the jogan experience I was really worried from the beginning about basically becoming this sort of decider of what is true in the world right that's like kind of a crazy position to be in for billions of people using your service and um so we tried to put in place a a you know a system that would deal with it um you know and early on tried to basically make it so that um it was really limited we're like all right we're just going to have the system where these these third party fact Checkers and they
can check the worst of the worst stuff right so um things that are very clear hoaxes that there's like it's not like like we're not parsing speech about whether something is slightly true or slightly false like Earth is flat um you know things like that right so so that was sort of the original intent we put in place the system and it just sort of veered from there I I think to some degree it's because some of the people whose job is to do factchecking a lot of their industry is focused on political factchecking so
they're just kind of veered in that direction we kept on trying to to basically get it to to be what we had originally intended was just just you know it's not the point isn't to like judge people's opinions it's to to provide you know this layer to to to kind of help fact check some of the stuff that seems the most extreme but um it just you know it was it was just never accepted by by people broadly I think people just felt like the fact Checkers were too biased um not necessarily even so much
and what they ruled although sometimes I think people would disagree with that a lot of the time it was just what types of things they chose to even go in fact check in the first time in the first place so I I kind of think like after having gone through that whole exercise it um I don't know it's something out of like you know 1984 one of these books where it's just like it really is a slippery slope and it just got to a point where it's just okay this is destroying so much trust ESP
in the United States to have this program um and I guess it was probably about a few years that I really started coming to the conclusion that we were going to need to to change something about that um Co was the other big one where that was that was also very tricky because you know at the beginning it was you know it's like a legitimate Public Health crisis you know in the in the beginning and it's um you know even people who are like the most Ardent First Amendment um you know Defenders that the Supreme
Court has this clear presson that's like all right you you can't yell fire in a crowded theater there are times when if there's an emergency um your your ability to speak can temporarily be curtailed in order to get an emergency under control so I was sympathetic to that at the beginning of Co it seemed like okay you have this virus seems like it's killing a lot of people I don't know like we didn't know at the time how dangerous it was going to be so at the beginning it kind of seemed like okay we should
give a little bit of Defence to the government and the health authorities on how we should play this but when it went from you know two weeks to flatten the curve to um you know in like in the beginning it was like okay there aren't enough masks masks aren't that important to then it's like oh no you have to wear a mask and you know all the like everything was shifting around I it just become very difficult to kind of follow and and this really hit the most extreme I'd say during it was during the
Biden Administration when they were trying to roll out um the vaccine program and I'm generally like pretty Pro rolling out vaccines I think on balance the vaccines are more positive than negative but I think that while they're trying to push that program they also tried to censor anyone who was basically arguing against it and they pushed us super hard um to take down things that were honestly were true right I mean they they basically pushed us and and said you know anything that um says that vaccines might have side effects you basically need to take
down and I was just like well we're not going to do that like we're clearly not going to do that I mean that that that that is kind of in our who was they who's telling you to take down things that yeah it was it talk about vaccine side effects it was people in the um in the Biden Administration I think it was um you know I wasn't involved in those conversations directly but I think it was how difficult is that to not be involved in those conversations directly that's got to be strange too right
because you're running the company but there's clearly you're moderating at scale that's beyond the imagination the number of human beings you're moderating is [ __ ] insane like what is what's a Facebook what how many people use it on a daily basis forget about how many overall like how many people use it regularly it's uh 3.2 billion people use one of our services every day that's yeah it's no it's wild more than a third of the planet that's so crazy and it's almost half of Earth well on a monthly basis it is probably half of
but just I want I want to say that though for there's a lot of like hypercritical people that are conspiracy theorists and think that everybody's a part of some cabal to control them I want you to understand that whether it's YouTube or all these and whatever place you think is doing something that's awful it's good that you speak because this is how things get changed and this is how people find out that people are upset about content moderation and and censorship but moderating at scale is insane yeah it's insane yeah the what we were talking
the other day about the number of videos that go up every hour on YouTube and it's bananas it's bananas that's like to try to get a human being that is reasonable logic logical and objective that's going to analyze every video it's virtually impossible it's not possible so you got to use a bunch of tools you got to get bunch of things wrong and you have also people reporting things and how how much is that going to affect things there's you could have mass reporting because you have Bad actors you have some corporation that decides we're
going to attack this video because it's bad for us get it taken down there's so much going on just I want to put that in people's heads before we go on like understand the kind of numbers that we're talking about here now you have the the pandemic and then you have the administration that's doing something where I think they cross the line where it gets really weird where they were saying what you were saying they were trying you to get you to take down vaccine side effects which is just crazy yeah so I mean like
you're saying I mean this is it's so complicated this system that I could spend every minute of all of my time doing this and not actually focused on building any of the things that we're trying to do AI glasses like the future of social media all that stuff so um so I I get involved in this stuff but in general we we have a policy team there are people who I trust there're the people are kind of working on this on a day-to-day basis and the interactions that um that I was just referring to I
mean a lot of this is documented I mean because uh you know Jim Jordan and the the house had this whole investigation and committee into into the the kind of government censorship around stuff like this and we produced all these documents and it's all in the public domain I mean basically these people from the Biden Administration would call up our team and like scream at them and curse and it's like these documents are it's all kind of out there did you record any of those phone calls I don't no I don't think I don't think
