♪♪ >> Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this, bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation, and I ask every American to join me in this cause.
>> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."
I'm Ian Bremmer.
The Trump presidency is officially over.
On January 20th, Joe Biden became 46th President of the United States.
But for the first time in our lifetimes, we did not have a peaceful transition.
The impact of the events in the days and weeks leading up to the inauguration will be felt for generations.
Today, we're looking at one angle of that -- Big Tech.
Trump was banned from social media, leaving some people cheering, others declaring war on the tech companies.
It sparked a huge debate about censorship and the power those companies have in America.
We're going to talk about that and more with one of the best known tech reporters in the business, Kara Swisher.
>> We have to figure out how to break up the amount of companies where concentrated power is.
That is at the heart of all this, and that is where the solution lies.
>> And later on "Puppet Regime," one last goodbye to 45.
It's as simple as A-B-C.
But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.
>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.
At First Republic, our clients come first.
Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.
More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.
Additional funding provided by... ...and by... >> The year was 1996, Flip phones all the rage.
Dolly the cloned sheep was born, and Yahoo turned two.
The technology of the 1990s looked nothing like today's connected world and the Internet hosted just a fraction of the billions of people who now use it all the time.
Yet Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, is the law that governs rights and responsibilities of social-media companies that weren't even around when it was written.
It exempts them from liability for the content that users post, but also gives them the right to moderate or block that content.
Debate about the law is hardly new, but it exploded following violence in the U.S. Capitol.
As you know, Twitter, Facebook, even Pinterest have all banned President Trump for life.
You might expect that to draw cheers from liberals and jeers from conservatives, but it's actually much more complicated than that.
In fact, the ACLU, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and even Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny have all raised serious objections to the move.
And both Republican lawmakers like Ted Cruz and Democratic President Joe Biden himself have called for deep revisions to Section 230, though for very different reasons.
In 2009, just three years after its founding, Twitter was heralded for helping to expose a brutal crackdown on protesters in authoritarian Iran following an election that was viewed as illegitimate.
Today, a former U.S. president is banned from Twitter for inciting violence and spreading lies about an election right here in America.
Technology isn't the only thing that has changed since 1996.
By the way, Iran's supreme leader -- he is still on Twitter and he's tweeting about what's happening in the United States.
So how do you begin to discuss regulating some of the most powerful companies in the world, and what lies ahead for Big Tech as the Biden years officially begin?
That's the topic of today's big interview.
And I'm delighted to be with Kara Swisher, someone I really want to talk to today.
Thanks so much for joining "GZERO World."
>> Thank you.
>> Let's start with the big ban -- Trump taken off of major social media.
They say for life.
They say permanently.
You say right move and, in fact, they waited too long.
Why?
>> Well, I actually didn't want him taken off originally because I thought they had the right attitude that he was newsworthy, you know, even though he violated the rules pretty regularly, that other people would have gotten suspended or kicked off.
Most of this stuff was even if offensive was not rule-breaking.
But then he started really badly to break the rules in the last year and then, of course, right after the election where he really was causing a lot of problems.
And so what he kept doing is sort of one-upping Twitter in terms of what awful things he could say and causing problems, doing lies, and especially at a really tense time.
And so I think they really did, you know, they should have expected it is what I think, is that they sort of bred him to behave like this.
They sort of -- It's sort of like having a kid and giving them endless sugar and then wondering why your kid is, you know, diabetic and crazy.
>> And bouncing off walls.
>> Yeah.
>> But never gave him a suspension.
It went from, you know, having some comments underneath posts to "you're gone for life."
I mean, that's like zero to 100, right?
I mean, is that appropriate?
>> I don't know.
I mean, it was at a very tense time, right in the middle of these riots that were happening at the Capitol.
And so he was -- you know, I think a lot of people feel and as more evidence is beginning to show up, the danger that people inside the Capitol were actually in and his tweets were fomenting that.
So I think probably, to cover themselves, especially at that moment of crisis, probably they have a good excuse to do so.
