Are Social Media Platforms Killing Our Democracy? (with Imran Ahmed) 41:59

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Hey everyone, it's Reed. Before we get started, I just want you to understand that what we're fighting is multi-front battle.

There will be the airwaves, there will be the internet, there will be neighborhoods and town hall meetings, but all of it matters. It all ladders up to making sure that if we've done our part in our cities, in our counties, in our states, that we will be victorious in November. I thank you so much for listening. I hope you share this podcast with your friends, your families, and your colleagues, and anybody who wants to know more about this fight. Thanks everybody for listening, and now on with the show.

Welcome back to The Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Gale. Today, I'm joined by Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, or CCDH.

CCDH is an organization whose mission is to protect human rights and civil liberties online, particularly by holding social media companies accountable, and recently emerged victorious at a lawsuit with Elon Musk and X, formerly known as Twitter. Imran is an authority on social and psychological malignancies on social media, such as identity-based hate, extremism, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Well, we've got no shortage of any of that. Today, he's coming to us from the mother country, the UK. Imran, welcome back.

It's great to be here. So it's been a little while since we had you on. So why don't you, if you don't mind for the audience, remind us about your background and how you came to found CCDH and what it is you guys do. So the Center for Countering Digital Hate had its origins in 2016 when I was working in British politics and

Two things happened pretty much simultaneously. One was the rise of anti-Semitism and extreme anti-Semitism on the left of British politics in the Labour Party, run then by Jeremy Corbyn. And in particular, the way that that was happening in digital spaces, things like Facebook groups, which were called Jeremy Corbyn's fans, but actually were being run by anti-Semites, where they were dripping the lies that underpin hatred against Jews and

And the second thing was the EU referendum, the Brexit referendum, as it's known now, where a lot of lies and conspiracy theories about hateful conspiracy theories against black people, against Muslims, and also about how the elections were going to be rigged, which might sound familiar, were being shoveled through cyberspace.

But in the middle of that referendum, something pretty terrible happened. My colleague, Jo Cox, who was a member of parliament, a 35-year-old mother of two, was shot, stabbed and beaten to death by a far-right terrorist on the streets of her constituency. And when that happened, it really brought home that what was happening online, all this kind of nonsense, had a real offline cost to it.

And I spent three years studying how bad actors were weaponizing platforms, talking to the platforms until I realized that they didn't care. And so we launched the CCDH as a public organization seeking to publicly hold them accountable for the proliferation of hate and lies on their spaces. And over the last four and a half years, we've become, I guess, the leading check and balance on social media platforms' ability to profit from the way in which they hyper-amplify bullshit and hate.

Right. And so there's that expression, maybe I'm stealing it from Kara Swisher, enragement equals engagement. And so now it feels like, Imran, now everything, every post, every headline, whether or not it's from some deep, dank place on the Internet or the New York Times, has a headline or some banner designed to get somebody to click on it in anger.

As precisely the problem is that what works best on social media platforms, they've realized over time is negativity. And when everything has to be bent to be negative, it eventually leads to that brittleness, the polarization, the sense of us being locked in some sort of mortal struggle, when actually what people are debating is two different, perfectly legitimate views over how to run a country.

but it also opens up space for extreme forms of anti-democratic forces like the fascist parties we see rising all over Europe today.

and one might argue in the United States. Well, I would not just argue it. I would state it plainly. So let's talk a little bit about this. So you started in 2016. This is going to sound like a pretty basic question, Imran. I'm sorry. Is it worse now than it was? If it is, how much so? Is it different than it was? Because I just think about

In 2016, you know, Twitter was the thing and Facebook was the thing. And then 2020, Twitter was still the thing. Facebook was still the same thing. You know, Instagram is coming online. Obviously, YouTube's always had a very strong presence. Now here in 2024, it's all of those things.

Plus, you have the big monster called TikTok, which is gobbling up eyeballs as fast as it can. So based on the last eight years, and I know there's no such thing as a straight line trajectory, but how do you feel about where this fight has gone since you started? So it's definitely gotten worse in some ways. And let me give you two ways in which it's gotten worse. First of all, the aggressiveness of the algorithms that reshape the world for us and reshape reality.

have become much more addictive, much more effective, and much more virulent in the way they present a distorted view of the world. Second is that bad actors have become more sophisticated and their tactics and strategies have evolved over time. They're getting smarter at what they do. They're more effective at what they do. The propagandists that slyly undermine our democracy undermine the integrity of our societies.

