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Good evening. It's August 27.
As you can see, tonight, as is true of last night, we are not currently in our normal System Update studio. Unlike last night, we are actually in a studio tonight. It's just not our normal studio. I'm on the road traveling for some issues relating to some reporting I'm working on, as well as some family matters. In Miami, we are using the Locals studio, which is very nice. It's just not the format we typically use. Last night I actually did it from an undisclosed hotel room and the show went off, I think, without any technical hitches. So hopefully we can make tonight's even a bit smoother. I think we have a lot of important topics to cover. I want to begin with the story that we're most following tonight, which is that when it comes to new and severe threats to online speech, the 2020 presidential campaign and everything that happened in the lead-up to it might seem like it's a long, long time ago – and in some senses, it is: there's a lot that has happened since then that has escalated that censorship board even further. But we must never let go and forget about what it is that happened in the run-up to that 2020 election, because that was really, in my view, the first signal for how limitless the powers of factions intended to be in never allowing what in their mind was the debacle of 2016 to happen again. In other words, they were never going to allow the internet to be a place of free and unfettered information because they saw when you let that happen, the results that you get are things like Trump defeating Hillary Clinton and the UK pulling out of the EU through Brexit, and they created immediately overnight expertise called “disinformation experts” and got massive amounts of money to finance that. It was an entire system designed to lay the theoretical and legal foundation for how these states could start to do it. But 2020 was the first real egregious trespass, because what had happened was that you probably recall just a couple of weeks before the election, the New York Post had obtained a large archive of documents that came from Hunter Biden's laptop that he had left in a repair store in Rhode Island and never picked up. Oftentimes, addicts, who are in active use like he was, do things like drop off the laptop and don't pick them up for 90 days and then end up being in the hands of the repair shop. They realized what it was, and they turned it over to people that they thought could get it to the media, and as a result, it made its way into the hands of the New York Post, which began authenticating those documents and then published one document and then a second starting on the 14th of October of 2022, and then, on October 15, revealed not information about Hunter Biden's private life, but extremely substantive information about how the Biden family and Joe Biden himself we're trading on the power and influence that Joe Biden himself had assembled as the vice president and as somebody who might be president one day, to have his family pursue highly lucrative business deals in Ukraine, in China and elsewhere that traded on his name with his involvement.
Yet none of that reporting made its way into the hands of the American people. The exact opposite happened. Twitter announced that there was a brute censorship ban on any reporting on that story. If you ever tried to link to that story using Twitter, Twitter would instantly detect the link and block it and say, this is not a permissible link, even if you tried to send it by a private message over Twitter, Twitter would block that as well. There was no way to use Twitter to promote or show people the evidence on which that story was based.
On the day that Twitter censored major reporting about the presidential frontrunner, Joe Biden, in the 2020 race, Facebook popped up and announced – and they chose, bizarrely, to announce this through a lifelong DNC operative of their company named Andy Stone – that Facebook would also be suppressing the spread of the story, not necessarily doing a brute ban like what Twitter did, but doing something much more insidious, which is tinkering with their algorithms to make sure it couldn't spread. So, you would be allowed to post on your Facebook page, but they would make sure that nobody saw it, it never spread, and it never got into anybody's hands. At the time they did this, the justification they used came from the U.S. intelligence community, namely, that these documents were not reliable, this reporting is not credible, because it is based on what the security state, the CIA, the FBI, the DHS, the DNI, the NSA, all these officials from all these agencies that are built to never interfere in our domestic politics doing exactly that by claiming that all of this had the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.
Even if it had been Russian disinformation, we all know that that was an outright lie, the idea that tech companies are competent to assess that, or just blindly follow what the FBI tells them and censor whatever the FBI tells them to censor in the middle of an election, is obviously alarming in the extreme. And yet that's exactly what both Twitter and Facebook did. At the time, Twitter was run by its founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, and he quickly apologized for the mistake that he said he allowed Twitter to make in just censoring all of those documents and all of those stories and said it was a big mistake that Twitter did that. Facebook has never said that, despite all sorts of efforts by myself and others to get them to account for what they did in 2020, which they've ignored up until now. Mark Zuckerberg was sent a detailed list of questions by the GOP Judiciary Committee subcommittee that is investigating this, and the letter that Mark Zuckerberg sent back on behalf of Meta, the company that owns Facebook, will show you he made this extraordinary confession. He said, yes, we did actively and aggressively suppress the spread of the reporting that came from Hunter Biden's laptop, but we didn't do so on our own accord. We did so because the FBI told us, falsely, as it turns out, that that information was Russian disinformation. And he said, oh, we realize we made a mistake, we're never going to do it again. But it's amazing how so many of these mistakes only get acknowledged way after it's too late. But what we now know, based on the media's own findings, based on the admissions that we got today and before, from Facebook and from Twitter, is that the agencies of the U.S. security state, the part of the government that is unaccountable and unelected, the permanent part of the security state that was built never to aim at American citizens, only at foreign adversaries, only at foreign countries, is now an extremely active player in trying to manipulate our elections by demanding or encouraging or cajoling Big Tech platforms to censor information that might help the Donald Trump campaign win and the censoring will help Joe Biden or whoever is running against Trump ensure that they can win. That is so clearly on the historical record and it's hard to overstate the consequences of that to democracy.
We're going to look at that Facebook admission, this extraordinary confession that contains some other confessions as well, that have come from Mark Zuckerberg before about admissions, that the U.S. government was successfully forcing them to censor dissent on Covid that ended up being either debatable or even true – we've run over it before – but this whole new admission gives crucial new light to what the story is. I don't want to just go back and make sure we have the right history on it. I want to make sure that we can take a look at one of the most vivid and extreme cases, at least as of that date, to understand how far down the path we really are and why I keep talking about this and focusing on it as the grave threat it is to American democracy. It's not just the free speech angle, it's also the interference of the security state in our domestic politics as aggressively as anything could be imagined.
We want to talk about, as well, about the ongoing escalation of the attacks on free speech that have been taking place since October 7, not by censoring conservative speech or silencing people who question gender ideology that has been going on, that has continued to go on, but the far more frequent and significant strain of censorship in the United States since October 7. I'm talking here about people being fired from their jobs in journalism, and academia, and people and groups being summarily closed and kicked out of school or banned from participating online. Actual bills have been passed and executive orders have been implemented to severely restrict the range of views that Americans are permitted to express about not just Jews, but about Israel and the war in Israel in particular, to try to clamp down on having that range of views that were always considered free speech should now be free, then no longer be considered free speech. Some recent examples are highly disturbing showing that none of these trends, that for a while were justified on the shocking severity of October 7, just like a bunch of civil liberties erosions were justified in the wake of 9/11 as we get even almost a year away now from October 7, none of these attacks on the free speech rights of American citizens in the name of protecting Israel are slowing down. In fact, many of them are accelerating with a somewhat deafening silence from the people who have done very well for themselves over the past decade in branding themselves free speech warriors and people who are deeply offended by censorship. We want to tell you about some of those recent developments as well.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