I think the big question is not so much the ban, because he did deserve it.
He did break the rules over and over and over again.
But other people have been kicked off for much less.
So, you know, that's sort of the justice system too, right?
Some people get one sentence, another person gets a different one.
And so what was really the issue is what they did before and how long it took, and also, I think, more importantly, why are these systems built this way so someone like President Trump can abuse them in such a fashion and, in fact, not abusing them -- using them exactly as they're built.
And so that is the bigger question, is this is the group that got us into the mess and now they, of course, had to clean it up.
But I think -- Let's not forget the first part, which is they got us into this mess.
>> When was the first time you saw a post from the President and you said, "Okay, this is not on.
This is not acceptable in this environment"?
>> You know, I don't even remember.
There's so many of them.
I think when he was talking about insurrection.
It was a similar kind of thing, when he was sort of tweeting about insurrection.
I wrote a whole column about it saying, "Wow, he's really getting right to the edge of this."
And I can't remember what it was, but it was about insurrection and maybe it's a good idea, which was unusual coming from the president.
Now, again, people have their rights to say these things.
But on Twitter, you often get -- if you incite violence, there's two bright lines for these sites, which is one is child pornography and terrorism.
I guess there's three.
And then incitement to violence, which is right next to terrorism.
And so he really did cross that line, I thought, a while back a couple of times, very closely at least.
And then this time I think he really did incite violence.
And so they were within their rights to do something.
The fact that Mike Pence was in such danger while Trump was tweeting these sort of angry tweets at him is really problematic for the President.
Now, different sites -- Facebook suspended him indefinitely, which is probably permanent, would be my guess.
But everybody did a different thing, and the whole issue is we're sort of at the mercy of these -- basically two people -- Jack Dorsey, who runs Twitter, and Mark Zuckerberg, who runs Facebook.
>> Now, of course, there are other leaders, world leaders that use these sites to directly incite violence.
Certainly some of what I've seen from Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei against Israel, and they're still up.
And I'm not suggesting that that undermines your argument, but I am interested in what that means for the kind of standards you think these sites need to have.
And is it okay for them to have double standards since they're American companies and they're talking about American leaders?
>> You know, I've always written they're arbitrary.
I mean, one of my issues is the arbitrary enforcement is a problem.
I mean, that really is -- I don't -- I have no problem removing them too if they are violating the rules that Twitter has set up.
I think the issue is these companies, not just Twitter because it's much smaller.
Facebook really is the center of all this.
Everybody sort of focuses on Twitter because the media is on Twitter and the politicians are on Twitter.
But in terms of size and impact, Facebook really is the whole game across the globe, especially globally.
But yeah, I think the arbitrary nature of how they do this random -- you know, they sometimes enforce rules, they sometimes don't.
It's largely because this is a small company, really, which is trying to enforce standards across the world.
And so the issue is how these things -- is the architecture of these sites.
They're all built for enragement.
They're all built for aggression.
They're all built for addiction.
And so people get sucked up into them, whatever site they're on.
And one of the things that was really remarkable, watching and listening to the people at the Capitol, is they truly believe the nonsense they were spewing.
They truly believe it, and it's because they've been -- you know, we talk about radicalization with terrorists in the Middle East.
These are radicalized people who've been radicalized by lies on these sites.
And so that's what I'd like to focus on, is how this happens.
And a lot of people have focused on it.
>> I mean, you know, talk about what the fixes need to be aside from clearer or less arbitrary lines for what is and what is not acceptable to post on a social-media site.
>> Well, you know, I don't know.
That's the issue.
I don't know how you fix an architecture of a building that is just purposely dangerous for everybody.
You know, it's really difficult.
I think it's about power.
I think one of the things that drives me crazy is the GOP talking about being unnecessarily targeted on these sites, you know, conservative bias against conservatives.
This is another evidence-free claim by most of these people.
There is no bias that has been able to be shown.
Right?
