I'm Jesse Brown, and today we're talking shit about the news. We'll talk about how the boomers are going to mobilize to save us from Trump, or at least write awful, awful columns about that. We'll talk about carbon tax Christia and carbon tax Carney. Are they actually just...
carbon tax cowards axing their own tax for very Pierre reasons. Mostly, we'll be talking about our suddenly Republican tech overlords. You do have to ask yourself, like with a guy like Zuckerberg, with a guy like Musk, do they really care about the harm that they're doing? Wait for that. This episode is brought to you by Oxio.
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Hey, Sam Graywall, publisher of The Pointer, which people should read whether or not they live in Brampton, Mississauga or Niagara, because it's an excellent local news site. Welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me, Jesse. TikTok is back. The TikTok ban did happen this weekend, but it did not stick around for very long.
The decision saw millions of users jump to other Chinese-owned apps like Red Note. Fallout tonight after Meta's mega-move to eliminate traditional fact-checking. I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits. San, what the hell is happening with social media and with these internet tech overlords right now? First, you got the U.S. TikTok ban, which, like, it did happen. TikTok went down and then came back.
with a shout out to President Trump. The fear of that ban leading to mass migration towards a Chinese app called Red Note, topping the app stores here in Canada. An app which, by the way, apparently presents an even more egregious risk to privacy than TikTok. There was like the billionaire's row of American tech giants at Trump's inauguration. Then the update on Elon Musk's Sieg Heil is that like Reddit, many of the biggest...
subreddits are blocking all links to X in an effort to make it even more irrelevant. We'll see how that goes. There is now infighting, like you figure they won. They are on the winning team with Trump, but now they're fighting amongst themselves about tech contracts, OpenAI, Sam Altman fighting with Musk out in public. And of course, you can't forget Meta, who kicked off this latest news cycle of social media chaos, announcing that they were going to back away.
from content moderation, perhaps as a part of their move towards a more manly, aggressive internet. What is happening, San? We have handed over the world to a bunch of very narrow math geniuses. They're not even particularly good at a lot of types of theoretical math and computational math. It's just one narrow area of math. And because of that skill, they now rule the universe. You know what they're really not good at?
These are not humanities people. These are not people who are funny. They're not people who are like interesting, nuanced thinkers. They're very faddish. Zuckerberg suddenly, he's all about manliness and bow hunting and aggression. And we idolize them as these mythic figures and they've got like big personal brands, but like Elon Musk can't tell a joke. And Zuckerberg for all of his, like, I'm a classicist. He can't really articulate a philosophy or an ideology.
or have any consistency or reason as he goes from one thing to the next, they suck. Yeah, and Peter Thiel thinks he's a philosopher. Mark Andreessen, like these folks that run venture capital down in the States, they've underwritten all of the biggest communications and tech firms have now spilled over into every single type of like business model that you can imagine. Pretty much even like the oil companies are going to be owned by these guys. And in this phenomenal book.
I really advise anyone who's listening to read it. It's called The End of Reality by Jonathan Taplin. And it's essentially a profile of four of these guys, Musk, Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen. And it's pretty scary. I don't want to make a value judgment about the way they were raised, but no coincidence that there was a thread that difficult childhoods didn't really fit in, problems with parents, you know, their own identity.
Teal's case, I don't know how long he's identified as being gay, but he came out eventually. Took Gawker down for revealing it. Right. He destroyed a promising, vibrant news source that was not without its problems and complications, but which was the last news source that I think legitimately was a threat to power. And operated.
on a model using principles and philosophies very similar to what's being defended by these same folks now. That's right. Not just free speech, but kind of a laissez-faire attitude towards like, yeah, we published the Hulk Hogan sex tape. So what? It's going to be public. Now, I don't agree with that, but Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk of 2025 seem to agree that there should be as little gatekeeping as possible. But when it suited them, this is the danger.
in my earlier tirade against them and how bad they are telling jokes and how I'm smarter than them. I'm not smarter than them. The things that they're smart about, they're really, really smart about. And that's limited to a very narrow element of what they do. They are not smart at understanding how policies are interconnected. They are not smart at realizing the difference between an economy and a market. They're not smart at understanding that when we talk about, like with TikTok, for example.
How can you have concern about national security and safety, but utterly disregard when Zuckerberg is testifying before Congress last year and he's asked about, did you know that Instagram, if you're looking for child sexual abuse material, like literally material showing child abuse, sexual abuse, that you get a note, you get a little card that pops up on Instagram saying you're about to see child sexual abuse material and then you're taken to that material. Let me ask you this.
