Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2255 - Mark Zuckerberg
Uploaded: 2025-01-10T18:00:12.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2255 - Mark Zuckerberg' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-01-10. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2255 - Mark Zuckerberg' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-01-10. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2255 - Mark Zuckerberg

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
All right, bro, what's happening?
Good to see you.
You too.
What's going on?
You know, chill week.
Yeah, sort of.
This recent announcement that you did about content moderation, how has that
been received?
Probably depends on who you ask.
Right.
But, you know, but look, I mean, I've been working on this for a long time.
So, I mean, you got to do what you think is right.
You know, we've been on a long journey here, right?
I mean, I think at some level you start, you only start one of these companies
if you believe in giving people a voice, right?
I mean, the whole point of social media is basically, you know, giving people
the ability to share what they want.
Right.
And, you know, it goes back to, you know, our original mission is just give
people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.
So, what do you think started the pathway towards increasing censorship?
Because clearly we were going in that direction for the last few years.
It seemed like we really found out about it when Elon bought Twitter and we got
the Twitter files.
And when you came on here and when you were explaining the relationship with
FBI where they were trying to get you to take down certain things that were
true and real and certain things they tried to get you to limit the exposure to
them.
So, it's these kind of conversations.
Like, when did all that start?
Yeah, well, look, I think going back to the beginning, or like I was saying, I
think you start one of these if you care about giving people a voice.
You know, I wasn't too deep on our content policies for like the first 10 years
of the company.
It was just kind of well-known across the company that we were trying to give
people the ability to share as much as possible.
And issues would come up, practical issues, right?
So, if someone's getting bullied, for example, we'd deal with that, right?
We'd put in place systems to fight bullying.
Right.
You know, if someone is saying, hey, you know, someone's pirating copyrighted
content on the service, it's like, okay, we'll build controls to make it so we'll
find IP-protected content.
But it was really in the last 10 years that people started pushing for like
ideological-based censorship.
And I think it was two main events that really triggered this.
In 2016, there was the election of President Trump, also coincided with
basically Brexit in the EU and sort of the fragmentation of the EU.
And then, you know, in 2020, there was COVID.
And I think that those were basically these two events where, for the first
time, we just faced this massive, massive institutional pressure to basically
start censoring content on ideological grounds.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but when it first came up in 2016, did it come
under the guise of the Russian collusion hoax?
Yeah, and this is the thing.
At the time, I was really sort of ill-prepared to kind of parse what was going
on, right?
It's, you know, I think part of my reflection looking back on this is I kind of
think in 2016 and the aftermath, I gave too much deference to a lot of folks in
the media who were basically saying,
okay, there's no way that this guy could have gotten elected except for
misinformation.
People can't actually believe this stuff, right?
It has to be that there's this kind of like massive misinformation out there.
Some of it started with the Russia collusion stuff, but it kind of morphed into
different things over time.
Well, it was, it was, he was so ideologically polarizing, right?
Like people didn't want to believe that anybody looked at him and said, this
should be our president.
Yeah, so, so I took this and just kind of assumed that everyone was acting in
good faith.
And I said, okay, well, there's like, there are concerns about misinformation.
We should, just like when people raised other concerns in the past and we try
to deal with them.
Okay. Yeah. People, people know, you know, if you ask people, no one says that
they want misinformation.
So maybe there's something that we should do to, to basically try to address
this.
But I was really worried from the beginning about basically becoming this sort
of decider of what is true in the world.
That's like kind of a crazy position to be in for billions of people using your
service.
So we tried to put in places or a, you know, a system that would deal with it,
you know, and early on tried to basically make it so that it was really limited.
We're like, all right, we're just going to have the system where there's these
third party fact checkers and they can check the worst of the worst stuff.
Right. So things that are very clear hoaxes that there's like, it's not like,
like we're not parsing speech about whether something is slightly true or
slightly false.
Like earth is flat, you know, things like that. Right.
So that was sort of the original intent.
We put in place the system and it just sort of veered from there.
I think to some degree it's because some of the people whose job is to do fact
checking, a lot of their industry is focused on political fact checking.
So they're just kind of veered in that direction.
And we kept on trying to basically get it to be what we had originally intended,
which is just, you know, it's not the point is to like judge people's opinions.
