Ep. 2111 - MASSIVE MAGA WIN: Facebook REVERSES Its Censorship!
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Well, folks, Donald Trump is not yet president and the world is changing in dramatic, dramatic ways. This morning, Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta, which, of course, is the parent company of Facebook, as well as Instagram, made a huge announcement. Facebook, he said, is now going to be reversing its censorship policies. This is enormous. Facebook has absolutely crushed, I mean,

crushed conservative media on the platform over the course of the last several years. We know this personally over at The Daily Wire. I was the number one Facebook page of all Facebook pages on the platform in 2020. In 2021, something happened, something shifted. And in 2021, our impressions from my personal page, for example, which was again, maybe the most prominent page on Facebook, we went from, I'm not kidding you,

1 billion impressions a month. We went from that to less than 100 million impressions a month, 90% reduction in impressions in reach. And that was a deliberate move by Facebook to crush political content on the platform in 2021. And now Mark Zuckerberg is reversing all of that. I want to get to what he is doing, what the policies actually look like in a second.

I want to begin with the timeline because to understand what has been unfolding over at Facebook, you really have to understand more broadly what has been unfolding in America around the issues of free speech. In 2016, things fundamentally changed. They fundamentally changed when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. Up until 2016, social media had widely been perceived by the left as a large platform

Overall good that social media was a way for people to network with each other, for political content to be distributed to a broader audience. In fact, the Obama 2012 campaign had received all sorts of plaudits for its magical use of Facebook in getting people out to vote in 2012. And then Donald Trump won in 2016.

And Democrats looking for an excuse for why Trump had won decided it couldn't be because Hillary Clinton was an awful candidate. It couldn't be because Democrats had become disconnected from the body politic. It had to be. It had to be that social media had allowed Trump to win. Social media had to be cuddled into the corner. It had to have been the American people. The American populace was manipulated by outside forces that Russian bots had manipulated the election. You remember this narrative.

This was all part of the giant Russiagate narrative, which was that the Trump team had been infiltrated by pro-Russian stooges and then had been doing the work of Vladimir Putin. And in return, Vladimir Putin had manipulated the American body politic through Facebook memes into electing Donald Trump in 2016. In the form of politics, this took the form of the Mueller investigation and the entire Russiagate nonsense that lasted four years. But in the realm of social media and free speech, this turned into an argument for censorship.

It turned into an argument for shutting down social media's dissemination of dissenting point of views. The idea from the left was if Facebook allowed dissenting point of views to be distributed widely, that might lead to things like Donald Trump being elected and that had to be stopped. Now, the left like to hide this behind the rubric of disinformation. Remember, they use this word all the time in 2017.

Russian disinformation, election disinformation. That's why Trump had won. And then they started to merge that with misinformation and turn into misinformation and disinformation. Now, those are two very different terms. Disinformation would be a foreign power actively intervening with false information in order to thwart the will of the people, for example. Misinformation is just a catch-all term for things that you may not like in politics.

Misinformation, for example, the media said, was that Joe Biden was senile. That was misinformation. We were told that. It was cheap fakes and misinformation. So what the media started to do was lump all this together. Anything the media didn't like, the legacy media, anything the legacy media didn't like had to be shut down. This is also a business proposition for the legacy media. So it's a political proposition because they did not want people like Donald Trump to win. But it was also...

a business proposition because the thing about Facebook and the thing about social media generally is it allowed startup enterprises like The Daily Wire to actually thrive. We were able to market ourselves on Facebook. We were able to become a prominent company

and very powerful company because we were able to reach people through mechanisms that the legacy media did not control. That's what social media was for. And so you could see the legacy media and Democrats combine to crack down on social media outlets like Facebook, like Twitter, until Elon bought Twitter, by the way, like all the big social media outlets.

By 2017, Dianne Feinstein, and of course she was alive, she was a senator from California, she was holding hearings. Democrats in the Senate were holding hearings, berating members of the social media hierarchy and telling them that they needed to crack down on disinformation. And if they didn't crack down on disinformation, the government would. The pressure campaign from the government began as soon as Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Here was Dianne Feinstein openly threatening social media companies,

with shutting them down, restricting them in significant ways if they did not effectively do the bidding of Democrats. What we're talking about is a major foreign power with the sophistication and ability to involve themselves in a presidential election and sow conflict and discontent all over this country. We are not gonna go away, gentlemen.

And this is a very big deal. I went home last night with profound disappointment. I asked specific questions. I got vague answers. And that just won't do. You have a huge problem on your hands.

And the United States is going to be the first of the countries to bring it to your attention, and others are going to follow, I'm sure, because you bear this responsibility. You've created these platforms, and now they are being misused. And you have to be the ones to do something about it. Or we will. Open threats, open threats.

And again, the goal of this was to shut down dissenting points of views. This is not about Russians. It was never about Russian disinformation. Those supposed effective Russian memes over the course of the entire 2016 election cycle reached about 126 million people. That sounds like a big number until you realize that my personal Facebook page was reaching a billion people every single month. OK, so these are not big numbers, actually, over the course of an entire election cycle. It was never about that. It was always about censorship.

