Name: Minds Founder Bill Ottman on "Sneaky" TikTok Ban
Uploaded: 2023-04-13T17:18:14.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Minds Founder Bill Ottman on "Sneaky" TikTok Ban' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-04-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Minds Founder Bill Ottman on "Sneaky" TikTok Ban' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-04-13. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience the US government produces more classified
information than non classified information so even if like there's an
audit they could redact everything yeah and it's just all these different
divisions and departments and they all have their own protocols so just getting
a handle on it is I mean that's the first thing that has to get done we have
but not that we're even gonna get the real information from there right but but
then there's also the national security aspect of it it's like you know you
have
to have some things redacted because you know of China and Russia like you
could
just say that and then yeah that is the phrase that gets used sure so because
they have a full like clampdown on their population I mean they they limit the
access to the internet they're they're in it is essentially like China based
like
you VPNs are illegal it's like and they're trying to do that here in America it's
all
backwards yeah with the restrict that is why it's getting it's getting nasty 20
years if you use a VPN which is hilarious and it's it's managed by the Commerce
Department unelected bureaucrats are the ones see the tick tock's actually not
named in
that act right they're just letting the Secretary of Commerce decide which apps
yeah that's insane it's insane so yeah Dan Crenshaw posted about it he he he
thinks it's not
that big a deal because he thinks that you know there's a lot of acts that get
pushed and then
they never get passed through but what's disturbing is just the idea the desire
to do this and the fact
and the fact that imagine if it did get passed I mean it's just a fucking full-on
assault on free speech
yeah I mean it seems to be getting a toxic stigma connected to it did you see
Jesse
Waters grill Lindsey Graham about it no I didn't oh he didn't read it but he
endorsed it oh Jesus and
it was and he just got completely called out it was it was really funny like
that should be illegal if
you should not even be able to sign right something that you haven't read and
they can't read it it's
too it's too long right there's not enough time there's not enough time that's
a lot of these acts
right oh and they slip a bunch of shit in there that's like wait a minute what
about page 485
like what the fuck is going on there and then like oh I didn't read that
yeah I mean meanwhile it's just like it's gonna change discourse in this
country it's gonna change what
people have you know the the the access to people have to free speech and
communication
and I mean I think a lot of people endorsed it righteously being concerned
about tick tock you
know that's what was so sneaky is you know they they enrage you to then support
this disaster yeah um and
it's just like we we can all agree that there's a problem with tick tock and
that there's you know
the chinese government having access to all of this data is is problematic but
like we there should
be an encrypt act like pretty encrypt everything but you can't go around banning
apps it just doesn't
work it's irrelevant people are going to use uh vpns i i i think this this uh
act needs i i don't think
it's going to make it i hope i hope you're right yeah because more people are
talking about it tulsi
gabbard posted a big thing about it there's a lot of people that are up in arms
but my concern is
if it wasn't for social media that act which was kind of ironic right if it
wasn't for social media
and people sharing this and becoming outraged and people discussing this it
would have slipped right
through like the patriot act did the patriot act existed in a time where there
wasn't social media
and people weren't really aware of what they were pushing through until it was
too late
yeah i think there's much better solutions i mean did you watch any of the tick
tock ceo getting
grilled yes i did okay so yeah you know that was interesting because you know
he's a pretty he seemed
like a sober guy um but in his point was well you have to have consistent
standards for other social
media companies too i mean right face like how do we know that facebook and
google just because
they're us-based doesn't mean that they're not giving data to china we have no
idea we have no idea
so that's really the issue we need to understand what specifically are all of
these apps doing they
should be labeled very specifically um you know and we're starting to see some
of that happen but
the thing is you can't know with these proprietary apps because they're just
not sharing anything
i think one of the problems that people have with uh whether any kind of
decentralized um
app like yours or any other d decentralized uh social media network is that
people immediately go
oh what what do i have to do to do this like mastodon when people start using
mastodon right and you get
on it you're like what is this there's so many servers and how do i know what
