>> Now that Donald Trump has been deplatformed from every major social media platform,
new data indicates that the spread of misinformation has dramatically dropped. Now,
of course, there's the issue of censorship,
we'll get to that in a minute. I always make sure that we spend some time discussing that.
But it's also important to acknowledge the fact that Donald Trump should have been deplatformed. I
agree with deplatforming Donald Trump, especially after we had violent insurrectionists and rioters
breach the Capitol, murder a police officer, Capitol police officer. And of course,
we also learned that four other people died in the middle of those riots.
So Trump's provocations and spread of misinformation was an issue. And I'm
glad that finally these social media sites took some action
in that specific case. Now let's go to the data and learn a little
bit about what happened after that. Online misinformation about election fraud plunged
73% after several social media sites suspended President Trump and key allies last week.
This analysis was done by Zignal Labs, in case you're wondering how we know this.
Conversations, for instance, about election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to
688,000 mentions across several social media sites in the week after Trump was banned from Twitter.
And of course, Trump and his supporters have lost accounts on various social media platforms,
including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, Spotify, Shopify and others.
Facebook called Trump's suspension indefinite, but they have left open the possibility that
his account could later be restored. Now mentions of the #FightforTrump, which was widely deployed
across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media services in the week before the rally
dropped 95%. #HoldTheLine and the term March for Trump also fell more than 95%.
And aside from the analysis that was done by
Zignal Labs, Media Matters for America did their own analysis. And they found that the
number of people clicking and sharing content from right-leaning political Facebook pages
also fell substantially in the days after Facebook issued its temporary ban on Trump's account.
Now if you want a perfect example of why I think it was important for this to happen.
Look, I don't promote a lot of stuff on this show unless I really believe in it. And I think that
it's information that can help you understand what's going on in the world and in our country.
But the Daily, which is the podcast for the New York Times had reporters speak to Trump
supporters, people who were not at the Capitol riots, to ask them how they felt about it. And
even the supporters who are against the violence and found it reprehensible and all of that,
they are just completely convinced that the election was stolen from Donald Trump.
That Joe Biden is not the rightful president elect.
That is an issue that continues to divide the country in incredibly dangerous ways. So
take a listen to that podcast, I recommend it. But Ryan, I wanted to get some of your thoughts.
>> I mean, I'm still sorting through some of how I feel about this.
And I wonder if some of the, I would bet that a signficant amount of decline that they're
pointing to is directly related to the fact that the insurrection failed so spectacularly.
I mean, I think March for Trump, Fight for Trump, Stop the Steal and claims about the
election being stolen would collapse in the face of this riot being beaten back.
I don't think that they, some of them certainly expected they would
be able to take over the Capitol. I think most of them thought they
would be well enough guarded, most secure building on the planet. That they wouldn't get in,
they'd make a lot of noise, that their voice would be heard on the outside, but they wouldn't get in.
Once they got in, and they saw the public reaction to that, it really set back
everything that they were advocating for in such a tremendous way that I don't know
if that alone accounts for all of it, but it is interesting that Media Matters found
that right wing sites also had a significant drop in traffic to them.
My problem with this scene is more that it's treating a symptom rather than the
disease. Because if you leave the disease unchecked, then it's just
gonna create more symptoms. And you can't just constantly rely on the wisdom and the mercy of
Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey to make the right decisions of which accounts to ban.
And so you have to go deeper and say, well, what was it that set people against each other to begin
with? And I think that where you can start is to say that these social media monopolies
should not be able to profit by seeking people against each other.
So their platforms and their profit margins are derived by making people angry. If you go on
YouTube and you start out looking for a chicken soup recipe, pretty quickly
you are watching a Jordan Peterson video. And that's
by design. And it's designed that way because he makes people angry.
And that whole content world makes people angry. And anger drives engagement. And
you shouldn't be able to do that like that. If you want to have this monopoly platform,
then the government should be able to regulate it in a way that says
no, they were trying to figure out how to make a chicken soup, this should be quite simple.
You don't need to feed them to a militia video. >> Yeah, I love the fact that you brought up
the poor decisions that were made by the executives at these platforms that kind of led to
the division that we see. Because, look, to be clear,
my problem with Donald Trump's Twitter activity was that
he was able to successfully drive the news cycle just through his tweets and it was so infuriating.
