Transcripts For CSPAN3 Bill Whittle On Messaging For Millenn

CSPAN3 Bill Whittle On Messaging For Millennials June 22, 2024

Had died. And i was curious, in these violent situations, what response, if any, does twitter have . And so im not familiar with this one. So the account or the material that was going out from her account was not true she was reporting on the violence. And no one was entirely clear if she ever was a real person or not. I see. So, i would say that in the context of violence or any kind of crisis kind of situation, part of we get this question a lot actually, because ill give you a slightly more tame example than violence in mexico. But still it relates. In the aftermath of hurricane sandy, there were accounts on twitter of flooding in this place, and people even had these falsified photos of certain places that were under water. And there, like in the case of mexico, you have these questions, like, hey, twitter and other social media seem to be giving rise to potential misinformation. As i was saying earlier, it is, i really do believe, one of the most extraordinary viral platforms that has ever existed, and as such, it can be a vector for the viral spread of misinformation. But i always point out in this context, the spread of misinformation in the context of some kind of a crisis, breaking news situation, is not new. It far predates certainly social media. And you know, the example i would give from sometime after i graduated from here was the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Before social media, you had established media, and the news accounts at the time were that there were people of a certain ethnicity who purportedly executed that bombing. The difference, though, and i think this is the key distinction and what the sort of double edged sword of social media is, youre right, it can be this vector of misinformation, but the difference, i would argue at that time, i dont remember exactly the confines of it. If you go back, i promise you, it wasnt minutes that information was out there. Perhaps somebody here knows how long the duration was. It seems to me, it may have been days in many circles. And the fundamental change is that you have, on one hand, with platforms like twitter, an opportunity for incredible, on the ground reporting. Im standing on the hudson river, theres a plane, it just landed there, heres a picture. And we later find out this is true. Or im standing on the corner of bleaker street, and were under water, ps its not true. The beauty of social media is that it has accelerated the time of debunking these things. So i would argue that if we were able to rewind the tape to the Oklahoma City bombing, that tragedy, were we to have had a platform like twitter, i think you might have accelerated the time it took to debunk these the misinformation that was out there. So, yes, that misinformation exists, but it can also get put back in its place even better and more quickly now. Thanks for that. Can you use the microphone. Sorry. Hi, thank you. Im wondering whats your view on google withdrawing from china, more specifically to provide limited but still more superior service to 1. 4 billion people, compared to just nouocp service at all . Yeah. That was definitely the most challenging chapter of my time at google, without a doubt. And, you know, it was a source of real soulsearching at the company. What i can tell you is, first let me tell you where we stand on this at twitter, and then i can try to shed some light on kind of how that went for us at google. So twitter is currently blocked in china. As much as we would love for people in china to freely access twitter, they cannot. And what weve said is that were unwilling to make the kinds of sacrifices that we believe we would need to make in order to be unblocked there. Perhaps there is a world in which twitter could be unblocked, but it would require sacrifices that were just not prepared to commit to. Because of our values. And in the case of google, i would say it was very similar. Just the difference was, for us at the time, to continue operating there, it was requiring levels of sacrifice that we were unwilling to continue to sign up for. And you could absolutely argue, as it was argued extensively internally at the time, that being there, even in this diminished capacity and giving people some access to the service is better than nothing. But what ill tell you about the experience at the time was, we, the premise of it was, well, well be there and hopefully the trend line will be one of sort of greater and greater openness. And yet we viewed the opposite. That coinciding with our presence there, was a move towards more and more closed behavior and limited access acc then finally at the time when we decided to take the action that we did, actual targeting of activists and dissidents. And i think for many of us there at the time the question was what for . Why are we doing this . What is the benefit coming from our presence . And it didnt seem like it was benefiting the people in Mainland China and it didnt seem like it was benefitting people outside of Mainland China either. So it is a perfectly valid question. And it was one that required literally years of deliberation on our part. But that was the conclusion that we came to. And i would say it is a similar conclusion weve come to at twitter. Thanks for that. Over here. Feel free to line up if you want to so one of the things i think with twitter is interesting is youve been seeing a decline or not at least the growth that people want to see for monthly active users and ive heard one of the trends is around syndication, how is twitter being integrated into tv shows, is it a greater measure of the impact that twitter is happening but now you talk about the Free Speech Movement and twitter is a movement. Im wondering, do you have any thinking about what mettics you could use to more quantitatively measure how twitter is being used as a movement and whether it is where you want to see it and the kind of impact it is having as a company. Yeah. This is a great question. And so actually before when i was saying that i feel like being a publicly traded company hasnt changed us but the spotlight is maybe brighter. This is a great example. We love the growth that were seeing with the company. There are people who, in sort of investment