How many times did an Instagram user who got this warning that you're seeing images of child sexual abuse, how many times did that user click on see results anyway? I want to see that. Senator, I'm not sure if we stored that, but I'll personally look into this and we'll follow up after. And what follow up did Instagram do when you have a potential pedophile clicking on I'd like to see child porn? What did you do next when that happened? Senator, I think that an important.
piece of context here is that any context that we think is child sexual abuse... Mr. Zuckerberg, that's called a question. What's problematic about it is we're concerned about sort of national security interests and safety interests in that realm. Patent rights and data mining and monitoring of individuals and global espionage and intelligence and all of these things. But when we have them sitting in front of Congress, five of them, CEOs of the social media platforms, including Zuckerberg, and
They're asked about, why don't you guys care about the protection of individuals, usually young children? Why don't you care that when someone's looking for child sexual abuse material, all they have to do is punch in a couple of keywords in Instagram, and they're going to be able to get whatever they're looking for. This material wasn't just living on the dark corners of Instagram. Instagram was helping pedophiles find it by promoting graphic hashtags.
Including hashtag ped whore and hashtag preteen sex to potential buyers. And you, because you're protected, there's a law called the Communications Decency Act down in the U.S. And it refuses to regard them as publishers. And it's been around since 1996. And those protections that were put in place for online entities, those were enacted now almost 30 years ago.
As we know, how the internet has evolved and what it's turned into, where you can buy illegal drugs and, like I said, the child sexual abuse material and human trafficking and all kinds of other illicit, you know, behavior and illegal actions that go on. You can coerce someone to commit suicide. You can, like, have a terrorist organization using platforms as recruiting grounds or planning grounds. I could go on and on and on. And yet, that foundational piece of legislation, the communications decency.
Act, Section 230. It refuses to view them as publishers. And that's what they want. They want impunity. And as you said, Jesse, and as I alluded to, these are not people who understand the complexities of being a publisher. When you're the New York Times, you're grappling over every word. You are responsible for it. Every letter that goes into that publication. And you're thinking about it constantly.
And you've got a hundred year old tradition and you've got lawyers and you've got teams of like experienced, experienced professionals who've done this all their lives. And over at Meta, oh, we're just going to get rid of the developers that were supposed to create the safeguards to protect against child sexual abuse material. We'll just throw that out. All the content moderators, oh, yeah, don't need that anymore. We'll let you self-govern. They are not smart enough to be publishers.
They're much smarter than that. They're smart enough to realize how hard it is to be a publisher. And the lesson they've learned since they got humiliated before governments, before Congress, after Trump's first victory, when they conceded to reasonable minds that like.
We can demonstrate that you have allowed foreign interference into our politics. We can demonstrate that you have opened the door to all of these evils. We can demonstrate that you have developed tools that prey upon people's worst impulses. We can show you the misinformation you've spread. And when they were on their back heel, because they're also like cowards when they are threatened.
They scurried and sputtered and apologized and promised they would do something about it. They're here. You're on national television. Would you like now to apologize to the victims who have been harmed by your product? Show them the pictures. Would you like to apologize for what you've done to these good people? This is why we invest so much and are going to continue doing extremely big efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things that your families have had to suffer.
And they've spent the time since realizing how hard it is. And they contradicted themselves a hundred different ways. Elon Musk's faints towards free speech while banning journalists from Twitter. Zuckerberg now talking about free speech. You can't share news in Canada. It's hilarious to me that this guy's talking about how it's a return to their roots of allowing real expression when you cannot share news in a market as big as Canada, really anywhere. But that's still part of Facebook.
And that's the thing. The only view Canada is a market. Like their entire essence is nothing more than a market driven enterprise. They don't have any concerns about non-market conditions. They don't operate in any way that's not transactional. Like what you said about publishers is so important. You have two people, like let's say in university, one person just wants to make money. The other person, for whatever reason, has this driving impulse to like do good and like, you know, help with justice issues and pursue certain things that make the world a better place.
I don't know why they're different, but one thing I do know, one decides to go off and work for Google. One decides to go off and work as a journalist making, you know, 60, 70,000 bucks a year.
The only thing they share, I guess, philosophically, I don't think that this is about a shared audiology, but there is a worship of like game theory amongst guys like this, that the world is sort of like a video game. And there's just a series of variables. And why they seem so malleable is like, that's sort of part of it. You adapt yourself to whatever the circumstances are of the day. And ultimately...
