Dianne Feinstein (5:10)

What we're talking about is a major foreign power with the sophistication and ability to involve themselves in a presidential election and sow conflict and discontent all over this country. We are not going to go away, gentlemen, and this is a very big deal. I went home last night with profound disappointment. I asked specific questions. I got vague answers, and that just won't do. You have a huge problem on your hands, and the United States is going to be the first of the countries to bring it to your attention. And others are going to follow, I'm sure, because you bear this responsibility. You've created these platforms, and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones to do something about it, or we will.

Ben Shapiro (6:16)

Open threats. Open, open threats. And again, the goal of this was to shut down dissenting points of view. This is not about Russians. It was never about Russian disinformation. Those supposed effective Russian memes over the course of the entire 2016 election cycle reached about 126 million people. That sounds like a big number until you realize that my personal Facebook page was reaching a billion people every single month. Okay, so these are not big numbers, actually, over the course of an entire election cycle. It was never about that. It was always about censorship. Now, Zuckerberg over at Meta, which was then Facebook, was coming under severe pressure, but he was standing up to the pressure. In 2019, he gave a speech at Georgetown. We talked about it on the show. You can go find the episode in which he stood up for free speech in what I thought were useful, productive, and strong ways. Here was Zuckerberg back in 2019.

Mark Zuckerberg (7:08)

Today, we are in another moment of social tension. We face real issues that are going to take a long time to work through. Massive economic transitions from globalization and technology, fallout that remains from the 2008 financial crisis, very polarized reactions to social issues and greater migration, not just here, but across the EU and around the world. And many of our issues flow downstream from these changes. And in the face of these tensions, once again, a popular impulse is to pull back on free expression. We are at another crossroads. We can either continue to stand for free expression, understanding its messiness, but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us, or we can decide that the cost is simply too great. And I'm here today because I believe that we must continue to stand for free expression.

Ben Shapiro (8:12)

Okay? And he was right then. He was right in 2019. We praised him on the show for it in 2019. He sounds like Elon Musk today. Zuckerberg in 2019. And then something happened. And the thing that happened was 2020, Donald Trump was up for reelection. And several things coincided. One, the COVID pandemic. And the government started to go to social media and and tell social media it needed to shut down misinformation about the pandemic. And that misinformation ranged from actual false data to things that were patently true. Things like, for example, the fact that the vaccine did not prevent transmission, which, as it turns out, was true. Things like the Wuhan virus theory that it came from a lab in theory, the lab leak theory that was shut down by social media at the behest of governments all the way up through the election. When the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was deliberately buried by places like Facebook, they shut down the dissemination of the Hunter Biden laptop link. You remember this happened at Twitter also, because this is before Elon had bought Twitter. So the social media companies were under serious pressure all through 2020, and they kept exerting more and more pressure in 2020, shutting down particular modes of communication on everything from transgenderism to Black Lives Matter, on everything from immigration to Covid. Well, all of our institutions have been under serious pressure from the left. That, of course includes colleges. You have to be very careful where you send your kids or where you go if you're looking at a university. Grand Canyon University is a private Christian university in beautiful Phoenix, Arizona. They believe we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. GCU believes in equal opportunity. And the American dream starts with purpose. GCU equips you to serve others in ways that promote human flourishing and create a ripple effect of transformation for generations to come. By honoring your career, calling you impact your family, your friends and your community. Change the world for good by putting others before yourself to glorify God. Whether your pursuit involves a bachelor's, master's, or doctoral degree, GCU's online on campus and hybrid learning environments are designed to help you achieve your unique academic, personal and professional goals. With 350 academic programs as of June 2024, GCU meets you where you are and provides a path to help you fulfill your dreams. The pursuit to serve others is yours. Let it flourish. Find your purpose at Grand Canyon University. Private christian affordable visit gcu.edu I've been to their campus. It is a beautiful place. They have a Wonderful student body. Go check them out right now and see how they can help you. Grand Canyon University Private christian affordable visit gcu.edu to get started. Also with the New Year here, I've been thinking about how my approach to planning has evolved. These days, it's not just about setting career goals or making resolutions. It's about making smart moves to protect what matters most to me. Family. And that's why we need to talk about about your death and about life insurance. You need Policy Genius. They're not an insurance company. They're actually the country's leading online insurance marketplace, making it incredibly simple to find and buy life insurance that gives your loved ones a financial safety net. If you're a homeowner the way I am, mortgage payments are a common cost that could be covered by life insurance. Policygenius helps you find and compare all the plans that fit your priorities best. Here's what I love about Policy Genius. They combine easy to use digital tools with real licensed experts who help you every step of the way. Their team answers all your questions, handles the paperwork, advocates for you throughout the entire process. You you can compare quotes from top insurers side by side, completely free, no hidden fees. Here's something you should know with Policy Genius. You can find life insurance policies that start at just 292 bucks per year for a million dollars in coverage. Some options are 100% online and let you avoid those unnecessary medical exams. So go check them out right now. Secure your families tomorrow so you have peace of mind today. Policygenius.com Shapiro or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes. See how much you could save. That's policygenius.com Shapiro here is Zuckerberg in 2022 with Joe Rogan admitting that Facebook took action at the behest of the federal government to shut down dissemination of certain types of information.

Mark Zuckerberg (11:53)

The distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it. So you could still share it, you could still consume it.

Ben Shapiro (12:00)

So when you say the distribution has.

Mark Zuckerberg (12:02)

Decreased, it got shared.

Ben Shapiro (12:03)

How does that work?

Mark Zuckerberg (12:04)

Basically the ranking in News Feed was a little bit less, so fewer people saw it than would have otherwise. So it definitely.

