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We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
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Thank you.
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is off the hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined tonight by Kyle.
Yes.
Rob T. Firefly out in Skype land.
Good evening.
Gila.
Good evening.
And Alex.
Indeed.
Good evening.
And Alex, once again, you got to raise your levels every week.
We can't spend any more time on this.
Please just raise your levels every week.
We get a new microphone.
I don't know.
Go somewhere else.
But we can't be spending all these hours, literally, getting your levels up.
Okay.
So I think we're all in different places today.
Gila, you're somewhere else, aren't you?
I am.
I'm actually still in my office.
So not home yet.
Usually you're in the same room as Rob.
So I guess we're taxing the system by having three different locations.
But anyway, enough of this, because we have some important things to talk about tonight.
A lot of stories, a lot of listener mail.
I'd love to get to it.
But unfortunately, there's so much news that one particular story, or actually, it's a story that takes several different forms.
We really need to focus some time on that.
And Alex, I really hope you get your microphone fixed, because I want to hear your thoughts and feelings on this.
Because there are legal matters.
There are international matters.
There's all kinds of technological issues here.
I'm talking, of course, about Twitter, and the latest controversy taking place as we see that once mighty platform begin to unravel, or continue to unravel, actually.
Latest being the battle, what seems to be a personal battle, between Elon Musk and the country of Brazil.
Yeah, currently, the platform Twitter, which some people know as X, I will continue to call it Twitter.
Because, have you ever tried looking for X online?
I mean, you can't search for a single letter.
And if you speak about X, you can be speaking about all kinds of things.
You don't own the letter X.
Sorry, Elon.
Twitter it is.
So, it was one of the world's most popular social networks.
And it is currently offline in Brazil, which has, believe it or not, and I believe it, the fifth largest digital population.
I'm not sure he knew this, but yeah.
A whole lot of people from Brazil are online.
And, boy, a lot of them were on Twitter, at least in the past.
So, Elon Musk has refused to comply with their local laws.
Yeah, because he knows better.
He's a billionaire.
He knows better.
He sends things to space.
By the way, there are people being sent to space by Elon Musk on, I think, Friday.
You know, it's probably too late to get you out of the craft or whatever, but please, just think it over.
Just think it through carefully and logically.
You know, look at this guy and tell me that you trust him to send you up there.
To do something that's never been done before, by the way, and to do a spacewalk, I don't know.
I just, I'm having nightmares about this.
So, you know, if you're involved, please, intervention something.
Anyway, continuing.
So, millions of Brazilian Twitter users found themselves unable to access the network Saturday morning as internet providers and mobile phone companies began to enforce the ban.
Large numbers of Brazilian shelter on a rival network known as Blue Sky, which many of us are already on.
It looks a lot like what Twitter used to look like, too, by the way.
They gained millions, millions of new users in the past few days.
And they are becoming very fluent in Portuguese as well.
So, the banning of Twitter, which, again, has more than 22 million users in Brazil, is the climax of a politically charged, months-long arm wrestle between the country's top court and the right-wing tech billionaire.
And he has gone full-on right-wing, fascist, Trump, MAGA, I don't know how many possible adjectives I can use here, but what was basically flirting with, well, you know, why can't we just allow free speech?
And, you know, why are we fighting free speech to complete buying into the ultra-right-wing, not only in this country, but throughout the world?
It's been scary to see that transformation.
Not the first time I've seen it, but it's scary when it's something that is so familiar to you.
You mean, like, championing that particular side, not just, like, the overall idea of ideas?
Yeah, when you buy into one political ideology.
I haven't been paying attention to what's being said there.
Everybody values free speech.
Everybody wants to be able to say what is on their mind.
But when somebody continuously just sides with the right-wing and the ultra-rich and, you know, various corporations and things like that, and doesn't really pay attention to those people who are truly marginalized, you have to worry.
You have to say to yourself, this isn't really about free speech, is it?
So, that is basically what Elon Musk has been trying to frame this whole kerfuffle as being about free speech.
But actually, Alexander de Mores, and I'm sorry, Your Honor, if I'm mispronouncing your name, I probably am, but I'm going to continue to say it that way because I don't know any better.
Alexander de Mores is the influential Supreme Court judge that is responsible for the ban.
He has been spearheading an attempt to force Twitter to purge anti-democratic, far-right voices in the wake of, and you might not remember this, the January 2023 uprising in the capital of Brasilia, carried out by supporters of the former far-right president.
