do it. They'll remove the ability to put advertising on a conversation that they don't like. And it doesn't have to be like my conversation with Douglas Murray was demonetized without any explanation. None zero. They don't have to. Douglas is he's talking. He's clearly flat on their eyes. Yeah. But if you listen to our actual context of our conversation, there was nothing remotely hateful about it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, these are private companies. They've got the right to choose whatever policy. The only thing I would expect from a private company is show a consistent policy towards these things. You know, if you don't like hate speech, then Brown, Brown people who are also advocating more than just the hate speech, but actually preaching violent terrorism. Yeah. It's a strange time for this man because it's it's also a time where it's you can communicate so instantaneously. It's fantastic in that regard. You can get ideas out so quickly. But these hubs of information like where the information gets distributed are they're controlled by people that I don't think ever knew that they were going to have this sort of responsibility. I don't think I think you're seeing that with Zuckerberg and these trials where the speeches that he's given in front of Congress, like when you see him on television talk about it, you get the sense that this is a guy that never prepared for this, had no idea this is going to happen. And then all of a sudden from this simple social media platform that was supposed to be friends, sharing photos and just talking about girls. Yeah. No, it was set up to pull women. There was a lot of that, you know, but I mean, and what was Twitter? I mean, Twitter was essentially just, you know, I mean, do you remember the old days at Twitter? It would be, you would use your name like is doing this, like under Sam Harris, like Sam Harris is at the movies. You would say that almost if you were in a third person. That was the original form that people would use Twitter. I would come after that. Yeah, it was weird. It was a weird way of talking. And then people started just writing what they thought and it just became, and then became ideology. And then it became sharing links, sharing links and interesting articles is a big part of it. But to me, that's the only good part of it now. Like I've just discovered that, and that was most of my attachment to it. I genuinely use it as a curated newsfeed. Because I follow interesting people, they tweet interesting stuff and I consume it that way. But noticing what's coming back at me in the ad mansion. So I put something out, a podcast, and then I look to see how it's being received on Twitter. And I don't tend to do that in other forums. I don't really look at Facebook comments much. I don't look at YouTube. I mean, YouTube is just cesspool, right? So even if they're for you, the comments are horrible. Why is that? It's a strange phenomenon. It starts here on YouTube, I think, by the way. Nasty and it starts here on the YouTube comment friends.