Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers on dismantling the "Censorship Industrial Complex"

(0:00) Jason and Sacks welcome Sarah B. Rogers! (2:22) Free speech, EU censorship, OSA/DSA overreach? (13:44) Censorship on mass migration policies, major fines against US companies, the DSA as a "censorship tariff" (22:59) AI deepfakes, giving freedom the benefit of the doubt, Biden-era censorship (34:42) Understanding the "Censorship Industrial Complex" in America Follow Sarah: https://x.com/UnderSecPD Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  David and I are staying in a 300-year-old house. And we've both smashed our head on the beams twice already. But this is our first Davos, David.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:10Jason Calacanis?

  First Davos. We've been here for 24 hours. And any first impressions here?

• 0:17Speaker 01

  It's interesting. You know, we're staying very far away.

• 0:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Apparently, they didn't want you to be part of this.

• 0:23Jason Calacanis?

  They didn't want me too close. Yeah.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  But we finally got you an invitation. Your invitation to not get lost in the mail.

• 0:29Jason Calacanis?

  My invitation to not get lost in the mail this time.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  For those of you who watch the pod, you know what I'm talking about.

• 0:33Jason Calacanis?

  Inside joke.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:35Jason Calacanis?

  But it's great to be here. And great to be here at USA House. Thanks to all the sponsors. And really delighted for our first guest for the pod. Sarah Rogers works for, is the undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department. For members here who don't know this position, or what you've been charged with, or what you've decided to work on, I'm curious about that. Do they tell you what to do? Or do you come up with your own mandate? But yeah, tell us everything about what you're doing.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Longtime listener, first-time guest. And thank you to both of us. Thank you from all of us at America House for joining us here. So I am the undersecretary for public diplomacy. And when I got this nomination, my friends and family all congratulated me and then kind of furtively said, what is that?

• 1:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  So diplomacy traditionally concerns the relationship between the American government and foreign governments. Two ambassadors shake hands, make a deal, solve a war. But public diplomacy is different. Public diplomacy addresses the relationship between the American government and foreign publics. And this has become a very important undersecretariat with the rise of the Internet. And then during the Biden administration especially, these mushrooming concerns about so-called disinformation. And what do we do when there are allegedly malign influences on the public view of America? Public's intersection with American interests? How do we interact with the Internet and the information ecosystem? That is part of my portfolio.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  I also oversee other soft power activities, including our educational and cultural and sports diplomacy. So I am privileged to play a role in the World Cup this summer and the L.A. Olympics coming up. And the Fulbright program and others like it. So it's a great job.

• 2:23Jason Calacanis?

  You seem particularly focused on... Freedom of speech and a little bit of tension between our standards and the companies in America which have made the move to being strongly freedom of speech, something that kind of got lost in our industry for a couple of years in technology, but has now made, I think, some significant progress on. Does seem like some folks in Europe don't share our love of freedom of speech. Maybe you could explain to us what the tension is today and what some of the regulations are that have been put in place in Europe.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Sure, absolutely. So, the two main regulations that I've interfaced with since taking office, and part of this is just a product of, my first official trip was to Europe, and while I was in Europe, a large fine came down on an American platform, X, under the Digital Services Act, which I'll get into in a moment. So, Europe, especially since the Second World War, but I think really since the American founding and our codification of the First Amendment, you know, America has taken a much stronger approach on free speech than even most of the West. And with the rise of the Internet and all communication, or a lot of communication, becoming transnational, we see these new technocratic regulatory frameworks in Europe bumping up against the commitments to free speech in the United States.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  And Jason makes an important observation, that for a while, some of these large American technology platforms were more inclined to moderate or to censor, kind of in conformity with some prevailing norms and concerns in the United States. But I think, in the United States, we've shifted back toward a less insuraneous approach, and so have these platforms. And at the same time, you have regulatory efforts in Europe and the UK, and I'll name a couple that I think have been particularly relevant. So, the UK has something called the Online Safety Act. The Online Safety Act imposes age-gating obligations on a broad swath of content, almost

• 4:22Speaker 02

  any content that's upsetting, and then requires platforms to run risk assessments for it, and in some cases, remove content that the UK would say is illegal. And in the UK, you know... Major categories of content are banned, are rendered illegal, that would not be illegal in the United States, which is where these platforms are located, which is where their original user base is, which is where their executives live, and which is their primary regulator. So, under the Online Safety Act, we now have active litigation by the relevant regulator Ofcom against several American websites. These are websites that don't reach into the UK. They're not, these aren't websites dedicated to discussing the Queen. They're not websites that sell goods in the United Kingdom.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  These are websites that exist on American soil, host large quantities of American users, and oftentimes discuss American political topics. But because users are permitted to discuss them in a way that offends UK law, there's the imposition of a UK fine. The Digital Services Act in the EU is similar. So, DSA contains, but doesn't just contain, content-based regulations, hate speech regulations. So, DSA requires all of the EU member states to adopt at minimum kind of a floor for hate speech prohibition. And those prohibitions in the statute, I think, are much vaguer than American lawyers are accustomed to.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  And one of our jurisprudential principles under the American First Amendment is, if you're going to enact any regulation that comes close to touching speech, it needs to be very clear what you are prohibiting, because you have this chilling effect concept. A vague prohibition will chill speech, especially when that prohibition is imposed on a large risk-averse corporation. So, you impose vague prohibitions on large risk-averse corporations, and that's how it becomes illegal to make jokes around the water cooler, for example. You see the same effect here. Digital Services Act also regulates other aspects of digital commerce and social media, so it regulates things like transparency and competition.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  And I think, you know, we have a lot of Europeans in the audience today, and I hope none of them will find it contentious if I suggest that in Europe, there is more of a focus on technocratic regulation as an arbiter of what's acceptable than there might be in America, where we have this tradition that really emphasizes rugged individualism and individual conscience.