Now, Zuckerberg over at Meta, which was then Facebook, was coming under severe pressure, but he was standing up to the pressure. In 2019, he gave a speech at Georgetown. We talked about it on the show. You can go find the episode in which he stood up for free speech in what I thought were useful, productive and strong ways. Here was Zuckerberg back in 2019. Today, we are in another moment of social tension.

We face real issues that are going to take a long time to work through. Massive economic transitions from globalization and technology. Fallout that remains from the 2008 financial crisis. Very polarized reactions to social issues and greater migration, not just here but across the EU and around the world. And many of our issues flow downstream from these changes.

And in the face of these tensions, once again, a popular impulse is to pull back on free expression. We're at another crossroads. We can either continue to stand for free expression, understanding its messiness, but believing that the long journey towards greater progress requires confronting ideas that challenge us. Or we can decide that the cost is simply too great. And I'm here today because I believe that we must continue to stand for free expression.

Okay, and he was right then. He was right in 2019. We praised him on the show for it in 2019. He sounds like Elon Musk today, Zuckerberg, in 2019. And then something happened. And the thing that happened was 2020. Donald Trump was up for re-election. And several things coincided. One, the COVID pandemic. And the government started to go to social media and tell social media it needed to shut down misinformation about the pandemic.

And that misinformation ranged from actual false data to things that were patently true. Things like, for example, the fact that the vaccine did not prevent transmission, which, as it turns out, was true. Things like the Wuhan virus theory, that it came from a lab in theory, the lab leak theory, that that was shut down by social media at the behest of governments.

All the way up through the election when the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was deliberately buried by places like Facebook. They shut down the dissemination of the Hunter Biden laptop link. You remember this happened at Twitter also because this is before Elon had bought Twitter. So the social media companies were under serious pressure all through 2020. And they kept exerting more and more pressure in 2020, shutting down particular modes of communication on everything from transgenderism to Black Lives Matter, on everything from immigration to COVID.

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Here was Zuckerberg in 2022 with Joe Rogan admitting that Facebook took action at the behest of the federal government to shut down dissemination of certain types of information.

The distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it. So you could still share it. You could still consume it. So when you say the distribution has decreased, how does that work? Basically, the ranking in newsfeed was a little bit less. So fewer people saw it than would have otherwise. So it definitely... By what percentage? I don't know off the top of my head, but it's meaningful. But basically, a lot of people were still able to share it.

We got a lot of complaints that that was the case. You know, obviously, this is a hyper political issue. So depending on what side of the political spectrum, you either think we didn't censor it enough or censored it way too much. But we weren't sort of as black and white about it as Twitter. We just kind of thought, hey, look, if the FBI, which I still...

view as a legitimate institution in this country. It's like very professional law enforcement. They come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something that I want to take that seriously. Did they specifically say you need to be on guard about that story? No, I don't remember if it was that specifically, but it was it basically fit the pattern.

Now, later, Zuckerberg would admit that actually there was tremendous pressure in 2020 and also in 2021, and it only ratcheted up in 2021. So after January 6th, the left and the media decided they were going to ratchet up the pressure on Facebook even more, on social media even more. The idea was that Facebook had been responsible for January 6th. You remember this? Again, anytime something happens that the left doesn't like, they blame the mechanism of distribution because what they are after is control of the mechanism of distribution.

Always and forever, it's about power. It is never about principle. It is always about power. If something goes wrong, you find the thing you want to take over. You blame the people in charge of that thing. And you suggest that you should be in charge of that thing. By the time that January 6th happened, there were posts nearly every day from people on the left, on various social media outlets, and at the New York Times, lamenting the fact that we had such wide distribution at the Daily Wire. And this took the form of members of the Biden White House

actively stumping to reduce our traffic on Facebook. This is a thing that happened. According to Just the News, there were meeting notes from the White House, quote, shortly after taking office in January 2021, President Joe Biden's administration pressured Facebook to stifle the Daily Wire's reach on the platform and boost the reach of legacy media outlets, according to meeting notes recently turned over to Congress. The

Those meeting notes first reported by Just the News detailed discussions then White House digital director Rob Flaherty had with Facebook executives in 2021, where the Biden staffer pressured the big tech company to moderate content related to COVID vaccines in order to enforce the administration's policy goals. During one meeting on April 14th, 2021, Flaherty asked Facebook about, quote, changing the algorithm to push content from The New York Times and Wall Street Journal over news from The Daily Wire and other polarizing entities, quote.

If you were to change the algorithm so that people were more likely to see The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, any authoritative news source over Daily Wire, you wouldn't have a mechanism to check the material impact. Flaherty asked Facebook employees in a conversation about changing Americans' attitudes towards COVID.

At the time of that meeting in April 2021 and in the months to follow, The Daily Wire was still the leading publisher on Facebook. We had way more likes, way more clicks, way more reaction than New York Times, Wall Street Journal, everyone. That is why the White House was targeting us. And basically in response to that, in response to our success on Facebook, The Daily Wire is a company, our success on Facebook, Facebook under pressure from the White House decided to completely shift their entire take on

on political media. They decided they were going to shut down the dissemination of political media on Facebook. And we could see it in the statistics. We had to change our entire business model to adjust for the fact that Facebook had done this. Again, the reach on my personal page dropped by 90%, 90 in the middle of 2021 because of all of this.

