Her voice and you say thats the collusion. Its a collusion between the democrats and the media and social media in these platforms. Its a disgraceful thing. That was from july at the White House Social Media summit and that is our topic this week on the communicators. Conservatives and social media and whether they are censored. Joining us to discuss this issue are two conservatives. Patrick is with the Competitive Enterprise Institute in robert is with the Heritage Foundation you were at that social media summit and what are your impressions . Guest quite an event. I will never see anything quite like it as the president is known to put on events like this. What is accommodation of both a celebration of social media and the success that he and other conservatives have had taken the message directly to the American People but it also was an opportunity for him to highlight some of the areas where he feels hes being suppressed in his reach. Other conservatives stood up and spoke about their own examples of bias what they perceive as bias from the social Media Companies. Examination of those two types of things and of course is the president is known to do when on for quite a long time and some entertainment mixed with policy discussions. Are conservatives are conservative social and social media . Guest the social Media Company say no. They are on that one side of it. We have personally experienced examples were content has been removed when you go to google or facebook or twitter and ask them why it seems that its because of their beach policy or Community Standards or other things that we see as just speech or a policy issue where they may tend to agree with us on. So, in some cases yes, i do think conservatives have experienced a bias or suppression because of the liberal values the come out of Silicon Valley. I dont have a definitive study that goes to show because theres other cases where liberals have complained of bias. Ultimately comes down to is social Media Companies sometimes over exerting and if they would let free speech take priority might be better off. Host same question. Guest i will just say its impossible for any private entity to censor another private entity censorship specifically applies to action by government and we have to remember that the First Amendment is a resection on government and not an entitlement upon private actors. We are talking about private platforms and systems created by americans that themselves have First Amendment protections and that includes freedom of association in their own freedom of speech. To the extent that they are limiting and again i would agree with my counterpart that there is no general study looked at this and found any systemic examples of what they are referring to as censorship or suppression to the extent that is occurring again that is not a First Amendment violation because if there is some sort of removal going on this is private companies exerting their own First Amendment right saying we dont want to be affiliated with some of the messaging being posted on our site. Host does those social Media Companies have an outsized influence and have more a responsibility to allow free speech . Guest there is no size clause in the First Amendment. They have we have responsibly to respect the speech rights and Association Rights of all americans no matter how big or small their platform or their influence may be. Guest patrick, that has a value. We as americans should aspire to respect the freespeech rights of others. I agree with you completely in terms of the Government Role and regulating companies. I do not want to see the government step in and the consequences we have unintended consequences if that were to happen but as consumers we can certainly demand that if users of facebook and twitter and google if we are going to be on that platform we expect that they will respect our ability to communicate. If we dont like it, we can quit and go found our own company and take our message to a different platform but ultimately they are private companies and they can set the rules. Guest i think a lot of conservatives are ignoring the net positive that weve seen from the advent of big tech. You have someone like craig or whos suing google over what he believes is suppression of his videos, prager universities, videos i enjoy a lot of those and have seen them and generally theyre doing a great job and the numbers speak for the fact that doing a good job. I believe they have over 1 billion views. To me it seems hard to levy an accusation that big tech is a net negative in any way, shape or form to conservative speech with someone like Dennis Prager is now getting a billion use on the products in the videos hes putting out. Guest its true. Conservatives have had great success. The president is a clear example of this. The president addresses the question headon when he was asked would you be in class today if it werent for your use of social media. He says he would but i think what he was able to do on facebook in terms of targeting certain audiences that maybe more receptive to his message and ability to bypass the National News media by going directly to twitter to make his announcements and his policy positions those things that were significant factors in his ascension to the white house and so there are plenty of others with Heritage Foundation in daily signal being from that i know from a first and on the success we get today is a direct result of social media. Host when have you been censored . Or have you been censored . Guest the Heritage Foundation in daily signal which is our news outlet has experienced this problem. I have a colleague who is also censored for a time or was blocked from posting on twitter. His case involved an issue of miss generated some of the social economies have policies where if you use the wrong pronoun for transgender individual able block you and my colleague found himself in that situation and was off the platform for about one week and appealed and twitter eventually came back and apologized to him and restored his account. In the more notable examples for the Heritage Foundation in daily signal we interviewed a pediatrician about the dangers of giving blockers to children. This pediatricians video went viral on facebook and taken off and currently has 74 million views but when he got to about 70 million views the video the spirit from the platform. We cannot find it anymore and contacted facebook and facebook restored