They have completely reversed themselves as being thought of as, remember when they were like the saviors of progressive politics, the tech was going to be like this boon to democracy and human interconnection. No, obviously it suits them as business people to have Trump in office and they have moved him by funding him towards serving their interests. A lot of them, their net worth has gone up dramatically in the last few months. And yeah, of course they would rather have responsibilities that they once said that they would be equal to.
to be relieved of them. So we've heard a lot and we've talked a lot about Meta laying off the human beings that they employed as fact checkers and content moderators. It goes way beyond that. We're going to talk about other tools that Meta is turning off, tools that are there to stop misinformation and bad content. A couple of news stories are pointing to some really troubling content that is visible on Meta platforms, Instagram and Facebook. Wait for that after the break.
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It's not just content moderation that Facebook has gotten rid of. It's not just the fact checkers, more fact checkers than anybody else in America employees, gone. And he like insulted them on the way out. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US. They're all biased, these journalists that he hired. But also the machine learning aspects of content moderation.
Casey Newton of Platformer reported last week that Meta is shutting down a machine learning system that helps stop the spread of misinformation and viral hoaxes. So they built tools. They always hated leaving anything to humans. They always wanted it to be automated. And some of the tools were to this purpose of making sure that things like Pizzagate don't go viral immediately. Here's why you need these systems. It's not just about detecting that some misinformation is going viral, eliminating some hoax from spreading. It's also about...
moderating the ad ecosystem? Because, like, here are the kind of ads that you can find on meta platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Washington Post reporting sexually explicit Facebook ads raise eyebrows in Europe. Meta may be entering its free speech era in the US, but a report turned up thousands of sexually explicit Facebook ads in Europe. Should they be turning off these tools or, like, making them better?
Globe and Mail reporting here in Canada that they found ads on Meta's platforms for human smuggling. Listen to this. Canada to USA, safe reach, the Facebook post says. No police, low price, payment after reach. Canada to USA, safe game, cheapest in market, 100% guarantee, Instagram post reads. Smugglers offering to help people cross the border illegally into the U.S. are openly advertising their services on social media.
The Globe and Mail has found multiple posts from people smugglers who are promoting safe routes to the United States, including from Montreal and B.C., with some claiming there will be no police involvement or checkpoints. And then we have to square that with all of Trump's claims about the border and all these issues. So on one hand...
You have the right and Republicans and the tech folks and the platforms who want to do all these things with impunity. They don't want any regulation. They just figure like, let it be the Wild West. But then why is Trump like whining and complaining about the exchange of drugs across the border illegally and human smuggling and other problems? I've read all these stories now about people coming into Canada from India, for example, who are then using services like this advertised on these platforms to get over to the United States illegally.
This is what's sort of hilarious about the lack of detail and understanding around the issues. So you're going to come after us with tariffs to cure all these problems, but you're not going to go to Musk and Zuckerberg and all the other social media folks and say, hey, why do you enable all the legal immigration? Why do you enable human smuggling across the border? Why do you enable the illicit?
exchange and enterprise of illegal drugs between countries like through your platforms. We don't see any of that concern. This is the bottom line of it is like, it's not that complicated. And in a way, it's silly for us to be like, what is the ideology? The ideology is self-interest, is free speech of my speech and suppression of speech. If it's, I don't know, revealing that like a tech overlord is gay when they're in the closet or free speech that somehow hurts their interests. It's free markets.
Unless they don't want the markets to be free. But you know, Jesse, I actually wonder how much ideology is involved. After the social network came out, the profile of Zuckerberg, how he basically from the Winklevoss twins stole their idea and created a platform to rate and rank women, you know, in universities across the United States on the basis of how attractive they were. His original enterprise or his interest in whatever, even if he stole it from someone else. What did that have to do?
with what Meta fundamentally is involved in now. What's been suggested by people who've watched him very carefully, who've profiled him, you know, I believe it's Kara Swisher, some of the stuff I've read late that she's detailed very interestingly about him. And the conclusion is, he doesn't have a clue of what he wants. He doesn't know what the next step is going to be. He has never known what Facebook, Meta, Instagram, what it was supposed to be. I've seen whistleblowers give their own personal accounts, their anecdotes of working under him, saying,
They don't know what they're doing. They're literally like a bunch of frat boys, devoid of ideology, devoid of a personal philosophy, devoid of like a real worldview. They're kind of like childish. I don't damn them for this necessarily. Who could have anticipated how popular these tools would become? All technology follows unexpected routes because of people. So especially if the technology is about people. And it's funny that these guys are...
