The following rushed transcript may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Michael Fox:

Hi, Marc.

Marc Steiner:

Hi. Good to see you, man.

Michael Fox:

Good to see you. Marc, I want to take us for a moment someplace. So I’m standing on the edge of this three lane highway, three lanes on each end. Cars are rolling back and forth. It’s a beautiful blue sky. Chilly November morning. Leaves are starting to turn Crimson and Golden. And I’m in the Bay Area just on the other side of the Dunbarton bridge, which rolls from the East Bay over to the West Bay. So I’m just on the other side of this near these kind of swampy wetlands on the edge of the San Francisco Bay. And I’m standing in front of a nondescript intersection. But what’s fascinating about this intersection is what it says on one corner. There’s a big sign with kind of a twisted infinity sign in blue and underneath it says Meta One Hacker Way because in front of me is the headquarters for Meta.

Of course, Meta is the parent company for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger. And this is its home.This is where it is. It’s incredible. This is right here. This is in the edge of Silicon Valley. Billions of people use this company’s tools, apps, websites each day. And it’s incredible to think of the role that this company has in terms of the way that we communicate, how we communicate what’s said, what isn’t said, what should be said. I mean, I use WhatsApp all day long and that is based and housed right here. There’s people taking a selfie in front of the Metasign literally right now and it’s just incredible to be here.

It’s largely from what you can see from the road are these three-story pastel colored office buildings that roll back to the wetlands and it’s just this massive campus. And it’s interesting because this is one location and you think of how much power that Meta has, but then 15 minutes away is Google, 20 minutes away is Apple. And then not to even think about all of the other startups and all of the other massive tech companies, they’re all located in this one spot. I’ve come here because I feel like you cannot understand what communication means today and free speech means today without understanding this location, without understanding tech, social media, artificial intelligence. But also today they’re deep, deep, deep ties to none other than President Donald Trump. And what does that mean in the way that we communicate? Mark, but what does Silicon Valley mean to you?

Marc Steiner:

Two different things here. I mean, I’m on social media all the time on every level and every form. And so it is a boon to our communications to be able to talk to people across the planet at any given time discussing ideas and really pushing conversations forward you couldn’t do without that technology. But I’m also very aware of what’s bubbling below the surface that actually controls what I’m using. And the question always is, what happens to our information? What happens to what we talk about? Do they know who I am? Do they know who they are? And the fact that it is not some amorphous international agreement to let people communicate, but it’s actually controlled by billionaire private corporations. In some ways it’s worse than having control by the federal government.That’s this combination of things. So I use it all the time. I’m always on it.

And look, my kids are always on it. My kids range in age by decades and whatever generation they’re in, they’re in it all the time. That’s how they communicate. That’s how they live.

Michael Fox:

Yeah, exactly. So I asked Todd Wolfson. Do you know Todd Wolfson? He’s an associate professor of department journalism and media studies at Rutgers University.

Marc Steiner:

Yes. He’s been on a show before. Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Fox:

So I asked him to kind of set the scene for where Silicon Valley is and what it means.

Speaker 3:

Silicon Valley is south of San Francisco and it’s been the head kind of like the center of technological development and tech companies in the US for the last 40 or 50 years. It was a gambit that California made. They heavily invested in it by creating low tax, high infrastructure sort of shells for people to build out companies that were very business friendly. And many of the companies that we know are headquartered somewhere in Silicon Valley and it’s everything from big, big companies like Google to many, many startups. Obviously it’s a huge engine of the US economy and is probably the central engine of California economy.

Michael Fox:

And I almost feel like Marc, there is no other, and this is where I want to go with this or I want to begin this for today. I almost feel like there’s no other industry that’s so intertwined and so deeply intertwined with Trump and his politics today.

And let me just set this scene, right January 20th, 2025, Trump’s inauguration, Trump is standing at the podium and behind him to the left and to the right are many groups of people. Now traditionally you see a lot of senators up there, politicians, people that are important maybe for Trump, but what you have is the heads of all these Silicon Valley tech firms that are just off to his left. So you’ve got Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO, Tim Cook, Google CEO, Sunder Pichai, Google co-founder, Sergei Brin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla an ex- CEO Elon Musk. Were you watching this moment, Mark,

Speaker 4:

His

Michael Fox:

Trump’s inauguration? How unprecedented is it that you have basically the barons of the tech industry of Silicon Valley who are there just right beside Trump as he’s speaking at his podium?

Marc Steiner:

It’s not uncommon for the powers of industry to be in places like that. What it says is that there is a new sheriff in town in our economic town in our future. That’s why they’re there. And I think that … Well, let me take a step back and ask you this question first. Your subtext seem to be the danger of the power that resides in those men and their companies. I mean, go there for a minute and why that becomes potentially very onerous.

Michael Fox:

Yeah. Well, I mean, the danger of the power of these men and also the connections of these men to Trump and his administration. For instance, you had Elon Musk who of course ran the DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, the first 130 days of Trump’s White House and then worked as kind of a White House advisor. September 2025, you had Trump.

Speaker 5:

Thank you very much, everybody. It’s an honor to be here with this group of people

Michael Fox:

Who hosted 33 top CEOs of Silicon Valley Tech firms at the White House and they said they were grateful for his support, of course. Saffra Katz, who’s the CEO of Oracle, which is a tech company based in Silicon Valley, one of the 20 largest companies in the world. And she told him that I think-

Speaker 6:

This is the most exciting time in America ever. Ever, at least that I remember. So thank you. Thank you for everything you’re doing.

Michael Fox:

Trump had this to say.

Speaker 5:

This is taking our country to a new level. We’re leading the world. We’re leading China, but we’re leading the world by a lot and we’re leading it because of the people around the table and all I can do is implement and make it a lot easier for you and I’ll be doing that 100%. So I just want to thank you all.