the video. We are currently google over the videos the same videos from youtube it youtube is currently blocking the video because it violates youtubes hate speech policy. In many cases we try to resolve the strictly with the company. Prager eu has taken a different course and decided to sue. Host have you been blocked or censored . Guest nothing i have seen, no. I would like to point out that just this week we have an example of someone on the far left saint they have been blocked in censored. Representative who is also not running for president is claiming that sued google claiming censorship as well. Theres a lot of examples from both the left and right about this perception for broadbased censorship or suppression and its important we point out those examples on the left but i do think conservatives tend to be a little louder on this issue because theres been that long standing perception that in the conventional media that conservative voices have not been heard. Theyre vigilant about the things that plenty examples in cases in the Tech Companies will tell you about videos that violated their terms of service or felt violated in the Community Standards that have been taken down and come from outlets such as the Huffington Post. I believe the Huffington Post has had more videos put behind the same barrier that Dennis Prager is complaining about the Dennis Prager has. Host why isnt there either a conservative or all everything facebook type page out there where everybody can post anything . Guest i dont think people would use a product like that because anybody can post anything on a platform like that. You will get a lot of spam and images and a lot of hate speech. It will be a nasty place to go. The laws that protect the companys to moderate their content is about what creates these forms that people do like to go for reliable information. Host can you put anything you want on Competitive Enterprise Institute website . Guest i cannot. No, i go through an editing process and because we control what goes on our website but i believe we do have a Comment Section where instead of prescreening people will leave comments and its something if its illegal or a threat or Something Like that we take action. Host why isnt there a conservative facebook . Guest i think some people have tried but a factor that facebook and twitter and some of these problems are successful is because they dont just cater to a specific ideological or political party. They bring in diverse viewpoints. In many cases they started out as an exchange between friends or high school and college classmates were people did not have monolithic political views. I think there are values that the social media platforms bring to the table. For instance, im able to keep in touch with my friends from back home in upstate new york. As well as perspective at the competitive enterprises. You dont want to necessarily have a Walled Garden where you have republicans or them talking. Then we get into a hold those exposed to different ideas. Im the biggest believer you should subscribe to multiple news outlets and consume information from a wide variety of sources because if you are just relying exclusively on one day a broken or conservative social media platform it probably not going to get the full perspective on the screen on in the world. Guest to get back to the stink distinction of a small one like ours versus of facebook platform this gets out a lot of the criticism we see levy that facebook and other platforms that they are acting like publishers. They are not. Most publishers are reading what goes on their page or into their newspaper or into their book before they decide to publish. If you would apply that standard to facebook or google or amazon or fc or ebay or some of these ecommerce platforms they would cease to exist in the way that we know and enjoy them today because theres literally billions of different posts going up on these websites at any given day and to expect them to prescreen all these things for they go life is completely unrealistic and to say that they should be held accountable for what is just a thirdparty creation from billions of different sources is going to undermine their ability to operate. With the a lot of them accept that legal risk and end up shutting down and we would lose all the benefits that come with having these platforms for decentralization. Host in their art Market Forces at work. For instance, if someone goes onto a platform and they start pulling me or patrick we have the ability to report that to these companies and they have inside bullying policies in place in order to flag comments like that and raise them to us urgent attention. The private individuals have certain protections where they can shield the speech that they may find the other issue is the daily signal has a new story or video and that we post on the platform and the policy we are talking about conflicts with the Community Standards and that is where i thank you get into this great area. What i dont want to see the government step in and relate that in any way possible i do think the consumers should have the ability to push back and raise awareness about this and if so be it ticket to their own website where they allow more of that speech. What is so funny and tragically funny is that a lot of those protections that the companies have put in place that you filter out content that folks may not want to see or find harmful those programs are part of these problems are things that conservatives genuinely call for a dont want their children to be able to go on to the forms and be exposed to nudity or violence or other in their view is obscene material and then they are not turning back and saying these things calling the perceived censorship to. They have to be careful what theyre asking for and realize the same tool that the sites have to ensure that in general facebook and some of these platforms, twitter are places that are generally safe for people to go where they wont be scammed or see pornographic images and things like that and the same thing conservative is believed to suppression and the constant they post as well. Host what do you think about twitters new rules with regard to socalled hate speech or Community Standards. Is Community Standards a set Legal Definition or is it fuzzy . Guest yeah, im not an attorney so i cant speak to that but i would say i think as with any other private area it is their expectations of here is what we