And Zuckerberg has admitted publicly that in 2021, they shifted all of their policies at the behest of the Biden administration, at the behest of the left. All of this, by the way, again, designed to benefit legacy media, because if you shut down the alternatives to legacy media, the only thing left is legacy media if you engage in

in false fact checks of people and entities like the Daily Wire while ignoring all of the lies that are told by CNN or the New York Times. If you decide that you're going to downgrade all political content, any viral political content on Facebook, what you end up doing is benefiting the consolidated big guys at the expense of the upstart little guys. That is what that does. It is effectively a government-controlled monopoly at that point or an oligopoly. Again, in 2024,

This is precisely what Zuckerberg recognized. Zuckerberg actively sent a letter to the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, letter dated August 26th, in which Zuckerberg said he regretted not speaking up about the pressure that he felt from the White House. Again, he wrote in this letter,

That his company was, quote, pressured into censoring content and the company would push back if it faced such demands again, quote. In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree. I believe the government pressure was wrong. I regret we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today. Okay, so now Donald Trump has won re-election.

Now Donald Trump has won reelection. And because Donald Trump has won reelection, the tides have turned. And so there are two ways to view this. One is that Facebook is sort of riding the winds of whatever is popular, that if Democrats get elected, the censorship goes right back into place. And that's a possibility. The other way to read this is that Zuckerberg, even when Democrats were in control of Congress in 2019,

Even then, Zuckerberg was pushing for free speech. And it was when they had full control of the government that they were able to cudgel Facebook into doing what it was they wanted. And now that they no longer have control, Facebook can finally let up and allow people to see the content they wanted to see. You have to understand what Facebook did is they made it so that you were automatically downgraded in the political content you viewed. If you subscribed, if you followed my page, for example, over at Facebook, which again was one of the top pages of Facebook, period.

If you did that, I just disappeared from your feed. You may have noticed this if you're on Facebook at all. My show, my content just disappeared from your feed. And Facebook said that they had done this to all political content. And that's true. They did do it to all the political content across the board because the idea was to nuke the entire sector in order to avoid the implication that

that they were helping conservatives because conservatives were too successful in the space, particularly daily wire. Well, now they're reversing themselves. And so Mark Zuckerberg this morning put out about a five minute video explaining the changes that are happening over at Facebook. I want to go through it piece by piece because every piece of this is important and also revealing about exactly how these processes have been working for years.

By the way, imagine, imagine how successful Republicans would be if social media had not been censoring conservative content for literally years on end. Here is Zuckerberg this morning. Hey, everyone. I want to talk about something important today because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression. And I still believe this today.

But a lot has happened over the last several years. There's been widespread debate about potential harms from online content. Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political. But there's also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly. So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content. But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes.

Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people. And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we're going to get back to our roots. Stop it there for a second.

Okay, that is the key. The recent elections are a cultural tipping point. Now, they are also a political tipping point, obviously, and a governmental and regulatory tipping point, very clearly. So Meta as a corporation is looking and saying, listen, we now have the wherewithal to allow free speech, which is to say that I hope the commitment is real and lasts beyond whatever the administration is right now, that this is an actual long-term commitment to free speech. That's what I would hope for. Okay, but what he is saying is correct. And the implication is also correct.

which is that the Democratic Party does not like free speech, particularly on social media. So long as social media is censoring the stuff they want, they are perfectly in favor of censorship. It's the reason why Elon Musk went from amazing tech genius in Iron Man to baddie of the week. That's why. It's because he bought X. The reason that Zuckerberg went from the example of the American success story to evil is because Donald Trump won in 2016. Again, it's all about power for the left.

And so with Donald Trump elected, what that says is

is that now free speech can bloom once again, which again should tell you something about where the left is in this country. They do not like free speech. Zuckerberg acknowledges it. Everyone knows this. The reason there is a new wind across America is because Trump was elected. The American people tired of the censorship regime. The left does not like free speech. They also do not like business very much, but the future could be bright for business. Ask nine experts. You'll get 10 answers. Bull market, bear market, inflation up or down. Can someone please invent a crystal ball already? But

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Get 15% off plus free shipping on your very first set of sheets at bullandbranch.com slash ben. That's bullandbranch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D, branch.com slash ben to save 15% exclusions apply. See site for details. Okay, continue. And focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the U.S.,

After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US. So over the next couple of months, we're going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.

So that point, again, totally right. And we've been yelling this from the rooftops for years. The news fact checking organizations are opinion organizations of the left. This is true for all of them. This is true for the Washington Post fact checker. This is true for PolitiFact. It was true for Fox.

All of them, for all the fact checkers and the lie checkers, they were all biased to the left, clearly and obviously in two ways. One, in their selection bias, the things they chose to fact check, and two, how they fact check those things. So if Joe Biden told a lie, it wasn't a lie. It was a misspeak.

If Donald Trump said something that was too broad and was generally true, but specifically he made a mistake, then the whole thing was wrapped up as a giant lie. That is the way the fact checkers did their work. And this was wrapped into broader conversations about censorship. So you had entire organizations like GARM, which we helped dismantle along with Elon Musk and the House Judiciary Committee.

GARM, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, was a censorship racket. It was designed as a quote-unquote fact-checking organization designed to downgrade particular outlets.