• 6:50Jason Calacanis?

  And to be clear... No one is saying, certainly not the State Department or America, "Hey, you can't have your own platforms in Europe."

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:58Jason Calacanis?

  Build your own, build your own Facebook, build your own Instagram, build your own Twitter slash X, TikTok, whatever you'd like to build, and you can have whatever standards you like on your platforms. We're saying, "Hey, these are our platforms, this is our standard, and we don't want our users or our platforms to be receiving fines." That's our position.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  I think that's basically it. And look, when American companies operate abroad, they abide by the laws where they operate. But at a certain point, so we recently issued some sanctions, which we'll get into, and one of the individuals we sanctioned was a former EU official who threatened Elon Musk with enforcement action because X within the United States had said that it was going to host on a live Twitter space an interview with Donald Trump, our president. So it wasn't that Donald Trump had said anything violative, it wasn't there was a specific piece of content that the EU wanted to ban. It was just that the act of an American business hosting an interview with an American president

• 7:58Speaker 02

  might offend EU preferences about speech generated a regulatory threat. And when you reach across borders and make a threat like that, that offends American interests and American values, and so you can expect America to respond. And I think, so I, my history is as an American lawyer in American courts, and we have, you know, we're a nation of 50 states, and each state has its own regulations. And we've had to think about, you know, when there's a website in California that operates in Texas, how do you decide to what extent Texas gets to regulate? And we have all these jurisdictional concepts like, does the website purposefully avail itself of the form? Is it, are you posting defamatory statements about a person in Texas?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  But the mere existence of a website in California that Texas doesn't like is hardly ever, basically never, a basis for regulation. And so when we talk about things like extraterritoriality, you know, what we're really talking about is, it's undisputed that Europeans get to have their own laws in Europe, but we also get to have our own laws in the United States. And we're celebrating 250 years of American independence, and so we want, you know, we want our markets to be able to interoperate online, but we're not willing to give up American freedom of speech in the bargain.

• 9:14Jason Calacanis?

  David, when we look at... And I'm asking you this one, so I can give you a pass on it. But what do you think people are so scared of in the UK when it comes to freedom of speech? And maybe the most freedom, the most raucous platform, X specifically?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think the people are afraid. I think the government is afraid of the people criticizing it. And therefore, they're engaged in what censors always do, which is protect the people in power. There's something, Sarah, you should explain this to us. But as I understand, there've been over 12,000 people. Is it prosecuted or?

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Arrested.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Arrested under the Online Safety Act. Was that just in one year? Or is that since the?

• 10:03Speaker 02

  That was in 2023 alone.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  But that isn't just under the Online Safety Act. So I think what's particularly insidious and particularly relevant about statutes like the OSA and the DSA is that these are portals through which existing censorship laws get applied to the internet. So a lot of these Brits are arrested under existing statutes. Like, there's a Communications Act. There's a law against inciting, quote unquote, racial or religious hatred. And we, I think, have differences of opinion about, you know, what amounts to incitement in America versus the UK. But so, for example, you had a comedian called Graham Linehan, who tweeted that if a woman sees a penis in a ladies' room, you know, she should feel free to kick that guy in the balls. And that's something a lot of comedians say. And I think it channels an impulse that a lot of Americans and Europeans would frankly

• 10:51Speaker 02

  consider common sense. But he was dragged out of the airport like a terrorist, had his devices confiscated, was thrown in jail overnight, and lost access, my understanding is, to his heart medication, if I recall correctly.

• 11:02Jason Calacanis?

  And because this was an incitement to violence?

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Because this offended some existing law against provocative speech in the UK. And the Online Safety Act is a device through which all of those existing laws get applied to the internet. You had another case in the UK where Joey Breton, a footballer, called somebody a "bike nonce", which nonce is not an American term. But I imagine you're insinuating someone is effeminate for riding a bike so much or in the manner that he rides the bike. And that resulted in a suspended prison sentence, but still a prison sentence.

• 11:35Jason Calacanis?

  Because he called somebody dusty?

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically.

• 11:37Jason Calacanis?