making tools that are about human connection and how people feel when that's just what they're so removed from. So, yeah, they were just sort of like gamblers and improvisers. But they just let the technology go where it was going to go. They let the market take it where it was going to take it. They didn't know what it was going to become. They didn't have like a...
a real interest. But there's a talent to improvising effectively. And for everyone, Zuckerberg, who was able to change it, rework it, there are a hundred other apps and MySpaces out there that were not able to exploit that. Yeah, and there's a lot of people around him. But that's not my point. My point is, we, and the book that I mentioned, The End of Reality, the fear of mine, the danger for us collectively, is that when we infuse...
all of this grandeur and we come to see these people as iconoclasts and as godlike with these powers and these abilities that are so above normal humans. When you listen to the way Musk talks about like everyday average people, he's got this worldview that you've got the worker bees and then you've got folks in the middle and then you've got people like him.
The enlightened class. I agree. Like a caste system. Glorifying these guys. It's the cult of Steve Jobs, who is really like, I mean, these are talented people in their own way, but you know, he smushed an MP3 player together with a smart, like whatever. They're good marketers. They're good at designing things. Like, great. Let's like. I wouldn't put Steve Jobs in the same category as a lot of these guys. Well, all these guys are like, maybe you can make a better case for Steve Jobs, but they are all taking what was built around Steve Jobs and applying it to themselves. And they are like stunted adolescents. They don't know anything about.
being responsible in a community. They're not connected to human beings the way that the rest of us are. They're interesting people. Some of them are very talented people. The problem is it's not just glorifying them and putting them on a pedestal. It's also demonizing them and making them the biggest enemies in the history of the world. But you do have to ask yourself, like with a guy like Zuckerberg, with a guy like Musk, do they really care about the harm that they're doing?
I have no idea. And I have no idea if they reach a certain point where they want to buy their way into respectability. I think a lot of these tech guys have made promises that at one point they're going to give their wealth away. I just don't want to live in a world where we are actually dependent on one of these guys being a more decent human than one of these other guys. It's very clear to me that they need rules. They need rules and, you know.
The Communications Decency Act, its defenders will say that if we didn't have these rules making the internet kind of a dumb pipe, making these websites different than publishers, then we wouldn't have the internet. We wouldn't have had the huge explosion of this industry and all this innovation. But we need rules now. And at the time of that, regulators and government, they didn't even know what this stuff was to regulate it. They would have done a bad job of it. But I think it's really overdue and clear that, like, you know, Thomas Edison was a piece of shit. Henry Ford was a racist asshole.
We got to get over all of our illusions about these guys being like, oh, government doesn't know what they're doing, but these guys, these guys will save us all. These guys are always shitty. And eventually we learned that they are rapacious, selfish bastards who need to be hemmed in, broken up, regulated. That comes sooner or later. And the issue of our time, this existential issue of our time, and Biden said this in his last big address to the U.S., was that if you're comfortable living under an oligarchy, then be comfortable.
If you want to see an experiment like that lead to what we have in Russia, then be fine with it. If you think what these far-right Steve Bannon types and a lot of the people that they buy into that we should view the CEO as the president or the president as the CEO. We want a culture and a society that is going to be led by a CEO. We basically want an oligarchy.
Haven't we decided that or haven't Americans? Isn't that what they very literally have decided? It's going to be interesting these next four years. San, as you will recall from last time and the time before, we like to duly note stories that our listeners may have missed. Do you have something to do to note today? I don't know if listeners would have missed this, but the nuance of it, like why are the liberal contenders for the leadership all bailing on the carbon tax?
Is anyone going to point out that the Parliamentary Budget Office has pointed out that in five years, almost every single household in Canada will make money from it? That all three, Karina Gould, Christopher Freeland, Mark Carney, they have all been on the record. So Gould is now saying she'll freeze it. Carney and Freeland are...
suggesting that they would eliminate the consumer carbon tax. But if you go back into all of their statements, Gould just, I believe, in September, Freeland repeatedly in the House of Commons as finance minister and deputy PM, Freeland's comment fairly recently in the House of Commons was, it is the best economic system to attack climate change. It is the best way to do it. Gould has said similar things.
Carney has an entire chapter in his book, Values, where he talks about it being the most effective market way. And actually, Carney says it's inevitable because he says with all of the capitalization of industries outside of petrochemicals, so basically energy alternatives, getting all kinds of financing now from banks around the world, and he was a big part of that. He has basically written in his book how basically carbon pricing.
is the way to transition. It is the economic policy. But now all of them are, like, backing away from it. And every single thing I've read, there's not one person who I think follow these things closely and really know how to read the tea leaves. They have all said nothing but a political move. Nothing but a response to Polyev. I don't think that you're being fair to their feelings. I don't know if you've ever been called carbon tax man San.
