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so as you recall just last week people on reddit
nearly bankrupted a very famous hedge fund they
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did that by using a strategy that hedge funds have
used for years they shorted stock in companies
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like gamestock and drove them up for that purpose
now of course only hedge funds were allowed to
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manipulate the stock market so corporations turned
to a familiar tool they censored the people on
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reddit the online service discord for example
accused the reddit day traders of hate speech
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and then there were the questions around robin
hood which was the service they used to conduct
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those trades all of this is filled with lessons
for the rest of us we're not financial experts
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we're talking to someone now who is david sacks is
a technology entrepreneur very well known in that
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world he co-founded paypal he wrote a really smart
piece about the implications of the story you can
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find on the online publishing platform persuasion
and we wanted to talk to him tonight david thanks
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so much for coming on so you have the grounding
in this world sufficient i think to draw informed
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conclusions about what happened and what it
means for everybody else what have you concluded
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sure well tucker you know you've been warning
about censorship and the slippery slope when
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people start to invoke censorship and i
think we see it here with with discord uh you have a case here where some wall street
traders their their message board was taken down
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they weren't engaging in political speech at all
they were engaging in a plan to give these wall
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street predators a taste of their own medicine
because of that they were very threatening to
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the people in power and they were accused of hate
speech and they were taken down now if you were to
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actually go into these message boards you wouldn't
see hate speech you would see a lot of very
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raunchy speech but nothing that's too different
than what you'd see on any trading floor or
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or boiler room on wall street you know and all of
a sudden these uh sort of titans of wall street
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are just shock shocked by the language that's
going on here so you know look this is when you
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this is a really good example i think of when you
strip away sort of partisan issues you see that
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the real purpose of censorship is as a as a tool
for the people in power to keep the outsiders out
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i think that's really smart so when they invoke
the phrase hate speech especially of all of all
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the phrases they use i think is the scariest
nobody wants to be thought of as a hater or
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you know using hate speech that's an awful thing
that's certainly how i feel but what you're saying
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is they don't employ that in order to protect the
weak they use that phrase in order to protect the
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strong yeah exactly i mean hate speech is a very
malleable term and so the people who get to decide
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what it means which is really always the issue
with censorship is who decides who has that power
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right it's the people in power get to decide what
it means and so you know you had a case here where
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look these message boards weren't set up for the
purpose of organizing hate or even any political
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topic they were organized to talk about a trade
and they you know figured out actually a plan that
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worked perfectly to execute a short squeeze and
these hedge funds lost 20 billion dollars and so
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they were you know in a lot of trouble a lot
of financial distress and they were looking
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for a way out and so the way they they found a
way out was to go through these message boards
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they screenshot any posts that could plausibly
be characterized as hate speech they report it
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and then they get the site taken down and
so this is kind of where the slippery slope
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of censorship goes is that whenever outsiders
become too threatening to powerful insiders the
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insiders use censorship as a weapon they weaponize
these these speech rules to prevent the threat
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so you're making a very traditional liberal
argument i mean you're saying what the aclu
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said for about a hundred years what you know nat
hendoff used to write about in the village voice
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why aren't more people saying that now do you
think more people empowered with authority
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well it's a really good question tucker and i
think part of it is that a lot of the people in
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power are frankly threatened by these new social
networks and so certainly the traditional media
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has been very upset with social networks and
social media because of it's a threat to their
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influence and business model you certainly
saw these you know wall street titans uh
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become very nervous that all of a sudden their
control over the monopoly board was threatened
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by these these outsiders these these reddit
kids and so frankly the people in power don't
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have any reason to want to like social
networks because social networks allow large groups of outsiders to get together and
so they accuse social networking ironically of
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being a threat to democracy but this isn't a
threat when you're talking about large numbers
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of people getting together to organize for change
that is democracy that's not a threat to democracy
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what it is is a potential threat to the people
in power and that's why they don't like it man
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i mean you're one of the people who built sort
of the internet that we use and you're saying
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what people said 20 years ago when they built it
you're about the only one still saying it though
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which is this is supposed to democratize things
and empower normal people no one else seems to
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believe that except you anymore but i appreciate
that you do david sacks thank you thank you