  That's what we call it in the United States now.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  And there were some other tweets too, but none that would meet the bar for American incitement. So David, you're absolutely right. So that was in a single year of slightly over 12,000 Brits arrested for speech acts. And that is more than we're arrested that year in Russia, more than in China, more than in Turkey. And when you talk to Brits about this, you know, you're absolutely right. Most of the British people that you talk to say this is totally unacceptable. And if you look at the polls in the UK, you see public sentiment against this kind of thing. But I've had, you know, both public and private engagements with regulators in these countries. And the defense you hear as well, you know, we have a less chilling, less totalitarian environment than China, so maybe more people are willing to break the rules, more people are willing to offend.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  But if you arrest 12,000 people a year for speech and you're raising children in an ecosystem where you can be dragged out of the airport for offending the dogmas of transgender activism, then you might not have a different culture than China for long.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  And why should the United States be paying to defend your country and support it in fighting, say, a proxy war against Russia if that's basically the values that are being enforced?

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. When we interact with our NATO allies in the NATO context, we hear a lot about our shared history and shared values. And it's time to ask, you know, what values do we still share? We, together with our allies, comprised the free world after World War II, the free world that was assembled against communism. But the cornerstone of a free world, of any free society, has to be freedom of speech.

• 13:16Jason Calacanis?

  And criticizing, and the uncomfortable speech is where this actual defense is necessary.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:23Jason Calacanis?

  And we have a very special, you know, bent in the United States to really go after our leaders. I do it every week with David, since he's now a public servant. I mean, we go at it. And they're knocking on people's doors strictly for saying like, hey, you know, I might have disagreements with the Catholic Church. I'm a Catholic.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of it's about immigration, right?

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  So I've seen a bunch of these examples, you know, on X. I saw one clip on X where a judge was handing down a two-year sentence against somebody. I don't know if this rings a bell, but supposedly for speech that I think was criticizing the UK's open immigration policies. That's where I sense a lot of the prosecutions are, right?

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Right, and this is another place where, you know, free speech and freedom of expression are American values and interests in and of themselves. But another priority for the administration is common sense on mass migration. And a lot of the speech that offends those in power has to do with migration policy. So there was a 31-month sentence handed down to a suburban mother named Lucy Connolly in the UK because after a man called Axel Brubanka stabbed, I think it was a seven-year-old girl, an eight-year-old girl, and a nine-year-old girl at a birthday party. There was ensuing unrest, and she tweeted something anti-migration. It was pretty inflammatory, but it would have been unambiguously legal in the United States.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  She said, "If this is what migration is going to do to our country," and I'm paraphrasing slightly, but I remember it pretty well, "if this is what migration means, then burn down the migrant hotels for all I care." This was a bereaved mother who'd lost a child. She saw three little girls murdered for no reason. And she reacted, and then she felt bad and she deleted the tweet. That was a 31-month sentence.

• 15:12Jason Calacanis?

  31 months.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  31-month sentence in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, you have actual pedophiles, actual child sex offenders, who get minimal prison or none in the United Kingdom. And that's led to this epithet that you hear among UK activists, this quote-unquote "two-tier policing," this activist cause that they've assembled around because they sense that if you oppose mass migration, if you make that kind of critique, you are subject to a different justice system than the kind of person who merely agitates for Sharia law in Britain or merely downloads child pornography in Britain.

• 15:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  So, okay, so.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  I emphasized that.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, I mean, so I think.

• 15:52Jason Calacanis?

  That was the gong of righteousness.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:54Jason Calacanis?

  We appreciate it.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  And then, just to add one more dimension to this. So, US companies have been getting fined like crazy, right? In the UK and then the EU. And I think it's related to this issue, but can you just describe that?

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Because that's where this crosses over into, you know, an ally doing something that we think is mad into directly hurting American interests, I guess, right?

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Right. So, I don't believe there have been any big fines under the UK Online Safety Act yet, but its provisions take effect over time and some of those provisions are just coming online now, including the ones relating to AI.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  And we have active litigation in American courts right now. One of the leading lawsuits involves the website 4chan, which people who are very online in America may be familiar with. 4chan is kind of a no-holds-barred promotional soup for memes and the like. The cat memes come out of there. A lot of activism, Occupy Wall Street, came out of 4chan. But 4chan has essentially no censorship rules. It bans child pornography, that's pretty much it. And so the UK has decided that 4chan is not allowed to exist unless it pays a bunch of money to the United Kingdom for not policing its speech in accord with UK laws. The numerous UK speech statutes that led to prison sentences like the one I just discussed. But there was a large fine handed down during my recent European tour against X, and I

• 17:24Speaker 02

  believe it was 140 million euros, but that might be dollars.

• 17:28Jason Calacanis?

  Are they targeting Elon because they disagree with his influence in the UK?

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Look, I can't speak for the UK regulators, but I can make inferences.

• 17:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, what's your inference?

