Name: How Intelligence Agencies Infiltrated Social Media Companies
Uploaded: 2023-03-30T18:46:39.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Intelligence Agencies Infiltrated Social Media Companies' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-03-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Intelligence Agencies Infiltrated Social Media Companies' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-03-30. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- First of all, what was it like
to get a hold of the Twitter files?
Like, what was that experience like?
How did that go down?
- Exciting as hell, man.
I mean, seriously.
There's been a lot of misinformation about that itself,
but Barry Weiss contacted me.
She lives in LA, and she got in,
and she's like, "How soon can you get over here?"
And I was like, "Let me finish this interview I'm on,
"and I'm over."
And yeah, it was incredible.
You know, I'd never met Elon before.
You know, I'd met him at the coffee station,
just making himself a cup of coffee.
He had no idea who I was.
And yeah, we just got into it.
It was a, you know, I was sort of the least known
of the big three journalists that were there.
It was Barry Weiss and Matt Taibbi, who was on.
And they'd already started thinking about
how to, kind of, what to go after.
And Matt had done a story on the Hunter Biden laptop already.
And then we were starting to look at January 6th,
because Trump gets deplatformed on January 8th.
And so because I'm like the junior member of that threesome,
so to speak, they gave me January 7th.
So the first thing we, one of the first things we did was just to look at how
they made a decision
to get, to pull Trump off the platform.
And it turned out that the 7th was an important day, because that was when they
started to rationalize this decision to deplatform Trump,
even though their own people inside had decided that he had not violated their
terms of service.
So they were sort of stuck making up a reason to deplatform him.
And that was an important theme, was that they just kept changing the rules,
basically, to do what they wanted to do.
And that was the same thing on the Hunter Biden laptop.
The New York Post story that they censored also had not violated their terms of
service.
So, I mean, look, it was crazy.
I mean, it was, you know, people always ask questions about the files
themselves.
But, you know, the experience was we would ask for these searches, and we'd
just get back huge amounts of data.
There's lots of thousands and thousands of emails, thousands of internal
messages on their Slack messaging system.
And so, yeah, I mean, a lot of it was, you know, some of it was very boring,
because you have to just read tons and tons of stuff.
But, you know, I think the big theme was we start by seeing a real, you know,
super progressive.
It's like 99% of campaign contributions from Twitter staff are going to
Democrats.
You know, the head of safety at Twitter, this guy named Yoel Roth, who, you
know, said there's actual Nazis in the White House when Trump came in.
He was very progressive.
But over time, we just kept finding, like, this weird, like, FBI wants us to do
this.
You know, there's these other government agencies.
Oh, you know, all these people used to work at the FBI.
The CIA shows up, Department of Homeland Security.
And we're kind of like, what the hell is going on?
And then the story quickly shifted from us sort of – and I think what Elon
thought, which was that it was just very progressive people being biased in
their content moderation, in their censoring, to there is a huge operation by U.S.
government officials, U.S. government contractors, and all of these super
sketchy NGOs getting money from who knows where, basically demanding that
Twitter start censoring people.
And at that moment, the story shifted for all of us.
And that was, I think, where Taibbi became particularly important and sort of
the lead because he had had so much experience on sort of looking at how the U.S.
government during the war on terror had waged disinformation campaigns,
propaganda campaigns.
And it became clear to us over time that the U.S. government had turned its
propaganda and disinformation campaigns that had been waging abroad, it turned
them against the American people.
And that was where you just sort of get chills up your spine and you were like,
this is something seriously sinister is going on.
Do we know when this began?
Like, when did they infiltrate these organizations?
Because I'm sure it's not just Twitter, right?
I'm sure it's –
Oh, no, absolutely not.
That's part of what was so terrifying is that it was all of the social media
companies, including Wikipedia, by the way, which we don't talk enough about,
but also all of the mainstream news organizations are all being organized.
So when does it start?
You know, it really – what you're looking at is the apparatus that was
created by the war on terror over the last 20 years, starting after 9-11.
Then there was a battle against ISIS because ISIS was successfully recruiting
on social media.
So there was sort of a counter-ISIS recruiting campaign that occurred.
Then you get the big event is Brexit 2016, Trump's election in 2016, and the
establishment just freaks out, absolutely freaks out.
And they – there's a lot of different motivations here.
So one of the motivations is just to blame Facebook, blame social media for
Trump's victory.
It was never true.
I don't really think anybody really believed it.
There's just – you know, it just – there was just – for a variety of
reasons we can talk about, there was never any good evidence that whatever
Russians did had much of any influence, any measurable influence on the outcome
of the campaign.
