← On with Kara Swisher
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- [00:13]
A
Hi, everyone. From New York magazine and the Vox Media podcast network. This is on with Kara Swisher. And I'm Kara Swisher. Last year, we talked a lot about the ways the tech industry cozied up to the Trump administration and the ways that the Trump administration has returned the favor by trying to defang any attempt to regulate them, even by foreign governments. The latest example of this back scratching came right before Christmas. The Trump administration imposed travel bans on four European tech researchers and a former regulator. It accused them of trying to censor American viewpoints online, calling them, quote, agents of the global censorship industrial complex. What incredible nonsense. Imran Ahmed is one of the people targeted by the White House. He's not a politician or a regulator. He's a British citizen who runs an organization called the center for Countering Digital Hate. It researches the ways hate, hate speech and disinformation spread on social media and AI platforms and advocates for policy changes to combat it. Of the five, Imran is the only one who lives in the United States, meaning that he could be deported. A federal judge has blocked his attention for now. I think the administration is going after him at the behest of Elon Musk. And of course, I think this is censorship, which is the very thing they decry. Being a hypocrite is not new to the Trump administration, but this creates the most egregious, one of the most egregious examples of it, because these people have talked about being against censorship, when in fact, that's what they're calling for. All right, let's get into my conversation with Imran. Our expert question comes from Nicole Wong. She served as deputy U.S. chief technology officer during the Obama administration and was a top lawyer for Google and Twitter, and someone I have huge respect for who has been thoughtful about these very difficult issues of policing online speech and what to do about it. So stick around.
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Foreign.
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Had the time of my life a I never.
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Felt this way before.
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- [03:39]
B
It's good to be here.
- [03:40]
A
Yeah, I don't we have not met, although we work in similar areas or I've been talking about these topics that you work in for a long time but you jumped into the news and so let's get started there.
- [03:50]
B
It's been a crazy few weeks.
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A
Let me just get people up to speed. On December 23, two days before Christmas, the State Department said it was barring you and four other Europeans who do similar work in the U.S. but you're the only one who lives. Walk us through that day and how did you find out about the government's decision? What went through your head and what was the first thing you did?
- [04:08]
B
So, yeah, I mean, as you say, on the 23rd of December, I got a text message from someone saying that the State Department had issued a press release saying it was gonna deport or ban five people from the United States. And this had kind of been trailed for a couple of weeks beforehand. There'd been a few articles in odd outlets like the British Telegraph with a State Department source and Zetao, which is a very left wing online site, saying that they were going to take revenge on some people, including me, for the European Commission's decision to fine X and also to stop people who are targeting X Corp in particular. And I mean, at the time I just thought, well that's got to be nonsense because everything that you've just cited is First Amendment protected advocacy activity and the State Department can't take action for that. But then on the 23rd they announced it and this sort of minor political appointee in the State Department specifically named me and said I'm one of the five, and the only one of the five who's Here in America. I'm married to an American citizen, my daughter is American. And yeah, the first thing that comes into your head is why? I think there's been a lot of people who've said that it's because of X or Y or Z. But to me it was really obvious. This is about Elon and the wider problem of big tech, big money, and the incandescent anger of thin skinned plutocrats like Musk and Zuckerberg that we've been effective at holding them accountable. They're angry that we've helped to pass legislation that we're listened to by their advertisers, that we've driven action that impacts their bottom line.
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A
So let's get back to that day. You heard about it through a press release. The State Department didn't call you or anything else?
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B
Well, I saw this tweet from or I was sent. I'm not on X. I was sent a tweet from a lady, an undersecretary in the State Department who said they were targeting me. And because they'd already trailed this in the news, we'd already organized ourselves. Is the truth, Kara? I'd spoken to Robby Kaplan, who's my longtime attorney, great lawyer, and to Chris Clark, who's a phenomenal litigator and has represented. He's actually represented Elon before and he'd agreed to come on board if the government, you know, we just thought, when we read the articles, we thought, this is never going to happen. Anthony Romero from the ACLU called me and said, look, I've seen this. What do you need? And a guy called Norm Isen, who runs something called Democracy Defenders called. And so Norm called as well and said, like, what do you need?
- [06:47]
A
So you had a sense something was coming, although you found out about it on X. Essentially, yeah. Talk about the personal stakes for you here. You mentioned your wife and child are a marriage. Have you thought about what you and your family will do if you're forcibly removed from the United States?
- [07:00]
B
In one respect, the stakes are relatively low for me because they're talking about deporting me to London. You know, I get to live in Marylebone again and, you know, go to my favorite restaurants from a place I've spent 20 years living in. But the real stakes are that, well, first of all, I mean, it's complete disruption of our life. I'd moved to America six years ago on an O1 visa, so an extraordinary ability visa given by the Trump administration for the work I was doing with the Trump administration on digital anti Semitism Ironically, and I met my wife here. I love this country. I've been making my life here. We bought a house, we've had our kid, and we want to have more kids. And this is the place that I saw my future in. So it's shattering, obviously, all of those. But the other thing is, it's. There's an enormous sense of this is not right. And given what I do, it is unsurprising that my first reaction when someone does something which I believe to be fundamentally immoral and wrong, that my first reaction was.
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A
Fight right. Do it so just for people. The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, put out a statement announcing the action. He accused you and others of trying to, quote, coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints. I want you to explain these claims and also why they're false. I want you to explain it from their point of view and then explain your point of view.
- [08:42]
B
Well, I mean, I can explain it both at a fundamental philosophical level. The truth is, Kara, you and I have been circulating in circles where these debates have been happening for a long time. The censorship industrial complex.
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A
I call it the aggrievement industrial complex for the most part, but go ahead.
- [08:56]
B
Fundamentally, private individuals can't censor anyone. Private individuals hold opinions. They may think that you're a scumbag, but that's not censoring you. That's a First Amendment protected opinion that they have on you. Private publishing platforms can't censor anyone. They have editors, editorial lines and standards and algorithms may make the decision. But it is an act of mathematical editing of timelines for billions of people. That is also their First Amendment right. So whenever someone sued a platform, for example, saying, I need to be let back on this platform, they got rid of me. That breaches my First Amendment rights. The judges have had to remind them, no, darling, actually, it's the platform that has a First Amendment right to decide not to have you on there.
