Joe Rogan | YouTube & Facebook's Responsibility w/Ben Shapiro

It will come home to roost. I mean, here's what's going to happen is Facebook and YouTube are going to fall prey to their own standards. Because if their standard is that you're responsible for your followers or I'm responsible for my followers or Jordan or anybody else is responsible for all the people who view their stuff, okay, then why isn't Facebook responsible for all the people posting on its platform? If they are, right, if Facebook becomes responsible for all the people posting on its platform, they'll be bankrupt in a week. They've got a problem. They really do because they have to decide whether they are a platform or whether they are a do-gooder publication. I run a publication, Daily Wire. It's openly conservative. We make no bones about that. And we are responsible for the content that appears on our platform. And if we say something defamatory, we will be sued. If we say something that is false, then we will be sued, presumably. If you post something false on Facebook, Facebook doesn't get sued. But now Facebook has deemed itself the morality police, and they'll ban people they don't like and they'll decide what editorially ought to be elevated and what ought not to be elevated. Does that sound more like the phone company to you, or does that sound more like my website where I decide what gets published and what doesn't? Because Facebook's case for exemption from these laws is – well, we're like the phone company, right? When you're on the phone with somebody, if that person says something criminal, AT&T isn't responsible for the person saying something criminal or terrible. It's just the phone company. But Facebook isn't doing that. Facebook is jumping into the middle of conversations and then saying, well, we don't really like this conversation, so we're just going to kind of shut it down, not because of legal threat, but because we just don't like it. So are they actually doing that? Say if you put a post up on Facebook and they don't like the way you worded things or described things, will they actually shut down your post? What will they do? So they've done it in the past to some conservative public. It's pretty controversial because they're not transparent at all. I can tell you that at the beginning of 2018, we lost about 35% of our traffic because Facebook started cracking down on mostly conservative sites. They said that it was kind of news sites generally, but that's not what the statistics showed. They're doing it more often with things that we all sort of agree are bad, right? We all agree white supremacy is bad, white nationalism is bad. Now they say they're going to censor that stuff. But here's where I'm uncomfortable. I think that that stuff is awful and evil, and those people are the ones – they're the reason I have personal security. But once you get into the business of Facebook gets to decide which speech is good and which speech is bad, they're an editor. They're an editor. Even if I agree with their assessment of what stuff is good and what is bad, I am not comfortable with them in the driver's seat there. And if they are going to be in the driver's seat, then they should be held liable for all the stuff that's on their platform. I mean why is it that – Twitter, same thing, right? Why is it that Lewis Farrakhan is still on that platform but Alex Jones is not? I don't like Alex Jones's material. I've been very, very critical of Alex Jones. I didn't think he should get banned from Twitter unless he actually violated the law, unless he was responsible for a violent threat, unless he was defamatory or something. They're definitely going down this road of being the moral arbitrators. They're the ones who get to decide what the conversations are, and that's an insane responsibility, the responsibility of getting to dictate what should and should not be discussed. And to have it be a handful of people and have these people almost exclusively live in the Pacific – in San Francisco, that whole tech community. I mean it's all tech liberals who really – if you're around those people, they live in this really strange, uber-wealthy bubble of super genius spectrum people who are coders and super capitalists and people that are raising money all over the place and designing technology, and they have an ideology. And it's not necessarily a bad one, just being honest and upfront about what it is. It's incredibly progressive, which is very unusual for big business, right, for big business to be just openly, transparently progressive and pushing social justice. It's very unusual. Well, I think that there is a sort of misunderstanding of when we say what big business is, what big business is. So I think that there's a wide variety of owners of businesses and how they think about politics, obviously. Bill Gates is a progressive guy. Warren Buffett's a progressive guy. They are now, right? I think Bill Gates has been for a while. Was Bill Gates progressive his whole life? Well, he's ruthless with Microsoft. Well, so I think that there are a lot of people – listen, I think that the vast majority – I think Mark Zuckerberg is ruthless with Facebook, and he's progressive. I think Jack Dorsey is as ruthless as the next guy when it comes to profit. I mean he's still got to be answerable to his shareholders. So I think a lot of the progressivism is sort of a way to excuse your own involvement in the capitalist market. No, when Facebook took off, don't be evil. That was their thing. Don't be evil. They decided to remove that. Yeah, it was Google, right? Oh, yeah. Did I say Facebook? I'm sorry, Google. Yeah, when Google did that. I meant Google. It's funny when you think something, but you're saying another thing. When they did that, it's like why would