Land & Sea Journal

Joe Rogan Experience #2255 - Mark Zuckerberg (youtube.com)
‘They [people in the Biden administration] pushed us pretty hard ... to censor things that were true. ... Anything that says vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.’ Zuckerberg on the period when the government was trying to push the vaccine mandate. Jim Jordan had an investigation, so a lot of the censorship and aggreesive Biden team (screaming, Zuckerberg said) pressure on Facebook staff is public. ‘The emails are published.’ He said that then, at one point, Biden said ‘These guys are killing people’ or something, and then all the agencies started coming after Facebook and ‘it was brutal.’

The two events, Z said, when censorship from the government and whoever increased was the aftermath of the Trump 1.0 election 2016, and the pandemic measures 2020.

Xwitter factchecking works like, when people who usually disagree on an issue agree that something is false, it gets flagged and downranked.

Facebook is going to increase its precision classifiers for harmful content, which means it will censor less people who were not actually doing harmful content, but it will also catch less harmful content. Mistakes at scale is unacceptable, but it's a hard calculation.

Facebook is not changing its policy on the several categories of actual harm, but the two categories that have been very politicized are misinformation ('because who gets to judge what's false and what's true') and the other one is what people refer to as “hate speech”...' Wanting to promote feeling good and inclusion, but the problem is ‘all these things are on a spectrum’ and ‘we got to this point where there were things you just couldn’t say which were just mainstream discourse.' That Z would refer to it not as ‘hate speech’ noun but as ‘what people refer to as “hate speech"’.

‘Who are the people that people look to?’ A lot of the people who people looked to before, they've seen now those people weren't being that honest about some things. Authentic. Valuable information. ‘I think there’ll be a new class of creators who'll be the cultural elites that people look at like Ok these are the people who give it to me straight.' Maybe it's possible because of social media. ‘Who are the voices that matter?’

There's no reason to cut an interview down to 4 minutes on the internet, in contrast with TV, Z said. We can talk for 3 hours. These are complex issues, it takes a lot to unpack them. In front of an audience is the worst way to get people to talk, Joe Rogan said. You have to be able to pause, not think about entertaining. A conversation is like a dance, you can't talk at different speeds, you have to go along and find your rhythm, and how these two people are gonna talk.

Americans now have felt what limitations of free speech, actual censorship, feels like.

‘We didn’t take down things that were true [except some moderators might have], but we did generally defer to the government on things that I probably wouldn't now, in retrospect.' Z

On Dana White joining, ‘We have a lot of governments and folks around the world putting pressure on our company, and we need some strong people who are gonna help and advise on how to handle some of these situations.’ ‘Running this company is not for the faint of heart.’

He sounds like a non-admitting MRM too.

At 2:40 Joe Rogan asks the question I was wondering, if, a couple years ago when the Biden government was pressuring him (forcing him, from his perspective) to censor Facebook, basically to government control Facebook but unofficially and non-publicly, if Zuckerberg thought this was just how it was going to be from now on. Zuckerberg said they reached a point where they just pushed back on all that stuff. ‘We were unwilling to do it. We developed a very adversarial and bad relationship with our own government. ... But fortunately in the US we have good rule of law, and at the end of the day, OK, these agencies can open up these investigations and we'll just defend ourselves. We'll go to court and we'll win all the cases. Because we follow all the rules.' But he also said that this does create a situation where you're really afraid if you do something to mess something up, then they're really gonna bring the hammer down on you.

But I think of the contrast between Zuckerburg in 2019 testifying about cryptocurrency, and he looked so contained, so self-controlled, over-clean-cut, like a robot, not really like a person, with nothing in his eyes really, so unhappy, so ‘Just what do you want me to do?’ and then starting a year or so ago, after MMA and now Trump beat Biden, and having gone through that and being able to look at things with that experience

It's also yet another argument in favor of teaching martial arts in schools, if it wasn't enough just to know the Japanese do it.