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A
Right.
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B
Advertisers can't censor people. They can reward content with money. So you produce great content and advertisers come to you, and you. You earn money off the back of that. Forcing an advertiser to reward content they don't want to reward is also contrary to the First Amendment and the right of free association. Only governments can censor in the United States.
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A
Right?
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B
Right. By using the threat of overwhelming force. And that is to say, if you say something I don't like, I will punish you using the monopoly of violence that I hold. And so there is this that's the fundamental truth of how censorship works. And accusing a nonprofit or even a platform of censorship is frankly, legally meaningless.
- [10:17]
A
Even if you were saying things that were false. Correct.
- [10:20]
B
I mean, you know, one of the things the First Amendment fundamentally protects is not just your right to be false, but your right to lie. You have the right actually under, you know, apart from in certain circumstances, fraudulent activity, et cetera, et cetera, you have the right to lie to people. And of course, what the First Amendment doesn't say is you can't be ostracized for it. You can't be punished for it socially, economically, in other ways people might decide they don't want to do business with a liar. You have the right to hold an opinion about someone. So I, I think the debate on censorship's become incredibly diffuse and dumb because really what it's been used for is some very thin skinned people to say, please, please, please don't say mean things about me. And you will know this with people like Musk as well. Is that the reason why, you know, I'm always bemused by his claims of censorship. The truth is that he's, he's kind of scared. He's a scared little boy that people might hold opinions about him that he is an asshole. And, you know, and as a result, he bought the playground and still can't make people love him. And he then manipulated the rules of the playground to benefit him. And even then he couldn't get people to love him. He's done everything he could and yet can't. And what CCDH does is essentially hold up a mirror to bad behavior.
- [11:40]
A
All right, let me get in that. I'm gonna play devil's advocate because I've listened to them too for a long time. All right, this is what their principal argument is. A lot of people believe that tech companies censored conservatives and their views at the urging of the government and the organizations like yours. For example, in March 2021, as the COVID vaccines were starting to roll out, your center for Countering Digital Hate put out a report called the disinformation dozen, about 12 leading online anti vaxxers. The list included Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And your organization called for all of them to be deplatformed. Every person named your report was removed and heavily suppressed by more than one major platform at the time. Talk about what this set up. Explain why that is or is not a problem because you did have effect with these platforms before. Right now, of course they could give a fuck.
- [12:27]
B
You know, I mean, I set up CCH in September 2019. Initially, it was primarily about looking at antisemitism and other forms of hate, the kind of hate that was taking lives in Britain. And it was, it's only six months later. The pandemic started in March 2020. And I had to make a decision as to what we did with our tiny team of people. And we said, well, actually we probably do most good by studying the spread of disinformation lies about vaccines and about COVID because Covid was, it was clear by then going to take more lives than any hate actor on the planet in the following couple of years. Now, at that time, in March 2020, President Trump was the president. One of the things that was really interesting is that when we were talking to the Trump administration at the time, they were very worried about anti vax rhetoric coming from Biden and Harris. And here's the truth, with some reason, like they're actually kind of right to be pissed with Biden and Harris for saying things like Harris was asked if she would take the vaccine. She said, I think that's gonna be an issue for all of us. I will say I would not trust Donald Trump, which is an incredibly irresponsible thing to say. And I don't care that she's a Democrat. Like, it's an incredibly irresponsible. And Joe Biden has said things like, who's gonna take the shot? Are you gonna be the first one to sign up once they now say it's okay? And Trump was pretty pissed about that, correctly. So I think in March 21, we put out this report, the Disinformation Dozen, which was an analysis of of the hundreds of thousands of bits of disinformation circulating on social media platforms where they were linking to outside sites. We found that 12 people were producing 65% of the disinformation being linked to on social media platforms. And that.
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A
But how do you respond to critics who see that report and the result and say that's harmful censorship at your organization's urging? Why isn't it censorship?
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B
I think platforms have the right to enforce their rules. I mean, like, we all sign up to the rules of our platforms when we join them, right? We all agree to it. If you have a rule, that's your responsibility to abide by the rules, but you have a corollary right to expect others to abide by it too, and for there to be someone to enforce those rules. And again, the evolution of ccdh, it does include some of us kind of realizing, oh gosh, just putting Moral pressure on these companies doesn't work. At the time, we still, by arguing the point, by showing the evidence that platforms would change their behavior, which Maria.
- [14:58]
A
Ressa tried to do in the Philippines and others have tried to do.
- [15:02]
B
Yeah, lots of people. And, you know, Maria and I are friends and, you know, we've talked about this. I work with people like Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly took her own life because of content produced, which was sort of flooded her timelines on Instagram. And, you know, her father tried to put pressure on these platforms. But, you know, and I know that they don't give a shit.
- [15:22]
A
Right. So why are they claiming harmful censorship? From your point of view, what is their strongest argument?
- [15:28]
B
I think it's politically expedient for them to sort of to now say that, oh, gosh, that was terribly harmful. And at the time, they were telling the Biden administration, look what a great job we're doing on cleaning up disinformation. I think right now we're in a. We're in a really odd moment in America where what has been bipartisan consensus on. And I still think there is bipartisan consensus, if you look at polling, that vaccines are the safest, most effective, most consequential inventions of the past 200 years in medicine is breaking down and has become infected in part because of the way that social media algorithms work. And you and I probably agree on this emphatically, that they forced us to the fringes of argument on every issue. And so we have this perception that there is a significant wing of the population who believe that vaccines are the work of Satan.
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A
Right. I think the argument is that they weren't allowed to say that. That they weren't allowed to say they were satanic and they should have been allowed on these platforms, as you were saying, because they can lie. I had a similar argument with Mark Zuckerberg about anti. If you remember that 2018 interview I did where he got into a big trouble where he said holocaust deniers don't mean to lie. And I said, oh, they do.
