AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: Big Tech and Censorship

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a very good discussion Big Tech Censorship of speech and although it was bit off-script from what I planned to talk about it was an interesting subject. Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN.

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: We now have kind of a shadow bureaucracy, if you will. That is in place by the programmers who might be the ones that are really causing many of these problems. We know they are when it comes to Google and the search results not showing results for certain websites like Breitbart.

Craig Peterson: Hey everybody, Craig Peterson here. Welcome. So glad to have you here. it was a really a fun flashback for me because it reminded me of my years and years of doing kernel programming. I want to know if you have a solution for this. Anyways, here we go with Matt, WGAN morning news.

Matt Gagnon: Seven 36 on the WGAN morning news on Wednesday morning. And it's time to talk to Greg Peterson, our tech guru, Craig, how are you this morning?

[00:01:00] Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning. Doing great, Matt.

Fantastic. We always talk to Craig at this time every week and pleased to have him here. Once again, Craig, we've got a lot of topics to get to, you know that you and I discussed of course before you come on every week, but I must go off-script.

If you don't mind, Craig, come with me down this garden path. Okay. So you saw, I trust the whole thing in front of the Supreme court with the doctors yesterday and then all the brouhaha afterward. Okay. So I'm going to set aside any sort of conversation between you and me about whether or not you should take those doctors seriously, whether or not they're cranks or whether or not they're truth sayers, all that stuff.

Set it aside for me for a moment, let's deal with what the tech companies did though. Because that video was shared, it was a press conference essentially. And it was shared on Facebook. It's on YouTube. It's everywhere. It was taken down everywhere. Tell me a little bit about, I don't know, just your thoughts on exactly where we are as it relates to these tech giants, trying to police truth like that and take down stuff.

[00:02:00] And whether or not even it's effective. I gotta be honest with you, Craig. I feel like them doing that, even if they're right and these people are cranks. Which again, we're not debating right now, even if they are right. It just increases the interest and the, Hey, what are they hiding stuff about this? It makes it more popular. I just don't get what they're doing here.

Yeah. I have to agree with you on that. And it's interesting because I saw the video I saw part of it live when they were doing it. The doctors, because my wife had pointed it out to me, and I had a look at it and I thought, wow, this is really interesting, but they're getting into a lot of detailed stuff and I got the other stuff to do.

I stopped watching it. I figured all this go back to it later. It is. It's really an interesting problem here because I think what's happening. Are these tech giants have the typical hard left-wing mentality of we're smarter than you. Just like Hillary Clinton's the smartest woman that has ever lived and she has to be president so she can tell us what to do.

[00:03:00] That is exactly what these tech giants are doing. No, obviously not everybody had that attitude, but there were plenty that did with Hillary. But when we're talking about these tech companies, they're treating us like they are our parents and we're three-year-olds. That we can evaluate things. I think it's a real problem.

I'm concerned for a couple of reasons, obviously about the information so many people rely on it, et cetera, but what's the recourse here. What's going to happen. Are the feds are going to swoop in? You remember a couple of years ago there was talk about, we need to regulate these companies. Is that going to make it even worse? It's going to depend on what the bureaucrats have to say. So it's very upsetting to me.  I've moved, for instance, I moved over to Parler.

Matt Gagnon: Instead of Twitter?

Craig Peterson:  Exactly many people have, but I don't know. There are some alternatives, Parler being one of them for Twitter, but it's,

[00:04:00] Matt Gagnon: But let's be honest though, Craig, Parler is great and everything, but it doesn't have the same volume of people and I don't think it ever will. It's basically made up of conservative, homeless people who are just, they're homeless online at least. They're tired of being beaten around by Twitter, but that's not enough to really make up a broad base of users. What matters is what most Americans use. If they're using the stuff and their content is curtailed like that, it's just interesting.

Craig Peterson: It is. It is, but it's the same problem, right? This is what you're pointing out. So you've got this one voice and if you disagree with that voice, Your tweet gets deleted or your account gets deleted as we've been seeing with the whole QAnon thing.

You talked about that before. It's very upsetting to me and I cannot see a good answer to any of this.

Matt Gagnon: Nor can I, Craig, and that's a sad tale. It's just, it's increasingly happening. I saw also another story that showed that Google was no longer producing search results for Breitbart too, which is, stuff like this is very, it's terrifying to me.

[00:05:00] I'm actually going to talk about this issue a little bit more in-depth, a little bit later on. And one of the things I'm going to be talking about is a number of scientists over the years that were dismissed and not taken seriously in their time. And then years after their deaths, they'd be, they became the scientific consensus on something.

