Joe Rogan Experience #1258 - Jack Dorsey, Vijaya Gadde & Tim Pool

five four three dos uno come on tricaster live all right we're live ladies and gentlemen to my left uh tim tim poole everybody knows and loves him vija what is it how do you how do i pronounce your last video not vida vidja vidja gaddy gaddy and your position at twitter is i lead trust and safety legal and public policy that's a lot that's a lot and jack dorsey ladies and gentlemen um first of all thank you everybody for doing this appreciate it thank you thank you feels also there's tension in the room we're all loose we're all loosey-goosey just a few minutes you got attention everyone's like oh this is really happening here we go um before we get started we should say because there were some uh things that people wanted to uh have us talk about um one that the cash app is one of the sponsors of the podcast it's been a sponsor for a long time and also a giant supporter of my good friend justin wren's fight for the forgotten charity building wells for the pygmies the congo this is very important to me and i'm very happy that you guys are a part of that and you are connected to that i don't that's i mean it's easy for someone to say that doesn't have an influence on the way we discuss things but it doesn't so if it does i don't know what to tell you um i'm gonna mention too just because i don't want people to come out and freak out later i actually have like 80 shares in square which isn't really that much in you know but but it's something it is it is so i don't want people to think you know whatever you you're the ceo of square i think right yep yeah there you go yeah there you go we're on the cash up so and the reason why we decided to come together is um we had a i thought a great conversation last time but there's a lot of people that were upset that there were some issues that we didn't discuss or didn't discuss in depth enough or they felt that i didn't press you enough i talked to tim because uh you know tim and i have talked before and he made a video about it and i felt like his criticism was very valid so we got on the phone and we talked about it and i knew immediately within the first few minutes of the conversation that he was far more educated about this than i was so i said would you be willing to do a podcast and perhaps do a podcast with jack and he said absolutely so we did a podcast together it was really well received people felt like we covered a lot of the issues that um they felt like i didn't bring up and so then jack and i discussed it and we said well let's bring tim on and then have vidja on as well i say that right yep it's a hard one sorry i'll get it right i promise uh but so we're here we're here um today uh you know do you know who sean baker is he's a doctor who's a prominent proponent of the carnivore diet his post was his account was frozen today i just sent it to you jamie yeah his account was frozen today because of an image that he had because he's a proponent of the carnivore diet there's a lot of people that believe that this elimination diet is very healthy for you and it's known to cure a lot of autoimmune issues with certain people but some people ideologically oppose it because they think it's bad for the environment or you shouldn't eat meat or whatever the reasons are this is huge in the the bitcoin community yes yeah well it's for a lot of people that have autoimmune issues particularly psoriasis and arthritis it is a lifesaver it's crazy it's essentially a it's an autoimmune issue so because he has a photo of a lion in a header eating a looks like a wildebeest or something like that his account was locked for violating his rules rules against graphic violence or adult content in profile images that seems a little silly and i wanted to just mention that right away now whose decision is something like that like who decides to lock a guy's account out because it has a nature image of you know natural predatory behavior on this particular case it's probably an algorithm that detected it and made some sort of an assessment but as a general rule how we operate as a company is we rely on people to report information to us so if you look at any tweet you can kind of pull down on the carrot on the right and you can say report the tweet and then you have a bunch of categories you can choose from what you want to report um i think this one in particular though is probably an algorithm so how does does does he have the option to protest that or to ask someone to review it absolutely and i i'm guessing that people are already reviewing it but there's a choice to appeal any action and that would go to a human to make sure that it is actually a violation of the rules or in this case if it's not then it would be removed is that a violation of the rules that image i don't think so i don't think that that would be what we're trying to capture in terms of graphic images in an avatar it's more about violence towards uh humans unless it was some sort of cruelty depicting animals or something like that but this seems not the intention of the rule does this have this one of the reasons why i wanted to bring this up immediately does this highlight a flaw in the system in that people can target an individual because with him he's a he like i said he's a doctor and a proponent of this carnivore diet but he's also he ruthless in his condemnation and mocking of vegans he does it all the time and so then they get it upset at him and they can target posts and just report them in mass and when they do that then this becomes an issue i think this does reveal part of um you know the challenges that we face as a global platform at scale in this part i don't i don't know what happened in this case so it's hard for me to talk about it but what i would say is that it doesn't really matter if one person reports it or 10 000 people report it like we're going to review the reports and we're going to make an assessment and we're never going to you know kick someone off the platform finally and forever without a person taking a look and making sure that it's an actual violation right okay so but the mob reporting behavior does happen yeah it does it happens across the spectrum i'd have to assume it's going to be one direction i can't imagine he would target vegans but vegans would target him right well he might i mean he doesn't but is he the kind of guy's going to want to report to vegans and get them banned from twitter or is he going to want to make fun of them he's going to make fun of him they're going to target him to try and get him removed by exploiting the system that you guys have it may not be him though it could also be his followers it's a really complicated world out there so yeah you know the motivations of why people mob report are different and it's not always under someone's control it could easin even be other carnivore diet proponents who are just jerks that don't like him because he's getting all the love people are weird yeah but it's history the idea though is that it it does kind of highlight a bit of a flaw in that it's good that someone could like you might see something awful someone doxing someone or something like that and then you can take that and report it and then people can see it and get rid of it and minimize the damage that's done there's another big problem here in that is the carnivore diet legitimately healthy is it a threat to your health and if it is is what is twitter's responsibility in controlling that information right so just to clarify my my opinion is if you want to be a proponent for the carnivore diet let them but you've got people on youtube who are being deranked for certain beliefs about certain health issues that i don't agree with and so one of the risks then is you know we're coming towards a position where people think some ideas are better than others therefore as a company we're going to restrict access to certain information you mean like anti-vaxx exactly right yeah so so i guess i'm trying to say is at what point would you guys restrict someone from sharing info like false information about vaccines that could get someone hurt that is not a violation of twitter's rules no i i think i mean i'd be interested to hear your ideas around this but our our perspective right now is um around this concept of variety perspective like are we are we encouraging more echo chambers and filter bubbles or are we at least showing people other information that might be counter to what they see and there's there's a bunch of research that would suggest that further emboldens our views there's also research that would suggest that it at least gives them a consideration about what they're what they currently believe so you guys sorry given the dynamics of our network being completely public we're not organized around communities we're not organized around topics um we have a little bit more freedom to show more of the spectrum of any one particular issue and i think that's how we would we would approach it from the start that said we haven't really dealt much with misinformation more broadly across like these sorts of topics we've we've focused our efforts on elections and um well mainly elections right now you know youtube is a different animal you know someone can really convince you that the earth is flat if you're gullible and you watch a minute youtube video right you know it's it's kind of a different thing but i wanted to just kind of uh get into that statement you made about misinformation and whether or not you'll police it so i i think that the tough part of this is really and love to have a discussion about this is do you really want corporations to police what's true and not true absolutely not that's a really really tough position but you guys do that we try not to do that we don't want to do that but your rules but the places that we focus on is where we think that people are going to be harmed by this in a direct and tangible way that we feel a responsibility to correct what do you say rules tim what do you mean by that naming and misgendering dead naming and misgendering yeah that's a specific ideology that's unique to a very small faction of people in this world that you guys actually ban people for so the way i think of it is it's behavior based and i know you think of it as content and we can we can disagree on this point but this is about why are you doing this to a trans person why are you calling them by this name when they've chosen to go by a different name or why are you outing them in some way like what is your intent and purpose behind that i don't know i don't mean to interrupt but in the interest of clarity i i want to explain what dead naming means right right so that so uh a transgender individual changes their name when they transition a dead name would be their birth name or the name they went by before the transition okay so cause my mom's probably going what and ready for the text what's a dead name and i will clarify too your role specifically say targeted misgendering and dead naming i believe that's correct right so years ago we we passed a policy that we call our hateful conduct policy and that prohibits targeting or attacking someone based on their belonging in any number of groups whether it's because of their religion or their race or their gender their sexual orientation their gender identity so it was something that's broad-based is that you you can't choose to attack people because of these characteristics but you do have limits on what characteristics you police right so you're not you're not banning people for targeted trans-specieing others right uh well we we have also general abuse and harassment rules right which says you can't engage in abuse and harassment on the platform you can but you can't detonate someone but you can call them stupid uh generally i mean if you created an account that uh only was there to call the same person stupid five thousand times we'd probably view that as a you know targeted harassment target harassment right it's a function of the it's a function of behavior like because people with our system can do this in massive velocity so it's likely to ultimately silence you from a platform or to say like i give up i don't want to deal with this thing i'm i'm out so there's so uh we can just get into all of the big examples i mean uh starting with i'd love to tim but can we just take a step back and and try to level set what we're trying to do with our policies i think it's worth doing yes yes so as a as a high level i personally and this is my job to run the policy team i believe that everyone has a voice and should be able to use it and i want them to be able to use it online now where we draw a line is when people use their voice and use their platform to abuse and harass other people to silence them because i think that that's what we've seen over the years is a number of people who have been silenced online because of the abuse and harassment they've received and they either stop talking or they leave the platform in its entirety if you look at free expression and free speech laws around the world they're not absolute they're not absolute there's always limitations on what you can say and it's when you're starting to endanger other people so so my question then is when i was physically threatened on twitter you guys refused to take down the tweet and i showed up in berkeley and someone physically threatened me because they were encouraged to when i was in venezuela i was physically threatened by high profile individual 10 000 people tweeting at me you guys do nothing right so i i guess there's the obvious question of why does it always feel like your policies are going one direction politically you say it's about behavior you said it several times already but i've already i've got tons of examples of that not being the case and you will always be able to find those examples yeah examples where you guys were alerted multiple times and did nothing like when antifa doxed a bunch of law enforcement agents some of the tweets were removed but since september this tweet is still live with a list of private phone numbers addresses yet kathy griffin she's fine the guy who threatened the lives of these kids in covington and said lock him in the school and burn it down you did nothing i mean he got suspended i'd take his tweets down was he banned for threatening the lives of kids absolutely not so again we have and i'm i'm happy to talk about all these details we have our policies that are meant to protect people and they're meant to enable free expression as long as you're not trying to silence somebody else now we take a variety of different enforcement mechanisms around that sometimes you get warned sometimes your tweet is forced to be deleted it's a very rare occasion where we will outright suspend someone without any sort of warning or any sort of um ability to understand what happened what did you guys do with kathy griffin when she was saying she wanted the names of those young kids wearing the maga hats at the covington high school campus that's a great example joe so in that particular case you know our doxing policy really focuses on uh posting private information which we don't consider names to be private we consider your home address your home phone your home phone number your mobile phone number those types of things to be private so in that particular case we took what i think now is probably a very literal interpretation of our policy and said that that was not a doxing incident do you think that was an error i think that it was short-sighted and given the context of what was going on there that if i was doing this all over again i would probably ask my team to look at that through the lens of what was the purpose behind that tweet and if the purpose was in fact to identify these kids to either dox them or abuse and harass them which it probably was then we should be taking a more expansive view of that policy and including that type of content especially considering the fact they're minors i mean i would think that right away that would be the approach so this is a trial and error sort of learn and move on with new information sort of a deal absolutely we're going to learn we're going to make a ton of mistakes we're trying to do this with hundreds of millions of accounts all around the world numerous languages we're going to make mistakes even if we get better there will always be mistakes but we're hoping to learn from those and to make ourselves better and to catch cases like tim's or others where we clearly may have made an error and i'm open to having those discussions i'm not i'm sorry tim familiar with your specific cases but i'd love to follow up with you and really do you want to pull it out we don't want to pull that up so it's uh b-i-t dot l-y slash antifa tweet all lower case this is also an evolution in prioritization as well one of the things we've come to recently is we do we do need to we do need to prioritize these efforts both in terms of policy enforcement um how we're thinking about evolving them one of the things that we want to focus on as number one is physical safety and this will lead you immediately to something like doxing and right now the only way we take action on a doxing case is if it's reported or not what we want to move to is to be able to recognize those in real time at least in the english language recognize those in real time through our machine learning algorithms and take the action before it has to be reported so we're focused purely right now on going after uh doxing cases with our algorithms so that we can be proactive that also requires a much more rigorous appeals process to correct us when we're wrong but we think it's tightly scoped enough it impacts the most important thing which is someone's physical safety once we learn from that we can really look at the the biggest issue with our system right now is all the burden is placed upon the victim so we only act based on reports we don't have a lot of enforcement um especially with with more of the more more the takedowns that are run through machine learning deep learning algorithm but if something is reported a human does review it eventually or are there a series of reports that you never get to there's there's probably reports we don't i mean we we prioritize a cue based on severity and the the thing that will mark severity is something like physical safety or private information or not so generally we try to get through everything but we have to prioritize that queue even coming in so if if someone threatened the lives of someone else you would would you ban that account would you tell them like like let's say someone tweeted three times kill these people i want them dead three times is that yes that's a violation you didn't ban him though and i don't i don't know why that up jamie that's uh i don't know i don't necessarily want to give out specific usernames because then people just point the finger at me and say i'm getting these people banned but yeah you know during covington this guy said multiple times to he wanted his followers to go and kill these kids yeah and we have to look at that but we also look in the context because we also have i think we talked about this a little bit in the last podcast but we we have gamers on the platform who are saying exactly that to their friends that they're going to meet at the game in the game tonight and without the context of that relationship with the context of the conversation that we're having we would take the exact same action on on them incorrectly yeah absolutely that that i understand i think in the case of covington though this user was so high profile he's a verified user he's got something like 20 000 followers and it was highlighted by numerous conservative media outlets saying wow this guy's it's screenshotted it's being shared i mean you had a disney producer in like saying a picture of a wood chipper with a body being thrown in it saying that's what he wanted to happen you know so i i do know that some of these accounts got locked disney producer was doing that that well i'll i'll clarify fact check me on that but that's the basically the conversation that was had there's a guy disney was he posted a picture from fargo of someone being tossed in a wood chipper and he says i want all these maga kids you know done like this you had another guy who specifically said lock them in the school burn it down said a bunch of disparaging things and then said if you see them fire on them and he tweeted that more than once and that those accounts were those tweets were taken down those were violations of our rules that's i'm pretty sure it's actually illegal to do that right it's to to to to tell your any individual to commit a felony is a crime like right yeah incitement of violence is certainly yeah yeah in many places i i just have to wonder how like i understand the context issue but this is what this is what i talked what was the context and scale too though right but tim those accounts were actioned they may not have been actioned the way you wanted to but the the tweets were forced to be deleted and the account i i took a penalty for that so i well again as i said earlier joe we don't uh usually uh automatically suspend accounts with one violation because we want people to learn we want people to understand what they did wrong and give them an opportunity not to do it again right and it's a big thing to kick someone off the platform and i take that very very seriously so so i want to make sure that when someone violates our rules they understand what happened and they are given an opportunity to you know get back on the platform and change their behavior and so in many of these cases what happens is we will force someone to acknowledge that their tweet violated our rules force them to delete that tweet before they can get back on the platform and in in many cases if they do it again we give them a timeout which is like seven days when we say look you've done it again it's a temporary suspension if you do it time out you're a mom i'm totally a mom exactly and i'm a new mom too and if you do it again then you're done right so it's kind of like you know three strikes so sort of like baseball and so in some of these cases that tim is referencing i have to imagine because these tweets were deleted they are violations of our rules people are upset that the account came back again and was allowed to say other things but we did take action on those tweets they were violations and then you have people like milo who is mean to a person and you delete you banned him permanently there's a little bit more than that actually let's talk about it yeah i'm happy to talk about milo and i actually brought um the tweets because so so let's let's preface that by saying the point i want to make sure it's clear is that you had somebody who actively called for the death of people i understand the context issue maybe he's talking about video games scale and scale so this is a verified user and that's just the complexity in acting so it's not not an excuse for why we didn't do it in a particular there are a lot of other examples too that get into more egregious areas that i've prepared so here we have someone with over 20 000 followers he's verified numerous times incites his followers to commit a crime against these kids the action taken against him is delete the tweets you get a suspension you get timeout then you have people like alex jones who berated a cnn reporter permanently banned you get milo yiannopoulos he was mean permanently banned but that's your impression that's not what happened okay and i'm here to talk about the details yeah let's pl let's do this one at a time let's start with milo so what was the details of milo so milo had a number of tweets that violated our rules going back to 2014. but i'm going to talk about the final three in this three strike concept um he claimed to be a buzzfeed reporter in his bio um and he's a verified account so that is impersonation i'm not sure why he did that he did do that well buzzfeed's a left-wing thing so he was doing parody uh potentially but our parity rules are very specific that if you have an account that's me being uh a is a parody account you need to say that it is a parody account right but these people everybody who knows milo would know that he's not a buzzfeed reporter but people who don't know milo will look at that verified account and say but he wasn't verified after a while you removed his verification he violated our rules around verification so the vi the verification was removed because of the buzzfeed thing i believe so i can i can confirm that i believe so he also uh docked someone he posted private information about an individual so that was the second one he tweeted to somebody else um if you were my child i'd have dashed your head on a rock and tried again which we viewed as a threat really mm-hmm that's it seems like he's saying like your mom should have swallowed you you know it's like you know what i'm saying he's like you're you're a mistake that's a threat i understand why reasonable people would have different impressions of this i'm just going through and telling you what they are just so we can have all the facts on the table and then we can debate them and then the last one we found um a bunch of things that he posted that we viewed as incitement of abuse against leslie jones so there's a bunch of them but the one that i like to look at which really convinced me is he posted two doctored tweets that were supposedly by leslie jones they were fake tweets the first one said white people are getting on my nerves like how can you call yourself human and then the second one said um the goddamn uh slur for a jewish person at sony ain't paid me yet damn bix nude better pay up so this was just a fake tweet that someone had photoshopped two fake tweets and we know they were faked because we could still tell from the the software that they were faked you can't always tell so it is it is possible that he didn't know they were faked it's possible someone sent it to him and he didn't do his due diligence and looking it up and it is possible but it was pointed out to him that they were fake because he left it on and not only did he leave it on he said don't tell me some mischievous internet rascal made them up exclamation point so this in the context of a bunch of other things he was saying towards leslie jones on twitter i and my team felt that this was taken as a whole incitement of harassment against her wasn't there another issue with multiple accounts that were connected to him there were a bunch of other issues on the background but these are the three primary things that we looked at in terms of but the other things that were in the background weren't they multiple accounts that were connected to him like i think that i'm not sure about that joe i think it was more that we found him to be engaging in coordinated behavior and inciting people to to attack leslie jones now with a case with like him no i'm just going to be honest when i'm listening to those or listening to read those tweets out they don't sound that bad and they certainly don't sound as bad as calling for the death of a child who's wearing a maga hat throw them into a wood chip or the fact that that guy's still out there tweeting and yet milo's not milo's initial the whole thing stemmed from other than the buzzfeed thing stemmed from his legitimate criticism of a film and he's you know he's uh a satirist he was mocking this film the daxing incident wasn't related why don't we into the real world so uh milo is a contentious figure and there's certainly things you can pull up that i wouldn't agree with anything he did there i think those are horrible i think joe brought some really good points but what about chuck johnson why was chuck johnson banned i don't have those details in front of me chuck johnson said that he was preparing something to take out deray mckesson and in the in a journalistic context people take this to me and he was going to do a dossier or some kind of hit piece on deray he was permanently banned and my understanding and it's been a long time since i've read this there was some leaked emails i think from dick castollo where he said maybe it wasn't dick i don't want to drag dick i don't know who it was exactly they said i don't care just get rid of him and he was off so you have and again maybe there's some hidden context there i don't know but on the surface