Michael Fox:

So Trump’s deep connections to Silicon Valley and the tech billionaires are really concerning. And I think this is the point though, Mark, that I want to get to. Social media is how people are getting their information. It’s how we communicate today. 86% of Americans get news from either a phone, a tablet, or a computer. Over half of Americans get news from social media, over half according to a Pew Research Center study published in 2025. So there’s this intertwining and intermeshing. So on the one hand, that’s where people are getting their news and information is from these social media sites that are run by these billionaires who are in cahoots or in the pockets of Trump. And there’s this incredible insight, Marc, that I heard actually from a college student in the Bay Area who I interviewed the same day I drove down to Silicon Valley.

He’s a second year economic student at UC Berkeley. His name is Samuel Mendoza. And he said first that there’s always a time when free speech is under attack.

Speaker 7:

I think that now is no different. And so we got to make sure that people know that free speech is something that is a human right that we all have.

Michael Fox:

But he said he is concerned about the role of social media on our free speech today.

Speaker 7:

I think that social media definitely adds a new playing field and so it’s important to keep in mind that even though sure the freedom of speech is allowed for in public, at the end of the day, social media is managed by these huge corporations and so they have a lot of censorship and a lot of power over it. So it’s important to remember to keep that in mind when talking about free speech.

Michael Fox:

In other words, there’s this idea out there that speech online or over social media is free, freer than ever. You could say whatever you want, but the question is who owns that space and whose voices people actually hear That is the question that we’ll be tackling today.

Marc Steiner:

I want to introduce you all and say welcome to this continuing series that Michael Fox and I are producing for the real news is our battle for the freedom of speech. It’s the right to speak one’s mind. It’s the cornerstone of our Democratic principles in this country. This is who we are. It’s what we were founded upon. This precious freedom is under assault. How? We’re going to explore that from what we just said and where we’re going to take that conversation for you and for all of us. This is the battle for free speech. It’s part of a new multi-part narrative series and you’re in it now and we’re in it now and Mike Fox is here.

Michael Fox:

In the first episode, we looked at the attacks on our free speech rights from the Trump administration, people being silenced, fired, or even jailed for voicing their opinions or their views. In the last episode, we looked at the history, how moments and organizers in the United States have stood up and spoken out fearlessly going back centuries demanding that their voices be heard.

Marc Steiner:

Today we walk back into the present where media consolidation, social media and AI are shifting the battle over free speech in really concerning ways for all of us. This is where we’re heading today. And Mike, I think you wanted to start here in the marketplace of ideas and what that means.

Michael Fox:

Exactly. So I feel like we can’t talk about free speech without mentioning this and we’re three episodes in, so it’s about time. I kind of like to use this metaphor of a medieval square. People are selling things from all sorts of different stalls. People are walking around shopping. Maybe a minstrel is playing in the background. The idea is everyone shares their ideas, the best, more truthful ideas outpace the rest or rise to the surface. Kind of have this back and forth discussion in community and we’re trying to come together to make decisions what democracy should be. It’s this beautiful idea. It’s this great image and it’s the roots of really free speech ideas and culture and law going back in many ways a century. And the reason why I want to talk about this today is that the first reference of this marketplace of ideas in this sense comes from a dissenting opinion from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 1919.

Speaker 8:

Oh yay, oh yay, oh yay. All persons having business before the honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States are admonished to draw.

Michael Fox:

And other podcasts have really done a great job on this radio lab, more perfect, have done a really good job about talking about this time of Oliver Wendell Holmes and what it meant for free speech. But basically our understanding of free speech today and this marketplace of ideas comes from the Supreme Court case, Abrams versus the United States, right? 1919, where a group of anarchists in New York are arrested for spreading flyers against sending US troops to intervene in the Russian Civil War. So they’re convicted under the 1918 Sedition Act. Five defendants appealed on free speech grounds and the Supreme Court actually upheld the conviction saying their actions could cause a clear and present danger. But Oliver Wendell Holmes, he dissents and he wrote that quote, “The best test of truth in the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” And that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.

So this would later become the basis of future Supreme Court free speech rulings, including from the 1960s on. It’s this beautiful idea. The idea is that let’s bring all these ideas together and let’s debate them in the market, but there’s a bit of a problem. And I’ve been speaking with several people about the idea of the marketplace of ideas and I want to bring one of them in now. His name is Farah DeBoivla. He’s a history professor at Princeton University, the author of the 2025 book, What Is Free Speech, The History of a Dangerous Idea. And we’ll hear from him more in the next episode and a little bit later today, but I really appreciate his kind of analysis about this. He says, look, the marketplace of idea, this is a great idea, but what would this really mean?

Speaker 9:

It would mean that each of us is independently able to walk around a marketplace where all ideas are given equal weight and airing, that we are all equally reasonable in our approach and that we’re equally able to judge truth against falsehood somehow intrinsically and that we’re all doing so in good faith and that all the arguments being put to us are being put in good faith.

Michael Fox:

But we’re actually have, however, is the exact opposite of that today. Farah actually calls it a shit-filled sewer of public discourse online social media, which I think is such a great quote.

Speaker 9:

No one has an intrinsic ability to judge the truth. That’s a presumption that is there in many free speech doctrines, but it’s actually conclusively debunked by history and by science. What we require is attention to how as a society might create a better marketplace of ideas. And I’m afraid just throwing everything into the jumble of social media and allowing private companies basically to determine how they can best keep people hooked on their platforms is not the best way of creating, especially a political sphere of debate.

Michael Fox:

Maryanne Franks is someone else who I spoke to about this. And if you remember, she’s the legal scholar from the George Washington University Law School who I spoke in the last episode. And she says she actually used to criticize the idea of the marketplace of ideas.

