All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers on dismantling the "Censorship Industrial Complex"
22 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the role of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy?
David and I are staying in a 300-year-old house. And we've both smashed our head on the beams twice already. But this is our first Davos, David. It's our first Davos. We've been here for 24 hours. And any first impressions here?
It's interesting. You know, we're staying very far away. Yeah. Apparently they didn't want you to be part of this.
They didn't want me too close.
Yeah. But we finally got you an invitation.
Chapter 2: How do EU regulations impact free speech in the US?
Your invitation did not get lost in the mail.
My invitation didn't get lost in the mail this time.
For those of you who watch the pod, you know what I'm talking about.
Inside joke.
Yes.
But it's great to be here and great to be here at USA House. Thanks to all the sponsors and really delighted for our first guest for the pod. Sarah Rogers is the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy at the State Department. For members here who don't know this position or what you've been charged with or what you've decided to work on, I'm curious about that.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the Digital Services Act?
Do they tell you what to do or do you come up with your own mandate? But yeah, tell us everything about what you're doing.
long-time listener, first-time guest, and thank you to both of us. Thank you from all of us at America House for joining us here. So I am the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy. And when I got this nomination, my friends and family all congratulated me and then kind of furtively said, what is that?
So diplomacy traditionally concerns the relationship between the American government and foreign governments. Two ambassadors shake hands, make a deal, solve a war. But public diplomacy is different. Public diplomacy addresses the relationship between the American government and foreign publics.
And this has become a very important undersecretariat with the rise of the internet and then during the Biden administration especially, these mushrooming concerns about so-called disinformation and what do we do when there are allegedly malign influences on the public view of America, public's intersection with American interests.
Chapter 4: How is the concept of the 'Censorship Industrial Complex' defined?
How do we interact with the internet and the information ecosystem? That is part of my portfolio. I also oversee other soft power activities, including our educational and cultural and sports diplomacy. So I am privileged to play a role in the World Cup this summer and the LA Olympics coming up, and the Fulbright program and others like it. So it's a great job.
You seem particularly focused on...
freedom of speech and a little bit of tension between our standards and the companies in America, which have made the move to being strongly freedom of speech, something that kind of got lost in our industry for a couple of years in technology, but has now made, I think, some significant progress on, does seem like some folks in Europe don't share our love of freedom of speech.
Maybe you could explain to us what the tension is today, and what some of the regulations are that have been put in place in Europe.
Sure, absolutely. So the two main regulations that I've interfaced with since taking office, and part of this is just a product of
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of AI deepfakes on freedom of speech?
My first official trip was to Europe, and while I was in Europe, a large fine came down on an American platform, X, under the Digital Services Act, which I'll get into in a moment.
So Europe, especially since the Second World War, but I think really since the American founding and our codification of the First Amendment, you know, America has taken a much stronger approach on free speech than even most of the West. And with the rise of the Internet and all communication or a lot of communication becoming transnational,
we see these new technocratic regulatory frameworks in Europe bumping up against the commitments to free speech in the United States. And Jason makes an important observation that for a while, some of these large American technology platforms were more inclined to moderate or to censor, kind of in conformity with some prevailing norms and concerns in the United States. But I think
In the United States, we've shifted back toward a less censorious approach and so have these platforms. And at the same time, you have regulatory efforts in Europe and the UK, and I'll name a couple that I think have been particularly relevant. So the UK has something called the Online Safety Act.
The Online Safety Act imposes age-gating obligations on a broad swath of content, almost any content that's upsetting, and then requires platforms to run risk assessments for, and in some cases remove, content that the UK would say is illegal. And in the UK, you know,
major categories of content are banned, are rendered illegal, that would not be illegal in the United States, which is where these platforms are located, which is where their original user base is, which is where their executives live, and which is their primary regulator.
So under the Online Safety Act, we now have active litigation by the relevant regulator Ofcom against several American websites.
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Chapter 6: How does censorship relate to mass migration policies?
These are websites that don't reach into the UK. They're not These aren't websites dedicated to discussing the Queen. They're not websites that sell goods in the United Kingdom. These are websites that exist on American soil, host large quantities of American users, and oftentimes discuss American political topics.
But because users are permitted to discuss them in a way that offends UK law, there's the imposition of a UK fine. The Digital Services Act in the EU is similar. So DSA contains, but doesn't just contain, content-based regulations, hate speech regulations. So DSA requires all of the EU member states to adopt at minimum kind of a floor for hate speech prohibition.
Chapter 7: What are the consequences of censorship on American companies abroad?
And those prohibitions in the statute, I think, are much vaguer than American lawyers are accustomed to. And one of our jurisprudential principles under the American First Amendment is if you're going to enact any regulation that comes close to touching speech, It needs to be very clear what you are prohibiting because you have this chilling effect concept.
A vague prohibition will chill speech, especially when that prohibition is imposed on a large risk-averse corporation. So you impose vague prohibitions on large risk-averse corporations, and that's how it becomes illegal to make jokes around the water cooler, for example. You see the same effect here. Digital Services Act also regulates other aspects of digital commerce and social media.
So it regulates things like transparency and competition. And I think...
We have a lot of Europeans in the audience today, and I hope none of them will find it contentious if I suggest that in Europe there is more of a focus on technocratic regulation as an arbiter of what's acceptable than there might be in America where we have this tradition that really emphasizes rugged individualism and individual conscience.
And to be clear... No one is saying, certainly not the State Department or America, hey, you can't have your own platforms in Europe.
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Chapter 8: How can individuals protect their free speech rights?
Build your own. Build your own Facebook. Build your own Instagram. Build your own Twitter slash X, TikTok, whatever you'd like to build. And you can have whatever standards you like on your platforms. We're saying, hey, these are our platforms. This is our standard. And we don't want our users or our platforms to be receiving fines. That's our position.
I think that's basically it. And look, when American companies operate abroad, they abide by the laws where they operate. But at a certain point, so we recently issued some sanctions, which we'll get into.
And one of the individuals we sanctioned was a former EU official who threatened Elon Musk with enforcement action because X, within the United States, had said that it was going to host on a live Twitter space an interview with Donald Trump, our president. So it wasn't that Donald Trump had said anything violative. It wasn't there was a specific piece of content that the EU wanted to ban.
It was just that the act of an American business hosting an interview with an American president might offend EU preferences about speech, generate a regulatory threat. And when you reach across borders and make a threat like that, that offends American interests and American values. And so you can expect America to respond.
And I think, so I, my history is as an American lawyer in American courts, and we have, you know, we're a nation of 50 states, and each state has its own regulations. And we've had to think about, you know, when there's a website in California that operates in Texas, how do you decide to what extent Texas gets to regulate?
And we have all these jurisdictional concepts like, does the website purposefully avail itself of the form? Are you posting defamatory statements about a person in Texas? But the mere existence of a website in California that Texas doesn't like is hardly ever, basically never, a basis for regulation.
And so when we talk about things like extraterritoriality, what we're really talking about is it's undisputed that Europeans get to have their own laws in Europe. But we also get to have our own laws in the United States. And we're celebrating 250 years of American independence here.
And so we want our markets to be able to interoperate online, but we're not willing to give up American freedom of speech and the bargain.
Hey, David, when we look at, and I'm asking you this one so I can give you a pass on it, but what do you think people are so scared of in the UK when it comes to freedom of speech? And maybe the most freedom, the most raucous platform, X specifically.
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