- [16:45]
B
Just to be specific. We were very careful not to talk about things like lab leak. We were very careful not to talk about whether or not they're satanic. We actually looked specifically at is this information likely to harm someone's life or put them risk of death.
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A
We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from Twilio. Twilio's customer engagement platform is the ultimate toolbox for developers, designers, business leaders, and everyone in between. Whether you write code or shape strategy. If you Build you belong Looking to create truly memorable customer experiences you bring the vision Twilio brings the platform. Think of it as your digital workbench where you can tinker, play and ultimately create a product you've been dreaming about. Twilio provides real time messaging, AI driven insights, personalized customer journeys. It's all there, ready for you to build with. And their customer engagement platform is flexible, open and designed for builders who want to create unforgettable customer experiences that drive impact. If you're scaling a startup or transforming an enterprise, you need a customer engagement platform that can keep up. And with Twilio you get the power to build, test and scale with confidence. You can create without limits, without workarounds and without compromise. Just the freedom to build your way. Bottom line, Twilio is the ultimate builder's toolbox. So what will you build today? Learn more@Twilio.com that's Twilio.com Be a builder with Twilio. Support for this show comes from Quo. If you're a business owner and someone can't get through to you, it's more than just annoying, it's bad for business. Quo spelled Q U O is a smarter way to run your business communications. With Quo, you and your team can stay on top of every customer conversation so you can reply faster and never miss an opportunity to connect with your customers. Quo is designed to work for you wherever you are. You can use it right from an app on your phone or computer and you can add new numbers or can you teammates in minutes, sync your CRM and use seamless routing and call flows as your business grows. And Quo isn't just a phone system, it's a smart system. Their AI agent automatically logs calls, generates summaries and highlights next steps so nothing gets lost. It can even qualify leads or respond after hours, ensuring your business stays responsive even when you're offline. You can make this the year where no upgrade opportunity and no customer slips away. Try quo for free plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com kara that's q u-o.com kara quo no missed calls, no missed customers. Support for the show comes from Framer. You need a website, then you need a website builder. In other words, you need Framer. Framer is an enterprise grade no code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Miro to move faster with real time collaboration, a robust CMS with everything you need for great SEO and advanced analytics and include integrated A B testing your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your.com from day one, changes to your framer site go live to the web in seconds with one click without help from engineering. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com framer has programs for startups, scale ups and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a framer specialist and get started building for free today@framer.com Kara for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com Kara for 30% OFF framer.com Cara rules and restrictions apply. Let's get back to the government's case against you because the State Department's actually, as you came, as you noted, a few weeks after the European Union fined x $140 million for violating the Digital Services Act. The European Union's been much more strict on tech companies than the US hasn't been strict. I don't know what the opposite of strict is, but that's whatever that is, is what the US government has done, both the Democrats and the Republicans. It was the first penalty imposed under the law which sets rules for how platforms operate. The Trump administration hasn't explicitly linked their action against you this case, though they did cite your organization's support for the law, which you can do.
- [21:16]
B
The actual fine by the European Commission was because ETT breached its rules on data access on and I think that that's the fundamental most important thing. We need transparency of these platforms. We actually have a right as a public to know how we're being misled, how we're being, how they are distorting the information that we receive.
- [21:35]
A
Like what's in the food.
- [21:36]
B
Exactly. It's like a label. Right. Because we're not eating nutritious food anymore. We're eating ultra processed food. Slop. Yeah, Right. And I think just a few days ago the Secretary for Health and Human Services said we want to reduce the amount of ultra processed food. I agree. I also agree we should try to reduce the amount of ultra processed information we're receiving.
- [21:56]
A
That's a very good point.
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B
Now, X broke those rules and they were fined US$114 million, 120 million. And apparently that censorship, breaching rules and transparency, that is now censorship, which is odd.
- [22:11]
A
Well, everything's censored at Elon Musk. He owns X. As you said, he celebrated the news of the visa sanctions. The two of you, as you noted, had a pass. In 2023, Musk sued your organization over a report documenting a spike in hate speech on X. After he took over, a federal judge dismissed it. Do you see this? He's a very litigious person. He'll do it. And even if he doesn't have a good case, but he'll continue to do it and harass people. Do you see this as the federal government retaliating against you on behalf of Musk? And why now rather than when he was sort of at his strength? Although he's back, I guess.
- [22:45]
B
I mean, why now? It's been going on for years is the truth. Kara. So the story of his lawsuit was extraordinary. It started off with him calling me a rat and calling my organization evil Online. We did the study that was on the New York Times that showed that when he took over, there was a tripling in the global usage of the N word on his platform. There was a massive spike in anti women, anti lgbtq, anti Hispanic, anti Semitic hate on his platform. Platform. And that led to him losing a lot of advertisers. His Trust and Safety Council resigned because of the content of our research. And he sued us. And initially he just was like, you guys are rats. You guys are evil.
- [23:20]
A
You're to blame for my fall off in business, not himself. Yeah.
- [23:23]
B
So, I mean, and he kept asking, like, who's funding you? Who's behind you? Because he's a conspiracy theorist, and so he's asking, who's behind you? And I took a picture of his screenshot of his tweet, and I said, I'll tell you who funds us. The public donate here. And I asked a few friends to retweet me, and a few celebrities retweeted. And it got a lot of views. We actually brought in a lot of money off the back of it. And that really annoyed him. And so the next day, he called up the chair of my board and said, I want to speak to you about Imran. And the chair of my board said, nope, I'm not his dad. You speak to him. And then the next day, we got a letter from Alex Spiro, his lawyer, saying, we want to Quinn Emanuel, just.
- [24:07]
A
For people who don't know. Go ahead.
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B
Yeah, we want to sue. We're going to sue you under the Lanham Act. So he said, you are secretly funded by Mark Zuckerberg and by Google and by foreign governments, and therefore, we're going to sue you. And we thought, well, we're not funded by any. We're not funded by any government or any tech company. So that's nonsense. And that's the first time I met Robby Kaplan. And I called her up and said, I hear that you're very good at suing billionaires. And she said, I am. And I said, I've got another one for you. And she said, I'll do it.
- [24:39]
A
Yeah. So that was the peak over this. Why now, though? So he lost the case.
