Doctor Mike

Platforms were also, their moderation efforts were reframed as censorship.

Fact checking and labeling too were reframed as censorship.

So when you reframe fact-checking as censorship and then the platforms say, like, okay, we'll be totally hands-off, we'll do nothing, then you have created an environment that advantages liars.

You've created an environment that advantages people who are willing to do, you know, where the end justifies the means, meaning...

We are going to essentially make it such that anything, any response at all is seen as egregious tyranny and censorship.

And so we want to make it so that there is no response.

There is nothing that happens here.

And that is where I think we are at this point.

You've seen the government dismantle its efforts to track foreign interference.

A lot of the task forces within the FBI, DHS, State Department, the intelligence community that handled this kind of stuff within the government that were started in the first Trump administration have now been dismantled under the second Trump administration.

So it's not entirely clear

you know, we just engaged in a conflict with Iran, right?

We just bombed Iranian reactors.

I'm kind of curious where the capacity is to look for Iranian influence in cyber operations now.

Because we've dismantled a lot of it in response to the allegation that all of the actions to look for those accounts were secretly biased against conservatives or secretly trying to stifle Trump's speech.

It's really I know it's a very complicated thing for people to follow.

And this is where any time I try to explain it or get into it, even in conversations like this, you feel vaguely like, you know, you sound like you're explaining a conspiracy theory because it is such a complicated set of pieces of a machine that really came together to.

make it a liability for different types of stakeholders in ensuring free and fair elections to talk to each other, or for different types of stakeholders ahead of a next pandemic, what social media entity is going to want to communicate with the Surgeon General's office.

Nobody.

What academic researcher is going to want to communicate with the Surgeon General's office knowing that that communication is going to be reframed as some sort of weird secret collusion cabal?