Ben Shapiro (12:11)

By what percentage?

Mark Zuckerberg (12:13)

I don't know off the top of my head, but it's meaningful. But I mean, but basically a lot of people were still able to share it. We got a lot of complaints that that was the case. You know, obviously this is a hyper political issue, so depending on what side of the political spectrum you either think we didn't Censor it enough or censored it way too much.

Ben Shapiro (12:32)

But.

Mark Zuckerberg (12:32)

But we weren't sort of as black and white about it as Twitter. We just kind of thought, hey, look, if the FBI, which I still view as a legitimate institution in this country, it's very professional law enforcement, they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously.

Ben Shapiro (12:48)

Did they specifically say you need to be on guard about that story?

Mark Zuckerberg (12:53)

No, I don't remember if it was that specifically, but it was. It basically fit the pattern.

Ben Shapiro (12:59)

Okay. Now, later, Zuckerberg would admit that actually there was tremendous pressure in 2020 and also in 2021, and it only ratcheted up in 2021. So after January 6th, the left and the media decided they were going to ratchet up the pressure on Facebook even more, on social media even more. The idea was that Facebook had been responsible for January 6th. You remember this again, anytime something happens that the left doesn't like, they blame the mechanism of distribution because what they are after is control of. Of the mechanism of distribution always and forever. It's about power. It is never about principle. It is always about power. If something goes wrong, you find the thing you want to take over, you blame the people in charge of that thing, and you suggest that you should be in charge of that thing. Right. By the time that January 6th happened, there were posts nearly every day from people on the left on various social media outlets and at the New York Times lamenting the fact that we had such wide distribution at the Daily Wire. And this took the form of members of the Biden White House actively stumping to reduce our traffic on Facebook. This is a thing that happened. According to just the news. There were meeting notes from the White House, quote, Shortly after taking office in January 2021, President Joe Biden's administration pressured Facebook to stifle the Daily Wire's reach on the platform and boost the reach of legacy media outlets, according to meeting notes recently turned over to Congress. Those meeting notes, first reported by just the news. Detailed discussions then White House Digital director Rob Flaherty had with Facebook executives in 2021, where the Biden staffer pressured the big tech company to moderate content related to Covid vaccines in order to enforce the administration's policy goals. During one meeting on April 14, 2021, Flaherty asked Facebook about, quote, changing the algorithm to push content from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal over news from the Daily Wire and other polarizing entities. Quote, if you were to change the algorithm so that people were more likely to see the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, any authoritative news source over Daily Wireless. You wouldn't have a mechanism to check the material impact. Flaherty asked Facebook employees in a conversation about changing Americans attitudes towards Covid. At the time of that meeting in April 2021 and in the months to follow, the Daily Wire was still the leading publisher on Facebook. We had way more likes, way more clicks, way more reaction than New York Times, Wall Street Journal, everyone. That is why the White House was targeting us. And basically in response to that, in response to our success on Facebook, the Daily Wires, the company, our success on Facebook. Facebook, under pressure from the White House, decided to completely shift their entire take on political media. They decided they were going to shut down the dissemination of political media on Facebook. And we could see it in the statistics. We had to change our entire business model to adjust for the fact that Facebook had done this again. The reach on my personal page dropped by 90%, 90 in the middle of 2021 because of all of this. And Zuckerberg has admitted publicly that in 2021, they shifted all of their policies at the behest of the Biden administration, at the behest of the left. All of this, by the way, again, designed to benefit legacy media. Because if you shut down the alternatives to legacy media, the only thing left is legacy media. If you engage in false fact checks of people and entities like the Daily Wire, while ignoring all of the lies that are told by CNN or the New York Times, if you decide that you're going to downgrade all political content, any viral political content on Facebook, what you end up doing is benefiting the consolidated big guys at the expense of the upstart little guys. That is what that does. It is effectively a government controlled monopoly at that point, or an oligopoly Again, in 2024. This is precisely what Zuckerberg recognized. Zuckerberg actively sent a letter to the House of Representatives Judiciary committee, letter dated August 26, in which Zuckerberg said he regretted not speaking up about the pressure that he felt from the White House. Again, he. He wrote in this letter that his company was, quote, pressured into censoring content and the company would push back if it faced such demands. Again, quote, 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, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree. I believe the government pressure was wrong. I regret we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today. Okay, so now Donald Trump has won reelection. Now Donald Trump has won reelection. And because Donald Trump has won reelection, the tides have turned. And so there are two ways to view this. One is that Facebook is sort of riding the winds of whatever is popular. That if Democrats get elected, the censorship goes right back into place. And that's a possibility. The other way to read this is that Zuckerberg, even when Democrats were in control of Congress in 2019, even then Zuckerberg was pushing for free speech. And it was when they had full control of the government that they were able to cudgel Facebook into doing what it was that they wanted. And now that they no longer have control, Facebook can finally let up and allow people to see the content they wanted to see. You have to understand what Facebook did is they made it so that you were automatically downgraded in the political content you viewed, if you subscribed, if you followed my page, for example, over at Facebook, which again was one of the top pages of Facebook, period. If you did that, I just disappeared from your feed. You may have noticed this if you're on Facebook at all. My show, my content just disappeared from your feed. And Facebook said that they had done this to all political content. And that's true, they did do it to all the political content across the board because the idea was to nuke the entire sector in order to avoid the implication that they were helping conservatives cuz conservatives were too successful in the space, particularly Daily Wire. Well, now they're reversing themselves. And so Mark Zuckerberg this morning put out about a five minute video explaining the changes that are happening over at Facebook. I want to go through it piece by piece cuz every piece of this is important and also revealing about exactly how these processes have been working for years. By the way, imagine, imagine how successful Republicans would be if social media had not been censoring conservative content for literally years on end. Here is Zuckerberg this morning.