But then there are countervailing forces. So in 2016, when I used to talk to people about how Facebook was destroying the values that underpin democracy, people would laugh at me and no one's doing that anymore.

We've realized that online harms have a real offline impact. The second thing is that platforms in 2016, people will kind of just see them as being nice, liberal tech bros who are trying to make the world a better place. And, you know, if bad people were using their platforms, it wasn't their fault. And I think people really now identify the platforms as the villains. But there is still much to be done. The truth is that while people are realizing that there's a problem, we still haven't got solutions in place for it.

And, you know, all too often when we talk about solutions, people go, well, you want to talk about censorship? And I'm saying, no, no, no, I don't want censorship. Actually, I think everyone has their right to be wrong. But no one has a God-given right to profit from hate speech or disinformation, nor does anyone have a God-given right to hide from everyone else the ways in which they are reshaping our information world.

And so we are an organization that argues for transparency and accountability. And in the UK and EU legislation has now been passed demanding transparency from these platforms, holding them accountable so that we can actually create costs for them if they do promote hate and lies. And that can be through advertising, through reputational damage, whatever else. But in the US, nothing has changed. And it is so frustrating to see the inaction of Congress

us in a crisis that's not just about democracy. It's also about the mental health of our kids if you're thinking about eating disorder and self-harm content. It's got so many effects on our society, Reid. I was talking to somebody the other day that said, Amazon, Google, Meta, you name it, they have more lobbyists individually than there are members of Congress. Look, I used to work in the public affairs and public relations space.

And there is an unending flow of money and an unending number of companies that are willing to work for that money and unending number of front groups they set up. Right. And they all have something to do with freedom or speech or something. Right. And Ron, like it's like this is a very sophisticated operation. It's not just like Meta does something. Meta does something and it spends hundreds.

Hundreds of millions, maybe a billion dollars a year, all of it to protect all of the stuff that you're talking about. We have this Section 230, which basically said going back years now that platforms weren't responsible for what's on their sites, on their platforms. But that's also sort of relying on the fox to guard the hen house.

It really is a very sophisticated industry now that has emerged to defend the absolute right of platforms to not be held accountable for the way that they operate their businesses and to not take responsibility for the harms that they produce.

And you know, that is inevitable. Like one of the things that really strikes me is that CCDH was inevitable too, that you cannot expect to profit so lavishly as people like Mark Zuckerberg and the others have done for so long while causing harm and not expect someone to stand up and go, excuse me, I don't think that's right, mate.

And at the same time, when we then expose them, it is inevitable that they will fight back. And of course, they have more resources than us, Reid. We have $4 million a year. They have, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's worth $100 billion.

He's making $4 million a day. Dude, $4 million could fall out of his pocket and he would not notice it. So, you know, we're in that situation. It's really, really, it's a really challenging fight. But guess what, Reid? CCDH is kind of winning. I mean, that's why, as you know, we were sued by Elon Musk because just one of our studies, he claims, cost him $100 million in lost advertising.

And when we're so successful in producing the evidence and the advocacy that drives real impacts on these companies, then you've got to say that's $4 million a year. That's well worth spending. For sure. So let's talk a little bit about that. That's a good segue into Elon Musk. And so

You all, you did a study and you were showing, as I recall, it was this massive uptick in racism, hate speech, anti-Semitism on the Twitter platform that he purchased. What is that? In October of 22 now, I think. Yeah. So, you know, we're talking 18 months ago. And the idea here being that like a bunch of advertisers are like, I don't want to be next to

der Sturmer. I don't want to be next to white people are awesome.org, right? And everything else. And advertisers do what the market suggested, which was they got the hell out of there. But in Elon Musk's twisted world, if I'm getting this right, Amron, and please correct me where I'm wrong, is like, no, you told the truth. You made the platform look bad. That hurts my bottom line. Therefore, I'm going to sue you for defamation.