Speaker 10:

Because I thought, well, what a horrible metaphor that is. That shouldn’t be the way that we look at speech. And now I’ve come to the point of saying it’s not that it’s a horrible metaphor, it’s that it’s entirely accurate. And because this is something I’ve noticed about the strange convergence between civil libertarians and economic libertarians, which is this idea that the market somehow is good, the presumption that markets are good and that markets work and that the best way to have a functioning market is to never regulate

Michael Fox:

It. Just leave the market alone. Let the invisible hand of the market work its magic. But the problem is that in a deregulated market, that just leads to more asymmetries where people, the powerful gobble up the small where we have monopolies. And so every market, every economy actually has regulations for exactly this reason.

Marc Steiner:

And I have to remember that the freehand of the market is a puppeteer up on top.

Michael Fox:

Exactly, exactly.

Marc Steiner:

Who’s manipulating that free hand, the alleged free hand.

Michael Fox:

Exactly. And so she says actually that it works the same way with the marketplace of ideas.

Speaker 10:

And that’s really what we are doing with our free speech discourse. We are saying whatever the status quo is, just don’t touch it. I mean, we’ve got enough laws, we can’t possibly come up with anything now that would be wise and so just leave it alone. And that’s ridiculous. And I think most people who would hear that about the market, the actual economic market would understand that’s a crazy thing to say that you’re going to get the best possible outcome by just letting the status quo flourish. And so I would just suggest that we’d be as critical about the marketplace of ideas as we ought to be critical about economic inequality and distorted markets and monopolies and all the things that we should recognize are bad things when they happen economically and are really bad when they come to ideology as well.

Michael Fox:

So her analysis flips everything on its head and I think it’s really important that it makes us reconsider this kind of ideal that’s been the supposed basis of free speech and First Amendment law in the United States. And of course, that’s coming from someone who’s literally teaching this law. And I wanted to start this episode with that understanding of like, let’s put the marketplace of ideas on the table. If we live in societies where we’re all working together to try and make decisions and really come together with debate and democracy, that’s what it should be, but it’s not how it works now. And what we have instead is insanely consolidated media market.

Marc Steiner:

Let’s talk a bit about where you think the state of that is at the moment and what we face. I think we still live under the illusion that free speech is in control of our democracy. And if you look at the latest statements that you talked about earlier from Trump, from some of the others, it’s under assault. It’s not as obvious how it’s under assault and it needs to be kind of thrown out there and exposed about how it’s under assault and what we have to do to retain that power and actually do more with it.

Michael Fox:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think this is such an important point, Mark, and it’s so key for this podcast series because there is a discourse out there that is pushed again and again by Trump, by the leaders of social media, by large multimedia billion dollar conglomerates that says, “Oh, we are the leaders of free speech. We are the ones showing you the way.” And in reality, they’re censoring free speech in the name of free speech, right?That’s what we’re seeing time and time again, which is just terrifying, but it’s true. And Mark, I think this is a perfect moment to start to transition into this discussion around the consolidation of the media sphere because you did an episode last year titled Jimmy Kimmel’s Back, but Trump’s War on Free Speech is just beginning.

Speaker 4:

Right.

Michael Fox:

You spoke to Jeff Cohen. He’s the founder of the Media Watchdog Group, Fair Fairness and Accuracy and Reporting. And I think this episode really underlined Marianne’s point of how the media landscape has been consolidated to fewer and fewer hands. Powerful companies bought up media markets over the last few decades. Just the latest was this Tegna Nexstar merger approved by FCC in March 2026.

Speaker 11:

ABC 10 News at five starts with breaking news. NexStar Media Group has officially closed its multi-billion dollar acquisition of ABC10’s parent company, Tegna, creating the largest local broadcast television company in the country.

Speaker 12:

So it’s been happening decade after decade, but it’s never been worse than now because the conglomerates are bigger than they ever were and we have the Trump team.

Marc Steiner:

This is where it’s gone from. 1983, 90% of all American companies in media were owned by 50 companies. Today it’s six Comcast, Disney, Warner Brothers, Discovery, Paramount Skydance, Sony and Amazon, maybe that’s seven. The FCC allowed the merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media last year and CBS settled for $16 million, the lawsuit filed by Trump over editing his 2024 interview with Kamala Harris.

Michael Fox:

And what does that mean for our voice? What does that mean for our ability to communicate and where we’re getting news from? Is that less and less, do we have a diverse market sphere of everyone hearing from different points of views and more and more, it’s top down, right? And Mark, you’ve covered this for a really long time, the consolidation of the media market.

Marc Steiner:

A long time.

Michael Fox:

Right? All the way back to the 1990s, right?

Marc Steiner:

Yes, since 1990s, since 93, as a matter of fact. But we’re in a moment that is akin to the early 20th century in breaking up the huge monopolies in America because the new monopolies is in media and control of our information, control of what we see and hear and even how we think. So I think that part of what we’re facing is one of the reasons that they called Tiger Roosevelt a progressives because you went after them

As precedent. And I think that that’s what America needs now to really go after these things, force them to break up to diversify and make our media more democratic, which in some ways it was before, maybe not perfect, but here in Baltimore, you had the Baltimore Sun, you had the News American, two major papers for the city, for the whole community. They were owned by local people. And then we had our own free press when we produced our underground newspapers like the South Baltimore Voice, which was a working class paper that reached a lot of people and we’ve been all pushed out by these conglomerates controlling what they want the world to think is the truth. What is the real news? Well, we are at the real news. I’m just kidding. So what is real news? You know what I’m saying? I think that we are at the moment on a precipice, a really dangerous precipice that we don’t see and we see it because that’s what we do every day.

Michael Fox:

When you spoke with Jeff Cohen, I felt he said something that I think that was really important and he kind of laid out this process of consolidation, the consolidation of the media market where he said that for decades, one individual or one company could only own in the whole country, seven television, 7AM radio stations, and seven FM radio stations and you couldn’t own two in the same market.

Speaker 12:

When Reagan took over, Fowler, his FCC chair, got it changed so it was 12, 12, 12. That’s how it stood until the point you want me to talk about, which is 1996 when there was this corrupt law written by the telecommunications and media company lobbyists that sort of divided up the media pie among fewer companies that were allowed to get bigger because the caps were relaxed. So instead of being able to own 12 TV stations, now you could own hundreds.