• 17:39Speaker 02

  I think X has a particular political valence. We saw Joe Biden after Elon acquired Twitter saying, you know, we've got to find ways to go after him, and I think that sentiment might be shared. But. As an undersecretary of state, I'm not an advocate for one American company, or even one American viewpoint on the free speech issue. If any American company were fined, let's say $140 million even, by a foreign power for upholding the American First Amendment, if General Motors were treated that way, you know, the US government would have something to say about it. I also think that X is not the first company to be fined under EU digital regulations. So there's an infographic that circulated recently comparing,

• 18:22Speaker 02

  you know, revenues raised within the EU through other metrics, and then revenues raised just by fining American tech companies.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  And there's a suspicion that this is really kind of a de facto tax, and pretext are contrived for fining large American tech companies in order to raise revenue.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that was the thing I think I was referring to is that, and I think actually the president may have truthed that out, that I think that maybe this is more the EU, but the DSA has become almost like a digital speech trap to try and fine American companies. And it does massively disproportionately affect them to the point where you could argue that it's effectively like a tariff on American tech companies operating in Europe. And if that's the case, well, I mean, I guess Europe is allowed to have tariffs, but then that's going to change the tariffs that we set. So it's all part of a larger trade negotiation.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. I've referred to the DSA before as a censorship tariff, because the cost of maintaining the censorship apparatus under the DSA is intentionally levied on specific companies, mostly American ones, that are subject to higher and more intricate regulatory standards than other companies are. And EU regulators say, well, that's not because they're American, that's because they're large. But the fact that they're American and not European surely makes them easier as a political proposition to tax. And so a lot of Americans see this as a tax.

• 19:45Jason Calacanis?

  Really bizarre, David. We're seeing, we're living in a time where we're seeing freedom of speech, expression, go down in Europe and go up in the Middle East. You know, they just had the Riyadh Comedy Festival.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:56Jason Calacanis?

  There were some rules, hey, you can't criticize the kingdom, let's leave religion off the table, but you can go after your own. But we might not, we might have some sensitivities there. And, you know, then there's everything in between. South Korea does require you have a social security number essentially to post online. But David, I'm wondering what you think about this overall trend in the world of what we're seeing with censorship.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not a good trend. I think that the purpose of censorship, like I mentioned before, is always to protect the people in power. And specifically, it insulates them from criticism. But it'd be a lot better for them to hear that criticism and adjust their policies than it would be to try and switch off the feedback altogether. And it's very clear, I think, in Europe and the UK that these policies of open migration, mass migration are very unpopular. Why not listen to the people and adjust their policies instead of trying to silence them?

• 21:01Jason Calacanis?

  Say what you will about President Trump, and people have varying opinions, but South Park has been deranged this season. I mean, they have gone full bore in attacking him, like, to a level that I wouldn't feel comfortable explaining the details of it.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Not in a family podcast.

• 21:21Jason Calacanis?

  Not in a family podcast. But even President Trump has a thick skin on these things. We did have one weird thing that occurred. I think it was before your time, the Jimmy Kimmel, Charlie Kirk fluffle. But even that, it seemed, David, President Trump and the administration, and Brendan Carfront of the pod, who's been on a couple times, kind of rethought that one, yeah?

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Well, Jimmy Kimmel was back in the air within, was it like, two or three nights? So, yeah, I mean, there's no real censorship there. In that case, it was the network affiliates who were upset because Jimmy Kimmel said something untrue and malicious and outrageous. So in any event, the system kind of...

• 22:01Jason Calacanis?

  It was the heat of the moment with...

• 22:03Speaker 01

  The system kind of worked itself out. There was no, like, government censorship there.

• 22:06Jason Calacanis?

  Brendan probably shouldn't have said what he said, in my estimation.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Anyway, in any event, there was no government censorship. That's the bottom line. Yeah, I think it is disturbing that countries that we see as our closest allies, that share similar values, that are part of the same Western culture and history, are moving in this direction of more and more censorship. It's disturbing, and I'm glad to see that, under President Trump, the Department of State is pushing back on this. I think, Sarah, the work that you're doing, and Secretary Rubio, extremely important. So I think you're making a huge difference. I think we have to use the tools that we have, whether they're tools on trade, or the denial of visas, or expressing condemnation, to push back on this as we, you know, as

• 22:55Speaker 01

  we will, as we can.

• 22:56Jason Calacanis?

  Let's talk about some of the new issues. AI, it was pretty obvious, but 18 months ago, when you saw a deep fake. It just didn't pass the uncanny valley. Grok images, Nano Banana from our friends at Google, I mean, these things now. If you're flipping by very quickly, you could make a mistake. This also, in terms of censorship, we have significant protections in the United States for, say, cartoonists, as do the French, and they're mocking public figures. How is it different when you're mocking public figures, presidents, prime ministers,

• 23:39Jason Calacanis?

  cabinet members, but the public can't tell? Because this is new.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Right. I think this is a really interesting question, and it's our privilege to be at this new technological frontier where these new questions arise. I'm glad you mentioned cartoonists. So after Charlie Kirk was murdered, and I knew him, I represented him on some First Amendment issues in the United States, I saw Americans walking around in an old t-shirt from 10 years ago. And that t-shirt said "Just We Charlie," because that was a t-shirt we bought when free speech in France was under threat. And French people stood up for it. The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were bombed, they were murdered, for saying things that offended religious zealots. And I think, you know, it's a different kind of religious zealotry to not want to allow any dissent online. And...

