Minds Founder Bill Ottman on "Sneaky" TikTok Ban

The US government produces more classified information than non-classified information. So even if like there's an audit, they could redact everything. Yeah, and it's just all these different divisions and departments and they all have their own protocols. So just getting a handle on it is, I mean, that's the first thing that has to get done. But not that we're even going to get the real information from there. Right. But then there's also the national security aspect of it. It's like, you have to have some things redacted because of China and Russia. Like, you could just say that and then... Yeah, that is the phrase that gets used. Sure. It's so sad. Because they have a full like clampdown on their population. I mean, they limit the access to the internet. Their internet is essentially like China based. VPNs are illegal. And they're trying to do that here in America. It's all backwards. Yeah, with the restrict act. That is wild. It's getting nasty. 20 years if you use a VPN, which is hilarious. And it's managed by the commerce department. Unelected bureaucrats are the ones... See, TikTok's actually not named in that act. They're just letting the secretary of commerce decide which apps. Yeah. That's insane. It's insane. So, yeah. Dan Crenshaw posted about it. He thinks it's not that big a deal because he thinks that, you know, there's a lot of acts that get pushed and then they never get passed through. But what's disturbing is just the idea, the desire to do this. And the fact that imagine if it did get passed. I mean, it's just a fucking full on assault on free speech. Yeah. I mean, it seems to be getting a toxic stigma connected to it. Did you see Jesse Waters grill Lindsey Graham about it? No, I didn't. Oh, he didn't read it, but he endorsed it. Oh, Jesus. And he just got completely called out. It was really funny. Like, that should be illegal. You should not even be able to sign something that you haven't read and they can't read it. It's too long. There's not enough time. There's not enough time. That's a lot of these acts, right? Oh, and they slip a bunch of shit in there. That's like, wait a minute. What about page 485? Like what the fuck is going on there? And then like, oh, yeah. I mean, meanwhile, it's just like it's going to change discourse in this country. It's going to change what people have, you know, the access that people have to free speech and communication. And I mean, I think a lot of people endorsed it righteously being concerned about TikTok. You know, that's what was so sneaky is, you know, they they enrage you to then support this disaster. And it's just like we can all agree that there's a problem with TikTok and that there's, you know, the Chinese government having access to all of this data is problematic. But like there should be an encrypt act like encrypt everything. But you can't go around banning apps. It just doesn't work. It's irrelevant. People are going to use VPNs. I think this this act needs I don't think it's going to make it. Well, I hope you're right. Because more people are talking about it. Tulsi Gabbard posted a big thing about it. There's a lot of people that are up in arms. But my concern is if it wasn't for social media, that act, which was kind of ironic, right? If it was for social media and people sharing this and becoming outraged and people discussing this, it would have slipped right through like the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act existed in a time where there wasn't social media and people weren't really aware of what they were pushing through until it was too late. Yeah, I think there's much better solutions. I mean, did you watch any of the TikTok CEO getting grilled? Yes, I did. OK, so, you know, that was interesting because, you know, he's a pretty he seemed like a sober guy. But in his point was, well, you have to have consistent standards for other social media companies, too. I mean, right. Like, how do we know that Facebook and Google, just because they're US based, doesn't mean that they're not giving data to China? We have no idea. We have no idea. So that's really the issue. We need to understand what specifically are all of these apps doing? They should be labeled very specifically, you know, and we're starting to see some of that happen. But the thing is, you can't know with these proprietary apps because they're just not sharing anything. I think one of the problems that people have with whether any kind of decentralized app like yours or any other decentralized social media network is that people immediately go, oh, what do I have to do to do this? Like Mastodon, where people started using Mastodon and you get on it, you're like, what is this? There's so many servers and how do I know what to join and what's going on here? Yeah. So what Minds is different. Minds is actually not fully decentralized. We're a hybrid. So we run a centralized infrastructure, but we interface through delegation, delegated cryptographic events, signing. That's happening in the background, but like our app feels like a normal social media app. Because Mastodon, the way that that works is federated instances. So there's all of these different instances with different URLs and there's like 20 people on each one. But there is sort of some interoperability between the instances because you can subscribe to somebody on another instance from your instance, but it's not fully decentralized. It's federated. And the problem is that you don't own your identity. So if one of those instances goes down, you're screwed. Your stuff is gone. In Noster, which is like an architecturally different setup, and there's other protocols similar to Noster, but it doesn't matter if the website goes down. You just pop over to another one, upload your key and all your stuff is there. And that's why we like it because it keeps us in check because our users can now basically, if we fuck around, they'll bounce and they can take their stuff. Because the social graph specifically is the key because you spend a decade getting all these followers. It's your life. People spend their lives doing this. And then to be able to just get taken out by YouTube is so devastating and unethical. It's really creepy too because many of the things they took people out for have turned out to be true. There was a lot of things that they were labeling as disinformation or misinformation, which are 100% proven fact now. And people lost their accounts and there's no recourse. They're not going to reinstate you. And that was a problem also with Twitter, that for the longest time, if you said anything that was contrary to whatever the narrative was, whether the government was pushing it or the CDC was pushing it, anything contrary to that narrative, you would get fucked. Yeah. And those people, they're not back though. I think Twitter is making