Collusion between the democrats and the media and social media and these platforms. It is a disgraceful thing. And that was from july at the White House Social Media summit. That is our topic this week on the communicators. Conservatives and social media and whether they are censored. Joining us to discuss our to conservatives. Patrick hedger is with the competitive enterprise institute. Robert bluey is with the Heritage Foundation. You were at the social media summit. It was quite an event. I will probably never attend anything quite like it. This president is known to put on events quite like this. It was a combination of a celebration of social media and the success that he and other conservatives have had taking their message direct you to the american people, but it was also an opportunity for him to highlight areas were he feels he is being suppressed in his reach. Other conservatives took up and spoke about their own examples of bias from the social Media Companies. It was a combination of those two types of things. As the president is known to do, it went on for quite some time and there was some entertainment stimulus substantive policy does russian. Are conservatives censored on social media . The social Media Companies say no. They are on that one side of it. We have personally experienced samples examples of where content has been removed and when you go to google or facebook or twitter and you ask them why, it seems that it is because of their hate speech policy or Community Standards or other things that we see as just speech or a policy issue, where they may tend to agree with us on. In some cases, yes, i do think that conservatives have asked. Bias or suppression because of the liberal values that come out of silicon valley. I dont have a definitive study that goes to show because there have been other cases where liberals have complained about bias. I think what it comes down to is the social Media Companies sometimes over exerting and if they would just let free speech take priority, we might be better off. Peter same question. Patrick i will say i think it is impossible for any private entity to censor and other private entity. Censorship specifically applies to action by government and we have to remember that the First Amendment is a restriction on government, it is not an entitlement upon other private actors. We are talking about private platforms and systems created by americans that they themselves have First Amendment protections and that includes freedom of association and the run freedom of each. To the extent that they are limiting and, again, i would agree with my counterpart that there is no general study that is looked at this and found any what theyxamples of are referring to a censorship or suppression, to the extent that that is occurring, that is not a First Amendment violation because if there is some sort of removal going on, this is private companies exerting their own First Amendment rights, saying we dont want to be affiliated with some of the messaging that is being posted on her website. Peter but dont those social Media Companies have an outsized influence and have more of a responsibility to allow free speech . Patrick there is no size clause in the First Amendment. We have a responsibility to respect the speech rights and the Association Rights of all americans, the matter how much no matter how big or small their platform or their influence may be. As a value, we as americans should aspire to respect the freespeech rights of others, i agree with you about the Government Role in regulating companies. I do not want to see the government step in. I dont think the consequences i think you could have unintended consequences if that were to happen, but as consumers, we can certainly demand that as users of facebook and twitter and google, if we are on that platform, we expect that they will respect our ability to communicate. If we dont like it, we can quit, we can go found our own company, we can take our message to a different platform, but ultimately, they are private companies and they get to set the rules. Patrick and i think a lot of conservatives are ignoring the net positive that we have seen from the advent of big tech. You have someone like Dennis Prager suing google over what he believes is suppression of his videos, videos that i enjoy a lot of them, i have seen them, i think they are generally doing a pretty great job, i think the numbers speak for that fact. They have over one billion views. To me, it seems hard to levy an accusation that big tech is a net negative in any way, shape, or form to conservative speech when somebody like Dennis Prager is now getting one billion views on the products and videos he is putting out. Robert it is true. Conservatives have had great success. The president himself is a clear example of this. In fact, the president addressed this question when he was asked, would you be in the white house if it were not for your use of social media . He says he would. I think what he was able to do on facebook in terms of targeting certain audiences that maybe were receptive to his message, his ability to bypass the National News media by going directly to twitter to make his announcements and some of his policy positions, those things were all significant factors in his ascension to the white house. There are plenty of other examples, the Heritage Foundation being some i know about firsthand, and the success we have had today is a direct result. Peter when have you been censored or have you been censored on social media . Robert the Heritage Foundation and the daily signal have experienced this problem. I have a colleague who was also censored for a period of time or was blocked from posting on twitter. His case involved an issue of mr. And during. Some of these misgendering. Some of these companies have a policy