the concern is that this is always leaning towards the left oh it absolutely is and i'm i'm i'm not even getting started yeah i can understand why you feel that way i don't think that's true i think we look at each individual instance of violations of our rules and try to make the best case that we can and i'm not trying and i i do think joe just did just to say i do think we've failed in a couple of ways and i want to admit that okay number one we haven't done enough education about what our rules are because a lot of people violate our rules and they don't even know it like some of the statistics that we've looked at like for a lot of first-time users of the platform if they violate the rule once almost two-thirds of them never violate the rules again so we're not talking about like a bunch of people accidentally like if they know what the rules are most people can avoid it and most people when they feel the sting of a violation they go okay i don't want to lose my rights to post exactly and they're able to do it so we have a lot of work to do on education so people really understand what the rules are in the first place the other thing we have to do to address these allegations that we're doing this from a biased perspective is to be really clear about what types of behavior are caught by our rules and what types are not and to be transparent within the product so when a particular tweet is found to be in violation of our rules being very very clear like this tweet was found to be in violation of this particular rule and that's all work that we're doing so we think the combination of education and transparency is really important particularly for an open platform like twitter it's just part of who we are and we have to build it into the product i appreciate that your particular thoughts though on those examples that he described when he talking about someone saying they should throw these children into a wood chipper versus chuck johnson saying he should take this guy he wants to prepare a dossier to take this guy out or how do you say it he said something like i'm going to take out d ray mckesson with he said i'm preparing to take out derek something like that i can't preparing so it could be misconstrued as he was trying to assassinate him right you could you could misconstrue that but not a direct threat but the other one's a direct threat one guy is banned for life the other guy is still posting and we can i'm happy to follow up obviously don't have all the chuck johnson it's not about one thing as i said it's about a pattern in practice of violating our rules and we we don't want to kick someone off for one thing but if there's a pattern in practice like there was for milo we are going to have to take action at some point because we can't sit back and let people be abused and harassed and silenced on the plow well so so one really important thing that needs to be stated is that twitter by definition is a biased platform in favor of the left period it's not it's not a question i understand you might have your own interpretation but it's very simple conservatives do not agree with you on the definition of misgendering if you have a rule in place that specifically adheres to the left ideology you by default are enforcing rules from a biased perspective well tim there are a lot of people on the left who don't agree with how we're doing our job either for sure and those people think that we don't take enough action on abuse and harassment and we let far too much behavior go anything but that's a radical example though i mean what he's talking about i mean in terms of generalities that in general things lean far more left would you agree to that i don't know what that means but in this particular case it's how the speech is being used that this is a new vector of attack that people have felt that i don't want to be on this platform anymore because i'm being harassed and abused and i need to get the hell out will people harass and abuse me all day and i don't do anything about that i i might my notification's permanently locked at 99. you have a worse than i do i mean you get substantially more followers and i don't click the notification tab anymore because it's basically just harassment and i even when so this is a really funny anecdote i i was uh covering a story in berkeley and someone said if you see him attack him like it was it was i'm paraphrasing they said basically to swing at me take my stuff steal from me and twitter told me after review was not a violation of their policy somebody made an allusion to me being a homosexual and i reported that instantly gone so when i show so so for me i'm looking i'm like well of course of course twitter is going to enforce the social justice aspect of their policy immediately in my opinion probably because you guys have pr constraints and you're probably nervous about that but when someone actually threatens me with a crime and incites their fathers to do it nothing got done and i'm not the only one who feels that way well tim that's a mistake if someone acts in that manner and threatens to hurt you that's a violation of our rules right maybe there was a mistake there and i'm happy to go and correct that and we can do it offline so we don't fear any sort of reprisal against you but that's a mistake that's not an agenda on my part or in the team's part would this be you don't make it i don't have any pr constraints that does not happen so why did you ban alex jones you can get in that you want to get into that absolutely are you ready for auction sure all right oh i've been ready for it um well let me say this the reason i bring him up is that oliver darcy one of the lead reporters covering alex jones and his content said on cnn that it was only after media pressure did the social networks take action so that's why i bring him up specifically because it sort of implies you are under pr constraints to get rid of him i think if you look at the pr that twitter went through in that incident it wouldn't be that we looked good in it and that's not at all why we took action sorry you have to look at the full context on the spectrum here because one of the things that happened over a weekend is what alex mentioned on your on your podcast with him he was removed from the itunes podcast directory that was the that was the linchpin for him because it it it drove all the traffic to what he said basically zero immediately after that we saw our pure companies facebook spotify youtube also take action we did not we did not because we when we looked at our service and we looked at the reports on their service we did not find anything in violation of our rules then we got into a situation where suddenly a bunch of people were reporting content on our platform including cnn who wrote an article about all the things that might violate our rooms rules that we looked into and we gave him one of the other warnings and then we can get into the the actual details but yeah we did not follow we we resisted just being like a domino with our peers because it wasn't consistent with our rules and the contract we put in before our customers so what was it that made you ban them so there were three separate incidents that came to our attention after the fact that were reported to us by by different users there was a video that was uploaded that showed a child being violently thrown to the ground and crying so that was the first one um the second one was a video that we viewed as incitement of violence i can read it to you it's sure it's a little it's a little bit of a transcript but but now it's time to act on the enemy before they do a false flag i know the justice department's crippled a bunch of followers and cowards but there's groups there's grants juries there's you called for it it's time politically economically and judiciously and legally and criminally to move against these people it's got to be dumb now get together the people you know aren't traitors aren't cowards aren't helping their freaking bets hedging their freaking bets like all these other [ __ ] do and let's go let's do it so people need to have their and then there's a bunch of other stuff but at the end so people need to have their battle rifles ready and everything ready at their bedsides and you've got to be ready because the media is so disciplined in their deception so this is you're saying that this is a call to violence against the media that's what it sounded like to us at the time and there have been a number of incidents of violence against the media and again i take my responsibility for what happens on the platform and how that translates off platform very seriously and that felt like it was an incitement to violence so if he only tweeted the incitement to violence he would have been fine if he only if he only tweeted that trans uh posted that transcript saying get your battle rifles ready you wouldn't have deleted this account again context matters to him it's not about one thing so we'd have to look at the entire context of what's going on so i'm asking was that was that egregious enough for you to say that alone that wasn't that wasn't right right so then i guess the question is what was the video context of the kid being thrown to the ground was it newsworthy we obviously didn't think so and depicting violence against a child is not something that we would allow on the platform even if it's news content um if it was uh there are certain types of situations where if you were reporting on um you know war zone and and things that might be happening we would put an interstitial on that type of content that's graphic or violent but we didn't feel that that was the context here well so there's a video that's been going around that was going around a few four or five weeks ago the one where the the girls were yelling at that big giant guy and the guy punched that girl in the face and she was like 11 years old i saw that multiple times on twitter that was one of the most violent things i've ever seen this giant man punched this 11 year old girl in the face and that was was that removed from twitter i don't know i i would have to go see if anyone reported it to us i think one of the issues here is too is you know you do you want me to get to the third one yeah so the third strike um that we looked at was a verbal altercation that alex got into with a journalist and in that altercation there were which was uploaded to twitter um there were a number of statements using eyes of the rat even more evil looking person he's just scum you're a virus to america and freedom smelling like a possum that climbed out of the rear end of a dead cow you look like a possum that got caught doing some really really nasty stuff in my view there was a bunch of that's enough really that's hilarious pattern in practice but it was a verbal altercation that was posted on our blog so so we took the totality of this having been warned that we have rules against abuse and harassment of individuals we saw this pattern in practice one strike two strike three strikes and we made a decision to permanently and so that last one was on periscope is that what it was that he uh broadcast through um i think it was uh originally on periscope but it was also reposted from multiple related accounts onto twitter so we can we can agree with you when you say these things like you know alex said this sounds like a threat he was berating this person saying awful things but ultimately your judgment is the context you say we have to pay attention to the context we're just trusting that you made the right decision well i'm i'm giving you as much facts as i i can give you here and i think that this is the real um hard part of content moderation at scale on global platforms it's not easy and i don't think jack or i would tell you that it's easy it's a preposterous volume you guys have to deal with and that's one of the things that i wanted to get into with jack when i first had him on because when my thought and i wasn't as concerned about the censorship as many people were my main concern was what is it like to start this thing that's kind of for fun and then all of a sudden it becomes the premier platform for free speech on the planet earth so it is that but it's also a platform that's used to abuse and harass a lot of people and used in ways that none of us want it to be used but nonetheless it happens so and i think it's an enormously complicated challenge for any company to do content moderation at scale and that's something that we are sitting down thinking about how do we take this forward because this is it doesn't scale yeah so but so let's let's take the other context now we've heard what you said why what alex jones did was bad and now we can look at it this way oliver darcy who has on numerous occasions insulted conservatives recently on cnn called them gullible being sold red meat by grifters repeatedly covers a story i'm going to do air quotes because i think to an extent he's allowed to cover these stories he keeps going after alex jones he keeps digging through his history then he goes on tv and says we got him banned then alex jones confronts him in a very aggressive and mean way and that's your justification for for or i should say i uh invert the timeline basically you have someone who's relentlessly digging through stuff insulting you you know calling you names sifting through your history trying to find anything they can to get you terminated going on tv even writing numerous stories you confront them and say you're evil and you say a bunch of really awful mean things and then you ban him right so then you post that information all over the internet right but you have a journalist who recently went on tv and said cpac is a bunch of gullible conservatives being fed red meat by grifters you can tell this guy's not got honest an honest agenda so what you have it to me it looks like the conservatives to an extent probably will try and mass flag people on the left but from an ideological standpoint you have the actual you know whatever people want to call it sect of identitarian left that believe free speech is a problem that have literally shown up in berkeley burning free speech signs and then you have conservatives who are tweeting mean things and the conservatives are less likely and i think it's fair to point out less likely to try and get someone else banned because they like playing off them and the left is is targeting them so you end up having discipline there's a lot of assumptions in what you're saying and i don't know what basis you're saying those things i mean you have conservatives demanding free speech and you have liberals uh i shouldn't say liberals you have what people refer to as the regressive left calling for the restrictions on speech you have these i don't know what those terms mean to be honest with you we have people on all sides of the spectrum who believe in free speech and i i believe that to be the case so your platform restricts speech our platform promotes speech unless people violate our rules and in a specific direction in any direction but uncle i don't want to say his name the guy who calls for death gets a suspension the guy who insinuates death gets a permanent ban but tim you're you're misinterpreting what i'm saying and i feel like you're doing it deliberately it's not about one particular thing it's about a pattern and practice of violence you have a pattern and practice of banning only one faction of people recently published an article where they looked at 22 high-profile bannings from 2015 and found 21 of them were only on one side of the cultural debate but i don't look at the political spectrum of people when i'm looking at their tweets right you you have a bias you know who they are you're biased and you're you're targeting specific individuals because your rules support this perspective no i don't agree with that well so can you be clear though in like what rules support that person specifically the the easiest one is misgendering right because that's so clearly ideological if you ask a conservative what is misgendering they'll say if someone is biologically male and you call them you know a biological man you call them she that's misgender and that's a conservative view the the progressive view is inverted so now you actually have in your policies a rule against the conservative perspective i have a rule against the abuse and harassment of trans people on our platform that's what my rules are we just give context in the background i know why that is and i brought some some research so we obviously received a lot of feedback so we don't make these rules in a vacuum just to be clear we have a bunch of people all around the world who give us context and the types of behavior they're seeing how that translates into real world harm and they give us feedback they tell us like you should consider different types of rules different types of perspectives different like for example when we try to enforce hateful conduct in our hateful conduct policy in a particular country we're not going to know all the slur words that are used to target people of a particular race or particular religion so we're going to rely on building out a team of experts all around the world who are going to help us enforce our rules so in the particular case of misgendering i'm just trying to pull up some of the studies that we looked at but we looked at the american association of pediatrics and looked at the number of transgender youths that were committing suicide it's an astronomical i'm sorry i can't find it right now in front of me it's a really really high statistic that's like 10 times what the normal suicide rate is of normal teenagers and we looked at the causes of what that was happening and a lot of it was not just violence towards those individuals but it was bullying behavior and what was what were those bullying behaviors that were contributing to that and that's why we made this rule because we thought and we believe that those types of behaviors were happening on our platform and we wanted to stop it now there are exceptions to this rule we don't and this is all this isn't about like public figures and there's always going to be public figures that you're going to want to talk about and that's that's fine but this is about are you doing something with the intention of abusing and harassing a trans person on the platform and are they viewing it that way and reporting it to us so that we take action so so i will just state i actually agree with the rule from you know my point of view i agree that bullying and harassing trans people is entirely entirely wrong i disagree with it but i just want to make sure it's clear to everybody who's listening my point is simply that you know ben shapiro went on a talk show and absolutely refused and that's his [ __ ] you know and he's one of the biggest podcasts in in the world so if you have all of his millions upon millions of followers who are looking at this rule saying this goes against my view of the world and it's literally 60 plus million in this country you do have a rule that's ideologically bent and and it's true you you did the research you believe this well then you have ben shapiro who did his research and doesn't believe it yeah and i relied on the american association of pediatrics and uh you know human rights council and other and i'm sure he has his sources too for when he gives his statements the point is but i just wonder if they have that context i mean and that's and that's where we have also failed it's as well as just explaining the why behind a lot of our policy and reasons i i would agree and i think it's fine you did research and you found this to be true but we can't simply say maybe ben shapiro and other conservatives who feel this way don't know we have to we we can't you know the point i'm trying to make is it's simply whether you believe it what whether you justified or not is not the point the point is you do you do have this rule that rule is at odds with conservatives period well i think i i think that you're you're generalizing but i think it is really important as jack said to the why behind these things the why is to protect people from abuse and harassment on our platform i understand but you essentially created a protected class if this is the case because despite these studies and what you know these studies are showing there's a gigantic suicide rate amongst trans people period it's a 40 percent it's it's outrageously large now whether that is because of gender dysphoria whether it's because of the complications from sexual surgery sexual transition surgery whether it's because of bullying whether it's because of this awful feeling of being born in the wrong gender whether that all that is yet to be determined the fact that they've shown that there's a large amount of trans people that are committing suicide i don't necessarily think that that makes that makes sense in terms of people from someone's perspective like a ben shapiro saying that if you are biologically female if you are born with a double x chromosome you will never be xy if he says that that's that's a violation of your policy and this is you're creating a protected class to be to be fair targeted yeah if it's targeted or targeting if you want to express that opinion so you're fully entitled to express that opinion if he's doing it in a manner that's targeted at an individual repeatedly repeatedly repeatedly and saying that okay but what about what's where the intent is you know what's going on with martina navatorova right now martina navitrolova why why can't i say your last name yeah i don't think i've ever said it martina navato tolova is it talova tralova anyway epic world-class legend tennis player right who happens to be a lesbian is um being harassed because she says that she doesn't believe that trans women meaning someone who is biologically male who transitions to a female should be able to compete in sports against biological females this is something that i agree with this is something i have personally experienced a tremendous amount of harassment because i stood up when there was a woman who was a trans woman who was fighting biological females in mixed martial arts fights and destroying these women and i was saying would you just watch this and tell me this doesn't look crazy to you um well well my point is you should be able to express yourself in if you say that you believe someone is biologically male even though they identify as a female that's a perspective that should be valid i mean that this is someone's someone's this is a first of all it's biologically correct so we have a problem in that if your standards and your policies are not biologically accurate then you're dealing with an ideological i you know an ideological policy and just because i mean i don't i don't want to target trans people i don't want to harass them i certainly i'll call anybody whatever they want i mean if you want to change your name to a woman's name and identify as a woman i'm 100 cool with that but by saying i don't think that you should be able to compete as a woman this opens me up for harassment and i never reported any of it i just don't pay attention to it but going into like megan murphy for instance right you can call that target harassment if megan murphy who is for those that don't know she's a radical feminist who refuses to uh use the transgender pronouns if she's in an argument with a trans person over whether or not they should be allowed in sports or in biologically female spaces and she refuses to use their pronoun because of her ideology you'll ban them again it depends on the context on the platform and it's also i want not banned permanently like you get warned well she was banned permanently but let's say she was warned about what happened but she wasn't explaining because you explained it to me what did she actually do my understanding and i don't have the tweet by tweet the way that i did for the others but my understanding is that she was warned multiple times for misgendering an individual that she was in an argument with and this individual is actually bringing a lawsuit against her in canada as well so it is so you have an argument between two people again and you have a rule that enforces only one side of the ideology and you've banned only one of those people we have a rule that attempts to address what we have perceived to be instances of abuse and harassment but she was saying it's your ideology right but it is an ideology right she's saying a man is never a woman if that's what she's saying and then biologically she's correct we obviously have a debate here this is not a clear cut this is not something like you'd say water is wet you know this is dry it's this is not like something you can prove this is something where you you have to acknowledge that there's an understanding that if someone is a trans person we all agree to consider them a woman and to think of them as a woman to talk to them and address them with their preferred name and their preferred pronouns but biologically this is not accurate so we have we have a divide here we have a divide between the conservative estimation of what's happening and then the definition that's the liberal definition of it i think that's right joe and i think what i'm trying to say is that it's not that you can't have those viewpoints it's that if you're taking those viewpoints and you're targeting them at them at a specific person in a way that reflects your intense abuse and harassment what if it's in the context of the conversation what if she's saying that i don't think that trans women should be allowed in these female spaces to make decisions for women and then this person's arguing and she says a woman is biologically female you are never going to be a woman she responded with men aren't women though and that was her first in the series of events that's what got her the suspension and the warning um that was one of many tweets that was part of providing context and that was actually the second second actually strike is my understanding but why is that a striker yeah why is that a strike but again like it's the context of i don't i don't have all the tweets in front of me there were like 10 or 12 tweets going back and forth and my understanding is that in that context of all of those she was misgendering a particular person not that she was holding a belief or that wasn't it i don't know it was so you're having you're having an individual who is debating a high profile individual in her community and she's expressing her her ideology of versus hers and you have opted to ban one of those ideologies it's within the context of this conversation this is this is what is being debated whether or not someone is in fact a woman when they were born a male i understand that this is controversial i i do especially to a radical feminist i understand why why people would not agree with the rule but that being said it is a rule on our platform and once you're warned about the rule to repeatedly post the same content is also going to be a violation of our rules right but the rule it's this seems like a good example of an ideologically based rule if if you're if she's saying that a man is never a woman though that is not in that context harassment that is a very specific opinion that she has that happens to be biologically accurate now i don't you know i don't agree with targeting harassment on anybody and i i targeted harassment on trans people or or straight people or whatever i don't i don't agree with it i don't think you should do it it's just it's not something i want to do but in this context what she's saying is not just her her expression but it's accurate i i think an important point is if i tweeted to you joe joe you are not a hamster that's clearly not a violation of the rules however there are i identify as a hamster well no uh it wouldn't be clear because i know uh i know people who have specifically begun using insults of animals to avoid getting kicked off the platform for breaking the rules certain individuals who have been suspended now use certain small woodland creatures in place of slurs so they're not really insulting you and it's fine but there are people who consider themselves trans species now i'm not trying to belittle the trans community by no means i'm just trying to point out that you have a specific rule for one set of people and they're there so there are people who have general body dysphoria you don't have rules on that there