The following is an abridged transcript of a segment from System Update’s most recent episode, lightly edited for clarity and readability. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.

System Update is an independent show that is free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

Mark Zuckerberg – the Founder and CEO of Meta – made an extraordinary announcement today on behalf of the two social media giants his company controls. That announcement had many components, and all of them took direct aim at the censorship industrial complex that was created by governments and funded by neoliberal billionaires after 2016 in order to control political speech on the internet. The newly announced policy is also a bomb that was placed and then detonated at the heart of the fraudulent industry that calls itself "disinformation experts", people who have somehow proclaimed that they are uniquely able to discern truth and falsity with such authoritative dare, such certainty that their decrees must define the limits of permissible speech online by others. 

Now we can and absolutely should question the motives behind Zuckerberg's announcement, and we will definitely do that.. One can also be skeptical of whether it really is as striking a blow for online free speech as it might seem, and we will, of course, express that kind of skepticism as well – not just tonight but an ongoing basis. 

The speech – regardless of what follows – was extremely consequential just enough in and of itself, not just in the U.S. but internationally.  Zuckerberg, who has hinted at all of this long before Trump was elected, explicitly accused disinformation experts of acting for politicized ends and thus rendering them entirely unreliable. As a result, he announced that Meta would no longer pay for or use their services to determine what speech should and should not be permitted on the platform. He also acknowledged that the censorship policies of Facebook and Instagram have become wildly excessive and even repressive and thus vowed to abandon platform-wide censorship in favor of the model used by X: of allowing the community to correct inaccurate claims while giving up those claims without censoring them. 

He accused governments around the world – not only the U.S., but governments throughout Europe and in Latin America, including Brazil – of increasing their tyrannical control over the internet and vowed that Meta would no longer collaborate with these state censorship efforts. And perhaps most importantly of all, Zuckerberg recognized that it is not the role or responsibility of social media platforms, nor is it their competence, nor is it anyone else's, to determine what is true and what is false, to the point where people who decree that have the right to have their decrees honored as censorship orders. The whole point of free discourse for adults, after all, is to allow other people to debate those questions themselves freely and then decide it for themselves. 

Again, there are all sorts of reasons to distrust Mark Zuckerberg and Meta but there is no question that Zuckerberg's major announcement is a reflection of the growing backlash against online censorship and the fraudulent disinformation expert industry on which it relies. 

The following is an abridged transcript of a segment from System Update’s most recent episode, lightly edited for clarity and readability. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.

System Update is an independent show that is free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

Today is January 6, in our house and in this studio solemnly referred to as Insurrection Day. For years we were told Jan. 6 was an attempted coup engineered and incited by Donald Trump, part of his attempt to install himself as a fascist dictator – a white supremacist dictator – on par with Adolf Hitler, whom we were told in the last weeks before the campaign is someone about whom Trump frequently spoke with admiration. 

 This show examines what this says about everything that has been churned out over the last 4 years. We also talk about one of our primary topics of coverage over the last year which has been the steady and aggressive attacks on core free speech rights and values in the name of shielding Israel from criticisms: a new law in New York that would specifically criminalize the removal of pro-Israel signs – but no other kind – and the attempt to charge a prominent broadcast journalist in Australia with “hate crimes” for reporting on a speech by the leader of Hezbollah. We’ll dissect these latest repressive measures in part because they’re important and because – for obvious reasons – there are few people who will.

The following is an abridged transcript of a segment from System Update’s most recent episode, lightly edited for clarity and readability. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.

System Update is an independent show that is free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

I don't think there's any question that Trump is one of the most, if not the most consequential presidents of our lifetime. That's neither praise nor critique. That's just an observation that I think is undeniably true. The impact that he has had on media, the impact that he's had on political coalitions, the impact that he's had on policy, on political culture throughout the West and beyond, I think is far beyond any other specific president. Maybe Richard Nixon is the president who competes with him in terms of how consequential he was – and his presidency was – for better or for worse. But I would say Trump is probably the most consequential and the main reason for that, in my view, is how much he deviates from prior presidential patterns. Whatever you say about Donald Trump, you cannot say he's an ordinary political figure or an ordinary president. 

One of the things I think is most worth noting about Trump, the thing that for me has always been a vessel of potential, a reason why I think that there's something not only interesting but positive in Trump's emergence on the political scene is precisely the fact that, unlike virtually every president from either political party in my lifetime who is sort of a person you just wind up and they reflexively embrace the most sacred authorities of DC's power centers, in part because they are byproducts of them, they're sort of strivers, people who have been training their whole life to become president, they're trained above all else in how to say and believe the things that advance their careerism, their self-interest and their political agenda, they just are reflexively unrevolutionary, eager not to alienate powerful people, and therefore they're very reliable vessels for establishment dogma. Trump has spent his entire life doing exactly the opposite. The fact that he wasn't even in politics at all, in any elected capacity or as a candidate, basically until 2016, when he was 71 years old, I think is what enabled him to be so willing to reject ideas, positions, and pieties that presidents previous to him, major presidential candidates previous to him, would never even dream of rejecting because the cost is too high, the anger on the part of powerful and influential people is too intense. And yet, for whatever reasons, Trump has constituted in such a way as to not really care about that, I think he does crave at a certain level, gaining approval and being liked, but there's a bigger part of him that is willing to incur the wrath of the people who are most powerful. 

As a result, this unpredictability, I think is central to understanding Trump.