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Thinking back on that episode and how European consensus on free speech might have shifted since then is really sobering, but I think America, we take pride in being the kind of civilization where Charlie Kirk and Charlie Hebdo can both speak. I think making fun of public officials, you know, pointing out when the emperor has no clothes is one of the most essential things you can do in a democracy. If you believe in self-governance, you have to believe in that. And what's interesting about a deep fake is that the point of parody is that you can tell that it's parody. But if you're depicting a public official falsely in a way that people can't tell is a satirical or non-authentic depiction, then the parody tension really isn't there.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  And what I would say, though, is whenever we reach a new technological frontier, there's a temptation to just enact a flurry of new regulations. And if we look back over history at other frontiers that have caused similar instability, like the invention of the printing press, people thought that was the end of the world. The invention of the telegraph, there were worries about disinformation and attention span. The invention of the film strip, people thought the train was coming at them through the screen. The impulse to restrain that zeal to regulate and to allow people to adapt and to give freedom the benefit of the doubt, that impulse tends to be vindicated over time. When it comes to deep fakes, I think we have, in America and in Europe, strong legal remedies against defamation.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  So if someone creates an image of a public figure that is false and people are believing that image and a reasonable viewer would believe that that person engaged in that action, you can already sue for defamation.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  And that doesn't mean that-

• 26:06Jason Calacanis?

  And we have child protection and underage laws. Those are very strong.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  And fraud.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  And fraud. The thing is, just because you don't have AI-specific laws doesn't mean that you can do whatever you want with AI. You could still use AI as a tool to then break the law and be prosecuted. I mean, if you engage in cyber hacking, for example, and you use AI to do it, you're guilty of a cybercrime.

• 26:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  So there's a lot of things like that where there are plenty of existing laws that apply to AI, and we should just think about using all of those before you start then creating a bunch of AI-specific laws.

• 26:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, if those didn't cover it, then there would be, hey, maybe we need to have a thoughtful discussion because, you know, I'm trying to think of an edge case here, but- For cybersecurity, it's even hard to do. Like, using voice clones, it's just fraud, you know?

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:57Jason Calacanis?

  Wire fraud, you know?

• 26:59Speaker 02

  And it might be that you use the existing fraud statute, but there are little regulatory tweaks you can make the fraud easier to detect. So, one approach, which I don't think is always correct, but it exemplifies one direction of thinking is maybe there's watermarking or something on some AI images. That would mitigate tort liability for some of the providers. Or when we invented capital markets on a mass scale, right? We had our old laws against fraud, but we kind of made some more fine-grained securities regulations. Like, now you have to file a certain disclosure annually with your earnings and whatnot. And we didn't fundamentally change how we treated false information. We just developed some slightly more fine-tuned devices.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  But when I say "fine-tuned," I think that's an important piece of guidance. You don't just go crazy and try to put the technological innovation back in the bottle, especially when, you know, we have foreign policy rivals like China that are developing AI at an aggressive pace. And if we cocoon ourselves in safetyism, we hurt our standing in that race.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  So, Sarah, where do you think this relationship between the US and EU is now headed on this topic of free speech? I mean, there does seem to be a fundamental divergence. Do you... I don't know the conversations that you're having, but do you think this gets worked out? Or do you think the divide gets greater? Like, where's this headed?

• 28:25Speaker 02

  So, before President Trump and Secretary Rubio did me the honor of this appointment, I was a litigator, and it was my job to fight. And now I'm a diplomat, so it is my job to be diplomatic. And in that spirit, I would like to sound a gong of optimism.

• 28:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  I think that a lot of ordinary Europeans are not comfortable with comedians getting dragged out of the airport, just like Europeans weren't comfortable with comedians getting murdered who are publishing offensive cartoons. And if you look at polls in Europe, I think you see some of the sentiment. So, I don't know where things are going. I can't promise in a panacea, but I will say that I've had productive conversations and hope that I'll have more.

• 29:08Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, if it does become more acute...

• 29:12Jason Calacanis?

  Is Europe prepared for all the American social networks to be turned off and blocked by IP address? Because we really don't need the money. Like, these platforms, it's nice to make money in Europe, but maybe it's time...

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Or would the European, or would various European countries demand their own version? You know, would there be a UK-specific version of X? Is that where this would be headed?

• 29:34Speaker 02

  To an extent, because, you know, one way to resolve the transnational issue is geo-fencing. Now, I think, I, I understand that some of the UK enforcement actions, geo-fencing has not been enough, which is pretty ridiculous, but you're essentially...

• 29:46Speaker 01

  You're saying that's not enough for them?

• 29:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, there's, there's a, there's a, there's a small American website, and I can't recall the name of it, that Ofcom has sued, and that website responded, "Well, we've geo-fenced, we've blocked UK IPs, so you should have nothing to say about the content on our website," but Ofcom is still going after them.