Michael Fox:

So just one example, Sinclair Broadcast Group only owned 12 in 1996. Today they owned 200 stations. That was illegal in 1995.

Speaker 12:

Other things that happened, Murdoch, because of the 1996 bill, he was able to build his Fox Empire. Clear channel. A right-wing radio company out of Texas closely allied with George W. Bush. Prior to the Telecommunications Act, they owned 50 radio stations. Within two years, they owned about 1,200 radio stations.

Michael Fox:

And it’s only gotten worse, which is what’s so shocking to me is that it only increases. And you know what’s crazy, when you spoke with Jeff Cohen, it was right after Jimmy Kimmel, right after he was fired and then rehired.

Marc Steiner:

Right, right, right.

Speaker 3:

As I was saying before, I was interrupted.

Michael Fox:

Both you and Jeff were talking about how in large part he was fired because of the fact that the company that fired him wanted to merger with another company and so they wanted to get on Trump’s good side.

Speaker 12:

You have all of these companies doing some assaults to please Trump, especially if they have merger business before the Federal Communications Commission. The reason that Colbert was terminated, many of us believe is because Paramount needed to merge with Skydance and the merger could not go through until 60 minutes had been squeezed. The executive producer, 60 minutes left in protest as did his boss. So now we come to Kimmel and it’s the same thing. Disney had merger business before the Federal Communications Commission. Disney already owns Hulu, the streaming service, and they wanted to get FUBO and that needs federal approval. It’s currently at the Justice Department, Trump’s Justice Department.

Michael Fox:

The Trump agenda is being pushed in order for you to get what you want, then you have to play the game, right? And you just mentioned it, Mark, how we’re on this dangerous precipice.

Marc Steiner:

Precipice. Yeah.

Michael Fox:

Yeah. Where the right wing governments are in power. And I don’t think that people understand what a danger this is because you still … It’s the Washington Post. I got the Washington Post. I get the New York Times. You still have your newspapers there, but it’s about who’s controlling these newspapers or where we’re getting your information. It’s a terrifying moment.

Marc Steiner:

And questions I have in the time we have today together A, I think that talking about the deregulation of the industry that was regulated so monopolies could not happen, it’s being lost and B, not just complaining about it, what can we do about it? Where’s the resistance? I think that part of the reason we don’t have an organized resistance is people don’t see it because there’s no reason to see it. And I think that those two things have to be answered.

Michael Fox:

And it’s hard because particularly today when you think of our means of communication are all controlled by people who are backed or supporting Trump or who are afraid to speak out. So even over social media, our means as we’ll look in further today, our means of getting that message out is even harder and harder to be heard because if you aren’t speaking what Trump and his billionaire friends would like you to say, well, then the algorithm simply isn’t going to allow your voice to Be carried. I think this is the challenge that we have today and why today is so complicated and so hard. But it doesn’t mean that we can stop, but I think it’s a massive, massive challenge for today.

Marc Steiner:

I did a lot of work on the early 20th century because my childhood hero was Teddy Roosevelt as a kid. Then I learned a little bit more, but he was my hero as a kid.

Michael Fox:

Wow.

Marc Steiner:

And part of it was he took on big business and he took on the monopolies, the trust that controlled this country. And I think that’s the movement that has to begin here now. If we’re going to save what’s left of this democracy, A, and B, not to allow these few people to control all the information that we hear and see. And I think that is a struggle that has to be built. And I think that the problem is it’s not in front of, as I said earlier, I think it’s not something that’s in your face. You don’t see it. It seeps in. Nobody knows who owns our local stations or how they’re connected to another local station, how they control what kind of news is read, what kind of letters from listeners and viewers are being read on the air. And I think that it behooves us to do that organizing and bohos groups like the real news where we broadcast from part of that, getting it out there to say we have to come together to save our democracy.

And part of that is saving our free press.

Michael Fox:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is part of the question, Marc, because these realities like someone might say, “Oh, if a billionaire owns something, let’s say owns this newspaper, owns all of these newspapers.” Are they really having an impact? What difference does it actually make? But they do have an impact. Jeff brought this up in his conversation with you about when he was talking about how billionaires control the media and that they’re all sitting in the front row at Trump’s inauguration and how this would’ve been impossible just a couple of decades ago

Speaker 4:

And

Michael Fox:

How they’ve actually pushed people out. Those billionaires have pushed people out. And this brings back another question, Mark, or another moment that I think is really important to highlight that I’ve been thinking a ton about lately is how these newspaper owners and the owners of television and the owners of social media are feeling more empowered than ever by Trump to push their agenda and only publish the voices they like. There’s just one tremendous example of this.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah, please.

Michael Fox:

And that is late February 2025.

Speaker 13:

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is implementing major changes to the outlet’s opinion pages adjusting what columnists can and cannot write about.

Michael Fox:

He wrote a decision first to the Washington Post to employees there and then he tweeted this out over X and he said he would only publish opinion articles defending quote personal liberties and free markets. So for always, the Washington Post was always this bastion of … It wasn’t always super progressive, but you had a variety of opinions. And suddenly Jeff Bezos, who was, again, he’s the owner of Amazon. So powerful, powerful person. He says, “No, I’m only going to publish opinion articles in pro of free markets.” And he wrote over X that quote, “There was a time when a newspaper, especially one with a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that

Marc Steiner:

Job.”

Speaker 4:

Whoa.

Michael Fox:

It’s just-

Marc Steiner:

Internet may allow it, but it doesn’t do that job.

Michael Fox:

Exactly, exactly. It may allow

Marc Steiner:

It. It can’t. It can’t.

