Facebook admits it censored on behalf of government (08-27-2024--Hour1)

[00:00:04] [SPEAKER_02]: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalinershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:28] [SPEAKER_02]: All righty, what is going on? Happy Tuesday. Pete Kaliner here. Welcome to the program. News Talk 1110-993-WBT-7045-701110. Email is pete at thepetekalinershow.com. Mark Zuckerberg is very sorry. Very, very sorry for any role that he may have played or his company may have played in deceiving the American public in the run up to the last election.

[00:00:52] [SPEAKER_02]: I want to welcome to the program from the Media Research Center. That's MRC.org. Curtis Houck. He is the managing editor of News Busters at the Media Research Center. Welcome, Curtis. How are you, sir?

[00:01:06] [SPEAKER_00]: Hey, good to be with you. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:08] [SPEAKER_02]: Did I come close to pronouncing your last name correctly?

[00:01:12] [SPEAKER_02]: Yes.

[00:01:12] [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, great. Okay. All right. So first of all, Mark Zuckerberg says in a letter, I guess he sent this over to the House Judiciary,

[00:01:22] [SPEAKER_02]: Judiciary Committee, members of Congress, that yes, in fact, Facebook had caved into pressure by the Biden-Harris administration to lightly censor or moderate some content.

[00:01:39] [SPEAKER_02]: So explain why is this a big deal? I mean, didn't most people already know that this was happening or had happened?

[00:01:47] [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, yeah, of course, this is something that we all knew. But this was one of those things where you got to put the meat on the bone.

[00:01:54] [SPEAKER_00]: You got to have Zuckerberg say it for like for all the media like losers out there who were like going along with this and are totally fine with it.

[00:02:04] [SPEAKER_00]: But yes, he's very sorry that he basically was duped and he was pressured by the administration, the Biden administration, to not only, you know, censor COVID-19 content, humor, satire.

[00:02:19] [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, obviously it was about vaccines, but also it had to do with COVID origins.

[00:02:24] [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's really something that we've been interested in at Newsbusters.

[00:02:28] [SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of people are interested in COVID content specifically regarding origins being censored, the lab leak theory,

[00:02:34] [SPEAKER_00]: because we know from the emails that this was something Francis Collins and NIH and Tony Fauci were annoyed with,

[00:02:42] [SPEAKER_00]: perturbed with that people were accusing them of all these things.

[00:02:45] [SPEAKER_00]: And so they wanted it taken away so they could shut down debate. But the other thing in this letter that was important was he admitted that, yes,

[00:02:52] [SPEAKER_00]: we were told that we needed to downgrade it, slash OK, censor Hunter Biden content as well, you know, going back for the last election.

[00:03:01] [SPEAKER_00]: And he said, yes, it was because the FBI told us we needed to do this because this was Russian disinformation.

[00:03:07] [SPEAKER_00]: So here again, you know, the things that we know that the Twitter files have talked about.

[00:03:13] [SPEAKER_00]: But for the rubes out there in the liberal media, this is very plainly spoken from Mark Zuckerberg's mouth in the form of a letter to our ears.

[00:03:24] [SPEAKER_00]: That, yes, these things happen. So now these things cannot be in dispute.

[00:03:28] [SPEAKER_00]: And he's very sorry that it won't happen again. But yes, in terms of whether he would censor again,

[00:03:33] [SPEAKER_00]: I'm highly skeptical, but I'm glad this came out.

[00:03:37] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. So there were a couple there were three main portions of the letter right now.

[00:03:41] [SPEAKER_02]: The first was the covid-19 related posts and such.

[00:03:46] [SPEAKER_02]: The second was, as you mentioned, the Hunter Biden laptop.

[00:03:48] [SPEAKER_02]: And then the third is the Zuckerberg's and the donation of money to local boards of election that somehow, crazily enough,

[00:03:58] [SPEAKER_02]: managed to end up in predominantly Democrat precincts and counties to get out the vote and to help elections run more smoothly for those areas versus the Republican areas.

[00:04:11] [SPEAKER_02]: On the Hunter Biden laptop story, and I've been following this one for years now.

[00:04:17] [SPEAKER_02]: And I am, you know, the only way in my understanding of this is the only way this worked was because there was the sort of readying the field for the planting

[00:04:31] [SPEAKER_02]: where they did tabletop exercises with media people.

