Restricted: How Big Tech Is Taking Away Your Freedom | Short Documentaries

Facebook demonetized my page for the high crime and misdemeanor. My name is J.P. Sears. I'm a comedian and video creator. So I started posting videos, I believe in 2013. At the time, they were just insanely boring videos, life advice videos on different topics. I'd like to ask you today, how can you truly heal depression? When I started making comedy videos, some of them started to get some great views. In fact, I remember the first one. Being ultra spiritual has nothing to do with actually being spiritual, because no one even knows what that actually is. Being ultra spiritual means you look spiritual. I put it on my YouTube channel. After about a week, it had a thousand views, which astonished me at the time. My name is Brian Amridge. I was the senior engineering manager at Facebook. I saw the role that communication technology could have in giving somebody with no power, no money, no connection to the media, a voice and the ability to get their ideas out there in front of other people. And I believe very strongly that the velocity with which a person could do that was sort of a fundamental lever. I'm Dave Rubin. I'm the host of The Rubin Report, and I'm a co-founder of Locals.com. It's really weird, actually, because, you know, these things are all free and you can sign up for them in two seconds. So it's like, oh, wow, this is awesome. It's the Wild West. We can do whatever we want, whenever we want, and nobody's our boss. And we can come and go as we please. It's all fantastic. And that's sort of the way it was for those first few years of YouTube, maybe even for a decade of YouTube, actually. And then slowly, when you start doing some interesting things, you start talking about free speech or start going against the grain or being a little politically incorrect, then slowly things start turning on you. You start noticing when you do things that are more controversial, certain videos seem like they really get depressed. Or you're on Twitter and, you know, you say something that goes against the progressive orthodoxy of the day, and suddenly you get three retweets instead of, you know, 300 retweets or whatever it might be. I'm Marissa Streit. I'm the CEO of PragerU. In 2011, I was hired to build PragerU. The idea was to create a media educational company on the internet. And so YouTube was the perfect destination for it. Suddenly, they changed their community guidelines. They put notifications on our content. They start editorializing our content, making comments that our content is not accurate or inappropriate. That wasn't there in the beginning. We haven't changed. They changed on us. And so in the beginning, Facebook and YouTube lived up to the creator expectation really well. And then after a few years, I think Facebook really fell from the creator Mount Rushmore. But after a couple years, Facebook just wanted me, the creator, to pay them to show the viewers the videos of mine that they wanted to watch in the first place. You know, we wanted to be like a glass of water. We wanted to be that transparent container that just lets you see straight through to the content. Back then, it really wasn't political. That did start to change. I became very insecure with the reliability of YouTube and all the platforms. I was seeing so many people get their videos censored. Then I got censored. There was a video I made called The Conspiracy Theory Guy, where I'm actually making fun of conspiracy theories rather than touting them. Adam and Eve, obviously, they've created an inbred population of seven billion people. That's too much for this planet. More importantly, kids can be annoying. Have you ever been on an airplane with kids? I woke up, that video had been out on YouTube for at least a week, and I woke up and the video's gone. It just had a message in the back end of YouTube saying this video's violated community guidelines. It certainly made me scared. What other videos are going to be taken down? But more importantly, how do I stay on YouTube? How do I guard against being de-platformed? The only way to ensure I'm not de-platformed is I stop making videos. Dear Facebook, I am sorry. I unfortunately made a huge mistake of exercising free speech and trying to help people better their lives. I now realize both of these things are in direct violation of your community guidelines. I remember the day, it was in 2016, where I walked into the office one day and I got a bunch of emails, mostly from students, who were saying that they were looking for our videos on YouTube and they couldn't find them. I thought it was just some giant glitch in the system, a big mistake. We wrote it into YouTube saying, what is going on? Why can't students find our videos anymore? Eventually, once we got ahold of someone there, they responded that they've been reviewing our videos and that PragerU videos are deemed inappropriate for young people, and that's why they're being restricted. It was shocking. I think that this is not just an issue for PragerU. It's not just an issue for content creators. It's certainly not just an issue for those on the right. This is an issue for all citizens who believe that they should hear the truth and make their own decisions about things. Even if they don't agree with the content that we make, they should still have the right to hear opposing points of view. What I saw happening was that these activist employees, the executive team at Facebook, had a real hard time pushing back against them, saying no to them. Mark would say it in our Friday Q&As, but then what would actually happen is that we would sort of ratchet further and further toward a policy that was vague and subjective and included, you know, broadened and broadened the definition of hate speech as different identity groups asked Facebook to broaden it. And I started giving feedback about that. I started sort of raising the alarm bells from the perspective of this being a platform for ideas. When I started challenging what was happening, people wouldn't even talk about it. You know, they called me a hate monger for even daring to criticize the hate speech policy. And even the people who did agree with me were very clear in saying, but I am not willing to actually say anything to anybody else in