Have you pronounced J-A-I-R?
Somebody must know.
I don't want to make a fool of myself.
I already have.
Hi-year, I believe.
Hi-year?
Okay.
I can say Bolsonaro, and I'm not going to say his first name again.
I'll just say Bolsonaro from now on.
The former far-right president.
And I know what you're saying.
Wait a minute.
You're confused.
You're talking about former right-wing President Trump and people storming the capital in January of 2021.
No, I'm not.
I'm talking about the sequel that happened in 2023 in Brazil where almost the exact same thing happened.
And Elon Musk has been a good friend of Bolsonaro and a lot of right-wing dictators.
And it's super disturbing to see.
Now, he has not only aligned himself with Bolsonaro and Trump, but figures all over, all kinds of wretched people.
He has pushed back against the Supreme Court judge, accusing him of squelching free speech, trying to censor conservative views.
His public attacks on Morris, which are infantile and vulgar in many instances, were reminiscent of his repeated online digs at the British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, during the recent far-right U.K. riots.
Yeah, now we're in the U.K.
If you recall a few weeks ago, there were riots throughout the country, throughout England, because of this disinformation that was being passed around, saying that migrants were murdering little girls.
And that brought people out in droves with all kinds of repressed hatred and anger.
And the country devolved quickly.
It was disgusting.
You saw cars being stopped, people being asked, are you white?
I'm not making this up.
This happened.
And it happened because of Elon Musk's Twitter and his refusal to do anything about it.
And what they're doing in Brazil right now is saying, we're not going to have that.
We're not going to have a repeat of what happened in January 2023.
We're going to push back.
We're going to insist that you not allow this kind of hate speech, this kind of disinformation, this kind of incitement of violence and racial hatred.
You have to take some responsibility.
Elon Musk is refusing to do that.
And that is how this whole fight has transpired.
Now, the final straw before Twitter's blocking in Brazil came last Thursday, when Musk ignored a 24-hour deadline to name, a simple thing, name a legal representative after they closed their local office in mid-August.
You know, a simple thing.
Name your legal representative after you closed your office.
In a ruling on Friday, ordering the ban, Moras accused Twitter of treating the social network like a no-man's land, a veritable land without law, by allowing the massive propagation of misinformation, hate speech, and anti-democratic attacks.
Hours later, shortly after midnight, Brazilian users began noticing that they were no longer able to connect to Twitter.
Now, Musk ramped up his attacks on Moras, calling the judge Voldemort and tweeting a meme of a dog dangling its scrotum in the face of another animal.
Yeah, this is real high-level discourse here.
He is a dictator and a fraud, not a justice, Musk wrote, although Brazilian users could no longer read his words without using a virtual private network.
And, of course, you may have noticed this, prominent right-wing voices immediately rallied to his side, including many in this country, underlying the growing affinity between not only the Brazilian far-right, but the American far-right and the far-right all around the world, and the world's richest person.
Nicholas Ferreira, a prominent right-wing congressman in Brazil, said,
I'm going to radicalize, even if I do it on my own.
You are a freedom fighter, Musk replied to him.
Real love fest going on here.
Progressive Brazilians scoffed at Elon Musk's claim to be defending free speech, with many celebrating the Supreme Court's decision to show him that he was not above the law.
Left-wing congresswoman Erica Hilton wrote,
If billionaires want to have companies that make billions in these parts, they need to learn to respect the laws.
Long live the rule of law and national sovereignty.
And, again, a lot of people have moved over to Blue Sky.
They've gained 2 million new users over the last week.
And that seems to be pretty much the trend that's going on.
The other thing that has been reported is that Brazilians don't really care that much about Twitter.
When the justice ordered the suspension, many people just weren't bothered at all.
They say they prefer Instagram anyway.
Shirley Sampio said if they took Instagram away or WhatsApp, that would hurt.
But people don't use Twitter.
Yeah, the nation of 215 million was an early and enthusiastic adopter of Twitter, once commanding its largest international market.
More than 40 million Brazilians, nearly one-fifth of the population, routinely took to the network to engage in heated discussions on politics or gossip over the latest episode of Big Brother Brazil.
Big Brother Brazil, I guess is the name of the show.
It was credited with mobilizing massive and wide-ranging protests in 2013 and then helping to propel former President Bolsonaro's rise to power.