But they started to scapegoat the social media companies as a way to get
control over them.
And so then they started – then in 2017, they set up – well, two things
happen, or many things happen.
The Department of Homeland Security just declares election infrastructure to be
part of their mission of protecting election infrastructure.
And that meant protecting the media environment, protecting.
Protecting.
Put that in quotes.
You know, it's creepy.
It's patronizing.
It's a power move.
So that's the first thing that happens.
They create something called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency within the Department of Homeland Security to supposedly protect the
media environment from foreign influence.
They create something called the Foreign Influence Task Force with the FBI to
basically start policing domestic speech on these platforms.
They start organizing all the social media companies to participate in these
meetings.
So you had Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, in here.
And he says to you, there's this critical moment where you ask about the Hunter
Biden laptop.
And he goes, well, yeah, you know, in the summer of 2020, all these FBI guys
come to us saying there's going to be a hack and leak operation involving
Hunter Biden, which is super suspicious because, as everybody now knows, the
FBI had Hunter Biden's laptop in December 2019.
What freaked me out and I was I had so, by the way, I was a victim of the
Hunter Biden laptop disinformation.
I thought that I voted for Biden.
I thought that it was a I thought that that laptop was Russian disinformation.
I just bought the whole thing.
And this is from somebody who you're a journalist.
I'm supposedly a journalist, right?
So called journalist.
I bought it.
You know, I'm still a big liberal in so many ways.
And everybody I knew was like, oh, you know, besides Trump, it was just he's so
for all the reasons that progressives bought that the laptop was fake.
I bought that it was fake.
So so then when you realize that it was real and that everything in that New
York Post story on October 14th, 2020 was was accurate, I started seeing stuff
in the emails.
The thing that really freaked me out was this thing that Aspen Institute, a
call it's called a tabletop exercise.
And it was actually a Zoom call to role play how to deal with a Russian hack
and leak around Hunter Biden.
This is like in June of 2020.
So this is like months before the New York before months before Rudy Giuliani
gets that the laptop before Rudy Giuliani gives the laptop to New York Post.
Why in the hell is Aspen Institute holding a tabletop exercise to pre bunk?
Basically, they are training or brainwashing all these journalists.
I mean, it's CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, Wikimedia Foundation, the
Wikipedia folks, the networks, all of the social media companies all coming
together to be like, OK, well, if something is if something is leaked, then we
should not cover it in the way that journalists have traditionally covered it.
Meanwhile, Stanford University, a few a few months earlier, had put out a
report saying reporters should no longer follow the Pentagon Papers principle.
Well, the Pentagon Papers, of course, is this famous episode.
It was Steven Spielberg made a whole movie about it where The Washington Post
and New York Times published these internal Pentagon documents showing that the
U.S. government was losing the war in Vietnam.
Right.
This is Daniel Ellsberg.
And he just releases it.
He steals these documents.
He breaks the law, steals these documents, gives them to the newspapers.
The newspapers publish them.
It's this kind of incredible moment in American journalism where we are like
the First Amendment gives these newspapers the right to publish hacked, so-called
hacked, but leaked information.
And here you have Stanford University, Aspen Institute saying, oh, no, no, no,
that's all.
We should stop doing that.
Journalists should no longer write about leaked information in that way.
Instead, we should focus on the person who leaked it.
So it really sent chills on my spine.
You know, it was the creepiest thing I'd ever seen.
And this is, of course, you've got to remember, Aspen Institute's funded by the
U.S. government.
Yeah.
Stanford's funded by the U.S. government.
So this is people go, oh, well, you're just one of the responses we've got.
They go, oh, you're just talking about, you know, content moderation by private
companies.
No, we're talking about U.S. government-funded organizations.
You can't, if the U.S. government is censoring information, that's obviously a
violation of the First Amendment.
But if the U.S. government is funding somebody else to censor information, that's
also a violation of the First Amendment.
You can't indirectly, it's still a violation if you're funding somebody to
demand censorship.
So that was quite a steeplechase.
But there's a lot here.
I mean, it's a lot of people, a lot of institutions, a lot to unpack.
And that was part of the reason I wanted to reach out and be like, I didn't
need a Joe Rogan session to just kind of go through it all.
Yeah, well, I'm very happy to provide that.
Here's the question.
Obviously, the Hunter Biden laptop would harm Joe Biden, obviously.
And if that story got out, who knows how many people would have voted the other
way.
Is this a direct result of the things that Trump said when he was in office
that went against the intelligence community?
Like, how did they decide?
