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What if I were to tell you that the world was not as it seems, Well.

Some larger organism with its own kind of personality and its own kind of drive, absolutely takes over in those moments.

A virtual organism is a group of people that behave as one larger organism.

So we thought, this is really interesting.

You know, this thing really works.

We should use it for search.

Our universe tends to strive towards larger forms.

So Larry and his grad school friend Sergey Brin embarked on creating a search engine.

The exploited the grouping phenomenon on the Internet.

They called their company Google.

Zuck has lost control of Facebook.

I mean, for all we know all these systems we complain about, actually no one has any power to fix them.

I'm Patrick Carelci and I'm Adriana Cortes, and this is.

Red Pilled America, a storytelling show.

This is not another talk show covering the day's news.

We're all about telling stories.

Stories.

Hollywood doesn't want you to hear stories.

The media mocks stories about everyday Americans at the Globalist Ignore.

You can think of Red Pilled America as audio documentaries, and we promise only one thing, the truth.

Welcome to Red Pilled America.

Brian Ammeorridge appears to be a near extent to breed in Silicon Valley that still believes in the free exchange of ideas.

And when he tried to stand up for that principle, the virtual organism we know as Facebook went on the attack.

I was a senior employee at the company, and so I started to talk about the issues around content policy.

Brian was bothered by Facebook's new approach towards so called hate speech.

Internally, I started, you know, doing you know, having one on one conversations with people.

I started writing a little bit about it in Facebook's internal network, which is called a workplace.

And what I found was people didn't want to have the conversation.

You know, a lot of people felt threatened even or afraid by having the conversation.

They just they thought it was hot water to talk about these things.

And you know, I was called a hate longer by more than one employee, by.

Quite a number actually, for questioning, you know, the wisdom of a hate speech policy.

And you know, when I.

Started to see that, where it's like, well, well, I mean, not only is this going in the wrong direction, but I can't even talk about.

The fact that I think it's going in.

The wrong direction without being called a bigot, without being called a racist, without being called a hate longer.

You know, that's where I realized, like, this is a lot more serious than even just the policy.

I'm Patrick Corelchi and this is red Pilled America.

We've been exploring how so many Silicon Valley companies have become monopolies.

This is our third and final episode in this series.

You don't need to have heard our last two episodes to understand this one, but just in case you missed them.

In part one, we looked at the origin story of YouTube to see how it became a monopoly.

We learned that it looked like it stole the idea of becoming an online video hosting platform from Vimeo and then allowed massive copyright infringement on its site to draw traffic.

When it was about to be destroyed by the entertainment industry for allowing piracy of its content, Google swooped into by the company and then used in nineteen ninety eight law that specifically shielded Internet platforms.

In the end, YouTube fended off a billion dollar lawsuit and became a video hosting monopoly.

In Part two, we went down the rabbit hole to explore a fascinating scientific phenomenon that helps explain the growth of Silicon Valley monopolies, the phenomenon in nature that likes to form ever larger groups.

This grouping phenomenon in human nature has led to the formation of a new type of being, what we call a virtual organism, which is a group of people that behaves as one larger organism.

As they grow, these virtual organisms gobble up the competition and attempt to change the rules to allow even further growth.

Google exploited this grouping process on the Internet to become one of the most powerful virtual organisms in human history.

Now, these massive silicon value organisms appear poised to grow even larger, and so we ask the final question in this series, should anything be done to stop these silicon value monopolies.

To find the answer, we want to track the rise of social media behemoth Facebook because understanding its development will help you understand what we should expect if these virtual organisms are allowed to grow unchecked.

Hi.

I'm Adriana Cortez.

So.

In December two thousand and two, three Harvard students had an idea.

They wanted to start a social network for people to connect with others romantically, socially, and professionally.

It wasn't a novel idea really.

Since the new laws favoring internet platforms went into effect, there's been a few social networks that popped up six degrees dot Com and Friendster come to mind, but none had yet taken off.

What was novel about their idea was the way the trio wanted to launch it.

They wanted to focus on Harvard students then and roll it out to other universities from there.

By that time, colleges issued school emails so they'd have a way of authenticating the person's real identity.

The trio called the project Harvard Connection, and after going through several programmers to develop the site, a prankster computer science student caught their eye, mister Mark Zuckerberg.

They met with the Harvard sophomore, explaining their marketing approach and asked if he wanted to finish developing the site.

He agreed.

Both my Space and Friendster were in full swing, so getting to market quickly was important, a view they relayed to Zuckerberg, but the trio didn't know that Zuckerberg had something else in mind.

Whether he got the idea to create a social network from them or had already decided to do when independently is unclear, But what is clear is that at the same time Zuckerberg said he was working on Harvard Connection, he was contemplating creating the site he was calling the face book thing.

College facebooks were actually the unofficial name of university student directories.

They typically included a profile picture of each student, their name, address, and phone number.