way more progress than everyone else. And look, I'm ultimately an Elon fan. I'm rooting for him. I think it's vastly improved. But there's chaos currently underway at Twitter. Oh, sure. And those people have not all been let back on. And I don't really understand why. Who hasn't been let back on? The people that we don't know. The people whose random Joe Schmoe posting a COVID study, like has he been let back on? All the thousands of people that got banned. Well, I think he essentially let back on everyone who didn't do anything illegal. So not Alex. Not Alex. Yeah, that's true. Why? Yeah. Well, that's a personal opinion of Elon's, which I don't agree with at all. Yeah. Because they let Andrew Tatum. Right. You know, it's like it doesn't mean that he's endorsing Alex to let him back on. Right. It doesn't. I mean, because there's a lot of people that are back on that are, you know, they didn't make that one specific mistake that Alex made, but they've said some. But the mistake that the reason Alex was banned was because he confronted, it was actually for something he did off Twitter. So he confronted this journalist, Oliver Darcy, in a line at some event. And he was, you know, being Alex Jones, sort of ranting at him. Yeah. And then Twitter said, oh, you're bullying this guy. And this is like not acceptable behavior. So you're going to leave. But then when I remember, you know, the exchange with Elon and whoever it was that was asking, asking, it was that he hadn't been let on because of the Sandy Hook stuff. Yeah, which is not the same. That's not even why he was banned. Right. So, you know, it's not easy. I understand, you know, the politics of it. And he probably has Tim Cook being like, you know, we're not going to advertise if you have Alex Jones. But I don't know what's going on. But it doesn't seem to me because he could he could win the argument if he would just let him back on. Right. And did you see this crazy clip of of Elon and the BBC guy? I did. I posted it. Oh, you did. It's amazing. Amazing. It was amazing. It was amazing because I kept trying to change subjects and let's move on. Like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. What what the fuck are you talking about? Because that guy thought he could just say the narrative without specific examples. Like, give me an example. And the guy had no examples. That's most people who are concerned about this. Well, this is like a lot of people that I know that are famous that like publicly announced they were leaving Twitter. And you know, one of them I really love. And I was like, why are you doing it? I didn't even say anything to her. But I'm like, why are you doing this? This is so dumb. Like, you're just doing this because this is the thing that everyone feels like they're supposed to do. Hey, well, Twitter is kind of fucked now. So buy. No, it was fucked before. It's less fucked now. Yeah. Are there people that are going to say things like what I showed you earlier today, which is hilarious. And someone posted to Kamala Harris. She said something about the salt pan. That shit's important. It's important to have people mock people. Like, I'm sorry if it hurts someone's feelings, but that shit's important. Yeah. And I think the way that Elon handled that was great because obviously you need a specific example to back up an argument. However, I sort of think the whole premise of the conversation is wrong. This idea that this war that Twitter is at with all the think tanks and I think it was the Institute for Strategic Discourse that had actually compiled the information that the BBC guy was talking about. And there is information that there is data showing, you know, hate speech, XYZ has has increased. However, this is the wrong conversation. It's not the existence or even rise of hate in the presence of that content on an app is not you're not just trying to ban hate. Banning hate does not stop hate. And this is what the peer reviewed research shows. So so trying to bully Elon and Twitter for look, even if there was a bump of hate speech since it became a little bit more free. I mean, it seems like that's a potentially understandable intermediary effect to happen while things reorient. Like we open up free speech, we open up the valve a little bit. OK, because we think that this is going to be healthy for society long term. So let it bump a little bit. We need that. We need to see what we hate or what other people hate. You need to like what is it? Free speech, let us let us know who the idiots are like you need to identify them. Yes. Yeah. The best response to whatever it is bad speech is better speech, is better arguments. And that's you literally have a debate platform, which is what Twitter essentially is. Yeah, that is the purpose. Yes. Purpose. Yeah. Yeah. And not to mention that the hate isn't defined. So it's only one type of hate that these people are typically referring to. Right wing hate. Right wing hate. Yeah, not left wing hate. Right. That's that's OK. And so actually so we're we're suing California. We just filed this law because this complaint they are trying to pass this social media law called AB 587, which requires it's a censorship law. They're they require these policies on disinformation, misinformation, hate speech. And then they use the undefined use the words extremism and radicalization. There's no definitions. They don't require you to have a child exploitation material policy, but they do require you to have a policy on hate, which isn't defined. And so we're suing them with with the Babylon B and and Tim Poole. When did they start this when when they start trying to pass us? It just went into effect in January. So it's now it's now it's in. So if you live in California, what's the repercussions? So it is it's targeted at social media companies. So basically mandating that social media companies have the submit these policies. So we would have to we would they would force us to write a policy on hate speech. And submit it to them. And then additionally, we would have to on like a biennial basis submit analytics about all of our moderation data, which honestly, we're already transparent about our moderation data. So that's that's largely public anyway, we have a jury system. And we have in house moderators. But it's just it's a huge burden. Like it's crazy that they would expect companies to submit all that and then have these arbitrarily. Well, actually not arbitrarily specifically chosen categories for policies that are clearly politically charged and knew some like when he came out and announced this law, it was very, you know, we have to stop hate on social media and misinformation and disinformation, protect society, protect democracy. No, you know, you're not protecting democracy by stopping free speech. That is there's no there's no checks and balances in place if something turns out to be accurate.