are people who have actually amputated their own arms you don't have rules on that you have a very specific rule set and in more importantly in the context of a targeted conversation i can say a whole bunch of things that would never be considered a rule break but that one is which is ideologically driven yeah thank you for the feedback i mean we're we're again always learning and trying to understand different people's perspectives and all i'll say is that our intent is not to police ideology our intent is to police behaviors that we view as abuse movement harassment and i hear your point of view and it's something that i'll definitely discuss with my team and even in this case it would it wasn't just um a you know going against this particular rule but also things that were more ban evasive as well including taking a screenshot of the original tweet reposting it which is against our terms that sounds like so it's more of the actions it sounded like a protest against your rule but i understand you could ban them for it but people can protest any of our rules we can't we can't like let them do that no no i promise any of them i'm not i'm not made i understand what you're saying but i just want to make sure i point out she was clearly doing it as an effort to push back on what she viewed as an ideologically driven rule well this is the problem is this is a real debate in the lgbt community this is a debate where there is a division and there's a division between people that think that trans women are invading biological female spaces and making decisions that don't benefit these biological females cisgender whatever you want to call them this is an actual debate and it's a debate a debate amongst progressive people amongst left-wing people i mean it's a debate amongst liberals this is i mean i would imagine the vast majority of people in the lbgt community are in fact on the left and this is one example of that so you have a protected class that's having an argument with a woman who feels like there's an ideological bent to this conversation that is not not only not accurate but not fair and she feels like it's not fair for biological women the same as martina well i'll uh take this to its logical conclusion i got sent a screenshot from somebody and maybe it's faked i think it was real they were having an argument with someone on twitter and responded with dude comma you don't know blah blah and they got a suspension and a lockout had to delete the tweet because the individual using a cartoon avatar with the eight with the name apparently was sam reported and said that i'm transgender and he's calling me dude and the dude and the twitter user actually got a suspension for it so i can understand mistakes happen but when you have a rule that's like that there's colloquial terms that are like man come on don't say that dude is like we say like like i asked you guys when you were gonna take a photo in front of this thing i said guys but i included you and i didn't i wasn't offended thank you and i wouldn't have reported you for it thank you yeah it's it's tricky but in this case of megan murphy that's her name right yeah yeah that doesn't make any sense to me that seems like she should be allowed to express herself in and this is this is not being she's not being mean by saying a man is never a woman this is a perspective that that is scientifically accurate and that's that's part of the problem i think i i just don't want to run into beating a dead horse so i think i want to you know it's a really important thing to go over all the nuances of this particular subject because i think that one in particular highlights this idea of where the problems lie in having a protected class and i think we should be compassionate we have a lot of protected classes gender race nationality like these are the protected but it's not for white people you when you say gender or race it's protect a category so you can't attack someone for their belonging to a particular race or a particular religion but you can mock white people ad nauseum it's not a problem it doesn't get it doesn't get removed i'm not talking about mocking i'm talking about abusing and harassing somebody but i mean if you mock a black person in the same way it would be considered targeted racism um again it's about targeted harassment on the platform well i mean what is targeted harassment i mean but when you're okay like if you have what is racism is is racism only i mean there's this progressive perspective of racism that it's only possible if you're from a more powerful class it's only punching down that's the only racism i don't think that makes any sense i think racism is looking at someone that is from whatever whatever race and deciding that they are in fact less or less worthy or less valuable whatever it is that that takes place across the platform against white people now i'm not saying white people need to be protected i know it's easier being a white person in america it's a fact but it's hypocritical to have a policy that only distinguishes you can make fun of white people all day long but if you decide to make fun of asian folks or you know fill in the blank that is racist but making fun of white people isn't and it doesn't get removed there are tons of like how about sarah john from the new york times that's a well i can actually explain that one please do that was uh my understanding is that you guys started banning people officially under these policies around 2015 and those all the tweets she made was prior to that and so you didn't enforce the old testament yeah so our hateful conduct policy joe just to be clear is is across the board meaning like it doesn't just protect women it protects men and women it protects all races it doesn't matter and this is how the law is set up in the united states right you can't discriminate against white men you can't discriminate against black men like those are the laws right like that's the structure it is that doesn't it doesn't take into consideration so if someone says something about white people and mocks white people on twitter what do you do about that if it's targeted harassment targeted at a person so just white people in general if you say something about white people in general that's not an issue well i mean we focus on targeted harassment which is behavior that is targeted against an individual who belongs to that class okay because if you try to police every opinion that people have about different races or religions like obviously that's a very different story so this is about if you target that to somebody who belongs to that class and that's reported to us that is a violation of our rules and so in the sarajean case a lot we did see many tweets uh of that nature that were focused on uh people who were white or men and our rules are in this area came into effect in 2015 which was our hateful conduct policy and a lot of those tweets were from a time period where those rules weren't an effort and in her defense she was actually supposedly responding to people that have you don't believe that oh come on over three years and she's tweeting blankets yeah sure sure but so i will say too obviously i've done it can i just finish on my one point so in in that case there were tweets from before the rules went into effect and tweets from after the rules went into effect and we did take action on the tweets from after the rules went into she's also pretty young but so i want a point uh yeah she's in her 20s yeah so we're talking about something that might have happened eight years ago right right 20 it was like 20 11 to 13. but i do want to point this out um before coming on i've obviously did a decent amount of research i searched for slurs against white people black people latinos and i found copious just just tons and tons of them now uh they don't go back most of what i found didn't go back too far because it does seem like you guys are doing your best but there's a lot and it targets white people black people jewish people it's everywhere and i can i can i can understand that you guys you've got hundreds of millions but uh let's let's let's try another uh subject just just to address that point um and i think jack talked about this a little bit like this is where right now we have a system that relies on people to report it to us which is a huge burden on people and especially if you're uh happen to be a high profile person and tim you would you would understand this you're not going to sit there and report every tweet and joe you'll understand this like it's not worth your time you're not going to go through tweet by tweet as people respond to you and report it people tell us this all the time so this is where we have to start getting better at identifying when this is happening and taking action on it without waiting for somebody to tell us but using an algorithm though do you not miss context i mean it seems to me that there's a lot of people that say things in humor you know they or or slurs within particular communities which is perfectly reasonable right right so yes there is a danger of the algorithm's missing context and that's why we we really want to go carefully into this and this is why we scoped it down first and foremost to doxing which is at least first it hits our number one goal protecting physical safety like making sure that nothing done online will impact someone's physical safety offline on our platform in in this case the second is that there are patterns around doxing that are much easier to uh see without having the context there are there are exceptions of course because you could dox someone's public you know a representative's public office phone number and email address and the algorithm might catch that not have the context that this is a u.s representative and this information is already public so essentially this just it highlights how insanely difficult it is to monitor all of these posts and then what is the volume like what are we dealing with like how many posts do you guys get a day uh hundreds of millions of posts a day and how many human beings are manually reviewing any of these things i don't have that that number a lot a lot thousands hundreds of thousands how many employees you guys have we have uh 4 000 employees around the world that's it yeah we we have four thousand employees the reason that's crazy though but stop and think about that four thousand people that are monitoring hundreds of millions of tweets we have a we have a we have a small team who's monitoring uh tweets and some of them are employed by us some of them are contractors throughout throughout the world so four thousand employees total four thousand employees who are engineers who are designers who are lawyers so the number of people actually monitoring tweets is probably less than a thousand uh well the reason we don't give out specific numbers is we need to scale these dynamically right if we see a particular event within a with a country we might hire 100 more people on contract to deal with it right whereas they may not be full time and and and with us the entire time they have the ability to take down tweets uh they have they have the so as we get reports it goes into a queue and those are ranked by severity and then we have people who look at our rules and look at the look at the tweets and look at the behavior and the context around it and they have the ability to go down that enforcement spectrum that vigil talked about one make people log in read why it's a violation over tweet and delete it two temporary suspensions and finally a permanent suspension which is the absolute last resort which we ultimately do not want to do we want to make sure that our rules are also guided towards incentivizing more healthy conversation and and more more participation so so let me ask you um the rules you have are not based in u.s law right u.s law doesn't recognize restrictions on hate speech it's considered free speech so if you want to stand in a street corner and yell the craziest things in the world you're allowed to on your platform twitter you're not allowed to so even in that sense alone your rules do have an ideology behind them i don't completely disagree i think you know i don't want harassment um but the reason i bring this up is getting into the discussion about democratic health of a nation so i think it's it can't be disputed at this point that twitter is extremely powerful in influencing elections you know i'm pretty sure you guys published recently a bunch of tweets from foreign actors that were trying to meddle in elections so even you as a company recognize that foreign entities are trying to manipulate people using this platform so i i there's a few things i want to ask beyond this but if wouldn't it be important then to just as a at a certain point twitter becomes so powerful in influencing elections and giving access to even the president's tweets that you should allow people to use the platform based under the norms of u.s law first amendment free speech the right to expression on the platform this is becoming too much of a it's becoming too powerful in how our elections are are taking place so even if you are saying well hate speech is our rule and a lot of people agree with it if at any point one person disagrees there's still an american who has a right to this you know to access to the public discourse and you've essentially monopolized that and not completely but for the most part so isn't there some responsibility on you to guarantee at a certain extent less regulation happen right like look if you recognize foreign governments are manipulating our elections then shouldn't you guarantee the right to an american to access this platform to be involved in the electoral process i'm not sure i see the the the tie between those things but i will address one of your points which was uh we're not we're a platform that serves the world so we're global uh 75 of the users of twitter are outside of the united states right right so we don't apply laws of just one country when we're thinking about it we think about how do you have a global standard that can meet the threshold of as many countries as possible because we want all the people in the world to be able to participate in this conversation and also meet elections like the indian election coming up as well right and i'm my understanding is you were also accused of being biased against conservatives in india recently there was a report on that as well as you held up a sign that said something offensive about the brahmin yeah so in that sense even in other countries you're accused of the same things that you're being accused of by american conservatives i think that the situations are very very different um and i don't think that that the ideologies in play are the same at all well so the reason everyone can we clarify that i i'm not sure what you're talking about but we we did have our vice president of public policy testify in front of indian parliament a couple weeks ago and he was they were really focused on election integrity and safety and abuse and harassment of women and political figures and the likes so so my my concern i guess is i recognize you're a globe you're a company that serves the world but as an american i have a concern that the democracy i live in the democratic republic i'm sorry in the democratic functions are healthy one of the biggest threats is you know russia russia iran china they're trying to meddle in our elections using your platform and it's effective so much so that you've actually come out and removed many people you know covington was apparently started by account based in brazil you know the covington scandal where this fake news goes viral was reported by cnn that it was a it was a dummy account they were trying to prop it up and they were pushing out this out of context information so they do this they use your platform to do it you you've now got a platform that is so powerful in our american discourse that foreign governments are using it as weapons against us and you've taken a stance against the the laws of the united states i don't mean like against like you're breaking the law i mean you you have rules that go beyond the scope of the us which will restrict american citizens from being able to participate meanwhile foreign actors are free to do so so long as they play by your rules so our elections are being threatened by the fact that if there's an american citizen who says i do not believe in your misgendering policy and you ban them that person has been removed from public discourse on twitter right but they don't get banned for saying they don't agree with it they can't ban for sure specifically violating it by targeting an individual let's say in protest an individual repeatedly says no i refuse to use your pronouns in like megan murphy's case and she's a canadian so i don't want to use her specifically the point i'm trying to make is at a certain level there are going to be american citizens who have been removed from this public discourse which has become so absurdly powerful foreign governments weaponize it because you have different rules than the american country has so just to to be clear my understanding and i'm not expert on all the platforms is that foreign governments use multiple multiple different ways to interfere in elections it's not limited to our platform nor is it limited to social media but the president is on twitter the president is on a lot of different platforms as is the white house uh i think it's fair to point out the media coverage of his twitter account is insane and they run news stories every time he tweets and so certainly undeniable i'm just pointing out that there are a number of different avenues for this and individuals have choices in how they use the platform yeah he might have other platforms but he uses twitter and exclusively and what i'm trying to bring up is that if twitter refuses to acknowledge this problem you are facing regulation i don't i don't know if you care about that but at a certain point which problem if you're going to restrict american citizens from participating on a platform where even the president speaks and and it's essentially you have a private privately owned public space if i could use an analogy that would be most apt and you've set rules that are not recognized by the us in fact when it came to a supreme court hearing they said hate speech is not a violation it's actually protected free speech so there's actual odds so there might be someone who says i refuse to live by any other means than what the supreme court has set down that means i have a right to hate speech you will ban them that means your platform is so powerful it's it's being used to manipulate elections and you have rules that are not recognized by the government to remove american citizens from that discourse so as a private platform you become too powerful to not be regulated if you refuse to allow people free speech but i'm trying to pick apart um the connection i i think so yes we we do have an issue with um foreign entities and misinformation and and this is a extremely complicated issue which we're just beginning to understand and grasp and take action on i i don't think that issue is solved purely by not being more aggressive on something else that is taking people off the platform entirely as well which is abuse and harassment it's a cost benefit analysis ultimately and our rules are designed again and you know they don't always manifest this way in the outcomes but in terms of what we're trying to drive is opportunity for every single person to be able to speak freely on the platform and that's that's absolutely not true you would don't allow heights allow hate speech so free speech is not on your platform i i i said speak for enable everyone that create the opportunity for everyone to speak on our our service unless they've all right it's hate speech right and then in part of that the recognition that we're taking action on is that when some people encounter particular conduct that we see them wanting to remove themselves from the platform completely which goes against that principle of enabling everyone to speak or giving people the opportunity to speak or so the rules are focused on the the opportunities presented and we have particular outcomes to make sure that those opportunities are associated with let's let's separate the first the point i made about foreign governments was just to explain the the the power that your platform holds and how can be weaponized we'll separate that now when antifa shows up to berkeley and bash is a guy over there with a bike lock that is suppressing his speech right that's a fact of physical violence however when antifa links hands and blocks a door so that no one can go to an event that is also legally allowed right so what you're saying is that if someone is engaging in behavior such as going on twitter and shouting someone down relentlessly that's something external to what happens in in the world under the us government i am allowed to scream very close to you and not let you speak in public but on twitter you don't allow that so there's a dramatic difference between what twitter thinks is okay and what the us government thinks is okay our democracy functions and how twitter functions the issue i'm pointing out is that we know twitter is becoming extremely important in how our public discourse is occurring how our cultural culture is developing and who even gets elected so if you have rules that are based on a global policy that means american citizens who are abiding by all of the laws of our country are being restricted from engaging in public discourse because you've monopolized it can i counter that though because these foreign governments are restricted by the same rules so if they violate those same rules they will be they will be removed so if they play within those rules they can participate in the discourse even if they are just trying to manipulate our elections on the other hand if the people that are on the platform play by those rules they can also counteract unless their ideology goes in line with u.s law and is legally allowed as opposed to what you allow so foreign governments can can absolutely keep making new accounts and keep botting and keep manipulating they can even post things that'll go viral and then get banned and not care right but a private american citizen can say here's my opinion i refuse to back down oh seriously you'll ban him so we can see that at a certain point you have a lot twitter is slowly gaining in in my opinion too much control from your personal ideology based on what you've researched what you think is right over american discourse if you if twitter and this is my opinion i'm not a lawmaker but i would have to uh assume if twitter refuses to say in the united states you are allowed to say what is legally acceptable period then lawmakers only choice will be to enforce regulation on your company actually tim i spent quite a bit of time talking to lawmakers as part of my role uh had a public policy um i spent a lot of time in dc i want to say that jack and i have both spent a lot of time in dc and i think from the perspective of lawmakers they across the spectrum are also in favor of policing abuse and harassment online and bullying online those are things that people care about because they affect their children and if they affect their communities and they affect individuals and so i don't think that and as a private american business we can have different standards than what an american government-owned corporation or american government would have to institute those are two different things american and i understand your point about the influence and i'm not denying that certainly twitter is an influential platform but like anything whether it's the american law or the rules of twitter or the rules of facebook or rules of any platform there are rules and those rules have to be followed so it is your choice whether to follow those rules and to continue to participate in a civic dialogue and it's your choice to not do that absolutely you've monopolized public discourse to an extreme degree and and you say my way or the highway we are facing tim we haven't monopolized it there are many different avenues for people to continue to have a voice there are many different platforms that offer that we are a largely influential one i'm not trying to take away from that and we're a very important one you don't need to be the most important it's just that you are extremely important and that's and it's a compliment twitter has become extremely powerful but at a certain point you should not have the right to control what people are allowed to say no private or look i'm a social liberal i think we should regulate you guys because you are unelected officials running your system the way you see fit against the wishes of a democratic republic and there are people who disagree with you who are being excised from public discourse because of your ideology that terrifies me and we can take it one step further so tim just just so i understand so are you suggesting that we don't have any policies around abuse and harassment on the platform i'm trying to understand what it is you're saying because i'm not i'm not sure i'm following you so you don't think we should have any rules about abuse and harassment so even the the threats that you received but you mentioned a number of threats that you received and you were quite frustrated that we hadn't taken action on them you think we shouldn't have rules that i'm frustrated because of the hypocrisy obviously when i when i see only i see the flow of one direction and then what i see are republican politicians who in my opinion are just too ignorant to understand what the hell's going on around them and i see people burning signs that say free speech i see you openly saying we recognize the power of our platform and we're not going to abide by american norms i see the manipulation of twitter for in violation of our elections i see democratic operatives in alabama waging a false flag campaign using fake russian accounts and this and the guy who runs that company has not been banned from your platform even after it's been written by the new york times he was doing this so we know that not only are people manipulating your platform you have rules that remove honest american citizens with bad opinions who have a right to engage in public discourse and it's like you recognize it but you like having the power i'm not quite sure so just to get back to my point so you believe that twitter should not have any rules about abuse and harassment or any sort of hate speech on the platform that that's your position well that's that's that's uh extremely reductive i don't know that maybe maybe too simplistic the point i'm trying to make is but but that is a point you're trying to make you're you're asking us to comply with the u.s law that would criminalize potential speech and put people in jail for it and you're asking us to enforce those those well i mean if you incite death you will that's a crime you can go you can go to jail for that so at the very least you could you like when you when you have people on your platform who committed crime you don't ban them i say well that's really weird and then when you have people on your platform who say a bad naughty word you do ban them i say oh that's really weird i mean i've seen people get banned for tweeting an end to you i understand what they're trying to do when they tweet letters at you jack but they get suspended for it and they get a threat you know like you can't let's let's talk about learn to code what do you what do you mean by that yeah so there are people who know that they can tweet a single letter and the next person knows what letter they need to tweet you see what i'm saying so you'll see you know one user will say n the next user will put an i the next user will put g yes and so they get suspended for doing so and and these are these are the people who are trying to push the buttons on the rules right they get suspended for that absolutely so because i think somebody but here's the thing i think i think your team understands what they're doing however you get really dangerous territory if someone someone accidentally tweets an end and you assume they're trying to engage in a harassment campaign which is why yeah i said let's talk about learn to code but we do we do look at coordination of it of accounts messages uh i don't