Mark wanted to create an online social networking version of these school directories, but the problem was that he was now supposed to be developing Harvard Connection, and admittedly Zuckerberg thought the guys were going to promote the site pretty well, so beating them to market was, in Zuckerberg's eyes, imperative to his Facebook thing winning.

So he decided he was going to, in his words, fuck them by stringing the trio along them backing out right before launching his site.

Zuckerberg thought the move was unethical, but joked with the friend saying, quote, you can be unethical and still be legal.

That's the way I live my life.

It was an ethos he expressed in a different way a few years later.

And a lot of times people are just like too careful.

I think it's more useful to make things happen and then like apologize later than it is to make sure that you dot all your eyes now and then like just not get stuffed on.

And that's what he did.

He screwed his schoolmates by dropping their project last minute.

When Zuckerberg launched the Facebook dot com exclusively at Harvard, it was an immediate success.

By week two, the membership jumped from six hundred and fifty to four thousand members.

A competing service called Facenet launched a few weeks later at Harvard, but what Zuckerberg learned was that once his site infiltrated a school and got enough people to register and build their network of people.

Once users spent the time to form their online social group, they would not leave to a competing service.

So he understood what he had to do.

We are a site that needs to allow people to register as quickly as possible.

So he began expanding to other schools, first Columbia, a day later, Stamford, a few days later, Yale.

Because the schools were so influential, he started to catch the eye of the media.

Mark.

If somebody was to put the question to you about the magnitude of what you think you've launched, how big do you think your product or your service.

Is, Well, it's impossible to tell.

When we first launched, we were hoping for you know, maybe four hundred five hundred people.

Harvard didn't have a Facebook, so that's the gap that we were trying to fill.

And now we're at one hundred thousand people.

So who knows where we're going next.

What is the Facebook exactly?

It's an online directory that connects people through universities and colleges through their social networks.

There, you sign on, you make a profile about yourself by answering some questions, entering some information such as your concentration or major at school, contact information about phone numbers, instant messaging, screen names, anything you want to tell intro, what books you like, movies, and most importantly, who your friends are.

And then you can browse around and see people's friends are, and just check out people's online identities and see how people portray themselves and just find some interesting information about people.

Within just under a year of launch, they reached a million users, but by comparison to another site, it was small potatoes.

Just a few months later, MySpace had amassed sixteen million monthly users and sold to media behemoth News Corp.

In July two thousand and five.

Less than a year after that, MySpace surpassed Google as the number one traffic to site in America.

Facebook hadn't even been open to the public yet.

That didn't happen until September twenty sixth, two thousand and six.

By that time, my Space had roughly four times as many users as Facebook.

But astonishingly, within just two and a half years, Facebook would accomplish the sea singly impossible.

They surpassed my Space and users, and they never looked back.

In twenty sixteen, my Space was boasting fifteen million monthly users.

By the end of twenty eighteen, Facebook reported two point three two billion monthly active users.

How did this happen?

How did Facebook win?

Facebook exploited the natural grouping phenomenon we see throughout nature, the Internet, and human culture.

What we need to do is empower people all around the world to build communities.

Things like church groups and sports teams, and neighborhood groups and groups for people who love dogs and new moms and dads.

You know, those are the groups that actually bring people together.

And once people are coming together at these smaller, smaller groups, that actually grows and it ends up with much bigger changes in the.

World universe, especially Ivy League universities, where the places with some of the tightest social groups in the country.

A rollout first targeting these communities seated the Facebook with some of the strongest social bonds in society, college friends.

Here's Facebook's early president Sean Parker explaining this dynamic.

You know, college is this unique time in your life where some studies indicate you have more friends, that you are more social than any other time in your life.

No one had really attempted launching a social network exclusively through universities, and for some reason, this community with the strong social bond was completely untapped for social networks.

Again Sean Parker.

So I wanted to make a play in social networking, and the only markets that were open were these peculiar markets where the density of social inn of social connections was much much higher, where you spent most of your time hanging out with the same type of people in a very dense and and kind of environment.

Where and so the two markets that were not on Facebook.

And I only bring up the military as an example of kind of another market, but basically college kids and the military, and they have these similar characteristics where like the military people are they leave home, they're hanging out only with other military people.

They're on a military base, or they're abroad.

College they leave home, they're sort of you know, on a campus hanging out only with other college kids.

And these are like the two groups of people that we identified that were not using Facebook, and obviously military would be a terrible place now using social that works at that time, right, Sorry, so sorry, that's what not using friends to or MySpace, So you know, and you could ask yourself, you know, why is you'd have a long sociological debate about why why this is the case, And I could give you my theories, but the reality was it was just these two groups that weren't doing it, and college was the one that made a ton of sense, and military was the one that made actually no sense.

As Facebook progressed, they introduced tools and increased group formation.

They added a feature that allowed students to join study groups and groups of common interest, and perhaps most importantly, as Facebook opened up their platform to the public, they focused on making their virtual community mirror the physical world.

I think the goal that we went into it with wasn't to make a phenomenon community.