It's just that they get kicked off more.
Maybe they violate more.
I don't know.
But there is no actual evidence about this.
But they do have a point that this is about power, that the power is in the hands of a very small group of people.
So the way you solve that is you have more companies.
And so we've allowed these legislators and our regulators have allowed these companies to get enormously big in the way we used to allow the oil companies or the telephone companies or whatever we were going to break up.
We have experience in this area as Americans over our long history.
And so these companies -- three or four companies control everything.
And so that's really the issue.
And it's not so much what they do because in some cases they do the right thing.
In some cases they do the wrong thing.
But the fact that there's not enough companies in choice that people can go to all kinds of places or there can be other voices or other versions of technology so it's not so concentrated in one place.
>> Now, if the business model is driven by advertising dollars and sucking up as much data as humanly possible and pretending it's a much bigger site than it actually is, I mean, if you have 10 or 15 companies as opposed to 4, how does that deal with these structural problems of what the companies are?
>> Well, there are business incentives that are really problematic.
Absolutely.
There's no question.
But my point is that when we go to make these decisions, when we give one or two companies where everybody coalesces in one place as if it's a public square, as if it's a national public square, when it is in fact a private square owned by billionaires, owned by the richest people on Earth, you're going to have problems.
Some people think a lot of these companies should have legal responsibility.
It's certainly something we should debate, and that hasn't been under debate.
Instead, it's, you know, "get rid of section 230," which is this law that provides broad immunity, instead of "Okay, we're not going to get rid of it because it could hurt a lot of companies.
What can we do to reform it, to protect us against giant companies that have unlimited and unfettered power?"
And so there's a discussion that needs to be had after all this time that the Internet has impacted us to what kind of Internet do we want in a democracy?
And that's okay to have that discussion about power of companies when one company like Google has ninety-- I forget -- 90% of search.
Come on.
Like how?
You know, maybe they're good, maybe they're bad.
But, you know, I don't know.
But I think 90% is the only number I want to look at, and same thing with Facebook.
There's been no new social network created in a very long time.
There's no significant one.
There's been no significant search service.
There's been no significant e-commerce effort, you know?
So you have to just sort of look around.
There's only two app developers, right, in the whole -- in terms of -- not app developers.
There's lots of app developers.
There's only two app stores, Google and Apple.
So these are the kind of things we need to talk about as a country and as legislators.
And they have not done their job in privacy legislation, in fines, in enforcement or anything else that could sort of rein in the power of these giants.
>> You say it's about power, and I certainly understand that.
I mean, I've spoken with senior executives in the industry who have told me that if the Republicans had won the Senate, Parler would not have been de-platformed because of the blowback that would have come on the legislative side.
What do you think about, I mean, the fact that, okay, they've gotten rid of Trump, they've gotten rid of Parler, they've gotten rid of "stop the steal" as a hashtag.
But the Democrats now run the Senate and the House and the executive.
And so they're going to be -- in a sense, the power is on their side now.
I mean, what do we do with that dynamic going forward?
>> Well, I think, you know, they don't have the full power, by the way.
It's a very tight -- both in the House and the Senate.
No one's going to be doing anything very much.
Like, they're not gonna run wild.
>> Yeah, there's not gonna be a lot of legislation generally.
Agree with that, sure.
>> But it's an opportunity to do very bipartisan legislation around things that are -- that concern us all, which is what is the reform of Section 230?
What should it be?
Now, we can have an actual cogent discussion without all the screaming on one side or the other.
I think it would be really -- I think it's very important to have a privacy legislation, which we do not have a national privacy bill.
Every other country does.
There's a number of them in states.
I think enforcement by the FTC around antitrust and the Justice Department in a way that treats Big Tech not like a monolith but individual cases that start to bring more innovation.
One thing the FTC was looking into was all the small purchases that these big companies do, because what they do is they kill a lot of companies in the cradle, right?
Or they buy them.
It's called -- It's some terrible expression.
Kill -- Kill acquisition or something like that.