Mark Zuckerberg (18:57)

Hey everyone, I want to talk about something important today because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression and I still believe this today. But a lot has happened over the last several years. There's been widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there's also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly. So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content. But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people. And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we're gonna get back to our reasons.

Ben Shapiro (20:02)

Stop it there for a second, okay? That is the key, the reasons elections are a cultural tipping point. Now, they are also a political tipping point, obviously, and a governmental and regulatory tipping point very clearly. So Meta as a corporation is looking and saying, listen, we now have the wherewithal to allow free speech, which is to say that I hope the commitment is real and lasts beyond whatever the administration is right now, that this is an actual long term commitment to free speech. That's what I would hope for. Okay? But what he's saying is correct. And the implication is also correct, which is that the Democratic Party does not like free speech, particularly on social media. So long as social media is censoring the stuff they want, they are perfectly in favor of censorship. It's the reason why Elon Musk went from amazing tech genius in Ironman to baddie of the week. That's why. It's cuz he bought X. The reason that Zuckerberg went from the example of the American success story to evil is because Donald Trump won in 2016. Again, it's all about power for the left. And so with Donald Trump elected, what that says is that now free speech can bloom once again. Which again should tell you something about where the left is in this country. They do not like free speech. Zuckerberg acknowledges it. Everyone knows this. The reason there is a new wind across America is because Trump was elected. The American people tired of the censorship regime. The left does not like free speech. They also do not like business very much. But the future could be bright for business. Ask nine experts, you will get 10 answers. Bull market, bear market inflation up or down. Can someone please invent a crystal ball already? But until then, over 38,000 businesses have found a way to future proof their operations with Netsuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP. Imagine having your accounting, financial management, inventory and HR all seamlessly integrated into one fluid platform. That's NetSuite. With this unified business management suite, you're not just juggling numbers, you're wielding a powerful tool that gives you the visibility and control to make quick, informed decisions. It's like having a map in a maze of market uncertainties. Real time insights and forecasting. Check. It's like peering into the future with actionable data right at your fingertips. And here's a game changer. You'll be closing your books in days, not weeks. That means less time drowning in paperwork, more time focusing on what truly matters, steering your business towards success. At the Daily Wire we're proud to partner with NetSuite because they're leading the way in future proofing operations for businesses around the world, including our own. Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars, NetSuite adapts to your needs, helping you respond to immediate challenges, seize your biggest opportunities. Speaking of opportunity, download that CFO's guide to AI and machine learning@netsuite.com Shapiro that guide is free at netsuite.com Shapiro that's netsuite.com Shapiro also you know, I've tried everything to improve my sleep setting stricter bedtimes, putting the phone out of reach to get some downtime from the news cycle, rearranging the bedroom. You know, all those sorts of things. But all these changes took constant effort, not a lot of result. Here is the thing when I really want to change my sleep, I came up with some simple upgrades. Number one bowl and branches 100% organic cotton sheets from the first night, I could feel the difference. These aren't just any sheets. They have incredibly buttery softness that puts you in instant relaxation mode. What really impresses me is how they get softer with every single wash. I know that doesn't sound true. It is absolutely true. I've tried other premium sheets before. Nothing comes close to the breathable comfort of Bullen brand sheets. The best part? They're woven with the finest 100% organic cotton on earth, crafted by artisans who earn the pay and respect they deserve. Not only do you sleep better, you can feel better about your purchase as well. Now is your big chance to change the way you sleep with Bull and branch. Get 15% off plus free shipping on your very first set of sheets@bolandbranch.com Bend that's bull and Branch. B O L L a n d branch.com Ben to save 15%, exclusions apply. See site for details.

Mark Zuckerberg (23:32)

Okay, continue and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X Starting in the US after Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US So over the next couple of months, we're going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.

Ben Shapiro (24:17)

Okay, so that point again, totally right. And we've been yelling this from the rooftops for years. The news fact checking organizations are opinion organizations of the left. This is true for all of them. This is true for the Washington Post fact checkers. This is true for PolitiFact. It was true for all of them. For all the fact checkers and the lie checkers. They were all biased to the left, clearly and obviously in two ways. One, in their selection bias, the things they chose to fact check, and two, how they fact check those things. So if Joe Biden told a lie, it wasn't a lie, it was a misspeak. If Donald Trump said something that was too broad and was generally true, but specifically he made a mistake, then the whole thing was wrapped up as a giant lie. That is the way the fact checkers did their work. And this was wrapped into broader conversations about censorship. So you had entire organizations like garm, which we helped dismantle, along with Elon Musk and the House Judiciary Committee. Garm, the Global alliance for Responsible Media, was a censorship racket. It was designed as a, quote, unquote, fact checking organization, designed to downgrade particular outlets. These organizations like News Guard. News Guard, an organization specifically designed to quote, unquote, rate news outlets that invariably benefited the left at the expense of the right. Invariably, those were used by places like Facebook as, quote, unquote, the fact checkers, to determine what deserved to see the light of day and what didn't. And Zuckerberg is now acknowledging the reality. These fact checkers were totally full of crap. They've been full of crap for years. We have been screaming this stuff from the rooftop, screaming it. And it has determined social media policy, meaning how you actually are able to access information. And, and so now Zuckerberg correctly is looking at the wonderful thing that Elon did on X with community notes, and he's actually implementing that over at Facebook. So big win for Elon and yes, big win for Facebook because community notes allow a sort of crowdsourcing approach to what is true and what is false and allows you to link to the information and allows people to upvote that. That is a much better way of trying to arbitrate truth than simply looking to some sort of cotti on a hill. Who's going to dispense justice one fact check at a time? So that is move number one. That is correct. It should have been done years ago. Here's move number two.