But sort of like a mirror for the real community that existed in real life.

Facebook was a platform that used its technology to enable group formation with friends and like minded people.

By contrast, MySpace took a different approach.

It focused on music, becoming a place where people connected with independent bands more than with their actual friends.

They became more of a media company, or in Internet terms, a portal providing general information that had nothing to do with group formation.

Here's MySpace CEO in twenty ten, two years after Facebook overtook the site.

My Space just several years ago was all their age and social networking.

It's really taken a back seat to Facebook in particular, but others it's been sort of a drum reversal.

First, explain how MySpace got in that situation.

Well, my belief is that MySpace got very, very diverse in its offering and didn't really have a specialized service that users understood.

So as we broadened our service over time, I think we lost some of the core strategic functions that MySpace offered early on that delighted its customers.

So linger for a second on that, Because early on, MySpace developed a reputation, no matter what else it was about, for being largely about music.

That was always a focus of MySpace.

And are you saying that got lost along the way.

No, the music component of MySpace remains very very strong, and the music origins of MySpace are definitely part of what drove MySpace into its current strategy of social entertainment.

I believe what happened in addition to music was that MySpace took on a portal strategy where they added functions like horoscopes, like weather, basic traditional portal functions that aren't natural to a social environment.

MySpace was headquartered near the entertainment capital of the world, so becoming the media company made sense.

This was a difference that even Zuckerberg noticed.

You know, for quite a while, the company's been doing pretty different things, right, So, my Space has always defined themselves more as a media company, whereas Facebook has always defined itself more as a technology company focused on efficiency and making it so that people can share and communicate more effectively.

As a result of their approach, MySpace ignored the real identity of its users.

They allowed users to take on anonymous personas, and the site was more about discovery and less about mirroring the real world.

Facebook's become ubiquitous online.

It's the company that verifies your real identity in the virtual world.

Early on, we wanted to establish this culture of real identity on the service, and you know, there weren't really any other online services or communities where people were openly their real self before that.

And one of the ways that we kind of determined that someone was really who they said they were and their credentials were real where everyone had school email addresses, and so school.

Email addresses where the original source of identity.

Well that's how we knew what school you.

Were in, right, and then you weren't just a sock puppet because you can't just get the school to keep creating exactly yeah mail addressing.

Yeah yeah.

So it also it made it said people couldn't sign up for fake accounts, so most people typically only have one school account.

So being able to bootstrap off of that was this really nice early thing that helped us establish this culture of real identity.

And then once we got to a few million people or ten million people where that culture was established, it was able to bootstrop into something that was much bigger that kept most of that culture.

Even though now obviously most people in the world don't have emails that are issued by some institution that vouches for their identity.

Now people lug in through Facebook.

Now you're the source of identity.

Well, you know, it.

Comes around shielded by the laws benefiting internet platforms.

Facebook has in essence created a digital nation state.

It rules an entire virtual world that has become the real world projection of ourselves online twenty twelve.

Facebook's goal was one of the most ambitious and human history.

You know, for a while, we had this rallying cry of can we connect a billion people?

And you know when we start talking about that.

We thought that was crazy, right, it was way bigger than any service in the world that had been built.

And you know, it was ten digits long.

Right, It's like, you know, it just it felt crazy.

We'd never get to that.

But then the thing is, as we started to actually get closer to that, we took a step back and we're like, all right, well, our mission isn't actually to get one in seven people in the world to be connected, it's we want to connect everyone.

This was the state of Facebook when a man entered the company that would eventually expose one of its greatest challenges, or more precisely, one of America's greatest challenges.

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Welcome back to red Pilled America.

Brian Ammeridge grew up in New York and it was clear at a young age that he was going to have a principled approach to life.

I had read Pallas Shrugged when I was in high school.

That became like that was transformative for me.

It was really like, oh.

Not only do other people have the same sort of ideas about the importance of entrepreneurialism and building products and products for people, and then the sort of hero the heroism of that that I think Pine Rand recognized and Alice Shrugg, but I also discovered the entire philosophy behind it, which is which is called objectivism.

When Brian was around fourteen, he took a trip to California and he saw an entrepreneurial spirit in the Golden State that made him want to eventually call it home.

So when it came time to apply for college, he made sure his school would get him there.

You know, the truth is, I actually only applied to schools in California because I knew I wanted to live here.

After the first time I visited here, it was clear like, oh, this is a place that really gets entrepreneurialism.

Brian ended up going to the University of California at San Diego and chose computer science, but he didn't think it was a good decision.

I rather foolishly chose computer science as.

My focus there.

And I say foolishly because I had really taught myself to build software and was doing it professionally for a couple of years.

Before I joined the school, and.

So I really didn't learn terribly much about software while I was at school, but I learned lots of other things.

From the time he was a kid, he'd already been coding.

When he was home sick for a week with strep throat as a young boy, he started programming a Lego robot using a simple user interface.

It opened up his mind to the possibilities.