where if you use a wrong pronoun for a transgender individual, they will block you. My colleague found himself in a situation. He was off the platform about a week, we appealed, twitter eventually apologized to him and restored his account. In the more notable examples for the Heritage Foundation and daily signal, we interviewed a pediatrician about the dangers of giving puberty blockers to young children. This pediatricians video went viral on facebook. It was taking off. It currently has 74 million views. When it got to about 70 million views, the video disappeared from the platform. We could not find it anymore, we contacted facebook, and facebook restore the video. We are currently in a dispute with google over the same videos removal from youtube. They are blocking that video because they say it violates youtubes hate speech policy. Robert have you been blocked peter have you been blocked or censored . Patrick nothing that i have seen. Just this week, we have an example of somebody on the far left saying that they have been blocked or censored. You have Tulsi Gabbard who is claiming, suing google, claiming censorship. There are a lot of examples from the left and the right about this perception of broadbased censorship or suppression and it is important that we point out those examples on the left, but i do think conservatives tend to be a little louder on this issue because there has been this longstanding issue that in the conventional media that conservative voices have not been heard, so they are vigilant about these rings. Cases whereenty of they said they violated Community Standard or terms of service and have been taken down from outlets such as huffington post, which has had more videos put behind the same barrier that Dennis Prager is complaining about then he has. Peter why isnt there a conservative or alleverything facebook type page out there, where everybody can post anything . Patrick i dont think a lot of people would like to use a product like that. If anybody can post anything on a platform like that, you are going to get a lot of spam, you were going to get obscene images, you are going to get a lot of hate speech, it is going to be a pretty nasty place to go. The laws that protect these companies ability to moderate content is what creates these platforms as people does places that people do like to go for the reliable information. Peter can you put anything you want on competitive enterprise institutes website . Patrick i cannot. It goes through an editing process because we control what goes on our website, but i believe we do have a comments section, where instead of prescreening, people will leave comments. Of course, if something in there is a legal or a threat, then we take action. Peter why isnt there a conservative Facebook Robert there have been people who have tried. Thatf the other factors is the reason facebook and twitter and other platforms are successful is because they dont just cater to a specific ideological position or political party. They bring in diverse viewpoints. In many cases, they started out as an exchange between friends or high school or college classmates, were people did not have monolithic political views. So, i think there are values that these social media platforms bring to the table. Im able to keep in touch with my friends from back home in upstate new york, as well as your perspectives from people at the competitive enterprise institute. You dont want to necessarily have a Walled Garden where you will have republicans or democrats talking. Then we get into this whole other issue about filter bubbles and whether or not people are exposed to different ideas. Im the biggest believer that you should subscribe to multiple news outlets and consume information from a wide variety of sources, because if you are just relying exclusively on one, say a republican or conservative source of media social media platform, you are probably not going to get the full perspective. Patrick to get back to a distinction of a small website like ours versus facebook, which is a platform for third parties to post content, this really get that a lot of the criticism that we see levy devotees book and some of these other platforms, that they are acting like publishers. They are not. Most publishers are reading what goes on their page or into their newspaper or into their book before they decide to publish. If you were to apply that standard to facebook or google or amazon or at sea or ebay or some of these ecommerce platforms, they would cease to exist in the way that we know and enjoy them today because there are literally billions of different post going up on these websites at any given day and to expect them to prescreen all of these before they go live is completely unrealistic and to be able to then say that they should be held accountable for what is really just a thirdparty creation from billions of different sources is really going to undermine their ability to operate. I think you would see a lot of them not accept that legal risk and end up shutting down and we would lose all of the benefits that come with having these platforms for decentralization. Robert there already are Market Forces at work. If something goes on to a platform and they start bullying me or patrick, we have the ability to report that to these companies and they have antibullying policies in place. In order to flag comments like that and raise them to a certain attention. Private individuals have certain protections in place where they can shield themselves from some speech that they may find insights violence or whatever it may be. The other issue we are talking is we have a daily video we post on the platform and in some way the policy we are talking about conflicts with the Community Standards, that is where you get into this gray area. See thedont want to government