Mark Zuckerberg (26:28)

Second, we're going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and. And shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.

Ben Shapiro (26:54)

So, second thing, he's. He acknowledges there are certain issues that Facebook has shut down discussion of. Correct? Correct. You know how hard we've had to look at all of our content just to not have our pages banned. If you say things like men are not women on Facebook, this puts you in danger for years on end. It was true on X also until Elon bought the platform. If you say mass migration by radical Muslims into the west is a threat, that was something that would get downgraded in the news. You know our coverage since October 7th of Radical Muslim terrorism or the war in the Gaza Strip against Hamas. That has been downgraded on nearly every social media platform for simply mentioning the topic because the topic is too controversial. We've had to bleep out actual descriptions of, like, geography in the Middle east because it might be too controversial. And what is he acknowledging? He's acknowledging the left has tried to shut down conversation on these issues and social media was compliant. Social media was complicit in the attempt to shut down discussion of the biggest issues in public life, like immigration and whether boys should be taught that they can be girls and vice versa. So good. Good. Late, but good. Okay, he goes on to the third change over at Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg (28:11)

Third, we're changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now we're going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations. And for lower severity violations, we're going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action. The problem is that the filters make mistakes and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn't. So by dialing them back, we're going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms. We're also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content. The reality is that this is a trade off. It means we're going to catch less bad stuff, but will also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.

Ben Shapiro (29:03)

Okay, this is a huge thing. Okay, the point that he is making here, which is that the filters were set in order to exclude particular content. This is how social media blame the algorithm. He set the algorithm to remove political content and it removes everything. This ended up in a federal lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court in which there was talk of about the federal government putting pressure on Facebook in order to restrict the dissemination of information by individuals. And the Supreme Court idiotically found that that was not a violation of the First Amendment on standing grounds. They didn't even get to the underlying issue. They said for standing reasons this lawsuit wasn't ripe or whatever, but it clearly was a violation of the First Amendment. So they're gonna retune their content filters. So presumably you will be allowed, if you subscribe to the Ben Shapiro page at Facebook, to see content from Ben Shapiro. Right? That will be the way that it works, which is the way it always should have worked. They, without your permission, demoted political content in your feed using these filters. That is why the traffic dropped. It is why you stopped seeing. It's why people disappeared. Not just me, tons of people on the right just disappeared from your feed. Okay, he continues.

Mark Zuckerberg (30:08)

Fourth, we're bringing back civic content for a while. The community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed. So we stopped recommending these posts. But it feels like we're in a new era now and we're starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again. So we're going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram and threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.

Ben Shapiro (30:32)

Okay, so again, that is a method of allowing you to see the politics you wanted to see in the first place. And then Facebook took away from you and made it impossible for you to even know because hidden on a page is in your settings was a way for you to turn that back on. But if you're like pretty much everybody who uses Facebook, then you don't even know that that's how you set your. You don't even know it went away. You don't even know why it went away. You just consume passively what comes through your screen on most of these social media sites. So now they're changing that. So now you can finally see that stuff again. And this never should have happened. It happened because of Democrats. It happened because of the left. It happened because the left decided they wanted to kill alternative media. That's what this was, pure and simple. And. And Facebook was part of that process. And now they are reversing themselves because, as Zuckerberg says, the winds have changed. Times have changed. Now question did the times change or were you all politically active the whole time? The answer is we were all politically active and interested the entire time. Our company has doubled, tripled, quadrupled in growth since the time that Facebook cracked down on us in a wide variety of ways. We have worked around those systems, not on Facebook, but in terms of how we designed our business. With that said, the real reason that this is changing is not because the American people are quote unquote, reengaging in politics. We've been a little engaged, you may have noticed. The real reason is because Trump won. And now for the first time, the left is not in control. And social media, you better stick with it. You better stick with it because enough of this going back and forth, the shilly shout. The minute Democrats get. If they win the midterms, we're going to go right back to censoring. It's absolute horse crap. It has to end. Okay, Finally, Zuckerberg makes a staffing announcement.

Mark Zuckerberg (32:04)

Fifth, we're going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California. And our US Based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams. Finally, we're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They're going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US Government. And that's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the US Government has pushed for censorship by going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression and I am excited to take it. It'll take time to get this right. And these are complex systems. They're never going to be perfect.

Ben Shapiro (33:25)

There's also a lot of illegal stuff.

Mark Zuckerberg (33:27)

That we still need to work very hard to remove. But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focused primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice. I'm looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there, and more to come soon.