we but but I think I want to listen I mean there are emails the emails are published it's all it's all kind of out there and um and they're like and basically it just got to this point where we were like no we're not going to we're not going to take down things that are true that's ridiculous um they wanted us to take down this meme of Leonardo DiCaprio looking at a TV talking about how 10 years from now or something um you know you're going to see an ad that says okay if you took
a covid vaccine you're um eligible you you know like uh for for this kind of payment like this sort of like class action lawsuit type Meme and they're like no you have to take that down we just said no we're not we're not g to take down humor and satire we're not going to take down things that are that are true and then at some point um I guess uh I don't know it flipped a bit I mean Biden when he was he gave some statement at some point I don't know if it was a
press conference or to some journalist where he basically was like these guys are killing people and and um and I don't know then like all these different agencies and branches of government basically just like started investigating and coming after our company it was it was brutal it was brutal wow yeah it's just a massive overstepping you weren't killing people this is this is the thing about all of this it's like they suppressed so much information about things that people should be doing regardless of whether or not you believe in the vaccine regardless put that aside
metabolic health is of the utmost importance in your everyday life whether there's a pandemic or there's not and there's a lot of things that you can do that can help you recover from illness it prevents illnesses it makes your body more robust and healthy it strengthens your immune system and they were suppressing all that information and that's just crazy you can't say you're one of the good guys if you're suppressing information that would help people recover from all kinds of diseases not just covid the flu common cold all sorts of different things high doses of
Vitamin C D3 with K2 and magnesium they were suppressing this stuff because they didn't want people to think you could get away with not taking a vaccine which is really crazy when you're talking about something that 99.07% of people survive this is a crazy overstep but scared the [ __ ] out of a lot of people to redpill as it were a lot of people because they realized like oh 1984 is like an instruction manual it's like this is it shows you how things can go that way with wrong speak and with bizarre Distortion of
facts and when it comes down to it in today's day and age the way people get information is through your platform through X this is how people are getting information they're getting information from YouTube they're getting information from a a bunch of different sources now and you can't censor that if it's real legitimate information because it's not ideologically convenient for you yeah so I mean that's basically the journey that I've been on Right started off very Pro free free speech free expression um you know then over the last 10 years there were been these two
big episodes it was the Trump election and the aftermath where I feel like in retrospect I deferred too much to the kind of critique of the media on what we should do um and since then I think generally Trust in Media has fallen off a cliff right so I don't think I'm alone in that journey I think you know that's basically the the the experience that that a lot of people have had is okay it's the the stuff that's being written about is not kind of all accurate um and and even if the facts are
right it's kind of written from a slant a lot of the time of course and then um and then there's the government version of it which was during covid which is okay like it's like our government is is telling us that we need to censor true things it's like this is a disaster and it's you know it's not just the US right I think um you know a lot of people in the US focus on this as an American phenomenon but I kind of think that the reaction to co probably caused a breakdown and trust
in a lot of um governments around the world because I mean you know 2024 was a big election year around the world and um you know there all these countries India me you know just like a ton of countries that had that had elections and the incumbents basically lost every single one um so there is some sort of a global phenomenon where the the um whether it was because of inflation because of the the economic policies to deal with um with Co or or just how how the governments dealt with Co um seems to have
had this effect that's Global not just the us but like a very broad decrease in trust at least in in that set of incumbents and maybe in in sort of these Democratic institutions overall so I I think that what you're saying of yeah how do people get their information now it's by sharing it online on social media um I think that that's just increasingly true and my view at this point is like all right like we started off focused on free expression we kind of had this pressure tested over the last period I I feel
like I just have a much greater command now of what I think the policy should be and like this is how it's going to be going forward and um and so I'm I mean at this point I think you I think a lot of people look at this as like a purely political thing you know it's because they they kind of look at the timing and they're like hey well you're you're doing this right after the election it's like okay I try not to like change our content rules like right in the middle of an
election either right it's like there's not like a great time to do this it's you know um and you want to do it a year later yeah it's like there's no good time to do it there you know at whatever time is is going on there's going to be you know so um the good thing about doing it after the election is you get to take this kind of cultural pulse as like okay where are people right now and how are people thinking about it we try to have policies that reflect um you know mainstream
discourse uh but yeah I mean I I don't know this is something I've been thinking about for a while I think that this is going to be pretty durable because this point we've just been pressure tested on this stuff for like the last 8 to 10 years with like these huge institutions just pressuring us and um and I I I feel like this is kind of the right place to be going forward what was it like when they were attacking you like first of all what was the premise like what what would they were they
saying was your offense was it that you were allowing information that was not true that was getting out there I know there was also they're saying that you guys were allowing hate groups to speak there was a lot of this yeah I mean the the TR the tough thing with politics is that there's like well when you say who someone's coming after you are you referring to kind of the government and investigations and all that I mean so the issue is that there's the there's what specific thing an agency might be looking into you for
and then there's like the underlying political motivation which is like why do the people who are running this thing hate you and I think that those can often be two very different things