So, yeah, it can be used for good and for bad.
Now, since then, Twitter's cloud in Brazil has shrunk considerably.
At last count, the social media network had an estimated 22 million Brazilian users.
That's about half of what it used to have.
And that's before the shutdown.
Surveys showed Brazilians were far more likely to use WhatsApp or Instagram, even the Chinese video-sharing app Kwai, than they would Twitter.
In 2022, only 3% of Brazilians cited the social network as their preferred location to consume political news, the area in which Twitter was once strongest, according to a survey by the Institute for Democracy and Democratization of Communication.
Now, under the leadership of tech billionaire Elon Musk, the losses have deepened.
He bought the platform in 2022, reinstated banned users, changed content moderation standards, and rechristened it as X, a global public square.
He says, for all people and views.
But not really.
I mean, you know, to use myself as an example, there's this little icon whenever you post something on Twitter that says how many people have read your tweet.
And when I would post something, you know, I have, I think, around 10,000 followers.
That number would go shooting up past at least 500 into over 1,000 in most cases.
Recently, recent days, when I post things, many of which are critical of Elon Musk, doesn't even hit 100.
Not even 100.
I know a lot of people have left, but there are still people there.
There are still people there, and those numbers make no sense.
So, yeah, doesn't really support all views.
Now, last week's controversy has made it even more apparent that the network is growing weaker and weaker in Brazil.
So, as I mentioned, the judge requested that Musk name a representative.
Musk refused.
According to this article from The Washington Post, Brazilians shrugged.
Yeah, some accused Marais of judicial overreach.
Some said their freedom of expression was being infringed.
But most have gone about their lives.
They no longer use Twitter that much anyway.
The suspension has further weakened its capacity to compete with other social media companies.
In the days since it was removed from the Brazilian Internet, more than 1 million Brazilians shifted to Blue Sky, created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.
That's a little subtext to that.
Others have flocked to Threads, which is a social media company run by Meta, who owns Facebook.
And, by the way, a couple of days ago, Monday, a Supreme Court subcommittee affirmed the ruling unanimously.
Yeah, the truth is, this is Justice Flavio Dino, the truth is that public digital governance is essential in a domain where power is monopolized and concentrated in the hands of few businesses.
The rules can be written by private autocrats who can dodge their responsibilities without caring about the system's risks or negative outcomes that their businesses cause.
Now, the Internet provider Starlink, which is another business owned by Elon Musk, you may have heard of them launching thousands of satellites into the sky.
They're active in Brazil, and they said they were going to refuse the order, too.
They were going to refuse and continue to allow people who use Starlink to access Twitter.
Yeah, well, they cut off their bank accounts.
They made it so that Starlink could not operate in the country, at least not without losing a ton of money.
And I believe they are now complying.
I believe they are now blocking access to Twitter on Starlink.
It is a mess.
It is something like I've never seen before.
But I think it illustrates just what happens when when billionaires come up against countries, you know.
And what's what's interesting also is that Elon Musk in the past has complied with very, very similar rulings from right wing regimes.
Now, you might notice that Brazil has has gone more left wing than Bolsonaro, not too hard to do if you get rid of Bolsonaro.
And that has really rubbed the right wing in this country and around the world the wrong way.
And that's why you're seeing all this feigned outrage at these restrictions.
Why aren't you allowing free speech?
Because, you know, you're a leftist regime and you're you're you're you're cutting off our right to say anti-immigrant things and to spread lies and to spread hatred.
Why won't you let us do that?
Oh, right wing dictators, you want us to shut up?
Yeah, we'll do that.
No problem.
We're just going to focus on the left wing.
OK, I've said enough.
Who wants to tackle this first?
So Gila, you first.
So I I found something very interesting when I was getting ready for the show, and I apologize for not having sent this to everyone.
But apparently there is one segment of Brazilian population that was still very actively on Twitter, which I'm going to continue calling Twitter.
Thank you.
Absolutely.
And apparently a lot of fandom accounts were run out of Brazil.
I read something from the AP, like from six hours ago, that apparently the Brazilian Twitter ban has cut global fandom social media off at the knees.
What is fandom?
So as an example, people who run accounts talking about outfits at the Met Gala, who have thousands, nay, millions of followers on Twitter talking about outfits at the Met Gala.
Did you just use nay in a sentence?
I did.
Wow.
OK, props.