So these companies, which could maybe challenge these companies someday, don't get to exist.
And so that's the kind of thing we need to be looking at.
>> The other side of that argument, of course, is that what you're talking about in the United States is not true globally.
I mean, there are other massive companies in this space.
They're Chinese.
And so -- no, only that if you're talking about global power, there's a lot of people that are saying actually these American companies are national champions and need to be stronger because otherwise China dominates the space globally.
>> Mark Zuckerberg says -- he said it to me in an interview two years ago, actually, clearly, and that's sort of the trope from Silicon Valley.
That's the idea is like, "We need to be big in order to beat the Chinese."
That's sort of a fearmongering way to look at it.
The reason U.S. companies are so good is because they don't have a top-down situation like in China.
Innovation comes from the bottom.
It does not come from the top, and that's the way a free Internet has to be.
A free Internet is not about top-down government-controlled innovation.
As someone who's been very concerned about the Chinese, the way to beat the Chinese is through bottom-up innovation, which is the way we do it in this country.
It's capitalism.
It's how we create new companies.
Right now, we have three companies that are driving down the information superhighway, blocking everybody -- everybody.
>> Does Mark know what he's doing and not care?
Is Mark -- I mean, is the ideology "I just need to ensure that I protect my power and my dominant position no matter what and that's my superpower.
That's what I'm going to be good at"?
>> No, I think it's too much for anybody to have the power he has.
It's too much.
He's not -- You could "is he smart enough?"
Nobody is.
I'm not smart enough.
You're not smart enough.
This is unlimited, unfettered power by one person.
And it's lucky he's not a certain kind of person, right?
We know what this is, and it is unfettered, unregulated power that can make decisions.
Sometimes they make good decisions.
In the case of Trump, they made a good decision, but I don't know who's going to run them.
I just don't -- I don't feel like we need power concentrated in a small group of people.
I just -- It never turns out well.
>> So one thing I have noticed since the de-platforming of Trump is all of these people that are now moving and downloading these encrypted apps.
>> Yeah.
>> Moving to Telegram, moving to Signal.
What are the implications of that, in your view?
>> I think they were already there.
I think this is like a typical story to write for reporters.
"Now they're going underground."
They were underground.
Then they came out of the ground and used the mainstream services.
And you know what?
It's funny.
A lot of it I find, especially the white supremacy stuff, it's like mold.
It thrived in the light, actually.
You know what I mean?
The light was good for white supremacists, unfortunately.
And so they're always gonna be underground.
And by the way, they were always there.
Like, this is the lie we tell ourselves as Americans, that this stuff -- like, "Where did this come from?"
It's been there forever.
It's always been there.
And now it emerged and organized online.
And they're going to organize no matter what.
And I think giving them more tools to publicly organize brings -- radicalizes people.
I do.
I think underground, it's a different story.
And, you know, then our government should monitor the dangerous ones, let the others spew all they want about make America great again or whatever they want to spew, even the QAnon people.
Like, you know, it's madness, the stuff they say.
But we monitor them until -- and if they become dangerous, we take action.
If they cross a line, just like the mob did at the Capitol, that's when we take action.
Until then, they can spew all the nonsense they want anywhere they want.
I don't think that's -- It's just the way it's going to be.
>> You've seen Angela Merkel come out and oppose the decision by Twitter.
And, of course, part of the reason she opposes it is because the government in Germany actually has much stricter regulations about what kinds of free speech are actually not permitted.
Do you think that's necessary in the United States?
>> No, we have the First Amendment.
No, I mean, that was rich for me because I'm like, "Wow, you can't do hardly anything."
There was lots of cases of Internet companies being prosecuted in Germany for all kinds of stuff like that.
So that was a little -- that was a little bit ironic I thought.
She's usually on point.
I often find her on point.
They have a system that allows that.
We have the First Amendment, and so government shall make no law.
That's the most fascinating thing.
What I love when I'm listening to this is so many people don't know the First Amendment.