you ever take off don't be evil? Like keep that. But here's my thing. Here's my thing. I think that if our tech companies were honest, they should take that stuff off. Like stop pretending you're do-gooding. You're not do-gooding. You're providing a platform. And maybe the platform is the good, right? In a capitalist economy, the product that you provide is the good. I don't need additional good to come from your product, right? If you want to provide me a solid morning drink, right, I don't need your politics along with that. I just need the drink. Well, if I want a social media company, I don't give two craps about what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about politics. Dude hasn't studied it. I don't care at all what Jack Dorsey, who vacations in Malaysia and gets bitten by a million mosquitoes while meditating, has to say about the nature of life. Like why do I care about Jack Dorsey's political view? He has provided me a good. The good is this basic chat room where I'm consuming news. How about that would just be enough, but it's not enough for a lot of these folks. It's the kind of hoolie from Silicon Valley. We're going to pretend that we're here to do good. And it's not enough just to acknowledge that maybe the thing that you provided is the good. Like Bill Gates has done more good with Microsoft than he has done with any of his charities. He's given a lot of money to charity, but Microsoft has provided legitimately hundreds of thousands of jobs and created enormously productive lines of business and made enormous profit for a lot of people. A lot of people have stock in Microsoft. As a basic factual thing, he has done more good doing that than giving tens of millions of dollars to various outside causes. So it feels like a lot of the progressivism in corporate halls in Silicon Valley is bifurcated mentally. It's like people have – they're like dolphins. It's one side of the brain on at a time. Here's my capitalist side where I go out and make money and profit. And then here's my other side where I show people what a great person I am by proclaiming that I'm for Bernie Sanders while parking my money offshore to make sure that it's shielded from the tax man. Yeah, well, that's a good assessment. What I'm saying is that the don't be evil thing – one of the things that I thought was – what if that was like a legal decision? Me being cynical that they were pulled into some sort of an office and said, if we say don't be evil and you take someone off the platform, you're accusing them of evil. I mean – Maybe we should slow that down. Maybe. I mean, again, this self-assessment of you are the moral police, I find really troubling. And it's so funny. I'm the supposed moralist, right? Right. I'm the religious guy. I'm the orthodox Jew, right? I talk about social standards and how people should behave in their personal life. But when it comes to government and when it comes to me imposing my views on you, I am way less of a top-down tyrant than any of the people in Silicon Valley. I am not here to tell you that you are not allowed to be on a platform because we disagree. It's one thing if you're threatening violence, which is an actual violation of law, but this crap where people like me – because I believe in a social fabric built on certain Judeo-Christian values, but I'm not forcing you to be part of that. And I'm not – I don't think the government should compel you to be a part of that. Or I'm the tyrant, but the person who sits at the top of Twitter or Facebook who is saying that they get to police what you see, and they're going to nudge you in the right direction, nudge you in the right direction without your consent, without them even telling them what you're doing, right? They're just – they're going to push you a little bit because they know better than you, and they can sort of massage you into better views if we control your channels of information. This is something the Obama administration was very fond of. There's a scholar named Cass Sunstein who's a legal scholar, and he wrote a book called Nudge. It was very famous. It was used as sort of a handbook during the Obama administration. And the idea was, well, if we can just use non-forceable means to sort of nudge people in a particular direction without them even knowing they're being nudged, then shouldn't we do that? And I think, no, you shouldn't. You shouldn't, because transparency is the only way I can tell what kind of bullshit you're trying to sell me. Well, not just that. You're closing down even conversation. If as soon as you're trying to silence this other voice – if you believe one thing and another person believes a different thing, you should probably talk about it. And the way that I know for sure there's something wrong with your argument is if what you're trying to do is you're sneakily trying to silence these voices. And again, as long as we're not talking about threats of violence and as long as we're not talking about harassment or doxing, we're just talking about conversation. You're just talking about people with differing points of view. If you want to silence differing points of view, I have to wonder about your intent. I have to wonder about whether you're going into this conversation with good faith. I have to wonder whether you've really objectively assessed whether or not your argument does hold up against scrutiny. Because this is also part of the problem. And when you're in an echo chamber, you often don't formulate these arguments very well. Like when you confront people about certain biased beliefs that they have, and you have an opposing belief, if they're part of a bubble – like sometimes they might not have even ever considered some of the things you have to say. And I've seen that with some of your videos.