Unnamed Speaker (11:14)

So jawboning refers to informal pressure or persuasion, usually by government officials or somebody with political power to a private company that is trying to get them to act in a certain way, a way that isn't supported by law or regulation. So it's an informal pressure. It's the government using its power or the threat of it, to kind of indirectly bully people into doing what they want when they can't flat out force it. And it's bad. Just to be clear, jawboning is bad.

Julian Walker (11:40)

This kind of jawboning influence has been alleged against the Biden administration. Missouri and Louisiana tried to sue Joe Biden, falsely claiming that the White House engaged in a campaign to censor conservatives on social media. And that case ended up getting thrown out of the Supreme Court with Amy Coney Barrett really clearly explaining why they had no standing. This hasn't stopped RFK Jr though, from trying to make similar claims against Joe Biden that he was censored with his anti vax messaging during the pandemic.

Unnamed Speaker (12:11)

In the context of Zuckerberg and Meta now, the interesting dynamic is that even though we've had this Court case related to jawboning, ostensibly from the Biden administration. What we've also seen in recent months has been that Jim Jordan and the Weaponization Committee were investigating Meta. There were rumors that they were trying to bring Zuckerberg in for a hearing and that in response to that pressure, he wrote a letter. And in his letter, he apologized for a bunch of things that the right was upset about. He also apologized for things like his nonpartisan election donations that people might have read them the wrong way. And so what we're seeing there is an interesting indication that coercive pressure that, that effort by government to. To make a company or a powerful individual act in ways that they want them to act. We're seeing that job owning, it seems, going in the other direction.

Julian Walker (13:03)

In the post and the video announcing these new changes, Mark Zuckerberg gave the impression that, you know, fact checking had started off with all the best intentions, but it had become too politically biased. And that made me want to ask Renee Diresta about one of the terms she uses a lot in her writing on this. It's called working the ref.

Unnamed Speaker (13:23)

Working the refs, referees. It's a metaphor from sports of which I know very little about sports. But I like this metaphor because it's, you know, in a sports game, you'll see a team, you know, you'll see somebody get, like, nudged ever so slightly, and then they'll fall on the field, like, clutching themselves. And, you know, they perform to try to make the referee make a call that favors them. And so working the referees refers to this process where continually alleging that a referee is biased or making unfair calls against you actually aims to pressure the referees to treat you better, to make calls in favor of the complainer, because they don't wanna seem biased. They're very upset about that allegation. So that's what working the referees is. So platforms are tools of power, right? They're incredibly important for getting political messages out, for activating online fans and factions. And so recognizing this, what we've seen over the last decade or so is the right and the left have each refworked on platform policies, trying to change the rules to advantage their side in some way to increase their distribution, have more of their content, get. Have less of their content come down. And it's an interesting strategy, but it's one that seems to work. And that's because very little regulation is actually passed on these things. So this effort to persuade, to make the platform change its rules through persuasion is how most platform policies have changed over the years. And in the case of fact checking, which you mentioned. So Zuckerberg claimed that there was some partisan bias to the fact checkers. He presented no evidence of this. Just to be clear. There was no evidence that was presented to back up that rather bold claim. But the right has for a very long time reframed fact checking as something partisan, as something biased against them. And so by echoing that language, Zuckerberg is sending a signal to the people who have made this argument for a very long time that he agrees and then he capitulated through the changing of the policy. Again, only in the United States. This change was not made overseas, where fact checking continues to happen. And that's because it was much more a response to a US Culture war dynamic than it was to any demonstrable evidence that any of us have seen that fact checking is somehow biased.

Julian Walker (15:35)

I just want to comment here on the sociopathic genius of lying all the time and then complaining when you get fact checked that it's biased against you because your claims are getting fact checked more than anybody else's. I'm going to include a link in the show notes to a January 11th article that Renee wrote about the Zuckerberg announcement. It's titled if you give the mouse a cookie. And she borrows this term from a popular children's storybook. And this is a metaphor that she's using here for meta appeasing the Trump administration. The implication, of course, is that it doesn't stop there, because if you know the storybook, if you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to want a glass of milk. If you give him a glass of milk, he's going to want a napkin.