Thank you.
I'm glad that English degree is paying off.
So sometimes two 18-year-old girls, they're kids in college, they started this account about the Met Gala, and they just share celebrity news all the time.
There's some young woman who started an account about an actor who's in a movie called Red, White and Royal Blue, and she thinks he's hot.
And now she has a fandom account about him and just talks about him all the time.
And she's like, OK, this has been great.
But if they don't reverse the Twitter ban, I guess it's going to be done.
Apparently, a huge number of celebrity-focused Twitter accounts have come out of Brazil.
And that whole universe is in a really unpleasant kind of environment right now because Twitter ban, and there's not another place for people to go because they can't put videos up on Blue Sky in the same way.
They can't share stuff on Instagram because it's going to get copyright claimed.
Apparently, for these folks, it's Twitter or bust.
And I guess right now it's bust.
Well, temporarily, you know, things can be developed just because Twitter does something one way doesn't mean nobody else can ever do it that way as well.
So, you know, I feel for them, but these are bigger issues, and they need to be dealt with.
And I'm sure there will be a time when they'll be able to regain all their followers and post videos to their heart's content.
But right now, this is the issue that really needs to be addressed.
And Alex, go ahead.
Yes, hi.
And hopefully, my levels are a bit better.
You sound great now.
Do that next time.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
So, what I had to do was actually connect my iPhone.
Nobody cares.
Microphone.
I know.
Yeah.
In any event, I mean, it's hard to even figure out where to start given the massive amount of information that you had, I guess, vomited at us there, Emmanuel.
Wow.
Okay, that's quite a – does that foreshadow?
Do you have a disagreement with the things I might be saying?
No, I generally agree with most of the things you've been saying, shockingly to say.
But, I mean, why don't we just start a very, very basic principle of the law here when we're thinking about this?
I think it's always good to go back to basics and just think about things from first principles.
And one of those principles is that if you're a company or if you're a person or some kind of legal entity, you are going to be subject to the national laws of the country within which you operate.
That's just really, really basic.
I mean, I don't understand how somehow we have gotten to the point where it's okay for billionaires to think that they are just completely above the law that they need to – or rather they have the right to just completely ignore national laws of countries within which they operate.
Are you new to this country, though?
Because that has been pretty much practice forever, billionaires getting away with things.
Getting away with things, but that's totally different than just ignoring legal process.
Well, it's a development – sorry, my mic's a little spicy.
No more of that.
It's the development of a certain attitude and the idea of too big to care about flouting regulation and the sort of effective altruism and the sorts of we know better types of ideas because we have more or just have the ability
and don't need to really consult with what society thinks of your idea.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I also think that Twitter had the opportunity here to comply with the law.
The judge gave them the opportunity to comply with the law.
They chose not to comply with the law.
They didn't have a lot of time.
So I do see how on the one hand this can be considered to be a victory for national sovereignty in the face of the burgeoning powers of billionaires and social media platforms.
But yet on the other hand, and I don't think that we've addressed this yet, the judge's order also goes, I think, in my opinion, way too far in penalizing users or potentially penalizing users.
I completely agree with that because I think they were going to fine them something like $9,000 a day, which is annual salary or something, ridiculous amounts like that.
I think they backed off from that a bit, but that was stupid.
That's how you get people against you.
It could be misinterpreted in a broad way.
Yeah, of course they jumped on that.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think it was around $8,000 for anybody who used a VPN to access Twitter in violation of the ban within Brazil, which is totally insane.
I mean, to think, how are they going to get that information anyway?
They'd have to get the information, I guess, from ISPs about anybody who connected to a particular VPN.
The VPNs aren't going to comply or don't have logs with that.
And then the only other place that would actually have the information that would allow them to enforce that local law would actually be, ironically, Twitter or X, whatever the hell we want to call it.
But here's the main point, though, because I think on the other hand of this or the other side of the argument, we have these free speech absolutists who are continuing to say, look, this is a matter of free speech.
Elon Musk is claiming this is all about free speech.
But I think we really have to question the motivations here.
And I think you were hinting at this, Emmanuel.
I mean, is he a proponent of free speech or is he simply protecting a business model that's predicated on platform engagement?
Is this a case of duty and self-interest happily coinciding for once or are there larger economic interests at stake for Elon Musk here?
And I think it's very much the latter here.
I think it benefits him tremendously economically.