in analyst communities, who have their own ideas of what that growth should look like. I think the disconnect is if you just view twitter through the lense of monthly active users, it is missing a whole part of the equation and it certainly misses it in the context of the broader movement. So for us, when we think about the impact we have and how best to measure it, it much better to do with the total audience associated with any given moment than it does the specific number of monthly active users who are exposed to something. It has much more to do with the number of people who got to view and interact with a tweet associated with the oscars or the super bowl or elections in the u. K. Than the individual number of people who produced a tweet. It has much more to do with this audience total audience than it does this limited slice of a user base. So that is more of how we think about it. And i guess most recently you saw some starting to experiment with different kinds of loggedout experience that would allow you, if you are not a monthly active logged in user to experience this. And that is how were thinking about it. And hopefully, yeah, it will absolutely let people experience that part of the global conversation. And when you use the term audience, you are not just thinking collective followership, right . That is right. It is retweets, expression of engagement with the content, right . Look at it like this. If you are barack obama and you want to tell the world that youve just been reelected as president of the United States, you take to twitter to do so and you tweet out four more years as he did. But you take to twitter to do so not because it is only your xmillion followers or active members that see that, but you do that because that tweet gets syndicated around the web, around the world, broadcast on television, that is your audience that is exposed to that particular expression. And so our users already think of it in this way and it is a question of i think your question is totally valid which is okay, but what are the ways to sort of quantify that and were certainly thinking along those lines. Great question. Are there things that keep you up and we have some time for a few more questions. Are there things and we have thought about a few things that might keep one up at night. Can you give us an example as you look out on the horizon that might be worrisome. I think the china example is a fair one. We have been blocked at various times by other countries around the world too. And these are things that keep us up because when suddenly people are unable to access this platform that gives their voice this broader sort of megaphone, it is really, really challenging for us of how to navigate those watters and how do we waters and how do we do that and continue to uphold our values. Yeah, i think those are things, certainly for me, those are things that are really, really challenging on a daily basis. Especially for you. Because you get the first call, right. Gabriel, what do you think . Yeah. That is remarkable. How often do you tweet . Several times a day ill tweet or retweet. One of you were tweeted that you were excited to have me here. Thank you. Was that you . I responded to that. It is a pleasure to meet you in the real world. I should say, hey, again, in terms of just to tread lightly and question the status quo, in part because for me i feel like what is a pretty visible publicly visible position, and i am myself a pretty private person, i end up using twitter more for professional purposes. And so youll see me tweeting out things like we just issued our transparency report, that is the kind of thing i want people to know about. I know there are a lot of other people that are tweeting about seeing their daughters first steps. My daughters first steps were experienced be me in the comfort of my home and werent disseminated that way. But that is up to each his or her own feeling. But that is my particular usage. And people do talk about occasionally, because i tend to use it professionally as well, but occasionally ill tweet about my kids and i think if it feels or sounds authentic to them i think they respond favorably to that. It is lovely. It is lovely. As a user, i just some of the moments where i get to see this unvarnished look at people who i never would have access to i love those kinds of experiences. To be able to be exposed to interactions between people, i love those experiences too. And to the extent there is an appetite from some of you out there to see the unvarnished look at me, im happy to catch up over coffee sometime but that is not something i put on display. Are there any tweets that you regret . Oh, that is a great. I dont think honestly, no. And maybe this is because im a fairly cautious person. No. There are certainly none that i regret. There are plenty that i regret other people having done for them. But no. I stand by. Thats great. Thats great. And this is a relatively recent tweet of mine and iid thought i was harmless, my daughter who was 11, nicole had a civilizations history text book and i picked it up and started leafing through it and it mentioned that as best experts can tell that christ was not born in the year zero. That christ was born in the year 5 bc, or the best guess. And i tweeted that i just learned this and am i the last to know. And so the birth date for christ is a lot of important to people in the world and i got a lot of response to that tweet and i was trying to be the scientist. No, it got more response than i expected. So if it makes you feel any better, we had doctor kneel gaston out here in the bay area last week and he came by the office and was asking him about this extraordinary exchange he had some of you may have seen this but i think it was last christmas he tweeted out in his way that on this day, i guess on december 25th, he tweeted out on this day we celebrate someone im going to do a bad job of paraphrasing but understand this is the spirit of it. For all of you Fact Checkers out there. On this day we celebrate that was born by the time he was born revolutionized the world, happy birthday isaac knew ton. And it turned out people assign special value to december 25th. And he heard an earful about it. But to your question, any that any tweets that we or others regret, he certainly was unapollo jettic in