[00:04:34] [SPEAKER_02]: I think it was out of the Aspen Institute and they would essentially war game like what would happen?

[00:04:40] [SPEAKER_02]: We're just going to come up with just some, you know, random hypothetical that let's say Hunter Biden's laptop gets stolen and it's got a bunch of stuff on it.

[00:04:48] [SPEAKER_02]: That would be a Russian disinformation operation.

[00:04:50] [SPEAKER_02]: They literally use that example. And then lo and behold, a couple of months later, oh, here's a Hunter Biden laptop.

[00:04:56] [SPEAKER_02]: And so, of course, now the social media people may be a little bit motivated reasoning going on, too.

[00:05:01] [SPEAKER_02]: But they they immediately, dare I say, pounce or seize upon the information and say, aha, this must be it, which to me indicates they knew this was coming.

[00:05:12] [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah. I mean, and the news media kind of have been revealing telling on themselves by not even touching this.

[00:05:19] [SPEAKER_00]: Last night, ABC, CBS, NBC on their newscast didn't bring it up.

[00:05:23] [SPEAKER_00]: And then this morning, CBS Mornings didn't mention it either.

[00:05:27] [SPEAKER_00]: Today's show had a 39 second news brief.

[00:05:30] [SPEAKER_00]: But the way they phrased it was Zuckerberg apologizing for giving into pressure from the Biden administration to censor COVID content during the pandemic.

[00:05:40] [SPEAKER_00]: That's what they said. The entire letter was about the noble lie.

[00:05:43] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's like it's framed as the noble obligation.

[00:05:45] [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, extreme oversimplification of the matter.

[00:05:49] [SPEAKER_00]: Now, to their credit, ABC News did about two and a half minutes with this.

[00:05:53] [SPEAKER_00]: And yes, that the framing of this from their correspondent, Aaron Katursky, correctly noted that a lot of this dealt with.

[00:06:01] [SPEAKER_00]: He waited. He called it the general consensus in the medical community about COVID.

[00:06:05] [SPEAKER_00]: But he said especially the origin of COVID-19 checkmark there, you know, bowed to pressure to censor.

[00:06:13] [SPEAKER_00]: And then, you know, he brought up the example of the pressure, the public.

[00:06:18] [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, there was private pressure, but there was public pressure.

[00:06:20] [SPEAKER_00]: Folks may forget this.

[00:06:21] [SPEAKER_00]: Back in July 2021, Biden on the way to Marine One on the White House lawn said Facebook is, quote, killing people.

[00:06:31] [SPEAKER_01]: Mm hmm.

[00:07:01] [SPEAKER_00]: They have demoted the story.

[00:07:02] [SPEAKER_00]: Close quote.

[00:07:03] [SPEAKER_00]: From Zuckerberg.

[00:07:06] [SPEAKER_00]: And that's, you know, in just a sentence is the correct way to put it.

[00:07:10] [SPEAKER_00]: It was not Russian disinformation.

[00:07:13] [SPEAKER_00]: But the liberal media, what they will not do is, like a lot of these things, they act detached.

[00:07:18] [SPEAKER_00]: Like they were not part of this entire narrative.

[00:07:21] [SPEAKER_00]: That they were supportive of this.

[00:07:23] [SPEAKER_00]: That the administration knew they could make these demands and these emails wouldn't be leaked.

[00:07:29] [SPEAKER_00]: That they know that they could get away with it.

[00:07:32] [SPEAKER_00]: And they're not, they're acting like, yeah, they're not a party to this.

[00:07:35] [SPEAKER_00]: This is the same thing we have with Kamala Harris not doing an interview.

[00:07:38] [SPEAKER_00]: They're like Kamala's trying to have it both ways by being the incumbent or by not being the incumbent and being a new face while also being the sitting vice president.

[00:07:47] [SPEAKER_00]: The AP had a story yesterday.

[00:07:48] [SPEAKER_00]: She's having it both ways.

[00:07:50] [SPEAKER_00]: Well, who's letting her have it both ways?

[00:07:51] [SPEAKER_00]: You guys.

[00:07:52] [SPEAKER_00]: You're again acting like you're not detached and you're not part of the body politic.

[00:07:57] [SPEAKER_00]: And that's one of the things that annoys me most about the media.