to join and what
what's going on here like yeah so well mines is different mines is actually not
fully decentralized
we're a hybrid so we run a centralized infrastructure but we interface through
delegation delegated cryptographic events signing we we that's happening in the
background but like
our app feels like a normal social media app it's different mastodon the way
that that works is
federated instances so there's all of these different instances with different
urls and there's like
20 people on each one and you know but there is sort of some interoperability
between the instances
because the you can subscribe to somebody on another instance from your
instance but it's not fully
decentralized it's federated and the problem is that you don't own your
identity so if if one of those
instances goes down you're screwed your your stuff is gone within in nostr
which is like an architecturally
different setup and there's other protocols similar to nostr but it doesn't
matter if if
the website goes down you just pop over to another one upload your your key and
all your stuff is
there so and that's why we like it because it keeps us in check because our
users could can now basically if we
fuck around they'll bounce and they can take their stuff and that's you know
the because the thought
the social graph specifically is the key because you spend a decade built you
know getting all these
followers like it's your life people spend their lives doing this and then to
be able to just get taken
out by youtube is so devastating and unethical it's really creepy too because
many of the things they took
people out for have turned out to be true like there's a lot of things that
they were labeling as
disinformation or misinformation which are 100 proven fact now and people lost
their accounts and there's
no recourse they're not going to reinstate you and that was a problem also with
twitter that for the longest
time if you said anything that was contrary to whatever the narrative was what
whether the government was
pushing it or the cdc was pushing it like anything contrary to that narrative
you would get fucked
yeah and those people are also they're not back though i will i think twitter's
making way more
progress than everyone else and i'm look i'm ultimately an elon fan i'm rooting
for him i think it's
vastly improved but there's chaos currently underway at twitter oh sure and and
those people have not all
been let back on and i don't really understand the people that we don't know
the people who's random
joe schmo posting a covid study like has he been let back on all the thousands
of people that got banned
like well i think he essentially let back on everyone who didn't do anything
illegal
so not alex not alex yeah that's true why yeah well that's a personal opinion
of elon's which i don't
agree with at all yeah because they let andrew tate on right you know it's like
yeah it doesn't mean that
he's endorsing alex to let him back on right it doesn't i mean because there's
a lot of people that
are back on that are you know they didn't make that one specific mistake that alex
made but they've said
some but the mistake that the reason alex was banned was because he confronted
it was actually for
something he did off twitter so he confronted this journalist oliver darcy in a
line at some event
and he was you know being alex jones sort of ranting at him yeah and then
twitter said oh you're
bullying this guy and this is like not acceptable behavior so you're gonna
leave but then when i
remember you know the exchange with elon and whoever it was that was asking
asking it was that he hadn't
been let on because of the sandy hook stuff yeah which is not the same that's
not even why he was
banned right so you know it's not easy i i understand you know the politics of
it and he probably has
tim cook being like you know we're not going to advertise if you have alex jones
but i don't know
what's going on but it doesn't seem to me because he could he could win the
argument if he would just
let him back on right and and did you see this crazy clip of uh of elon and the
bbc guy i did i posted
it today oh you did it was amazing amazing it was amazing it was amazing yeah
because the guy kept
trying to change subjects and let's move on like no no no no no no no no no
what what the are you
talking about you because that guy thought he could just say the narrative
without specific examples
like give me an example and the guy had no examples that's most people who are
concerned about this well
this is like a lot of people that i know that are famous that like publicly
announced they were
leaving twitter and you know one of them i really love and i was like why are
you doing i didn't even
say anything to her but i'm like why are you doing this this is so dumb like
you you're just doing
this because this is the thing that everyone feels like they're supposed to do
hey well twitter's kind
of now so bye no it was before it's less now yeah there are there are people
that are going to say
things like what i showed you earlier today which is hilarious and someone
posted to kamala harris
after she said something about the assault ban that's important it's important
to have people mock