Ben Shapiro (33:51)

So again, those last couple things are unbelievably important. So he's moving the content moderation teams from San Francisco, from Silicon Valley, San Jose, bunch of libs over to Texas where presumably we'll have a broader panoply of people who actually know the rest of America, cuz the rest of America does in fact exist. But that last point is the telling one. This is how bad the Biden administration has been. This is how bad Democrats are. All across the world, censorship regimes are common de rigueur. This is true in Europe. This is why if you post the wrong thing in Britain, you will go to jail for longer than a rapist of a young girl. This is why in Canada you could theoretically risk jail if you say the wrong thing politically. Because it turns out the United States is unique in its pursuit of free speech. What Zuckerberg is saying is that during the Biden administration, he said it's openly there. During the Biden administration. The Biden administration was engaged in precisely the same sorts of pressure tactics that are engaged in by countries around the world. The Biden administration took its lead from censorship regimes in Europe, Asia and Latin America. They did not take our lead in free speech. And now President Trump is going to do the opposite. He's going to push for free speech in all the rest of these places. Use the American standards of free speech. In Europe, for example, instead of allowing Europe to to set the censorship rules on all of these companies that operate inside the United States. If you're a company that operates multinationally the way that obviously Facebook does, you have to have standards for every single different country. You have to have a standard for China, where they won't even allow Facebook, by the way. You have to have a standard for France or for Britain or for the United States. And all these Standards are different. But what the Biden administration did is they basically sided with the European standards. And so Facebook also sided with the European standards. And now that Trump is in office, the idea should be that the American exceptionalist idea of free speech should be purveyed everywhere and the US Government should use its weight in order to make sure that it can be purveyed in other places. This idea of a broader free speech movement and we need a full scale, long term commitment from these social media companies to actually change. This can't just be a temporary change for purposes of pleasing President Trump. Obviously, there's a lot of politics that goes around in these areas, but a commitment to free speech by social media needs to last longer than whomever is in the office. And that has not been the case. That has not been the case. Zuckerberg acknowledges as much. He acknowledges that Facebook literally changed its standards because of Joe Biden and Democrats in office. That can't happen again. It was bad for the country. It was very, very bad for the world. But this is the effect of one election. This is why it matters who you vote for. This is why it matters that Donald Trump is going to enter. The man is not even president yet. He has not even been sworn in as president again. And the entire world is changing. We'll get to more of those changes in just one moment. First, kickoff 2025. With 25% off a new Daily Wire plus annual membership, this year will be one for the history books. In less than two weeks, Donald Trump will be inaugurated and the Daily Wire will be there with live, uncensored coverage of every monumental moment. But while we celebrate what's ahead, the fight is not over. 2025 reminded us of that in its very first hours. The bad guys don't rest. Neither do we. Join us in the fight right now. Get 25% off your new Daily Wire plus annual membership. Every dollar fuels our mission. Go to DailyWire.com subscribe. Join today. By the way, I don't want to make it seem as though the legacy media are just going to go away on this one, because they certainly will not. But it's up to social media to ignore them. Ignore them. You don't need to listen to the Kevin Cruises of the world. You don't need to spend your days worried about what CNN is going to think about what social media allows to be posted. The reason I say this is because CNN has a piece talking about Meta's new moves. And here's what they say. Quote, the announcement comes amid a broader apparent ideological shift to the right within Meta's top ranks and as Zuckerberg seeks to improve his relationship with Trump before the president elect takes office later this month. Just one day earlier, Meta announced Trump ally and UFC CEO Dana White would join its board, along with two other new directors. Matta has also said it will donate a million dollars to Trump's inaugural fund and that Zuckerberg wants to take an active role in tech policy discussions. Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican who was elevated to the company's top policy job last week, acknowledged the Tuesday announcement is directly related to the changing administration. But here is CNN's Take the moderation changes mark a stunning reversal in how Meta handles false and misleading claims on its platform. In 2016, the company launched an independent fact checking program in the wake of claims it had failed to stop foreign actors from leveraging its platforms to spread disinformation and sow discord among Americans. In the years since it it continued to grapple with the spread of controversial content on its platform, such as misinformation about elections, anti vaccination stories, violence and hate speech. The company built up safety teams, introduced automated programs to filter out or reduce the visibility of false claims, and instituted a sort of independent Supreme Court for tricky moderation decisions. But now Zuckerberg dismantled the company's fact checking teams and made user generated context labels called Community Notes, the platform's only method of correcting false claims. He's following in the footsteps of Musk. Oh no. So this is how the media are gonna play this. How dare the misinformation be unleashed? How dare the misinformation. Here's the thing. It's not about unleashing quote, unquote misinformation. It's about stopping the censorship regime. And again, it's gonna be up to Zuckerberg and Elon and all the members of the social media honchos to stop listening to the people who would like broader censorship again in the name of power. Okay? Meanwhile, again this the the election of Trump is being felt all over the political and corporate map. McDonald's has now dropped its diversity targets for employees and suppliers. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago based company said it would not issue new representation goals for its staff, but will continue to report numbers pertaining to diversity in its ranks. They used to actually set goals as to how many people of each particular race should be employed at McDonald's. They're not going to do that anymore. Instead, they are going to, you know, try to use the best people in the best job. Things are Changing. And it smells like freedom. Because here's the thing. A corporation unbound from the insanity of left wing censorious garbage is going to pursue profit effectively. Social media companies are going to pursue the things that they think people want to see. They are not going to do the work of the censors if they're allowed to operate freely. Do they feel more or less free under Trump than they did under Biden? The answer, much, much more free. This is true for everyone in the country, including people who did not vote for President Trump. Meanwhile, what does the left have? Well, the left's got January 6th. So yesterday, of course, was January 6th, and that means it was time to talk about democracy and quote, unquote, threats to democracy. Now, it seems to me a rather large threat to democracy would be cudgeling the largest social media companies on the planet into censoring your opponents. That seems to me a rather large threat to democracy. A systemic threat to democracy. In fact, a much larger and more systemic threat to democracy than a rally that led to a smaller riot, that led to a group of people who are fairly small in number going out of control at the Capitol and committing criminal acts. That seems to me significantly less bad than what the Biden administration did to censor free speech, try to force 80 million Americans to vaccinate against their will. There are many things that the left does on a daily basis in order to maximize power and prevent the freedom of Americans, and those are much more threatening. But the left's got one card, and they're gonna play it over and over and over, and that card is bad. Things happened on January 6th. So Kamala Harris had to, ironically, preside over the failure of her own presidential campaign. Yesterday in Congress, she had to certify the election as her job as the Vice President of the United States. And here she was, tooting her own horn about it.