These organizations like NewsGuard, NewsGuard, an organization specifically designed to quote unquote rate news outlets that invariably benefited the left at the expense of the right. Invariably, those were used by places like Facebook as quote unquote the fact checkers to determine what deserved to see the light of day and what didn't. And Zuckerberg is now acknowledging the reality. These fact checkers were totally full of crap. They've been full of crap for years. We have been screaming this stuff from the rooftop, screaming it.

And it is determined, social media policy, meaning how you actually are able to access information. And so now Zuckerberg correctly is looking at the wonderful thing that Elon did on X with community notes, and he's actually implementing that over at Facebook. So big win for Elon, and yes, big win for Facebook, because community notes allow a sort of crowdsourcing approach to what is true and what is false, and allows you to link to the information, and allows people to upvote that. That is a much better way of trying to arbitrate truth than...

Simply looking to some sort of Coddy on a hill who's going to dispense justice one fact check at a time. So that is move number one. That is correct. It should have been done years ago. Here's move number two. Second, we're going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.

What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas. And it's gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms. So second thing, he acknowledges there are certain issues that Facebook has shut down discussion of. Correct. Correct. You know how hard we've had to look at all of our content just to not have our pages banned?

If you say things like men are not women on Facebook, this puts you in danger for years on end. It was true on X also until Elon bought the platform. If you say mass migration by radical Muslims into the West is a threat, that was something that would get downgraded in the news.

Our coverage since October 7th of radical Muslim terrorism or the war in the Gaza Strip against Hamas, that has been downgraded on nearly every social media platform for simply mentioning the topic because the topic is too controversial. We've had to bleep out actual descriptions of like geography in the Middle East because it might be too controversial. And what is he acknowledging? He's acknowledging the left has tried to shut down conversation on these issues and social media was compliant with

Social media was complicit in the attempt to shut down discussion of the biggest issues in public life, like immigration and whether boys should be taught that they can be girls and vice versa. So good, good, late, but good. Okay, he goes on to the third change over at Facebook. Third, we're changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation.

Now, we're going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations. And for lower severity violations, we're going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action. The problem is that the filters make mistakes and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn't. So by dialing them back, we're going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms. We're also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content.

The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we're going to catch less bad stuff, but we'll also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down. Okay, there's a huge thing. Okay, the point that he is making here, which is that the filters were set in order to exclude particular content

This is how social media, quote unquote, blame the algorithm. You set the algorithm to remove political content and it removes everything. This ended up in a federal lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court in which there was talk about the federal government putting pressure on Facebook in order to restrict the dissemination of information by individuals. And the Supreme Court idiotically found that that was not a violation of the First Amendment.

on standing grounds. They didn't even get to the underlying issue. They said for standing reasons, this lawsuit wasn't ripe or whatever, but it clearly was a violation of the First Amendment. So they're going to retune their content filters. So presumably you will be allowed if you subscribe to the Ben Shapiro page at Facebook to see content from Ben Shapiro.

Right. That will be the way that it works, which is the way it always should have worked. They, without your permission, demoted political content in your feed using these filters. That is why the traffic dropped. It is why you stopped seeing. It's why people disappeared. Not just me. Tons of people on the right just disappeared from your feed. OK, he continues. Fourth, we're bringing back civic content. For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed. So we stopped recommending these posts.

But it feels like we're in a new era now, and we're starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again. So we're going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive. Okay, so again, that is a method of allowing you to see the politics you wanted to see in the first place, and then Facebook took away from you and made it impossible for you to even know. Because hidden on a page in your settings was a way for you to turn that back on.

But if you're like pretty much everybody who uses Facebook, then you don't even know that that's how you set yourself. You don't even know it went away. You don't even know why it went away. You just consume passively what comes through your screen on most of these social media sites. So now they're changing that. So now you can finally see that stuff again. And this never should have happened. It happened because of Democrats. It happened because of the left. It happened because the left decided they wanted to kill alternative media. That's what this was. Pure and simple. And Facebook...

was part of that process, and now they're reversing themselves because, as Zuckerberg says, the winds have changed. Times have changed. Now, question. Did the times change, or were we all politically active the whole time? The answer is we were all politically active and interested the entire time. Our company has doubled, tripled, quadrupled in growth since the time that Facebook cracked down on us. In a wide variety of ways, we have worked around those systems.

Not on Facebook, but in terms of how we designed our business. With that said, the real reason that this is changing is not because the American people are quote unquote reengaging in politics. We've been a little engaged, you may have noticed. The real reason is because Trump won. And now for the first time, the left is not in control. And social media, you better stick with it. You better stick with it. Because enough of this going back and forth, the shilly shat, the minute Democrats get, if they win the midterms, we're going to go right back to censoring. It's absolute horse crap. It has to end.

Okay, finally, Zuckerberg makes a staffing announcement. Fifth, we're going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California and our US-based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.

Finally, we're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country.

The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government. And that's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship. By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression and I am excited to take it. It'll take time to get this right, and these are complex systems, they're never going to be perfect.

There's also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove. But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people voice. I'm looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there, and more to come soon.

So, again, those last couple of things are unbelievably important. He's moving the content moderation teams from San Francisco, from Silicon Valley, San Jose, a bunch of libs over to Texas, where presumably you'll have a broader panoply of people who actually know the rest of America because the rest of America does, in fact, exist. But that last point is the telling one. This is how bad the Biden administration has been. This is how bad Democrats are all across the world. Censorship regimes are common.