people like i'm sorry if it hurts someone's feelings but that's important yeah
and i i i think the way
that elon handled that was great because obviously you need a specific example
to back up an argument
however i sort of think the whole premise of the conversation is wrong this
idea that this war that
twitter is at with all the think tanks and i think it was the institute for
strategic discourse that
had actually compiled the information that the bbc guy was talking about and
there is information
that there is data showing you know hate speech xyz has has increased however
this is the wrong
conversation it's not the existence or even rise of hate in the the presence of
that content on an app
is not you're not just trying to ban hate banning hate does not stop hate and
this is what the peer
reviewed research shows so so trying to bully elon and twitter for look even if
there was a bump
of hate speech since it became a little bit more free i mean it seems like that's
a potentially
understandable intermediary effect to happen while things reorient like we open
up free speech we're
opening up the valve a little bit okay because we think that this is going to
be healthy for society
long term so let it bump a little bit we need that we need to see what we hate
or what other people hate
you need to like what is it um free speech let us lets us know who the idiots
are like you you need to
identify them yes yeah yeah the the best response to whatever it is bad speech
is better speech there's
better arguments and that's you you literally have a debate platform which is
what twitter essentially is
yeah that is the purpose yeah it's the purpose yeah yeah and not to mention
that the hate isn't defined
so it's only one type of hate that these people are typically referring to
right wing hate right wing
hate yeah not left wing right that's that's okay and so actually so um we're at
we're suing california
we just filed this law because the um this uh complaint they are trying to pass
the social media law
called ab 587 which requires it's a censorship law they're they require these
policies on disinformation
misinformation hate speech and then they use undefined use the words extremism
and radicalization there's
no definitions they don't require you to have a uh child exploitation material
policy but they do require
you to have a policy on hate which isn't defined right and so we're suing them
with uh with the
babylon b and and tim pool when did they start this uh when when they start
trying to pass this
it just went into effect in january so it's now it's now it's in so if you live
in california what's
the repercussions so it is it's it's targeted at social media companies okay so
basically mandating
that social media companies um have the submit these policies so we would have
to we would they
would force us to write a policy on hate speech and submit it to them and then
additionally we would
have to on like a biannual basis submit analytics about all of our moderation
data which honestly
we're already transparent about our moderation data so that's that's largely
public anyway we have a jury
system um and and we have in-house moderators but the it's it's just it's a
huge burden like it's crazy
that they would expect companies to submit all that and then have these arbitrarily
well actually not
arbitrarily specifically chosen categories for policies that are clearly
politically charged and
newsom like when he came out and announced this law it was very you know we
have to stop hate on social
media and misinformation and disinformation protect society protect democracy
no you know you're not
protecting democracy by stopping free speech that is there's no there's no
checks and balances in place
if something turns out to be accurate

Minds Founder Bill Ottman on "Sneaky" TikTok Ban

the Joe Rogan experience the US government produces more classified
information than non classified information so even if like there's an
audit they could redact everything yeah and it's just all these different
divisions and departments and they all have their own protocols so just getting
a handle on it is I mean that's the first thing that has to get done we have
but not that we're even gonna get the real information from there right but but
then there's also the national security aspect of it it's like you know you
have
to have some things redacted because you know of China and Russia like you
could
just say that and then yeah that is the phrase that gets used sure so because
they have a full like clampdown on their population I mean they they limit the
access to the internet they're they're in it is essentially like China based
like
you VPNs are illegal it's like and they're trying to do that here in America it's
all
backwards yeah with the restrict that is why it's getting it's getting nasty 20
years if you use a VPN which is hilarious and it's it's managed by the Commerce
Department unelected bureaucrats are the ones see the tick tock's actually not
named in
that act right they're just letting the Secretary of Commerce decide which apps
yeah that's insane it's insane so yeah Dan Crenshaw posted about it he he he
thinks it's not
that big a deal because he thinks that you know there's a lot of acts that get
pushed and then