But I discovered that you could actually learn a real programming language for it, and not just sort of use the very basic graphical interface.

But you could learn and you could code for it.

So when the time Brian got to college, he was already fully versed in programming and was toying around with project ideas.

He designed some software to help people build websites, and after a few other projects, he decided it was time to start focusing on creating products full time.

You know, I had always done it sort of as a part time thing when I was in high school and then in college, and I felt, you know, the entrepreneurial part of me was like ready to fully commit to betting on myself, and so I dropped out focus.

On the business.

You know, got the work, the products I had been building to a place where I was pretty proud of them.

For a while.

He'd been coming to a conclusion about the power of technology.

I always thought of the airplane as like a wonderful example of that of like you just fundamentally changes what we're capable of as people, you know, before and after is very dramatic in terms of our lives.

So I asked myself from that perspective within technology, what's sort of.

At that level.

And I realized that communication technologies were right in the focus of that, and that you know, if you really look at the way communication technologies and in that I include everything from like language, the telegraph, the printing press, radio, television, eventually the internet and email.

Those are the sort of things that really, you know, they have a disproportionate effect on the ability of a person to sort.

Of have an idea.

And then get that out into the world, and that underpins almost everything else.

And so once I.

Sort of really I really very strongly adopted that perspective that like, Okay, these communication technologies, these things that accelerate the velocity that ideas move around the world, that's the stuff that matters.

He eventually saw Facebook as one of those groundbreaking technologies, one that would change the arc of history.

You know, what I realized about Facebook in particular was that, you know, like you progression of communication technologies from the printing press to the internet and email, I thought, you know, I realized that Facebook is the next one of these, and it.

Does have this sort of really disproportionate effect on the ability of a person.

With an idea to get it out to the world.

And I think that specifically, what Facebook did was give people who you know, don't necessarily have.

Any money or power.

Or connection to the media a platform where not only could they get an idea out to one other person, but they can get it out potentially to the whole world.

You know, when I sort of had those dots fall into place, you know, I was really really passionate about Facebook's mission, which you know, originally was to make the world more open and connected.

And the second part, which is the part for me, was to give people the power to share.

And about the time he came to this realization, many of his friends were moving from Apple to the social network.

So he applied and started working at Facebook in twenty twelve.

You know, when I joined Facebook, which is in early twenty twelve, you know, this is a time when Facebook did not have the native application on the iPhone, so it was mostly a website at the.

Time, and so in my background.

Was in native software for both the Mac and the iPhone, and so what I was really interested in was helping Facebook make this transition to building really great software for the phone.

And they were very aggressively hiring some of the best people in the industry to do that, and.

That's how many of my friends ended up there.

And I joined specifically to sort of help with this second wave, or both the first wave and then most emphatically the second wave where they were going to redesign everything for the phone.

When Brian entered the company, the office culture was one of the big reasons why he wanted to work for Facebook.

You know, it really wasn't political.

That's I think that the key thing to say about it.

I mean, it was.

Everything that's that I think is still good about face books culture today.

It was you know, it was relentlessly open, It was transparent.

The company was at that time, I.

Think it was about, you know, a little bit under twenty five hundred employees, and just for comparison, it's over thirty thousand today, and so it was much much smaller, ten times smaller than it is today.

It was the kind of culture where, you.

Know, I was able to just go and have some conversations on Friday evening with Mark Zuckerberg because I had some ideas and you know, I was ruminating about things after the weekly Q and A with him.

One of Mark Zuckerberg's earliest insights that made Facebook so successful was that he wanted their virtual community to mirror the real world.

So Facebook implemented a specific workplace culture that ensured that perspective came out in their products.

They had this sort of cultural value of being your authentic self and bringing your authentic self to work, and that was a really really good thing in terms of how bonded the company was and how committed they were to each other, which is really important when you're building teams.

This approach also, no doubt, helped the company realize Mark Zuckerberg's vision from the early days of having Facebook's virtual community mirror the real world.

If people were allowed to be themselves in the office, that same principle would likely come out in Facebook's products.

But sometimes the things that make us successful also become our biggest weakness.

The problem with this cultural value began to show as the twenty sixteen election cycle arrived.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again.

It was such a politicized event that what it meant to bring yourself, bring your authentic self to work was to bring your politics to work.

And you know what happened was just given the sheer demographic, the political demographics of the company, which is overwhelmingly left leaning.

It's in the Bay Area, it's overwhelming left leaning.

Facebook finds its home, of course, in Silicon Valley, but more specifically Menlo Park, California, within an area known as San Mateo County.

Dating back to World War Two, the presidential elections bounced back and forth between parties, sometimes going Democrat, but more often going Republican up through nineteen eighty four, where Ronald Reagan got fifty two percent of the vote, But since Reagan's nineteen eighty six amnesty, the dynamic drastically shifted.

Just two years later, Democrat Ducacus received fifty six percent of the vote, and it's been all downhill for the Party of Reagan ever since.