Well, I mean, there was two studies that we did that really, really clearly angered him. One was a study that showed that when he took over the platform, having put up the bat signal to hate actors and said, you're welcome back here, that there was a massive increase in hate speech on the platform. The use of the N-word tripled on the platform in the week after he took over.

compared to the year before. And no one wants a world where there is a tripling in use of the most offensive term about African Americans, the use of anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, racist words all increased. The second study we did looked at 10 reinstated bad actors, you know, racist, misogynist, homophobes. And by the way, I count antisemitism, and I know you do too, as a form of racism. It is racism, full stop. I'm not going to divorce the two. Antisemitism is anti-Jewish racism.

And we showed that 10 reinstated accounts were worth $18 million a year of advertising because they generate attention. And that attention has ads placed on it. And that's what really pissed him off because advertisers then read that on the front page of the New York Times. They left en masse. And he didn't sue us for defamation, Reid, because we had the defense of truth if he'd sued us for defamation. He sued us for the act of doing research itself.

He said that by downloading 9,500 tweets to study them, we were scraping his platform and therefore we owed him $10 million. And he said that scraping wasn't allowed in the contract, in the terms of service. Now,

Now, of course, hate isn't allowed on the terms of service of those platforms, but he ignores that every day. And what the judge concluded was, you don't really care about them downloading 9,500 tweets. In fact, that can cause you no real harm. What you're obsessed about is them telling people what they found.

that CCDH held up a mirror to your platform and you didn't like what you saw in that mirror. And rather than doing what normal people do, which is have a haircut and brush their teeth and have a shave, you sued the mirror saying, how dare you? I'm beautiful. Support for the Lincoln Project podcast comes from Odoo. If you feel like you're wasting time and money with your current business software or just want to know what you could be missing, then you need to join the millions of other users who've switched to Odoo.

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We saw on camera just a couple of weeks ago, Imran, you know, him sort of lose his mind on Don Lemon, right? This guy, you know, Lemon had left CNN or been pushed out, whatever. It doesn't really matter. But, you know, then he inked a deal with X.

And, you know, he's going to do a sit down with Elon. And I have to assume that Don knew what he was doing when he started asking Musk these questions. And then Musk got really pissed off and basically said, you're fired. Right. Or be careful. Don't do this stuff. There was just a story in Rolling Stone about, you know, in this deposition last month where.

There was a kid suing him for defamation because he posted a picture of this kid from Riverside, California, and said he was basically an Antifa activist. And the kid got all sorts of trouble headed his way, not surprisingly. And the judge decided to release the interview against the CEO's wishes. And it's just a disaster. So like, and this is an unfair question. I don't want you to psychologically break down this guy. But how does, you know, I guess if we're all

multitudes. How does this guy live all day, every day, internally and externally? Or is it sort of Trump-like, which is their superpower is their reality distortion field, and when reality comes in contact with it, they just can't handle it? So I think Elon doesn't have the talent that the aforementioned former president has in creating a reality distortion field around him. I think the truth is that

He is a victim of the reality distortion field that is X, that is the platform that he runs. He has Twitter brain. He believes the nonsense he sees on there as being real. And, you know, one of the frustrations with Mr. Musk is that he's clearly a very, very brilliant CEO of companies like Tesla and SpaceX. You know, I read the Isaacson biography and I admire hugely his

orientation to improving processes, his instinct for quality control, his indefatigability in improving the delivery of processes, the delivery of products, and his desire to do that. But at the same time, this is a guy that is ill-suited to running a platform because he is incapable of divorcing his interest from the public interest. He thinks the public interest means anything that's in his interest. And that's just not true.

So in some ways, though, you know, he's not alone in that. And then you see and let me pick on, you know, the tech bros for a minute here, Imran, right? Like they all seem to get, you know, maybe is it when they when their bank account tips up over a billion that those worlds start to merge or collide, depending on how you want to look at it, which is insane.

If I want it to happen, it'll happen. And ergo, because it's happening and I want it to happen, it's good for humanity, whether or not, you know, and I don't really care or I don't understand or it doesn't matter. I mean, is that right? Is there this sort of egotism, this sort of, you know, I asked Michael Lewis when I was interviewing about Sam Bankman Freed, like, do these guys all have these God complexes, right, that this rarefied air creates around them?