If he can turn around Twitter, this $44 billion megaphone that he has purchased and the way in which he does that is to promote some kind of free speech absolutism, which, you know, if you're going to to promote engagement on your platform, you want it to be as divisive as possible.
You want it to be as disgusting as possible.
You want people to operate in as tribal a manner as possible.
So I really question the free speech or rather the absolutist love of free speech at heart.
Well, he is certainly succeeding at making it as disgusting as possible.
So if that was his goal, hats off.
He did a fine job with that.
But also, you know, you say $44 billion.
That's what he paid for it.
It's not worth that anymore.
It's not worth anything near that anymore.
So it has plummeted like a rock.
And that must also be something that's motivational.
Rob, go ahead.
First of all, talking of disinformation, I misspoke earlier when I said that Bolsonaro's first name was Jair.
It's actually pronounced Jair.
Made a fool of me.
So I mispronounced it.
Wow.
Okay.
Made a fool of us all.
And I'll keep doing that.
But what I find fascinating about this is, yes, the alignment of the government's move with a left-leaning government, but also with the issue of free speech.
But, and I am really, I find myself personally really conflicted about this because I do, you know, find myself on the side of free speech.
And, you know, yeah, everyone should be able to say whatever they want, even if it makes them look like an idiot.
But I can see their point, and I can see the progression of this, which can be traced back to Musk refusing to appoint a legal representative for X in Brazil.
So, yeah, he was given rules to follow.
He refused to follow those rules, and he found himself no longer to wag his ego machine around in that particular country.
And there is also part of me that feels really good about him suffering some sort of consequence for running the hellhole the way he runs it.
And so, yeah, I am really interested in how this is all going to shake out.
As far as fandom culture and everything else and people and businesses who depended on the reach of Twitter, I mean, the reach of Twitter has been, you know, swirling down the toilet for quite a while now.
And this is just a bigger than usual bubble in that.
And social media as a whole has always, in the past, historically, had the ability to find the next place to be.
And I think it's long past time that, you know, people who depend on Twitter found the next place to be.
Go ahead, Alex.
Go ahead, Alex.
So, yeah, I had to unmute there.
The other aspect of this, too, is that – and something I think you were dancing around as well, Emmanuel, which is that Elon Musk, as the world's richest person, seems to have his hand in so many geopolitical conflicts and issues at the moment that it's absolutely frightening.
I think terrifying to think of the reach of this one particular man who also is seemingly quite unhinged when you look at his tweets.
I mean, you mentioned a canine scrotum being used to represent the Supreme Court.
I mean, it's absolutely insane.
So, I mean, you think about this, even in places like China, right?
So, he has influence in China because of the Tesla factories there.
And he did that, and he put those Tesla factories in China against the recommendations of the United States.
So, he really angered the United States by putting these Tesla factories there, this really high-level technology when it comes to electric vehicles.
And the United States is competing globally for, I guess, hegemony when it comes to electric vehicles, and China is actually winning.
People actually also believe that China may have stolen some of the technology from Tesla.
Look at the conflict in Russia and Ukraine and the role that Starlink has played in providing access to the Ukrainian military in the face of Russia, Russia's initial massive bombing of Kiev.
And then removing access from the Ukrainian troops when they planned an attack on Crimea.
That's really, really interesting, too, because that's Musk injecting his own version of what he believes should and should not happen in wartime, in a battlefield.
And utilizing technology to hamstring one opponent against another.
You mentioned, as well, in the United Kingdom, you see Elon Musk castigating repeatedly Keir Starmer, the new prime minister, and instigating, I guess maybe not himself, but through his platform, the propagation of disinformation and misinformation that sparked a lot of the riots in the United Kingdom.
You even see Musk having influenced in the Israel-Gazza conflict because there was actually issues with respect to Starlink once again.
And he had intended to provide Gaza-based organizations with Internet access, angering this time Israel, of course, and then determined, I believe, that they would only do that in certain areas with Israel's approval.
And then you have them being banned in Brazil right now, the largest country in South America.
And at the same time, simultaneously, providing plans to go pick up astronauts that are stranded over at the International Space Station for the United States.
So, I mean, this guy has his hand in the world's politics.
He's seemingly unhinged.
And it's terrifying to me that he may, in fact, have more power and more reach than most national governments, including the United States.
This is something I think we really need to think about.