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B
So he lost the case. But as soon as he sued us, we immediately got subpoenas from the House Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee. So Jim Jordan's committee, and he asked.
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A
Specifically, as night follows day.
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B
As night follows day. He asked us under. And of course, they have the subpoena power. He asked us for all correspondence and contracts between us and any social media company and any branch of government, which is a lot. And we wrote back going, here's all of it. So we did. We gave him every single bit.
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A
Right. But it's expensive for a small organization like you to do this kind of stuff.
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B
It cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in total, millions of dollars, this whole thing. But of course, that evidence would have been very pertinent to Musk's initial claims and belief that we're secretly funded by Mark Zuckerberg. So. But there was nothing there, so he didn't really go any further with it. Then we were targeted by Stephen Miller, who said that we're in breach of the Foreign Agents Registration act through his America first legal nonprofit and referred us to doj, which is not true as well. We're not in breach of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Then we had the FTC start investigating us for being part of a criminal. This is in the last year, being part of a criminal enterprise in which we sit, essentially we control Disney, is the argument from the ftc.
- [26:01]
A
That's well known.
- [26:01]
B
And then we had the State Department take this action. So you say, like, this is an odd time for it to happen. The truth is, it's never stopped happening for three years now.
- [26:10]
A
They kept trying. They were probably in a room going, now we'll do this. Like, I can see that.
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B
And it's death by a million cuts. Right? If you are an organization with revenues of a few million dollars a year. I have 36 staff, data scientists, people who are studying things, advocates, communicators. I mean, all of this means I can't hire people, we can't do things. And so we've had to endure a lot. The truth is, though, that you will know that when you get attention, a lot of people hear our message and Go. Actually I quite like the cut of that kid's jib. And so when Elon sued us, our revenues were about one and a half million globally. Last year there were about seven million globally. And that's all. Because that's all the Elon effect. That's the Musk bump.
- [26:49]
A
Thank you, Elon. But why now did they do this? Because they got a lot of other shitty stuff on their plate. Right? Like was there a resurgence of his power? He didn't do it in the middle of Doge. Right. He didn't like when he had more power than ever.
- [27:03]
B
I mean, I'm not going to speculate as to, you know, I don't know what his current relationship is with anyone in Washington. I do know that they are escalating and escalating and escalating because of course they're feeling the cage coming around them. Kara. Like whether it is the UK passing the Online Safety act, the European Union, the Digital Services Act, Canada. Mark Carney came to power saying he was going to pass an online harms Act. Australia, Australia. But also domestically, Florida's passed bans. You know, Texas has got stuff in the mix. California, you've got AI Legisl all over the country. Because actually there is a fever pitch and change organizations like mine organizations trying to change a system, especially one that's relatively new. This is decades long work. Nadir. It wasn't immediate. It takes years to build up awareness.
- [27:47]
A
Others against drunk driving, et cetera and cigarette. Exactly. So on the AI front right now, speaking of the cresting of the situation, I have been focused a lot on kids in chatbots, for example, like since 2023 and I kept saying this is going to be a problem. One of the big stories right now is how people have been using the chatbot grok from Musk's AI company XAI to generate sexual images of women and minors. Musk said anyone making illegal content will suffer the same consequences if they upload illegal content. But as it's recording, X does not seem to have done anything with these posts. There's now one of the woman who was killed in Minnesota in a bikini. Apparently we've seen governments pass laws to criminalize deepfakes in non consensual images like this. In the US we have the Take It down act, right, which was a very Republican backed. What is the effect of what's happening right now? Because these See SAM images are disturbing and most companies react. But so far Musk has not removed them as people are following it. And neither of the platforms that are in the center of the app universe. Apple or Google have moved in any way. And though Musk is at the center of it, they're certainly complicit in that.
- [28:59]
B
I just think it shows how weak we've been at passing legislation to do common sense things like not allowing AI platforms to produce csam. You would have thought that'd be the first thing that we'd think we want to fix, we want to make sure it doesn't happen. And of course, somehow we've got to the situation where Elon was at one point boasting about the fact that his platform will put a bikini on anyone. And our argument's always been that if you have ungoverned spaces. So I mean, in my past I worked on foreign policy for the United Kingdom, so we know about ungoverned spaces, like spaces that are ungoverned. When I worked on countering Terrorism, an Islamic State, for example, spaces like Syria, Somalia, they become breeding grounds for Al Qaeda, for Al Shabaab, for isis. X became the breeding ground for anti Semitism when Musk took over. And now GROK has become the breeding ground for pedophiles because essentially it's an ungoverned space where you can do whatever you want. And without rules, bad shit happens. So the question is, who's going to put the rules there?
- [30:03]
A
Do you see it? This being the crest of it? Because people have certainly, the Europeans have certainly reacted the US Less quickly.
- [30:10]
B
The Europeans have kind of reacted. The British have moved slightly faster. The European look, I've got an office in Brussels. We have people there. I have an office in London. We have people there who are talking to, you know, lawmakers and everyone else.
- [30:21]
A
All right, The US is glacial. This is turtle.
- [30:24]
B
The problem in Brussels is no one's back until next week because they're Europeans. And so therefore they have their six week Christmas vacation. And the Brits have said something, but they have no powers. So actually the Prime Minister came out of the United Kingdom and said, it's unacceptable, this cannot happen. And you're like, so what are you gonna do about it, bro?
- [30:40]
A
What are you gonna do about it?
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B
And there are very few powers available.
- [30:44]
A
What is gonna happen here, do you think? This is one of these moments along with chatbots and everything else. Yeah, Sexualized children. Cuz we do have this act.