Yeah. And I don't think that's unique to social media platforms that they tell themselves that they're doing something to save the world when in fact, all they're doing is making themselves richer. There's nothing wrong with making yourself rich. I started my career at Merrill Lynch, ironically. And one of the things I always liked about working in finance was that no one ever pretended that we're there to save the world. It was like, no, I'm there to get rich, bro. And there's a sort of

almost palate-plensing honesty to that that I quite admire. Whereas what Elon has told himself is that he is trying to save humanity. I mean, he says it all the time. I'm saving humanity. And if you believe that your job is to save humanity rather than to make yourself rich, there's nothing that you wouldn't do to destroy anyone that gets in the way. I just think he's talking nonsense. I don't think that him running X rather than Jack Dorsey or someone else is going to save humanity. In fact, the reality is that he may be killing democracy, throttling it,

in a web of disinformation, lies, and hate that is actually causing irreparable damage to the values that underpin our democracy, making us a more brittle, a more divided, a more polarized, a more hateful society. And that isn't good, man. But why, if objectively, and everyone's entitled to an opinion, Imran, but if objectively, if

There are no times in history that hate speech leads to something good, right? With the exception of a conflagration so awful that it makes everybody sort of sit up for a while, not forever, but for a while and say never again. And again, I guess with a guy like Musk, objectivity is out the window and everything's subjective. But how can you tell yourself that?

that I am pursuing the highest rates of human freedom, the highest level of human freedom. I'm 100% free speech all the time. And he clearly throttles people he doesn't like or punishes people he doesn't like. I mean, how do those thoughts live in the head together? Because he doesn't think very hard about them. I mean, you know, if every time my Jewish neighbor walked out of his house, there was a burning cross outside it and people chanting...

the Jews must be eradicated, he wouldn't leave his house very often and he may withdraw from public life. So, you know, freedom of speech for an abuser actually vitiates the fundamental rights of speech and of public participation of the victim. But also the rest of us who don't want to be in that society. I wouldn't want to live in that neighborhood. It'd be horrifying on a daily basis. And so actually what he's doing is creating a toxic sphere where the loudest voices, the only voices left standing are those of

Sociopaths. They're not creating a planet in which democracy survives or the smartest survive. He's creating a planet in which

basically sociopaths survive, you know, planet of the sociopath. It is not a pleasant place to be, the Elon Musk world. And we know where societies like that end up. I'm European, I mean, clearly from my accent. And I've just been doing a documentary for German television a few minutes ago. And, you know, speaking to them about antisemitism, they nod sagely because they know where that leads to. They know it leads to bad things.

You know, one of the most recent bits of research that we did was some polling of children and adults in America. And the findings that we had were really disturbing. For the first time ever, 14 to 17 year olds are more likely to believe conspiracy theories about Jews than adults. And high use social media kids using social media for over four hours a day. They were 54% of American 14 to 17 year olds that use social media for four plus hours a day believe that Jewish people control politics and economy. And that is insane.

terrifying. That is, you know, Weimar Republic, third right levels of belief, and that leads to bad things. So I think that we are doing irreparable damage to our society. Okay. Well, let's go back to a couple of things there. One is, you know, I have a teenager. Can I get Instagram? No. Why not? Because it's bad for you.

But my friends, I don't care. I'm not your friend's parents. Right. Terrible. Right. I'll print out the research that says they know this is bad for teenage girls and they do it anyway. Right. Nope. Not going to happen. But four hours a day, Emron, for 14 to 17 year olds, four hours a day. That's half the time they spend in school on a daily basis.

Right? I mean, that's an outrageous amount of time. Now I'm going to have to take my kid's phone away just as a, you know, freaking out by extension. I mean, a Pew research study says that currently in America, the average is 4.8 hours a day. So nearly five hours a day. God. That should really, really worry people.

And yeah, I mean, look, one of the most frequent questions I get asked is by parents. Leaving aside all the other work that we do, like the most frequent thing I get asked about is the work that we do on kids. And so we've done research showing that if you so we set up accounts on TikTok in four different countries, UK, US, Canada, Australia. We then recorded the for you feed and we set up accounts as a 13 year old girl.

Within 2.6 minutes, those accounts were getting self-harm content. Within eight minutes, eating disorder content. Now here's the really, really terrifying thing. We named half the accounts like a girl's name like Susan, and we named the other half a name like Susan Lose Weight because there's evidence to suggest that young people will often reflect any mental health or eating disorders or anything else they have in their bios or their username. Those accounts that were called Lose Weight, they got 12 times as much self-harm content.

So the algorithm can recognize vulnerability. And instead of doing what any normal human being would do, we just say, gosh, I've got to be careful. It says, look, I've got a way to addict this kid. They've got a vulnerability and exploits it.