[00:07:59] [SPEAKER_00]: It's not necessarily even a left-right issue.

[00:08:02] [SPEAKER_00]: It's like they somehow claim that they're just like observers of everything, not like they help move the news cycle.

[00:08:09] [SPEAKER_02]: That is one of my biggest criticisms of media.

[00:08:12] [SPEAKER_02]: I used to be a reporter for almost a decade.

[00:08:15] [SPEAKER_02]: And I loathe reporters who pretend that they are not participants in the arena.

[00:08:21] [SPEAKER_02]: They absolutely are just by fact of choosing to do a story, by amplifying one story over another because space is limited.

[00:08:31] [SPEAKER_02]: In the story selection, therein lies the bias.

[00:08:34] [SPEAKER_02]: And to pretend that you're not part of the arena is a lie.

[00:08:38] [SPEAKER_02]: And it's just the most frustrating thing for me, which is why I appreciate the work you guys do at Newsbusters Media Research Center.

[00:08:43] [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, I was going over your analysis the other day on the amount of coverage, the positive versus negative coverage for Harris versus Trump.

[00:08:53] [SPEAKER_02]: And I got a message from somebody.

[00:08:55] [SPEAKER_02]: And so maybe you can address it.

[00:08:56] [SPEAKER_02]: Somebody asked, you know, why do we care?

[00:08:59] [SPEAKER_02]: I think your analysis looked at NBC, ABC and CBS nightly newscasts.

[00:09:05] [SPEAKER_02]: So it's my understanding that those three newscasts are still, if you lump them all together,

[00:09:10] [SPEAKER_02]: they still draw the majority of viewers when it comes to newscasts.

[00:09:15] [SPEAKER_02]: And so why look at just those three?

[00:09:18] [SPEAKER_02]: I'll ask you.

[00:09:19] [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and that's correct.

[00:09:21] [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, people watch these networks way less than they used to.

[00:09:27] [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's still not tens of millions of people.

[00:09:30] [SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, I'll just put in last week or a few weeks ago, the Nielsen numbers we have for the week of August 12th.

[00:09:36] [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, ABC was in first place with 7.1 million viewers, NBC at 5.9, and CBS at 4.3 million viewers.

[00:09:45] [SPEAKER_00]: All of those numbers are higher than the highest watched shows on cable, which are a lot of Fox News primetime shows.

[00:09:53] [SPEAKER_00]: More people tune into those shows than, you know, Tucker Carlson during his heyday, Bill O'Reilly during his heyday.

[00:10:00] [SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, these people, people tune into these network newscasts more than any scripted show in primetime on these networks.

[00:10:08] [SPEAKER_00]: So these are huge audiences that are still watching them.

[00:10:12] [SPEAKER_00]: And in an election, everybody is saying, left, right, center, that this is going to be a really close election to the American people to show them what's going on in these network newscasts.

[00:10:21] [SPEAKER_00]: Because a lot of times, too, people tune in to get their local news updates at the bottom of the hour and the morning shows,

[00:10:26] [SPEAKER_00]: which they themselves pull in about 2.5, 3 million viewers, depending on which show you're talking about.

[00:10:33] [SPEAKER_00]: So the election is coming down to voters, a few voters here, a few voters there.

[00:10:40] [SPEAKER_00]: You all know this in North Carolina.

[00:10:43] [SPEAKER_00]: I feel like we owe it to the American people to kind of show them, you know, what's going on,

[00:10:48] [SPEAKER_00]: because you never know what people are watching in terms of what news you consume.

[00:10:52] [SPEAKER_02]: Right.

[00:10:53] [SPEAKER_02]: Curtis Houck, the managing editor of Newsbusters at the Media Research Center, the website MRC.org, Newsbusters.org as well.

[00:11:00] [SPEAKER_02]: Curtis, thanks so much.

[00:11:01] [SPEAKER_02]: I appreciate your time.

[00:11:02] [SPEAKER_02]: Good to talk with you.

[00:11:03] [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no problem.

[00:11:04] [SPEAKER_00]: Anytime.

[00:11:05] [SPEAKER_02]: All right.

[00:11:05] [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.

[00:11:05] [SPEAKER_02]: That is Curtis Houck.

[00:11:06] [SPEAKER_02]: And all right.

[00:11:07] [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks again to Curtis Houck from the Media Research Center.