- [30:52]
B
Well, the Take it down Act. The FTC has the power to fine them $52,000 per instance. And this is Melania's act. And President Trump signed it into law. It's a Good act. You know, it's weak, but it's the first substantive piece of liability reform since Foster Sester. And that was the first piece since section 230 years ago in 1996. So. And I think that it may push some people to call for action in. You may see some tightly written bills which deal specifically with this problem. But we have a more general problem as well. We just did a research report, Fake Friend, where we did in two modes. First of all, users simulating being a 13 year old with mental health problems. So suicidal ideation, eating disorder and drinking drugs problems. And we wanted to see how quickly could we get it to tell us how to safely cut ourselves. ChatGPT 4.02 minutes. How quickly could we get it to list what drugs we could take at home to kill ourselves? 40 minutes. How quickly could we get it to write a suicide Note for us? 65 minutes. And then we bombarded the back end with prompts asking try and work out quantifying how many times in the probabilistic model. So ChatGPT doesn't always give the same answer. So how many times does it give a bad answer? Over half the time it was giving a dangerous answer. A few weeks later they launched ChatGPT 5 and Sam Altman came out specifically and said, cause Adam Rain's case came out two weeks after our fake friends report.
- [32:26]
A
This is a chat. I interviewed their parents. I interviewed their parents.
- [32:29]
B
Yeah. And I meet too many parents who've lost their kids. I'm sure both of us are parents. It never leaves your soul. It never leaves your soul. And it chips away. And it's chipped away at mine a lot over the, over the last seven years.
- [32:45]
A
I had one tech person saying, when are you gonna stop interviewing these parents? I said, when you stop.
- [32:49]
B
Stop killing them. Stop killing their fucking kids.
- [32:51]
A
That's what I said. That's what I said.
- [32:53]
B
And so I didn't kill them.
- [32:55]
A
I'm like, ah, that's a debatable situation you created. You handed them the gun is my feeling. I was like, handed them the gun.
- [33:02]
B
You handed the gun and you said, and often you said, please shoot.
- [33:06]
A
Yeah. What will it take to enforce it? What do you imagine?
- [33:10]
B
You know, Sam Altman actually got it right a couple of years ago when he was still pretending to care about safety. And he went to Congress and he said, we need. I remember him saying, he said, we need accountability and we need legal responsibility. And that's literally the star framework that we'd written five years earlier.
- [33:24]
A
And I was going and Character a just settled with Google. What do you make of that? That was Megan Garcia's son.
- [33:30]
B
Yeah. I mean, they all claim that they want to fix this, but the truth is that they aren't actually doing it. And now we know that in the last year they have spent a ton of money, a ton of money on lobbying against the precise laws that they once claimed to want. Again, I don't know why this has become political. Having chatbots that don't persuade your kids to kill themselves or generate CSAM should not be a partisan issue. And somehow in America, we've managed to make it partisan.
- [34:03]
A
Well, look who is standing next to Trump in the inauguration. That's. Take that. I always show that picture whenever that happens.
- [34:09]
B
If you want to ask the question of why I'm currently being targeted by the State Department, why they want to force me to move and take my American family with me. Leave the country or to fight it. And I'm stuck in this country now. I cannot leave this country because I wouldn't be allowed to be readmitted. So if my parents get ill and die, I can't go to their funerals in the uk I can come back to the point. I feel I have to fight this. But the reason why they did that is that one image, that image of them standing there at the inauguration because they are desperate to protect their franchises from the inevitable and the growing, the crescendo of clamor begging for change.
- [34:47]
A
Let me just very finish up with your case. The federal judge blocked your removal from the US for now. The Supreme Court, though, is largely deferential to Trump with issues of immigration, although this is also a free speech case.
- [34:58]
B
So it's a First Amendment case.
- [35:00]
A
That's right. But I'm saying they all make it an immigration case. How confident are you of where this goes and what are the broader stakes then? What message will it senate? The government is able to revoke your green card over your work.
- [35:14]
B
Well, I think this is the core of where we are right now. I have faith in the courts. I've actually, as I said before, I've gone up against Elon and a court found that he was trying to. He said, look at this, censor, blah, blah, blah, I'm going to sue him for $10 million. And the court said, no, no, you are trying to censor him. You're trying to use lawfare to silence a nonprofit. And they gave us a slap ruling, a strategic litigation against public participation ruling. We got costs awarded, dismissed completely. So I have faith in the courts, but in this case, they're gonna position it as, we have the right to throw out whoever I want. And I'm gonna say, well, no, you don't. You don't have the right to throw someone out.
- [35:53]
A
We have the right to throw out troublesome immigrants.
- [35:55]
B
That's basically, I'm a legal permanent resident. I abide by the law. I pay my taxes, I create wealth here as well through the work. And so what I actually want is for my. This is about. What they're pissed off about is my speech. And that's why I don't want to fight this. I don't want to have a fight with the government. I have to, though, because governments acting this way are one thing, and governments do act this way. Governments are often quite naughty.
- [36:20]
D
Sure do.
- [36:21]
B
But if we accept or we lose the will to fight, that's when all is lost. It's not when governments behave badly, it's when we just don't care anymore or we lose the will to fight. So that's why these cases matter, because if, if we win, it doesn't matter if you're Democrat or Republican. All Americans will have stronger free speech protections from big companies who seek to silence them or the government seeking to punish them.
- [36:44]
A
This isn't specifically related to tech platforms, but it kind of is because it moves to it. But what we're seeing happen in Minnesota right now, after the ICE officer shot and killed, and I would call it murder, given the videos. Even when we have videos, it shows what happened. And most media companies are now, she was veering away from him, but the Trump administration is actively lying from the get go about it, even though video shows what's happening. This is a situation where the government itself is lying in their ability to have free speech. And then it's jumping online with all these. Of course, once again, let's take apart the videotape all along. So talk about what it says about information ecosystems right now, that they, they're not even doing the conspiracy theory thing. They've jumped right to we're gonna lie until people are too confused in some fashion. And then it gets iterated around the Internet ecosystem or the digital ecosystem.