And I think that when you are talking about how parents feel about these platforms, they feel bewildered, terrified, and they feel they have no option but to tell their kids no. But too many parents don't feel they have the option. And I admire you for having, I think, the tenacity to hold that line. But so many of my friends who are parents don't. And

You know, we've just released our latest PSA. I think it's coming out this week. And we've had our PSA running all over the US for the last year, which is basically like a parent sitting next to their child on the sofa and saying, you know where your kids are at 10pm, but you don't know who they're with, and you don't know what they're being told. And that is terrifying to most parents. And so trying to encourage parents to have those healthy conversations with their kids about social media, that's a lot of the work that we do these days. We

We even have a brand new website, protectingkidsonline.org, just for that, just to sort of have a parent's guide on there that we wrote with the father of a young girl who took her own life because of the content that she was exposed to on social media, a guy called Ian Russell, who's on my board, who we worked with to build this parent's guide. Well, and Rob, let's make sure we put both the PSA, if we can get a link to it, Imran, and that website in our show notes so that anybody listening who needs more information can get it. But, you know, I think...

To bring it down to my level of intelligence, Imran, which is far below yours, it's sort of, we've all invited the vampire into the house, right? And once you invite the vampire into the house, you can't kick him out again. And I think we've done that, yeah, collectively as a society.

You know, they've been running an experiment on our society. And the truth is that this is more than just a vampire. This is someone that has extended access to us over a prolonged period of time in which they are playing with the dials of our emotions, our knowledge, the intensity with which hate and disinformation flows in our society. And they're just trying to work out what is the perfect amount of hate and disinformation to maximize time spent on platform so we can show ads for as long as possible.

And they've really refined that. It's a science. I mean, they're hiring psychologists, as many psychologists as they are technologists, trying to make sure that they can manipulate our psychology in the right way. And who the heck authorized them to run an unlicensed psychological experiment on the entire population of the world? Not me.

So I do think that we are in trouble. I still though, like, you know, I am fundamentally in my heart a small L liberal. I don't believe government should tell us what to say ever.

And so all I'm saying is I actually want not less speech, I want more speech. I want the companies to tell us how they are manipulating the information ecosystem. Tell us how your algorithms work. Tell us how your content enforcement rules work. Tell us how the advertising works and how that reshapes the lens through which you present the world.

And then let's have a discussion about it based on real data from inside your platform so we can hold you meaningfully accountable. And if you screw up really badly, then just like any other business in America, you should be subject to negligence law. And I think that that framework, which is really simple, really rational, really, you know, it speaks to a regulatory-backed

market solution for how we fix this proliferation of hate and disinformation in our society. That's what I want as an organization. The problem is, of course, that you've got a guy like Elon Musk that sucked half a million dollars out of my organization by suing us for the most ridiculous reasons possible. And keep in mind, the first time a judge got to see this complaint, and it already cost us half a million dollars, he threw it out. I mean, the ruling is quite extraordinary.

And he threw it out immediately on all counts. So that's the problem is that we are dealing with companies that are willing to play dirty, dirty with us.

You talk about the psychological experiment, but it's worse than that because it's a psychological experiment being carried out on a, I don't know if it's willing or unwilling, maybe unwitting is the better word, Imran. But they're also locking us in the laboratory more and more, which is there's only so many places now you can go to get information, right? Google and Meta and TikTok, everybody else, they're hoovering up bandwidth, they're hoovering up eyeballs. And you see that, you know, I was talking to

Claire Atkin over at CheckMyAds.org the other day, who I think you guys have partnered on stuff before, about the idea that there was a study out that showed just a massive drop off in traffic to right wing websites, which I guess is a good thing. What the real story was, there was a massive drop off in a lot of websites because if I type into my Google search bar,

And Ron, you know, celebrity a got divorced. Now Google will just provide me a preview, right? I don't even have to go to the website. It'll just provide me a preview because it's already scraped all that information, which means let's say if it's a TMZ about celebrities or ESPN about sports, Google's keeping you there. So now it's they're conducting the experiment, but you're in the laboratory and you can't get out of it. Am I right or am I wrong? Am I overstating it?