De rigueur. This is true in Europe. This is why if you post the wrong thing in Britain, you will go to jail for longer than a rapist of a young girl.

This is why in Canada you could theoretically risk jail if you say the wrong thing politically, because it turns out the United States is unique in its pursuit of free speech. What Zuckerberg is saying is that during the Biden administration, he says it openly there, during the Biden administration, the Biden administration was engaged in precisely the same sorts of pressure tactics that are engaged in by countries around the world. The Biden administration took its lead from censorship regimes in Europe, Asia and Latin America. They did not take action.

our lead in free speech. And now President Trump is going to do the opposite. He's going to push for free speech in all the rest of these places. Use the American standards of free speech in Europe, for example, instead of allowing Europe to set the censorship rules on all of these companies that operate inside the United States. If

If you're a company that operates multinationally the way that obviously Facebook does, you have to have standards for every single different country. You have to have a standard for China where they won't even allow Facebook, by the way. You have to have a standard for France or for Britain or for the United States. And all these standards are different. But what the Biden administration did is they basically sided with the European standards.

And so Facebook also sided with the European standards. And now that Trump is in office, the idea should be that the American exceptionalist idea of free speech should be pervade everywhere. And the US government should use its weight in order to make sure that it can be pervade in other places, this idea of a broader free speech movement. And we need a full-scale long-term commitment from these social media companies to actually change. This can't just be a temporary change for purposes of pleasing President Trump. Obviously, there's a lot of politics that goes around in these areas.

But a commitment to free speech by social media needs to last longer than whomever is in the office. And that has not been the case. That has not been the case. And Zuckerberg acknowledges as much. He acknowledges that Facebook literally changed its standards because of Joe Biden and Democrats in office. That can't happen again. It was bad for the country. It was very, very bad for the world. But this is the effect of one election.

This is why it matters who you vote for. This is why it matters that Donald Trump is going to enter. The man is not even president yet. He has not even been sworn in as president again, and the entire world is changing. We'll get to more of those changes in just one moment. First, kick off 2025 with 25% off a new Daily Wire Plus annual membership.

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By the way, I don't want to make it seem as though the legacy media are just going to go away on this one because they certainly will not. But it's up to social media to ignore them. Ignore them. You don't need to listen to the Kevin Cruises of the world. You don't need to spend your days worried about what CNN is going to think about what social media allows to be posted. The reason I say this is because CNN has a piece talking about Meta's new moves.

And here's what they say, quote, the announcement comes amid a broader apparent ideological shift to the right within Meta's top ranks. And as Zuckerberg seeks to improve his relationship with Trump before the president-elect takes office later this month. Just one day earlier, Meta announced Trump ally and UFC CEO Dana White would join its board, along with two other new directors.

Meta has also said it will donate a million dollars to Trump's inaugural fund and that Zuckerberg wants to take an active role in tech policy discussions. Joel Kaplan, a prominent Republican who was elevated to the company's top policy job last week, acknowledged the Tuesday announcement is directly related to the changing administration.

But here is CNN's take. The moderation changes mark a stunning reversal in how Meta handles false and misleading claims on its platform. In 2016, the company launched an independent fact-checking program in the wake of claims it had failed to stop foreign actors from leveraging its platforms to spread disinformation and sow discord among Americans. In the years since, it continued to grapple with the spread of controversial content on its platform, such as misinformation about elections, anti-vaccination stories, violence,

and hate speech. The company built up safety teams, introduced automated programs to filter out or reduce the visibility of false claims, and instituted a sort of independent Supreme Court for tricky moderation decisions. But now, Zuckerberg dismantled the company's fact-checking teams and made user-generated context labels called Community Notes,

the platform's only method of correcting false claims. He's following in the footsteps of Musk. Oh, no. So this is how the media are going to play this. How dare the misinformation be unleashed? How dare the misinformation be unleashed? Here's the thing.

It's not about unleashing quote unquote misinformation. It's about stopping the censorship regime. And again, it's going to be up to Zuckerberg and Elon and all the members of the social media honchos to stop listening to the people who would like broader censorship again in the name of power. Okay, meanwhile, again, the election of Trump is being felt all over the political and corporate map.

McDonald's has now dropped its diversity targets for employees and suppliers. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago-based company said it would not issue new representation goals for its staff, but will continue to report numbers pertaining to diversity in its ranks. They used to actually set goals as to how many people of each particular race should be employed at McDonald's. They're not going to do that anymore.

Instead, they're going to, you know, try to use the best people in the best job. Things are changing and it smells like freedom because here's the thing. A corporation unbound from the insanity of left-wing censorious garbage is going to pursue profit effectively. So,

Social media companies are going to pursue the things that they think people want to see. They are not going to do the work of the censors if they're allowed to operate freely. Do they feel more or less free under Trump than they did under Biden? The answer, much, much more free. This is true for everyone involved.

in the country, including people who did not vote for President Trump. Meanwhile, what does the left have? Well, the left's got January 6th. So yesterday, of course, was January 6th. And that means it was time to talk about democracy and quote-unquote threats to democracy. Now, it seems to me a rather large threat to democracy would be cuddling the largest social media companies on the planet into censoring your opponents.