Or something hurtful like that. I have been. Well, then you should be more sensitive because Pierre called her carbon tax Christia. Pierre called him carbon tax carny. He's now getting a little bit more original. Those words really hurt. And I also think that, you know, if you are telling me that the carbon tax makes me money.
Why do they call it a tax? I don't understand. They took $3 and gave me four. I don't want to do the math here. I'm not a mathematician. All I know is it's called a tax. But how hard would it be for the media to dig into this? What a concession to Polyev's insults to Canadians. Like, oh, damn.
He said ax the tax. We don't have anything that good. We can't fucking do this. Let's just blow up our policy. Yeah, let's just, we got to get away from this thing. It's just got the word tax in it too many times. We have C in our name. He's got us here. He's got us, folks. Duly noted. Sam, I have one last thing to duly note here. You worked for the Toronto Star, yeah? I did. They specialize in a certain kind of first person piece that I feel is written specifically to enrage me. Like they've got my numbers.
so down with these pieces. Like, I don't know who gave them access to my buttons, but okay, what am I talking about here? Catherine Bradbury has an opinion piece in the Star, and I don't know what to do but read from it. With Trump back in, Canadian boomers are in a fighting mood. God help me, I pressed click on this. At a dinner party of three quarter lifers last weekend,
Donald Trump's economic and possibly tactical invasion of Canada dominated the conversation. After hearing our resistance plans, I'll say this to Trump. You have no idea of the freedom fighter you've unleashed in Canada's over-60s. This is the central thesis of the peace, Sam, that the boomers of Canada are going to take on Trump.
The zesty host to my right plotted a subversive cell of himself and four friends, all of us lifelong backwoods skiers. We'll dress in white, and with our white hair against the white snow, they'll never see us coming, he said, eyes ablaze. We'll call ourselves the 69ers. No, don't talk about 69ing, Boomer. My own resistance cell, where we'll go without the internet. But how will I check my daily step count?
Or the New York Times top recipes. She thinks she's cute. Why do they think they're cute? Read The Economist's last issue. The problem with the world, boomers. Folks who have more time to go backwoods skiing.
And figuring out what to do with like all of the money that they've accrued from their real estate purchases 50 years ago. Oh, enjoy, enjoy. Just stop telling me about how you are. Yeah, I don't really think they have enough time between the backwoods skiing and like the other trips and dinner parties. I don't really think they're going to have a lot of time to be doing any freedom fighting. Hoarding all of the post-World War II wealth that Canada accumulated, hoarding all of the real estate.
Enjoy whatever. I'm over it. But stop telling me that you, like, there were like, was there like 18 months where you like protested wars? Yeah, their lives sound, from that brief anecdote that you related, their lives sound pretty miserable. One woman said she would pass rebel messages in her homemade focaccia. We goofed around at dinner. Until we didn't. Our high spirits waned at the dessert course, a delicious pistachio bundt cake, when a deep foreboding took hold of our party.
And this is when things get serious and she starts talking about it like, well, maybe there's something to this. Maybe the boomers can get together and have another kick at the can and take on the establishment. And to validate this theory, she calls a young activist she knows. Emily Hunter, a 40-year-old climate activist in Toronto. I called her after the dinner party and she did not mock me.
And my companions, instead, she doubled down on our superpower. What we're seeing right now, this is the quote, is a regalvanizing of the boomer activist base from the 60s and 70s. And on a pedantic news level, I must duly note that we are not seeing right now any regal...
nor is any example of this regalvanization. In fact, the 60s, Trump, who is very much a creature of that selfish generation, they made the world this way. They are not a part of trying to get us out of this mess. Duly noted. That's our show for today. Thank you for joining me. You can email me about it at jesse at canadaland.com.
I read everything you send. San, this has been great. Where can people find you and your work? At thepointer.com. Holy smokes. Our new show, The Copernic Affair, is off to an incredible launch. It is on the charts and doing really big numbers. I think this might be the buzzy investigative show that you're going to have to say no spoilers when people start talking about it. It really deserves the success that it's seeing because it is...
an intriguing captivating compelling it's it's bingeable in like the least cheap way
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Visit them online at cfuv.ca. Hey, you can listen ad-free on Amazon Music, included with Prime. On October 3rd, 1980, a bomb was detonated outside a synagogue on Copernic Street in Paris. My mother...
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