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the jurogan experience it's a perfect time to have you on i mean this is uh i mean when we're talking about free speech in the time when the president of the united states has been banned off of twitter and facebook and it's right it's a wild time what do you make of that well you know facebook and twitter are private publishers right i mean whatever we don't exactly know what they are they're not exactly like the times or like uh nbc or abc um but they're close they're they're certainly in the private sector and and the private sector has always had has always had the discretion it's their first amendment right to decide who to publish and who not to publish um you know it's different with facebook and twitter because they claim to be uh platforms like the telephone company that you know anybody can use to have conversations but they're they're not quite that they they really are a lot like a publisher and you know the times decided to fire one of its columnists uh because it didn't like what he wrote they have a first amendment right to do so and they're not the government so you know and that to that extent um what facebook and twitter did is perfectly legal and and not really different than what a publisher or a broadcasting company would do if it decided to uh to change or or fire one of its one of its anchors or one of its columnists on the other hand they are sort of like a platform uh like an electronic soapbox that they've erected in a in a park and invited everybody and anybody to come and when they start picking and choosing uh no you're not good you're not good you're okay you know they when they stop being a gatekeeper uh you run the risk of them closing people out of of uh a national dialogue and depriving people of an audience basically and that that's a problem and it's a
problem we haven't figured out how to work out yet uh because this medium is in its infancy you know it's people forget that that the printing press started in the 15th century in 1400 and something and it took hundreds of years before uh freedom of the press and uh worked itself out in ways that we're familiar with now and we're you know we're right at the beginning of this internet speech uh medium and uh it's hard it's hard it's hard to say uh i i think facebook and twitter had the right to do what they did in banning trump um but the question is if they start banning anything that they don't like then they're really closing off the public conversation to people and what what's the criteria how do you do that yeah it's also it seems to me that we're using these outdated things to compare like uh comparing it to the printing press or comparing facebook or twitter to publishers or even comparing them to something like a utility like the the power there's something new there's something completely different and we i mean i hope it's not going to take hundreds of years to have some sort of a freedom of expression online in these things but they're monopolies it's not like anybody could have bought or made a printing press and printed their own books or printed their own newspapers not everyone can make their own twitter you know it's too it's so complex and there's so many users on it it it yeah there's very few places where you can like legitimately get your word out in a way that you can with twitter or express yourself but you know and it's true that these this medium is analogous to utilities in some ways analogous uh to publishers in some ways but they are new yeah and they're different that's that's right but but consider this when i was growing up uh i was a teenager in the 50s um
a big problem with free speech and the democratization of free speech was that nobody had access to anything i mean you had the times you had the washington post you had the hearst newspapers you had nbc and abc and cbs and that's where most speech occurred and nobody had access to that um so even with even with the monopolistic bans twitter and facebook are doing these days or can do have the power to do the fact is is that many many millions more of people ordinary people have access to huge audiences uh than did uh 50 years ago um uh you know if you couldn't get into the times and you couldn't get into the washington post and if you couldn't get onto television you could speak you were free to speak but nobody heard you yeah and so you know it's a lot better now even even with questions about abusing the power of of being a gatekeeper that twitter and facebook have yeah it's uh it's just such a strange time for this because it's uh in the middle of the like we're at the end of the president's run he's still in office but yet he's you know everybody wants him out as quickly as possible because you're wondering what he's gonna do and he can't really express himself uh publicly anymore it's it's just so strange yeah well of course you know he's still the president if he held the press conference uh everybody would cover it um and he you know if if uh i used to say uh back in the day that uh you know my father was a construction worker with a fifth grade education and uh if he had something to say he could say it to me he could say it to our family at thanksgiving but uh he didn't have access to an audience of the kind that roosevelt had when he went on the radio and he couldn't get into the times as easily as as the governor of new york if
the governor of new york held the press conference so you know it isn't it isn't different than that in that respect i'm not too worried about a president not having access uh to a public audience a president has tremendous power uh to attract attention and and that that was true a hundred years ago um what i'm worried about are ordinary people what i'm worried about are are are people like you um uh people you know who have something to say um but their freedom is that they get to say it in the closet you know where nobody hears them uh you know there's an interesting story uh a real case that happened in the 60s when james meredith who was the first black person to enter the university of mississippi uh was shot when on his first day there and it was it was a real outrage it was in the early 60s and a a man named sydney street uh a black guy living up in harlem in new york uh was so angered that you know he he he wanted to say american ideals uh american principles of liberty and equal rights have just gone up and smoked today and if he had stood on a street corner at 145th street in harlem and stood up on a soapbox and said that the only people who would have hurt him were a few dozen people who passed him on that street corner so what he did is he got out in the street corner and he burned an american flag it was his flag he owned it so he wasn't destroying anybody else's property he burned the american flag and by burning the american flag he attracted television cameras which his words by themselves would not have attracted so the television cameras came and he got to say i'm burning this flag to symbolize the fact that if a guy like james meredith can get shot just for going to school uh america's ideals have gone up in smoke and he got onto the six o'clock news and
and millions of people heard it heard his words and he was prosecuted for burning the flag which was a crime at the time and his case eventually went up to the supreme court the supreme court overruled it and said it was symbolic speech uh but but the reason that i'm telling that story is that is that it it demonstrates how before there was an internet people had to figure out dramatic things to do uh to get their message uh to more than a handful of people and that's why you know benjamin spock burned draft cards that's that's that's why sydney street burned the flag uh that's why there were demonstrations uh instead of just instead of just words and and uh you know it worked all right uh for some people but for the most part uh most people could not get their messages out to large audiences until the internet came and so even with twitter and facebook acting as gatekeepers in ways that trouble us uh because we don't know what the limits are we don't know what the standards are and we don't know why we should be having these private people decide who gets to hear what but even with that this the ability of ordinary people today to reach huge audiences with whatever it is they want to say is much much larger i mean by by orders of magnitude larger than it was 30 or 40 or 50 years ago unquestionably um but it just concerns me when a corporation has the ability to dictate even if it's a problem president even if it's someone is as crazy as trump just when a corporation gets together and they side decide that this guy can't use their platform anymore a platform that hundreds of
millions of people use it's just it just seems very strange well it is it is it is a problem because there are no standards right and that's what that's what i mean when i say we're just the beginning of thinking about how how to how to do that i mean here's here's what what i see as the issue if you allow facebook and twitter to make these decisions in the same way that you allow the times and the washington post and and and television networks uh to decide what what they publish um then you run the risk of of arbitrary exclusions from from people's speech reaching large audiences not just the president who has alternative alternative means but ordinary people the only way to remedy that is by law the only way to remedy that is to give the government the power to regulate what these corporations can do and all of our history shows that if you give the government the power to regulate speech you're going to be in a lot worse shape than if you allow the private sector to do it because who in the government are you going to give that power to um you're going to give it to trump you're going to give it to giuliani you're going to give it to joe mccarthy um you're going to give it you know to to roosevelt during the war who might have barred japanese americans from speaking to large audiences i mean who are you going to give that power to and our entire history shows that the only way to regulate private power is through government power and if you regulate speech through government power and you give the government the power to decide who gets to speak and who doesn't get to speak we will be in far worse shape uh than we are in in having the private sector do that catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience
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