unapologetic in having made that. And i think, again, people are pro pro provockive member of our society and just as much as he was before twitter it is just that we get to experience it along with him. And those type of behaviors i love seeing. I think that is part of the reason why the university, the market place for ideas is owe open here and that is why we love it so much. Gabriel, thank you for being here today. Thank you for having me. [ applause ] thank you all for being here today and thank you for the wonderful work that youve been doing. On behalf of all of us, thank you very much. Coming up on cspan. We focus on reaching young people. Next bill whittle on ways conservative can reach young voters using pop culture and making political candidates more appealing. Then a panel of millennials, including barbara bush, discusses the issues and cultures and stereo types about their generation. Then twitter chief communication officer Gabriel Stricker and the companys efforts to address free speech concerns while limited abusive practices such as trolling. The cspan cities tour visited Historic Sites across the nation to hear from local historians and authors and civil leaders every other week on book tv and American History tv on cspan 3. And this month with congress on the summer recess, the cities tour is on cspan each day at 6 00 p. M. Eastern. Today we travel to greensboro, North Carolina to learn about the literary life of that city. Now a look at conservative messaging for the 21st century. Political commentator and author bill whittle addressed an audience at the conservative forum of Silicon Valley looking at ways conservatives can reach young voters using pop culture and making political candidates more appealing. [ applause ] hi, everybody. I like to get this a little closer to me in case i decide to pick up a little religion tonight, and take a step back so i can hear how loud im being. It is a pleasure to be back up here. Last time i didnt realize how close i am to berkeley and this time i did and i was surprised that my skin didnt burst into flames but im a degree or two warmer than otherwise and it is great to be up here. We have a large, large problem ahead of us. Many times when we talk about problems out there in the real world, we talk about the problems of demographics, demographics if terms of the west disappearing, just demographically disappearing and we have a problem in the terms of the demographics of history. In high school, we face the fact that younger and younger people are becoming more left wing. It is not an accident that they werent taught about our founding principals, if they were they wouldnt be so left wing and so they are more left wing. And when we look out at conservatives, we see a group that is older. This isnt bad. I have been at a tea party crowd and the average age is deceased and that is a problem. That is a serious problem. [ laughter ] so in order to understand that problem and in order to do something about that problem and in order to start making some traction with young people who are, in fact, extremely conservative, we have to understand something. We have to understand this in our bones. And were very reluctant to understand this in our bones. We have to understand that people dont vote the way they think, they vote the way they feel. And this is true for all of us. That is not a bad thing. A lot of people look down on that. But the feelings are the core emotions, feelings are what really drives our personalities. And if people vote the way they feel and they feel bad about conservatives then theyre going to vote for liberals just because they dont like us. And that is really the simplicity of the problem we find ourselves in today. We dont get the votes because were perceived as being the villains. Ill give you an interesting example, exit polling after the elimination of mitt romney. Exit polling, people coming out of voting booths after the election of 2012 said mitt romney won on the issue they consider most importantly, which was the economy. He won on defense and job economy. And mitt romney in exit polling after the 2012 election won on virtually every single question the people asked with one exception. And the one exception where mitt lost was Something Like 89 in favor of obama was who do you think cares more about you. Romney won on defense and everything else, and who cares about you, and obama caried that with 89 or Something Like that. And that is how they voted. Because mitt romney turned you into a villain. And im here to tell you about the story today. Because if we dont tell you about story we wont win against the weenies and the losers an the weak lings and the kind of kids at the student koubs Meetings Council meetings saying if you vote for me, ill give you a longer recess. Get out of my face. I dont need you to tell me what to do. We are going to lose to these weenies before we lose the story. Before mitt romney got into the fight he was the villian. And people dont vote for the villain. The best entrance of a villain was in star wars, i saw it on the roof of a station waggan in 1977 and you see this Rebel Alliance and this vast enormous force of empire fighting this tiny little group of individuals trying to escape and you get in the spaceship and you see the rebel troopers and they are humans with faces and they are nervous and scared because they have a fight coming and the hatch blows and here comes the white stormtroopers and masked that suggest skulls and killing these individual people and after a few moments of this, this 7 1 2 foot tall treater with a nazi helmet with a mask that looked like a living skull and breathing like an artificial monster robot steps out of the gates of hell and i turn to the person sitting next to me and i said i bet you that is the bad guy. You will not vote for the villa villain. You wont. And mitt romney let himself be demonized and unvilified. You can only go after the other villain and then you can decide who has the best policy thnd we would have won the election. But that didnt happen. Because we dont understand the story, the power of what they did when they said mitt romney is a vampire that caused flauts and the election was already over. If we dont understand the power of this we wont win again and i dont want

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