know about direct messages but do you read direct messages we don't read direct messages we don't read them unless someone reports a direct message to us that they have received and so you read their direct message that they send to you so if if you have a direct message and someone says something terrible and then like you receive a death threat and you report that to us then we would read it because you've reported it to us do does anyone in the company have access to direct messages other than that um only in the context again of reviewing reports that were other than that they're not accessible um not to my knowledge i don't know what you mean like we're not reading we're not reading them is it possible that someone could go into tim's direct messages and just read his direct messages i don't think so so if tim writes an n and i write an i and jamie writes a g can you go into our direct messages and say hey let's [ __ ] with jack and we're going to write this stuff out and we're going to do it and let's let's see if they they ban us you can't read that i don't think so so if that's the case how would you know if there was a concerted effort i think what he's saying is like if we if we do see those train of replies then that is that is coordination you know what people are doing right the question is how do you prove it well i think beyond the end like you know the first person to put the letter you can't prove he did it but everybody else you kind of can't i don't but i don't think we would well i've uh look i can say this i've been sent numerous screenshots from people screenshots can be faked i recognize that but i i have seen people actually tweet and then i've seen the tweet following right after one one letter yeah someone tweeted at you uh someone decently high profile like a big youtuber tweeted an n at you and then got like a 12-hour suspension yeah but let's talk about learn to code right and why are people being suspended for tweeting learn to code yep we did some research on this yes we did some research on this um so there was a situation in i guess about a month ago or so where a number of journalists were receiving a variety of tweets some containing learn to code some containing a bunch of other coded language that was wishes of harm these were thousands and thousands of tweets being directed at a handful of journalists and we did some research and what we found was a number of the accounts that were engaging in this behavior which is tweeting at the journalists with this either learn to code or things like day of the rope and other coded language were actually ban evasion accounts that means accounts that had been previously suspended and we also learned that there was a targeted campaign being organized off our platform to abuse and harass these journalists that's not true so see here's the thing an activist who works for nbc wrote that story and then lobbied you you issued an official statement and then even the editor-in-chief of the daily caller got a suspension for tweeting learn to code at the at the daily show so i have never talked to anybody from nbc about this issue so i'm right but no so they report it don't misrepresent me they report it the narrative goes far and wide amongst your circles then all of a sudden you're seeing high-profile conservatives tweeting a joke getting suspensions so again some of these tweets actually contained death threats wishes of harm other coded language that we've seen to mean uh death to journalists so it wasn't about just the learn to code it was about the context that we were clear that's just not true the editor-in-chief of the daily caller was suspended for tweeting nothing but hashtag learn to code so tim can i can i finish what i'm saying yeah so we were looking at the context and what was happening is there were journalists receiving hundreds of tweets some had death threats some had wishes of harm some just learned to code and in that particular context we made a decision we consider this this type of behavior but dog piling which is when all of a sudden individuals are getting tons and tons of tweets at them they feel very abused and harassed on the platform can we pause this because this is super confusing for people who don't know the context the the learn to code thing is in response to people saying that people that are losing their jobs like coal miners and truck drivers and things like that could learn to code this was it was almost like ingest initially or if it wasn't ingest initially it was so poorly thought out as a suggestion that people started mocking it right correctly so this is correct the first stories that came out were simply like can miners learn to code right and the the hashtag learn to code is just a meme it's not even necessarily a conservative one though you will see more conservatives using it it was people are using it to mock how stupid the idea of taking a person who's uneducated who's in their 50s who should learn some new form of vocation and then someone says learn to code and so then other people when they're losing their job or when something's happening people would write learn to code because it's a meme well not right not even necessarily i would i would just characterize learn to code as a meme that represents the elitism of modern journalists and how they target certain communities with disdain okay so so to to make that point there are people who have been suspended for tweeting something like i'm not too happy with how you know buzzfeed reported the story hashtag learned to code right making representation of these people are snooty elites who live in ivory towers but but but again you know this is a meme that has nothing to do with harassment but you know some people might be harassing somebody and might tweet it why would we expect to see even still today i'm still getting messages from people with screenshots saying i've been suspended for using a hashtag and the editor in chief of the daily caller right he he he took he quote tweeted a video from the daily show with hashtag learn to code and he got a suspension for it so why why learn the code why is that alone so egregious and i don't think it is so egregious so is it just something that got stuck in an algorithm uh no it was a again a specific set of issues that we were seeing um targeting a very specific set of journalists and it wasn't just the learn to code it was a couple of things going on a lot of the accounts tweeting learn to code were banned invaders which means they have previously been suspended a lot of the accounts had other language in them or tweets out other language like day of the brick day of the rope oven ready these are all coded meanings for violence against people right um and so and they people who are receiving this were receiving hundreds of these in what appeared to us to be a coordinated harassment campaign and so we were trying to understand the context of what was going on and take action on them because again i don't know joe if you've ever been the target of a dog piling event on twitter but it is not particularly fun when thousands of people or hundreds of people are tweeting at you and saying things and that's can be viewed as a form of harassment it's not about the individual tweet it is about the volume of things that are being directed i understand and so in that particular case we made the judgment call and it is a judgment call to take down the tweets that were responding directly to these journalists that were saying learn to code even if they didn't have a wish of harm specifically attached to them because of what we viewed as coordinated attempt to harass them and again like i was saying some of the other signals in coded language and we were worried that learn to code was taking on a different meaning i understand in that particular context so but in and of itself though it still seems like there's alternative meanings to learn to code it still could be used as tim was saying to mock a lib uh you know snooty absolutely i agree with you so to elite it's really about the context of what was happening in that situation and all those other things i think in a very different situation we would not take action on that okay but doesn't that seem like you're you're throwing a blanket over a very small issue um because you've learned to code in itself is very small the blanket is cast over racism the blanket is cast over this all the other horrible things that are attached to it but the horrible things that are attached to it the real issue this learn to code thing is kind of a legitimate protest in people saying that these minors should learn to code that's kind of preposterous the first articles weren't mean it was just it learned to code kind of identified you have these journalists who are so far removed from middle america that they think you can take a 50 year old man who's never used a computer before and put him in the stories i think were legitimate yes but the the point more so it was a meme the hashtag the idea of learn to code condenses this idea and it's easy to communicate especially when you only have 280 characters that there is a class of individual in this country i think you mentioned on was it sam harris that the left these left liberal journalists only follow each other yeah in the in the run-up to the 20 2016 elections yeah and so uh i mean i i still believe that to be true i've worked in these offices it has changed they've done the study again the visualization and now there is a lot more cross-pollination but we what we saw is uh folks who are reporting on the left end of the spectrum mainly followed folks on the left and folks on the right followed everyone what you were talking about earlier that there's these bubbles there's there's bubbles and we've helped create them yeah and and maintain them so so here's what ends up happening and this is one of the big problems that people have with this story particularly particularly you have a left-wing activist who works for nbc news i'm not accusing you of having read the article he writes he he spends like a day lobbying to twitter saying god you have to do this you have to make these changes the next day he writes a story saying that 4chan is organizing these these harassment campaigns and death threats and while 4chan was doing threads about it you can't accuse 4chan simply for talking about it because reddit was talking about it too as was twitter so then the next day he after he published his article now he's getting threats and then twitter issues a statement saying we will take action and to make matters worse when john levine a writer for the rap got a statement from one of your spokespeople saying yes we are banning people for saying learn to code a bunch of journalists came out and then lied i had no idea why saying this is not true this is fake news then a second statement was published by twitter saying it's part of a harassment campaign and so then the mainstream narrative becomes oh they're only banning people who are part of harassment campaign but you you literally see legitimate high-profile individuals getting suspensions for for joining in on a joke oh they're for sure probably mistakes in there i don't think that any of us are claiming that we got this 100 right and probably our team having a lack of context into actually what's happening as well and and we would fully admit we probably were way too aggressive when we first saw this as well so and made mistakes i hope this clarifies then you have situations like this where you can see you know this journalist i'm not going to name him but he routinely has very like left-wing i don't want to use overtly uh esoteric words but uh intersectional dogmatic points of view right so this is consuming so like intersectional feminism is considered like a small ideology it people refer to these groups as the regressive left or the identitarian left these are basically people who hold views that a person is judged based on the color of their skin instead of the content of their character so you have the right wing version which is like the alt-right the left-wing version which is like um intersectional feminism is is how it's simply referred to so you'll see people say things like you know when they typically when they rag on white men or when they say like white feminism these are these are signals that they hold these particular views and these views are becoming more pervasive so what ends up happening is you have a journalist who clearly holds these views i don't want to call him a journalist he writes extremely biased and out of context story twitter takes action in response uh seemingly in response then we can look at what happens with oliver darcy at cnn he says you know the people at cpac are the conservatives are gullible eating red meat from grifters among other things disparaging comments about the right and he's the one who's primarily advocating for the removal of certain individuals who you then remove and then when kathy griffin calls for doxing that's fine when this guy calls for the death of these kids he gets he gets a slap on the wrist and look i understand the context matters but grains of sand make a heap and eventually you have all of these stories piling up and people are asking you why it only flows in one direction because i got to be honest i'd imagine that calling for the death three times of any individual is a bannable offense even without a warning you just get rid of them but it didn't happen right we see we see these you know people say men aren't women though and they get a suspension we see people say the editor-in-chief of the daily caller may be the best example hashtag learn to code uh quoting the daily show and he gets a suspension it's threatening death and inciting death is a suspension too it feels like it's only going in one direction yeah i think we have a lot of work to do to explain more clearly when we're taking action and why and certainly looking into um any mistakes we may have made in those particular situations so would you guys agree that in tech i think we can all agree this i would hope you agree tech tends to lean left like tech companies facebook twitter google i i would be willing to bet that a conservative running a social network would not have a hate speech policy i mean you look at gab and you look at minds and mine's not even right-wing right they're not right-wing at all they're just they just staunchly support free speech right i don't think gab is necessarily i don't think the owner is necessarily right-wing either i don't know much about him i think he's like a libertarian i i don't want to uh i don't want to yeah specify either i don't i don't know enough yeah i know that they're when you read what they write they're just staunchly committed to free speech but they will stop doxxing they will they will do things to stop targeted harassment and doxxing and things along those lines sometimes slowly admittedly yeah admittedly but they want they just want an open platform what my point is is that i think a lot of people that are on the right feel disenfranchised by these platforms they use on a daily basis i don't know what the percentage are the percentages are in terms of the number of people that are conservative that use twitter versus the number of people that are liberal but i would imagine it's probably pretty close isn't it i i don't know the numbers i don't know because we don't ask people we'd have to we'd have to infer all that based on what they're saying or because so let's not even go there but then but the the the people that run whether it's google or twitter or facebook any of these platforms youtube for sure powerful leaning towards the left when we all agree to that we don't ask our employees but my guess is that many employees at tech companies are probably liberal it's really fascinating but i also think i mean you point out all the companies you mentioned are in exactly the same region as well yes and then yeah we do you know we do have the challenge of some monocultural thinking as well but we and we you know i have said publicly that you know yes we will have more of a liberal bias within our company so this to cnn right but that doesn't mean that we put that in our rules right but hold on because what i'm getting at is that at some point in time things have to get down to a human being looking and reviewing at cases and if you guys are so left-wing in your your your staff and the area that you live in and all these things things are almost naturally going to lean left if is that fair to say if if we were purely looking at the content but a lot of this agent work is based on the behaviors all the things that we've been discussing in terms of the context of the actual content itself excellent exactly what the rules are accept the misgendering policy right so your rules do reflect your your bubble right go to middle you know go to middle america and go hang out at conservative town they're not going to agree with you your rules are based on your bubble in san francisco or whatever city i'm i'm from middle america i'm from saint louis missouri and i i hear the point i i definitely hear the point in terms of like us putting this rule forth but we have to balance it with the fact that people are being driven away from our platform i hear you and they may not disagree they may not agree with me on that my folks from missouri but i think they would see some valid argument in what we're trying to do to again increase the opportunity for as many people as possible to talk that's that's it it's not driving the outcomes that you're speaking to where you stop what what community is and isn't deserving of protection are conservatives not deserving of protection for their opinions but i want to be driven away on individuals and increasing the absolute number of people who have opportunity to speak on the platform in the first place so then do you need a rule for body dysphoria do you need a rule for other kin right you see what i'm asking you you have a specific i see what you're asking but like and and this came from a call and research and there there's there's disagreement as to whether this is the right outcome or not and this is the right policy and yes our bias does influence looking in this direction and our bias does take um our biases influence us putting a rule like this in place but it is with the understanding of creating as much opportunity as possible for as many people to speak based on the actual data that we see right of people leaving the platform because of experiences they have so why did your research stop there it hasn't stopped we we our rules aren't set in something that just stops and doesn't evolve we're going to constantly question we're going to constantly get feedback from people on every end of the spectrum of any particular issue and make changes accordingly into your credit doesn't stop and to your credit i really do appreciate that the fact that you're very open about that you have made mistakes and that you're continuing to learn and grow and that your company is reviewing these things and trying to figure out which way to go and i think we all need to pay attention to the fact that this is a completely new road this road did not exist 15 years ago there was nothing there that is a tremendous responsibility for any con any company any group of human beings to be in control of public discourse on a scale unprecedented in human history and that's what we're dealing with here this is not a small thing and i know people that have been banned to them this is this is a matter of ideology this is a matter of this is a matter of that there's a lot of debate being going on here and there's one of the reasons why i wanted to bring you on because tim because you know so much about so many of these cases and so much because you are a journalist and you're you're very aware of the implications and all the problems that have been that maybe have slipped through my fingers so i do want to make one thing really clear though i have a tremendous amount of respect and trust for you and you say you want to solve this problem simply because you're sitting here right now and these other companies aren't right jack you went on sam harris you were on uh get with gadsad and that says to me a good faith effort to try and figure out how to do things right like so as as much as i'll apologize for getting kind of angry and and being emotional because he was angry i'd look we also haven't been great at explaining our intent and there's there's a few things going on one as joe indicated centralized global policy at scale is almost impossible and and we realize this different services have different answers this reddit has a community-based policy where uh each topic each subreddit has its own policy and and you know there's there's some benefit to that so that's problem number one we know that this very binary off or on platform isn't right and it doesn't scale and it ultimately goes against our key initiative of wanting to promote more healthier conversation i i just don't think that's what you're doing i and and i hear you i hear you yeah but like so we're not done we're not we're not done we're not finished with our work and we need to the reason i'm going on all these podcasts and having these conversations and ideally just getting out there more often as well because we don't see enough in here enough for her we need to have these conversations so we can learn we can we can get the feedback and also pay attention to where the technology is going before the podcast we talked a little bit about and i talked about it on this our previous podcast and also sam's that technology today is enabling content to live forever in a way that was not possible before you can say that everything on the internet lives forever but that's not it's generally not true because any host or any connection can take it down the blockchain changes all that it can actually exist forever permanently without anyone being able to touch it government company individual and that is a reality that we need to pay attention to and really understand our value and i believe a lot of our value in in the future not today again we have tons of we have a ton of work is to take a strong stance of like we are going to be a company given this entire corpus of conversation and content within the world we're going to work to promote healthy public conversation that's what we want that's what we want to do and if you disagree with it you should be able to turn it off and you should be able to access anything that you want as you would with the internet but those are technologies that are just in the formative stages and presenting new opportunities to companies like ours and and there's a ton of challenges with them and a ton of things that we've discussed over the past hour that it doesn't solve and maybe exaggerates especially around things like election inference interference and um some of the regulatory concerns that you're bringing so there's a few issues right your definition of what is or isn't healthy right yes yes and and we want that to be public like we want that we're going we we have four indicators right now that we're working on with an external lab we want other labs to we want to give it up open source make sure that people can comment on it that people can help us define it we'll use that interpretation on our own algorithms and then push it but that has to be open that has to be transparent are we there today absolutely not we're not there i this this course of action to me looks like a fahrenheit 451 future where everything is so offensive everything must be restricted i see that's the path i see that you're on you want to have a healthy conversation you want to maximize the amount of people that means you got to cut off all the tall grass and level everything out so if if if you've decided that this one rule needs to be enforced because certain things are offensive no but can can i explain what what health at least means to us in this particular year so like we talked a little bit about this on the previous podcast but like we we have four indicators that we're trying to define and try to understand if there's actually something there one is shared attention is a conversation generally shared around the same objects or is it disparate so like as we're having a conversation the four of us are having conversation are we all focused on the same thing or is joe on his phone which you were earlier like whatever is going on because uh more shared attention will create will lead to healthier conversation number two is shared reality not whether something is factual but are we sharing the same facts is the earth round is the world flat so we we are yes we can tell what facts are we sharing and what facts are we not sharing what percentage of the conversation so that's that's the second indicator third is receptivity are the participants receptive to debate and to civility and to uh expressing their opinion and even if it is um something that might be uh hurtful or are people receptive to at least look at and be empathetic and look at what's behind that we this is the one we have the most measurement around today we can determine and predict when someone might walk away from a twitter conversation because they feel it's toxic i just ignore them all basically so and we see we see that in our data right so you and there's some conversations that you get into and you and you you know persist and then the finally is variety of perspective are we are we actually seeing the full spectrum of any topic that's being talked about and and these are not meant to be taken as individual parts but in unison how they play together and we've written these out we haven't gotten far enough in actually defining what they look like and what they mean and we certainly haven't gotten good enough at understanding when we deploy a solution like being able to follow a hashtag does that impact variety of perspective to the positive does it impact shared reality to the negative what not so this is how we're thinking about it and as we think more about that that influences our product it influences our enforcement and influences our policy as well what you're describing sounds wildly different to what twitter is right so you have a goal for where you want to get with those those metrics so i what confuses me then when you when we talk about someone like megan murphy who sure she violated your rules but in the context of a conversation you know you recognize people will sometimes get heated with each other if how you know how do you is a healthy conversation when no one is being negative what if people are yelling at each other and being mean and insulting or misgendering them i i think it's a question of what thresholds you allow and and the more control we can give people to vary the spectrum on what they want to see um that feels right to me i mean joe in in your your alex podcast did exactly this thing you're hosting a conversation you had both of your guests who started talking over each other you paused the conversation you said let's not get competitive someone said i'm not being competitive you said you're all talking over each other and and there's a dynamic that the conversation then shifted to that got to some deeper points right could have just said let that happen and and let it go and and that's fine too it's it's it's up to who is viewing and experiencing that conversation and i agree with you it is completely far off from where we are today we've not only have we had to address a lot of these issues that we're talking about at this table but we've also had to turn the company around from a business standpoint we'd have we've had to fix all of our infrastructure that's over 10 years old and we had to go through two layoffs because the company was too large so we we have to prioritize our efforts and i don't know any other way to do this then be really specific about our intentions and our aspirations and and the intent and the why behind our actions and not everyone's going to agree with it in the in the particular moment so so i will i want to point this out before i make my next statement though just real quick it seems like the technology is moving faster than the culture so i i do recognize you you guys are in a rock and a hard place how do you get to a point where you can have that open source crypto you know blockchain technology that allows free and open speech at the same time