Reggie Watts Has Some Major Problems with Facebook

It's the same thing only with Facebook and Zuckerberg and his like, you know, his continued position of like, well, we've got a balanced thing. It's like it all, it just comes off like the reaction to Kaepernick or Facebook's reluctance to do anything or even like Facebook's reluctance to do anything about what? Well, Zuckerberg, you know, is basically saying like, we're not, we're not here to edit anything. And I'm not saying that I'm for editing, but it's okay. If you're in charge of a company, you're the face of the company. So what you do is a reflection of what you believe in, right? So in his particular case, he must actually believe this, but he just believes that to say nothing, to do nothing about the things that are posted, which, you know, you can argue in court all day. Does it incite violence or is it just someone expressing their free speech or, you know, whatever the deal is? But if someone's consistently hitting a certain angle and the response is pretty palpable and fairly measurable, and yet you choose to just allow it to be what it is because, you know, people will figure it out. They'll educate themselves, that type of a thing. You have to take some kind of a position from a humanitarian point of view. And I think that I'm very disappointed in social media in general because they're trying to protect their bottom line. And that's really what it comes off as. It doesn't come off as like, well, I want to protect free speech. It, to me, comes across more like we need to protect our bottom line because if we start editing something, then it's going to be a huge landslide. Everyone's going to be like, oh, well, screw this. Screw these guys for stifling free speech and all of that stuff. When in actuality, it's the only reason why you would make decisions like that are really just to protect the bottom line. I don't really understand any other because, I mean, even Apple takes a position, you know, like Tim Cook will issue a letter that's then able to be circulated and you can read the letter and like, oh, okay, that's interesting. They don't believe in this and they don't believe in this as a company. Zuckerberg is more like, well, I believe in whatever the greater bland generalization is for my operating system existing. Well, first of all, if we want to talk difference between Apple and Facebook, these differences are gigantic. Apple is a technology company. They're not a social media platform. The difference between the responsibility of a technology company and the responsibility of a social media platform is enormous. It's enormous. The consequences are enormous. Apple makes phones and computers and they have an app store and, you know, they take down bad apps and, you know, things that they find that are spying on people and the like, but they don't really have the same dilemmas that someone like Facebook has. When you talk about the importance of free speech, when as soon as you decide, okay, this person can't talk, but this person can, what you're essentially saying is my viewpoint is better than the viewpoint of the person that I disagree with. Now, if you have very specific things like you can't dox people, you can't threaten people, you can't say anything racist or sexist or homophobic or once you establish those parameters, you know, if you decide that this is how you're going to operate, if this is your company, there's a real good argument that you should be allowed to do that because it's your company. But then when it gets, when the company gets big enough where it's like Facebook or Twitter, then you get a real argument, like, wow, the best argument for bad speech, the best antidote is more speech, it's better speech. So someone says something that's wrong, there's a real education value in being able to correct that and having other people correct it, like just eliminating it in some ways strengthens the resolve of the people that hold that marginalized idea, whether it's racism or sexism or whatever, and you just eliminate it, then they go off and it tends to strengthen their resolve. Sure. You know what I mean? Sure. And then, particularly when it comes to things like right wing issues or left wing issues, if you're running a, there's no right wing social media site that's as popular as the left wing ones, but if there was, and they just decided we're not going to tolerate any trans stuff, we're not going to, if you started talking about how a man who has a sex change is now a woman, we're going to tell you, go fuck yourself, that's not real, we're not going to tolerate abortion, you want to talk about abortion rights, you're killing babies, get the fuck off our platform. That's the kind of shit that right wing zealots would do to people that hold left wing ideology. But conversely, you do see that from people who are left wing zealots who are angry about people who have right wing ideas and maybe even not so right wing. Like Megan, I'm sorry if you've heard this before, I use this example all the time if you're listening, Megan Murphy, who is a, what you would call a trans exclusion, exclusionary radical feminist, they call her a turf. And what that means is she's a person that's a feminist that doesn't believe that you can just change your sex and then you can have these arguments and deal with women's issues. Like a trans person she believes is different than a woman and a feminist. And there was some sort of a debate she was having online with someone on Twitter and she said, but a man is never a woman. And so they told her she has to take that down. And so she takes it on Twitter. So she takes it down and then she makes a screenshot of it and post that. And so they ban her for life, for life, for saying a man is never a woman. Look, it's one thing if you're shitting on someone and you're, you're mad at someone, you're saying a man is never a woman. But if you want to just talk biology, a man is never a woman. So if you're a person who is a left wing progressive zealot and you don't want anybody that's not adhering or complying to the ideology of progressive people, you ban someone like that. And so I don't, you know what I'm saying? This is the problem with censorship. It's like, where do you draw the line? My opinion in that case is you let that woman say that and you let people correct her and you let people correct the people that correct her and you get a lively debate where people get to discuss whether or not they are different things. And I think there's a real valid intellectual argument in that. There's a valid social argument in that. But this is the problem with censorship. Well, you know, and my thing is like, I'm not exactly, I'm not saying I'm not saying to censor. I'm just saying weighing in on the conversation. So how do you do