Kamala Harris (41:15)

Today I did what I have done my entire career, which is take seriously the oath that I have taken many times to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, which included today performing my constitutional duties to ensure that the people of America, the voters of America, will have their votes counted, that those votes matter, and that they will determine then the outcome of an election. I do believe very strongly that America's democracy is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it. Every single person, their willingness to fight for and respect the importance of our democracy. Otherwise, it is very fragile, and it will not, not be able to withstand moments of crisis. And today, America's democracy stood.

Ben Shapiro (42:11)

Okay, wow, look at America's. America's democracy stood January 6th also, like 2021. This nonsense that we were, like, on the verge of the government being overthrown is just absolute sheer crap. But again, the left has to play that out because their actual goal is to hollow out all of the institutions of American life, ranging from church to family, and then replace them with an overweening state in the name of, quote, democracy. That's their actual goal. So they gotta play up January 6th because it's threats to democracy. Well, we turn to the world's stupidest human being, Sunny Hostin, over at the View. It is amazing. There are only, I believe, five hosts on the View, and two of them have now made big Holocaust boo boos. It's a pretty high percentage of Holocaust boo boos happening over at the View. Remember, Whoopi Goldberg once suggested that the Holocaust was not based on race because. Because her head is so far up her ass, it's coming out her face again. Well, Sunny Hostin is somehow even dumber than Whoopi Goldberg. So yesterday on the View, this collection of high IQ intellectuals, Sunny Hostin, suggested that January 6 was akin to the Holocaust. Now, just gonna put it out there that a smallish riot at the Capitol building was not, in fact, comparable to the Holocaust. I don't feel like that one's particularly controversial, but again, not much going on upstairs over at the View.

Sunny Hostin (43:28)

I think we need to find moral clarity, you know, in this country. And I just remember after January 6th, you had someone like Mitch McConnell placing the blame on January 6th where it belonged, squarely on Donald Trump's shoulders. And then you started seeing people backtrack that and not. And losing their moral. You had Condoleezza Rice, I believe, on this very show, saying, you know, we need to move on from January 6th. I say, no, you don't move on, because January 6th was an atrocity. It was one of the worst moments in American history. And when you, when you think about the worst moments in American history, you know, like World War II, things that happened, you know, like the Holocaust, chattel slavery. We need to never forget because past becomes prologue if you forget any race.

Ben Shapiro (44:20)

Oh, my God. I mean, how many historical statements that are false can you make in 20 seconds there? First of all, I love that the Holocaust is now in American history. It's actually mostly in European history. Like, we liberated death camps, the United States. We actually were not responsible for the Holocaust. And then comparing it to World War II, where hundreds of thousands of Americans died in battle and hundreds, thousands more were wounded and Comparing it to chattel slavery, I feel that that's a little insulting to, you know, black Americans. To compare January 6th to centuries of chattel slavery in the United States, that seems kind of wild. But they are so over their skis. They got nothing. They got nothing. And so they're gonna fulminate because when they cannot control the levers of power, all they can do is about how terrible the world is. That's all. That's all they can do. And then use that as a lever in order to control the levers of power again. So you end up with Joy Reid suggesting you can't peacefully transfer power to an insurrectionist.

Sunny Hostin (45:19)

Fourteen days from today, you will hear many soberly and reverently laud the peaceful transfer of power. Well, I hate to be the fly at the picnic table, but you can't peacefully transfer power to an insurrectionist simply because it took them an extra four years to finish the job. This was a violent transfer of power. The most violent in US History, if we're being honest.

Ben Shapiro (45:43)

This was the. This was the most violent transfer. I mean, you lost an election. This was. I love how things I don't like become violence according to Joy Reid, while actual violence is just, you know, a natural outcome of an unjust world. Also, by the way, those are. Those look like very heavy earrings. Wow. That can't be great for the neck. And one of the great ironies of life is that two of the least happy people on earth are named Sonny and Joy. That is always confusing to me. How desperate are the media for a story about how bad Republicans are? Yesterday, they tried to manufacture one out of completely whole cloth. So one of the people who was being sworn in yesterday was Senator Deb Fisher of Nebraska, and her husband showed up as well. And the media tried to play it as though Deb Fisher's husband would not shake Kamala Harris's hand. That's not what happened. He was holding the Bible on which his wife was being sworn in, and he couldn't shake her hand because he had his hand on a cane. He can't walk well. And so the entire left wing media went with, he's a white guy who must hate black people. You got. If you want to blow out your own credibility, I'm running out of ways for you to do so, actually. But you come up with creative new ways every day. Congratulations. Thank you.

Kamala Harris (46:52)

Thank you. Thank you for your work. Thank you. Congratulations to you.

Pierre Poilievre (46:55)

Thank you.

Ben Shapiro (47:01)

It was a little awkward. Kamala Harris thinks that he's deliberately refusing to shake her hand. His Hand is on a cane. He's got a cane in his hand. It's. Oh, the. The sought martyrdom of the left. Okay. In other ways, the world is changing. Justin Trudeau announced yesterday that he intends to resign as the head of the Liberal Party in Canada, which means that the minute that he is replaced as head of the Liberal Party, that person will then take the prime ministership up until the next election. Unless there is a vote of no confidence, which they're absolutely 100% should be considering at this doof. If he were to run in the upcoming election, wound about 20% of the vote, and lose something like 2/3 to 3/4 of the seats that his party currently holds in the House of Commons in Canada. Here is Hannah. Handsome Bernie Sanders. Certainly. Certainly not Fidel Castro's son. How dare you? Even though he looks exactly like Fidel Castro. Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau.