the company about it. I'm afraid to talk about this because I think my career is on the line. I started pushing harder and harder when I saw that. I started vocalizing more and more about the fact that we were becoming a monoculture. And we started to have issues with people who weren't left-leaning, expressing what they thought, you know, about our content policy, about sort of PR stances the company was taking, how it was defending itself, even, you know, in some cases about the art that ended up going up on the walls. I don't want to name names. Somebody in the C-suite at Facebook had a conversation with me where they made it very, very clear. They understand my argument and they disagree. And it's not going to change. This is the direction they're going in. They're committed to it. And they reject my argument that it is a fundamental contradiction to try to innovate their way out of enforcing what is an ill-defined and impossible to define concept like hate speech. I walked out of that room knowing that I was going to write my badge post right after that. I'm Rachel Bovard, the Senior Director of Policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute. It wasn't really until 2013 that I started taking an interest in big tech. And that was after Edward Snowden revealed that all of the big tech companies had willingly thrown open their back doors to CIA, the NSA, to track everyday Americans, to share our photos with them, our emails, our videos, even voice recordings. And I thought, this doesn't seem very kosher, so what else are they up to? All of these industry titans can demonetize these guys with the flick of a wrist. They've completely wiped out someone's livelihood. They can decide now who can make money on their platforms. And in many cases, that's how someone feeds their family. So the power these companies have to decide who can access the marketplace, who can access the guts of capitalism, that is now in the hands of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Jack Dorsey. And that is terrifying for a lot of small content creators. I'm Amy Pekoff, Chief Policy Officer at Parler. The goal with Parler was to go out and compete instead of complaining about the problems with the competitors. And then second, to do that while respecting user privacy. On Parler, the users are not the commodity. You know, in terms of what was making the difference such that they were allowing us to exist, coexist peacefully before, and then not later, I think it's because we became a serious threat. Parler doesn't deplatform people for not being obedient to the mainstream narrative. Like, do you have any idea how dangerous that is? You could be exposed to thought and truth. What are you going to do over there? Exchange thoughts and express yourself? Don't be a racist. Can we get some thought police on Parler? Is it too much to ask? Parler doesn't violate you with its community guidelines? It's almost like they don't want to track me. The phrase build your own is one that's always hurled at people who are unhappy with the content moderation. Hey, if you don't like Google, you should just build your own Google. At Parler, we made our own platform. When we saw first Amazon and then Apple and then vendor after vendor leave. So if you can imagine that, you know, you're playing whack-a-mole and then suddenly here and there you're being given a new bout of whiplash. That was what life was like. That was a massive escalation because it's one thing when you just, you know, take out one person so Alex Jones gets booted from Facebook or YouTube. But when they took out Parler, this was in essence competition to Twitter. It was competition to big tech. They had 21 million users and they blew up the servers. I mean, it's really that simple. They went to Amazon and they said, end this company. And really that was sort of a mafia tactic. I think they know that if people are given a viable platform, a successful platform that is a competitor, that offers more ability to decide for yourself what you want in your feed, and that you know you're not being manipulated, you know that you are not having your data mined, you are not the commodity, that that competitor now becomes very dangerous. And I think that's one of the reasons that they wanted to shut us down. So we've moved way beyond not being able to post on Facebook or send a tweet. And we've really moved into a phase where a handful of companies are deciding who can participate in public life. These handful of companies very much control the avenues to public life. You don't hold views they agree with, they can de-platform you not just from their platforms, but from participating in greater society. When we talk about the free market, you know, we want it to work. We want competitors to arise and out-innovate the big guys. And that's the free market we all know and love. Antitrust enforcement exists to make sure that the little innovator is actually allowed to compete on the merits with the big guy. And the big guy can't just stamp him out of existence. Antitrust is not regulation. Antitrust is law enforcement. So I think people often conflate it with regulation. But again, it is illegal in this country to be a predatory monopoly because of antitrust law. And antitrust enforcement is required when people aren't playing fair. And so this is the way that we protect our free market. And it's incumbent upon our enforcers to make sure the market exists and has integrity for these little guys as well as the big guys. Big tech's this little mom-and-pop shop. And then in came Parler, this huge monopoly. I'm glad the little guy could eliminate the monopoly, at least for a little while. But I'm bummed that Parler was able to bounce back. The original bill in which Section 230 was housed was called the Family Online Empowerment Act. It was kind of a trade-off. They really wanted people to clean up the internet, right? They said, hey, we're not going to sue you for content that users post, but we still want you to take down the smutty stuff, to take down the porn, to take down stuff people don't want to see. So it was designed with a pretty narrow focus in mind. They're all acting as publishers, not as platforms. If they were just neutral platforms, they would let all the content on there. And then if you broke