It's to to provide in this layer to to to kind of help fact check some of the
stuff that seems the most extreme.
But it just, you know, it was it was just never accepted by by people broadly.
I think people just felt like the fact checkers were too biased, not
necessarily even so much in what they ruled, although sometimes I think people
would disagree with that.
But a lot of the time it was just what types of things they chose to even go
and fact check in the first time in the first place.
So I I kind of think like after having gone through that whole exercise, it I
don't know, it's something out of like, you know, 1984, one of these books
where it's just like it really is a slippery slope.
And it just got to a point where it's just, OK, this is destroying so much
trust, especially in the United States, to have this program.
And I guess it was probably about a few years that I really started coming to
the conclusion that we were going to need to to change something about that.
COVID was the other big one where that was that was also very tricky because,
you know, in the beginning, it was, you know, it's like a legitimate public
health crisis, you know, in the in the beginning.
And it's, you know, even people who are like the most ardent First Amendment,
you know, defenders that the Supreme Court has this clear precedent that's like,
all right, you can't yell fire in a crowded theater.
There are times when if there's an emergency, your your ability to speak can
temporarily be curtailed in order to get an emergency under control.
So I was sympathetic to that at the beginning of COVID.
It seemed like, OK, you have this virus. It seems like it's killing a lot of
people.
I don't know. We didn't know at the time how dangerous it was going to be.
So at the beginning, it kind of seemed like, OK, we should give a little bit of
deference to the government and the health authorities on how we should play
this.
But when it went from, you know, two weeks to flatten the curve to, you know,
in like in the beginning, it was like, OK, there aren't enough masks.
Masks aren't that important to them. It's like, oh, no, you have to wear a mask.
And, you know, like everything was shifting around.
I it's become very difficult to kind of follow.
And this really hit.
The most extreme, I'd say, during.
It was during the Biden administration when they were trying to roll out the
vaccine program.
And I'm generally like pretty pro rolling out vaccines.
I think on balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative.
But.
I think that while they're trying to push that program, they also tried to censor
anyone who is basically arguing against it.
And they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly were true.
Right. I mean, they basically pushed us and said, you know, anything that says
that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down.
And I was just like, well, we're not going to do that.
Like, we're clearly not going to do that.
I mean, that's that that is kind of inarguably true.
Who is they who's telling you to take down things?
Yeah, it was it was a talk about vaccine side effects.
It was people in the in the Biden administration.
I think it was, you know, I wasn't involved in those conversations directly,
but I think it was.
How difficult is that to not be involved in those conversations directly?
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Seriously, get on this.
That's got to be strange too, right?
Because you're running the company, but there's clearly you're moderating at
scale that's beyond the imagination.
The number of human beings you're moderating is fucking insane.
Like what is, well, what's a Facebook, how many people use it on a daily basis?
Forget about how many overall, like how many people use it regularly?
It's 3.2 billion people use one of our services every day.
That's it.
Yeah.
No, it's wild.
More than a third of the planet.
That's so crazy.
And it's almost half of Earth.
Well, on a monthly basis, it is probably half of Earth.
But just, I want to say that though, for, there's a lot of like hypercritical
people that are conspiracy theorists and think that everybody is a part of some
cabal to control them.
I want you to understand that whether it's YouTube or all these, whatever place
that you think is doing something that's awful, it's good that you speak.
Because this is how things get changed and this is how people find out that
people are upset about content moderation and censorship.
But moderating at scale is insane.
Yeah.
It's insane.
Yeah.
That what we were talking the other day about the number of videos that go up
every hour on YouTube and it's bananas.
It's bananas.
It's like to try to get a human being that is reasonable, logical, and
objective that's going to analyze every video, it's virtually impossible.
It's not possible.
So you've got to use a bunch of tools.
You've got to get a bunch of things wrong.
And you have also people reporting things.
And how much is that going to affect things?
You could have mass reporting because you have bad actors.
You have some corporation that decides we're going to attack this video because
it's bad for us, get it taken down.
There's so much going on.
I want to put that in people's heads before we go on.
Like understand the kind of numbers that we're talking about here.
Now understand you have the pandemic and then you have the administration that's
doing something where I think they crossed the line, where it gets really weird,
where they're saying what you were saying.
They