Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Mark Zuckerberg On How FBI Lies Caused Facebook to Suppress 2020 Biden Reporting; Ongoing, Worsening Threats to Free Speech Over Israel
Video Transcript
August 28, 2024
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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. 

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Are you still posting transcripts?

What's with the American flag replacing the green on the Rumble logo? I tweeted at Rumble and Pavlovski, but they probably will pay no attention to me, and might pay attention to you. No one in the chat tonight wanted the change, FWIW. Also, Michael Tracey has a good post about deification of Charlie Kirk, which I assume is what prompted this unwelcome change.

Hi Glenn

I recently heard you say that Kyle Rittenhouse was rightly acquitted. Rittenhouse is from IL so he had to pass the same gun safety course as I did to get a gun permit. The training includes guidance, based on case law, that places the onus for safety on the gun owner. My training said that if you bring a firearm to a place where you expect violent conflict or the law presumes you are out looking for trouble, not defending yourself. Don’t take a weapon out unless you’re prepared to fire it. Don’t point a weapon at anything (or person) unless you’re prepared to destroy it.

Rittenhouse brought a rifle to a riot, appointed himself guardian of someone else’s property, and threatened a crowd with deadly force by brandishing his gun. Each of these acts was escalatory, which increases his culpability for the acts that followed.

Rittenhouse followed a similar fact pattern as the killers of Ahmad Aubry a few months earlier, except Aubry didn’t have his own weapon.

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Trump and Rubio Apply Panama Regime Change Playbook to Venezuela; Michael Tracey is Kicked-Out of Epstein Press Conference
System Update #508

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. 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 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!

 

 The Trump administration proudly announced yesterday that it blew up a small speedboat out of the water near Venezuela. It claimed that – without presenting even a shred of evidence – that the boat carried 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang, and that the boat was filled with drugs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio – whose lifelong dream has been engineering coups and regime changes in Latin American countries like Venezuela and Cuba – claimed at first that the boat was headed toward the nearby island nation of Trinidad. But after President Trump claimed that the boat was actually headed to the United States, where it intended to drop all sorts of drugs into the country, Secretary of State Rubio changed his story to align with Trump's and claimed that the boat was, in fact, headed to the United States. 

There are numerous vital issues and questions here. First, have Trump supporters not learned the lesson yet that when the U.S. Government makes assertions and claims to justify its violence, that evidence ought to be required before simply assuming that political leaders are telling the truth. Second, what is the basis, the legal or Constitutional basis, that permits Donald Trump to simply order boats in international waters to be bombed with U.S. helicopters or drones instead of, for example, interdicting the boat, if you believe there are drugs on it, to actually prove that the people are guilty before just evaporating them off the planet? And then third, and perhaps most important: is all of this – as it seems – merely a prelude to yet another U.S. regime change war, this time, one aimed at the government of oil-rich Venezuela? We'll examine all of these events and implications, including the very glaring parallels between what is being done now to what the Bush 41 administration did in 1989 when invading Panama in order to oppose its one-time ally, President Manuel Noriega, based on exactly the same claims the Trump administration is now making about Venezuela. For a political movement that claims to hate Bush/neocon foreign policy, many Trump supporters and Trump officials sure do find ways to support the wars that constitute the essence of this ideology they claim to hate. 

Then, the independent journalist and friend of the show, Michael Tracey, was physically removed from a press conference in Washington D.C. yesterday, one to which he was invited, that was convened by the so-called survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and their lawyer. Michael's apparent crime was that he did what a journalist should be doing. He asked a question that undercut the narrative of the press event and documented the lies of one of the key Epstein accusers, lies that the Epstein accuser herself admits to having told. All of this is part of Michael's now months-long journalistic crusade to debunk large parts of the Epstein melodrama – efforts that include claims he's made, with which I have sometimes disagreed, but it's undeniable that the work he's doing is journalistically valuable in every instance: we always need questioning and critical scrutiny of mob justice or emoting-driven consensus to ask whether there's really evidence to support all of the claims. And that's what Michael has been doing, and he's basically been standing alone while doing it, and he'll be here to discuss yesterday’s expulsion from this press conference as well as the broader implications of the work he's been trying to do. 

 

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Minnesota Shooting Exploited to Impose AI Mass Surveillance; Taylor Lorenz on Dark Money Group Paying Dem Influencers, and the Online Safety Act
System Update #507

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. 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 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!

 

The ramifications of yesterday's Minneapolis school shooting – and the exploitations of it – continue to grow. On last night's program, we reviewed the transparently opportunistic efforts by people across the political spectrum to immediately proclaim that they knew exactly what caused this murderer to shoot people. As it turned out, the murderer was motivated by whatever party or ideology, religion, or social belief that they hate most. Always a huge coincidence and a great gift for those who claim that. 

There's an even more common and actually far more sinister manner of exploiting such shootings: namely, by immediately playing on people's anger and fear to tell them that they must submit to greater and greater forms of mass surveillance and other authoritarian powers to avoid such events in the future. As they did after the 9/11 attack, which ushered in the full-scale online surveillance system under which we all live, Fox News is back to push a comprehensive Israel-developed AI mass surveillance program in the name of stopping violent events in the future. We'll tell you all about it. 

 Then, we have a very special surprise guest for tonight. She is Taylor Lorenz, who reported for years for The New York Times and The Washington Post on internet culture, trends in online discourse, and social media platforms. She's here in part to talk about her new story that appeared in WIRED Magazine today that details a dark money program that secretly shovels money to pro-Democratic Party podcasters and content creators, including ones with large audiences, and yet they are prohibited from disclosing even to their viewership that they're being paid in this way. We'll talk about this program and its implications. And while she's here, we'll also discuss her reporting on, and warnings about new online censorship schemes that masquerade as child protection laws, namely, by requiring users to submit proof of their identity to access various sites, all in the name of protecting children, but in the process destroying the key value of online anonymity. We'll talk to her about several other related issues as well. 


 

There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
System Update #506

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. 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 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!

 

We are going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

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