Mike Benz

We're in the late adolescent stage.

When I started crying about this in late 2016, early 2017, it was the infant stage.

And there were things that could have been done now to stop this that would prevent it from having taken the maturity that it did.

And it grew from that infant stage into this sprawling network as it became funded by the Pentagon, as it became funded more and more by NATO and by the State Department and USAID and by all the different domestic government agencies.

And it grew to this adolescent size

And now it's getting pushback.

There's a little bit of arrested development domestically right now since Elon acquired it, since there's been congressional pressure, since there's been civil legal pressure, and since there's been media pressure with more and more people being educated about some of these drivers.

But as I said, they have these... They're trying to...

usher it along to full maturity by going beyond the four bounds of the continental United States.

They are now bringing in their global pressure ecosystem in order to stop these global social media platforms from being able to operate internationally unless they bend the knee,

I'll give you an example.

This EU Digital Services Act, which NATO has been the main thought leader behind because NATO thought the biggest threat to NATO was the wrong people winning elections within NATO countries.

And so they pushed the EU to pass this through.

They have this... They have this...

sort of a safe harbor, if you will, to get out of the existential punishment to X and Facebook and YouTube and TikTok and any large social media platform that operates there.

Because the punishment is, if you do not go through with our stipulated disinformation compliance,

You either are forced out of the EU, we will ban your app from the, you know, people won't be able to use it there, or you have to pay 6% of your global revenue to the EU.

Global?

Global revenue.

Global revenue.