• 30:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they should be good, but those people then chose, their citizens chose, to get a VPN.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Yes, that's, well, that's, and that's a critical choice.

• 30:06Jason Calacanis?

  Which costs 30 bucks a year, and then you can make your own decision.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Which is what the people of Iran are doing, too.

• 30:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  But I think, I think, you know, you mentioned, like, fire, like, blocking by IP address. I think some countries that just, where the people, where they don't have that Charlie Hebdo tradition, like, countries like Russia or China, they just admit that they are censorious societies, and they just block these websites.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Right, it's like a great wall.

• 30:29Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, the Great Wall in China, we have the Great Firewall, which we're not trying to take down. If you want to take...

• 30:36Speaker 01

  But could that happen? Could the UK put up a Great Firewall and just say that, you know, we're blocking out the outside world?

• 30:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we call it your bluff.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  I think it's technologically, it's technologically feasible to a point, there are circumventions, but it is not politically feasible, because British people want to be free. And I think if Keir Starmer said, "We're putting up a Great Firewall, and you're not allowed to access any American social media anymore," he'd be out of office.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Right, so that is their right, but they don't want to do that, because it would be too obvious what they're doing, and so therefore...

• 31:02Jason Calacanis?

  They want to do the fines, they want to be underhanded.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  They're trying to levy fines, and just have it be more subtle, and we're pushing back, saying, "No, you can't do that."

• 31:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, good luck doing that against Elon. He's pretty principled, and I think he can pay for the speeding ticket. I don't think it's going to be a problem.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  And I would say President Trump, because I, I do think that that, President Trump's election definitely changed the direction of free speech in the United States, never mind the rest of the world. Because I think, under the Biden administration, we now know, from cases like Biden v. Missouri, and then also, you know, what was released in the Twitter files, and then since then, even more disclosure that's come out, that... The Biden administration was pressuring social networks to engage in censorship.

• 31:41Jason Calacanis?

  David, we did discuss this. You could bring up Biden for all of 2025, but when 2026 came around, you had to say that.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  I'm recounting what was happening for several years, and President Trump changed that direction.

• 31:53Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  And so if it weren't for that, I think we'd still be on a censorship track.

• 31:56Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, if it was up to Zuckerberg, he would have continued to do it under Kamala. He did it with no problem under Biden. He's a weather vane. His entire position is based on what makes the system grow.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Look, I think when it comes to these tech companies...

• 32:08Jason Calacanis?

  I don't have any personal feelings on it.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  I think when it comes to the tech companies, there's, let's say, a range of courage.

• 32:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  And so I'd say Elon is an outlier in terms of willing to stand up to the government, in terms of protecting free speech, and there's others who sort of just kind of more blow with the wind and do whatever the government is sort of suggesting.

• 32:28Jason Calacanis?

  Or demanding.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Demanding, but it was wrong. It was wrong for the government to be doing that, particularly in the US where you have a First Amendment. But let me...

• 32:35Jason Calacanis?

  And to catch people up, we literally had our FBI putting pressure on our own tech companies to say, "We don't like the tone of these tweets. The tone of these posts, we think are damaging." But we would have never gotten to the bottom of COVID, and if it actually, we should all be taking mysterious, you know, experimental vaccines. I took it. I'm OK. But like, the folks who were saying, "Hey, maybe we don't need this. Maybe we don't need to give it to kids." They don't see... That whole discussion was shut down by the Biden administration. Now you got me doing it.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Irrefutably. And the pretext for some of this was disinformation, a term that was really distended to encompass... And if you read the white papers put out by these disinformation NGOs, they will admit, "Yeah, the information can be true, but if it promotes an adverse narrative, we don't like it." And that's such an Orwellian adverse narrative, right?

• 33:24Speaker 01

  What do they call that? Misinformation? No, not misinformation.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  There's misinformation and disinformation. And the way some people define these was misinformation is false and disinformation is bad. And if disinformation pollutes your democracy, the wrong candidate right might win, I think is really the impulse. But we had information suppressed under auspices of combating disinformation that turned out to be true. So, things that were suppressed included the assertion that the vaccine did not completely prevent transmission. That turned out to be true. It mitigated transmission significantly, but it was not a sterilizing vaccine. Another thing that was suppressed-

• 33:59Jason Calacanis?

  Which, by the way, is why a lot of people took it. They didn't want it- they wanted it to be a blocker in the system, so like, it's my social obligation to do it.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:05Jason Calacanis?

  And if had given the choice, they might not have.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  And another thing that was suppressed was the assessment that the virus might have leaked from a lab. And we now know that was the same assessment of a House Committee and the CIA. So, the government thinks the virus- they're not sure, but it might have leaked from a lab, more likely than not. And you're reaching out to Twitter, to Facebook, to Instagram, saying, "Hey, you know, we can't force you to take these posts down under the First Amendment, but we'd really appreciate if you did. And if you want to stay in our good graces, you should."

• 34:33Jason Calacanis?

