Joe Rogan Experience #1864 - Alex Berenson

(drumming) Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music plays)

(sniffing) Smell that? That's vindication.

(laughs)

You are the sweet smell of vindication.

Not, not, not yet, my friend.

(laughs)

Not yet.

Not yet, but it's, it's definitely in the air.

(laughs)

Has there ever been a person that has, uh, gone to court and got back on Twitter, besides you?

There has not.

That's pretty impressive. That's pretty impressive.

Uh, s- (laughs) there's more common.

There's more?

Oh, yeah.

So explain the process. So you were, uh, what was the exact, uh, definition of what they kicked you off for?

Oh, are, are we, are we live?

Yeah, we're live.

Oh, oh, good, good.

We're rolling.

Okay, um, uh, all right. So, uh, it was almost exactly this time last year, Joe. It was August 28th, 2021. Uh, I, uh, wrote a tweet that began, "It doesn't stop infection or transmission." And they banned me. Um, I went on to say, uh, "This is not a vaccine, or don't think of it as a vaccine. Think of it as a therapeutic, meaning a drug, that has side effects, and that you have to dose in advance of illness." And then the last line was, "And we wanna mandate it? Insanity." Okay, I, I would say that that's been pretty well vindicated by events.

That's...

(laughs)

That's vindication.

So, so they banned me. That was, they said that was my fifth strike and that I was not allowed to tweet anymore, and my account was not available to anybody. All the previous tweets were gone. Uh, the 300,000 people, too bad. Um, so I sued them, uh, in December. And here's it gets, it gets interesting and tricky. Uh, so other people have sued Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, uh, and Wikipedia, actually, all these companies, um, and said, you know, "You've banned us." Uh, uh, you know, "I just wanna be able to use your platform. I haven't done anything wrong." And the companies say, "We can do whatever we want. We can ban you. We can, you know, attach labels to your tweets, this, that, and the other." Uh, and there's a law called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It's a federal law from 1998, I wanna say, maybe '96, uh, that basically was intended for two purposes. Purpose one was we don't want these companies to get sued over stuff that people are saying on them. So in other words, I go on and I say, you know, terrible things, defamatory things about Joe Rogan, or I say terrible things about my ex-wife, whatever, okay? Or I say, you know, "Go shoot the president." The, whatever it is that I'm saying, I'm saying something that's harassing or hateful or illegal. We can't expect, uh, a bulletin board or Facebook or, uh, or, or Twitter or whoever to police all that stuff. There's too much of it. It's not fair. So we're gonna give them complete protection from that. And that makes total sense, by the way, all right? You can't, you know, you can't have these people, uh, policing everything that's uploaded or downloaded. It's not, it's not within their capability, okay? The second idea was we want these folks to be able to give their users a better experience, and so we're gonna give them some protection, limited protection, to moderate the content that's posted, meaning let's say I'm posting tons of pornography and, you know, I'm posting it to a Christian website that, uh, that, you know, that's advertising itself as a family-friendly place. The idea was the, uh, 230's gonna allow me to take action against, uh, that user in good faith for harassa- harassing or objectionable content. So I'm gonna be allowed to ban stuff or to age restrict it. And, and that was really intended, when you look back at the statute, for porno- pornography especially. Okay. So what happened was the companies, with the help of the Ninth Circuit, which is, uh, the, the federal, uh, judges in, in California, which is where most of these companies are based, um, California and the West Coast, uh, managed to get bigger protection. And this really, this was happening for a while, and then it really happened in 2015. There was this case where a group of Sikhs, uh, uh, you know, an Indian minority group, the government of India went to Facebook and said, "We don't like these people. They're protesting against us. You gotta ban them. You gotta ban their, their group website." And Facebook said, "Okay," and pulled them. They sued Facebook. They said, "This is not right." And by the way, like, this was a classic example of a government telling, uh, you know, it's didn't, not wanting dissent, okay? They didn't... Facebook, uh, the, the Indian government didn't wanna deal with this group, so they told Facebook to ban it, okay? The Ninth Circuit said that 230 protection that allows you complete immunity if, if Alex Berenson says, you know, "Here's naked pictures of my, of my ex-girlfriend," that also allows you to ban whoever you want whenever you want. The, they called it first-party/third-party. They said there's no distinction in the statute between the immunity you get for, uh, you know, for, for this, for this defamation that Alex might be doing versus your own decision to ban these people who don't wanna be banned. And ever since then, 230's been a beast, and every time somebody has sued, the companies have said, "Look at Sikhs versus Facebook. We win."... and that's basically been how it's been. They've been allowed to do whatever they want. And so, uh, by the way, I know I'm not even talking about my case yet, but this is the legal background.