the technology exists twitter has been replicated numerous times in different ways mastodon for instance what what's disconcerting to me is you know and and maybe you have research on this which is why you've taken the decisions you have but when you ban someone because they've said you know bad opinions misgendering well they're not going to go away they're going to try and find anywhere they can speak so what effectively happens is you're taking all of these people from from a wide range of the most uh teaser prison analogy murderers all the way to pot smokers and you're putting them in the same room with each other and you're saying you're not welcome here well what happens when you take someone who smokes pot and put them in prison with a bunch of gang bangers and murderers they fall into that right so i totally get the point i'm hyper aware of our actions sending more and more things into the dark well this is something that i want to discuss this is really important in this vein of thinking what about roads to redemption what about someone like megan murphy what about someone anyone alex jones milo is is it can we find a path for people to get back to the platform that for good or for bad like it or not there is one video platform that people give a [ __ ] about and that's youtube you get kicked off of youtube you're doomed and that's just reality you can go vimeo is wonderful there's a lot of great video platforms out there they have a [ __ ] tiny fraction of the views that youtube dubs that's just reality the same thing can be said for twitter whether or not other platforms exist is that's inconsequential the vast majority of people are on twitter the vast majority of people that are making you know posts about the news and breaking information they do it on twitter what can be set up and have you guys given consideration to some sort of a path to redemption yeah there's there's redemption and there's rehabilitation okay you know we we haven't done a great job at having a cohesive stance on rehabilitation and redemption we have it in part so the the whole focus behind the temporary suspensions is to at least give people pause and think about why they violated or why and how they violated our particular rules what they signed up for when they came in through our terms of service right whether you agree with them or not like this is the agreement that we have with people you know i'm just thinking this i'm sorry to interrupt you but it would be kind of hilarious if you guys had an option like a a mode of twitter an angry mode like [ __ ] i'm angry right now so i'm gonna type some things and it says hey dude why don't you just think about this we're going to hold it for you in the queue and uh people do that people do that and people do that in their drafts but i'm sure they do i'm sure they do but it would be funny if you had an angry mode yeah but like you guys i notice you guys are using a lot of curse words and you're saying a lot of bad things we're going to put you in angry mode so think about this so you have to make several clicks if you want to post this and there is research to suggest that people expressing that actually tends to minimize more violent physical oh for sure well everyone says that with emails if you're if you're if you're in the middle of the night someone sends you an email and you find insulting you ready you type an email and then go to sleep wake up in the morning like someone say something nice you know that's how i wind up interacting with these people but what what do you think can be done for people like let's say megan murphy because she seems one of the it's as easy to see her perspective as any what do you think could be done for her i think i think you're right i think that i would love to get to a point where we think of suspensions as temporary and she's banned for life right now that's the only option that we've built into our rules but we have every capability of changing that and that's something that i want my team to focus on is thinking about as jack said not just coming back after some time bound period but also like what more can and should we be doing within the product itself early on to educate people about the rules so one of the things that we're working on is a very very simplified version of the twitter rules that's two pages not 20. i've made sure that my lawyers don't write it and it's written in as plain english as we can we try to put examples in there and like really taking the time to educate people and i get people aren't always going to agree with those rules and we have to address that too but at least simplifying it and educating people so that they don't even get to that stage but once they do understanding that there are going to be different contexts in people's lives different times they're going to say and do things that they may not agree with and they don't deserve to be permanently suspended forever from a platform like twitter agree so how do you get to it so we this is something that actually we just had a meeting on this uh earlier this week uh with our executive team um and you know identifying kind of some of the principles by which we would want to think about um you know time bounding suspension so it's work we have to do it and we're going to figure it out i'm not going to tell you it's coming out right away but it's on our roadmap it's something we want to do why don't you set up a jury system when someone reports something instead of you having to worry about it there would be no accusation of bias if one hundred thousand users were randomly selected to determine because periscope does this yeah yeah and we've learned periscope does this you please explain that we uh so periscope has a um a content moderation jury so we flag based on the machine learning algorithms and in some cases reports particular replies we send them to a small jury of folks to ask is this against or term service or is this something that you believe should be in the channel or not do you sign up to be on the jury no it's it's random so you randomly get chosen and you decide whether or not you want to participate yep and it's it's good it has some flaws it has some some gaming aspects to it as well but like we we do have a lot of experiments that we're testing and like we want to build confidence and like it's actually driving the outcomes that we think are are useful um and periscope is a good playground for us across many regards i think ultimately one of the greater philosophical challenges is that you are a massively powerful corporation you have international investors i believe as a saudi prince owns what six percent of twitter so when i is that true i just want to make sure that's well we're we're a publicly traded corporation right so anybody can buy stock but that doesn't mean they have uh influence on day-to-day well i think depending on which political faction you ask they'll say money is influence right so i'm not going to say that the saudi prince who invested in twitter because again i've only uh it's been a while since i've read these stories it's like showing up to your meetings and throwing his weight around but at certain points definitely not doing that but but you know for for i'm not do i have to trust you right this is a guy who's thrown in over a billion dollars i think into twitter twitter has influence on our elections foreign governments foreign government actors have stake in twitter it worries me then when you base your rules on your personal decisions on an unelected group of people you you have such tremendous power in this monopoly on public discourse near monopoly like he was saying some platforms twitter has no real competition so i just have to hope and trust you have the best interest at heart but you at the end of the day it's it's it's authoritarian no one chose you to be in charge of this i understand you mentioned you discovered twitter but here i am looking at you know both of you who have this tremendous power over whether or not someone can get elected you can choose to ban someone and tell me all day and night you have a reason for doing it i just have to trust you that's terrifying there's no proof there's no proof alex jones at any of these things other than things he's posted right i understand that that's actually what i was on the phone with alex was texting me saying that he'd never did anything to endanger any child and that he was disputing what people were saying about a video of a child getting harmed and so do we just trust an unelected i mean extreme extremely wealthy individuals saudi princes you know it's a publicly traded company who knows where the influence is coming from your rules are blessed based on a global policy and i'm sitting here watching wow these people who are never chosen in this position have too much power over my my my my politics i think that that's why it's so important that we take the time to build transparency into what we're doing and that's part of what we're trying to do is not just in being here and talking to you guys but also building it into the product itself i think one of the things that i've really loved about a new product launch what we've done is to disable any sort of ranking in the home timeline if you want and you don't have to see our algorithms at play anymore these are the kind of things that we're thinking about how do we give power back to the people using our service so that they can see what they want to see and they can participate the way they want to participate and this is long term and i get that we're not there yet but this is how we're thinking about it and you can imagine where that goes i mean in just one switch and turning all the algorithms off what what does that do what does that look like um so these are the conversations that we're having in the company whether they'd be good ideas or bad ideas we we haven't determined that just yet but we we we definitely look i i definitely understand the mistrust that people have in our company in myself in the corporate structure in all the variables that are associated with it including who chooses to buy on the public market who chooses not to i get all of it and i grew up on the internet i'm a believer in the internet principles and i want to do everything in my power to make sure that we are consistent with those ideals at the same time i want to make sure that every single person and do everything in my power has the opportunity to participate let me ask you a question then um for your policy as it pertains to say saudi arabia right do you enforce the same hate speech rules on saudi arabia our rules are global we enforce them against everyone so even in countries where it's criminal to be lgbt you will still ban someone for for saying something disparaging to or saying something to the to that effect like let's say saudi arabia sends someone's to it to death for uh i don't want to call it saudi arabia specifically let's call it iran because i believe that's the big focus right now with the trump administration iran it's my understanding it's still punishable by death i could be wrong but it is criminal if someone then directly targets one of these individuals will you ban them i mean do you guys function in iran because i think we're blocked in iran yeah so i figured but there but there are some countries where for instance michelle malkin recently got really angry because she received notice that she violated blasphemy laws in pakistan right so you do follow some laws in some countries but it's not a violence i guess the question i'm asking is in pakistan it's very clearly a different culture they don't agree with your rules we do have a per country takedown meaning that um content might be non-visible within that country but visible throughout the rest of the world but so just to add on to what jack's saying we actually are very very transparent about this so we publish a transparency report every six months that details every single request that we get from every government around the world and the content that they ask us to remove and we post that to an independent third party site so you could go right now and look and see every single request that comes from the pakistani government and what content they're trying to remove from pakistan and i i've seen a lot of conservatives get angry about this and it's kind of confusing confusing i'm like that's a really good thing i would want to know if pakistan wanted to kill me uh blasphemy laws posting pictures of muhammad so uh it's a crime are they angry about our transparency reporter there's a perception that you sending that notice is like a threat against them for violating blasphemy laws whereas it's very clearly just letting you know a government has taken action against you it's saying that the government has restricted access to that content in that country and the reason we tell users or tell people that that's happened is because a lot of them may want to file their own suit against the government or a lot of them may be in danger if they happen to be under that particular government's jurisdiction and they may want to take action to protect themselves if they know that the government is looking at the content in their accounts so we don't always know we don't we send the notice to everybody we don't always know where you are or what country you live in and so we just send that notice as like to try to be as transparent as possible the main point i was trying to get to is your policies support a community but there may be laws in a certain country that does not support that community and finds it criminal right so your actions are now directly opposed to the culture of another of the country i guess the point i'm trying to make is that if you enforce um your values which are uh you know perceivably not even the majority of this country if you're you know consider yourself more liberal leaning and you're half of the united states but you're enforcing those rules on the rest of the world that use the service it's sort of forcing other cultures to adhere to yours so a lot of a lot of our rules are based in more of the un uh declaration than just purely u.s doesn't the u.n declaration guarantee the right of all people through any medium to express their opinion it does and why they also have it also has can it also has conditions around particular speech inciting violence um and um some of the some of the aspects that we speak to as well and it protects specific categories whether it's religion race gender sexual orientation those are all also protected under the u.n covenant to protect human rights oh look at that a pause i'm sure we have many more things to talk about don't don't worry i don't want to just i'm just saying this i've got a bunch of other things that you know because there's a thing there's a bunch of other issues having to do with bias and censorship and i feel like we've kind of like beaten that horse relentlessly but i think that horse is good to beat and that's all i think it's also good to address why the horse is being beaten and why why it exists in the first place um and i i i really i want to say this again i really appreciate the fact that you guys are so open and that you're willing to come on here and talk about this because you don't have to this is your decision and especially you jack after we had that first conversation and the the blowback was so hard you wanted to come and clarify this and i think this is so important to give people a true understanding of what your intentions are versus what perceptions are i appreciate it and thank you for hosting us again and um look i i i think it's also important that the company is not just me we have people in the company who are really good at this and um are making some really tough decisions and having tough conversations and and getting pushback and getting feedback and they have the best intentions so well so uh let's i'll get back into the meat of things to get to beating the dead horse i don't know if you have any data on why jacob wall was recently banned do you have that uh i believe who is jacob wall he's uh i don't know describe him he's a conservative personality but he's very very uh controversial for like fake news or something i don't know too much about him so i don't want to accuse him of things because i don't know who he is but he was uh he was in something where he tried accusing mueller of like sexual assault and it turned out to be like just completely fake ridiculous this is a gentleman that was in the usa today article where he admitted that he was going to he had uh used tactics in the past to influence the election and he will continue to do so using all of his channels yes and so when we saw that report our team looked at his account we noticed there were multiple accounts tied to his account so fake accounts that he had created that were discussing political issues and pretending to be other people um how do you find that out we would have phone numbers linking accounts together or email addresses in some cases i p addresses other types of metadata that are associated with accounts so we can link those accounts together and having multiple accounts in and of itself is not a violation of our rules because some people have their you know work account their personal account is when you're deliberately pretending to be someone else and manipulating a conversation about a political issue and those are exactly the types of things that we saw the russians do for example in the 2016 election so it was that playbook and that type of activity that we saw about jacob wall and that's why his accounts were suspended did you investigate jonathan morgan i i don't know who that is why that's that's the important question why i i don't i don't know who that is well that's that's it might be that someone at twitter investigated him i personally don't know who that so uh one of one of the issues that i think is really important to get to is you should know who he is he's more important than jacob wallace but for some reason you know about this conservative guy and not the democrat who who helped meddle in the alabama election well so jonathan according to this is a sheer volume that they have to pay attention to right right right but it's it's about grains of sand making a heap in the flow of a direction where we can see jacob wall has said he's done this so you're like we're going to investigate we ban him it was recently reported and covered by numerous outlets that a group called new knowledge was meddling in the alabama election by creating fake russian accounts to manipulate national media into believing that roy moore was propped up by the russians facebook banned him as well as four other people but twitter didn't he still you ban the accounts that were engaged in the behavior i i do remember sending i do remember sending this to the team that's worse though so you didn't ban the guy doing it but you banned the people like so so in the case of jacob wall we were able to directly attribute through email addresses and phone numbers his direct connection to the accounts that were created to manipulate the election if we're not able to tie that direct connection on our platform or law enforcement doesn't give us information to tie attribution we won't take action and it's not because of political ideology it's because we want to be damn sure before we take action on it so someone could use a vpn perhaps and maybe additional email accounts and they could game the system in that way there are certainly sophisticated ways that people can can do things to mask who they are and what accounts that they're controlling and just the internal conversation tim just to provide more light into what happens like i got a i got an email or a text from vidja one morning and said we are going to permanently suspend this particular account and it's not a you know what do you think it's we are going to do this and i then have an opportunity to ask questions i asked a question why she gave me a link back to the document of all the findings and usa today we took the action i was on twitter a bunch of people pointed me at this particular case sent some of those tweets to her what's going on so that's well that's in the background wouldn't you just terminate anybody associated with the company that was doing this i mean keep in mind too at the time when this campaign was happening he admitted to engaging in the operation in a quote to new york times and you banned the accounts associated with it so if you know he's the one running the company wouldn't you be like okay you're gone um do you want us to take every single newspaper accounts attribution because what we were able to do in the jacob wall situation was actually tie those accounts in our own systems right that he actually controlled the accounts not just take the word of a newspaper you said you said you banned his accounts yes and you know from his own statement and from his tweets that he was the one running running the company jacob wall no no no jonathan morgan oh sorry i'm getting confused about it so uh uh jacob wall it's announced in the usa today he says i'm doing this and you're like okay we can look at this like how we can see it we get rid of them with with new knowledge you said you did take those accounts down i believe we were able to take down a certain cluster of accounts that we saw engaging in the behavior but we weren't necessarily able to tie it back to one person controlling those even if they say they did it do you and this is where i get back like we like to have some sort of attribution that's direct that we can see would we just take the any newspaper or any article at face value and just action them would you have to contact him and get some sort of a statement from him in order to take down his account obviously i don't think he would admit to manipulating twitter if twitter asked him but if you could get the fact that he communicated with a newspaper right to clarify uh what they said what they claimed to the new york times was that it was a false flag uh new york times said they reviewed internal documents that showed they admitted it was a false flag operation um the guy who runs the company said oh his company does this he wasn't uh aware necessarily but it was an experiment so he's given kind of uh in my opinion duplicitous like you know not straightforward but at the time of this campaign which he claims to know about he tweeted that it was real so during the roy moore campaign he tweets wow look at the russians then it comes out later his company is the one that did it so you're kind of like oh so this guy was propping up his own fake news right then when they get busted he goes oh no it's just my company doing an experiment but you tweeted it was real spearmint you used your verified twitter account to push the fake narrative your company was pumping on this platform and so so the point i want to make i guess is it sounds like we need to take a closer look at this one bam bring back morgan murphy well well uh megan murphy megan murphy i'm sorry morgan murphy's a friend of mine to to sorry morgan so this is i haven't read the story it's been like two months since the story broke so i could have my you know i don't want to i don't want to get sued and have my facts wrong but the reason i bring this up was not to accuse you of wrongdoing was to point out that i don't i don't think that the people who work at twitter are twirling their mustaches laughing you know pressing the band button whenever they see a conservative i think it's just there's a bias that's unintentional that flows in one direction so you see the news about jacob wall and i think there's a reason for it too there's a couple reasons for one yours your staff is likely more you've mentioned more likely to lean left and look at certain sources uh so you're going to hear about more things more often and take action on those things as opposed to the other side of the coin but but we we have to consider like where the actions are taking place i'm speaking more broadly to the 4 000 people that we have as a company versus the deliberateness that we have on vigi's team i just mean when we look at a company-wide average of all of your employees and the direction they lean versus the new sources they're willing to read you're going to see a flow in one direction whether it's intentional or not and so i think the challenge is but we don't generally rely on news sources to find manipulation of our platform but we're looking at what we're seeing the signals we can see and once in a while we will get tipped off to something but like for the most part when we're looking at manipulation it's not like the new york times can tell us like what's going on on the platform we're the ones that have the metadata back accounts we're the ones that can see patterns of behavior at scale but i hear your point i knew one name and i didn't know another name and it was because vigil said you know we're permanently banning this account and yes we we didn't have the the same sort of findings in the other particular account which i got feedback on passed to her and and we didn't find what we needed to find i think but to be clear the team had taken action on those stuff months ago when it actually had happened yeah i think you know uh a lot of what people assume is male intent is sometimes fake news you know i think one of my biggest criticisms in terms of what's going on our culture is the news system is like you pointed out although it's changed left-wing journalists only follow themselves i that's my experience i've worked for these companies and so they repeat these same narratives they don't get out of their bubble even today they're still in a bubble and they're not seeing what's happening outside of it and then what happens is you know according to data i think this is from pew uh most new journalism jobs are in blue districts so you've got people who only hear the same thing they only cover the same stories so if you know um we hear about jesse smollett we hear about how the story that goes it goes wild but there's like 800 instances of trump supporters wearing maga hats getting beaten you know throughout the past couple years we had a guy show up to a school in eugene oregon with a gun and fire two rounds at a cop wearing a smash the patriarchy and chill shirt and those stories don't make the headlines so it's you know when the journalists are inherently in a bubble the information you're going to get as a big company who follows these news organizations is going to be inherently you know one-sided as well and then the only action you're going to be able to take is what you know you can't ban someone if you don't know they're doing it i hear you i i think their biggest issue and the thing that i i want to fix the most is the fact that we create and sustain and maintain these echo chambers yeah well you you're rolling out that new feature that allows you to hide replies right we're we're testing we're experimenting with uh an ability to um enable people to have more control as you would expect a host over the conversation and like facebook allows that yeah but i i don't think they have the level of transparency that we want to put into it so we actually want to show whether a comment was moderated and then actually allow people to see those comments um so both showing the action that this person moderated a particular comment and then you can actually see the comment itself it's one cl one click one click over one tap over um that's how we're thinking about it might change in the future but we we can't do this without a level of transparency because we minimize something vigil spoke to earlier which is speaking truth to power holding people to account even things like the the fire festival where you know you had these organizers who were deleting every single comment moderating every single comment that called this thing a fraud and don't go here we can't we can't we can't reliably and and we like just from a responsibility standpoint ever create a feature that enables more of that to happen and that's how we're thinking about even features like this i'm going to jump right off to a different train cart here has law enforcement ever asked you to keep certain people on the platform even after they've violated your rules uh not that i'm aware so then this you know to the next question pertaining tobias you have the issue of antifa versus the proud boys and patriot prayer and twitter