No, that's exactly it. And look, when we talk about finding information, we literally say, Google it. It's one of those extraordinary brands that has become a verb. And I think that we are in real trouble because it's an oligopolistic system where a small number of companies dominate our information ecosystem, have privatized it, monetized it, and done that all over the world. And they don't pay due attention to whether or not what they're providing is accurate or not.

They have no public service interest at all. It's just about making as much money as quickly as possible by slapping ads on it. And of course, quite often sponsored links come higher up than news links. So, you know, you will find that nonsense and disinformation can quite often have an advantage over information, even on a platform like Google, certainly on platforms like Twitter, messes platforms, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and on YouTube.

Let's talk about this. Let's look forward a little bit. Let's talk about what you guys, I mean, you're doing incredible work around the digital hate speech piece. You're doing incredible work about ensuring that parents have the information they need to make the right decisions for their kids about social media. But what are you working on now? And if we know that this is like the Luddites aren't going to take over, Imran, right? Like somebody's not going to go into Facebook server warehouses all over the world and, you know, start unplugging things. So like, where do we go from here?

So there's three things that are happening right now that really matter that people should know about. First of all, the European Union and the United Kingdom have legislated to produce transparency and accountability legislation. So what's called the Digital Services Act and the Online Safety Act in the UK. And they will allow us to have access to data which we've never had before. Now, they haven't actually put the schemes in place and we're desperately trying to push them to do so. But we're lobbying really hard. We've just opened an office in Brussels to lobby the EU. We've got one in London as well.

The second thing that we're doing is we're getting ready for the elections. And there are 2.5 billion people around the world going to vote in elections this year, all across Europe, the US and elsewhere. And it's vital that we ensure that those are not distorted

by the lens that social media provides on the world around us and the way that they promote disinformation and hate. I'm old enough, I'm 45, so I remember going to college reading Fukuyama and The End of History and being told that democracy had basically won. That's a beautiful idea. I love the idea that we win, that authoritarianism is

It's decisively defeated. But that's not what history has shown. What history has shown is that authoritarianism is finding a new hold. And I think that we're on a tipping point right now in a lot of democracies, in Germany with the AFD, the Alternative for Deutschland, in France with the Front National, the National Front, in Britain, in the US, in all around the world, bad people are getting close to victory.

and people who will never, ever let go of their control. So the end of democracy. So we're doing a lot of work this year on election-related disinformation, on AI-generated disinformation, checking if the guardrails are in place so that platforms are doing the right thing. We did a study on image generators just the other day showing that in the US, all the image generation applications

AI platforms who are vulnerable to producing disinformation about election rigging, about, you know, we got them to do Donald Trump on a plane with Jeffrey Epstein and Joe Biden dying in a hospital. They just don't have the guardrails they promised they'd have in place. But the third thing that's really important is that we're doing a ton of work on kids because there's the Kids Online Safety Act, which...

which senators Blackburn and Blumenthal are pushing for in the US, even if that doesn't go through and it's looking quite shaky at the moment, I'm not confident of its progress through both the House and the Senate. We are going to have to find ways to ensure that there is legislation in place that protects kids in the United States. There's just no excuse for it. There's no excuse...

for telling a kid 10,000 times that they're too fat and that they should go on a 700 calorie a day diet that will kill them. And I'm sorry, but you can't justify that on freedom of speech basis. You just can't.

Yeah, I mean, look, we have a proud tradition. It is enshrined in our foundational documents of free speech. But again, the demarcation is free speech and then harm. And I actually had a guy on not too long ago, Imran, we talked about fire in a crowded theater. Well, you can yell that if there's a fire, right? You shouldn't do it if there's not a fire. And so I think that's the other part. But and I'm going to get philosophical on you for a second, Imran, like about the nature of government. Right. I grew up a Republican.

you know, small government, all that. But the difference between a small, efficient government

and one that does nothing on purpose, to me, are two vastly different things, which is the government, we give it authority. We trade a level of security, right, and freedom for the idea that our elected representatives will do what is in our best interests. But now we have a situation, right, where like we're almost at in-state Ayn Rand stuff, where it's like,

Anytime somebody says we have to regulate meta, we have to regulate Google, we have to do because they are showing demonstrable harm to children. They say market, market, market. You're going to harm our ability to innovate. You know what? Maybe I'm OK with that, Imran. Maybe I'm OK with the fact that they've had 30 years of unfettered innovation and this is where we ended up. Does that make sense?

