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

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. Yes. It's our first Davos. We've been here for 24 hours. And any first impressions here? It's interesting. You know, we're staying very far away. Yeah. Apparently, they didn't want you to be part of this. They didn't want me too close. Yeah. But we finally got you an invitation. Your invitation did not get lost in the mail. My invitation, you can get lost in the mail this time. For those of you who watch the pod, you know what I'm talking about. Inside joke. Yes. 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 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. Long-time 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? Yeah. So diplomacy traditionally concerns the relationship between the American government and foreign governments. To 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, the public's intersection with American interests, how do we interact with the internet and the information ecosystem. That is part of my portfolio. 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 LA Olympics coming up, and the Fulbright program and others like it. So it's a great job. 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. It 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. 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. 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 centurious 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 any content that's upsetting, and then requires platforms to run risk assessments for, 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 reach into the UK These aren websites dedicated to discussing the Queen They not websites that sell goods in the United Kingdom 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. 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, 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, like, rugged individualism and individual conscience. 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. 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. 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 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 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 and 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 forum? Are you posting defamatory statements about a person in Texas? 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 and the bargain. 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. 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 have been over 12,000 people. Is it prosecuted or... Arrested. Arrested under the Online Safety Act Was that just in one year, or is that since it... That was in 2023 alone. Okay. 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 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. Because this was an incitement to violence. 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 as 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. Because he called somebody zesty. Yeah, basically. That's what we call it in the United States now. 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 you're 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 is, 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. but if you arrest 12 people a year for speech and you 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 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? 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, comprise the free world after World War II, and 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. And criticizing the uncomfortable speech is where this actual defense is necessary. Yes. 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. Well, a lot of it's about immigration, right? I mean, 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? Right. And this is another place where 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 Rudabanka stabbed, I think it was a 7-year-old girl, an 8-year-old girl, and a 9-year-old girl at a birthday party, it was ensuing unrest, and she tweeted something anti-migration, and it was pretty inflammatory, but it would have been unambiguously legal in the United States. 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 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. 31-month. 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. Yeah. So, okay, so... I emphasized that. Yeah, so, I mean, so I think... That was the gong of righteousness. Yes. We appreciate it. And then just to add one more dimension to this. So U.S. companies have been getting fined like crazy, right, in the U.K. and then the E.U. And I think it's related to this issue. But can you just describe that? Yeah. 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? 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. 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, primordial 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 believe it was 140 million euros but that might be dollars Are they targeting Elon because they disagree with his influence in the UK Look I can speak for the UK regulators but I can make inferences Yeah, what's your inference? 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, the U.S. 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 revenues raised within the EU through other metrics and then revenues raised just by fining American tech companies. And there's a suspicion that this is really kind of a de facto tax, and pretexts are contrived for fining large American tech companies in order to raise revenue. 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 maybe this is more the EU, but the DSA has become almost like a digital speed 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. 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. Really bizarre, David. 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. There were some rules. Hey, you can't criticize the kingdom. Right. Let's leave religion off the table, but you can go after your own, but we might have some sensitivities there. And 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. I mean, it's not a good trend. And 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? 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. Not in a family podcast. Not in a family podcast. Yes. 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 Kerfluffle. But even that, it seemed, David, President Trump and the administration and Brendan Carr, friend of the pod, who's been on a couple of times, kind of rethought that one. Yeah. 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 It was the heat of the moment. The system kind of worked itself out. There was no government censorship there. Brendan probably shouldn't have said what he said, in my estimation. 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 disturbing and I 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 is 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 we will, as we can. 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, cabinet members, but the public can't tell? Because this is new. 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 Sweet 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 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 parody But if you depicting a public official falsely in a way that people can tell as a satirical or non depiction then the parody tension really isn't there. And what I would say, though, is whenever we reach a new technological frontier, there is 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 deal 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 deepfakes, I think we have in America and in Europe strong legal remedies against defamation. 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. Right. And that doesn't mean that... And we have child protection and underage laws. Those are very fraud. Yes. And fraud. And 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 cyber crime. 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 ones. 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. It's wire fraud, you know. 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 securities regulations like now you have to file a certain disclosure annually with your earnings and whatnot And we didn fundamentally change how we treated false information We just developed some slightly more fine-tuned devices. 