Justin Trudeau (47:54)

I intend to resign as party leader, as prime minister after the party selects its next leader through a robust nationwide competitive process. Last night, I asked the president of the Liberal Party to begin that process.

Ben Shapiro (48:15)

Well, I mean, it's about time. Just a trip down memory lane with Justin Trudeau. The reason that he has to leave is because he's really, really bad at his job. But the final cap on him being bad at his job was the election of Donald Trump, who has declared that Justin Trudeau might be the governor of our 51st state. Well, now that he's leaving, I feel like our window to take Canada is shrinking because once Pierre Puliev is the head of the government in Canada, I feel like at that point, we have an allied government, and also they might resist the invasion. Right now, we'll be greeted as liberators because no one likes Justin Trudeau at all. And in my plan for Greater America, which includes both Canada and Greenland, as well as ownership of the Panama Canal, I feel like the window is closing. Guys, we got to move. We got to move fast and move. In any case, the reason Justin Trudeau is actually going is because he's quite terrible at his job, and Donald Trump pointed that out. And then, because Justin Trudeau can't deal with Donald Trump, his own Finance minister, Chrystia Friedland, decided that she was going to walk out on his government. What does his record look like? Well, he has a 73% disapproval rating, including 43% of liberal voters. Christia Friedland called out Trudeau's costly political gimmicks in her resignation letter. That was a reference to his $4.5 billion plan to send $175 checks to everybody in the country, making less than $105,000 a year. His signature carbon tax has reduced real incomes across the country. According to Barry Weiss over at the Free Press, Canada's record on immigration is insane. They had 1.1 million new immigrants who came to the country in 2022 alone. Many of those people do not exactly share Canada's values, driving up anti Semitism in the country. Violent crime has skyrocketed under Trudeau's leadership. Homicides rose by more than 50% between 2014 and 2022. There's now more violent crime on a per capita basis in Canada than in the United States, which is insane. You remember the trucker protest. You remember the guise of combating disinformation, where Canada's Online News act was sold as a way to make social media companies pay news organizations when linking to their content. In reality, it was an attempt to shore up legacy media. The rise of assisted suicide, the rise of drug use. For those poor judgment. I mean, let's just go through some of Justin Trudeau's greatest hits so we can remember and. And miss what he. What he once was. It was not long ago that he was shaking it off at a Taylor Swift concert. And one of the least manly men ever to man. Here is a Justin Trudeau to Taylor Swift concert. There he is dancing. Oh, my God, he is a sad person. He is such a sad person. He's in the middle of great suffering in Canada, but at least he was shaking it off. And then meanwhile, you'll remember Justin Trudeau going after the freedom Convoy. The freedom convoy, of course, were truckers who decided that they didn't want to lose their job or, you know, be forced to take a vaccine. And Justin Trudeau said that they were a fringe. Do you have any regrets about calling Ottawa protesters a fringe minority?

Justin Trudeau (51:18)

Yeah, I wish I had said that differently. As I look back on that and as I've reflected on it over the past months, not just freshly from this commissioner's report, I wish I had phrased it differently. The fact is, there is a very small number of people in this country who deliberately spread misinformation and disinformation that led to Canadians deaths that led to excessive hardship in people who believed them. I continue to be very, very firm against those individuals. But that is a small subset of people who were just hurting.

Ben Shapiro (52:12)

I mean, so he says, even there, he called these people a fringe minority. And then he's like, I regret I said that. Also, they killed a lot of People in their fringe minority, the leadership of moron Justin Trudeau. Okay, how about Justin Trudeau on trans policy again? This guy was a left wing dream. I think what we are seeing across the west right now, by the way, is simply a response to reality. It turns out that in rich times, when everybody is fat and happy, you can do a bunch of left wing policy. And then all over the course of about five, 10 years, everything goes to hell in a handbasket, and then you have to turn back to the right. Here's Justin Trudeau on trans policy.

Justin Trudeau (52:45)

Canadian parents love their kids, and we want the very best for them and we want them to be kept safe. LGBT youth across this country are among the most vulnerable to homelessness, to suicide, to a range of things that can harm them. We need to be there to defend them. We need to be there to protect them. And I know Canadians across the country are doing just that.

Ben Shapiro (53:23)

Well, I mean, cutting off the body parts of healthy children doesn't seem like a great way to protect them. I guess the people of Canada might agree with that proposition. The truth is, again, Justin Trudeau came straight out of a sociology lab. Truly. And that is why he's wildly unpopular, and that's why his party's gonna get shellacked whenever the next election is held. Back in 2018, here he was doing land acknowledgments. I mean, this guy's just a wet dream for the Berkeley Humanities Department.

Justin Trudeau (53:49)

I would like to begin by recognizing that we are as we are every day in this house on the inside, ancestral land of the Algonquin people.

Ben Shapiro (54:01)

Well, the person who is very likely to replace him as Prime Minister as soon as an election is held, as I say, is Pierre Poliev. Incredibly talented. This guy has a resting heart rate of apparently 35. He just never gets agitated. I love this guy. He's great. Here's Pierre Poilievre, famously answering questions from a left wing reporter while eating an apple.

Pierre Poilievre (54:22)

On the. On the topic, I mean, in terms of your sort of strategy, currently, you're obviously taking the populist pathway.

Ben Shapiro (54:30)

What does that mean?

Pierre Poilievre (54:32)

Well, appealing. Appealing to people's more emotional levels, I would guess. I mean, certainly you certainly, certainly you tap very strong ideological language quite frequently.