And I was talking to one of the representatives, and they were going on about "this is a First Amendment violation."
I said, "It's not.
Do you know the First Amendment?
It's really short and it's the first, so you can find it pretty easily."
But I was like, "It says Congress shall make no law.
It doesn't say Twitter, Facebook, Google, whatever."
We have the First Amendment here.
No, we should not abandon that.
>> So we now have President Biden and his administration.
You've seen the appointments that he's made so far.
What are a couple of steps you think that the incoming administration can credibly do in the near term that would give you a little more cause for optimism, Kara?
>> Well, a big and little thing.
Some of these bills that have been stuck in Congress, especially the Senate because of Mitch McConnell, can go through, these advertising -- There's a number of really interesting privacy and advertising bills that should just sail right through, and national advertising, sort of an Internet Bill of Rights idea, which is many, many bills.
It's not one thing, but the ideas around privacy, around advertising, around targeting, around data that people have, I think absolutely should go through as fast as possible.
I think we should probably call together a bipartisan group of people to talk about Section 230 and what to do about immunity.
I think we need to figure out a way that innovation can be -- the government can really spur innovation.
The government did invent the Internet, so we -- what is the next thing and where is the research going?
That's really been ignored in the Trump administration.
I think a focus on STEM is still important for people, getting more people in there.
If we want to beat the Chinese like you talk about, we need more people in this country to be involved in that.
It's not the only thing people should be studying, but certainly -- especially a more diverse group of people.
If we're developing A.I.
and different things like that, it can't be one group of people that's designing it.
I think that's critically important.
I think a more -- a less friendly relationship with tech would be great by some of these officials.
I don't think President Biden has a whole lot of -- he talks about it but doesn't seem to know a lot about it.
That's fine.
Kamala Harris would be a more interesting person to be spearheading this.
When she was attorney general, she did a lot of things around privacy that I thought were interesting.
At the same time, she was somewhat a little more cozy with tech than probably she should be.
And so that's an issue.
So bring Elizabeth Warren in.
She seems to scare everybody in tech.
You know, let her be part of it.
And that, you know, just to focus in on the fact that we want innovation to thrive and we want enforcement of current laws.
And then lastly -- and I think it's the last goal -- would be antitrust, is to really press, which has already been started under the Trump administration, is a thorough investigation into antitrust issues and possible breakup of some of these companies, not all of them.
>> If we can't actually do the fixes you're talking about, would we be better off without them?
If you had a switch, and you could actually say "we can end these companies right now," would you rather do that?
>> I think so on some days.
Some days.
Some days I do.
I grew up, you know -- I started a career in the Internet, and I've been doing it for three decades because I love-- when I saw it, I was like, "The possibilities for --" I'm a Star Trek person, right?
You're either a Star Trek or a Star Wars person in this world, I think, if I want to be really geeky about it.
You either believe in the hope for humanity and the great, you know, "let's look and find people and solve problems" or your Star Wars, where even the heroes are troubled, the villains are complex.
Nobody ends up well.
I sure like the Internet, though.
I sure do like it still.
>> [ Laughs ] Pleasure to be with you.
Thanks so much.
This week, our nation inaugurated its 46th president, Joseph R. Biden, and made history with the swearing in of the first woman vice president, Kamala Harris.
>> Today we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause -- the cause of democracy.
The people, the will of the people, has been heard, and the will of the people has been heeded.
>> But today on "Puppet Regime," we're bidding adieu to Donald Trump with a final look at one of his greatest hits.
Roll that tape.
♪♪ ♪♪ >> "Puppet Regime"!
>> Alright, alright, alright, enough of that malarkey.
There's a new sheriff in town.
Let's roll.
>> That's our show this week.
Come back next week, and if you like what you see and of course you do because that's why we have this little intimate moment at the end of every show, check us out at gzeromedia.com.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.
At First Republic, our clients come first.
Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.
More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.
Additional funding provided by... ...and by...