In twenty sixteen, Hillary Clinton received a whopping seventy six percent of the vote in the area.

Yeah.

So around the same time in twenty sixteen, that twenty five hundred employee count had swelled to roughly seventeen thousand people.

With the area's heavy left leanings, Facebook was about to become overwhelmed by the same ethos that made it successful, you know.

That meant left leaning political perspective was you know, became rampantly present on campus around there, and I mean, like you know, around the time like Black Lives Matter was becoming a thing, there were posters about that sort of up on the wall, you know, the whole hashtag resist that you know, starting you'd see posters with these things up on the wall that you know, I mentioned that, you know that we had done this Q and A with Mark every week the kinds of questions that you know, people would start asking during that Q and A became increasingly political.

You know, there were you.

Know, Peter Teal is a board member of Facebook, and he received a lot of criticism for his support of Trump, and so there were you know, there were questions in there of like, why are we okay with Peter Teal being on the board when you know he has all of these offensive positions.

And the whole culture inside.

The company just almost overnight, it seemed like people felt very open and free to talk about their views on Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and so on.

With the sudden shift in work climate, Facebook management appeared to be counting on one certainty that would bring the stability back to the workplace.

That certainty was Hillary's victory.

The thing that was really interesting was that the executive team they were sort.

Of aware of how.

Politicized things were becoming and how sort of perturbed a lot of the employees were becoming.

You know, these things that Donald Trump was saying and that Peter Teal and so on, But they thought Hillary Clinton was going to win.

They I mean, they were they were confident and so that they were thinking it's all going to blow over with the employees.

We'll go back to normal once once Clinton wins, and then she didn't, and it just got twice as bad.

Brian can remember a turning point within the company that showed just how bad the problem had gotten.

I think one thing I remember specifically is someone or.

Some group of people had put up a Trump Supporters welcome poster and I don't remember if this was just.

Before he won or right after he won, and it.

Was torn down and it was like it was it was a really you know, pivotal moment, I think, where.

You know, Okay, what's the company going to do about this?

What's what's going to happen?

Like are the posters going to come back?

Or are people just going to look the other way?

And you know, people were fine with it.

That was it like that.

I later talked to the people who put those posters up, and they were just completely defeated and deflated.

I don't think there wasn't much of anyone.

Coming to their defense, and so that.

Voice it basically, you know, people just learned to stop saying anything about it.

There was also another event showing Facebook's culture had become toxic.

In twenty fourteen, Facebook acquired Oculus, a virtual reality company, for reported three billion dollars.

Usually a pretty stoic personality, you could hear Mark Zuckerberg's excitement in the new acquisition.

I am excited to announce Oculus quest.

Oculus was founded by a young entrepreneur named Palmer Lucky, and when Facebook bought the company, Palmer came on board.

At Facebook.

I described him as like a boy genius.

You know, his company got acquired from more than a billion dollars from Facebook.

He's a pioneer of the virtual reality industry.

But in September twenty sixteen, news reports revealed that the boy Genius had funded a pro Trump group that circulated anti Hillary memes.

When the election went for Trump, it was too much for Facebook's staff to handle.

I've spent some time talking with Palmer about this, and I I know a lot of the background details, and I'm pretty confident that, yeah, he was fired for his political views.

This was the tone being set throughout the company.

If even the pioneer of today's virtual reality, the same guy that led a division recently purchased for billions of dollars, if that guy could be fired, then anyone was vulnerable, even Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the problem during a Senate hearing.

Well, mister Zuckerberger, I will say, there are a great many Americans who I think are deeply concerned that Facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship.

Senator, let me say a few things about this.

First, I understand where that concern is coming from because Facebook and the tech industry are located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left leaning place.

And this is actually a concern that I have and that I try to root out in the company is making sure that we don't have any bias.

This culture of bringing your authentic self to work began to take the company in an entirely new direction, a direction that made Brian uncomfortable.

What happened was the content policy during this.

Time of deafening silence changed and it became much more focused on hate speech.

You know, the permission for controversy was more or less abandoned in the policy and the name of safety and nobody was saying anything.

And again, you know, from my perspective, it's like, well, this is fundamentally why I joined the company.

A lot of new ideas are controversial.

That's sort of endemic to the nature of having a new idea.

When you have a new idea about something important, it's going to offend people.

It's going to be a little bit scary sometimes, just because you know, people who have deeply held beliefs are going to be threatened by an idea that changes things or questions something that they hold to be really important.

And so, you know, when I started to see that, when I started to see like the core policy that governs what you're allowed to use Facebook for is shifting in this direction that is hostile toward the spread of new ideas, that started to really concern me, and I started to really adopt this perspective of like, well, you know, if that goes, then so do I.

This worry began to bruin Brian, and his concern was about to be leaked to the public.

As listeners of Red Pilled America know, this show is all about awakenings, and I recently had an awakening of my own courtesy of the Licorice guy.

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Welcome back to Red Pilled America.