- [37:42]
B
And I think it's one of the things that makes high profile law enforcement cases so difficult. I mean, I've worked with people in law enforcement. I've sat on the Commission for Countering Extremism, I've worked with, I've talked to and understood the perspectives of people from FBI and DHS and other agencies in the United States. We've never worked with them, but we understand where they come from. And one of the things that makes it really difficult is that instead of the investigative process, which is slow, meticulous, careful, that they're trying to understand exactly what happened and where liability may lie and criminal liability may lie, we instead get a screaming match on social media. And look, I think in a moment, like what happened in Minnesota, my heart absolutely, of course goes out to the family of a young woman. Again, as a young dad, as a dad, I'm not a young dad, I'm in my 40s. As a dad, like, like it upsets me enormously to see a six year old who won't have their mum come home. That's the worst thing that can happen. But you know, you've got both sides screaming based on a single video on social media about how one side's a criminal, abolished this, abolished that, blah, blah. And actually what we need is we need in a moment when we need sober politicians, our information ecosystem is designed in a way that actually advantages the dumbest politicians possible, the liars, the histrionic overreactors, the ones who spin and mislead as much as possible. And I think that's one of the problems that social. It's one of the broader problems of social media is that it's encouraged democratic and political discourse that's increasingly lies, toxic and then it destroys the values that underpin democracy. And that's my real fear Kara, is that we have a window to try and get to some sort of renegotiation with tech about the way that their engagement based algorithms work or the values that underpin democracy. And the hard earned trust that we've built in our society collapses. And my family's from Afghanistan. When shit goes bad, it happens fast, right? In the 70s we had women in miniskirts and cable, as my grandfather keeps reminding me because he likes miniskirts. And we had women in government minute. And it happens real fast. And so those tipping points of the the breakdown in trust, the breakdown in truth and look at Afghanistan now.
- [40:05]
A
We'll be back in a minute. Support for on with Kara Swisher comes from Groons. If you're looking for a health goal that you can actually stick to, you might want to check it out. Groons. Groons is a simple daily habit that deliver real benefits with minimal effort. They're convenient, comprehensive formula packed into a snack pack of gummies a day. This isn't a multivitamin, a greens gummy or a prebiotic. It's all of those things and then some at a fraction of the price. And bonus, it tastes great. Grun's ingredients are backed by over 35,000 research publications, while generic multivitamins contain only seven to nine vitamins, have more than 20 vitamins and minerals, and 60 ingredients which include nutrient dense and whole foods. That includes 6 grams of prebiotic fiber, which is three times the amount of dietary fiber compared to the lean greens, powders and more than two cups of broccoli. It's a daily snack pack because you can't fit the amount of nutrients Grunds does into just one Gummy Plus. That makes it a fun treat to look forward to every day. Kick off the new year right and save the up to 52% off with the code Kara Groons Co that's code Kara K A R A at Groons G r u n s.co.
- [41:28]
E
This week on Net Worth and Chill, I'm giving you an exclusive sneak peek at my new book, well endowed, hitting shelves February 3rd. I wrote this book because I believe everyone deserves to build wealth that actually works for their life life, not just follow some cookie cutter financial advice that wasn't made for us. I'm sharing the real strategies for building generational wealth, investing with confidence, and creating the financial future you actually want. This isn't just another personal finance book. It's a roadmap for taking control of your financial destiny and building the kind of wealth that gives you options, freedom and peace of mind. Pre order well Endowed. Now, wherever books are sold and get ready to transform your relationship with money, listen to this this week's episode Wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com YourRichBFF for most of the history.
- [42:11]
C
Of television, if you missed a show, you just missed it. It was over. It was gone. But then this little company called TiVo came along and gave people superpowers. You could pause live television, you could rewind it, you could save it and watch it later. It was incredible. And the people who had it could not stop talking about it. This week on Version History, a new chat show about old technology, we talk about the history of TiVo and how it is that a company whose products actually no one ever really had or used became one of the most iconic stories in tech. All that on Version History, wherever you get podcasts.
- [42:48]
A
So every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours.
- [42:52]
D
Hi everyone, my name is Nicole Wong. As Kara knows, the topic of online speech means a lot to me, so I appreciate your work and being included in this conversation. Over the last 30 years, I've worked with a lot of tech companies and a lot of governments about how to effectively manage online speech platforms. It's always been difficult, like playing five dimensional chess. There has always been harmful, malicious speech. But the difficulty is in the speech that falls in that category, that's offensive to some but meaningful to others, that gray zone. And for that category of speech, someone always has to be the decider. I have a multi part question for you. First, in your ideal regulatory framework, who makes that difficult decision about what contested speech is permissible and what's not and how do we assess success or failure? Second, what is the role of the government in enforcing such speech? Does it change when we're dealing with weak democracies or authoritarian governments who don't like what critics have to say? Thanks and happy New Year.
- [44:04]
A
So that's Nicole Wong, who worked for Google. I've known her for years. One of the smartest thinkers on this, back when they were smart at these tech companies where they had decent people working on these very difficult and thorny questions. She also worked at Twitter. So let's start with the first one who gets to decide what contested speech. Okay. And what's not, and how do you gauge success?
- [44:24]
B
So I think the First Amendment decides what speech is. And if you remove section 230, if you could sue a platform and if you were trying to sue them for protected speech, the courts would say, sorry, that's protected speech. You cannot sue them for it.
- [44:38]
A
They've won every time in that they've.
- [44:40]
B
Won because of 230. And I think that what we have to do is start looking at where that speech may actually become negligence or knowing indifference, and where they might be held liable, which might be an AI.
- [44:50]
A
By the way, which isn't clearly protected by Section 230, but go ahead.
- [44:53]
B
So platforms have always said, like, we're being defended by 230. And the First Amendment take 230 away. Because 230 is like, it's just a blanket ban on being held liable. The problem with not being held liable is, as you will have witnessed yourself, it starts to become a shibboleth. It starts to become an idea that they should never be held liable, neither legally nor morally.
- [45:13]
A
That's correct.
- [45:14]
B
It creates a culture of indifference to the harm that they cause.
- [45:17]
A
Very well said.
- [45:18]
B
It's what's driven the sociopathic indifference and greed that these platforms have towards the harm that they cause. And now when I come along and say, well, that's mad, they go, censorship, which is nonsense. I mean, utter nonsense.
- [45:36]
A
Right.
- [45:37]
B
So I mean That, I mean, that's how I'd answer that question, is let the courts decide. What, what is. Do not change the speech laws. That'd be madness.
- [45:45]
A
Go to court.
- [45:45]
B
Go to court.