step in and regulate that in any way possible, i do think that the consumers should have the ability to push back and raise awareness about this. If so be it, take it to their own website go to a competitor like youtube or another platform where maybe they allow more of that speech. Patrick what is so funny about this, tragically funny, is that a lot of those kind of protections that the companies have put in place that do filter out content that folks may not want to see or find harmful, those programs that are part of these platforms are things that conservatives generally call for. They dont want their children to be of to go want to these platforms and be exposed to nudity or violence or other what in their view is unseen material. And then they are now turning back and saying, well, these same things are what are causing the perceived censorship. They have to be careful what they are asking for and realize that the same tools that these websites have to ensure that, in general, facebook and some of these other platforms, twitter, are places that are generally safe for people to go, where they wont be spammed pornographic images, things like that, are the same things that conservatives believe is leading to the suppression of some of the content that they post. Peter what do you think about twitters new rules with regard to socalled hate speech or Community Standards . By the way, is Community Standards a set Legal Definition . Im not an attorney, so i cant speak to that, but i would say that i think, as with any other private area, it is their expectations of here is what we expect from you in exchange for using our free service. Peter from twitter safety, which is a blog on twitter, defining Public Interest on twitter, they write that they will be using a notice if they find something that they consider to be hate speech, etc. , and they will put that notice on a tweet if it is from a government or elected official you have more than 100,000 followers and are verified. They are going to start putting notices on tweets. We have seen this with facebook, as well, in terms of its Fact Checking program. This mostly came into play when president trump, i think people think of him immediately and whether or not some of the things that he tweets would apply to this new policy that twitter has put in place on the flip side, we have seen it with facebook and its Fact Checking program. Facebook will put a label on certain news items that it may deem as false. Look, again, they are private companies and they are able to monitor this content however they want and if they want to put a label on it, i think they have every right to do so. Some people may disagree and challenge it. In the case of a daily signal article that we published shortly after the state of the union, we did publish the fact check and were able to address that matter headon. Players cases, smaller might not have that same ability to do so. Patrick what i think this signals is something really important, the different platforms are experimenting with Different Things in order to keep their platform as accessible as possible to the widest possible user base. That is something that goes against these claims that conservatives have but they are being broadly censored. I cant think of any company that bases their Business Model on having as many viewers as possible and wanting to censor half the country. We want to ensure that we have a competitive dynamic, were facebook is trying one thing, twitter is trying another, and people will migrate. The market needs to be able to function and figure out this Fact Checking software or this label is the preferred solution that we have here for content that runs along that line for some people. The really dangerous thing that we are staring downright now is the prospect of having a uniform set standard having handed down by government, then there will be no experimentation and people will not be able to say this works better or this doesnt. You will have the set rule imposed by government whether you like it or not and you will have to deal with that, you will not be able to go to another site and work within their community that you may find to be better. Peter lets listen to a little bit more from the president from july 11. President trump today, im directing my administration to explore regulatory and legislative solutions to protect free speech and free speech rights of all americans. That is you people in this room and a lot of people out there, a lot of people. We hope to see transparency, more accountability, and more freedom. That is on both sides. Peter patrick, you are the president. Patrick i think his heart is in the right place, but as soon as government gets involved in talking about protecting speech by interfering with the actions of other private individuals, that is when we actually start to have a First Amendment problem. The First Amendment is exclusively a restriction on government. It is not an obligation upon private citizens to provide a platform for all speech, no matter what. So, i get concerned when i start hearing about inserting government as a referee for speech and i think conservatives should really take a step back and be careful what they wish for. It is not five years ago that conservatives were explaining about bureaucrats at the irs using Law Enforcement and tax enforcement laws to try to silence conservative speech. So to inject government is the answer to try to protect speech online really goes against everything that history tells us it goes against this idea i wish more Tech Companies would say that it is ok to be biased and we may not try to be biased, but everybody has a bias. Government agencies, the people that run those, they have biases, i have a bias, everyone has a bias, and to think that there is some perfectly neutral arbiter out there