I would always assume that, you know, the so-called deep state is essentially
bipartisan, that they wouldn't necessarily side with the Democrats or the
Republicans.
They're really, you know, they're just in charge of they're supposed to be
gathering information to protect the country.
So how did they decide specifically to either stop information or propagate
misinformation that would aid Joe Biden?
I mean, yes, that is exactly the right question.
So, I mean, I think the thing you have to understand is that that Trump was
viewed by the deep state, by, you know, CIA, FBI, Pentagon.
And, you know, I mean, all of the elites and this and you're right, it's
bipartisan in the sense that it's both never Trump Republicans and Democrats.
What freaked them out the most about Trump is that he was threatening to pull
the U.S. out of NATO.
I don't think that that was I just think that was bluster.
Like, that's insane.
Like, and by the way, I should say, I actually I support what we call the
Western alliance.
I support providing military security for our allies in Asia and in Europe.
I'm not a I mean, there's parts of economic nationalism that I respect, but I'm
also I don't I don't think we should pull out of NATO.
I think NATO has provided peace in the world and mostly been a good thing.
It's obviously had some crazy abuses like Iraq.
This whole experience has made me rethink my support for for Ukraine.
But I think it's important to understand that Trump terrified the deep state
and national security establishment.
So did Brexit.
There's a sense in which you had a guy on here named Peter Zion who wrote this
book called this really apocalyptic book about how the world is going to fall
apart.
And his whole argument, which I don't agree with.
I think he's brilliant, but the book is I think the argument's wrong.
His whole argument is based on the idea that the United States is going to stop
providing military security to our allies in Asia and Europe.
It's all just based on this assumption that Trump is the beginning of some the
U.S. withdrawing from its traditional role since World War Two.
There's a bunch of people who obviously their their ideology, their their
livelihoods, their identity, just their whole way of life is tied up with
providing.
The United States providing this protect this protection for Europe and Asia
and they view Trump as threatening that.
I also think they just really hated the guy.
They look down on him.
You know, he's crude and all the things that that.
Yeah, that people don't like it.
And he spoke disparagingly about the intelligence community.
Yeah.
I mean, he was crazy.
Absolutely.
He was against the war in Iraq.
He was different.
He was a nationalist Republican.
And what's so interesting is that, you know, if you read people like, you know,
people on the left, like Noam Chomsky and others who have been critics of U.S.
or Glenn Greenwald, who are critics of or and I think Matt Taibbi, critics of U.S.
government, you know, military invasions around the world since World War Two.
I mean, we've overthrown many governments, right?
You know, Iran, Chile, Guatemala, you know, and what the pattern is, is that
these are places where nationalists, sometimes socialists, but often just
nationalists who are trying to control their economies and they didn't want
foreign interference were coming to power.
And the U.S. government would see that as a threat to providing, you know, to
having this liberal global order, as it's called.
And so they saw what Trump, they saw Trump as an existential threat to this
post-war liberal order.
And they needed to, and they viewed social media as the means to his power,
which I think was exaggerated.
So on the one hand, they saw a threat.
I think they also saw an opportunity.
You know, the war on terror, we won.
I mean, like, it's just, I mean, huge, huge victory.
I mean, it's shocking how successful it was in some way.
So you have a bunch of people that suddenly need something to do.
So there's a lot of motivations there.
And then you also have the guys that lost the Hillary campaign.
John Podesta, who's the chair of her campaign.
He runs the most powerful progressive, frankly, propaganda organization in the
world, or at least in the United States, the Center for American Progress.
They were looking also, for some reason, someone to blame for their own
failures, you know, for the dislikability of Hillary.
And so there was just a lot of motivations to try to get control over social
media platforms.
They felt like they had lost control of them.
They felt like they had lost control of them.
They felt like they had lost control of them.
They felt like they had lost control of them.
They felt like they had lost control of them.
They felt like they had lost control of them.
They felt like they had lost control of them.

How Intelligence Agencies Infiltrated Social Media Companies

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- First of all, what was it like
to get a hold of the Twitter files?
Like, what was that experience like?
How did that go down?
- Exciting as hell, man.
I mean, seriously.
There's been a lot of misinformation about that itself,
but Barry Weiss contacted me.
She lives in LA, and she got in,
and she's like, "How soon can you get over here?"
And I was like, "Let me finish this interview I'm on,
"and I'm over."
And yeah, it was incredible.
You know, I'd never met Elon before.
You know, I'd met him at the coffee station,
just making himself a cup of coffee.
He had no idea who I was.
And yeah, we just got into it.
It was a, you know, I was sort of the least known
of the big three journalists that were there.