[00:11:11] [SPEAKER_02]: Their project called Newsbusters.

[00:11:13] [SPEAKER_02]: Highly recommend visiting the site.

[00:11:15] [SPEAKER_02]: They do analysis on coverage bias and that sort of thing.

[00:11:20] [SPEAKER_02]: Zuckerberg admitted in this letter to the House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan

[00:11:25] [SPEAKER_02]: that senior Biden administration officials repeatedly pressured Facebook to suppress COVID-19 content.

[00:11:33] [SPEAKER_02]: And part of the problem here is that the social media platforms enjoy special protection, essentially, under existing law where they're not the publisher.

[00:11:46] [SPEAKER_02]: Right.

[00:11:47] [SPEAKER_02]: And so people can get on there and they can make posts and that sort of thing.

[00:11:52] [SPEAKER_02]: And the platform is not responsible for the content that users post.

[00:11:58] [SPEAKER_02]: And Democrats over the course of the last five years or so have expressed interest in regulating these big tech firms and the social media platforms to make them responsible.

[00:12:11] [SPEAKER_02]: Which, of course, then would limit user content.

[00:12:14] [SPEAKER_02]: And, of course, the point there is to limit conservative content.

[00:12:18] [SPEAKER_02]: Because that seems to be, like, 99% of the time the stuff that gets censored or moderated.

[00:12:26] [SPEAKER_02]: So here's part of the letter from Zuckerberg to Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

[00:12:36] [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of talk right now about how the U.S. government interacts with companies like Meta, which is the Facebook parent company.

[00:12:43] [SPEAKER_02]: And I want to be clear about our position.

[00:12:45] [SPEAKER_02]: Our platforms are for everyone.

[00:12:47] [SPEAKER_02]: We are about promoting speech and helping people.

[00:12:50] [SPEAKER_02]: Notice he doesn't say free speech.

[00:12:52] [SPEAKER_02]: And helping people connect in a safe and secure way.

[00:12:56] [SPEAKER_02]: As part of this, we regularly hear from governments around the world and others with various concerns around public discourse and public safety.

[00:13:04] [SPEAKER_02]: In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.

[00:13:18] [SPEAKER_02]: And expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree.

[00:13:24] [SPEAKER_02]: Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down.

[00:13:27] [SPEAKER_02]: And we own our decisions, including COVID-19 related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of the pressure.

[00:13:34] [SPEAKER_02]: I believe the government pressure was wrong.

[00:13:37] [SPEAKER_02]: And I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.

[00:13:40] [SPEAKER_02]: I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we would not make today.

[00:13:46] [SPEAKER_02]: Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction.

[00:13:56] [SPEAKER_02]: And we're ready to push back if something like this happens again.

[00:14:01] [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, thank goodness.

[00:14:02] [SPEAKER_02]: All is well.

[00:14:03] [SPEAKER_02]: All is well.

[00:14:05] [SPEAKER_02]: Right?

[00:14:07] [SPEAKER_02]: Are you buying this?

[00:14:10] [SPEAKER_02]: Forced to acknowledge what we already knew, promising it won't happen again just in case it's Trump.

[00:14:15] [SPEAKER_02]: There's more.

[00:14:17] [SPEAKER_02]: We'll get to it.

[00:14:17] [SPEAKER_02]: All right.

[00:14:18] [SPEAKER_02]: Picking up this letter from Mark Zuckerberg to the House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan regarding censorship efforts by Facebook at the behest of the government.

[00:14:32] [SPEAKER_02]: He already covered the COVID-19 censorship that Facebook did in 2021.

[00:14:40] [SPEAKER_02]: He then goes on to talk about the Hunter Biden laptop story.

[00:14:45] [SPEAKER_02]: In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election.

[00:14:57] [SPEAKER_02]: All right.

[00:14:58] [SPEAKER_02]: Think about that sentence.

[00:15:11] [SPEAKER_02]: Number one.

[00:15:13] [SPEAKER_02]: How would the FBI know about that?

[00:15:17] [SPEAKER_02]: Before the publication of the New York Post story, which Facebook then censored, how would the FBI know about that story?

[00:15:27] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, thanks to Matt Taibbi and other journalists who got access to files and documented this stuff, we know that the FBI and the whistleblowers as well inside the IRS, we know that the Hunter Biden laptop was in the possession of Justice Department investigators like the FBI and that they had confirmed its legitimacy.

