Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing free speech and Big Tech. Now these are not really usually topics that I get into here but I was actually reading, we research a lot to make these videos and we talk a lot here in the office about matters pertaining to just the world around us.

This actually came up while I was looking around through the Bangkok Post, looking at other issues the Bangkok Post looking at other issues and I was reading through this article. I believe this is some sort of syndicated article but it was in the Bangkok Post bangkokpost.com. This is a small excerpt. I don't want to really get into the meat of the overall article because frankly it is not relevant to this video. I just thought this one excerpt was very interesting. In any event the article is titled: How an Indebted US Physician sells COVID Falsehoods and you can read through that and form your own opinions about anybody involved in that article. The thing that I thought was strange and frankly quite creepy came from this quote: Quoting directly, again the article is titled: How an Indebted US Physician sells COVID Falsehoods, Bangkok Post bangkokpost.com. Quoting directly:  "But much of her prolific output remains accessible -- illustrating the whack-a-mole problem of weeding out dangerous online content, which Big Tech has yet to solve." There was something about that statement that just threw me for a loop. The first one being when did it ever become incumbent on Big Tech to solve any of that. I remember Facebook coming online when the suffix to your email had to be .edu back when you had to be going to school to join Facebook. Facebook was a platform for people to talk. There was never any notion that Big Tech needed to solve our talk problems. I mean that was never there. Google for that matter or YouTube or any of these platforms. In a sense I almost don't blame the platforms because the platforms seem to have had this responsibility "thrust upon" them by a certain segment of the public or maybe segments of the media and look I mean crazy stuff goes across the internet. It has always been known that the internet is this wild west of ideas. There are all kinds of crazy things on the internet that quite frankly are nonsense and there are very interesting things on the internet. There are things on the internet that you find that are very insightful that you wouldn't have thought that what they would be insightful. 

Long story short, "Big Tech has yet to solve" this is within this article. So again this presumption that Big Tech needs to "solve" issues associated with what I believe it was Oliver Wendell Holmes called The Marketplace of Ideas and that is the purpose of free speech is this society has to be this Marketplace of Ideas and I would argue that during a time of crisis, that Marketplace is more necessary than ever because sometimes we need to find solutions and sometimes they are found in very unorthodox places. Places that one would not necessarily think that they would find solutions to a given issue. Further in the same excerpt "illustrating the whack-a-mole problem of weeding out dangerous online content." Okay. To me, dangerous online content is things like child pornography or telling someone to kill someone or harm someone; things that create an imminent threat or that are in and of themselves repugnant and cause damage to people. Now just talking about things, even really crazy things that people disagree on or just being a nut, being an idiot; being in total disagreement with the overall majority whatever, we have got to have that Marketplace of Ideas. We have got to be able to say "I think this", "I think X about Y" and I don't really want to live in a world where Big Tech needs to “solve” the Free Speech problem by "weeding out dangerous online content". That is not their function; that is not what I think anybody wants their function to be. I think most people would agree we like them being a platform; we don't like them being a sensor. And let's be clear, crazy notions get weeded out by themselves. People figure this out pretty quickly that you say something, "the earth is flat" and I am sure the flat earthers will come running, flocking to this thing to knock me down in the comments, whatever, but to me that is on its face absurd. The data, the observations, to me that is clearly absurd. Now there are people that don't believe that, that believe the opposite. I don't think those people should have their freedom of speech "solved by weeding out that dangerous online content". Disagreeing is not necessarily being dangerous. Yeah it can be really nonsensical and crazy but the best remedy for that is the truth, not censorship.