Unnamed Speaker (16:18)

And so the story continues, conceding to political pressure. In this case, whether by loosening content moderation rules or tweaking policies, it often leads to escalating demands. Right. The appeasement rarely satisfies the critic. It just emboldens them and they will make further requests for more concessions. And I think what we saw in the case of Facebook is that leading, sorry, like, yielding to pressure from one administration really set a precedent for how future demands might be handled, both from that administration. But keep in mind, this is a global platform communicating that you're willing to, you know, to change your rules in response to this kind of political pressure means that we should expect to see more political pressure from other powerful political figures who want the rules to advantage them in whatever country they're operating in, that the platform isn't going to want to have to moderate the political leaders who use that type of speech, that it's not so much rank and file Americans who talk like that, that it's actually going to be, you know, not wanting to moderate speech about, quote, filthy immigrants. Right. If it's coming from a political leader. And we've seen that kind of rhetoric from folks, you know, part of the new administration. And so Facebook not wanting to be in a position of having to moderate, that maybe means that. That it made some calls that are going to have profound impacts on ordinary people, not only in the US but overseas as well, because that particular policy is global.

Julian Walker (17:39)

So I mentioned at the top that at Trump's inauguration, it was widely reported and there were photographs of how there was this who's who of tech oligarchs with front row seats. They were hobnobbing with the new cabinet nominees. So you had people like Zuckerberg and Musk and Bezos and Tim Cook from Apple, and then seated beside Tulsi Gabbard was the TikTok CEO, Shozi Chu. And there had just been this very theatrical few days involving TikTok voluntarily taking themselves down and then bringing themselves back up and having this performative kind of statement when it was down for 24 hours or something that said that we were working with President Trump essentially to bring us back and help save TikTok from the terrible censorship of the Biden regime, which. Which was literally 24 hours from being a thing of the past.

Unnamed Speaker (18:28)

Calls to ban TikTok originated with Trump and many of the Republican inner circle at the time. They became bipartisan after some briefings that seemed to convince senators that there was something, some truth to the allegation that there is some Chinese government involvement in the algorithm, perhaps behind the scenes. That was the sort of thing where I thought, if the government has that evidence, I would like to see it. I think that the American people are entitled to see it. But that's not how it went. Instead, we had the ban. However, TikTok became highly useful for President Trump during the campaign. And TikTok is deeply beloved by many, many millions of Americans. And so all of a sudden, this opportunity to become the savior of TikTok presented itself. And the CEO, who is a very shrewd businessman, of course, chose to use flattery, which has been evidenced, to work with this particular president, chose to use flattery and to frame Trump as the savior of TikTok. And so there were a number of, when you opened up for the 14 hours or so that it was down, interstitials that would let you know that Trump was going to save TikTok. Just wait for it. That the team was working diligently with President Trump to save TikTok when the ban was temporarily lifted. I think Oracle began to serve TikTok content again. I believe it's still out of the app stores because there are very hefty financial fines. But Oracle began to serve the content again in response to a purported guarantee from Trump not to enforce. And in response, you had this very glowing message, thank President Trump again. And of course, showing up to the inauguration is a, you know, it's a calculated move. These are businessmen to demonstrate their willingness to cooperate, to align with political interests during this time, which for them is an existential time of very heightened, heightened scrutiny. So I think that's how we should, that's how we should read this. Less about genuine dialogue and shifting, perhaps more about optics signaling a willingness to play ball. But again, past a certain point, the optics become the reality. You can't just say, oh, I'm just doing this to be showy. Because what we've seen from users of TikTok is a deep distrust in response. Left wing, I should say left leaning users of TikTok is now a deep distrust, wondering if the platform is going to kowtow and capitulate to moderation and curation calls that the Trump administration wants them to make.

Julian Walker (20:51)

So, like so much these days, all of this is very demoralizing. I've been talking to Rene for a few years now. This is the third time that I've had this kind of conversation with her for the podcast. She's been working on studying academically and writing about trying to remedy the digital disinformation crisis for almost a decade. And my impression was that by 2022, she and her colleagues had really made significant headway. But then all of that was turned upside down with threats and smears and the discrediting sort of fake expose of the Twitter files and then the sweeping information requests from an official government House committee. And all of this was done in the name of being anti censorship and pro free speech, but very much from a right wing perspective that was claiming the censorship industrial complex was a way of naming this conspiracy between university research facilities like the Stanford Internet Observatory that Rene was the head of and big tech platforms and the three letter intelligence agencies of the government to somehow suppress conservative speech in unconstitutional ways during 2020 and, you know, bleeding over into 2021. But a lot of this was supposed to have been started under the Trump administration, which is, you know, just kind of beggar's Belief, but it also has to do with COVID and it also has to do with vaccines. And all of that is now massively set back. Attempts to remedy that, attempts to understand how do we get a handle on this out of control disinformation crisis, not to mention the propaganda efforts from malign foreign actors. It's all set back. So I asked Renee what are some of the negative downstream effects that she sees of anti disinformation measures being shelved and being labeled as biased censorship.

