Simon Adler

Jimmy Kimmel can't say that anymore.

The late night host taken off air indefinitely.

As we all know, free speech was in the news again.

And these questions of who can say what, where, and how much pressure the government can or can't exert just felt fresh and vital all over again.

And so I called Kate, yeah, to see how this is all playing out online.

Okay.

Well, I guess before we get into all of that, let's build a bit of a foundation first.

Sure.

So I guess how has the actual practice of keeping stuff up and taking stuff down changed and why?

Okay, how so?

So they're just taking tons and tons and tons of stuff down.

Okay.

If I can put a stupid man's term on it, it's like they are choosing to push things up instead of pull things down.

I have a confession, which is that I've maybe spent five minutes on TikTok in my life.

Well, and on that...

It is interesting that TikTok figured out how to make banal stuff compelling because we were certainly told that, well, the reason Facebook wants to leave some of this stuff up is because it's the highly emotive, highly reactive stuff that keeps people around.

So what did we have wrong there?

Was this just like an adjacent path to the same outcome, which is keeping people on a platform?

Fascinating.

So it's like Facebook figured out the sort of information that would keep you there.