That seems to me a rather large threat to democracy, a systemic threat to democracy. In fact, a much larger and more systemic threat to democracy than a rally that led to a smaller riot that led to a group of people who are fairly small in number going out of control at the Capitol and committing criminal acts. That seems to me significantly less bad than what the Biden administration did to censor free speech, try to force 80 million Americans to vaccinate against their will.

There are many things that the left does on a daily basis in order to maximize power and prevent the freedom of Americans. And those are much more threatening. But the left's got one card and they're going to play it over and over and over. And that card is bad things happened on January 6th. So Kamala Harris had to ironically preside over the failure of her own presidential campaign yesterday in Congress. She had to certify the election as her job as the vice president of the United States. And here she was tooting her own horn about it.

Today, I did what I have done my entire career, which is take seriously the oath that I have taken many times to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, which included today performing my constitutional duties to ensure that the people of America, the voters of America, will have their votes counted, that those votes matter, and that they will determine then the outcome of an election. I do believe very strongly

that America's democracy is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it. Every single person, their willingness to fight for and respect the importance of our democracy. Otherwise, it is very fragile and it will not be able to withstand moments of crisis. And today, America's democracy stood.

Okay. Wow. Look at America's democracy. America's democracy stood January 6th also, like 2021. This nonsense that we were like on the verge of the government being overthrown is just absolute sheer crap. But again, the left has to play that out because their actual goal is to hollow out all of the institutions of American life, ranging from church to family, and then replace them with an overweening state in the name of, quote, democracy. That's their actual goal. So they got to play up January 6th because it's threats to democracy. Well,

Well, we turn to the world's stupidest human being, Sonny Hostin, over at The View. It is amazing. There are only, I believe, five hosts on The View, and two of them have now made big Holocaust boo-boos. It's a pretty high percentage of Holocaust boo-boos happening over at The View. Remember, Whoopi Goldberg once suggested that the Holocaust was not based on race because her head is so far up her ass it's coming out her face again. Well, Sonny Hostin is somehow even dumber than Whoopi Goldberg. So yesterday on The View, this collection of high IQ intellectuals

Sonny Hostin suggested that January 6th was akin to the Holocaust. Now, I'm just going to put it out there that a smallish riot at the Capitol building was not, in fact, comparable to the Holocaust. I don't feel like that one's particularly controversial. But again, not much going on upstairs over at The View.

i think we need to find moral clarity you know in in this country and i i just remember after january 6 you had someone like mitch mcconnell placing the blame on january 6 where it belonged squarely on donald trump's shoulders and then you started seeing people backtrack that and not and losing their moral center you had condoleezza rice i believe on this very show saying you know we need to move on from january 6. i say no

you don't move on because January 6th was an atrocity. It was one of the worst moments in American history. When you think about the worst moments in American history, you know, like World War II, things that happened, you know, like the Holocaust, chattel slavery. We need to never forget because past becomes prologue if you forget any race.

Oh, my God. I mean, how many historical statements that are false can you make in 20 seconds there? First of all, I love that the Holocaust is now in American history. It's actually mostly in European history. Like we liberated death camps, the United States. We actually were not responsible for the Holocaust. And then comparing it to World War II, where hundreds of thousands of Americans died in battle and hundreds of thousands more were wounded.

And comparing it to chattel slavery, I feel that that's a little insulting to black Americans to compare January 6th to centuries of chattel slavery in the United States. That seems kind of wild. They are so over their skis. They got nothing. They got nothing. And so they're going to fulminate because when they cannot control the levers of power, all they can do is.

about how terrible the world is. That's all they can do. And then use that as a lever in order to control the levers of power again. So you end up with Joy Reid suggesting you can't peacefully transfer power to an insurrectionist. 14 days from today, you will hear many soberly and reverently laud the peaceful transfer of power. Well, I hate to be the fly at the picnic table, but you can't peacefully transfer power to an insurrectionist simply because it took them an extra four years to finish the job.

This was a violent transfer of power, the most violent in U.S. history, if we're being honest. This was the most violent transfer. I mean, you lost an election. I love how things I don't like become violence, according to Joy Reid. Well, actual violence is just, you know, a natural outcome of an unjust world. Also, by the way, those look like very heavy earrings. Wow, that can't be great for the neck. And one of the great ironies of life is that two of the least happy people on Earth are named Sonny and Joy.

That is always confusing to me.

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How desperate are the media for a story about how bad Republicans are? Yesterday, they tried to manufacture one out of completely whole cloth. So one of the people who was being sworn in yesterday was Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska, and her husband showed up as well. And the media tried to play it as though Deb Fischer's husband would not shake Kamala Harris's hand. That's not what happened. He was holding the Bible on which his wife was being sworn in.

And he couldn't shake her hand because he had his hand on a cane, can't walk well. And so the entire left-wing media went with, he's a white guy who must hate black people. If you want to blow out your own credibility, I'm running out of ways for you to do so, actually. But you come up with creative new ways every day.

It was a little awkward. Kamala Harris thinks that he's deliberately refusing to shake her hand. His hand is on a cane. He's got a cane in his hand.

