Joe Rogan | Social Media is in Control of Political Discourse w/Tulsi Gabbard

Now one thing that exists now that really didn't exist when Obama was running for president is the impact of social media. It's just tenfold what it used to be. But with that also comes this reality that we're living in right now where there's only a few companies that are controlling the discourse in this country. I mean you really have essentially a Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook on Instagram. That's right. There's a couple other small ones, but that's the bulk of our discourse. What concern do you have about these private companies controlling the vast majority of communication between people on social media? It's extremely dangerous. It's extremely dangerous when you think about it and there's a few things. There's gosh with Facebook and Google for that matter. They can set their algorithms. Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook and set his algorithm to control what information is coming across our newsfeed in Facebook. What are the stories that we're seeing? Instagram, same thing. With Google, they can control when you punch in something what are the first stories that you're going to see on the first page that pops up. When you think about that kind of power of influence that it has on the American people, literally being held within the hands of a couple of people unchecked and without oversight or transparency, it's incredibly dangerous. Let's talk about free speech. There's just been news recently about Facebook banning certain individuals from having Facebook accounts because of their speech. They disagree with the speech that they're using or the things that they're talking about, the ideas that they're pushing forward. Unchecked. First Amendment rights going completely out the window. The argument is they don't apply because it's a private company, right? Yes, but they're trying to get the best of both worlds. The fact that they're claiming to say, hey, this is a free space for open communication for everyone while at the same time going and saying, actually, you know what, Joe, I don't like what you're saying about this, so we're going to ban you and whoever your friends are from this conversation. I think that's a big problem. It undermines our First Amendment rights. Then you look at privacy, the privacy concerns of all the information that they're collecting in Facebook from us, all the information that they're collecting from us with Google and how they're monetizing that and selling or sharing that information with other people really without our knowledge or agreement. That's the part, right? The agreement that most people didn't understand that your data is a huge commodity. That's right. We signed up for these things. I mean, who reads terms of service agreements? Have you ever read one? Yeah. I've never read one of them. I just say, okay, all right. I start to get through the first two paragraphs like, okay. I hope it's not ugly. I hope there's nothing terrible in there. You know what I think back to? There's a South Park episode that is specifically about the terms and conditions. I had watched it a long time ago, but every time I see one of those things pop up, sign in terms, I'm like, oh man. Yeah. That was Cartman, right? Yes. Yeah, something happened. Yeah. Yeah. We can't talk about it. But there's a thing that they're doing. There's a couple things they're doing, but one of the things they're doing with your data, they find out what you're interested in. They find out what you're interested in engaging on. For many people, that's outrage. For many people, it's the things that piss you off the most. If you have a real problem with Catholic priests getting away with having sex with little boys, you will think that that's happening every minute of every day all across the world because it's going to be in your news feed constantly because I know that's what makes you engage. Your algorithm, the algorithm is your feed is going to be very different than my feed because I engage on different things than you do. The problem with that is even if they're not calculating, if it's not on purpose, they're not trying to get people outraged. It's not like they're trying to ramble rouse, but what they are doing is because they have an ad-supported model, they gravitate towards the outrageous because that's what people get excited about and that's what people make multiple posts about and that's how they make the revenue. It gets a bad ad model. It's an ad model that inadvertently supports outrage. Yeah. And it makes people think the world's worst place. And divisiveness and all of it. The tribal boundaries between the two sides on these issues are more tense and you would think that discourse and the ability to freely communicate would kind of open that up and people would kind of understand each other better, but it's not happening. It's like Twitter is a garbage fire all day long. It's just fire. Like you can't post anything about anything and there's people just jumping on people and it's a crazy thing that has happened that we gravitate towards the outrageous. I don't think that should be rewarded financially. I think that's not... If this is just what people go to organically, that's one thing. But when you're cultivating feeds, or at least your algorithm is cultivating feeds so that people get pissed off, you're making the country a shittier place. Like you're literally like making things worse. I mean this is one of the reasons why I think a couple of things should happen. And I think his name is Chris Hughes who co-founded Facebook with Zuckerberg. I saw that, yeah. Do you see his article calling for Facebook to be broken up? Yes, which is crazy. You hear about the person who founded it and he's saying this is out of control. And that's the point right now, is seeing how powerful, as you said, guys like Mark Zuckerberg have become and how out of control things are. Well, some of it just doesn't make sense. Like here's one. They just banned Alex Jones. Not only do they ban Alex Jones, but you can't talk about Alex Jones. If you wrote Alex Jones might be nuts, but damn is he cute. If you wrote that, you would get a message that says only you can see this message. This message is stopped at the border from entering into the Facebook universe. What if you want to say something funny? You can't say something funny. No, you can only say something if you're criticizing him. This is what they've said. So they're telling you how to think, which is fucking insane. It is insane. Because that's not just a violation of free speech. You're literally directing speech. That's insane. So you're not even blocking people from doing something hateful or evil. You're blocking people from saying something that you disagree with. Which is, people have sent me messages that said, God bless Alex Jones. And they say, you can only see this message. Facebook sends them a thing blocking that message. That's fucking crazy. Like the idea that you think you can do that, that is nuts. Being able to ban anyone arbitrarily without any, just violated terms of service. What does that mean? Be specific. How come, I mean, they took a bunch of people out, right? Like Louis Farrakhan was one. Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson was like, what did that guy ever do? I mean, people don't agree with him. I think what's happening is there was some serious concern that Facebook was used to influence the last election, whether against their knowledge or in a way where they were negligent about the type of filtering they use that stops people from posting propaganda and particularly stops these things like the IRA, the Internet Research Agency in Russia that literally creates thousands of profiles and pages and they'll have a Black Labs Matter page that's just designed to fuck with cops. And then they'll have a pro cop page that's just designed to fuck with Black Lives Matter. All they want to do is create anger. And they're doing this engineering these arguments. This is a hundred percent proven fact. Renee DiResta, who had been on my podcast, went over the details of how it's set up and how they do it and the memes and the memes that they create. Like this is an organized effort that they channeled through Facebook in particular and then Instagram and a couple other social media sites. You know what's interesting about Renee? She worked for New Knowledge, right? I do not know. She was a director for New Knowledge. This company, New Knowledge, that the DNC has tapped as one of their, I don't know, disinformation campaign experts and cyber experts was the very same company that created false accounts and pretended to be Russian bots in order to influence a US Senate election in Alabama. Yeah, I'd heard of that, right? So it's something that she was not a part of, but it happened before her time. She was a director of research, it says. At New Knowledge, right. But that's post this happening, correct? I don't know. She sent me an email about it because I questioned her about it after it happened. Yeah. And I don't think she's full of shit. Yeah. Well, yeah, I've never met her, but I know that that company is one that is often cited as a so-called expert and was a company that was cited to try to smear my campaign as somehow being an engine for the Russians or something like that, which to me, again, just points to, well, let's look at the so-called experts that you're citing in this company, New Knowledge, and the kinds of actions that they've been taking, the very same ones that they're criticizing others for doing. It's a dirty world out there. It's a wild west in the internet. It is a wild west in a sense that, I mean, I think there should be regulation. Like I mean, I don't think you should be able to put child porn everywhere. I don't think you should be able to dox people, but it's like, where does that border stop? Where does that regulation border stop? And I think it's a very good question. Do you think that these social media platforms, whether it's Google or Twitter or whatever, Facebook, do you think that they should be treated as a public utility where everyone essentially has the right to use them? You have the right to use water. You don't have the right to take a hose and smash your neighbor's window and flood his house. That's right. I do. I do think that they should be regulated like that, and they should be subject to the very same antitrust laws that have been used to make sure that we don't have other monopolies in other industries or in other areas to break them up. And I think that was something that Chris Hughes outlined in his article. The very first step that could be taken is just to say, hey, you've got a Facebook needs to let go of Instagram and WhatsApp, because that acquisition created an even stronger monopoly that really shouldn't have been allowed to take place in the beginning. And so there are concerns about the kind of power being consolidated into the hands of a very few people, as well as how that's impacting any kind of competition and squashing that competition from coming up and saying, hey, you've got Facebook and then you've got this other new social media technology. They've got better privacy standards and better service for the consumer than Facebook. But any time that that tries to happen, they're quickly squashed by companies like Facebook or Google for that matter. Or bought up. Or bought up, exactly. Yeah. That's the big concern, is that there's just not enough variety. And there's also a big concern that I have a big concern, that there's a bunch of people that don't seem to understand the consequences of what they're calling deplatforming people. It's basically censoring people, taking people out of the public discussion. And when you do that and you create a bubble or you create a one party leaning institution, one party leaning conglomeration of human beings, you're going to develop some real anger on the other side. And it does the opposite of what you want it to do. What you want it to do is make the world a better place. Let's take some of these angry voices out of the mix and let's make the world a better place. It just makes them more angry. And encourage discourse. Encourage these kinds of conversations where you can engage with people who might have a different view on an issue or might have a different experience that they bring to the conversation. And to do so that actually helps increase the knowledge and understanding that we have. Yeah, I think we have to reward civil discourse as well. I think we have to be kinder to each other. We have to be more upset at people that are acting like shitheads online for no reason. You think that it's just online, but what it is is communication. And if you're interested in shitty communication online, you're just a shitty communicator. All this calling it being a troll and all these different labels that people put on to make it cuter and whitewashing. It's not good. It's not good for anybody. And if people could figure out how to be less angry in their online lives and communicate about issues, I think we'd find that we meet more in the middle than we think we do. I think there's also a problem that people have where they become married to their ideas. And they dig their heels in and they support their ideology and they're very rigid about it. And that is only strengthened when you silence people. It does the opposite of what you're hoping it's going to do. It makes the world a worse place. It makes... Look, if people are saying things that you don't like, you don't have to read that. But if you tell people that no one can read that, they're going to go, why do you get to decide? And who are you? Exactly. Who are you? You are a regular person? How wise are you? How many steps ahead have you played this game? That's right. Because I'm looking at this game. I'm looking at civil war. Yeah. I'm looking at worst case scenario. This goes to that. That goes to this. This guy attacks that. That guy attacks this. They can't talk anymore. You got people fighting in the streets. That happens. Exactly. That's a human characteristic. That's right. That's right. And that is where this path ends up. This path that we're on of this hyper partisanship, this extreme divisiveness where it's either you're in my tribe or you're in the other tribe and the arrows are pointed at each other without any willingness to once again, just let's just have a conversation. Let me hear where you're coming from. Hear where I'm coming from. We can disagree without being disagreeable. We can even have a heated conversation in a debate. And I would say that what you're saying is patriotic. This is patriotic. And I think it's unpatriotic to be partisan because I think we're supposed to be on a team together. Yeah. This is supposed to be Team America, right? Exactly. What are we doing? Exactly. We're going to be doing this and mischaracterizing people's positions just to suit our own ideas. That's right. It's foolish. It's foolish. And as you said, it's extremely dangerous. And the American people are the ones who ultimately lose in all of this.