Well, fortunately, there's nothing impending in this country that could be considered controversial or that might pit people against each other.
That he might have undue influence in.
So, count our blessings for that.
But to get to England for a second, yes, very much in the front lines there.
He has actually shown public support for the racist backlash that was based on fake tweets.
People posting things that were not true, that were designed to get people outraged.
What you were saying before about how that is the model for the platform, to get people upset, to get people engaged.
Well, they got engaged, all right.
They got engaged right out there in the street when they were burning police cars and terrorizing people that weren't white.
That is what he was backing up.
And then he said that civil war is inevitable in England and feigned disbelief that people would be upset by that.
You know, it's one thing to have a spirited debate.
You know, we do that many times here on the radio station.
But to intentionally put out fake information that is designed to get a particular reaction, in many cases a violent reaction, and, you know, shrug your shoulders and say, oh, it's just free speech.
You know, there is responsibility.
You know, and there are consequences for the things that you do and say.
And if you call in a bomb threat or tell people something's on fire when it's not, that's not free speech.
You know, it's very, very different.
And we have to be super naive to think that all this can be allowed without consequence.
Well, people are paying the price for it right now.
And we don't hear about it until Elon Musk finally has to pay the price for it.
Kyle?
Well, I think that that example right there in England in particular, if that information that it was precipitated upon was indeed fake, like it just goes to show that's why he's that.
That's what he is there for is the racist backlash and that sort of overall, I think, explains it.
And I think the way he's running it is sort of like, you know, what else can it do?
Because that engagement stuff is just to basically, you know, feign an attempt to break even and maybe like this pipe dream of making any of that money back.
But for it to generate revenue, yeah, that's how it works.
But what else it can do for him is to leverage it in this way, especially in things that may advantage or otherwise benefit some of those horizontal entanglements in his industrial extant.
So all of it sort of explains this paranoia about where his plane is and stuff, though, which I think is hilarious because he thinks he's untouchable.
Yeah.
The situation in England was particularly disgusting, but, you know, it spread to so many people.
There was this woman named Lucy Connolly.
She is the wife of a counselor, the West Northamptonshire Council.
And she basically posted on Twitter that hotels, housing, asylum seekers need to be set on fire as well as mass deportations.
Yes. Yeah.
And she said, if that makes me racist, so be it.
It makes you more than racist.
Lucy, it makes you a hell of a lot more than just racist.
Makes you a danger to society.
And she is being sentenced for that next month.
They move quickly in England.
I'll say that.
You know, it's a different system.
You know, I'm not sure it would work over here.
But there are consequences, just like for January 6th, there are consequences for certain actions.
You can't just simply say, I was just exercising my freedom of speech when it goes well beyond that.
You know, and it's just one example of so many of the horrible things that happened as a result of the disinformation being spread around.
Now, I say disinformation, disinformation, I believe, is the deliberate spreading of false information.
It doesn't have to be from a government.
It can be from a company.
It can even be from people.
But if it's an organized conspiracy to spread falsehoods with a particular goal in mind, I don't think that's a mistake.
And that's what I consider misinformation to be.
That's simply spreading information because you're ignorant and you believe something that's not true.
I could be wrong.
And, Alex, I'm sure you'll tell me if I am.
Yeah, that's right.
And there's the difference between dis and miss.
I mean, you think miss is, you know, it's easy to remember misinformation as being accidental.
It's a mistake.
So miss, the trick is in the name and disinformation has to do with the intentionality behind the information itself.
But speaking of disinformation, just a few hours ago, there was an article posted on the Financial Times about the FBI and the U.S. government seizing 32 domain names that belong to a Russian disinformation campaign
that had intended to promote some form of election interference and disinformation with respect to Ukraine and the Russia conflict and various other things.
It's unclear exactly what domains they were.
But one of them that was referenced in the article itself was WashingtonPost.pm.
And I looked up the WHOIS data on that just before the show.
And interestingly enough, that domain in the .pm, which is obviously the country code top-level domain.
Okay, wait.
What country is .pm?
Who can get this?
I don't remember.
Somebody can look that up.
No looking it up.
We have to know.
We have to figure this out ourselves.
It's not Peru.
Micronesia something.
I don't know.
There's no P in Micronesia.
I don't know.
But, you know, maybe it's some kind of – who knows?
But anyway, the point is, while Rob is looking this up dutifully, I see him at work over there.
You're cheating, Rob.
