David Sacks on Tucker Carlson: Insiders' Game, WSB Censorship, Robinhood | FOX News

so as you recall just last week people on reddit nearly bankrupted a very famous hedge fund they did that by using a strategy that hedge funds have used for years they shorted stock in companies like gamestock and drove them up for that purpose now of course only hedge funds were allowed to manipulate the stock market so corporations turned to a familiar tool they censored the people on reddit the online service discord for example accused the reddit day traders of hate speech and then there were the questions around robin hood which was the service they used to conduct

those trades all of this is filled with lessons for the rest of us we're not financial experts we're talking to someone now who is david sacks is a technology entrepreneur very well known in that world he co-founded paypal he wrote a really smart piece about the implications of the story you can find on the online publishing platform persuasion and we wanted to talk to him tonight david thanks so much for coming on so you have the grounding in this world sufficient i think to draw informed conclusions about what happened and what it means for everybody else what have you concluded

sure well tucker you know you've been warning about censorship and the slippery slope when 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 they weren't engaging in political speech at all they were engaging in a plan to give these wall street predators a taste of their own medicine because of that they were very threatening to the people in power and they were accused of hate speech and they were taken down now if you were to actually go into these message boards you wouldn't see hate speech you would see a lot of very

raunchy speech but nothing that's too different than what you'd see on any trading floor or or boiler room on wall street you know and all of a sudden these uh sort of titans of wall street are just shock shocked by the language that's going on here so you know look this is when you this is a really good example i think of when you strip away sort of partisan issues you see that the real purpose of censorship is as a as a tool for the people in power to keep the outsiders out i think that's really smart so when they invoke the phrase hate speech especially of all of all

the phrases they use i think is the scariest nobody wants to be thought of as a hater or you know using hate speech that's an awful thing that's certainly how i feel but what you're saying is they don't employ that in order to protect the weak they use that phrase in order to protect the strong yeah exactly i mean hate speech is a very malleable term and so the people who get to decide what it means which is really always the issue with censorship is who decides who has that power right it's the people in power get to decide what it means and so you know you had a case here where

look these message boards weren't set up for the purpose of organizing hate or even any political topic they were organized to talk about a trade and they you know figured out actually a plan that worked perfectly to execute a short squeeze and these hedge funds lost 20 billion dollars and so they were you know in a lot of trouble a lot of financial distress and they were looking for a way out and so the way they they found a way out was to go through these message boards they screenshot any posts that could plausibly be characterized as hate speech they report it

and then they get the site taken down and so this is kind of where the slippery slope of censorship goes is that whenever outsiders become too threatening to powerful insiders the insiders use censorship as a weapon they weaponize these these speech rules to prevent the threat so you're making a very traditional liberal argument i mean you're saying what the aclu said for about a hundred years what you know nat hendoff used to write about in the village voice why aren't more people saying that now do you think more people empowered with authority

well it's a really good question tucker and i think part of it is that a lot of the people in power are frankly threatened by these new social networks and so certainly the traditional media has been very upset with social networks and social media because of it's a threat to their influence and business model you certainly saw these you know wall street titans uh become very nervous that all of a sudden their control over the monopoly board was threatened by these these outsiders these these reddit kids and so frankly the people in power don't

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 being a threat to democracy but this isn't a threat when you're talking about large numbers of people getting together to organize for change that is democracy that's not a threat to democracy what it is is a potential threat to the people in power and that's why they don't like it man i mean you're one of the people who built sort of the internet that we use and you're saying what people said 20 years ago when they built it you're about the only one still saying it though

which is this is supposed to democratize things and empower normal people no one else seems to believe that except you anymore but i appreciate that you do david sacks thank you thank you