Michael Fox:

It can’t. It can’t. And particularly now as we see more and more, those spaces over social media and over the internet are being tapped down. They’re being suffocated. And we got into this a little bit at the top of the episode in that there’s this myth being pushed by Trump and the tech giants that internet and social media are the new bastion of free speech, unregulated, completely free, and it’s just not true. But Mark, I just want to take us back for a moment to transport ourselves 20 years into the past.

Speaker 4:

Every business, no matter how large and no matter how small, we’ll be on the internet in the year 2000 is how the primary-

Michael Fox:

Mark, what was your feeling about the internet? Late ’90s, early 2000s.

Speaker 12:

You’ve got mail.

Michael Fox:

When suddenly this is becoming a space where you always had your radio show, it was on radio and suddenly, wow, there’s this whole new world. There’s indie media, there’s blogging and it offered this kind of democratic promise.

Speaker 4:

Right.

Michael Fox:

Talk to me about what did it mean back then? What did you feel in those moments?

Marc Steiner:

This is Marc Steiner from the Center for Emerging Media and welcome to our podcast, Up Free At Last. What you’re about to hear is a dramatic- I started my radio show in 93 and a place where all voices could be heard, even ones I despised and also to give voices to every community in America so not just white people had a voice. That was a big part about we also did. At any rate, the internet when it started, I remember it we said, “Okay, we got to get on the internet. We got to use the internet for our program. We got to bring in questions that way. We got to put out ideas that way.” Because we saw the internet then, and I’m not a free marketeer, but as a free market of ideas where people could learn a lot, dialogue with each other, get facts they didn’t know about, and really kind of open people’s minds.

And it was like that at the beginning in many ways. I remember the few programs, we did a bunch of programs about why the internet should be a public trust and not a private enterprise to keep it from allowing to be oppressed and suppressed and voices be oppressed and suppressed. And now that it was also the entrepreneurs of that day, as the ones you mentioned, Bezos and the rest, saw it as a gigantic opportunity, this void that they could fill and control and make more money on and also then to control who could say what and where.

Speaker 4:

That’s right.

Marc Steiner:

So they can’t control it all. I mean, there are people on radio and TV have an internet presence, but it’s so diverse. There’s so much of it, people don’t even know where to turn.

Michael Fox:

Yeah. I spoke with Todd Wolfson about some of this. Again, he’s the author of Digital Rebellion, The Birth of the Cyber Left. And he also mentioned how in those early days it was this moment of excitement, of possibility, of democratic promise, but then I asked him to kind of fast forward till today.

Speaker 3:

So if you go on Twitter, it’s like just a cesspool of fascist, white supremacist, white Christian nationalist hatred on that site. And that’s lifted up by Elon Musk and by the algorithm that he has instituted based on his own ideological matrix. No one is able to question the matrix that he uses in order to develop the algorithm that that organization or company uses and no one’s even allowed to see what it looks like. And so know that’s not free. It’s not free if you can speak, but no one’s going to hear you. But then Nick Flintes, a valed Nazi speaks and a million people hear what he says at the drop of a hat.

Obviously the left or democratic center have created other spaces, but they’re nowhere near the size and capability of the spaces that the oligarchs that have aligned themselves with fascism control. And so it’s created, one, it’s really moving forward fascist ideology in America, but two, it’s created really toxic environments for people to speak out. And if you speak out, they throw you up on Twitter and they just beat you to death. I mean, I don’t have any deep philosophical take here. It’s controlled by techno fascists who have an agenda and are using these platforms to move their agenda forward.

Speaker 6:

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Mr. Elon Musk. But I’m super fired up for the future. It’s going to be very exciting. As the president said, we’re going to have a golden age. It’s going to be fantastic. And one of the fundamental things that one of the most American values that I love is optimism and this feeling like we’re going to make the future good. We’re going to make it good.

Michael Fox:

I spoke, Mark, with Todd Wolfson a little bit. I asked him to dig a little bit more into the question of Silicon Valley and who these people are and how much … And again, the connections and the ties with Trump and the Trump administration, he talked a litle bit about Peter Thiel, the CEO of PayPal and the software company, Palantir, which of course ICE is using with their AI surveillance to do their crackdown against immigrants across the United States. Peter Thiel famously wrote just a few years ago, quote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” And in fact, Curtis Yarvin, who’s a far right software engineer and blogger who has basically become the philosophical guru of Silicon Valley and Peter Thiel, he basically says he doesn’t want democracy anymore. He wants a monarchy.

Speaker 3:

I mean, the thing about it is they have so much power and they have very, very strange and backward ideology. The other thing that’s most scary about I think these oligarchs is that they think that we’re overpopulated. And so they’re thinking it felt like what that means and what we do about overpopulation on the planet and they’re not accountable to anyone. So Peter Thiel and Elon Musk get to decide that we should get rid of two billion humans. Those are the kinds of conversations they’re having. Palantir, which is Thiel’s company, got a huge contract under Trump to do the security work for the administration. Obviously we know we saw Musk’s relationship to Trump in Doge, which has fractured to some degree, but I think it’s still behind the scenes operative. And then Curtis Yarvin, again, Teal’s like ideological mentor is an ideological mentor of JD Vance and Teal is JD Vance is like he funded him for the longest time and supported political careers.

It’s not like they’re open about their relationships.

Michael Fox:

So all of these things are kind of intertwined, but they’re all out in the open and it is this crazy, crazy moment. And you’re totally right, Mark, where we need to be thinking about how to create not just alternative spaces, but how to actually push back on this, how to create a movement to really push back on this.

Marc Steiner:

In the beginning when the internet began and the digital economy started erupting on the planet, people saw it as a liberatory technology. People saw it, the people who ran it and started it as people who believed in freedom and really wanted to extend it. And in many ways that meant it been true. The Teals of the world, for the independent media center and the camp corner treatment- Playing with the Trumps of the world are taking it in a different direction. I mean, everything could have been a liberatory technology, a liberatory world, but the powers to be see that as well and they took that and using it in very dangerous ways. And I think that that is what need to be exposed. People, as I said earlier, don’t see it because it’s hidden. It’s below the surface. It’s not obvious. And I think that there are a lot of good people in this industry and in this world that need to be brought in with others who are doing other kind of work and to really push it.