expect from you in a change were using our free service. Host from twitter safety which is a blog on twitter to finding Public Interest on twitter they write that they will be using a notice if they find something that they consider to be hate speech et cetera and they will put that notice on a tweet if from a government elected official you have more than 100,000 followers and are verified. They start producing notices. Guest we have seen this with baseball and to take twitter for example came into play with President Trump and people think of the things he treats would apply the policy has put in place on the flipside be seen it with facebook and Fact Checking. [inaudible] or the fact after that it works with me team is false and in their private companies the monitor is constant however they want and they put a label on it and challenging it and in the case of a daily article we did challenge the fact check and in other cases smaller individual may not have that same. Guest different platforms of trying and expanding to keep their platforms to the widest possible user base and ultimately that goes against the claims that conservatives have that they are being broadly censored. I cant think of any company that bases their Business Model and having as many viewers as possible and people using the site wanting to censor half the country. We want to ensure that we have a competitive dynamic where facebook is trying one thing and twitter is trying another and people will migrate to the market needs to function and figure out this Fact Checking software or this label is the preferred solution that we have here for content that runs along that line for some people and the really dangerous thing that we are staring down right now is the prospect of having a uniform that standard handed down by government and then there will be no experimentation and people wont be able to say this works better or this doesnt. You have to set rule of government in whatever agency or congress and whether you like it or not you wont have to deal with that and you wont have to deal with another site work within their Committee Standards that you may find to be better. Host lets listen to more of the president from july 11. Today im directing my and administration to [inaudible] legislative solutions to protect free speech and the free speech rights of all americans that is you people in this room a lot of people out there and a lot of people we hope to see transparency, more accountability and more freedom. That is on both sides. Host patrick, you heard the president. Guest i hurt think his heart is in the right place but as soon as government gets involved in talking about protecting speech by interfering with the actions of other private individuals that is when we have to start to have a First Amendment problem and again the First Amendment is exclusively a restriction on government and is not navigation on private citizens to provide a platform for all speech the matter what. I get concerned when i start hearing about inserting government as a referee for speech and i think conservatives should take a step back and be careful what they wish for here because it was not five years ago that conservatives were complaining about bureaucrats at the irs using legal lawenforcement in tax enforcement laws to try and silence conservative speech. To inject government as the answer and tried to protect speech online really goes against everything that history tells us and goes against this idea i wish more Tech Companies would say that its okay to be biased and may not try to be biased but everybody has a bias. Government agencies and the people that run those have biases and i have a bias and everyone has a bias. To think that there is some perfectly neutral arbiter out there that can please content online. In government or in one company is a fallacy. Host conservatives have overcome challenges like this in the past and look at the National News media for instance. Or a government regulate like that. What did conservatives do . He went out and invested in talk radio and came to dominate talk radio. What happened when the internet came around . You had maybe a handful of conservatives sites like a human event or National Review that existed before conservative media organizations had flourished but you can look at College Campuses and conservatives frustrated with the leftward tilt of academia and what do they do, they created their own colleges. Hillsdale, grove city, Patrick Henry so there are examples in other bases were conservatives successfully overcome these complaints. What troubles me is you almost half the tech company both in agreement here and some of the government in agreement that there should be regulation. You have seen Mark Zuckerberg come out and say she wants me regulate it and that gives me concern, not only is someone believes in the market but as a user of the platform. Host why does that give you concern connect. Guest be seen in other industries that the dominant player will stifle competition and lock in them as the primary entity and probably have a big influence in terms of writing what the rules are and the competition and experience asian were no longer happen and have a Government Agency comment and write the rules there is no doubt the conservatives may feel confident right now because you have a president in the white house who tends to agree with them but i guarantee soon as the president leaves the white house you might have someone from a Different Political Party that tide will turn. Guest i like to remind folks that there was an article going around a little bit in the wake of all these calls trying to break up these companies regulate these companies and an article from the guardian in 2007 and it was something to the effect of what we do because of the myspace monopoly. We look back on that and think how silly it was that. As long as we keep government relation to what rob was saying out of the way and do not allow it to stifle the dynamism we do see Silicon Valley we would be looking back ten years from now and how silly it seems to say we need to break up the current big Tech Companies because who known this industry may have already been founded in a dorm room somewhere but we will never know until it happens and we will never, never know if we institute a regular tory structure that that startup can never hope to get through because they dont have the resources that facebook and google have. Host