they never get passed through but what's disturbing is just the idea the desire
to do this and the fact
and the fact that imagine if it did get passed I mean it's just a fucking full-on
assault on free speech
yeah I mean it seems to be getting a toxic stigma connected to it did you see
Jesse
Waters grill Lindsey Graham about it no I didn't oh he didn't read it but he
endorsed it oh Jesus and
it was and he just got completely called out it was it was really funny like
that should be illegal if
you should not even be able to sign right something that you haven't read and
they can't read it it's
too it's too long right there's not enough time there's not enough time that's
a lot of these acts
right oh and they slip a bunch of shit in there that's like wait a minute what
about page 485
like what the fuck is going on there and then like oh I didn't read that
yeah I mean meanwhile it's just like it's gonna change discourse in this
country it's gonna change what
people have you know the the the access to people have to free speech and
communication
and I mean I think a lot of people endorsed it righteously being concerned
about tick tock you
know that's what was so sneaky is you know they they enrage you to then support
this disaster yeah um and
it's just like we we can all agree that there's a problem with tick tock and
that there's you know
the chinese government having access to all of this data is is problematic but
like we there should
be an encrypt act like pretty encrypt everything but you can't go around banning
apps it just doesn't
work it's irrelevant people are going to use uh vpns i i i think this this uh
act needs i i don't think
it's going to make it i hope i hope you're right yeah because more people are
talking about it tulsi
gabbard posted a big thing about it there's a lot of people that are up in arms
but my concern is
if it wasn't for social media that act which was kind of ironic right if it
wasn't for social media
and people sharing this and becoming outraged and people discussing this it
would have slipped right
through like the patriot act did the patriot act existed in a time where there
wasn't social media
and people weren't really aware of what they were pushing through until it was
too late
yeah i think there's much better solutions i mean did you watch any of the tick
tock ceo getting
grilled yes i did okay so yeah you know that was interesting because you know
he's a pretty he seemed
like a sober guy um but in his point was well you have to have consistent
standards for other social
media companies too i mean right face like how do we know that facebook and
google just because
they're us-based doesn't mean that they're not giving data to china we have no
idea we have no idea
so that's really the issue we need to understand what specifically are all of
these apps doing they
should be labeled very specifically um you know and we're starting to see some
of that happen but
the thing is you can't know with these proprietary apps because they're just
not sharing anything
i think one of the problems that people have with uh whether any kind of
decentralized um
app like yours or any other d decentralized uh social media network is that
people immediately go
oh what what do i have to do to do this like mastodon when people start using
mastodon right and you get
on it you're like what is this there's so many servers and how do i know what
to join and what
what's going on here like yeah so well mines is different mines is actually not
fully decentralized
we're a hybrid so we run a centralized infrastructure but we interface through
delegation delegated cryptographic events signing we we that's happening in the
background but like
our app feels like a normal social media app it's different mastodon the way
that that works is
federated instances so there's all of these different instances with different
urls and there's like
20 people on each one and you know but there is sort of some interoperability
between the instances
because the you can subscribe to somebody on another instance from your
instance but it's not fully
decentralized it's federated and the problem is that you don't own your
identity so if if one of those
instances goes down you're screwed your your stuff is gone within in nostr
which is like an architecturally
different setup and there's other protocols similar to nostr but it doesn't
matter if if
the website goes down you just pop over to another one upload your your key and
all your stuff is
there so and that's why we like it because it keeps us in check because our
users could can now basically if we
fuck around they'll bounce and they can take their stuff and that's you know
the because the thought
the social graph specifically is the key because you spend a decade built you
know getting all these
followers like it's your life people spend their lives doing this and then to
be able to just get taken
out by youtube is so devastating and unethical it's really creepy too because
many of the things they took
people out for have turned out to be true like there's a lot of things that
they were labeling as
disinformation or misinformation which are 100 proven fact now and people lost
their accounts and there's