Justin Trudeau (54:45)

Like what?

Pierre Poilievre (54:47)

Left wing, you know, this and that. Right wing, you know, I mean, it's that. That type. I never really talk about left or right anyways. A lot of.

Mark Zuckerberg (54:55)

I don't really believe in that.

Pierre Poilievre (54:56)

Okay. A lot of people would. Would say that you're simply taking a page out of the Donald Trump.

Ben Shapiro (55:02)

Like which people would say that?

Pierre Poilievre (55:04)

Well, I'm sure a great many Canadians, but like who? I don't know who, but.

Ben Shapiro (55:11)

Well, you're the one who asked the question, so how. You must know some. Somebody. He's the best, that guy. Honestly, I kind of just want him to do all of his press conferences while consuming fruit. I just think that it would make it so much more amusing just eating a squash or something. And vegetables would work as well because it's just more amusing to answer dumb questions while eating. I think it's hilarious. And meanwhile, again, the impact on fruit foreign politics of the domestic election in the United States are huge. They're also having effect abroad. That's obviously true in Britain, where consternation continues to roil the country after Elon Musk's criticism of Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of Britain, who presided over the Crown Prosecution Service, which was completely derelict in looking into the spate of radical Muslims raping white girls over the course of decades in Great Britain, ignored by the police, ignored by the authorities, ignored by the media for literally decades on end because it might be politically incorrect to look into the problem. Nigel Farage has a piece over at Express, the Express in the uk, saying, quote, I've campaigned for over a decade on the issue of rape, gangs sexually abusing children and young girls. It is a stain on the nation. Justice has still not been done. When I first raised this appalling scandal in 2012, I was accused by those on the liberal left of trying to exploit it for political gain. I believe this was a tactic to shut down legitimate debate, probably because so many of the rapists were of Pakistani origin. And highlighting this would shatter the idea of multicultural Britain being a bed of roses. Had some parts of the media not tried to muzzle certain people back then, perhaps more could have been done sooner to stamp out the criminal activities of the predators who ruined so many lives. I'm told there could be as many as 50 towns and cities in England who have been affected by this evil. Something similar is going on now, says Nigel Farage. Sir Keir Starmer seems to be trying to sweep the past failures of the establishment under the carpet by denying calls for a statutory inquiry into this outrage. Starmer was Director of Public Prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, when many of these gangs were active. For the sake of public confidence, urgent questions must be answered about his conduct and that of the Crown Prosecution Service during every one of those years and beyond. That requires a statutory inquiry. And as Nigel Farage, who's The head of the Reform Party in the uk, which has been getting serious steam because the Conservative Party refuses to be Conservative over in the U.K. meanwhile, Elon Musk again has raised this issue transnationally. He is becoming the subject of much consternation and outrage because how dare he intervene in the politics of other nations. Whole article in the Wall Street Journal today, quote, elon Musk is roiling European politics. Elon Musk is throwing grenades into Europe's political mainstream over issues ranging from immigration to free speech, creating a dilemma for governments as they try to respond to the tech billionaire and key advisor to the incoming Trump administration. In recent days and weeks, Musk has weighed in with a series of incendiary social media posts on European politics, including supporting a far right party ahead of an election in Germany, accusing the British Prime Minister of being complicit in rape, denouncing judges in Italy and slamming the European Commission. Oh, no, this is really bad. Emmanuel Macron is very upset. The French president who's been stymying the right by allying with the insane loony bin socialist leftist melancholy. He says, quote, 10 years ago, if someone had told us the owner of one of the world's biggest social media companies would support a new international reactionary movement and intervene directly in elections, including in Germany, who would have imagined that? Says Emmanuel Macron. Meanwhile, of course, you have Germany that is now warning that he should not get involved. He needs to stop that. He needs to stop that right now. According to the Express, political figures in Germany are not happy with Musk for getting involved in the country's politics. Oh, no. The Green Party's Robert Habeck sent a furious warning to Musk, telling Der Spiegel, hands off our democracy, Mr. Musk. Opposition Leader Friedrich Mears also called Musk's remarks, quote, intrusive and pretentious. Wow, Just terrible. How could in Norway, the Norwegian Prime Minister, whose name is spelled Jonas Gar Stor, but is pronounced Jonas Gesture. I looked it up last night. I'm still mispronouncing it, but it's closer to the latter than the former. In any case, he said he found it worrying that a billionaire social media owner like Elon Musk is inserting himself into the politics of other countries. He hears the rule, guys. The rule is if you are a socialist billionaire like George Soros, you get the Medal of Freedom for intervening in foreign countries. If, however, you are like Elon Musk and you are not in fact a socialist, then that means that you are really, really, really bad. Like super duper bad. And that needs to stop right now. Needs to stop right now. This Elon Musk and his billions of dollars. George Soros, however, again, a wonderful, wonderful person. By the way, George Soros, we shouldn't note at this point, is absolutely awful. He's truly terrible. This is A quote from October 2015, George Soros on immigration in Hungary. Quote, his plan treats the protection this Viktor Orban he's talking about. His plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle. Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders is the obstacle. Talk about saying the quiet part out loud. National borders are the obstacle. Soros has also praised China, saying that, quote, china not only has a more vigorous economy than the United States, but actually a better functioning government than the United States. What, what a joy he is. What absolute joy. George Soros. He definitely deserved a medal of freedom from our current dead president, Joe Biden. Already coming up. Apparently Greenland might be still on the table. Yes, Fezik will be one of us. If if you're not a member, become a member. Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans. Click the link in the description and join us.