It was Barry Weiss and Matt Taibbi, who was on.
And they'd already started thinking about
how to, kind of, what to go after.
And Matt had done a story on the Hunter Biden laptop already.
And then we were starting to look at January 6th,
because Trump gets deplatformed on January 8th.
And so because I'm like the junior member of that threesome,
so to speak, they gave me January 7th.
So the first thing we, one of the first things we did was just to look at how
they made a decision
to get, to pull Trump off the platform.
And it turned out that the 7th was an important day, because that was when they
started to rationalize this decision to deplatform Trump,
even though their own people inside had decided that he had not violated their
terms of service.
So they were sort of stuck making up a reason to deplatform him.
And that was an important theme, was that they just kept changing the rules,
basically, to do what they wanted to do.
And that was the same thing on the Hunter Biden laptop.
The New York Post story that they censored also had not violated their terms of
service.
So, I mean, look, it was crazy.
I mean, it was, you know, people always ask questions about the files
themselves.
But, you know, the experience was we would ask for these searches, and we'd
just get back huge amounts of data.
There's lots of thousands and thousands of emails, thousands of internal
messages on their Slack messaging system.
And so, yeah, I mean, a lot of it was, you know, some of it was very boring,
because you have to just read tons and tons of stuff.
But, you know, I think the big theme was we start by seeing a real, you know,
super progressive.
It's like 99% of campaign contributions from Twitter staff are going to
Democrats.
You know, the head of safety at Twitter, this guy named Yoel Roth, who, you
know, said there's actual Nazis in the White House when Trump came in.
He was very progressive.
But over time, we just kept finding, like, this weird, like, FBI wants us to do
this.
You know, there's these other government agencies.
Oh, you know, all these people used to work at the FBI.
The CIA shows up, Department of Homeland Security.
And we're kind of like, what the hell is going on?
And then the story quickly shifted from us sort of – and I think what Elon
thought, which was that it was just very progressive people being biased in
their content moderation, in their censoring, to there is a huge operation by U.S.
government officials, U.S. government contractors, and all of these super
sketchy NGOs getting money from who knows where, basically demanding that
Twitter start censoring people.
And at that moment, the story shifted for all of us.
And that was, I think, where Taibbi became particularly important and sort of
the lead because he had had so much experience on sort of looking at how the U.S.
government during the war on terror had waged disinformation campaigns,
propaganda campaigns.
And it became clear to us over time that the U.S. government had turned its
propaganda and disinformation campaigns that had been waging abroad, it turned
them against the American people.
And that was where you just sort of get chills up your spine and you were like,
this is something seriously sinister is going on.
Do we know when this began?
Like, when did they infiltrate these organizations?
Because I'm sure it's not just Twitter, right?
I'm sure it's –
Oh, no, absolutely not.
That's part of what was so terrifying is that it was all of the social media
companies, including Wikipedia, by the way, which we don't talk enough about,
but also all of the mainstream news organizations are all being organized.
So when does it start?
You know, it really – what you're looking at is the apparatus that was
created by the war on terror over the last 20 years, starting after 9-11.
Then there was a battle against ISIS because ISIS was successfully recruiting
on social media.
So there was sort of a counter-ISIS recruiting campaign that occurred.
Then you get the big event is Brexit 2016, Trump's election in 2016, and the
establishment just freaks out, absolutely freaks out.
And they – there's a lot of different motivations here.
So one of the motivations is just to blame Facebook, blame social media for
Trump's victory.
It was never true.
I don't really think anybody really believed it.
There's just – you know, it just – there was just – for a variety of
reasons we can talk about, there was never any good evidence that whatever
Russians did had much of any influence, any measurable influence on the outcome
of the campaign.
But they started to scapegoat the social media companies as a way to get
control over them.
And so then they started – then in 2017, they set up – well, two things
happen, or many things happen.
The Department of Homeland Security just declares election infrastructure to be
part of their mission of protecting election infrastructure.
And that meant protecting the media environment, protecting.
Protecting.
Put that in quotes.
You know, it's creepy.
It's patronizing.
It's a power move.
So that's the first thing that happens.
They create something called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency within the Department of Homeland Security to supposedly protect the
media environment from foreign influence.
They create something called the Foreign Influence Task Force with the FBI to
basically start policing domestic speech on these platforms.
They start organizing all the social media companies to participate in these
meetings.
So you had Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, in here.
And he says to you, there's this critical moment where you ask about the Hunter
Biden laptop.
And he goes, well, yeah, you know, in the summer of 2020, all these FBI guys
come to us saying there's going to be a hack and leak operation involving
Hunter Biden, which is super suspicious because, as everybody now knows, the
FBI had Hunter Biden's laptop in December 2019.