So the rising far left political atmosphere of Facebook began to make Brian emorrhage concerned about his workplace, but it eventually came to a head when Facebook did a workplace refresh.

The company had built out a new building on campus and Brian was skilled eduled to move to the new location.

He went on vacation for a week and his first day back was in this new building.

What I noticed when I walked into this building was this gigantic piece of art, a mural on the wall.

It said, you know it was, I don't even know how to.

Describe it to to be honest, it said gender free on it.

You know it was.

It was sort of this, you know.

A hyper left leaning perspective on gender being a social construct and beyond it being hideous as a piece of art.

To be very honest, the message itself like gender free.

Just the words on their own had to be like ten feet wide.

The thing itself was like maybe twenty feet wide.

It was enormous, and it was like one of the first things I saw in this new campus.

And I wrote a feedback post about that originally, and I basically said, I don't think this is appropriate in the context of us having senators walking around our halls wondering whether or not we can handle ourselves, whether or not we are politically biased, wondering whether or not we have a handle on what's offensive and controversial.

And in the context of that, I think it is extremely unwise for us to be putting up twenty foot wide murals with politically divisive messages.

And I said more than that in there, but that was the essence of it.

You know, I took real offense to the terminology gender creation for a whole bunch of reasons, which is, you know, that's a kind of a political philosophical perspective.

You can debate that point, but that was what.

This post was, and.

It immediately blew up.

You know, people were deeply offended that I had criticized it.

They were calling me a transphobe, all sorts of other names.

People were writing performance review feedback for me, saying things like I had created an uninclusive culture and that HR should investigate me.

I mean, just went on and on and.

On of people sort of piling on and sort of you know, calling me all the words that end in istanobe you can imagine.

And something else very interesting happened, which is that I started to get what started as dozens, but became hundreds of private messages from people telling me, you know, I would never say this publicly, but thank you for writing that.

I feel the same way.

And I mean that trend just continued where I had people telling me like, you know, I felt this way an orientation that I felt like I couldn't speak up about this, and nobody seemed to care about intellectual diversity.

It was just all these other sort of immutable characteristics that people care about in the diversity program, and I didn't feel like I could say.

Anything about it.

And you know, I feel like I can't tell people what I actually think about politically and philosophically because I'll get attacked and I fear for my career if people were to know that I voted for Donald Trump.

And it was hundreds of these kinds of messa people, including some very high level people from the company, who had said all these things really about how they felt like they couldn't be open about this stuff and that there was a real problem with political intolerance in the company.

The feedback gave Brian an idea, and he decided to use one of the features that helped make Facebook a monopoly.

And so what I did with their permission.

I took a bunch of these quotes anonymously and I put them on posters.

And I printed off a couple dozen of these posters, and I put them up around the campus, including under this horrible piece of art, and the bottom of the posters said join fbears for Political Diversity.

Like the Facebook a general user sees, the company also has an internal group feature that allows employees to join groups of common interest.

At the same time that Brian put up the posters, he published a memo to a newly created group called f Beers for Political Diversity, and he criticized the political monoculture of Facebook that's intolerant of different views.

The memo called out the mob like behavior of employees who attacked peers who expressed ideas that were opposed to left leaning ideology.

The memo was a five hundred and twenty six word indictment of the toxic culture within Facebook and asked people to join f Beers for Political Diversity to help correct it.

And that was the initial wave of interest, let's say that was attracted across the company and sort of drove the attention.

Towards the group and towards.

The memo, and then it became like a whole conversation inside the company for a week.

And then one week after I had put the posters up and written the memo, it was linked to The New York Times, and that just sort of became off another order of magnitude of interest.

But the internal reaction amongst the confile was predictable, and.

Like the internal reaction was.

I mean, it was it was it really, it was all of the same things, but magnified by ten.

It was, you know, people.

Were really pretty against me, and they thought I was making the company look bad, and they thought, you know, some people thought I had leaked the article, which.

I definitely did not.

People you know, were confused about whether or not this was really an issue.

But then there were also you know, there were hundreds of people who said, I think this might be.

A real issue, and thank you for.

Bringing it up, and and I do want to talk about this.

So it became a real conversation inside the company.

Unlike the infamous Google memo addressing gender inequality that leaked to Your earlier and led to the firing of its author, James de Moore, Brian got a different response from Facebook management.

And so you know, what ended up happening was senior leaders inside the company actually took that effort, in particular the political diversity effort.

They took that pretty seriously basically did not fire me.

They did the opposite of fire me, Like they basically escalated the level at which I was having these conversations in the company.

Like there were close to the most senior people in the company talking to me about these issues, trying to understand where I was coming from, and then in particular trying to understand like what.

Exactly can we learn from.

This group that I had created inside Facebook, which you know, I don't think that's been covered much by.

The media because I haven't talked about it too much.

But the group actually became like wildly successful because the purpose of the group was really not just to tell people, hey, there's a problem here.

It was more productive than that.

It's like, Okay, well, what do we do about it?