I mean, they have to be regulated, they have to be stopped and it has to become technology for the community, for the people, for the nation and not just for billionaires to use with people like Trump and with agencies that want to know who we are and what we’re doing. That’s the battle we’re in.

Michael Fox:

Absolutely. Mark, I want to talk about algorithms.

Marc Steiner:

You used that word a lot this evening.

Michael Fox:

Yes.

Marc Steiner:

So go ahead.

Michael Fox:

Let me tell you what an algorithm is.

Marc Steiner:

I was going to ask you to describe that. There you go. Go ahead, go, go. Well,

Michael Fox:

I mean, for me, A, first off, it almost reminds me of Star Wars. It’s supposed to be this force that decides what we see online.

Speaker 8:

Remember, a Jedi can feel the force flowing through him.

Michael Fox:

Governs our lives online. It tells us what posts what can view what we can’t view, but I wanted to get a deeper sense of this. So I spoke with Professor Ramesh Srinivasan.

Speaker 14:

I’m a professor at UCLA. I write and have written several books about how technology is impacting societies and cultures around the planet.

Michael Fox:

But he said it’s actually algorithm. It’s not actually necessarily itself a bad term.

Speaker 14:

But an algorithm is a very old term, 1500 plus years old. It’s actually a term that derives from Central Asian and Farsi Persian mathematics and it’s merely meant to mean rules applied to a body of data. So it’s not inherently, the term algorithm itself is not inherently like a leviathan or a demon. The problem is the algorithms have now come to stand in for their signifiers for the profound dysfunction that we’re living through that is directly tied to big tech, which is incredibly ironic because there would be no internet without public investment and there would be no AI or pretty much anything else without all our data

Michael Fox:

He kind of turns the algorithm on its head. So usually when I think of an algorithm, I think of an algorithm as giving me things like I’m on Facebook, it’s going to tell me that I want to see … Instead of giving posts of some of my friends that I might really want to see, it’s going to give me posts from somebody else that I don’t care about in a bunch of ads. But Romesh says, it’s not just used to send me things or allow me to see certain things online. He said it’s the opposite. It’s a process of surveillance by these big tech firms to extract data from us. So one of the phrases he used, which I think is really powerful in our conversation was we are being Googled, Mark, far more than we are Googling.

Speaker 14:

So it’s come to stand in for this process of extraction and surveillance from our lives where the data goes somewhere, we don’t know what’s being collected as by whom, for how long, how long it’s retained for, if that data is being aggregated and all of that’s being put into these very complex and disastrously energy consuming data centers and so on to order the world, to order our lives. What an ad algorithm now stands in for is a process of extraction to then feedback into essentially influencing our thoughts, our behaviors, and even our desires.

Michael Fox:

Mark, have you noticed on Facebook how it’s harder and harder to see a post from a friend, for instance?

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Michael Fox:

So all of this is the algorithm giving you what it wants you to see and that’s not by accident. It’s not giving you what it thinks you might want to see.

Speaker 14:

Imagine having a boyfriend or girlfriend who’s just constantly spying on everything and anything you do and then figures out ways to essentially manipulate your behavior and your desire. I think most of us would call that an abusive relationship. That’s the relationship that big tech has with us. It’s a relationship of abuse.

Speaker 13:

You may be taking a break from TikTok or Twitch to watch CBS News twenty four seven right now. Well, the new report from the Federal Trade Commission finds that many major social media platforms are collecting and sharing more personal data than most users realize. Over the past four years, the FTC examined how nine video-

Michael Fox:

I don’t think we understand it at that level. I don’t think people understand what an algorithm actually is or understand what’s actually doing to us. No,

Marc Steiner:

I agree because it’s just not obvious. It’s hidden. It’s subterranean and I think that’s the insidiousness of it all and the danger it has.

Speaker 9:

First of all, these media companies, the online media companies are the most powerful publishers the world has ever seen.

Michael Fox:

Farah De Boivla has had a lot to say about this and what it means for free speech.

Speaker 9:

But they’re not treated as publishers. No one thinks of them as publishers. Governments fail to think of them as publishers. They are publishers and they are constantly censoring discourse. Their algorithms amplify certain voices and certain messages and they suppress and silence others. That’s what publishers do. They’d make judgments automatically or otherwise about what they want people to see.

Michael Fox:

But then Pharis says, “Without any regulation, anything goes and lies and truth are shoved out into a world without any accountability.”

Speaker 9:

The moment that we’re in is really very dangerous political moment because of the ways in which social media is really an old-fashioned and anachronistic term for the mass media of our age. It’s not social, it’s political discourse and every other kind of discourse. The difficulty with that is really manifold. One is as that nomenclature already indicates, we’ve now shifted to a moment where all discourse happens in the same medium, on the same level. So pictures of cats, jokes, serious political debate all happening in the same sewer. And that muddles the rules and how the audience understands what’s going on and it makes it much easier for untruth to spread for sloganeering to take over from fact-based, evidence-based argument.

Michael Fox:

And this is I think part of this question of where things get into real danger is this question of disinformation and fake news. There was a time, it seems like a long time ago, but there was a time … Do you remember, Mark, when Trump was suspended from Twitter?

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Speaker 5:

We will stop the steal.

Michael Fox:

January 8th, 2021, two days after the January 6th Capitol invasion of Washington and they basically said, “Look, we have to stop you from trying to spew more hatred and violence online and that you could encourage more violent acts and so you’re banned.” And Trump just responded to that by creating Truth Social the next year. At the same time, we’ve seen this massive shift away from fact checking.