a law, well, then you got a bigger problem than what the platform is going to do to you. The reason they're acting as publishers is they decide what stuff you're going to see or what stuff you're not going to see or what Twitter will allow to trend or what stories they're going to hide or the litany of other things that they can do to manipulate suggested videos and whether they deboost things or derank things or shadowban people. I mean, all of these Orwellian terms that no one had heard of, you know, three or four years ago that now we basically talk about every day. When we realized that opposing points of view on YouTube were being censored, we started talking to other content creators. Some of them to the right, some of them to the left. All of us realized that we were having a serious problem. We had a serious problem with censorship. And so we decided to sue. Since we filed our lawsuit against YouTube, Google, things actually got worse. I feel like we're being punished. Not only are our videos restricted, now we're actually getting these little editorial pieces that they add on our videos where they mention other opposing views and other websites that people should look at in order to refute the points that we make in our videos. And so what has happened is now Google basically gets to have the cake and eat it too. It's a privilege that's been, you know, just totally distorted and expanded by the courts to cover all kinds of content removal, all kinds of behavior. And it's really almost now tantamount to an industry subsidy. And so it has allowed those nascent internet companies, Google, Facebook, Twitter, to grow into massive behemoths that you can't really compete with. What Facebook and Twitter and so on have done is create private squares that are so compelling that we might feel today like it's not possible for us to get our voice out there without them. And, you know, that's why we need to do a good job in giving them feedback. And it's why we need to ensure that the market is free for competition to come along and solve this problem. They aren't just private companies. They're our news source. They're where we speak. They're where we access the marketplace. All of these things, you know, govern society in it generally, right? So the issue isn't the content moderation itself. If Google did this for 30% of the world, it wouldn't be a question. The fact is, Google filters information for 90% of the world. Whatever Google decides is whatever 90% of the world sees. What do you hate most about free speech? Hate speech? It's everywhere, isn't it? Yeah. And if people didn't have the right to speak, then there would be no more hate speech. Yes. Brilliant. The most egregious manifestation of these problems at Facebook was the actual content standards policy itself. At that point, it was really about a hate speech policy. So the question is, who decides what's hate speech, what's comedy, and what's anything in between? We're seeing a very dangerous level of narrative control that they want to exert. They are now deplatforming or kicking off anyone who doesn't agree with a specific viewpoint. And I think the most concerning thing about this is that they are functionally doing it at the behest of Democratic lawmakers. You've seen everybody from Michelle Obama to Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beg big tech to deplatform people they don't like, or in the case of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, remove old tweets that were circulating or hashtags that criticize her. They are using big tech to silence views they don't agree with, to censor speech activity that if the government did it, it would be unconstitutional. But they're outsourcing that censorship to a private company. And that fusion is the most concerning development that I've seen in the last couple of months, because that is the definition of fascism. Is that what you want? Is that what you want? Do you want a government that then calls up big tech and doesn't allow you to hear information, information that pertains to you, your life, your rights? This is not an issue for PragerU. This is not an issue for any content creator. This is an issue for all citizens. They are manipulating us in ways we cannot imagine. It's not the ways that they're manipulating us that I can imagine that I'm worried about, right? It's the stuff that we have no idea that they're doing to us, or if they're not showing us a certain amount of stuff. It's a complete war on reality. Their perspective is that people will listen to experts, and we, the very smart, often Ivy League educated people at these companies, can figure out who the experts are. And if we connect the experts with the people, the people will listen to them, and then they will know it's true. With a capital T, true. Hi, I'm the PC police. I use fear, intimidation, and abuse to get you to betray your intelligence. Well, when Twitter tells you that Twitter is an essential human right, what they're saying is, we want to stay here forever. We can keep lurching into every part of your life. The word tyrannical feels true to me. It sure seems like it. I think they've gotten to a place where they're not looking to serve the people. They're not looking to serve their users or their customers. It seems as though they're looking to serve their own sense of power, control, and agenda, political or otherwise. As a society, we have to decide, are we going to let these companies do that? Are we going to let people who hate, you know, different kinds of speech work in tandem with these corporations to shut down views? Or are we going to stand up and say, no, that's not my America. The America that I know and love celebrates diversity of speech, celebrates diversity of viewpoints. And I want an America where the dissent is tolerated and even celebrated, because that is what makes this country exceptional. That's the kind of America I want. And that's a question that we're going to have to answer. They would love us to think that we're nothing without them. Our businesses are nothing without them. Our social life is nothing without them. Our self-esteem is nothing without all the likes on Instagram. We are nothing without them. That is absolutely false. We the people, we are everything. They are nothing without us.