You know, can we create norms and rules for discussions inside the company, for having controversial discussions respectfully?

Is it possible?

What do those rules look like?

What do they look like if you do.

Them on workplace, on our internal version of Facebook?

What does it look like to have a group that is allowed and encouraged to talk about controversial things, but that you're not allowed to attack people, Like how much moderation is required for something like that?

How much can people understand that distinction between attacking ideas and attacking people?

And so they looked at it with a lot of curiosity and saying like, well, is this going to work?

And if it does, maybe we can learn something from it, Maybe we can bring that not.

Just into the broader culture of the company, but eventually into the products.

But even after the positive response from management, it became obvious that Facebook was going to push for a new rule in the Internet space.

It was going to be an Internet platform that began to act like a publisher by editing users' ideas.

What happened through those conversations that I had was that while they took the cultural elements of it very seriously, I also became very confident in talking with them that they were deeply, deeply committed to the content policy direct that had sparked my concern in the first place, you know, And when it came to a balance between free expression and what they perceive as protecting people, they were firmly on the side of quote unquote protecting people, and that means sacrificing free expression.

And you know, in no uncertain terms.

Was it made clear to me that like, they're going to double down, triple down on their hate speech policies, on and moderation of content, on removing things that, you know, for one reason or another they beem objectionable.

I became confident that regardless of these efforts around culture, that the content policy direction of insulating people from quote unquote bad ideas was going to continue, and that that really wasn't open to discussion.

And you know, regardless of whether the culture.

Became healthy around political diversity or not, they were going to continue down this path of censoring content really and for me, as soon as I became confident that like, yeah, they mean what they're saying, nothing I'm going to do is going to be able to change that.

That was it.

I mean, I knew I was going to leave at that point.

On October tenth, twenty eighteen, Brian quit Facebook.

The following day, Facebook purged over eight hundred US Facebook accounts and pages for reportedly pushing political spam.

But even with these hate speech policies that forced him to leave Facebook, Brian would come to a surprising conclusion about what should be done to stop these social media behemoths.

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By the time Brian Ameridge left Facebook, his group FB Years for Political Diversity grew to about a thousand members.

But even with the internal diversity problems and more importantly, Facebook's content policies policing hate speech, Brian believes Facebook has a right to its position.

I think it's a really important issue for Facebook the company, to take seriously and do something about.

But what I would hate to see and what became a worry of mine, was for anybody to use the note I had written as evidence that, you know, Facebook should be regulated or the Facebook can't handle these issues and so on, because I don't believe that.

On one hand, I think they're really important issues for Facebook to address.

On the other side of the company now, I would defend Facebook until the end, like their right to screw this up.

It's not something I think where government really has any any role in quote unquote fixing this.

Which brings us back to the question should anything be done about these silicon value monopolies.

Many conservatives and libertarians agree with Brian Emorridge and are vehemently opposed to government intervention.

Throughout history, it's led to unintended consequences.

In fact, as we learned in Part one, we have silicon value monopolies today because of intervention.

Washington, DC laws created these virtual organisms.

Opposition to government intervention is an understandable stance.

It's historically been my position, but I do think in these unprecedented times we need to rethink our beliefs.

Let's take this question from a different angle.

What will happen if we allow these virtual organisms to continue to grow?

What will be the consequences of taking no action?

As we argued in Part two.

Left to their own devices, these silicon value organisms will never be shaken from their monopoly positions.

Maybe twenty years ago they could have been, but not now.

Web titans like AOL fell in a time when the Internet was young.

Contrary to AOL's name, America was not online the Internet was not ubiquitous.

AOL only had thirty five million subscribers at its peak.

Facebook now has two point three two billion monthly active users.

Two point three two billion, and growing free markets will not shake Facebook from its position.

The network effects nature's grouping phenomenon on the Internet has made Facebook too powerful to overcome.

The same could be said for Google, YouTube and others.

And these silicon value monopolies are not the monopolies of our grandparents.

They know everything about us today.

Even with the most advanced advertising systems that exist, they only have estimates of what someone's gender might be, or what someone's age might be, or what they might be interested in.

But on Facebook, we know exactly what gender someone is, and exactly how old they are, and exactly what they're interested in.

They know what we like, who our friends are, where we go, what we do, and if we don't like that fact, well, well they tell us maybe we should be more careful about what we're doing online.

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it.

In the first place.

But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time.

The federal government could only dream of having the kind of information Silicon Valley collects on us every minute of every day.

If these big tech giants were simply just monopolies, it might not matter.

But they aren't.

They're more than that.

They're virtual organisms with one dominating ideology, and they are deplatforming Americans that don't comply with their beliefs.

Silicon Valley is even threatening to escalate their censorship under the disguise of protecting us.

We only have one message for those who seek to push hate, division and violence.

You have no place on our platforms.

Civical and value monopolies have taken control of the digital public square and are censoring voices based on their belief systems.

And if you think the government has nothing to do with this censorship, you're mistaken.