- [45:46]
A
Let the courts decide. That's why I said the second part. What's the role of government enforcing speech? What does that change when you're dealing with a Donald Trump where it, it's whatever he likes, like he's been saying this week is whatever his moral compass is, is what the rest of us should do, which means that's a party.
- [46:02]
B
The government doesn't have a role in enforcing speech. It has a role in protecting speech. And that's what makes what they're doing to me so outrageous. The government's role is actually to protect you.
- [46:15]
A
To protect you.
- [46:16]
B
You and I are both in one respect, minorities. Right? I mean, no one that's ever listening to me ever knows that I'm brown, but I am actually brown. And. And you're gay. And these voices were suppressed. Our voices were suppressed. Our ability, my ability to be anywhere near the public sphere and your ability to be open about who you love and the type of family that you want to have was suppressed. We've benefited from the government actually protecting our right to speech. That's where the government's role. But what the government shouldn't do is give special protections to one kind of company because they're their friends. That's wrong. That's not the way that governments should work. That's, you know, that's communism. That's basically oligarchs who are friends of Putin being given special protections.
- [47:08]
A
So your organization published multiple showing the harms of various tech platforms. Your research showed how, as you noted, ChatGPT would produce instructions on self harm and disordered eating within minutes. How TikTok bombards users, young users with similar content, and how X and meta enable the spread of anti Semitism. This is a. So I've had round after round with Zuckerberg about this and one of the more famous encounters we've had, the last one we've had actually. What are you hoping these platforms will do with that information? Because one of the things I was trying to show in that famous interview I did was he is fundamentally unable to make these decisions and shouldn't.
- [47:44]
B
Right.
- [47:45]
A
So what should happen here with this information, because that's who gets to decide is Zuckerberg.
- [47:50]
B
I mean, one of the most interesting things Zuckerberg did was he put out a chart a few years ago which he was trying to explain why they have rules on their platform and why they enforce their rules, which they don't. And on the X axis. So, like, you know, it had how violative the content is, so how close it is to. Is to violating the rules. And on the Y axis, it had engagement levels. And what it showed is that engagement's really low, really low, really low. Until you get to the point of being violative. And then it just shoots up, shoots up, and it keeps going up.
- [48:19]
A
Yeah. You know, I always say enragement equals engagement, but go ahead.
- [48:23]
B
Right. And we know this from study after study after study that shows that emotionally effective content actually gets the most engagement. And so essentially what it means is hate gets more engagement, often people being pissed off at it, and actually tolerance gets less engagement. And if the fundamental way that your platform works is that it doesn't reward how smart you are or how hard you've thought about it, but just raw engagement numbers. He said we have to have rules and we need to enforce those rules because then once you go past a certain point of being violative, it drops to zero.
- [48:55]
A
What are the incentives, though, to reorder? Because one of the things Nicole and I, which I always appreciated back then, was she sort of said, google is fast, relevant and gets you the answer you want. It wasn't viral and incented for engagement. And she said when that changed, you couldn't reorder it back to just being useful. You know, speed and virality and engagement really fucked everything up. This was 15 years ago. She talked about this. How do you reorder the way we. Because we seem to like it. Right? Of course. Humans seem to like this. So how does it get reordered? Is there a better way to regulate the platforms? It isn't funding about deciding which speech is good on a case by case basis, because these companies understandably don't want to be the speech police and they're not good at it. So what could happen here?
- [49:45]
B
So, I mean, at a fundamental level, and this is one of the things that I really believe in as an organization, we were designed to look at the spread of the stuff that hurts people in the real world. We were never a tech organization. We're always a consumer rights organization that was looking at tech platforms. I'm a great believer in the serenity prayer. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, the wisdom to know the difference. I don't do search platforms. We look at social media and AI platforms specifically. Cory Doctorow and others have written about insertification and how essentially once Google won the franchise for search, they then and filled you up with ads. We do look at YouTube and YouTube has got a problem. We just did a study called Anorexia Algorithm looking at how YouTube was recommending anorexia content to children. And you know, YouTube have promised again and again and again they won't do it. YouTube have got this and you will know this, that because they had the image of being really cool, they're very good at managing their image, that they got away with it. And people kind of figure that YouTube probably wouldn't be as bad, but YouTube is. YouTube is systemically mendacious when it comes to covering up the way that their algorithms work in practice and their inability to deal with the flood of dangerous content on there.
- [51:02]
A
I had a long argument with Susan about this because I was like, whether you mean it or not, it's happened. Like my son was looking at Ben Shapiro and suddenly got to antisemitism. I'm like, wow, that's a leap. This guy is the opposite. Why is he down in anti Semitic content?
- [51:18]
B
That's a publishing decision by the platform. When you make a recommendation to someone, you are. You are essentially making an editorial decision. You are suggesting to them that that's something that you think they should watch next. And that's what I find so pernicious about it.
- [51:32]
A
Is that what then we are in this situation? How do we get out of it? Because tech companies, as you know, have long been opposed to government regulation their programs. What's new is the Trump administration is using its power on their behalf. And I would argue that Obama was a friend of also and Biden wasn't and he got his head handed to them by them. It's trying to suppress critics like you. It's weaponizing claims of censorship. Censorship to undermine foreign attempts to regulate content like the EU's Digital Services Act. So what worries you most is the Trump administration goes after some of the few guardrails that exist. And again, let me just note other countries. Australia passed a law to ban social media for young people, and other countries are considering similar legislation. I don't think that will happen here in the US Largely because of the. I think they'll have teens suing the government, but go ahead.
- [52:17]
B
A ton of Republican states are currently considered and some have already passed bans on. So, yes, we may not get one at federal level, but actually we. I think you'd be surprised. I think sentiment is moving so fast that legislation always lags sentiment and sentiment grows linear. But legislation's Binary. So at some point it flips from zero to one. Right. So the sentiment grows and I think that we may see something and it will require talented advocates, will require people who go out there and make the arguments, who can actually overcome the millions being spent by big tech. I think that that's what, I think that's why CCDH has been targeted. We're actually quite good at what we do. We understand how to create the precise fact patterns that drive action. We know we're quite clever in picking areas, in making these arguments in emotive and clever ways and also speaking to legislators in a way that they understand on a bipartisan basis. On the board of ccdh, we've got conservatives, we've got, got everyone from every side of the debate.