Zuckerburg just made the value-maximizing decision during Trump 1.0 (when he seemed to basically be carrying out D functions) and now again, said Chamath. It's the smart, value maximizing decision for Facebook shareholders. Elon didn't make the value-maximizing decision, he made a moral decision when it was difficult to make it.

Yeah, we can say there are people who are naturals at going against the mainstream, a minority, who face a lot of beatings but can take that, and Musk is probably that, whereas Zuckerberg is probalby not that, or hasn't been. But now Zuckerberg is like 40 and has had some experiences (when he was younger he may not have had many street experiences and may not have ever tried opposing authority, he may never have had a real view). But Musk, on the other hand, might go too far. I'm not sure yet that Musk won't go too far in his support for capable, serious, hardworking people at the expense of ‘normal people.’

If Harris had won, he would probably not be doing this, the Besties seemed to agree. That he was ‘jumping in front of a marching band.’ But I still am happy with the change. Even people who will do something benevolent for human and civil rights when they don't have to fear, that's still valuable, especially when the person has a high effect job or asset. Not everyone is so brave as to oppose power, probably a small minority. Can you say you've ever done it? And this should underlie the decision people make as voters in a republic, that they are chosing the person who will shape the landscape in which perhaps good but perhaps not always brave, effective people will be acting in.

Jcal pointed out that ‘He banned Trump, the president of the United States. ... When he had an opportunity to reevaluate that decision, he punted. He created a third-party organization to make the decision for him and make deflect it. Zuck created the oversight board. ... I’ll give $150m to this board to make these hard decisions for me, instead of me making the decision.' Again, as someone whose used to this, I'll just say you can't expect everyone to do that. Most people are just not like that. It would be interesting to know the calculation that leads to bravery. But now they got Dana White in there, and he's might be a pretty tough guy. A famous sort of team always is a smart guy and a tough guy together. A lot of times, a smart guy is just waiting for a tough guy to hang out with so he feels protected enough to do some interesting things. However, banning the president of the country from expressing himself is serious and I think most would say greivous, and there should be an understanding reached on how that happened, and some sort of just punishment for it, whether Zuckerberg did it of his own volition or whether someone threatened him into doing it, in which case he would not be guilty in the same way, as it would be duress. We should acknowledge that these platforms, once they reach a certain size, are not individual companies, they are utilities or public places, because they are the place people's speech happens.

Could something like this be said about Obama?

...'I think he is terrified of Trump and is doing this simply to appease Trump.'

I think, if Zuckerburg was doing something currently which he didn't want to do, he'd look and talk more like he did during the Congress scrutiny. It's possible he's just a great, carefree liar now, but that doesn't seem as likely.

I think, from his appearance and the way he talked during those years, max robot, that this lines up pretty well with a theory that he was doing something he really didn't want to do, didn't believe in, was perhaps ashamed about. Maybe if, at the time, he had had a toughguy friend. You can force compliance but you can't force a person to accept it in themselves. Jcal argued that ‘he wasn’t going to jail for opposing the government if he didn't refuse to censor Trump' but I think we all know how these organizations operate, and there may have been other types of threats. It also seemed from the way the interchange about Telegram founder arrest went, with Joe suggesting Pegasus, and Zuckerberg saying pretty tersely that he thinks there are a lot of ways (like Pegasus). Perhaps that's what happened to him.

Zuckerberg will have future opportunities to make difficult, dangerous decisions, though.

Also, no matter what's going on there with Zuckerberg, which we don't have clarity on, and can never unless a person makes a dangerous decision based on their beliefs (although this can include just repeatedly stating a position and conflicting with abusive powers in the realm of debate), he does need to come along a bit on the privacy and security front. He might be there with us on freedom of speech and personal liberties, but he and Musk too are not there on the need for privacy and security, in part because it conflicts with his company goals of spyglasses, using people's interesting information to generate use, the metaverse (which he is doing opensource though, for belief reasons it seems).