They were ahead of their time and blankly dismissed by the people who were their contemporaries. And not that I'm suggesting that you blow in front of the Supreme court where those people, because frankly, I don't think that's true. I think they in many ways have very problematic things about their paths, but regardless the point is when you make yourself the arbiter of truth like that.

And you're the one that's deeming what is, and is not worthy of being heard in a public dialogue. It becomes a terrifying thing for, in my opinion, in this country. And it's attitudes about free speech and its attitudes about mature dialogue between people and everything else. I don't know if a Republican truly stand with this kind of stuff happening wholesale across the country.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, it can. we all know the world is flat and the earth is the center of the universe, et cetera.

[00:06:00] Matt Gagnon: that's my point though, Craig, exactly. I know you're hitting on it, but yeah. if Twitter existed back then in Google existed back then somebody was saying that the earth was round. When everybody thought the earth was flat, Google would remove all websites that pointed the things that say that the earth is round and because it's not part of the currently held scientific consensus on something and therefore is not worthy of being heard.

When I don't know, at least my attitude is you should be able to hear the argument, even if it's crockery. And if it means some people buy into something that's wrong, that's just the price you pay for freedom. In my opinion, it's just what it is.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. There you're absolutely right. And there are alternatives, but there doesn't seem to be a downside for these tech companies really.

Matt Gagnon: Yeah.

[00:07:00] Craig Peterson: You've got so many of these amps advertisers telling Facebook, or we're stopping our advertisements and that is a punishment for Facebook. And although they've held true to some degree about not doing as much censorship as they had been doing, they have started a little bit more censorship, it's getting worse and worse. And that this problem is much more difficult than it ever has been before for one other reason.

And that is the program are involved. I've written a lot of code over the years, programming that I did decades ago helped to build and establish the internet. Some of it's still in use today. And is on our phones and is on our computers.

When you're sitting there and you're working on a program, you have to make certain assumptions.

So you try and cover all of the paths, all the things that could go wrong. But when we're talking about a company like Google or Facebook or Twitter, that really does. Edit it audit your feeds, right? You follow someone. You're not going to see everything that they post.

[00:08:00] In fact, in most cases, you might only see five to 10% of the things that they're posting online, even though you followed them. So we now have kind of a shadow bureaucracy, if you will. That is in place by the programmers, who might be the ones that are really causing many of these problems.

We know they are. When it comes to Google and the search results and not showing results for certain ones, like Breitbart.

Matt Gagnon: Yeah.

Craig Peterson: How do you deal with that? Some guys sitting there eating pizza at 2:00 AM, writing some code that he may or may not have malicious intent that is going to block conservative or free speech.

Matt Gagnon: There's gonna be a lot of dystopian novels written about this stuff. I think coming up in certain years, coming up soon, I really do think that it's just, a Brave New World is immediately at the top of my head for all this stuff.

Craig, I appreciate you going a little off-script here and tossing this around with me here this morning.

Cause I think it's an incredibly important topic and needs to be treated with seriousness. And a lot of people are not doing that right now. So thank you for helping me out a little bit on that.

[00:09:00] Craig Peterson: Indeed. Hey, thanks. And by the way, this weekend, I'm really going to get into this VPN thing. I've warned people before. This is an, I told you. My gosh, if you're using free or cheap VPNs, make sure you tune on Saturday at one, because, they've been lying to you. These VPN companies and we'll get into in some detail.

Matt Gagnon: Great. Thanks a lot, Craig. Appreciate it. As always coming up next. We'll talk a little bit about the ranked-choice voting challenge that I was speaking with Nick about a moment.

Craig Peterson: Hey, does this summer seem to be going incredibly fast for you? I don't know. Many of us, myself included are still in a lockdown mode, but oh my gosh. All right, everybody. Hey, we'll be back on Saturday.

We've been busy last night. I had our, our guy in, JJ who's helping me with the studio. Some of the videos & stuff that we're going to be doing is we're going to produce more training for everybody. And it's really, so I'll get the studio reorganized a little bit. The lighting's better camera position has a better, I fixed color problems that were there on the cameras.

And we got a lot coming up. We're going to teach you, as I mentioned [00:10:00] here about VPNs, but I'm also going to do some live webinar. Stuff with you guys. And not only about VPNs, but about a whole host of things. Our firewalls, what we're doing at home, the prosumer equipment versus just the consumer equipment, and how you just cannot use consumer equipment anymore.

So it's going to be a fun time, a lot of work for me, but that's fine. I got to get this info out and hopefully, a few of you guys are interested in hiring me and my family business here. That's been doing cybersecurity for 20 years. so we've got a couple of my kids in it and as well as a few other people, but, hopefully, if you are interested in hiring us to help you out. Anyways lots of free stuff, lots of great stuff.

Keep your eyes out and make sure you're subscribed. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

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