permanently excised anyone associated with the proud boys antifa accounts who have broken the rules repeatedly branded known cells that have been involved in violence all still active is there a reason well with the proud boys what we were able to do was um actually look at documentation and announcements that you know the leaders of that organization had made and their use of violence in the real world so that was what we were focused on and subsequent to our decision i believe the fbi also designated that that's not true it's not true that's not true no okay no that's not true yeah you know the proud boys started out as a joke gavin mcginnis uh anthony kumia who was a part of opian anthony now is his own show told me about it it happened on his show because there was a guy that was on the show and they made a joke about starting a gang based on him because he was a very effeminate guy and they would call them the proud boys and um they went into detail about how this thing became from a joke and saying that you could join the proud boys and everyone was you know was like being silly to people joining it and then it becoming this thing to fight antifa and then becoming infested with white nationalists and becoming this thing well in in many ways it was but it's been documented how it started and what it was and misrepresented as to why it was started i i i i think there's some things that should be clarified about them but gavin has made a bunch of statements that cross the line he claims he claims to be joking and so that's that's what he did on my podcast he was talking to me about antifa that when antifa was blocking people like ben shapiro's speeches and things along those lines and stopping conservatives for speaking you should just just punch him in the face we're going to have to start kicking people's asses and i was like this is not just irresponsible but foolish and short-sighted and just a dumb way to talk so then you have the antifa groups that are engaging in the same thing we've you know the famous bike lock basher incident where a guy showed up hit seven uh he hit seven people over there with a bike lock um they subsequently released his name i'm going to leave that out for the time being you have other groups like by end means by any means necessary you have in portland for instance there are specific branded factions there's uh the the tweet i mentioned earlier where they doxed ice agents and they said do whatever inspires you with this information and i mean you're tagged in a million times i know you probably can't see it but you can actually see that some of the tweets in the threat are removed but the main tweet itself from an anti-fascist account linking to a website straight up saying like here's the private home details phone number addresses of these law enforcement officers is not removed since september so here's what you end up seeing is uh again the point i think one of the big problems in this country is the media because it was reported that the fbi designated pride was an extremist group but it was a misinterpretation based uh a sheriff wrote a draft saying with you know the fbi considers them to be extremists the media then reported hearsay from the sheriff and the fbi came out and said no no we never meant to do that that's not true we are just concerned about violence so the proud boys all get purged and again i think you know gavin's a different story right if you want to go after the individuals who are associated with that group versus the guy who goes on his show and says outrageous things and goes on joe's show but then you have antifa branded cells like what i mean by that is they have specific names they sell merchandise and they're the ones showing up throwing mortar shells into crowds they're the ones showing up with crowbars and bats and whacking people i was in uh boston and there was a rally where conservatives were planning on putting on ireland it was literally just like libertarians and conservatives antifa shows up with crowbars bats and balaclavas with weapons threatening them and so i i have to wonder if if you know these people are allowed to organize in your platform are you concerned about that why aren't they being banned when they violate the rules yeah absolutely we're concerned about that has the fbi designated them as a domestic terrorist yeah i'm sorry homeland security in new jersey has listed them under domestic terrorism okay so so here i understand there's a conundrum in that the general concept of anti-fascism is a loose term that means you oppose fascism but antifa is now they have a flag they've had a flag since the soviet you know nazi germany in the soviet era and they've brought it back there are specific groups that i'm not going to mention by name that have specific names and they sell merchandise they've appeared in various news outlets they've expressed their desire to use violence to suppress speech there was a is it a centralized organization the same way that i i hear you on pro boys but like where they have like tenants that are written out and there's a leader and like uh not it's not the same but there are specific branded cells so that's why i bring them up specifically i realize you know someone showing up to a rally wearing a black hoodie and sunglasses who are you going to ban but there are groups that that organize specifically call for violence they they push the line as close as as lightly as possible they advocate sabotage and things like this and you know when the proud boys go out and get into fights they're not getting in fights with themselves they're you know so and i should point out that they they decided to call for violence based on antifa calling for violence yeah based on antifa actually actively committing violence against conservative people that were there to see different people well it uh partly started because in berkeley there was a trump rally so actually after milo got uh chased out of the berkeley there there was a hundred thousand thousand damages i mean there's a video of some guy in all black cracking someone on the back who's on the ground looking like they're unconscious so these conservatives see this and they decide to hold a rally saying we won't back down they hold a rally in berkeley and then antifa shows up again i understand you can't figure out who these people are for the most part they're decentralized but then uh this incites uh an escalation you then get the rise of the base to stick man they called it this guy shows up in armor with a stick and he starts swinging back and now you have two factions forming so while i recognize it's much easier to ban a top-down group there are you know the difference i guess is while when you look at the proud boys it's straight top down vertical you look at antifa and there's different cells of varying size and they're different accounts so i'd have to uh to like i guess the argument i could make is if you're going to ban the proud boys by all means under your justification but if you look at a specific channel that's got 20 000 followers that cheers them on right these are people who throw mortar shells into crowds isn't that advocating for you know terrorism incitement to violence yeah absolutely so i guess the question is how come they don't get removed well in the past when we've looked at um antifa we it's we ran into this decentralization issue which is we weren't able to find the same type of information that we were able to find about proud boys which was a centralized leadership-based documentation of what they stand for but absolutely i mean it's something we'll continue to look into and to the extent that they're using twitter to organize any sort of offline violence that's completely prohibited under our rules and we would absolutely take action would i ask you why gavin was banned was there a specific thing that he did or was it his association with the proud boys the association with the problem you know he's uh abandoned that he's not only that he's disassociated himself with it and said that it completely got out of hand he doesn't want to have anything to do with it yeah and i think this is a great again test case for how we think about uh getting people back on the platform yeah he said he's an interesting case because he's a really a provocateur and he fancies himself you know sort of a punk rocker and he just he likes stirring [ __ ] i mean when he came on my show last time he was on he was dressed up like michael douglas and falling down you know he he did it on purpose he brought a briefcase and everything i'm like what are you doing it's like michael douglas i'm falling down like he's he's uh showman in many ways and he did not mean for this to to go the way it went he thought it would be this sort of innocent fun thing to be a part of and then other people got involved in it and when people call for violence the problem is they think that you know you're going to just hit people that's going to solve a problem it just creates a much more much more comprehensive problem it's important to point out gavin said has had many like he said things way worse than alex jones ever did sure whether whether you want to say it's a joke or not he said things like you know choke him punch him directly yep but he did but i guess was the primary reason for getting rid of them was what you thought that the fbi had designated them in extremist group no because we did it months in advance oh okay yeah i was just so it's just it was just his association with the proud boys i don't recall and i would have to go back and i don't want to mistake things i don't recall whether those statements that you're referring to of gavin's were on twitter so they weren't um there's another you know when it comes to the weaponization of rules against like gavin isn't creating a compilation of things he's ever said out of context and then sending them around to get himself banned other people are doing that to him activists who don't like him and it's effective in fact i would actually like to point out um there's one particular user who has repeatedly made fake videos attacking one of your other high profile conservatives so much so that he said to file police reports harassment complaints and it just doesn't stop you know so i guess i'll ask this to this regard if someone repeatedly makes videos of you out of context fake audio accusing you of doing things you've never done at what point is that bannable yeah again if it's targeted harassment and we can establish it it's just a really hard thing with us determining whether something is fake or not well it's also when things are out of context you still have video of the person saying that i agree that it's at a contest that it's disingenuous but it's still the person saying it and you're making a compilation of some pre-existing audio or video so i think in in this instance of gavin like one of the things he said was like a call to violence but he was talking about uh like it was in the context of talking about a dog and being scolded yeah so he was like hit him just hit him and then it's like it turns out he's talking about dog like doing something wrong right and they take that they snip it and then it goes viral and everyone starts flagging saying you gotta ban this guy so again i understand you like you know but uh i guess the issue is if people keep doing that to destroy someone's life so so i think there's a there's a bigger discussion i think um both of you could probably shed some important light on too outside of twitter this weaponization of content from platforms is being used to get people banned from their banking accounts you know they're getting their uh we can talk about patreon for instance and again i'm not this is this may just be something you could uh chime in on patreon banned a man named carl benjamin also known as sargon of akkad he's also banned from twitter and it was why did you know why he got banned from twitter um i can see that's an interesting one uh i do have some some of the details here um do you want me to read it yeah please okay um looks like it's gonna be gross it's not stuff that i love saying um but i will say it want jack to say it should make it he doesn't like cursing either um let's see i curse more than he does so i guess i should say it uh first strike um [ __ ] white people kill all men die sis gum none of the above qualify as hate speech i don't have the dates i'm sorry but he's he's a white guy i mean obviously he's joking around there and also [ __ ] white people it also sounds like he's trying to make a point about your rules and how you enforce them not actually possibly which is also exactly why you get kicked off patreon he was it was exactly yeah well i know he also posted a photo of interracial gay porn at some white nationalists to make them angry yes yeah he's funny well he's funny sometimes i i can understand how uh posting that photo is an egregious violation of the rules whether whether or not he was trying to insult some people that's a very good point and i wanted to bring that up is porn a violation of the rules uh porn generally no good really good for you because it happens in my feed all the time i follow a couple naughty girls and occasionally they post pictures of themselves engaging in intercourse i'm like yikes so then why what what else what are the other strikes for sargon or carl um let's see um there was the use of a jewish slur how did you use it uh two or a person you trader remainer white genocide supporting islamophile jewish slur lover that should keep you going hashtag hitler was right but but these aren't general opinions these are targeted these are targeted at somebody that that sounds like he's being said like he's making a joke yeah i understand in context it sounds like the other one like in context what he's saying particularly the fact that he's a white guy that doesn't sound like a racial slur at all i mean he's saying [ __ ] white people and he is white in context again these are tied together right i always knew that person was not to be trusted that [ __ ] jewish slur oh i don't know the race of this person i'm sorry and this is not okay but this is not this is not parody this is not joking around we didn't view it that way i'm just telling i'm not trying to like read all this i'm just telling you what they were saying i i knew he had done things that were like egregious violations of the rules because you know plain and simple i didn't bring him up to you know go through and try and figure out a feat but that it does sound like at least the first one was meant to be a critique of fear so uh potentially but there are a bunch of others if you want to hear them more than sure keep it wrong this is again targeted this is how i know one day that i'll be throwing you from a helicopter you're the same kind of malignant cancer don't forget it um so there's just it's not one thing or two things or three things this is like a bunch of them here's the illusions of grandeur imagine think you're gonna throw someone from a helicopter well he doesn't get you in that helicopter but but admittedly um so so he he he's on youtube by the name of sargon of akkad he's a big account and i've criticized him for being overly mean in the past and i think he definitely gets angry but but he is very different now and i guess um the reason i brought him up was he's very different now how so well a lot of the content he makes is much calmer he's he's less likely to insult someone directly he's probably recognizing that he's on his last straw oh definitely i mean he's actually kicked off of twitter he's on youtube he's probably going to mind his p's and q's oh but so um the reason i brought him up again but we'll move on was that activists found a live stream from eight months ago again i totally forgot why i was bringing this up because we've moved so far away from where we were but um they they pulled this a clip from an hour and a half or whatever into a two-hour livestream on a small channel that only had 2000 views sent to patreon and then patreon said yep that's a violation and banned him out right without warning which again i understand is different from what you guys do you do suspensions first but i guess the reason i was bringing up was to talk about a few things um why blocking isn't enough why muting isn't enough and if you think that it's driving people off the platform people post my tweets on reddit i block them they use a dummy account load up my tweet post it to reddit and then spam me on reddit so you know blocking and even leaving twitter would never do anything short of me shutting up there's nothing you can do to protect me or anyone else look i mean these are exactly the conversations we're having one the reason why i don't think blocking and muting are enough is um one i don't think we've made mute powerful enough it's spread all over the surface uh you you can use it and then you gotta go find where you actually muted these people or their profile page and that's just a it's not a it's a disaster it just doesn't work in the same way that it should work in the same way that follow works which is just the inverse of that i noticed that now i get a notification that says you can't see this tweet because you meet this person right before i would just see a weird reply and be like oh it's one of those exactly so there's also all this infrastructure that we have to fix in order to like pass those through in terms of what action you took or what action someone else took to be transparent about like what's happening on the network the second um the second thing block is really interesting i think it's uh my own view is it's wholly un unsatisfying because what you're doing is you're blocking someone they get notification that you've blocked them uh which may embolden them even more which causes you know others around and ramifications from from the network but also that person can log out of twitter and then look at your tweets uh just on the public web because we're we're public so exactly it doesn't feel as as rigorous and as durable as something like making mute much stronger but i i guess the challenge is no matter what rule you put in place people are going to harass you if you're if you're engaging in public discourse you know if i go out in the street and and yell out my opinion somebody could get my face if i get off twitter because i'm sick i mean look you know i'm sure you get it way worse than i do especially as you know the high profile probably getting it right now yeah absolutely oh me too god i can only imagine but so so the only thing i can do is look we're not on twitter right now we're on joe rogan's podcast and they're still going to target you on twitter they're still going to i guarantee we're all over reddit the the left is probably railing on me the right's railing on you guys so it's it's it seems like even if you try everything in your power to make twitter healthier and better it's not going to change anything all right i'm not sure about that i'm not sure about that because one of the things that i do think is that just i'm not in favor of a lot of this heavy-handed banning and a lot of the things that have been going on particularly like a case like the megan murphy case but what i think that we are doing is we're we're exploring the idea of civil discourse where we're trying to figure out what's acceptable and what's not acceptable and you're communicating about this on a very large scale and it's putting that out there and then people are discussing it whether they agree or disagree or they vehemently defend you or or hate you they're discussing this and this is i think this is how these things change and they change over long periods of time think about words that were commonplace just a few years ago that you literally can't say anymore right you know i mean there's so many of them that were extremely commonplace or not even thought to be offensive ten years ago that now you can get banned off a platform but that's a good point to argue against banning people and to uh cease enforcing hate speech rules yeah i agree with that as well i think it's both things let me let me let me tell you something important i was in the uk at an event um for a man named count dankula who i don't know if you've heard of oh sure yeah yeah dankell is the guy who got charged and convicted of making a joke where he had his his pug do a nazi salute but i was there and i was arguing that a certain white nationalist had used racial slurs on youtube he has i don't want to name him and some guy in the uk said that's not true he's never done that and i said you're crazy let me pull it up unfortunately i don't know why but when i did the google search nothing came up what i did notice was at the bottom of the page it said due to you know uk law certain things have been removed so i don't know if it's exactly why i couldn't pull up a video proving or tweets or anything because i think using these words gets restripped from the social platforms i could not prove to this man the first entry in that in the uk that this would use a vpn and and get around that uh yeah i mean at the time i was just like trying to pull it up and i'm like oh that's weird so now you have someone who doesn't realize he's a fan of a bigot because the law has restricted the speech so there's a point to be made if you i understand you want a healthy like you you want twitter to grow you need it to grow the shareholders needed to grow the advertisers need to advertise so you've got all these restrictions but allowing people to say these awful things makes sure we stay away from them and it allows us to avoid certain people and isn't it important to know that these people hold these beliefs if you get rid of them you know someone could walk into a business and you wouldn't even know that they were a neo-nazi but if they were high profile saying they're things you'd be like that's the guy at home like you're absolutely right this is like one of my favorite sayings is that sunlight is the best disinfectant and it's so so so true like one of the biggest problems with censorship is the fact that you push people underground and you don't know what's going on and this is something i worry about it's not that i don't worry about why you banned people for these roles i also worry about driving people away from the platform and affecting their real lives so like we're trying to find this right balance and i hear you like you may not think we're drawing the lines in the right place and we get that feedback all the time and we're always trying to find the right places but i worry as much about like the underground and like being able to shine a light on these things as as anything else tim i i think it's a cost benefit analysis and we have to constantly rehash it and and do it it like we we have the technology we have today um and we are looking at technologies which open up the aperture even more and we all agree that a binary on or off is not the right answer and is not scalable we have started getting into nuance within our enforcement and we've also started getting into nuance with the presentation of of content so you know one path might have been for some of your replies for us to just remove that those you know offensive replies completely we don't do that we hide it behind an interstitial to protect the original tweeter and it and and also folks who don't want to see that they can still see everything they just have to do one more tap so that's one solution ranking is another solution but as technology gets better and we get better at applying to it we have a lot more optionality whereas we don't we don't have that as much today i i feel like you know i'm just going to reiterate an earlier point though you know if you recognize sunlight as the best is infectant you're it's like you're chasing after a goal that can never be met if you want to if you want to protect all speech and they start banning certain individuals you want you want to increase the amount of healthy conversations but you're banning some people well how long until this group is now offended by that group how long until you've banned everybody i hear you i i don't believe a permanent ban promotes health oh okay i don't know i don't i don't believe that but we we have to we have to work with the technologies tools and conditions that we that we have today so and evolve over over time to where we can see examples um like this woman at the westboro baptist church who was using twitter every single day to spread hate against the lgbtqa community and over time we had i think it was three or four folks on twitter who would engage her every single day about what she was doing and she actually left the church that's megan phelps she's amazing and she's crazy she's now pulling her family out of that as well and you could make the argument that if we banned that account early on she would have never left the church i completely hear that we we get it it's it's just well so it's i just want to make sure we we're advancing the conversation too and not just going to go back so uh i'll just ask you this have you considered allowing some of these people permanently banned back on with some restrictions maybe you can only tweet twice per day maybe you can't retweet or something to that effect i think we're very early in our thinking here so we're open-minded to how to do this i think we agree philosophically that permanent bands are an extreme case scenario and it shouldn't be one of our you know regularly used tools in our tool chest so how we do that i think is something that we're actively talking about today is there a timeline that we can so so look you know i think that would fix a lot of problems you think so yes i really do even if it's like i'm just curious like are you thinking like bands of a year or five years ten years like i'm just curious like what is what is a reasonable ban in this kind of context well i i think reasonably someone should have to state their case as to why they want to be unbanned like someone should have to have a like a well-measured considerate response to what they did wrong do they agree with what they did wrong maybe perhaps saying why they don't think they did anything wrong and you could review it from there i think um you know one of the challenges we have the benefit in english common law of hundreds of years of precedent and developing new rules and figuring out what works and doesn't twitter's very different so i think with the technology i don't know if you need permanent bands or even or even suspensions at all you could literally just i mean lock someone's account is essentially suspending them but uh i again i i wouldn't you know claim to know anything about the things you go through but what if you just restricted most of what they could say you know you blocked certain words in a certain dictionary if someone's been if someone received greased hill oh but no but but think about this way is it better that they're permanently banned or no it's not better but it's not it's not good either think about it this way instead of being suspended for 72 hours you get a dictionary block from hate speech words right does that not make sense but people just use coded language this is what we see all the time yeah i don't know well that's a good move what do you think about perhaps instead of what is it possible to have levels of twitter like a completely uncensored unmoderated level of twitter and then you know have like a rated r and then have like a pg-13 i mean i don't think that's a bad idea we we have those levels in place today but you don't really see them one we have a not safe for work switch which you can turn on or off oh really yeah not safe for work switch i think you have it off joe do it you think so just based on other things based on what you're seeing you have it off um so we don't even know it's there so we so we have that and then as vigil pointed out earlier you know we have the timeline we we started ranking the timeline uh about three years ago we enable people today to turn that off completely and see you know the reverse cron of everything they follow you can you can imagine a world where that switch has a lot more power over more of our algorithms throughout more of the surface areas you can imagine that so these are all the questions that are on the table you asked about timeline and this is this is a challenging one i don't know about timeline because first we we've decided that our