that? Well, you take responsibility for it. But what specifically are we talking about? Well, I'm just saying, like, for instance, if I look at my comments, say I post something on Twitter and there's all these comments or whatever, like a lot of my friends who have Twitter accounts, they may read the comment and be like, oh, that guy's an asshole or whatever and never say anything. And there's just like all of these comments that are some of just troll people just trying to get reactions and stuff like that. All that. I like to personally engage all of that shit and I like to come at them with a conversation. And the thing that ends up happening with something like Facebook is because it's like I'm just I guess I'm biased because I don't think I don't think very much of Zuckerberg at all. And he's just kind of a little bit of a thief or a lot of bit of a thief is a thief. And he's not he's not an innovator in any way. He's running a company. But when you say a thief, well, because he stole the idea. You know, I have some people that were going to school with him around that time period and he just basically stole the initial code for Facebook, which was generated by a few different people and just kind of made off with it. And he's just like, you know, it's like it's like how all many companies are formed. It's like someone had an idea. There's no way for them to protect the idea because someone capitalized on the idea of how come those people can't sue him? I don't know. I don't know. I think it's because it's arbitrary. I think it's like where that came from, where the original code came from and so forth is arbitrary. So they must be furious. I know that they're furious, you know, and I know that they're furious. And I know some other people from startups that also addressed it. No, of course, he's not going to address it. I mean, he may have made me maybe he did. I don't know. I'm not an expert on it. All I know is that in the beginning, there was that. And then in parallel, as it was growing and as they were making decisions, I would hear from people that are in his orbit that would kind of describe his decision making process processes and so forth. And I don't get a sense that he he understands his response to his social responsibility or his responsibility to the identity of the company seems very far removed. And his actions kind of dictate that it's like a little bit laissez-faire in a sense that if if I have like going back to my comments, I'm commenting on those things because I'm letting I'm letting people comment. But I'm engaging in a conversation with them in hopes that we can talk about stuff. Are you open to anybody being able to comment back to you? Oh, yeah. Say whatever they want. Yes, of course. Yeah. But do you know the what is the explanation that YouTube did for this? But this is the problem with banning comments or deleting comments. It gets that stuff can get co-opted. And there was a situation recently where YouTube was caught deleting comments that were critical of the Chinese Communist Party. And what they said was that it was a software glitch. Oh, yeah. No, that's them protecting their bottom line. A hundred percent. Right. Yeah. That's what I would imagine. Totally. But I saw that. I said, OK, but that's what I'm talking about. Like that kind of shit. Like once someone comes in and says, hey, we would really like it if you remove those things to talk about some of the mean stuff that we do. Yes. Yeah. And we're willing to do business with you. We want you to put filters up. Yes. So they said it was a software glitch. I don't know how that software glitches magically works out in favor of the Chinese Communist Party. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's that's my problem. I mean, I don't have I'm not saying get rid of stuff. I'm just saying be more accountable as the face of a company. So what would you like him to do differently? Well, I know you don't like him, but so is it just Facebook or do you have this problem with YouTube? Do you have this problem with Twitter? I mean, here's my problem. Whenever power is consolidated and there's there always going to be problems because there's going to be all these different ways that people wish that it were and it's not working for them in this way and so forth. My thing is the future is distributed. It's a distributed network, distributed social networks. I have my own app, WhatsApp that I created. Oh, what's that? It's just an app. It's yeah, WhatsApp. It's only on iOS, but you can look for it. What do you do with it? It just has it has exclusive content. I created a bunch of interviews with Jack White and Leslie Feist and Fred Armisen are on there in this stupid series I call Drone Versations that shot entirely on drones and you can't really hear the conversation because the drones are too loud. Really? Yeah, it's really stupid. But yeah, check it out. WhatsApp. It's out there, but it's got live streaming. I have a store that I sell all my old electronics on, but I have other artists that are interested in making an app, but apps are notoriously cost prohibitive. They're so expensive. I mean, it took over 100,000 to create an app, right? So I managed to get my app made for a really, really cheap price. A brilliant guy named Oliver Klein, Oliver Thomas Klein, designed single-handedly the whole app. It was amazing. His aesthetic is awesome. But my thing was if I can create a template and keep getting the price down to make an app and they're just using the template that I created for other artists and other bands, then we can have a distributed network of apps that can intercommunicate with one another without the need of Facebook, Instagram, any of these social media platforms. And that way, when a fan comes to visit my site, they know it's my shit. It's not being tracked. No one's getting tracked. There's no social for my app. There's no social component to it. People can't comment on anything. There's just content to observe, events to behold, and electronics and headphones to be bought. And that's it. So when you go there, it feels like a safe space. And so if there's an interconnected network of distributed apps, which essentially are just kind of interactive websites, I guess, that's what an app is, ultimately. Now you've got something that's distributed. Fans can kind of trust that it's a safe space. It's not owned by Facebook. It's not owned by any of these corporations. So for me, it's about power consolidation. It's never going to be what you want it to be. It'll be convenient, and it'll be ever-present. Like Google, for whatever reason, Google, I have a better opinion of than Facebook. And mainly, I will say, also the other big factor with Facebook to me is the aesthetics are a piece of shit. It's a confusing, terribly designed piece of shit.