Glenn Greenwald

They're trying.

That's what the TikTok ban was about.

That's why they wanted to ban TikTok or force it into the hands of Larry Ellison.

And that's why, you know, all these Western European countries or Canada and the UK and Australia and Brazil, lots of other places are constantly passing laws to make it easier to control content on the Internet.

But I think that that that ship has long ago sailed.

The Internet is just too big and unwieldy and people are too accustomed to being able to.

speak freely and hear what they want, that I don't think that that tactic is going to work.

And that's why I always thought of free and open internet was the most important cause, because if you can have a place where you can always communicate freely, you can reach a large audience, people are capable of hearing what they want to hear, what they should hear, then making up their own minds.

Coercion or population control of that kind, like really heavy state propaganda becomes virtually impossible.

Sure.

I mean, you know, any human institution is susceptible to corruption and independent media has a ton of that incentives.

I think probably the worst of which is audience capture, because the way that you make money in independent media is by building a big audience.

And if you build your audience based upon some sort of partisan or ideological identity.

It means that they don't want to hear the moments when you start questioning things or challenge their preconceptions.

They want to hear it validated.

They want to feel like they're part of a like-minded community.

I'm not saying all, but that is a big tendency.

And so you can see, you know, a lot of podcasters, the easiest path in order to become a big podcaster, build a big audience online with independent media and therefore make a lot of money, is just to plant your flag in some camp, you know, and say, I'm Maga, or I'm a Democratic partisan, or I'm whatever.

And, you know, you can do that and that'll work, but you run the huge risk of it very quickly, no longer being free.

It just becomes a job.