Absolutely.
You're cheating yourself.
Yeah.
But the point is, the domain was actually registered in November.
I believe it was November 10th of 2023.
And so, you know, nearly a year ago.
And so, they're just kind of picking these things up now.
They're just being activated.
It seems like Gila has the answer to the CCTLD quiz we have here.
St. Pierre and Michelin.
You're kidding.
I've been there twice.
Wow.
Those are the islands off the coast of Canada, off Newfoundland, that are actually part of France.
Yeah, you can drive to the EU from here.
Wow.
I should have known that.
I feel ashamed.
Yeah, that's pretty cool.
That is pretty neat, though.
So, yeah, WashingtonPost.pn and apparently 31 other domains.
It would be interesting to see what they are.
But, obviously, this reflects the fact that the U.S. government is still very concerned with Russia.
And Russia is still active with respect to the dissemination of disinformation.
Well, okay, I saw the postscript to the Elon Musk Twitter story before we move on to other related stories because we're running out of time.
But, apparently, his relationship with San Francisco is also nearly over.
And city officials are far from heartbroken about that.
Yeah, Elon Musk is shuttering his social media company's headquarters in a gritty downtown neighborhood in the coming weeks.
And will move its last employees, based there, to offices in Palo Alto and San Jose.
And new headquarters will be set up in Texas.
Makes a lot of sense when you think about it.
City officials, though, are not lamenting the exit.
Twitter bears little resemblance to the company that San Francisco wooed with a tax break more than a decade ago
to help anchor a budding tech hub in a downtrodden neighborhood near City Hall known as Mid-Market.
Now it's turned into a horrible virus that's grown out of control and needs to be quelled.
That's my quote.
So, basically, Twitter once symbolized San Francisco's status as a startup capital,
but the city's nonchalant response to the move amid public posts from Mr. Musk about San Francisco's inflexible tax policies and liberal politics
shows officials are now less willing to cater to companies considering a move.
Yeah, so good riddance to bad rubbish, I guess, is the message there.
Okay, we have to talk about this quickly as well.
The head of Telegram arrested in France as he flew in.
Its CEO, Pavel Durov, again, apologies if I'm mispronouncing,
arrested in Paris over the weekend, actually a couple of weekends ago,
over allegations that his platform is being used for illicit activity,
including drug trafficking and the distribution of child sexual abuse images.
He was born in Russia, spent most of his childhood in Italy, as a citizen of France.
And, yeah, this is interesting because, again, it speaks to responsibility when you run a platform.
And Telegram has long been known as a bastion for far-right-wing gatherings and organizing
and not much accountability.
You can pretty much do whatever you want.
I don't know, thoughts on the arrest here?
First of all, I should point out that the far-right in this country immediately jumped to his defense.
Now, you know, that just seems a little strange.
Why is the far-right immediately jumping to this, you know, Russian-slash-French guy
who runs this social media site that caters to neo-Nazis and child molesters and others?
They're legitimate people as well, of course.
That's where they get their favorite material.
Well, it just seems a little, you know, they were on it within minutes.
So, I don't know.
It just seemed a little strange.
Any thoughts from Skypland?
Go ahead, Al.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, this interestingly happened.
I think Pavel Durov was picked up in France.
He arrived the day that I left.
Remember, I was there two weeks ago.
But I've been tracking this and following it, and it's really fascinating because, again,
we have a nearly identical situation where you have a very large platform that's become very popular.
Even though Telegram itself hasn't been making Pavel Durov billions, he is a billionaire.
That comes from the sale of Vicontakte, which was essentially the Russian version of Facebook before he was forced to relinquish it several years ago.
But you have a very similar situation where apparently France had been asking Telegram over and over and over again to comply with certain investigative orders that it was issuing to investigate things like CSAM, child sexual abuse materials.
And remember, back in 2015, when there was that massive and horrific attack within Paris itself, apparently many of the terrorists that had perpetrated that attack in Paris had actually used the Telegram platform to plan that attack.
And so for quite a while now, Telegram has possibly been in the crosshairs of French authorities because even back then, they refused to assist with those types of investigations.
Whether they could or could not assist for technical means, I don't necessarily know.
But it does seem like it seriously angered the French authorities.
But this is another situation where a platform owner has essentially ignored the requests of a government.
And we don't necessarily know in the case of Telegram how much Telegram has ignored or flouted the orders of the French government.