Speaker 9:

Of course, all of these companies are rolling all that back and hiding behind the slogan of free speech to moderate as little as possible because again, it’s politically inconvenient, it’s also expensive. They never put a huge amount of effort into it. They always try to get away with as little as possible. It plays into a political discourse which is increasingly dominated by populist rabble rousing. And there’s an understanding that this is good politics on the part of right-wing politicians that chimes with good business model of just allowing anything to go.

Speaker 15:

I want to talk about something important today because it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. First, we’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X.

Speaker 4:

Zuckerberg said Meta is ending fact checking on Facebook, Instagram, and threads. He pointed to the election as a major influence on the decision and a desire to embrace free speech.

Michael Fox:

So Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram officially stopped fact checking in 2025. The same thing from most of the social media firms, but here’s the thing, this is what I want to get into. All of this is really important for us because fake news, we know it travels faster than truth, right? It goes viral faster. So there was a study released by MIT researchers that found that fake news travels 70% faster at the time on Twitter. This was a 2018 study and a 2022 study found that fake news traveled more than five times faster than real news. And it’s very possible that the new algorithms are making fake news travel even faster than that. So it’s a really, really crazy time when these tech platforms are pushing their agenda in line with Trump and nothing is there to contain the spread of misinformation, misinformation that is then being pushed by Trump himself.

Todd Wolfson, he told me something about how what we need to be doing, Mark, right now, is to claw back objective truth.

Speaker 3:

There are some things that are real. I’m looking at a sky that’s not pink right now and that’s real.

Michael Fox:

There is objective truth out there, even though we’re so divided right now. The sky is blue. When it’s raining, it’s raining, but it seems like when the minute you publish something, if Trump doesn’t like what you’re saying, then he just sues you for it. If you’re a media outlet, a hundred million suit and then people to try and bully people in submission

Speaker 4:

And

Michael Fox:

Then that becomes the norm, creating this climate of fear and backlash. You also mentioned something that I think is really important, Mark, in other episodes. You talked about how this moment is reminiscent of 1930s Germany and how dangerous that is of where we are now. And Todd, he referenced Joseph Gobles when he said that it seems like the Trump administration has really embraced Hitler’s Nazi propagandist Gobels when he preached, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. “

Marc Steiner:

Exactly, right.

Speaker 3:

And it does become true for a large part of our population.

Michael Fox:

How do you see that? How do you see all this? The lies being spread, the disinformation, the fake news without any check and even being pushed further with Trump.

Marc Steiner:

I mean, Joseph Gerbles, he would’ve loved to have the internet, I should say. Not everyone in it, but a large enough percentage of people who are involved in communications, digital communications and on the internet are right wing. People thought of it in the beginning, progressive, open, no, that’s not where we are. And I think controlling their billions, that means working with Trump and allies to control society, that’s what they’re going to do and that’s the danger we face.

And I think that I’m not sure that the moderate liberal left Democrats are up to the task of building a campaign to say we can allow them to control our lives. I can see the media pain now if they would do it. And I think that it’s a question of organizing and media campaigns to make people aware of what we face because people don’t think … Why would people even think about it? They don’t. There’s no reason to. The digital world is nothing but a tool for people to stay in touch with people they love, to read the news, what’s left of the news on the digital world. So I think that it’s a step in the struggle like organizing unions was in the 20s, 30s, and 40s and 50s, but now we’re facing a different monster that has to be organized and controlled. And that’s where I think that idea is not getting out there.

Michael Fox:

Yeah. There’s one more place I want to take us, Mark, before we go, and that’s back to Silicon Valley. I’m on Highway 101, so I’m driving north from Meta headquarters and down where Meta and Google and Apple are up north towards San Francisco and just all of these billboards either have to do with AI or technology. I mean, this is the industry here, like this one, planetscale inference together.ai, the AI native, does it say cloud and then has a bunch of names of different, I guess, startup AI companies AI for everything after code, harness. That must be another company. AI runs better on us. Nebias, another AI company. These are all massive billboards as we’re rolling north towards San Francisco through and out of Silicon Valley. I mean, just that in and among itself gives you a sense of the direction that this region is headed at least.

And it got me thinking and remembering about what this place meant. Silicon Valley, of course, birthed computers, the computer revolution, internet, social media, and now it’s AI. That same region has become artificial intelligence. This is the home of artificial intelligence in the region, being embraced, of course, by all these other tech companies, but it’s really we can’t talk about free speech today without mentioning AI because it’s increasingly going to occupy an outstretched role in our lives and there’s so little accountability. Even when you go online, for instance, now and you Google something, you don’t get the links that pop up. The very first thing that on the top of Google is an AI summary. I mean, it might send you back if you go search for where that data comes from, you might be able to find it, but there’s very little accountability when AI is telling you something or ChatGPT or whatever else, it’s just lumping a bunch of information at you and saying, “This is the truth because we’ve said it.

” And so again, I went back and this is one of the questions I really wanted to talk with Ramesh about, this professor from UCLA

And I asked him, “What does this mean for free speech? What does the AI revolution mean for our freedom of speech today?” And he says, “It means that now speech is being created by these technologies that mimic our behaviors and our experience Expressions.

Speaker 14:

So now we’re not sure where our speech matters. We already didn’t know that because I could say something and write something on Blue Sky or Twitter, but I don’t know if anyone’s going to see it. Those are all determined by these algorithms. But AI systems can dynamically create content designed to go viral that might be next to impossible for us to tell whether it’s human created or not. That’s why it’s critical at the bare minimum that every AI created piece of content, especially one that’s going to go viral, should be watermarked at the minimum at this point.

Michael Fox:

So he takes it to this other level. He says, look, if you remember Cambridge Analytical back almost a decade ago, there was this whole big scandal about collecting all of our data. Well, he says, right now it’s so much worth with AI because now in real time, data can be gathered about us. AI systems can create new content for us in real time.

Speaker 14:

It’s very similar to Alice Huxley and Soma in Brave New World. That’s something that Alis Huxley warned people about toward the end of his life when he did an interview with Mike Wallace, I remember.