november 19, 2018 rush limbaugh. Quote, they should be busted up. They are monopolies controlling the flow of information in this has become untenable and social media construct of today, this left loves to throw around the word fairness and obsessed by it but there isnt any fairness and there isnt anything approaching fairness in the social media universe and busting them up as monopolies is not facilitate conservatism but is to help American Consumers by providing competition and so forth which these companies are all shutting out by buying them off. Guest to address that point my favorite oxymoron is the term monopolies. If its plural you dont have a problem because you actually in the space though they offer slightly Different Services and certainly facebooks website looks different than the google homepage but they are vicious competitors facebook, apple, google, amazon all compete in many areas where you would not think they do compete. Have to remember these are social Media Companies. Facebook is not a social Media Company. Per se but an advertising comedy. Google is a Search Engine but it advertising company. That means they are competing with every last advertiser out there down to a billboard owner on a rural highway summer they are competing for eisen and dollars. You have amazon and apple competing in hardware sales and apple, google, facebook and others competing and how they treat your data and who you will message your friends and family through. Life in a facebook message or a gmail or will i send in my message on my iphone and these are all competing alternatives. To bring in antitrust action one ignores the fact that you have vibrant competition and two, where are the actual consumer harm. All we are seeing is if not falling prices, in the case of some hardware out there, you see completely Free Services that are offered in exchange for targeted advertising and then you also have companies that are looking at americans concerns over privacy and responding to that in providing alternative. Apple is championing itself as a privacy based tech company where your data is not going to be used to target advertising at you. We have a fledgling market and were talking in a very short timeframe again 2007, myspace was the dominant player. Nowhere to be found at this point. Guest to that point, if you talk to young people younger than us theyre probably talking about different platforms then the big three we focus mostly on today snapchat and ticktock are on the rise and who are they on the rise with . The next generation. 510 years now we could talk about a different landscape facebook i dont know if it will disappear to the weight myspace has disappeared from the conversation but there always will be other competitors trying to go after those audiences in young people view facebook as something that their parents or grandparents use and i think thats why there is all the competition going on in the market place right now and thats what you dont need the government to step in. Host charlie kirk of turning point suggest that section 230 protection should be removed from these companies if they dont quit suppressing speech. Guest thats a big focus on capitol hill. They spent legislation and using some republican senators come out in favor of doing that and one of the options we should have a robust debate about the look forward to having that type of debate. There is no question that this will be an issue that in some ways unites the right and left. You have those conservatives and liberals who see some ability to Work Together on this issue and hopefully those who believe in the market and competition can push past that effectively. Guest i will start that debate. Unfortunately, charlie, is dead wrong on this issue. Section 230 this great book came out professor at the United StatesNaval Academy that wrote 26 were secreted the internet. Basically the internet we know today for all the immediately very Fast Services and Services Following in price if not Free Services that we have we not exist without section 230. Section 230 was just a preemptive codification of the direction the lot of courts were going. We saw, not going in this direction and that section 230 essentially says is you cant hold these huge platforms accountable for what individuals are doing on the platform because they dont prescreen everything getting posted and if you were to assign liability to online form for what thirdparty upload you would shut down, not just facebook and google overnight, but you would shut down amazon and at the end ebay and platform where americans are crating Small Businesses and able to reach their consumers directly without having to go through a middleman. Section 230 is a broadbased protection and its not special treatment. It is again codification of a privilege we afford to a lot of industries and i hate when we talk about tech we think theyre just completely Different Industries that should not be subject to the same standards we apply to other Companies Like manufacturers. If someone negligently uses an automobile should not be able to sue for it. We should be able to go after the person that negligently using that technology but if you hold ford liable for all the misuse of their products you will stop providing those products. Host gentlemen, thank you for participating in this round table on the communicators. Patrick hedger is with Competitive Enterprise Institute, robert with the Heritage Foundation. All communicators are available as podcasts as well. In 1979 a Small Network with an unusual idea rolled out a big idea. But viewers make up their own minds. He spent open the doors to washington policymaking for all to see bring any unfiltered concerts from congress and beyond. A lot has changed but today that big idea is more relevant than ever. In television and online cspan is your unfiltered view of government so you can ache up your own mind. Brought to you as a public or service provider. Cspans washington journal live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. Coming up tuesday morning. Starting now, booktv on cspan2. Up next, George Packer talks about his biography about the life and career of american diplomat richard holbrook. Later a look at the life of George Washingtons mother mary with marthas sextons book the way to washington. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the council on Foreign Relations it is a pleasure to have George Packer here for the somewhat awaited