Name: What QAnon Means for Corporate Censorship
Uploaded: 2021-09-23T00:21:14.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What QAnon Means for Corporate Censorship' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-09-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What QAnon Means for Corporate Censorship' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-09-23. Transcript available.

This is an odd idea, but I think what it's doing is it's forcing us to adapt
and evolve
our ability to detect bullshit. And it's doing it almost like an immune system
response.
Like what we're reacting to and what we're recognizing from all this stuff is
like,
oh, we didn't know what this was. And this has resulted in this riot, whatever
you want to call
the Capitol Hill attack. And now we're looking at more censorship on social
media. We're looking at
them trying to batten down the hatches and figure out how to handle something
like QAnon or the people
that were allegedly promoting these ideas. A lot of them that are banned from
social media,
the stuff that you highlighted in your show. We have to figure out what's true
and what's not true.
And so there's been some sort of draconian measures that have been suggested,
you know,
like hiring some sort of a team that goes over social media and make sure that
everything is
according to what they deem to be correct or incorrect, which obviously is
subject to biases.
And we're, we're very aware that that's going on today, that there's a lot of
that going on today,
where the necessarily a truth doesn't like the Hunter Biden laptop story is a
great example of that,
right? Like the social media platforms, they censored news from the New York
Post, one of the oldest
newspapers in America on the Hunter Biden laptop story, because they decided
that somehow or another
it was propaganda or somehow or another it was not good to get that information,
but it was news.
It was real news. It was a real story. And they decided it was too close to the
election.
This could hurt Biden. We don't want Trump to win. So you're dealing with
biases. This is not just like
simply here's information that we know to be true, or here's information that
we know to be a lie.
We're going to stop that from getting through. No, they knew it to be true, but
they decided to stop it
because it wasn't convenient or it didn't fit the narrative they were trying to
promote.
Right. It's very it's and how do you find a neutral arbiter? Right. The truth.
Right.
If you are going to entrust someone with that responsibility. And I think that
that's it's just an
incredibly slippery slope. Incredibly slippery. And and what these big tech
companies have have
suggested is that, well, maybe we don't use humans. Maybe we use algorithms.
Right. You know,
to moderate everything. And, you know, the algorithms had had that that in many
ways had
bolstered something like Q because they're they're basically sociopathic when
it comes to just trying
to drive attention as much as possible. So now they can kind of invert those
algorithms and punish those
to talk about that kind of content. And oftentimes, even if even if their goal
was just to protect,
prevent, I don't know, conversation around QAnon because they consider it to be
problematic.
What else gets swept up? What else gets swept up with that?
I mean, I saw I saw a lot of people who were reporting on QAnon maybe coming
from the the side of critiquing it.
Their videos were being wiped out. You know, people who were documenting
January the 6th,
their content was being wiped out. People who are critical of QAnon, they had
websites that were
sort of on the other side that was being wiped out as well. And that's because,
of course, it's a
it's sort of this blunt force that that an algorithm wields.
So people even people that were analyzing the movement from a critical
standpoint,
people who are looking like how ridiculous this is, look at this.
They had their channels wiped out as well. Yes.
So any content on QAnon, they just want to erase it from the Internet,
essentially.
That seemed to be the the initial response. Yeah.
It's it's so strange that they all move together in sync.
I mean, I I think that if I did not have, you know, HBO in my sales with this
project,
it wouldn't have seen the light of day. Really?
Like if you try to put it on YouTube, you think?
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, when we even when we so when we first released the
series,
you know, there was there was there were some articles floating around like, oh,
maybe this is going to make it things worse.
If I typed in Q into the storm into YouTube, it wouldn't auto populate at a
certain point.
It started out auto populating and then that went away.
So, yeah, I wouldn't feel confident at all that, you know, if we didn't have a
gorilla in our corner that that this story that revealed ultimately who was
behind QAnon would have been seen would have been able to find an audience.
And that shout out to HBO. Shout out to HBO. I mean, they really had my back.
They've been amazing for decades. You know, you really think about it.
I mean, they're the people that when Bill Maher's show Politically Incorrect
got pulled off of what was it on ABC?
I forget. Yeah, I'm not sure. Network television.
They immediately took it, brought it over, turned it into real time and made it
even better.
You know, it's uncensored now. And it's, in my opinion, real time with Bill Maher
is probably one of the very best social commentary shows and comedy shows that
like really doesn't pull any punches on any network ever.
You want to hear something fucking crazy. So, yes, just yesterday I was talking
with someone who's helping distribute the film and I said, well, what about
Amazon?
You know, are we going to be able to put it out on Amazon internationally? And
they said, well, as of the last year, they have stopped taking documentaries,
all documentaries.
What?
You cannot publish a documentary on their platform. And the reason was because
that I was told is because, you know, there was all this conspiracy, flat earth
stuff, and they were getting blowback that eventually they said, we don't want
to have to decide what we publish and what we don't, what's real and what's not.
We're just not going to publish anything. And the example they gave me that
they couldn't get published was The Cove. I don't know if you saw that
documentary.
The Dolphin documentary.
Yeah, the Dolphin documentary. You know, it won an Oscar.
Yeah.
And just to check it, you know, I looked it up and sure enough, The Cove wasn't
available on Amazon.
So, you know, those who said that there wouldn't be a slow creep of censorship,
you know, kind of starting with things that I think everybody agrees should be,
you know, they wouldn't like to be in society.
You know, things like The Daily Storm or maybe a lot of people don't want 8chan,
you know, it's a, there's a progression.
You know, until you end up, it seems like something like, you know, The Cove
can't find an audience on a major platform.
And I don't want to conflate government censorship with the corporate
censorship too much.
However, in a lot of ways, it does feel like the government has passed the buck
to these corporations to do what they legally can't, which I think is the same
thing we saw the government do with privacy, right?
Like, they wouldn't have been able to get all of this data from us directly,
but if you give it to a Facebook or a Twitter, it's very easy for the
government to then go and get access to that information.
So I think what we saw happen with the Fourth Amendment, we're now seeing
happen with the First Amendment, where they can say, well, look, we couldn't
restrict conversation around certain topics.
We couldn't directly decide what's true or what's not.
We're going to put that in the hands of these companies.
And of course, these companies have intimate relationships with many members of
the government.
You know, there's a revolving door there.
So when people want to talk about limiting what we can say online or limiting
disinformation to other things, I think that it's almost the wrong place to
start.
I think we have to go back to the privacy issues.
And I actually think if we had not let privacy be eroded online, we wouldn't be
having this debate.
You know, because if these gigantic companies hadn't collected thousands of
data points on us, you know, didn't know our fears, our desires, if they hadn't
built these psychometric profiles, they wouldn't have been able to manipulate
us, use these algorithms to drive us into echo chambers, which have really
created these disparate realities.
And now these disparate realities can't agree necessarily on a set of facts.
Sometimes you're considered, you know, sometimes people will be ostracized for
even talking to somebody from the quote unquote other side, right?
And so now there's this conversation about what should be allowed to be said
online.
And I think that that's simply a byproduct of, you know, our privacy having
been eroded.
So, you know, if I was to do anything about these issues, I would start by
restoring rights.
I would go back and say, all right, well, how do we get, you know, how do we
get ownership and privacy rights online when it comes to our personal data?
Let's start there before we start, you know, going after the speech itself.
Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.