Twitter recently admitted that politicians from both sides of the aisle want big tech to police our behavior.

Twitter is slowly gaining, in my opinion, too much control from your personal ideology based on what you've researched, what you think is right over American discourse.

If Twitter, and this again is my opinion, I'm not a lawmaker.

But I would have to.

Assume if Twitter refuses to say in the United States, you are allowed to say what is legally acceptable, period, then lawmaker's only choice will be to enforce regulation on your company.

Actually, Tim, I spent quite a bit of time talking to lawmakers as part of my role how to Public Policy, spent a lot of time in DC.

I want to say that Jack and I have both spent a lot of time in DC, and I think from the perspective of lawmakers, they across the spectrum are also in favor of policing abuse and harassment online and bullying online, and.

Now banking and payment systems are taking their lead cutting off people who wrong think.

For those that believe Silicon Valley has the right to censor our speech on their privately owned digital sidewalks, I simply say you are wrong.

As we mentioned in a previous episode entitled companytown, a phenomenon known as company towns once existed in America.

These were places where the entire town, streets, sidewalks, and all were either owned or paid for by one company that was the main employer.

Mining companies and steel manufacturers would often establish a company town to mine coal or fabricate steel.

One such town, Chickasaw, Alabama, was owned by the Golf Shipbuilding Corporation in the early nineteen hundreds.

In nineteen forty five, a case was brought to the Supreme Court.

Grace marsh a Jehovah's witness, stood on the street near a host office in Chickasaw and handed out religious materials to passers by.

The police said that she needed a permit to hand out the materials and that she would not be receiving the permit, so she had to stop distributing the leaflet and leave immediately.

She was basically being banned from their platform.

When she refused on the grounds that they were violating her constitutional rights, she was arrested for trespassing.

During her trial, Grace argued that the city violated her rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Her argument was rejected by the lower courts on the grounds that the sidewalk was privately owned by the Gulf Shipbuilding Company, so these rights didn't apply on private property.

The appeals court upheld that verdict.

Grace took her case all the way to the Supreme Court, and in a five to three decision, the court sided with grace.

The core of the reasons for the First Amendments existence is that the protection of speech in the free market of ideas.

Which is about protecting the audience's.

Right to hear as much as it is to protect the right of the speaker to speak, is in and reflecting power.

That the assumption was the threat to that speech would come from public spaces, not from private spaces.

That's Robert Barnes, a Las Vegas based constitutional lawyer we spoke to for a previous episode.

So one of the things that Supreme Court highlighted back in the forties when they looked at company towns owning all of the space is they realized that that was the equivalent of the whole point of the First Amendment, would be mute if you could privatize the public square.

And so the reason for.

The sort of common sense application of the First Amendment to Facebook is that they effectively monopolize a part of the public square, and much more so than has ever been the case before.

And those Facebook matters a lot more than being able to go down to your local town hall or go to your local public park, or be out on your local public sidewalks.

They are the digital sidewalks.

They are the digital town hall.

They are the digital par where people communicate and to some degree, the system for all the good things we anticipated.

The Constitution did not anticipate that scenario.

They did not anticipate in privatized ownership.

Of the public space or the public square, and so that's why they were not ready and our laws are not ready to deal with the power that is now being monopolized and concentrated in the hands of the equivalent of the nineteenth century trust in Facebook and the other big tech social media giants.

These Silicon Valley monopolies have created something completely new in our society.

They have created digital company towns.

They own almost the entire online public square.

They are counting on America's free market principles to shield them and allow them to continue policing our behavior.

But free markets aren't how they became monopolies.

Gaming the free market is how they acquired power.

Our Bill of Rights was written to protect us from awesome power, the kind of power Silicon Valley is flexing right now.

We need to demand our constitutional rights in the physical world follow us into the digital world.

So the answer is clear.

Something must be done about these Silicon value monopolies.

The question now is what, whether you realize it or not.

The debate to answer this question is raging already.

It's why the MAGA movement rose into prominence.

Our culture naturally searches for a solution to an instability.

Throughout this series, we've discussed some universal laws that the universe seems to like forming groups, that through this grouping process, our universe strives towards even larger forms, and that at some critical point in the growth process, new laws are unleashed that allows the growth of even larger forms.

That's how silicon value monopolies form.

But we haven't mentioned another fundamental law of growth in human culture, and that is that once a virtual organism grows so big that it destabilizes the system, a counter movement arises, attempting to bring back stability.

That is practically what every social movement is about, challenging perceived power to bring back stability.

If a pro American movement doesn't stop the growth of these massive virtual organisms, these massive big tech monopolies destabilizing our American way of life, then an un American movement will grow promising to stop them.

God help us if that day ever comes.

Are you a democratic socialist?

Is that what you call yourself?

Or you don't want that label?

I mean it's part of what I am, it's not all of what I am.

Red Pilled America is an iHeartRadio original podcast.

It's owned and produced by Patrick Carrelci and me Adrianna Quartz of Informed Ventures.

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