It's the sought martyrdom of the left. OK, in other ways, the world is changing. Justin Trudeau announced yesterday that he intends to resign as the head of the Liberal Party in Canada, which means that the minute that he is replaced as head of the Liberal Party, that person will then take the prime ministership up until the next election unless there is a vote of no confidence, which there absolutely 100 percent should be, considering this doof, if he were to run in the upcoming election, would about 20 percent of the vote and lose something like

two-thirds to three-quarters of the seats that his party currently holds in the House of Commons in Canada. Here is handsome Bernie Sanders, certainly, certainly not Fidel Castro's son. How dare you? Even though he looks exactly like Fidel Castro. Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau. I intend to resign as party leader, as prime minister, after the party selects its next leader through a robust, nationwide, competitive process.

Last night, I asked the president of the Liberal Party to begin that process. Well, I mean, it's about time. Just a trip down memory lane with Justin Trudeau. The reason that he has to leave is because he's really, really bad at his job. But the final cap on him being bad at his job was the election of Donald Trump, who has declared that Justin Trudeau might be the governor of our 51st state.

Well, now that he's leaving, I feel like our window to take Canada is shrinking because once Pierre Poliev is the head of the government in Canada, I feel like at that point we have an allied government and also they might resist the invasion. Right now we'll be greeted as liberators because no one likes Justin Trudeau at all. And in my plan for greater America, which includes both Canada and Greenland, as well as ownership of the Panama Canal, I feel like the window is closing, guys. We've got to move. We've got to move fast and move in any case.

The reason Justin Trudeau is actually going is because he's quite terrible at his job. And Donald Trump pointed that out. And then because Justin Trudeau can't deal with Donald Trump, his own finance minister, Chrystia Friedland, decided that she was going to walk out on his government. What does his record look like? Well, he has a 73% disapproval rating, including 43% of liberal voters.

Chrystia Friedland called out Trudeau's costly political gimmicks in her resignation letter. That was a reference to his $4.5 billion plan to send $175 checks to everybody in the country, making less than $105,000 a year. His signature carbon tax has reduced real incomes across the country, according to Barry Weiss over at the Free Press. Canada's record on immigration is insane.

They had 1.1 million new immigrants who came to the country in 2022 alone. Many of those people do not exactly share Canada's values, driving up anti-Semitism in the country. Violent crime has skyrocketed under Trudeau's leadership. Homicides rose by more than 50% between 2014 and 2022. There's now more violent crime on a per capita basis in Canada than in the United States, which is insane. You remember the trucker protest. You remember the guys of combating disinformation.

where Canada's Online News Act was sold as a way to make social media companies pay news organizations when linking to their content. In reality, it was an attempt to shore up legacy media, the rise of assisted suicide, the rise of drug use, Trudeau's poor judgment. I mean, let's just go through some of Justin Trudeau's greatest hits so we can remember and miss what he once was. It was not long ago that he was shaking it off at a Taylor Swift concert. And one of the least manly men ever to man, here is a Justin Trudeau to Taylor Swift concert. ♪

There he is dancing. Oh, my God. He is a sad person. He is such a sad person. He's in the middle of great suffering in Canada, but at least he was shaking it off. And then meanwhile, you'll remember Justin Trudeau going after the Freedom Convoy. The Freedom Convoy, of course, were truckers who decided that they didn't want to lose their job or, you know, be forced to take a vaccine. And Justin Trudeau said that they were a fringe.

Do you have any regrets about calling Ottawa protesters a fringe minority? Yeah, I wish I had said that differently. As I look back on that and as I've reflected on it over the past months, not just freshly from this commissioner's report, I wish I had phrased it differently. The fact is there is a very small number of people in this country who deliberately spread misinformation and disinformation

that led to Canadians' deaths, that led to excessive hardship in people who believed them. I continue to be very, very firm against those individuals. But that is a small subset of people who were just hurting.

I mean, so he says even there, he called these people a fringe minority. And then he's like, I regret I said that. Also, they killed a lot of people in their fringe minority. The leadership of moron Justin Trudeau. OK, how about Justin Trudeau on trans policy? Again, this guy was a left wing dream.

I think what we are seeing across the West right now, by the way, is simply a response to reality. It turns out that in rich times, when everybody is fat and happy, you can do a bunch of left-wing policy. And then over the course of about five, 10 years, everything goes to hell in a handbasket. And then you have to turn back to the right. Here's Justin Trudeau on trans policy. Canadian parents love their kids and we want the very best for them. And we want them to be kept safe.

LGBT youth across this country are among the most vulnerable to homelessness, to suicide, to a range of things that can harm them. We need to be there to defend them. We need to be there to protect them. And I know Canadians across the country are doing just that.

Well, I mean, cutting off the body parts of healthy children doesn't seem like a great way to protect them. I guess the people of Canada might agree with that proposition. The truth is, again, Justin Trudeau came straight out of a sociology lab, truly. And that is why he's wildly unpopular. And that's why his party is going to get shellacked whenever the next election is held. Back in 2018, here he was doing land acknowledgments. I mean, this guy's just a wet dream for the Berkeley Humanities Department.

I would like to begin by recognizing that we are, as we are every day in this house, on the ancestral land of the Algonquin people. Well, the person who is very likely to replace him as prime minister as soon as an election is held, as I say, is Pierre Poliev. Incredibly talented. This guy has a resting heart rate of apparently 35. He just never gets agitated. I love this guy. He's great. Here's Pierre Poliev famously answering questions from a left-wing reporter while eating an apple.