no recourse they're not going to reinstate you and that was a problem also with
twitter that for the longest
time if you said anything that was contrary to whatever the narrative was what
whether the government was
pushing it or the cdc was pushing it like anything contrary to that narrative
you would get fucked
yeah and those people are also they're not back though i will i think twitter's
making way more
progress than everyone else and i'm look i'm ultimately an elon fan i'm rooting
for him i think it's
vastly improved but there's chaos currently underway at twitter oh sure and and
those people have not all
been let back on and i don't really understand the people that we don't know
the people who's random
joe schmo posting a covid study like has he been let back on all the thousands
of people that got banned
like well i think he essentially let back on everyone who didn't do anything
illegal
so not alex not alex yeah that's true why yeah well that's a personal opinion
of elon's which i don't
agree with at all yeah because they let andrew tate on right you know it's like
yeah it doesn't mean that
he's endorsing alex to let him back on right it doesn't i mean because there's
a lot of people that
are back on that are you know they didn't make that one specific mistake that alex
made but they've said
some but the mistake that the reason alex was banned was because he confronted
it was actually for
something he did off twitter so he confronted this journalist oliver darcy in a
line at some event
and he was you know being alex jones sort of ranting at him yeah and then
twitter said oh you're
bullying this guy and this is like not acceptable behavior so you're gonna
leave but then when i
remember you know the exchange with elon and whoever it was that was asking
asking it was that he hadn't
been let on because of the sandy hook stuff yeah which is not the same that's
not even why he was
banned right so you know it's not easy i i understand you know the politics of
it and he probably has
tim cook being like you know we're not going to advertise if you have alex jones
but i don't know
what's going on but it doesn't seem to me because he could he could win the
argument if he would just
let him back on right and and did you see this crazy clip of uh of elon and the
bbc guy i did i posted
it today oh you did it was amazing amazing it was amazing it was amazing yeah
because the guy kept
trying to change subjects and let's move on like no no no no no no no no no
what what the are you
talking about you because that guy thought he could just say the narrative
without specific examples
like give me an example and the guy had no examples that's most people who are
concerned about this well
this is like a lot of people that i know that are famous that like publicly
announced they were
leaving twitter and you know one of them i really love and i was like why are
you doing i didn't even
say anything to her but i'm like why are you doing this this is so dumb like
you you're just doing
this because this is the thing that everyone feels like they're supposed to do
hey well twitter's kind
of now so bye no it was before it's less now yeah there are there are people
that are going to say
things like what i showed you earlier today which is hilarious and someone
posted to kamala harris
after she said something about the assault ban that's important it's important
to have people mock
people like i'm sorry if it hurts someone's feelings but that's important yeah
and i i i think the way
that elon handled that was great because obviously you need a specific example
to back up an argument
however i sort of think the whole premise of the conversation is wrong this
idea that this war that
twitter is at with all the think tanks and i think it was the institute for
strategic discourse that
had actually compiled the information that the bbc guy was talking about and
there is information
that there is data showing you know hate speech xyz has has increased however
this is the wrong
conversation it's not the existence or even rise of hate in the the presence of
that content on an app
is not you're not just trying to ban hate banning hate does not stop hate and
this is what the peer
reviewed research shows so so trying to bully elon and twitter for look even if
there was a bump
of hate speech since it became a little bit more free i mean it seems like that's
a potentially
understandable intermediary effect to happen while things reorient like we open
up free speech we're
opening up the valve a little bit okay because we think that this is going to
be healthy for society
long term so let it bump a little bit we need that we need to see what we hate
or what other people hate
you need to like what is it um free speech let us lets us know who the idiots
are like you you need to
identify them yes yeah yeah the the best response to whatever it is bad speech
is better speech there's
better arguments and that's you you literally have a debate platform which is
what twitter essentially is
yeah that is the purpose yeah it's the purpose yeah yeah and not to mention
that the hate isn't defined
so it's only one type of hate that these people are typically referring to
right wing hate right wing
hate yeah not left wing right that's that's okay and so actually so um