  Which is a long way of saying, "We all need to be vigilant about it." In the United States, internationally. If you're not vigilant about free speech, there are people who will take it away.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Yes, and let me ask a question about that. So, you mentioned organizations or NGOs who are kind of instigating. They're like ginning up these regulators. They're showing them cases, "What about this? What about this? What about that?" I'm curious, and I think you've called this a censorship industrial complex. Could you just explain what this thing is? And do you think that- I know that some of these groups are in the US, not just Europe. In fact, they mostly might be in the US. And what I'm wondering is, are they going to the European regulators as an end run around the First Amendment in the US? Because they can get European regulators to censor material that otherwise could not be censored in the US.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a great question, but it's a question we don't even need to ask, because we know the answer, and the answer is yes. So, we have emails that have leaked from some of these NGOs. So, one of them is the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which is a British NGO whose leader was the target of some of our visa sanctions. There are emails exchanged with Democratic politicians in the United States and with politicians now very close to Kirsten Stormer, saying, "Our number one priority should be to kill Musk's Twitter, so kill an American company, right? In order to suppress American political speech. And our second priority is to instigate UK and EU regulatory action." So, this is an entity taking government money to get foreign governments to come after American businesses.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  And this whole fact pattern where these American NGOs were working with the American government to send- Kind of forceful, they allege not technically coercive emails to Twitter and Meta. That was an attempt by these activists to replicate sort of the EU DSA in a way that would kind of dodge the American First Amendment. So the EU DSA requires that member states designate NGOs as so-called trusted flaggers, meaning this organization, its job is to sit on Twitter, look for offending tweets that might be hateful or whatever, and report them to Twitter. And they get a privileged reporting channel and the company is required to give those reports first tranche priority.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  If you look at what was happening under Biden, it was a very similar system. These government agencies would arrange first tranche priority for these reports. And some of what was put into those channels, the reports were technically made by NGOs. You also had, you know, the upside, one of the small upsides of COVID, if you care about government transparency, is everyone was holding their meetings on video. And so you have these videos of these Zoom meetings with government operatives saying, you know, "We couldn't do this under the First Amendment." But fortunately, this NGO on this call with us is going to do it instead.

• 37:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and they have ways of pressuring people, which leads to my final questions for you, which is, there are firms that would, actually started in the conservative space and moved to liberal, "Let's try to get advertisers to cancel on this program." They went after Howard Stern, and they went after the liberals first, and they went after the conservatives, "Let's get, you know, Rush Limbaugh's advertisers to cancel." "Oh, my God, he said these and Cinderella things, yada, yada." But we had an even more pernicious one, which is, people started to say, "Well, hey, you're CloudFlare. Hey, you're Amazon. Hey, you're PayPal. Hey, you're Stripe. We're going to go after you and make sure that we shame slash pressure you, sometimes

• 37:56Jason Calacanis?

  behind the scenes, to de-bank and to demonetize." YouTube got pulled into this as well, like, "We're going to shadow ban your videos." They started labeling all-in videos because we had conversations with scientists. About COVID, okay. Labeling also suppressed, I think. So what are your thoughts on that, which seems even more pernicious? Because if you take away a person's ability to monetize it, how do they scale that?

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Right. So there's been one successful Supreme Court case in US history on viewpoint-based de-banking, and that was my case, which we won. And that was called NRA versus Vulo. And the way we got that into court was you had, you had the New York financial regulator, per the, you know, per the pleadings, literally reaching out to financial institutions, saying, you know, it would really be better for your enterprise risk management framework if you didn't do, if you didn't do business with any pro-gun groups.

• 38:50Jason Calacanis?

  Enterprise risk management framework.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you have all these professionals, and you guys have, you know, been in finance, and you know this, like, these bureaucracies hired within financial institutions to ensure compliance with all these regulations. And so they have these elaborate risk management protocols. And this gets a bit into the weeds, but there's this thing in finance called reputational risk. And that's supposed to be the reputation of a bank for safety, solvency, and soundness. You don't want to run on the bank. If everyone thinks the bank might fail, that's bad for the system. But there's this ESG movement to expand the concept of reputational risk, to include things like, do you have a reputation for letting naughty, disfavored speakers have bank accounts? And that came up in the NRA case. Supreme Court says government is not allowed to do that, even though the government, you

• 39:34Speaker 02

  know, our First Amendment says Congress shall make no law, you know, restricting the freedom of speech. This wasn't Congress making a law restricting the freedom of speech, but it was a government entity adversely applying regulations to choke off certain viewpoints. And they were applying it, instead of going directly to the guy saying the thing you don't like, they were putting pressure on this risk averse middleman, this bank. And the de-banking and deplatforming is insidious for exactly that reason. When you have a risk averse middleman, like a financial institution.

• 40:04Jason Calacanis?

  It's almost like they designed it that way.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. They, they, they don't have skin in the game, with respect, they don't believe in your speech the way you do. They have their in-house counsel telling them that this is going to piss off the financial regulator, so it's easier to take it down. And my office is very similar.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  That's a common theme, is that when the government can't do it directly, because it would be a violation of the First Amendment, they use an intermediary to do it.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  So you get the bank to de-bank someone, or you get an NGO.

