Keith Rabois argues that state propaganda predates social media and that Facebook, Google, and Twitter are just publishing tools. He says the government, not private platforms, bears primary responsibility for protecting elections, and that tech firms should follow official policy guidance when it changes. Rabois also notes that engineers' ideological views can influence internal decisions and product outcomes.
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These platforms are being misused by state actors to spread misinformation. This is concerning. You know, are you concerned about this? I know in the past you said the United States does the same thing in other countries. And yet we've got an election, a midterm election that is now weeks away.
So I think spread Writing propaganda is something state actors have done for centuries. It's like the definition of what a state and what clandestine agencies do. Social platform is like, in my view, it's like publishing a book. So once the printing press was unlocked in the world, people could publish pamphlets. The United States Revolution was driven by pamphlets, mostly anonymous pamphlets, actually. Federalist paper, and then the Federalist Papers, in terms of changing the constitutional structure. So this has all been a historical common thing and actually quite important. The United States used to drop leaflets in World War II. into occupied Nazi territory. We had radio free Europe broadcasting intentionally into the Soviet Union and attempting to subvert the communist regime. So this is something that State Actors do. So I just find it shocking and hypocritical to say that social media is some new thing.
That said, I'm sure you don't want them to be doing this as an American citizen. Well, I think what's wrong with these companies do.
I think the companies I think it's a lot to ask these companies to do more than the government does, meaning like, for example, the United States government under the Obama administration officially designated Russia as a friend, not a foe. So asking Google or Facebook or Twitter to conclude that Putin and Russia were a foe, when the president of the United States is calling him his friend, makes no sense whatsoever to hold Google, Facebook and Twitter to a higher standard than the US government. Now, at some point, the US government's position on Russia has changed and did change based upon facts. And I think asking tech companies to apply the government's perspective is a reasonable thing to do. So it's very obvious that Russia has interests that are different than the United States. Mitt Romney ran for president saying this, and Obama made fun of him. So I think that now that everybody knows because the facts are in the public domain, the companies should do their best to implement policies and tactics that are designed to limit the influence of foreigners in American elections. That said, the United States government bears the primary responsibility of protecting the American people, not Google, not Facebook, not Twitter.
Changing gears, I want to talk about Trump, who's been railing on social media, railing on Google. I know you have some controversial thoughts on this.
Do you think Trump has a point? Yeah, I mean, without a doubt, if the government ever sued an agency, attorney general, government if an agency ever sued one of these tech companies and was entitled to discovery, they would find very interesting emails, threads, internal discussions that would look terrible in the public domain. There are monocultures in these companies. The New York Times did write an exposé about Facebook and how some of the best engineers at Facebook are revolting.
So you read that one.
I read the headline. So they showed some diversity in their publication of it. But fundamentally, these companies have very strong ideological views about the world. and they are enforcing those views on their employees, as is played out in some public domain, but a lot of it is in the private. That has clearly had some consequences. Would you go so far as to.
Say Google search results, their news search results are biased?
I don't know. I'd like to see the evidence. I think there may be- I know there is not. I know there- well, I definitely know for a fact that their search results.