[00:15:56] [SPEAKER_02]: They knew it was the actual laptop of Hunter Biden and that the files contained therein were in fact the files on the laptop.

[00:16:06] [SPEAKER_02]: They were all true.

[00:16:09] [SPEAKER_02]: So they knew that this laptop existed.

[00:16:13] [SPEAKER_02]: So why would they be worried about a Russian disinformation operation prior to the 2020 election?

[00:16:20] [SPEAKER_02]: Where does Russia figure into this?

[00:16:22] [SPEAKER_02]: How did how did they get involved in any of this?

[00:16:24] [SPEAKER_02]: Well, remember, they did a tabletop exercise at the Aspen Institute.

[00:16:35] [SPEAKER_02]: They brought together a whole bunch of the Aspen Institute did brought together a whole bunch of media people, publishers, reporters, you know, editors.

[00:16:44] [SPEAKER_02]: And they brought in security experts and DOJ officials and they ran through some hypothetical exercises and, you know, what to be on the lookout for.

[00:16:55] [SPEAKER_02]: And one of the hypotheticals was literally a laptop with Hunter Biden's information.

[00:17:02] [SPEAKER_02]: And that this would be used in order to tank the Joe Biden campaign.

[00:17:08] [SPEAKER_02]: And.

[00:17:10] [SPEAKER_02]: And.

[00:17:11] [SPEAKER_02]: That's why when the story popped in the New York Post, all of these outlets said, oh, my gosh, this is exactly what we were warned about.

[00:17:18] [SPEAKER_02]: And having run through the tabletop exercise, they all kind of came to this, I'm sure, completely organic and impartial, unbiased agreement that they would suppress this kind of disinformation meant to undermine the integrity of our election system.

[00:17:36] [SPEAKER_02]: Which, of course, when you then read the letter from the intelligence officials, the 50 whatever intel people that said this smacks of Russian disinformation.

[00:17:50] [SPEAKER_02]: Right.

[00:17:50] [SPEAKER_02]: That's that was confirmation.

[00:17:52] [SPEAKER_02]: That was all they needed.

[00:17:53] [SPEAKER_02]: And so they suppressed the story, which was true.

[00:17:57] [SPEAKER_02]: The story was true.

[00:17:59] [SPEAKER_02]: And the story wasn't about the laptop per se.

[00:18:01] [SPEAKER_02]: It was about what was on the laptop.

[00:18:04] [SPEAKER_02]: And what was on the laptop detailed meetings, bank accounts, trips, right?

[00:18:12] [SPEAKER_02]: Phone calls and such between Hunter Biden, but also Joe Biden and Joe Biden's brother, Jim.

[00:18:20] [SPEAKER_02]: Indicating a web of corruption, pay for play, influence peddling operation that if investigated would be very, very damaging to the former vice president and presidential candidate at the time, Joe Biden and his family.

[00:18:37] [SPEAKER_02]: And so it was suppressed.

[00:18:39] [SPEAKER_02]: And Facebook helped them do that.

[00:18:42] [SPEAKER_02]: And they're playing this role of dupe.

[00:18:47] [SPEAKER_02]: Right.

[00:18:48] [SPEAKER_02]: Facebook is playing the role of the duped.

[00:18:50] [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, my gosh.

[00:18:51] [SPEAKER_02]: I can't believe they told us this thing and we believe them.

[00:18:54] [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we have to believe these government officials.

[00:18:57] [SPEAKER_02]: All right.

[00:18:57] [SPEAKER_02]: We'll start naming them.

[00:18:58] [SPEAKER_02]: How about you name the people that told you that this was a hoax?

[00:19:02] [SPEAKER_02]: This was disinformation from the Russians.

[00:19:04] [SPEAKER_02]: This is the thing that always that always angers me and frustrates me in these types of stories.

[00:19:09] [SPEAKER_02]: When you get fed bad information by anonymous sources and then you publish it, torching your own credibility.

[00:19:17] [SPEAKER_02]: You burn that source.

[00:19:20] [SPEAKER_02]: And you don't do it out of vengeance.

[00:19:22] [SPEAKER_02]: You do it so nobody else will be abused by their lies.

[00:19:29] [SPEAKER_02]: You don't give them more opportunity.