• 40:30Jason Calacanis?

  Dark NGO.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Which is really a government organization, because it's funded by the government, but they call themselves non-government. So they, they do the quote-unquote "fact-checking." You know, or you know, you get one of these other cases where, you know, the this was a little bit more overt, but where the FBI through the Biden administration is then putting pressure on the social networks. In any event, you get, like you said, a middleman to do the dirty work because the government can't do it directly.

• 40:56Jason Calacanis?

  And to do it in a really nefarious

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 40:59Jason Calacanis?

  way.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  That's hard to detect and

• 41:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, it's like, it'd be a shame if we blocked a merger. Like, they were very, Zuckerberg's a pragmatist, I'm going to go at him again, like, he likes to buy things. And if the FBI's calling you and you've got to get something through the FTC next, you're going to try to make nice, right?

• 41:17Speaker 02

  And that is the risk of giving any regulator kind of a capricious cudgel over the internet. Even if the, even if the regulation isn't explicitly speech-based, it's just, you can only do your merger if this guy likes, likes the look of the merger. Then companies are going to vie to impress that regulator. That, I think a bit of that was going on, frankly, with the Jimmy Kimmel thing. Because you had this, this merger in the works, this Tegna merger that they tried to complete under the Biden administration. And my friends in telecom tell me that when Tegna was trying to sell itself during the Biden administration, it went out of its way to show the regulator how woke it was. And so now it has an incentive to show the administration that it's MAGA-aligned. And that's what happens when you give a regulator a large cudgel. Now, I want to say something about labeling. So labeling videos, sounds,

• 42:02Speaker 02

  oh, it's just transparency, what could be wrong with that? People, people should know if fact-checkers think that something is wrong. And I think my office's approach on that is it depends on who's putting the label on there and for what purpose. So a lot of these disinformation NGOs, it was almost like, it was almost like the Red Scare.

• 42:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  They would make a list of outlets that were spreading disinformation, but they wouldn't just publish that list. They would send it around to the credit card companies, the payment processors, and suggest with, with kind of an implicit government informator, because they're all government-funded, as David very, very relevantly points out. Like, you know, you guys really shouldn't be funding these websites. And the websites would never know why. And the viewer would never know why. I think a type of labeling that's really good is the type exemplified by community notes on X, where I can read the tweet and then I can see what the community notes say about it.

• 42:47Jason Calacanis?

  And you can see a ranking of the community notes. It's very interesting.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  It's been a total game changer. I remember when they were doing fact-checking and the fact-checking was so bad because the fact-checkers were biased, or sometimes it wasn't good quality control. But the community note thing has like really worked. And you'll see That when someone posts something that's truly misinformation, like it's a fake image or a fake article or something.

• 43:08Jason Calacanis?

  It's almost it.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  It always gets caught.

• 43:10Jason Calacanis?

  It's really...

• 43:10Speaker 01

  It's a matter of time. And then you get notified. You get a... If you like... Have you noticed this?

• 43:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  If you like a post...

• 43:17Jason Calacanis?

  It'll come... It'll circle back.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  And then it gets community noted. I get a notification and then I feel like an idiot that, oh, I got fooled for five minutes.

• 43:22Jason Calacanis?

  You might want to unlike it.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  But you know what? People will drag social media for, you know, the fakes or whatever. But I never get notified when the New York Times makes a mistake and posts a correction.

• 43:32Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's on B17 on the app.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  On page 43. They never notify anybody about that. They bury that on the last page. So I still think social media is by far the best for accuracy.

• 43:41Jason Calacanis?

  Were you in the meeting when they were deciding, "Community notes or not?" And Elon was like, "Tell me about it." And I was like, "Elon, I think this is really interesting. You should double-click on it because it's actually working." And he looked at it. He immediately understood the algorithm and he said, "Keep the group."

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:59Jason Calacanis?

  That group stays.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  And you know what's the genius of that algorithm? Is the community note only gets promoted if users who usually disagree agree that that noted.

• 44:06Jason Calacanis?

  Right. They look for consensus amongst rivals.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:11Jason Calacanis?

  Which is a fascinating...

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Right. I'll tell you, the other game changer on X has been Grok. Because you can just go @Grok, "What's the truth?"

• 44:19Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  And you won't necessarily always agree with Grok. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's pretty darn good.

• 44:24Jason Calacanis?

  It's trending in the right direction.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  It's... I mean, it's really good on the whole. And yeah, I mean, it does a really good job fact-checking too. So we don't really need these bureaucrats and politicians and regulators telling us what's true or not. We have community notes. We have AI now. You've got other users.

• 44:41Jason Calacanis?

  And you can file a lawsuit if you feel you've been defamed.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:44Jason Calacanis?

  It exists in the United States.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 44:46Jason Calacanis?

  As a concept. Uh, listen, Sarah, we feel, I think, I can speak for everybody here in the USA House, that we're really glad that you're so vigilant and dogged in protecting the First Amendment. Give it up for Sarah Rogers.