What QAnon Means for Corporate Censorship

This is an odd idea, but I think what it's doing is it's forcing us to adapt and evolve our ability to detect bullshit. And it's doing it almost like an immune system response. Like what we're reacting to and what we're recognizing from all this stuff is like, oh, we didn't know what this was. And this has resulted in this riot, whatever you want to call the Capitol Hill attack. And now we're looking at more censorship on social media. We're looking at, you know, like them trying to batten down the hatches and figure out how to handle something like QAnon or the people that were allegedly promoting these ideas. A lot of them that are banned from social media, the stuff that you highlighted in your show, we have to figure out what's true and what's not true. And so there's been some sort of draconian measures that have been suggested, you know, like hiring some sort of a team that goes over social media and makes sure that everything is according to what they deem to be correct or incorrect, which obviously is subject to biases. We're very aware that that's going on today, that there's a lot of that going on today where the necessarily a truth doesn't like the Hunter Biden laptop story is a great example of that, right? Like the social media platforms, they censored news from the New York Post, one of the oldest newspapers in America on the Hunter Biden laptop story because they decided that somehow or another it was propaganda or somehow or another it was not good to get that information. But it was news. It was real news. It was a real story. And they decided it was too close to the election. This could hurt Biden. We don't want Trump to win. So you're dealing with biases. This is not just like simply here's information that we know to be true or here's information that we know to be alive. We're going to stop that from getting through. No, they knew it to be true. But they decided to stop it because it wasn't convenient or it didn't fit the narrative they were trying to promote. Right. It's very it's. How do you find a neutral arbiter to truth? Right. If you are going to entrust someone with that responsibility. And I think that that's it's just an incredibly slippery slope. Incredibly slippery. And and what these big tech companies have have suggested is that well maybe we don't use humans. Maybe we use algorithms, right? You know, to to moderate everything. And the algorithms had had that in many ways had bolstered something like Q because they're basically sociopathic when it comes to just trying to drive attention as much as possible. So now they can kind of invert those algorithms and punish those who talk about that kind of content. And oftentimes, even if even if their goal was just to prevent prevent, I don't know, conversation around QAnon because they consider it to be problematic. What else gets swept up? What else gets swept up with that? I mean, I saw I saw a lot of people who were reporting on QAnon maybe coming from the side of critiquing it. Their videos were being wiped out. You know, people who were documenting January the 6th, their content was being wiped out. People who are critical of QAnon, they had websites that were sort of on the other side that was being wiped out as well. And that's because, of course, it's a it's sort of this blunt force that that an algorithm wields. So people even people that were analyzing the movement from a critical standpoint, people who are looking like how ridiculous this is. Look at this. They had their channels wiped out as well. Yes. So any content on QAnon, they just want to erase it from the Internet, essentially. That seemed to be the the initial response. It's it's so strange that they all move together in sync. I mean, I I think that if I did not have, you know, HBO in my sales with this project, it wouldn't have seen the light of day. Really? Well, if you try to put it on YouTube, you think? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, when we even when we so when we first released the series, you know, there was there was there were some articles floating around like, oh, maybe this is going to make it things worse. If I typed in Q into the storm into YouTube, it wouldn't auto populate at a certain point. It started out auto populating and then that went away. So, yeah, I wouldn't feel confident at all that, you know, if we didn't have a gorilla in our corner, that that this story that revealed ultimately who was behind QAnon would have been seen would have been able to find an audience. And that shout out to HBO. Shout out to HBO. I mean, they really have my back. They've been amazing for decades. You know, you really think about it. I mean, they're the people that when Bill Maher's show Politically Incorrect got pulled off of what was it on ABC? I forget. Yeah, I'm not sure. Network television. They immediately took it, brought it over, turned it into real time and made it even better. You know, it's uncensored now. And it's in my opinion, real time with Bill Maher is probably one of the very best social commentary shows and comedy shows that like really doesn't pull any punches on any network ever. You want to hear something fucking crazy. So just yesterday I was talking with someone who's helping distribute the film and I said, well, what about Amazon? You know, are we going to be able to put it out on Amazon internationally? And they said, well, as of the last year, they have stopped taking documentaries, all documentaries. What? You cannot publish a documentary on their platform. And the reason was because that I was told is because, you know, there was there was all this conspiracy, flat earth stuff and they were they were getting blowback that eventually they said, we don't want to have to decide what we publish and what we don't. What's real and what's not. We're just not going to publish anything. And the example they gave me that they couldn't get published was The Cove. I don't know if you saw that. The Dolphin documentary. Yeah, the Dolphin documentary. You know, it won an Oscar. Yeah. And just to just to check it, you know, I looked it up and sure enough, The Cove wasn't available on on Amazon. So, you know, those who said that there wouldn't be a slow creep of censorship, you know, kind of starting with things that I think everybody agrees should be, you know, they wouldn't like to be in society, you know, things like the Daily Storm or maybe a lot of people don't want a chant. You know, it's a there's a progression. Yeah. You know, until you end up, it seems like something like, you know, that the Cove can't find an audience on a major platform. And I don't want to conflate government censorship of the corporate censorship too much. However, in a lot of ways, it does feel like the government has passed the buck to these corporations to do what they legally can't, which I think is the same thing we saw the government do with privacy, right? Like they wouldn't have been able to get all of this data from us directly. But if you give it to a Facebook or a Twitter, it's very easy for the government to then go and get access to that information. So I think what we saw happen with the Fourth Amendment, we're now seeing happen with the First Amendment, where they can say, well, look, we couldn't restrict conversation around certain topics. We couldn't directly decide what's true or what's not. We're going to put that in the hands of these companies. And of course, these companies have intimate relationships with with many members of the government. You know, there's a revolving door there. So I when people want to talk about what limiting what we can say online or limiting disinformation to other things, I think that it's almost the wrong place to start. I think we have to go back to the privacy issues. And I actually think if we had not let privacy be eroded online, we wouldn't be having this debate, you know, because if if these gigantic companies hadn't collected thousands of data points on us, you know, didn't know our fears, our desires, if they hadn't built these psychometric profiles, they wouldn't have been able to manipulate us, use these algorithms to drive us into echo chambers, which have really created these disparate realities. And now these disparate realities can't agree necessarily on a set of facts. Sometimes you're considered, you know, sometimes people will be ostracized or even to talking to somebody from the quote unquote other side. Right. And and so now there's this conversation about what should be allowed to be said online. And I think that that's simply a byproduct of of privacy having been eroded. So, you know, if I was to do anything about these issues, I would start by restoring rights. I would go back and say, all right, well, how do we get you know, how do we get ownership and privacy rights online when it comes to our our personal data? Let's start there before we we start going after the speech itself. Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.