Unnamed Speaker (22:49)

We saw a phenomenal rhetorical propaganda campaign to redefine terms like censorship in ways that make no sense. If you stop to think for even 30 seconds. The idea that a fact check is censorship is surreal, actually, because a fact check is adding more information. The way that the platforms usually presented it was adjacent to the story. You could see it ironically, even in this sort of idealization of community notes, Community Notes is also adding more speech. It's just implying that speech from ordinary people is more legitimate than speech from professional fact checkers. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. That, again, is a reflection of distrust, not of any kind of coherent definition of censorship. And also the people who write the community notes are usually citing the fact checks. They're citing professional media. That's what we still consider to be a reputable source. And so I think what you'll see is that narrative, however, is using the word censorship as a thought terminating cliche, right? A way to make people just, oh, I hear that word. It's applied to something. Well, censorship is bad and censors are bad. And I don't support that because I support free speech. Ergo, that must be bad, right? And so people stop thinking about what they're actually being asked to believe. And it's been incredibly effective. One of the ways that it manifested against us was with personal attacks, right? With threats, with smears. We went through this very remarkable experience being subpoenaed and turning over, I mean, just tens of thousands of emails and documents and things. And what I learned from that experience is that you can't exonerate yourself. Nothing that you turn over actually exonerates you. It is simply used in some way. They will move the goalposts very subtly and then find evidence to make you guilty of the thing that they've moved the goalpost to. You realize that what you're dealing with is the second coming of the House on American Activities Committee and that that's how we should think about where our government has gone. And so I think that again, from a personal Standpoint, you know, I do plan to continue fighting.

Julian Walker (24:53)

Right.

Unnamed Speaker (24:54)

The capitulation that I'm seeing has really been more demoralizing and frustrating than anything I personally experienced because I'm like, come on, guys, you don't have to do this. Right. But the question of how I think is what really remains. How do you convey to people, how do you show them how the propaganda campaign works? Right. How do you say, like the fact checker is not actually biased against you. You're being told that it is because that keeps you compliant. And that is what is actually happen happening here.

Julian Walker (25:23)

It's a stark picture that Renee paints, but it's always great to talk to her because I find her to be a real inspiring portrait in courage, moral courage, and the willingness to keep doing the work. So she has a new job. I asked her what she's doing and what she sees as potentially hopeful for the future.

Unnamed Speaker (25:43)

Yeah. So I am at Georgetown, I'm at the McCourt School of Public Policy and the Massive Data Institute. There's. I am doing a ton of work actually on what I consider to be like, future of Internet design sort of things. So I've been writing a lot about platforms like bluesky, which I think are some of the most technologically interesting things out there because they give users power. Right? Nobody is going to come and take over bluesky and say, okay, now we're going to moderate in this way because bluesky is architected from the ground up to be resistant to that sort of thing. It has downsides, right? You know, sometimes there have been figures who have come over, you know, Jesse Singel popped over to the platform that really upset some of the trans community there. And you know, at the same time, though, users are given the power to really control their own experience in incredibly granular ways. To shift feeds, to shift moderation styles, to, you know, to really build community from the ground up with algorithms that they have much more granular control over. And so I'm spending a ton of time kind of in that research space. How do we build a new and different Internet taking advantage of the decentralized protocol based technology that we have now? And then I'm looking at things like adjacent to AI. So there's really interesting work to be done. When AI agents are increasingly autonomous, how do we know when someone is human? This is the notion of decentralized privacy, protecting identity all of a sudden becomes, I think, the big sea change for people. And so I'm interested in that question of not how do you keep bad bots and automation out. But how do you build spaces for actual human beings to engage and do human things? Whether that's, you know, leaving political comments, banking, you know, you name it. We're gonna, we're gonna need systems that, that take this into account. And so those are the, the big areas that I'm working on right now.

Julian Walker (27:33)

I don't think it's too presumptuous to say that. I will join you in thanking Renee for sharing her time and her insights with us. Speaking of blue sky, you can find each of our us, me and Matthew and Derek there independently and collectively. We're still mostly on Instagram. That's the main social media feed that we've used for the time this podcast has existed and we continue to be very active there. Thank you so much for your time and for your support. Please remember, if you would like to support our independent journalism even more, you can do so through patreon.com conspirituality I'll see you soon.