But that seems to be what led to the arrest and now the formal investigation for possibly assisting with the dissemination of CSAM materials and money laundering and all of these terrible things.
This is a huge wake-up call to any platform that is providing this type of interactivity amongst its users because prior to this, you would see some kind of civil action.
You may have seen lower-level executives in various far-flung countries being threatened with fines or arrests, but you never necessarily saw the CEO of a company being picked up after his private jet landed in a country like Paris.
This is a very, very clear signal that the time when platforms could operate with complete immunity and get away with it is long gone.
Impunity.
And that the fight against disinformation and CSAM and all of these other parades of horribles that happened on these platforms is really raging right now.
And there's either going to be much more regulation coming down the pipeline or a lot more potential arrests of CEOs like Pavel and others.
Yeah, and I think not having handled a lot of that stuff and not, of course, then not having a track record of stories where there's been sort of cooperation or various kinds of working with the courts throughout some of those things.
If that hasn't been addressed and it is something they're interested in, then it kind of makes sense.
I don't know if there has been a lot of news about telegrams being forthcoming in any of those situations.
And I also think that there's a lot of other activity on that platform that is of interest to those with arresting powers.
I'd like to read something, a quote from John Scott Railton, who's a senior researcher at the University of Toronto Citizen Lab.
It says, popular telegram features like group chats and channels are not end-to-end encrypted.
That means that telegram can access their contents.
Similarly, messages between users are not end-to-end encrypted by default, which means that telegram could also access these messages.
Only telegram's opt-in secret chat feature is end-to-end encrypted, which would prevent telegram from accessing the chat contents.
So that's interesting.
That tells you that they could, in fact, gain access to things under court order.
But I think what the French are so upset about is the fact that they're just being ignored, not even acknowledged, not even saying that they're willing to work with them to come up with something that's mutually agreeable between them.
Probably a bad idea with law enforcement.
This reminds me of Parler and some of the other platforms being sort of clamped down upon.
Go ahead, Alex.
If the issue, though, is technical infeasibility of a platform to comply with some kind of lawful order, that's completely different.
I agree.
If they have the data, they may be legally obligated to hand it over.
But if the data itself cannot be handed over because of an end-to-end encrypted communication, then I think we have to look at this French prosecution as a hell of a lot more dangerous than simply going after somebody who may or may not have been complicit in assisting with the dissemination of child sexual abuse materials or these other parades of horribles that we had mentioned.
Because at that point, then what you actually are attacking is the use of encryption technology itself.
So why wouldn't Telegram just encrypt everything then?
Well, I'll tell you why.
Because in a group chat, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to manage encryption keys.
It's really, really hard to do that amongst a large number of people.
Everybody would have to exchange everybody else's keys.
It would be a total nightmare technically to try to keep that and maintain that, especially with new people keep coming onto the group.
Everyone's going to have to have everybody else's key.
It's a real pain.
But I think John Scott Ralston brings up a really important point, which is that people operate very often under the erroneous assumption that any chat in Telegram is going to be end-to-end encrypted.
That's simply not the case.
I believe in WhatsApp and other messaging platforms that is the case.
But you do have to turn on that feature in Telegram.
I wanted to also talk about Facebook and their battle with Canada as far as not allowing any links to news because they're unwilling to pay for the content or the links.
We've talked about this in the past, but it's persisted and it's continuing.
And the thing that really gets me is that I keep reading week after week about how advertising dollars for journalism, newspapers, radio, TV, it's all plummeting like a stone.
But social media companies, it's going into the heavens.
They are making so much money off advertising dollars.
There has to be a correlation here.
There has to be a correlation.
And people simply cannot say that they're not benefiting from this.
Yet Facebook insists that there is no value to them whatsoever from news, links, news stories.
And rather than pay, as Google has already agreed to, rather than pay for the content, they simply cut off access.
So if you're mad at Canada, you might want to look into the story a little bit more and see why Facebook has taken this action.
Because they don't want a precedent where they actually have to pay for the content that brings their image up.
People have better conversations when there's an actual news story being discussed on Facebook.
Whereas now, if you look at what the engagement is like in Canada, you'll see there's a lot of far-right propaganda being spread around because that's not considered news.
But it's being discussed in Facebook.
I wish we could talk about this more.
We can talk about this on Overtime.
We can talk about this next week on Off the Hook.
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Oh, wow.
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