Because if his lies went unchecked, then people have no access to what's really going on,
right? And I of course always had this urge to just ignore his tweets.
But some of them were so outlandish and so false, and again it would be
a way of just kind of beginning every news cycle with his narrative.
And you are constantly trying to keep up with his lies in order to debunk them,
I thought that was an issue. But I really do think that these social media platforms did what they
did because they don't wanna be held liable for anything that happened in the Capitol that day.
It's always about doing what's necessary to avoid liability. And I also love that you mentioned
the word engagement. Because that's exactly what you need to look at when you consider
the incentives, the financial incentives, not just for the platforms themselves,
but also for content creators, right? There is a financial incentive to engage in
divisive rhetoric and to engage in conflicts that are drummed up and full of nonsense.
And I think that has certainly contributed to the division we see in the country.
But to your point about fears regarding Zuckerberg, essentially being the arbiter,
or Jack Dorsey being the arbiter of what can and cannot exist on these massive platforms
that have monopolized this industry. People should be super supportive of and
spread as much information about the antitrust lawsuits that were filed by the US government.
Just to give you some background on that, the US government and 48 attorneys general filed landmark
antitrust lawsuits against Facebook. Seeking to break up the social networking giant over
charges it engaged in illegal anti-competitive tactics to buy, bully and kill its rivals,
as part of the reason why there's very little competition when it comes to this space.
And so if you rely on Facebook or Twitter to get your message out,
or to promote your work, or to use it for the positive purposes that it's there for,
and its algorithm decides to accidentally suspend you indefinitely from their platform,
that's a problem. And so you want to break up these companies or ensure that it's a competitive
area where other social media sites can be launched and they can succeed.
But Facebook has acted pretty aggressively to prevent that from happening, which is
what has helped it grow so big. Any thoughts on these antitrust lawsuits and their importance,
Ryan? Yeah, I actually think that the the Big Tech response to that Capitol storming
is connected to the lawsuits that you talk about.
Because now all of a sudden at the same time that the rioters were rampaging through
the Capitol, Jon Ossoff was declared the winner of the Georgia Senate runoff. Which put Democrats
over the top, so now they were gonna have unified control. So Big Tech's response
to kind of cozy up to Democrats, I think was related to them trying to trying to influence
the personnel decisions that the Biden administration, Biden transition is making
on who's going to staff the FTC and the Department of Justice antitrust division,
which will be overseeing these Google and Facebook cases.
So look, hey, we're your friends here. Look, we just knocked Parler off the Internet.
Look, we just nuked Ron Paul's Facebook page. And when they did Ron Paul's, that's where I really
raised my eyebrows. Okay, I'm sure Ron Paul was spreading some COVID misinformation, yeah,
I'm sure there's plenty that he was doing.
He said he didn't actually get any warnings from Facebook before this. But
what is useful to Ron Paul to the Big Tech industry is he's somebody
that people have heard of. He's famous in political circles, but he's also pretty
powerless. And so you nuke your rival, this upstart rival Parler and then you nuke Ron Paul.
And you say, look, we don't really need to be regulated. We're doing the best that we can here.
We're on your side in this fight, so don't worry about us. But really, they have made sure that the
American tech industry hasn't really innovated in years. What are the chances that the best
social media network that the world is capable of producing is Facebook, and it was made in 2005?
Yet that's the one we're going to be stuck with if it is
able to continue to successfully buy and crush every rival that comes up. And so,
at a minimum, what these antitrust enforcers are saying is that you can't also own WhatsApp,
can't also own Instagram. You can't also own these dozens of other startups that you bought
up strictly for the purpose of killing them so that they don't create a better product.
And when Snapchat came up, they immediately figured out ways to just crush Snapchat. And so,
if the social media experience is gonna give us what we got on January 6, then that alone
is argument that there ought to be more competition in the space to
see if we can get something that doesn't make us all so miserable.
>> Yeah, I totally agree with you on that. And just a funny update to Facebook's response to the
antitrust lawsuits. They propose to create and prop up a competitor to their company,
which I thought was hilarious. I mean, no one's falling for that. But Mark Zuckerberg,
the cojones on that guy for proposing that, it's just hilarious.