What freaked me out and I was I had so, by the way, I was a victim of the
Hunter Biden laptop disinformation.
I thought that I voted for Biden.
I thought that it was a I thought that that laptop was Russian disinformation.
I just bought the whole thing.
And this is from somebody who you're a journalist.
I'm supposedly a journalist, right?
So called journalist.
I bought it.
You know, I'm still a big liberal in so many ways.
And everybody I knew was like, oh, you know, besides Trump, it was just he's so
for all the reasons that progressives bought that the laptop was fake.
I bought that it was fake.
So so then when you realize that it was real and that everything in that New
York Post story on October 14th, 2020 was was accurate, I started seeing stuff
in the emails.
The thing that really freaked me out was this thing that Aspen Institute, a
call it's called a tabletop exercise.
And it was actually a Zoom call to role play how to deal with a Russian hack
and leak around Hunter Biden.
This is like in June of 2020.
So this is like months before the New York before months before Rudy Giuliani
gets that the laptop before Rudy Giuliani gives the laptop to New York Post.
Why in the hell is Aspen Institute holding a tabletop exercise to pre bunk?
Basically, they are training or brainwashing all these journalists.
I mean, it's CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, Wikimedia Foundation, the
Wikipedia folks, the networks, all of the social media companies all coming
together to be like, OK, well, if something is if something is leaked, then we
should not cover it in the way that journalists have traditionally covered it.
Meanwhile, Stanford University, a few a few months earlier, had put out a
report saying reporters should no longer follow the Pentagon Papers principle.
Well, the Pentagon Papers, of course, is this famous episode.
It was Steven Spielberg made a whole movie about it where The Washington Post
and New York Times published these internal Pentagon documents showing that the
U.S. government was losing the war in Vietnam.
Right.
This is Daniel Ellsberg.
And he just releases it.
He steals these documents.
He breaks the law, steals these documents, gives them to the newspapers.
The newspapers publish them.
It's this kind of incredible moment in American journalism where we are like
the First Amendment gives these newspapers the right to publish hacked, so-called
hacked, but leaked information.
And here you have Stanford University, Aspen Institute saying, oh, no, no, no,
that's all.
We should stop doing that.
Journalists should no longer write about leaked information in that way.
Instead, we should focus on the person who leaked it.
So it really sent chills on my spine.
You know, it was the creepiest thing I'd ever seen.
And this is, of course, you've got to remember, Aspen Institute's funded by the
U.S. government.
Yeah.
Stanford's funded by the U.S. government.
So this is people go, oh, well, you're just one of the responses we've got.
They go, oh, you're just talking about, you know, content moderation by private
companies.
No, we're talking about U.S. government-funded organizations.
You can't, if the U.S. government is censoring information, that's obviously a
violation of the First Amendment.
But if the U.S. government is funding somebody else to censor information, that's
also a violation of the First Amendment.
You can't indirectly, it's still a violation if you're funding somebody to
demand censorship.
So that was quite a steeplechase.
But there's a lot here.
I mean, it's a lot of people, a lot of institutions, a lot to unpack.
And that was part of the reason I wanted to reach out and be like, I didn't
need a Joe Rogan session to just kind of go through it all.
Yeah, well, I'm very happy to provide that.
Here's the question.
Obviously, the Hunter Biden laptop would harm Joe Biden, obviously.
And if that story got out, who knows how many people would have voted the other
way.
Is this a direct result of the things that Trump said when he was in office
that went against the intelligence community?
Like, how did they decide?
I would always assume that, you know, the so-called deep state is essentially
bipartisan, that they wouldn't necessarily side with the Democrats or the
Republicans.
They're really, you know, they're just in charge of they're supposed to be
gathering information to protect the country.
So how did they decide specifically to either stop information or propagate
misinformation that would aid Joe Biden?
I mean, yes, that is exactly the right question.
So, I mean, I think the thing you have to understand is that that Trump was
viewed by the deep state, by, you know, CIA, FBI, Pentagon.
And, you know, I mean, all of the elites and this and you're right, it's
bipartisan in the sense that it's both never Trump Republicans and Democrats.
What freaked them out the most about Trump is that he was threatening to pull
the U.S. out of NATO.
I don't think that that was I just think that was bluster.
Like, that's insane.
Like, and by the way, I should say, I actually I support what we call the
Western alliance.
I support providing military security for our allies in Asia and in Europe.
I'm not a I mean, there's parts of economic nationalism that I respect, but I'm
also I don't I don't think we should pull out o