priority right now is going to be on proactively enforcing a lot of this content specifically around anything that impacts physical safety like like doxing so i right but there's so many examples of what you guys not doing that i i know but that that's what we that's what we're fixing right now that's that's a prioritization but yeah i think from your own personal more perspective we think more in terms of milestones than the particular timeline we're going to move as fast as we can but some of it's a function of our of our infrastructure of the technology we have to we have to bring to bear do you guys have conversations about trying to shift the public perception of having this left-wing bias and maybe possibly addressing it yeah all right that's what they're doing right now right yeah i mean i i went on the sean hannity show i you know we how was that we brought ourselves before it was bringing a lot of sunlight it was short and he well it was short and um there weren't a lot of really tough questions and that was the feedback as well and yeah i i get it like look again i'm also i'm from missouri my dad is a republican he listened to hannity he listened to rush limbaugh my mom was a democrat and i feel extremely fortunate that i was able to first see that spectrum but also feel safe enough to express my own point of view but when i go on someone like hannity i'm not talking to hannity i'm talking to people like my dad who listen to him right and i want to get across how we think and and also that our thinking evolves and here's the challenges we're seeing and like this is our intent this is what we're trying to protect and we're going to make some mistakes along the way and we're going to admit to them we didn't admit to them in the past we'd admitted to a lot more uh over over the past three years um but you know i i don't know any other way to address some of these issues it all it all goes back to trust like our one of our core operating principles is earning trust how do we earn more trust and i you know there are people in the world who do not trust us at all and there are some people who trust us a little bit more but this is the thing that we want to measure this the thing that we want to get better at i saw uh you had a conversation with i think katie herzog no no who was it um that was the wrong person you had a twitter conversation with uh oh characters wow wrong person but someone's got a shout out uh and and you know i i see that the left goes at you in the opposite direction they want more can they want more banning they want more you know restrictions yeah and then look at the right is saying less right so i mean in terms of solving the problem uh tell us what that conversation was about uh i would you want to summarize because my the thing i was pointing out specifically was that you were being asked to do more in terms of controlling well it wasn't just more but to be a lot more specific about what actions we've taken to promote more health on the platform like what products did we change what policies did we introduce in the past uh two years so she was asking questions every question she asked she wanted me to be a lot more specific and some of these things have something that is very specific some are directional right now because like we we have to prioritize you know the direction and and i talked about like you know we've decided that physical safety is going to be a priority for us and to us that means like being a whole lot more proactive around things like doxing so two suggestions i guess i'm not going to imply that you have unlimited funding but we did mention the peer review right right and you had you mentioned earlier layoffs and retraction uh peer review which we mentioned but have you just considered opening an office even a small one for trust and safety in an area that's not predominantly blue so that at least you have like you can have some push back and is what does learn to code mean and then they could tell you absolutely so that's a that's great feedback and just so you know the trust and safety team is also a global team and the enforcement team is a global team so it's not like people from california who are looking at everything making decisions they're global now i hear your point about who trains them and the materials they have and all that and like we have to think about that and um that's that's one thing that jack has really been pushing us to think about is how do we decentralize our workforce because out of san francisco out of san francisco in particular so this is something he's very focused on what about publishing evidence of wrongdoing in a banning so when people say you know what did alex jones really do maybe a lot of people didn't realize what you what you saw and again it's an issue of trust yeah i i love this tim i'm a lawyer so by training um we're thinking of doing something called we call case studies but essentially like this is our case law this is what we use and so high profile cases cases people ask us about like to actually publish this so that we can go through you know tweet by tweet just like this because i think a lot of people just don't understand and they don't believe us when we're saying these things so to put that out there so people can see and again they may disagree with the calls that we're making but we at least want them to see why we're making these calls i think and that that i do want to do i want to at least start that by the end of this year so i think you know ultimately my main criticism stands and i don't see a solution to in that twitter is an unelected you know unaccountable as far as i'm concerned when it comes to public discourse you have rules that are very clearly at odds as we discussed i don't see a solution to that and i think in my opinion we can have this kind of like we've toned things down we've had some interesting conversations but ultimately unless you're willing to allow people to just speak entirely freely you are inv we have an unelected group with a near monopoly on public discourse in many capacities and i understand it's not everything reddit is big too and it's you know what i see is you are going to dictate policy whether you realize it or not and that's going to terrify people and it's going to make violence happen it's going to make things worse you know the the i i i i hate bringing up this example on the rule for misgendering because i'm actually i understand it and i can agree with it to a certain extent um and i have you know nothing but respect for the trans community but i also recognize we've seen an escalation in street violence we see a continually disenfranchised large faction of individuals in this country we then see only one of those factions banned we then see a massive multinational billion dollar corporation with private foreign investors and it looks to me like if you hold if if you know foreign governments are trying to manipulate us i don't see a direct solution to that problem that you do have political views you do enforce them and that means that americans who are abiding by american rule are being excised from political discourse and that's the future that's it yeah we we do have views on on the approach and and again it like we we ground this in creating as much opportunity as possible for the largest number of people right right that's where it starts and where we are today um will certainly evolve but like that that is what we are trying to base our our rules and judgments not and i i get that that's an ideology i i completely understand it but we we also have to we also have to be free to experiment with solutions and experiment with evolving policy and putting something out there that might look right at the time and evolving i'm not saying this is it but like we we look to research we look to our experience and data on the platform and and we make a call and if we get it wrong we're going to admit it and we're going to evolve it but i guess do you uh do you understand my point i understand the point that there are there are american citizens abiding by the law who have a right to speak and be involved in public discourse that you have decided aren't allowed to yeah and and i think we've discussed um like we we we don't see that as a win uh we we see that as not promoting health ultimately over time right but is ultimately what is your priority do you have it prioritized in terms of what you got what what you guys would like to change i think jack has said it a couple times but the first thing we're going to do is prioritize people's physical safety because that's got to be like understanding you already have done that pretty much right uh no you do that more we've prioritized it okay we're i don't think companies like ours make the link enough for me online and offline ramifications what's the main criticism what's the main criticism you guys is it censorship that you guys experience is it censorship is it banning like what is it what is it what do you get the most it depends on every single person has a different criticism so i don't think there's a universal opinion i mean you just painted the picture right i mean like the the the left-hand spectrum is asking for more sure and the right is asking for less that's very simplified just for this country but at a high level yeah that's consistent i mean my opinion would be as much as i i don't i don't like a lot of what people say about me what they do the rules you've enforced on twitter have done nothing to stop harassment towards me or anyone else right i swear to god my twitter i mean my reddit is probably you know 50 messages from various you know far left and left-wing subreddits lying about me calling me horrible names tweeting me and these people are blocked right and i i never used to block people because i thought it was silly because i can get around it anyway but i decided to at one point because out of sight out of mind if they see my tweets less they'll probably interact with me less but they do this and they lie about what i believe they lie about what i stand for and they're trying to destroy everything about me and they do this to other people i recognize that so ultimately i say well what can you do it's going to happen on one of these platforms the internet is a thing as they say on the internet welcome to the internet so you know to me i see twitter trying to enforce all these rules to maximize good and all you end up doing is stripping people from the platform putting them in dark corners of the web where they get worse and then you don't actually solve their harassment problems dark corner of the web right right no i'm not talking huge but there are dark corners i've read it there are alternatives i mean the internet isn't going to go away and people have found alternatives and here's the other thing that's really disconcerting we can see a trend among all these different big silicon valley tech companies and they they hold a similar view to you guys they ban similar ideology and they're creating a parallel society you've got alternative social networks popping up that are taking the dregs of the of the mainstream and giving them a place to flourish grow make money now we're seeing people be banned from mastercard from banned from paypal even banned from chase bank because they all hold the same similar ideology to you oh it's it's you know in some capacities uh i don't know exactly why chase does it i assume it's because you'll get some activists who will lie explain what you're talking about so there's there have been a series of individuals banned from chase bank um their accounts have been yes their accounts were closed one of i think maybe the most notable might be martina marcotta i don't know much about her i follow her on twitter and her tweets are typical conservative fair and she created a comic i think it's called lady alchemy she's a trump supporter and she got a notice that her business account was terminated you then have joe biggs who previously worked with infowars i don't know much about this i didn't follow up but he tweeted out chase's shutter my account and then you have the new chairman of the proud boys enrique i forgot his last name tario or something and so tina's really white oh no he's uh he's afro-cuban i know that's what's happening all right but you know so so what what i see across the board it's not just and this is what i want to bring up before about a perspective on these things you guys are like we're going to do this one thing and no snowflake blames itself for the avalanche but now what do we have we have conservatives being stripped from paypal we have certain individuals individuals stripped from paypal patreon financing so they set up alternatives now we're seeing people who have like you mentioned westboro baptist church and she's been de-radicalized by being on the platform but now we have people who are being radicalized by being pushed into the dark corners and they're building and they're getting they're growing and they're growing because there's this in this idea that you can control this and you can't you know uh i think you mentioned earlier that there are studies showing and also counter studies but people exposed to each other is better i found something really interesting and because i have most whether or not people want to believe this all of my friends are on the left and some of them are even like socialists and they're absolutely terrified to say to talk because they know they'll get attacked by the people who call for censorship and try to get them fired and when i talked to them i was talking to a friend of mine in la and she said is there a reason to vote for trump and i explained a very simple thing about trump supporters this is back in 2016 i said oh well you know you've got a lot of people who are concerned about the free trade agreements sending jobs overseas so they don't know much about trump but they're gonna vote for him because he supported that so did bernie and then the response is really i didn't know that and so you have this this uh ever-expanding narrative that trump supporters are you know nazis and the moga head is the kkk hood and a lot of this rhetoric you know emerges on twitter but when when a lot of these people are getting excised then you can't actually meet these people and see that they're actually people and they may be mean they may be mean people they may be awful people but they're still people and even if they have bad opinions sometimes you actually i think in most instances you find the regular people well there's a part of the problem of calling for censorship and banning people and that it is sometimes effective and that people don't want to be thought of as being racist or in support of racism or in support of nationalism or any of these horrible things so you feel like if you support these bannings you support positive discourse and a good society and all these different things what you don't realize is what you're saying is that this does create these dark corners of the web and these other social media platforms evolve and have farm i mean when you're talking about bubbles and about these uh the these group think bubbles the worst kind of group think bubbles is a bunch of hateful people that get together and decide their post they've been persecuted instead of like we were talking about with megan phelps having an opportunity to maybe reshape their views by having discourse with people who choose to or not choose to engage with them well let's let's think about the the logical end of where this is all going you want healthier conversations so you're willing to get rid of some people who then feel persecuted and have no choice but to band together with others mastercard chase patreon they all do it facebook does it they're growing these platforms are growing they're getting more users they're expanding they're showing up in real life and they're they're you know even if these people who are banned aren't the neo-nazi evil they're just regular people who have banded together that forms a parallel finance system a parallel economy you've got patreon alternatives emerging where people are saying you know we we reject you and now we're on a platform where people say the most ridiculous things now they have money and normalizes that as well that's also important that's what i mean by parallel society to them everything they're doing is just and and right yes and you can't stop them anymore and it develops hate for the opposing viewpoint you start hating people that are progressive because these are the people that like you and i've talked about the dating society report that labeled us as alt-right adjacent or what whatever now more fake news coming out about it right but it's ridiculous they're connected because you and i have talked to people that are uh on the right or far right that somehow or another were secretly far right and that there's this influence network of people together and it's just well it's a schizophrenic connection it's like one of those weird things where people draw a circle oh you talked to this guy and this guy talked to that guy therefore you know that guy well so so so here's an expanded part of this problem uh so this this you're probably not familiar but a group called data in society published what's entirely fake um report labeling 81 alt-right adjacent or whatever they want to call it youtube channels included joe rogan and me it's fake but you know what a couple dozen news outlets wrote about it as if it was fact you believe the proud boys were labeled as fba by the fbi's extremists when they actually weren't it was a sheriff's report from someone not affiliated with the fbi but they are activists within media who have an agenda and we saw this with learn to code it was an nbc reporter who very clearly is in you know left-wing identitarian writing a story for nbc then your average american sees that nbc story thinks it's factual then everyone talks about it then your people hear about it then you start banning people so you know i guess to drive the point home the snowflake won't blame itself for the avalanche you guys are doing what you think is right so is facebook youtube patreon all these all these platforms and it's all going to result in one thing it's going to result in groups like patriot prayer and the proud boys saying i refuse to back down showing up it's going to result in antifa showing up it's going to result in more extremism you've got an anti-account that published the home addresses and phone numbers that hasn't been banned that's going to further like show conservatives that the policing is asymmetrical whether you know it is or isn't and i think the only outcome to this on the current course of action is like insurgency we've seen people planting bombs in houston try to blow up a statue we saw someone plant a bomb at a police station in eugene oregon two weeks before that a guy showed up with a gun and fired two rounds at a cop wearing a smash the patriarchy and chill shirt so you know so so that happens then a week later they say you killed our comrade then a week later obama's planted i don't believe it's coincidence maybe it is but you know i lived in new york i got out too many people knew who i was and there was people sending me emails with threats and i'm like this is escalating you know we've seen throughout the past years with trump we've seen um breitbart has a list of 640 instances of trump supporters being physically attacked or harassed in some way there was a story the other day about an 81 year old man who was attacked and it seems like everything's flowing in one direction and nobody wants to take responsibility and say maybe we're doing something wrong right that's why that's why i brought up early regulations in my opinion inevitable yeah i mean i i don't think it's going to be the responsibility of any one company we we have a desire let me be clear that we have a desire to promote health in in public conversation and as we've said like i i don't think over time a permanent ban promotes health i i i don't but we we have to we have to we have to get there and there are there are exceptions in the role of course but like we we we just have work to do and i the the benefit of conversations like this is we're talking about it more but the people will naturally call us out like you gotta you gotta show it as well do you fear regulation i don't i don't fear regulation if if we're talking about regulation in the government intervention in the job of if a regulator's job is to protect the individual and make sure that they level the playing field and they're not um pushed by any particular special interests like companies like ours who might you know work with a regular to protect our own interest that i think is incorrect i agree that we should have um a an agency that can help us protect the um protect the individual and level the playing field right so i think oftentimes companies see themselves as reacting to regulation and i think we need to take more of an education role so i don't fear it i want to make sure that we're educating regulators on what's possible what we're seeing and where we could go when you say educating regulators that's initiating a regulation i mean you you not necessarily i mean we might just be educating regulators who are these regulators these are folks who who might be um tasked with coming up with a proposal for particular legislation or or laws um to present to um legislators so it's making sure that we are educating to the best our ability this is what we are this is what we see this is where technology is going and do you think you can hold off regulation though do you think that by these approaches and by being proactive and by taking a stand and perhaps offering up a road to redemption to these people and making clear distinctions between what you're what you're allowing what you're not allowing you can hold off congratulation or do you disagree with what he's saying about regulation i don't believe that should be our goal is to hold off regulation i believe we should be we should participate like any other citizen whether it be a corporate citizen or individual citizen in helping to guide the right regulation so uh are you familiar and i could be wrong on this because it's been like 15 years since i've done this are you familiar with the clean water restoration act at all i don't expect it to be it's a very specific thing so uh it was at some point in like the early 70s there was a river in ohio and again i could be wrong it's been 15 years i used to work for an environmental organization started on fire and what was typically told to us was that all of these different companies said we're doing the right thing but like as i mentioned the snowflake doesn't blame itself so over time the river was so polluted it became sludge and lit on fire and so someone said if all of these companies think they're doing the right thing and they've all just contributed to this nightmare we need to tell them blanket regulation and so what i see with these companies like banking institutions public discourse platforms video distribution i actually i'm really worried about what regulation will look like because i think the government is going to you know screw everything up but i think there's going to be a recoil of uh first i think the republicans because i watched the testimony you had in congress and i thought they had no idea what they're talking about nor did they care there was like a couple people who made good points but for the most part they were like whatever and they asked about russia and stuff so they have no idea what's going on but there will come a time when you know for instance one of one of the great things they brought up was that by default when someone in dc signs up they see way more democrats than republicans right you remember that when you testified yeah so well that there's an issue and i don't think i i believe you when you say it's algorithmic that these are you know prominent individuals so they get automatically recommended but then they're you know so again the solution to that like how do you regulate a programmer to create an algorithm to solve that problem is is crazy you're regulating someone to invent technology but i feel like there will be a backlash when too many right now we're seeing the reason one of the reasons we're having this conversation is that conservatives feel like they're being persecuted and repressed so then it's going to escalate for me it's not going to stop with these conversations and so that we've been having a lot of talks about this particularly around algorithms and um one of the things that we're really focused on is not just fairness and outcomes but also explainability of algorithms and i know jack you you love the steps i don't know if you want to talk a little bit about our work there yeah i mean we um so there's two fields of research within artificial intelligence that are rather new but i think really impactful for our industry one is fairness and ml um so fairness and what fairness and machine learn learning and uh deep learning so looking at everything from what data said is fed to an algorithm so like the training data set all the way to how the algorithm actually behaves on that on that data set making sure that it it does not develop bias over the um longevity of the algorithm's use case so that's one area that we want to lead in and we've been working with some of the leading researchers in the industry to do that because the reality is a lot of this human judgment is moving algorithms and the the second issue with moving algorithms is algorithms today can't necessarily explain the decision-making criteria that they use so they can't explain in the way that you make a decision you explain why you make that decision algorithms today are not being programmed in such a way that they can even explain that you may wear an apple watch for instance it might tell you to stand every now and then um right now those algorithms can't explain why why they're doing that right that's a bad example because it does it every every 50 minutes but as we offload more and more of these decisions both internally and also individually to watches and and to cars and whatnot there there is no uh there's no ability right now for that algorithm to actually go through and list out the criteria used to make that decision so this is another area that we'd like to get really good at if we want to continue to be transparent around our actions because a lot of these things are just black boxes and they're being built in that way because there's been no research into like well how do we get these algorithms to explain what their decision is that question hasn't been asked my fear is you it's technology that you need to build but the the public discourse is there we we know that foreign governments are doing this we know that democratic operatives in alabama did this and so i imagine that you know with donald trump i i you know he talked about an executive order for free speech on college campuses so that the chattering is here someone's going to take a sledgehammer to twitter to facebook to youtube and just be like for not understanding the technology behind it not willing to give you the benefit but the benefit of the doubt and just saying i don't care why you're doing it we are mad you know what i mean some bills and then it's over again clarifying i i i think you guys are biased and i think what you're doing is dangerous but i think that doesn't matter it doesn't matter what you think is right it matters that all of these companies are doing similar things and it's and it's and it's already terrifying people i mean look when when i saw somebody got banned from their bank account that's terrifying and paypal's done this for a long time you know that seems like more egregious than being banned from any social justice or social media platform that that seems to me to be worthy of boycott patriot patreon issued a statement about a man i believe his name is robert spencer and they said mastercard instructed us to ban him and you know what you know i'll say this too me mentioning chase paypal mastercard terrifies me i'm on the joe rogan podcast right now calling out these big companies in defiance and we've already i would like to know all the specifics of why they chose to do that i would hope that they would release some sort of a statement explaining why they chose to do that maybe there's something we don't know