- [53:17]
D
So.
- [53:17]
A
But where is the meaning of it? Because right now it feels like a rid me of this bothersome priest kind of situation. Right, but how can meaningful regulation of social media also happen without buy in from the us? When does that occur? This flip?
- [53:30]
B
Well, this is what worries me about what's happening right now. You know, interestingly, there's been no sanctions on Australia for having a ban on social media. What they are resisting most, what both the. So Elon, when he sued us, the actual tort in the lawsuit was that you broke the rules of our platform which ban people from taking data from the platform for research. There is a through line through all of this. We are now being punished apparently because the European Commission said you need to have transparency. CCDH is a research organization that uses research to hold up a mirror to these platforms again and again and again. The thing they're most scared of, Cara, is transparency.
- [54:12]
A
Yes, they are.
- [54:13]
B
And watchdogs who are able to get data and create understanding for people, well.
- [54:17]
A
You know, you're manipulating that data just so you know, according to them.
- [54:20]
B
But that's fine. Sue us. Sue us for defamation. Yeah, they never have, not once, not even Musk sued us for defamation because, you know, we are good at what we do and we know that we might get sued for defamation in the world's biggest companies. Of course we're triple checking everything. But look, speech itself, I've always said First Amendment, very important that you keep it to where the law is already. And some kinds of speech are dangerous and tortious and you may end up being sued for them and that creates a hard barrier on that. But the other stuff, let's tell us how we're being manipulated and then see if advertisers and the public still want to use your platform. Transparency is the key if tomorrow there was universal data access for all those guys at Stanford, Stanford and Harvard and at CCDH and everywhere else, so we could actually understand these platforms better? I think the game's over.
- [55:15]
A
Yes, agreed, agreed.
- [55:17]
B
Because I think once we realize that they're not just putting red dye into our information ecosystem, they are pumping uranium.
- [55:23]
A
Into it, let's just be able to sue them. Let's be able to sue the bastards. And if we lose, we lose. If we win, we win. That's just the way America.
- [55:31]
B
Here's my thesis. If everyone in America knew about the existence of Section 230 tomorrow, the day after Section 230 would no longer exist. Because overwhelmingly when people realize that special protections are given to one industry, they say that's not fair. And Americans believe in fair comp I, I, I It's why I love being in America. I am a, I'm competitive. I love, I like competing. I like being surrounded by people who are hyper competitive because it makes me better at what I do. But there have to be rules. There has to be fair competition. And social media platforms being given a special dispensation. Screw that. That is fundamentally un American.
- [56:09]
A
Yeah, but the Internet, without section 230, it is a legal minefield to vet every single piece of content the users uploaded. That's a real problem. Just removing it, it's like removing your liver at this point.
- [56:20]
B
So there's different ways that you could do this. So I would argue that the status quo is so bad, is so bad and moving in such a bad direction that actually radical action might be okay and why, and fundamentally why are they given any protections at all? There are people like Marianne Frank and Danielle Citron, brilliant legal theorists who've talked about, instead of saying that you're liable immediately, that actually it should be where there's knowing indifference to harm. So when you're killing kids, you know about it and you just kind of go eh. And you know that those guys I know behave that way.
- [56:54]
A
Then I have been in those rooms.
- [56:56]
B
Then the liability kicks in.
- [56:57]
A
So let's bring it back to you. You've made the last question. You made it clear you're not backing down from the fight with the administration or planning to change your work. What's next for this case and your organization. Then talk about where it goes from here.
- [57:10]
B
I mean, look, I'm way back in court. In two months time, the government was, were didn't oppose extending the restraining order for a couple of months and they gave us a fairly leisurely briefing schedule. So we're back in court in a couple of months. I look forward to being back in court. I have faith in the system. And in the meantime, what they are trying to do is bleed us to death. What I'll be going out there and doing what most of my. I used to have a fun job. I used to actually do research and do all this stuff myself. Nowadays it's mainly fundraising and begging people for. So I'm going to be going out there and raising money and also spreading the message. Because as I said to you, if I can use this targeting to help people, more people to hear about Section 230, that gets me closer today to the day when everyone in America knows that it exists. And I think the day after everyone in America knows that it exists, it stops existing.
- [58:02]
A
Well, we need to rename it like K Pop Demon Hunters or something. We got to give it a new name. So everyone.
- [58:07]
B
I do, I do think just. I'm quite weak at that. Cause I'm fundamentally a dork and I'm not very good at. I mean, I named my organization the center for Countering Digital Hate. Cause I was like, I'm just. I can't be bothered explaining what it does. So I'm just gonna put it in the name.
- [58:19]
A
Right? That's right. I'm just saying it's got. You're absolutely right. Anyway, so it goes to court and then you believe it could either be Taco, which is Trump always chickens out, or they'll lose. But it could bleed you.
- [58:31]
B
I wanna have this fight. I think it's an important fight to have. I think it is a fight about what the true censorship is. And I think it's time that we puncture this nonsensical debate that's been going on in for the last five years about whether or not criticizing Elon Musk is de facto censorship. No, Elon, he said this is great. When this was all announced, he was like, this is great. The great free speech. Absolutely said this is great. No, this is censorship. When you are told that you're going to be split from your family because of the things that you say and advocate, that is censorship. And we've got to all. It doesn't matter if you're a Republican or Democrat. You can't let any president have that power. Power. I've got to fight this and I've got to win it.
- [59:09]
A
All right. Thank you, Imran, for your time and I appreciate it.
- [59:13]
B
Thank you.
- [59:19]
A
Today's show was produced by Christian Castro, Roselle, Michelle Eloy, Megan Burney and Kaitlin Lynch Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Rosemary Ho and Bradley Sylvester. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you are fighting the good fight. If not, you're a scared little boy. And that only matters if you are actually a little boy, which Elon Musk is not. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for on with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to on with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. Be back on Thursday with more.