[00:19:32] [SPEAKER_02]: This isn't like super friends in the Legion of Doom where you let them fly away so they can fight another day.

[00:19:37] [SPEAKER_02]: No.

[00:19:38] [SPEAKER_02]: No.

[00:19:39] [SPEAKER_02]: You put the information out there so people know this source should not be trusted because they're using you as a conduit for mis or disinformation.

[00:19:48] [SPEAKER_02]: Because that's what the government did.

[00:19:50] [SPEAKER_02]: And at the time, Joe Biden was just a candidate.

[00:19:54] [SPEAKER_02]: Which tells you, right, this is the, quote, deep state that people on the right talk about.

[00:20:00] [SPEAKER_02]: People inside the government that used their positions and the information that they had in order to, you know, misinform, disinform, to rig an election.

[00:20:14] [SPEAKER_02]: Right.

[00:20:15] [SPEAKER_02]: To influence the outcome of an election.

[00:20:18] [SPEAKER_02]: Back to the letter, Zuckerberg says that fall when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's family.

[00:20:29] [SPEAKER_02]: We sent that story to fact checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply.

[00:20:37] [SPEAKER_02]: It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation.

[00:20:41] [SPEAKER_02]: And in retrospect, we should not have demoted the story.

[00:20:44] [SPEAKER_02]: We have changed our policies and procedures or sorry, our policies and processes to make sure this doesn't happen again.

[00:20:53] [SPEAKER_02]: For instance, we are no longer temporarily demoting things in the U.S. while waiting for fact checkers.

[00:21:00] [SPEAKER_02]: Because when you employ people who are all of the left to be your fact checkers or these third party nonprofit groups that are funded and staffed by leftists, you can't trust them to be your fact checkers.

[00:21:14] [SPEAKER_02]: News talk 1110-993-WBT.

[00:21:18] [SPEAKER_02]: Mark Zuckerberg from Metta, which is the parent company of Facebook now, founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee saying, yes, we were pressured to censor and we caved.

[00:21:33] [SPEAKER_02]: We were pressured by the government and we totally caved on that.

[00:21:39] [SPEAKER_02]: But we're totally not going to do it again.

[00:21:40] [SPEAKER_02]: We pinky swear.

[00:21:43] [SPEAKER_02]: First was the COVID-19 stuff during the pandemic.

[00:21:47] [SPEAKER_02]: Next was the Hunter Biden laptop story.

[00:21:49] [SPEAKER_02]: Talks about both of those.

[00:21:50] [SPEAKER_02]: Third paragraph.

[00:21:53] [SPEAKER_02]: He says, aside from or apart from the content moderation.

[00:21:57] [SPEAKER_02]: Sorry, I'm looking at a computer screen and it's an image of the letter and it is really, really small.

[00:22:02] [SPEAKER_02]: So I apologize for all of the mess ups here on my reading.

[00:22:06] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm usually really good at reading.

[00:22:08] [SPEAKER_02]: I got a lot of practice.

[00:22:10] [SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, he says, I want to address the contributions I made during the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure.

[00:22:17] [SPEAKER_02]: The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a global pandemic.

[00:22:27] [SPEAKER_02]: I made these contributions through the Chan Zuckerberg initiative, which I believe is named after his wife.

[00:22:34] [SPEAKER_02]: I forget her first name, but I think her last name is Chan.

[00:22:38] [SPEAKER_02]: And so they created this, you know, nonprofit philanthropy.

[00:22:43] [SPEAKER_02]: They were designed to be nonpartisan, spread across urban, rural and suburban communities.

[00:22:50] [SPEAKER_02]: Still, despite the analyses I have seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other.

[00:22:58] [SPEAKER_02]: My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another or to even appear to be playing a role.

[00:23:04] [SPEAKER_02]: So I don't plan on making a similar contribution this cycle, but maybe in the future.

[00:23:12] [SPEAKER_02]: He didn't write that part, but I added that.

[00:23:15] [SPEAKER_02]: But he just says this cycle.

[00:23:17] [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.

[00:23:19] [SPEAKER_02]: I'm also reminded of two things.

[00:23:21] [SPEAKER_02]: Number one, Zuckerberg already said much of this stuff.

[00:23:26] [SPEAKER_02]: A lot of the stuff in the letter he already said when he was on the Joe Rogan podcast like two years ago or something.