there was a there was a reporter um and i could be getting this wrong because i didn't follow it very much with big league politics who said that after reporting on paypal negatively they banned him that's terrifying so it's just reporting on it in what way like reporting on the sargon of akkad issue no apparently he's a journalist he wrote about something bad paypal did big league politics is conservative and so all of a sudden he got a notification that they can't tell him why but he's gone so i see these big tech monopolies i see youtube facebook twitter i see paypal mastercard and they're doing it and they all say they're doing the right thing but all of these little things they're doing are adding up to something nightmarish and some some legislators gonna show up in a matter of time with a sledgehammer and just he's gonna whack your algorithm well it's really the same stupid logic where i was talking about where you know gavin was saying punch people when you punch people it doesn't end there oh yeah ban them bam it doesn't end there it doesn't end there yeah you have to realize also uh twitter is how old now 11 years old 12 years old 13 years old 13 years old well 13 years from now what are the odds that there's not going to be something else just like it well pretty slim uh yeah we do so but here's so let's see let's let's talk about the incestuous relationship that a lot of these journalists have been defending the policies you guys push gab it was was was uh a study was done i talked about this last time where they found five percent of the tweet of the i don't say tweets but the post on gabor hate speech compared to twitter's like 2.4 so it's a marginal increase yet gab is called the white supremacy network of course you go on it and yeah absolutely it exists they say that synagogue shooter oh he was a gab user he was a twitter user too he posted on twitter all the time so why the media is is targeting it's it's such a crazy reality it is deductive narrative when when the guardian uh i believe was the daily mail called count dankula a nazi hate criminal yeah i saw that dude literally made a joke on youtube and he's being he was arrested i'm i thank god every day we have the first amendment in this country well there was a cover of a newspaper that was cause he got a new job somewhere he got fired for that he got kicked off the show wow yeah there's so so you have cause of trying to get it let me look let me ask you another thing do you guys do you guys take the advice of the southern poverty law center do we take the advice of like so it's it's widely circulated the splc lobbies various social platforms to ban certain people they advise uh it's been reported they advised youtube as is the anti-defamation league do you use them in your decision-making process it rule development we're very aware of flaws with certain of their research and we're very careful about who we take advice from but do you take advice from them um i i think that they have certainly reached out to our team members but there's certainly nothing definitive that we take from them we don't take correction you never take an action based on information received from them so the reason i bring them up specifically is that they're cited often you know in the united states there's other groups like hope not hate in the uk and now they're all going to point their you know figurative guns at me for saying this but the southern poverty law center uh wrote an article where they claimed i went to iran for a holocaust scenarios conference and i've never been to iran and their evidence was this guy found an archived website from a holocaust denier with my name on it and that was their proof and there are people who have been labeled you know extremists by this organization that have been sam harris sam harris was start was yeah didn't he didn't they lose a big lawsuit around this yeah yeah so so again like not not to imply that you guys do use it but i asked specifically because it's been reported other organizations do so we have activist organizations we have journalists that i can attest are absolutely activists because i've worked for i worked for vice i worked for a fusion i was told uh it implicitly not explicitly to lie to side with the audience as it were i've seen the narratives they push and i've had conversations with people that i'm not gonna i'm gonna keep relatively off the record journalists who are terrified because they said the narrative is real right one journalist in particular said that he had he had evidence of you know essentially he had reason to believe there was a wrongdoing but if he talks about it he could lose his job and there there was a journalist who reported to me that dating society admitted their report was was was was uh incorrect and now you've got organizations lobbying for terminating joe and i because of this stuff so this this narrative persists then you see all the actions i mentioned before and all the organizations saying we're doing the right thing and i gotta say like we're living in a i mean i feel like we're looking at the doorway to the nightmare dystopia i i i just want to clarify like i don't i don't know if we're going around saying we're we're necessarily doing the right thing we're saying why we're doing what we're doing right right that's what we need to get better at and i i don't want to hide behind what we believe is like the right thing we have to clearly rationalize why we're making the decision we're making and more of that that's that to me is the prevention from this snowflake avalanche metaphor well but but i think it's just obvious to point out again i said this before we can have the calm conversation and i can understand you but for um from where i'm sitting you hold a vastly different ideology than i do and you have substantially more power in controlling my government that terrifies me and what's what makes it worse is that a saudi prince owns a at least was reported that society prince owns a portion of that company so i'm sitting here like just a little american i can't do anything to stop it i'm just watching this unaccountable machine turn away and you're just one snowflake and then avalanche all these other companies are as well and i'm like well here we go there's going to be a ride this video said that saudi prince doesn't have any influence but but am i supposed to trust that that's that's the issue right i'm not trying to insinuate he's showing up to your meetings and telling you what to do but when someone dumps a billion dollars in your company i think it's silly to to imply that they don't at least have some influence but regardless and unlike the internet within a company like ours you don't necessarily see the protocol you don't see the the processes and and that is an area where we can do a lot more i i guess you know beat it over the head a million times be the dead horse i think ultimately yeah i get what you're doing i think it's wrong i think it's terrifying and i think we're looking we're on the avalanche already it's happened and we're heading down to this nightmare scenario of the future where it terrifies me when i see people who claim to be supporting liberal ideology burning signs that say free speech threatening violence against other people you have these journalists who do the same thing they accuse everybody of being a nazi everybody of being a fascist and you're like you're like a socialist as far as i know you're like ubi proponent you know well i wouldn't necessarily say i'm very i'm being facetious i'm except for the second amendment that's probably the only thing that i disagree with a lot of liberals on and then you see what the media says about everybody you see how they called jordan peterson all day and night alt-right all right hates him and this narrative is used to strip people of their income to remove them from public discourse well it's foolish because it in the ultimately upon examination like you're saying that sunlight is the best disinfection absolutely and upon examination you realize this is not true at all and that these people look foolish like they did in society uh article no no no all these organizations published that as fact without looking at any data maybe some did but anyway dozens but yeah and no no no no no they're still talking about millions and millions of people who's who are these people that are still citing it guardian well climb the company and start yelling shame but so so look we now have uh and this which makes things muddier is we now have a guy who's claiming that he did an uh this is you're gonna love this there's a guy claiming that the 81 accounts listed on this thing as alt-right have been are no longer being recommended on youtube and so i i looked at the the statistics for various people on this channel because first of all my channel is doing great my recommendations are way up uh as are yours a lot of people are growing and i did a comparison like subscribers or views are up what's this guy claiming and apparently he did a big sampling of videos where he for some reason thought you joe rogan were 12 of all videos in this network and then when when his data stopped working he claimed that everything stopped so he actually produced a graph of primarily your channel and then when his system stopped working he published that and it was picked up by cnet and now you have people claiming the alt-right has been banned from from youtube and it's more fake news based off fake news based off fake news i don't understand what you're saying so so basically there's a guy claiming that because of data and society we have been stripped of recommendations on youtube that you do i'll tell you one thing that is true though we don't trend like alex jones was saying like uh the video we did got nine million views but it's not trending and i said well it's because my videos never trend they just don't trend well here but i think it's probably because of the language that's used i think that's that's part of the issue it's a subject matter in language i think they have uh they have a bias against swearing and you know extreme topics and subjects i don't think that's true because you've had like uh late night tv hosts talk about really messed up things yeah they don't swear though it's not this it's not a matter of and what they talk about whether that's messed up in comparison what we talk about it's probably pretty different you know what man i'm uh i'm fairly resigned to this future happening no matter what we do about it and so i bought a van and i'm going to convert it to jesus christ well i'm coming into a work station right you're going to be a prepper bro no no no no no no first of all i will say it's hilarious to me like that people have band-aids they never use but they don't store like at least one emergency like food supply it's like you never use band-aids why do you have them but uh no i i do i see this every day it was a couple years ago i said wow i see what's happening on social media we're going to see violence boom violence happened i said oh it's going to escalate someone's been killed boom charlottesville happened and it's like i i've there have been statements from foreign security advisors international security experts saying we're facing down high probability of civil war and i know it sounds crazy it's not going to look like what you think it looks like it may not be as extreme as it was in 1800s but this was i think i think it was in the atlantic where they surveyed something like 10 different international security experts who said based on what the platforms are doing based on how people are responding one guy said it was like 90 chance but the average was really high well let's if let's look outside of the idea of physical war and let's look at the war of information what we're talking about what's happening with foreign entities invading uh social media platforms and trying to influence our elections and our democracy that is a war of information that is that war is already going on if you're looking at something like data in society that's sort of an act of war in that regard right right it's an information war an attempt to to lie to people about their their ideological opponents and it's also one of the women who wrote that said that it's been proven over and over again that deep platforming is an effective way to silence people and then called for us to be banned yeah which is kind of hilarious i don't think she was saying that we should be banned i don't think she said well she should be she said something the effect of youtube has to take action to prevent this from you know well you know when people see someone saying things that they don't agree with it's very important for people to understand where silencing people leads to and i don't think they do i think people have these very simplistic ideologies and these very very narrow-minded perceptions of what is good and what is wrong and i think and i've been saying this over and over again but i think it's one of the most important things to state people need to learn to be reasonable they need to be learned to be reasonable and civil discourse civil discourse is extremely important and think over the long term yes think over the long term and you're playing chess yeah um we did three hours and 30 minutes didn't we nobody had a p amazing i'm proud of all of you we did start a little late like 3 15. okay i mean um i guess the last thing i could say is i don't think i think we had a good conversation i think we did i i honestly i don't think we've solved anything i don't think there's been any do you think we could do this again in like six months and see where you guys are at in terms of like what i think is important is the road to redemption i think that would open up a lot of doors for a lot of people to appreciate you we're gonna need more than six months jesus christ don't you let me do it but here's the scary thing the the information travels faster than you can right yeah and that's the point i was making the the our culture is going to evolve faster than you can catch up to that problem because there's a problem and i don't well you know technology took a big leap twitter existed the internet existed now we're all talking so quickly you can't actually solve the problem before the people get outraged by it so no i i get i mean there's an early phrase on the internet by some of the earliest in internet engineers and designers which is code is law and a lot of a lot of what companies like ours and startups and random folks who are individuals who are contributing to the internet will change parts of society and some for the positive and some for the negative and the most i think the most important thing that we need to do is to just as we just said shine a bunch of light on it make sure that people know where we stand and where we're trying to go and what bridges we might need to build from our current state to the future state and and and be open about the fact that like we're not going to and this is to your other point we're not going to get to a perfect answer here like it's it's just going to be steps and steps and steps and steps and the what we need to build is agility what we need to build is an ability to experiment very very quickly and take in all these feedback loops that we get some feedback loops like this some within the numbers itself and then integrate them much faster what's wrong with the with the jury system on twitter why wouldn't that work i i don't know why it wouldn't work i'm not saying we wouldn't test that yeah like we're testing in periscope and and i don't have a reason a compelling reason why we wouldn't do it within twitter either i don't so we likely will but you know again we we're a company of so many resources finite resources finite people and and we need to prioritize and we've decided you may disagree with this decision but we've decided that physical safety and the admission of off-platform ramifications is critical for us and we need to be able to be a lot more proactive in our enforcement which will lead to um stronger answers and we want we want to focus on the physical safety aspect and doxxing is a perfect example that has patterns that are recognizable and then we can move on i i hear it and i just feel like you know the conclusion i can come from the conversation is you're going to do what you think needs to be done i think what you're doing is wrong and ultimately nothing's going to change i get it you're going to you're going to try new technologies you're going to try and do new systems from the from where i see it i think you have an ideology diametrically opposed to mine i mean not to an extreme degree i think there are people who are more like i'm not conservative um there are a lot of people who are who are probably think you know i'll say this too you're a symbol for a lot of them and so i can definitely respect you having a conversation there are so many different companies that do things that piss people off you sitting here right now i'm sure there's a ton of conservatives who are pointing all of their anger at you because you're here but you know ultimately i just feel like i don't think anything's going to change i think you're on your path you know what you need to do and you're trying to justify it and i'm looking at what twitter is doing as very wrong and it's it's it's uh oppressive and ideologically driven and i'm trying to justify why you shouldn't do it but nothing's going to change my my intention is to build a platform that gives as many people as possible opportunity to freely express themselves and some people believe the united states has already done that and twitter is now going against what the u.s has developed over hundreds of united states i mean the united states doesn't have a platform to do that twitter is when you're talking about the internet the united states if they want to come up with a united states twitter like a solution or an alternative that the government runs and they use it use free speech to govern that good luck good luck with that well it's a huge it's a challenge and also i recognize it's not just you you know almost insurmountable i mean did they have the dummies that are in charge of uh the united states government this is why i said regulation is scary yeah you know this is a slideshow it's a terrible idea but so but you know and i i think it's important to point out too that a lot of people don't realize you guys have to contend with profits you have to be able to make money to pay your staff there's no like you don't get free money to run your company so aside from the fact that you have advertisers want to be on the platform i imagine a lot of these companies are enforcing hate speech policies because advertisers don't want to be associated with certain things so that creates you know through advertisement cultural restrictions that's 100 the problem right 100 the problem with most these platforms including youtube absolutely yeah i mean when the pewdiepie thing happened and all of these uh you know restrictions came down on on advertising and content creators that's where it comes from it all comes from from money it's why uh i'll put those just to be clear those can be segmented as well advertisers advertisers can choose where they want to where they want to be placed certainly but the platform recognizes there's a huge blowback and they're losing money i mean look at the the the pedo scandal that just happened on youtube it was people posting comments with time stamps they weren't even breaking the rules and advertisers pulled off the platform and youtube didn't realize because they weren't breaking the rules they're just creepy dudes so creepy people also they were putting comments and so one of the most preposterous responses to that was that content creator is going to be responsible for their comments well they just turned them off well the problem with this people like me is that i put out a lot of content and there's millions of views and it's impossible to moderate all those cont the comments and we don't moderate them at all right about youtube banned only on videos with miners so they deleted all comments videos with mine yeah videos where they say youth but you know what i'm saying if you put a youtube video on you have a bunch of people that say a bunch of racist things in your youtube comments you could be held responsible and get a [ __ ] no no no youtube clarified that they clarified that when the uh recently they said afterwards but the first initial statement was that you were going to be responsible for your comments and then they said it's only people like philip defranco and a lot of people freaked out and then they qualified but so the reason i bring that up is just because there's going to be things that even if you segment your advertisers from look you know i pointed out i think the the democrats are in a really dangerous position because outrage culture although it exists in all factions is predominantly on one faction and so when trump comes out and says something really offensive you know grab him by the you know what i'm talking about the trump supporters laugh they bought t-shirts that said it the people on the left the democrat types they got angry so what happens now you see bernie sanders he's being dragged the media is looking for blood and they're desperate they're laying people off they're dying and they will do whatever it takes to get those clicks there's a like you know what does that have to do with twitter though it has to do with the fact that someone's going to find something on your platform and they're going to call up your advertiser and say look what twitter's doing and you're going to be like we have no idea and they're too bad canceled all ads your money's dried up and so the reason i bring that up is i recognize twitter youtube facebook these other platforms are worried money has to come from somewhere to pay people so you also have to realize you've got the press that's salivating looking for that juicy story where they can accuse you of wrongdoing because it'll get them clicks they'll make money and that means even though youtube did nothing wrong with these comments it was just a creepy group of people who didn't break the rules who figured out how to manipulate the system youtube ate like youtube you had to take the take that one the advertisers pulled out youtube lost money so youtube then panics sledgehammers comments just wipes them out that that could happen to anybody right we're in a really dangerous time with well also in their defense though they have to deal with that i mean they have a bunch of pedophiles that are posting comments i mean what do you do about that what do you want other than hire millions of people to moderate every single video that's put on youtube which is almost impossible the point i'm trying to bring up is that even if twitter wanted to say you know what we're gonna allow free speech what happens advertisers are later even if you segment it they're gonna be threatened by it and so the restrictions are gonna come from whether or not you can make money doing it i don't know about that i don't know i i think that that is changing and i think that is changing primarily because the internet if you look at what was acceptable in terms of people discussing that would get advertisement it was network television standards now that's changing i mean there's there's going to be there's ads on a lot of the videos that i put out that have pretty extreme content it's because advertisers are changing their perspective do you i don't think so they're shifting they're 100 shifting that's why this this podcast has ads sure sure i mean i don't think it's to the point where everyone's lost all ads but i look you think george carlin would be allowed to do his bit today yes no way no come on man they were not right he would be able to do it listen there's stuff like that on netflix specials that are out right now things are changing it's just in the process of this transformation where people are understanding that because of the internet first if you look at late night conversations how about colbert saying that president trump has putin's dick in his mouth how about him saying that on television do you really think that would have been done 10 years ago it wouldn't have been or 15 years ago or 20 impossible not possible but your standards are changing because of the internet so things that were impossible to say on network television just 10 years ago you can see that kevin kevin hart lost his oscar hosting gig because of john 10 years ago right but do you know why he lost he lost it because people were complaining right because people who were activists were complaining that he had said some homophobic things and they donated he had subsequently apologized for before they ever said that count count dankel as a comedian okay look you were to discuss this i'm with you and i understand what you're saying i am a comedian but i am a comedian and i understand where things are going the the the demise of free speech is greatly exaggerated that's what i'm saying i'm saying there's a lot of people out there that are complaining but the problem is not necessarily that there's so many people that are complaining the problem is that people are reacting to those complaints right the vast majority of the population is recognizing that there is an evolution of free speech that's occurring in our culture in all cultures around the world but this is a slow process that when you're in the middle of it it's almost like evolution you're in the middle of it you don't think anything is happening but it's [ __ ] happening no so i agree with you i agree with you that the majority of people are like that's funny i don't care but the minority is kind of dictating things right now for now they're not even dictating things they're just making a lot of points that noise is having an effect that's what data in society was an attempt at right i don't think it was effective that's why we're still here we're talking right now it was one attack but i mean there's many of them man there's hundreds of articles that are written about all sorts of things that are inaccurate or uh and some people have been eating their bank accounts and some people have been kicked off yes this is why it's important to have this conversation right conversations like this well so so here's what i'll say i just i cross my fingers and i wait for when you implement blockchain technology bro well the van is going to be a mobile production studio so i can travel around when things are getting great it's a lot of water food i'm putting more than just band-aids i'm putting a shower in it okay it's going to be like a computer and monitors and i'm going to be able to do video so i can travel around when everything's happening but but let's wrap this up i want to see the blockchain version of twitter where it's saying it exists that's what i want to see it's going to happen whether we like it or not um any last thoughts no i just want to thank you joe this has been great and tim thanks for your feedback we're always listening and i've learned a lot today thank you i really appreciate you guys thank you jack thank you any last things no i think we've said it all that's a wrap folks no more ear beatings good night everybody that was awesome thank you all right thank you thanks for for talking i really do appreciate it hey could you i just want to follow up on a couple of things because they worry me you mentioned an antifa count that doc's policeman can you please just send that over to me antifa tweet and then um would you dm me i'll follow you would you dm me the accounts that you said have threatened you no no um uh i believe in minimizing harm and if i i i so uh when patreon i won't how about this i won't take action on them but i want to understand why we didn't take action on them and i can't learn from that unless you so so uh when lauren sutherland got banned from patreon a lot of people were there you you

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 10,054,061

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, podcast, JRE #1258, 1258, Joe Rogan, Jack Dorsey, Tim Pool, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter, censorship, banned, comedy, comedian, jokes, stand up, funny, mma, UFC, Ultimate Fighting Championship

Id: DZCBRHOg3PQ

Length: 205min 11sec (12311 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 06 2019