Speaker 8:

Good evening. I’m Mike Wallace. Tonight’s guest, Altus Huxley is a man of letters as disturbing as he is distinguished.

Speaker 14:

And he wrote an essay called The Enemies of Freedom. Where he says, on a subconscious level, the technologies can become so intimate to make us love our own slavery. I

Speaker 16:

Mean, I think this is the danger that actually people may be in some ways hepy under the new regime, but they will be happy in situation where they open to be heavy.

Speaker 8:

But let me ask you this. We believe anyway that we live in democracy here in the United States. Do you believe that this brave new world that you talk about could, let’s say in the next quarter century, the next century, could come here to our shores?

Speaker 16:

I think it could. I mean, that’s why I feel it’s so extremely important here and now to start thinking about these problems, not to let ourselves be taken by surprise by the new advances in technology.

Michael Fox:

We may have had other ideas for what AI is, but now it’s actually being created to replace us. It’s the first time a technology that we have created in the history of the human race. All the technologies up until now have been created in order for us to use them and to improve our use of them and to prove our needs and whatever we can achieve with them. And now this is the first time we’re actually being … AI is being created to actually replace us. On the positive side, he says there is hope. He does a utopia’s podcast, Mark. And so I asked him what hope is out there, what we could see. And he says, look, we remember how good, how exciting the internet was, Occupy Wall Street. The Arab Spring, how important the internet was for all these things. We need to get away from the social media platforms, the tech industry, which are just trying to dumb us down to numb us and we can create our own technologies, use our own technologies.

Speaker 14:

But what we can’t do is have it be like this kind of place where we just kind of spit into the wind or talk into the wind and then just hope we’re actually changing anything or influencing anything or actually being heard at all. So I’ve seen numerous examples of that. I’ve seen true ingenuity in action. And

Michael Fox:

He gave a couple of really interesting examples, Mark. He talked about community radio in indigenous communities in Bolivia and Mexico. He talked about folks in East Africa who, for instance, are now using their cell phones to invent a new type of currency because they didn’t have a solid currency where they were. He talked about in Kenya people who have been diving for plastic trash who are then converting that and using it for their 3D printers that they’re making themselves like homemade 3D printers, they can print microscopes. So we need to be like creators. We need to be inventors.

Speaker 14:

True innovators, innovator meaning resourceful here, not the bullshit term that circulates out of Silicon Valley where you think iPhone 16, iPhone 17 is the definition of innovation. We don’t even know what the difference between any of these things are really. So I’ve seen resourcefulness in action. And so what I just want to say is that what we have as human beings, which these technologies never will have are two very important capacities. The capacity to care, to care and love and imagine and ideate in a way that far transcends the algorithmic walls and silos and the reduction of life to numbers, which is what these technologies are doing. That’s one. The second is creativity.

Michael Fox:

We can do in tremendous and insane things, but we have to come together and maybe put our screens down and maybe read a book and maybe go up for a walk and reconnect and organize that is not just organizing on long line over social media or making some clicks or likes because our entire conversation, our communication, Marc, has been reduced to like something or follow something or comment here and that only helps the algorithm more. It only tells the algorithm we’re literally giving away our data. We’re producing videos and content for these massive companies and they just take it and they don’t give anything back. And so we need to understand what this all means for kind of free speech. And if we lose free speech, this is like the basis of what it means to be America, right? You’ve talked about so much and what these platforms are doing is actually reducing it.

They’re actually destroying our free speech. They’re regulating, they’re censoring and we need to understand that first of all, because most people don’t understand that and we need to move beyond it.

Marc Steiner:

Very well said. I think that gives us maybe some impetus for the next program.

Michael Fox:

I just want to close with something that Marianne Franks told me because it fits perfectly. It kind of really summarizes these questions that we’ve been talking about, but also how they fit in with the Trump administration its attack on free speech rights.

Speaker 10:

We have an administration that does not believe that it is constrained by the law. I don’t think we’ve ever seen that in the United States and at least in modern history. And so it’s not just the free speech question, but again, the free speech question is hugely important, but this is a government that is in fact declared an all out assault on all speech that does not conform to what Trump says it should conform to. And so we’re being attacked on every side. It’s universities, it’s social media, it’s mass media, it’s newspapers and it’s not just through we’re going to throw you all in jail or we’re going to send armed soldiers towards you. Although that’s a huge part of it. It’s also because of the marketplace, the literal marketplace where Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and Amazon and a gazillion other things and Elon Musk has all this power to use X as a propaganda channel for his own views for Donald Trump to be able to get personal enrichment from Truth Social as his propaganda channel.

It is the conglomeration, all the consolidation we’re seeing around mainstream media as well. The fact that we’ve got one handful of corporations that are controlling all the ways that we get information, exchange information. This is a real problem and the Trump administration didn’t create it, but they are making such good use of the fact that our entire information ecosystem is essentially dominated by six men. So that is something that we should all be terrified by because it is the government acting with its powers to hurt people, to deport people, to kidnap people, to torture people. There’s no way that we can have free speech under that kind of regime and we know that when we look at other countries, but also unprecedented levels of entanglement between the government and all forms of media communication, social media, media, other forms so that they’re also controlling the kind of output as well as the input.

It’s all under this kind of frankly fascistic control and it’s what I’ve called a techno fascist control because the intertwining of these industries has meant we have a kind of a fully surveillant society where the capacity for the government to control what we’re saying or try to control what we’re saying is not … It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and you like this series, please do us a favor, go to your podcasting app and give us a like, a follow, a subscribe, or tell a friend about it and leave us a comment or a review. It really helps to spread the word about the show and the state of free speech in the United States today. You can find more of my work on my Patreon page at patreon.com/mfox. Also, please make sure to sign up for the Real News Network’s newsletter so you never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com or you can click on the link in the show notes. If you’d like to find out more about the stories we talked about today in this episode, we’ve added some links in the show notes there as well. The Battle for Free Speech is a production of The Real News.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.