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 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. So, Sarah, where do you think this relationship between the U.S. and EU is now headed on this topic of free speech? I mean, there does seem to be a fundamental divergence. 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? Where's this headed? 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 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 for 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 a panacea, but I will say that I've had productive conversations and hope that I'll have more. I mean, if it does become more acute, 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. 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? To an extent, because, you know, one way to resolve the transnational issue is geofencing. Now, I think I understand that some of the UK enforcement actions, geofencing has not been enough, which is pretty ridiculous, but you're essentially... You're saying that's not enough for them. Yeah, like 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 geofenced, we've blocked UK IPs, so you should have nothing to say about the content on our website, but Ofcom has said that. Yeah, they should be good, but those people then chose, their citizens chose to get a VPN. Yes. Which costs $30 a year, and then you can make your own decision. Which is what the people of Iran are doing, too. Yeah. But I think, you know, you mentioned, 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. Right. It's like a great wall. Yeah, I mean, the Great Wall in China, we have the Great Firewall, which we're not trying to take down. 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? We call your bluff. I think 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. 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... They want to do the fines. They want to be underhanded. 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. 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. And I would say President Trump, because 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. David, we did discuss this. You could bring up Biden for all of 2025, but when 2026 came around, you had to slow down. I'm recounting what was happening for several years and President Trump changed that direction. Absolutely. And so if it weren't for that, I think we'd still be on a censorship track. 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 weathervane. His entire position is based on what makes the system grow. Look, I think when it comes to these tech companies... I don't have any personal feelings on it. I think when it comes to the tech companies, there's, let's say, a range of courage. Yes. 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 Or demanding Or demanding But it was wrong It was wrong for the government to be doing that particularly in the U where you have a First Amendment But let me 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 okay. 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. 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 an adverse narrative, right? It's a narrative we don't like. 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 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... 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 it's my social obligation to do it. And if given the choice, they might not have. 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. 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. 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 curious and I think you 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 U not just Europe In fact, they mostly might be in the U.S. And what I'm wondering is, are they going to the European regulators as an end run around the First Amendment of the U.S. because they can get European regulators to censor material that otherwise cannot be censored in the U.S.? 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, 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 Keir 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. 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-tranched priority. If you look at what was happening under Biden, it was a very similar system. These government agencies would arrange first-tranched 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 is 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 gonna do it instead. 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 the liberal, let 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 get you know Rush Limbaugh advertisers to cancel Oh, my God, he said these incendiary 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 behind the scenes to debank 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? So there's been one successful Supreme Court case in U.S. history on viewpoint-based debanking, 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 the New York financial regulator, 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 business with any pro-gun groups. Enterprise risk management framework. 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. The Supreme Court says the government is not allowed to do that, even though the government, you know, our First Amendment says Congress shall make no law 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 debanking and deplatforming is insidious for exactly that reason. When you have a risk-averse middleman, like a financial institution, It's almost like they designed it that way. 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... So 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. Right. So you get the bank to debank someone, or you get an NGO. Dark NGO. Which is really a government organization because it's funded by the government, but they call themselves non-government. So they do the quote-unquote fact-checking. Yeah. You know? Or, you know, you get one of these other cases where, you know, 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. And to do it in a really nefarious way. That's hard to detect and reject it. 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 is calling you and you got to get something through the FTC next you going to try to make nice right And that is the risk of giving any regulator kind of a capricious cudgel over the internet Even if the regulation isn't explicitly speech-based, it's just you can only do your merger if this guy likes the look of the merger, then companies are going to vie to impress that regulator. I think a bit of that was going on, frankly, with the Jimmy Kimmel thing, because you had this merger in the works, this Tegno merger that they tried to complete under the Biden administration. And my friends in telecom tell me that when Tegno 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, 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 the Red Scare. 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 and the payment processors and suggest with kind of an implicit government imprimatur because they all government funded as David very very relevantly points out like you know you guys really shouldn 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. And you can see a ranking of the community notes. It's very interesting. 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 was a 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, it always gets caught. It's really... It's not enough time. And then you get notified. You get a... If you like... Have you noticed this? Yeah. If you like a post... It'll circle back. 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. You might want to unlike it. 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 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. 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 on it because it actually working And he looked at it. He immediately understood the algorithm, and he said, keep the group. That group stays. 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 note is right. They look for consensus amongst rivals, which is a fascinating, Right. I'll tell you the other game changer on X has been Grok, because you can just go, at Grok, what's the truth? And you won't necessarily always agree with Grok. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's pretty darn good. It's trending in the right direction. 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. And you can file a lawsuit if you feel you've been defamed. Yes. It exists in the United States. Exactly. As a concept. Listen, Sarah, we feel, I think, I can speak for everybody here in 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.