On the topic, I mean, in terms of your sort of strategy currently, you're obviously taking the populist pathway. What does that mean? Well, appealing to people's more emotional levels, I would guess. I mean, certainly you tap very strong ideological language quite frequently. Like what?

Left wing, you know, this and that, right wing, you know, I mean, it's that type of ideological thing. I never really talk about left or right. I don't really believe in that. Okay. A lot of people would say that you're simply taking a page out of the Donald Trump book. Probably like which people would say that? Well, I'm sure a great many Canadians, but... Like who? I don't know who, but... Well, you're the one who asked the question, so you must know somebody.

It's the best. That guy, honestly, I kind of just want him to do all of his press conferences while consuming fruit. I just think that it would make it so much more amusing. Just eating a squash or something. And vegetables would work as well because it's just more amusing to answer dumb questions while eating. I think it's hilarious.

And meanwhile, again, the impact on foreign politics of the domestic election in the United States are huge. They're also having effect abroad. That's obviously true in Britain, where consternation continues to roil the country after Elon Musk's criticism of Keir Starmer, the prime minister of Britain, who presided over the Crown Prosecution Service, which was completely derelict in looking into the spate of radical Muslims raping white girls over the course of decades.

In Great Britain, ignored by the police, ignored by the authorities, ignored by the media for literally decades on end because it might be politically incorrect to look into the problem. Nigel Farage has a piece over at Express, the Express in the UK, saying, quote, I've campaigned for over a decade on the issue of rape gangs sexually abusing children and young girls. It is a stain on the nation. Justice has still not been done.

When I first raised this appalling scandal in 2012, I was accused by those on the liberal left of trying to exploit it for political gain. I believe this was a tactic to shut down legitimate debate, probably because so many of the rapists were of Pakistani origin, and highlighting this would shatter the idea of multicultural Britain being a bed of roses.

Something similar is going on now, says Nigel Farage. Sir Keir Starmer seems to be trying to sweep the past failures of the establishment under the carpet by denying calls for a statutory inquiry into this outrage. Starmer was director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013 when many of these gangs were

We're active. For the sake of public confidence, urgent questions must be answered about his conduct and that of the Crown Prosecution Service during every one of those years and beyond. That requires a statutory inquiry. That is Nigel Farage, who's the head of the Reform Party in the UK, which has been getting serious steam because the Conservative Party refuses to be conservative over in the UK. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, who again has raised this issue transnationally, he is becoming the subject of much consternation and outrage because how dare he intervene in the politics of other nations?

Whole article in the Wall Street Journal today, quote, Elon Musk is roiling European politics. Elon Musk is throwing grenades into Europe's political mainstream over issues ranging from immigration to free speech, creating a dilemma for governments as they try to respond to the tech billionaire and key advisor to the incoming Trump administration. In recent days and weeks, Musk has weighed in with a series of incendiary social media posts on European politics, including supporting a far-right party ahead of an election in Germany, accusing the British prime minister of being complicit in rape, denouncing judges in Italy, and slamming the European Commission.

Oh, no, this is really bad. Emmanuel Macron is very upset. The French president who's been stymieing the right by allying with the insane loony bin socialist leftist, Mélenchon. He says, quote, 10 years ago, if someone had told us the owner of one of the world's biggest social media companies would support a new international reactionary movement and intervene directly in elections, including in Germany, who would have imagined that? Says Emmanuel Macron.

Meanwhile, of course, you have Germany that is now warning that he should not get involved. He needs to stop that. He needs to stop that right now. According to the Express, political figures in Germany are not happy with Musk for getting involved in the country's politics. Oh, no. The Green Party's Robert Habeck sent a furious warning to Musk, telling Der Spiegel, hands off our democracy, Mr. Musk. Opposition leader Friedrich Mayers also called Musk's remarks, quote, intrusive and pretentious.

Wow, just terrible. How could in Norway, the Norwegian prime minister, whose name is spelled Jonas Garstor, but it's pronounced Jonas Garstori. I looked it up last night. I'm still mispronouncing it, but it's closer to the latter than the former. In any case, he said he found it worrying that a billionaire social media owner like Elon Musk is inserting himself into the politics of other countries. See, here's the rule, guys. The rule is if you are a socialist billionaire like George Soros, you get the Medal of Freedom for intervening in foreign countries.

If, however, you are like Elon Musk and you are not, in fact, a socialist, then that means that you are really, really, really bad, like super duper bad. And that needs to stop right now. It needs to stop right now. This Elon Musk and his billions of dollars. George Soros, however, again, a wonderful, wonderful person. By the way, George Soros, we shouldn't note at this point, is absolutely awful. He's truly terrible. This is a quote from October 2015. George Soros on immigration in Hungary, quote,

His plan treats the protection, this is Viktor Orban he's talking about. His plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle. Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle. Talk about saying the quiet part out loud. National borders are the obstacle. Soros has also praised China, saying that, quote, China not only has a more vigorous economy than the United States, but actually a better functioning government than the United States.

What a joy he is. What absolute joy, George Soros. He definitely deserved a medal of freedom from our current dead president, Joe Biden. All right, coming up, apparently Greenland might be still on the table. Yes, Fezzik will be one of us. If you're not a member, become a member, use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans. Click the link in the description and join us.