[00:23:33] [SPEAKER_02]: So we've known about it.

[00:23:34] [SPEAKER_02]: I think I played audio from that interview where he talked about how the government pressured them to censor.

[00:23:41] [SPEAKER_02]: And they would demote things.

[00:23:43] [SPEAKER_02]: In other words, push the stories down so you don't see it.

[00:23:47] [SPEAKER_02]: Use their algorithms to prevent you from seeing stuff on your timeline.

[00:23:54] [SPEAKER_02]: The other thing about all of this, this Mark Zuckerberg admission is not only did we know all of this stuff, right?

[00:24:10] [SPEAKER_02]: But he's not actually saying he's going to do stuff differently and how.

[00:24:15] [SPEAKER_02]: No, he hasn't.

[00:24:17] [SPEAKER_02]: Actually, hang on a second.

[00:24:18] [SPEAKER_02]: I think I saw an email.

[00:24:20] [SPEAKER_02]: I did.

[00:24:21] [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.

[00:24:21] [SPEAKER_02]: From John, who says, just saying that Facebook takes responsibility for their part and censoring is meaningless.

[00:24:28] [SPEAKER_02]: What concrete steps are they taking to make sure it doesn't happen again and to fix the damage done to the people that were censored?

[00:24:35] [SPEAKER_02]: I agree Facebook and other social media should not be held responsible for content published on their page.

[00:24:41] [SPEAKER_02]: But that also means they should not be censoring it either.

[00:24:45] [SPEAKER_02]: Right.

[00:24:45] [SPEAKER_02]: You can't have it both ways here, Zuck.

[00:24:48] [SPEAKER_02]: You can't have it both ways.

[00:24:49] [SPEAKER_02]: You can't say, oh, we're not responsible for anything that gets posted on our platforms, but we're also going to now moderate and curate and demote and promote things on your pages.

[00:25:08] [SPEAKER_02]: John says, if you're going to act like editors and decide what can and cannot go on the page, then they should be held responsible.

[00:25:16] [SPEAKER_02]: But if it is open for anybody to post, then that truly is like the public square and they should not be held responsible for what others post unless it is illegal activity.

[00:25:26] [SPEAKER_02]: Right.

[00:25:27] [SPEAKER_02]: And that's really the key here.

[00:25:29] [SPEAKER_02]: It's an enforcement model versus a preemption model.

[00:25:33] [SPEAKER_02]: It is you can't post these things.

[00:25:37] [SPEAKER_02]: And by the way, this is what Elon Musk has said as well, which is we already have an extensive body of law that covers this stuff in America under First Amendment case law and precedent.

[00:25:52] [SPEAKER_02]: Why not just use that?

[00:25:54] [SPEAKER_02]: Right.

[00:25:55] [SPEAKER_02]: Why not just use that?

[00:25:57] [SPEAKER_02]: We these these issues and disagreements have been litigated in the courts for 100 years and more than that.

[00:26:06] [SPEAKER_02]: And so just use the case law.

[00:26:09] [SPEAKER_02]: Just follow the case law.

[00:26:12] [SPEAKER_02]: But they don't want to.

[00:26:15] [SPEAKER_02]: See, that's the issue is there are a lot of people that work in these companies.

[00:26:18] [SPEAKER_02]: They don't want to.

[00:26:20] [SPEAKER_02]: They want to moderate stuff because they don't think you should have access to that information because they don't believe it is true at any given moment.

[00:26:27] [SPEAKER_02]: And as we're going to find out in the next hour.

[00:26:30] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[00:26:31] [SPEAKER_02]: Attitudes about what is true and what is not beliefs and what is true and what is not.

[00:26:35] [SPEAKER_02]: They change.

[00:26:36] [SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes they change very quickly.

[00:26:39] [SPEAKER_02]: Almost as quickly as a Kamala Harris policy stance.

[00:26:46] [SPEAKER_02]: All right.

[00:26:47] [SPEAKER_02]: That'll do it for this episode.

[00:26:48] [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for listening.

[00:26:50] [SPEAKER_02]: I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast.

[00:26:55] [SPEAKER_02]: So if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here.

[00:26:58] [SPEAKER_02]: You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to the Pete Calendar show dot com.

[00:27:03] [SPEAKER_02]: Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.