It does. And this happens with every new industry. So I remember the debate on car safety and, you know, people saying that if you forced people to wear seatbelts, it would end freedom. Like your ability to drive as you want is all that matters. And of course, now there is a market for safety standards in cars.

My wife and I are about to have a child. I would never buy a car that I haven't checked the safety rating and make sure that my child is not going to go flying out of a windscreen the second that I brake. Or that if someone touches my tailpipe, as with the Ford Pinto, it explodes into flames. I mean, we can balance safety with freedom and innovation.

And in fact, we do that in most industries, but for some reason not in social media. And you know, and I know, that that's because of a law that was passed in 1996, which accidentally immunized social media. So before social media platforms even had been invented, that accidentally immunized them against ever being held for negligence or product design flaws.

And I think that that's got to end. This sort of culture of impunity for social media platforms has to end. They should be subject to the same laws as the rest of us. We're not asking for them to be treated differently. We're asking for them to be treated the same as everyone else. No industry is ever... I'm not happy about... I run a charity. I run a 501c3. Do you know how much compliance paperwork I have to fill in every year? I mean, big government...

I have been to the DMV. I get it. Like, yeah,

Yes, government is inefficient and sometimes overweening and overbearing. And the size of the American state, sure, you can have debates over that. I think it's really healthy to have debates over that. But the problem is that an industry that says we should not be subject to the rule, there is also this really fundamental principle in the law that it applies equally and equitably and fairly to each of us, that we're all equal under the law. And here's the thing, Reid.

I know that that's true in America. I was in England when the judgment came through, when the world's richest man sued, you know, a tiny little nonprofit in Washington, D.C. And a judge said, I will judge this based on the merits of the of the arguments. And he ruled in our favor. And that shows that the American justice system still.

still allows us a moment in which we are all seen and treated equally. And I'm really proud of that.

I'm really proud that I live in a country where that's true. I was here in London, actually, when I'm actually in Oxford today, speaking at a conference. And I was in London and I put my arms in the air and I started chanting, USA, USA. I'm sure your friends love that. It made me proud. I think my wife, I was on the phone to my wife and she was just laughing because she knows that she's slowly turning me into...

a real red-blooded American, but apart from the accent, which I really can't shake. But, you know, look, I think that's the point is that I think they should just be subject to the same laws. And I think when they are, we can all pump our arms in the air and say, USA! Because the US will have

A, benefited enormously from the profitability and the innovation of the American economy and the tech economy, but then found a way to make sure it's not completely at odds with the safety and prosperity of the people that live in America. Because right now, it is actually working against our collective prosperity and collective safety.

Right. And again, that's the whole idea is it's out of many one, not there are a few and the rest of you, good luck. I don't even know how you'd say that in Latin, Imran, but that's not the ethos. No. And look, the other thing is that social media is great. It was launched with the promise of connecting the world and actually making us have better discourse.

of allowing more people into it. And the truth is that a platform like X has become a place where really the biggest abusers, the biggest liars, the biggest hate actors, they are the ones who thrive and prosper the most.

And that is not a healthy playing field. It's not healthy for our democracy. And so I want them to live up to their promise. I want them to live up to what technology should be able to do, which is to bring us together, make us more prosperous, make our societies more secure, more knowledgeable, more rich in the way that we are able to communicate with each other and not actually what it has become, which is a place where too many of us feel locked out because they're just such toxic places to be.

Well, as someone who probably spends too much time on them every day, I can promise you that. All right. Emron, as always, thank you for joining me. Where can we find you online and where can we find more about CCDH? So our main website is counterhate.com. To any parents out there who want to download our free parents guide, go to protectingkidsonline.org. And we'd love to hear from you. Please do get in touch.

As always, gang, you can find me on Twitter and TikTok, as unsafe as they both might be, at Reed Galen, on threads and Instagram at Reed underscore Galen USA, and over at Substack on the home front. Imran Ahmed, thanks for joining me. Thank you, Reed. Everybody else, we'll see you next time. Thanks again to everyone for listening.

Be sure to follow and subscribe to The Lincoln Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or however you listen. Don't forget to leave a five-star review. To connect with us, follow us on Twitter, at Project Lincoln. And for more information on our movement, to join our mailing list, subscribe to our newsletter, or make a contribution to our efforts, visit lincolnproject.us.

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