Bohumil Kartous: Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, later Instagram, and CEO of Meta, came out with an incredible video. A five-minute video in which he sprinkles ash on his head, says that Meta made a mistake, that it went too far, .that we fell into too much censorship. I’m talking about Mark Zuckerberg announcing that Meta is changing its internal corporate policy and platforms like Instagram and Facebook are no longer policing the veracity of content. In other words, Instagram, Facebook is no longer about exposing misinformation, at this point in time still only in the U.S. environment, but very likely with an effort here to spread this new policy globally and we have Josef Holý, co-author of the podcast Canaries in the Net, who is looking at not just misinformation but just the impact of technology on our individual social lives. Hello, Josef.
Josef Holy: Hello, thank you for having me.
Bohumil Kartous: We talked briefly before we recorded this interview about how we find this incredible, but it probably fits into the overall picture of the United States today. How do you feel about the message that Mark Zuckerberg has delivered to the world with such enthusiasm?
Josef Holý: You have to look at it in the context of what is happening in the United States right now. Basically, the oligarchic clique of Silicon Valley now has the President of the United States. Elon Musk gave Trump over 200 million dollars and he was not alone. Then there are hundreds of millions more from other big investors, and so the interests of the platforms and the interests of the American state will be the same after January 20th, when Trump officially takes office. Logically from the point of view of the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world, the most valuable company in the world, that is Facebook, they’re still in the top 5 or top 10 of various companies, so it’s basically a logical step that they’re going to kiss the ring so to speak. That is, they have to become part of this new, I’m already calling it, doctrine, new doctrine and but it’s not just that suddenly Zuckerberg would kneel down and jump over to Trump. It’s important to remember that the first Facebook investor, the angel investor, the first person to give a million dollars to Mark Zuckerberg was Peter Thiel, who is an ally of Elon Musk and the person who put in place or helped put in place J.D. Vance as a vice presidential candidate and future vice president, who is still in the background right now, but it’s just this clique that’s just an interconnected techno-oligarchy that is now going to try to exert this enormous technological influence in manipulating our perception of reality. That is, how we perceive reality through the information that we receive through social networks increasingly.
Bohumil Kartous: This was the same investor, excuse the interuption, the same investor who was behind the effort as a grey eminence to remove some of the leaders of American universities accused of anti-Semitism, very very unfairly.
Josef Holý: Among other things. And he’s also the owner or co-owner of Palantir, which is the biggest data firm today that takes contracts from or works for the Pentagon. That means Peter Theil is tied to government contracts. So you have the structure here. Then there’s the so-called crypto bros, that is, again, the technologarchs who have made money in cryptocurrencies, then it’s not without interest that there’s also a guy named Jeff Yass, who gave the Republicans, or Trump, or the Republicans, about $100 million as well, who holds 15% in ByteDance, which is the operator of Tiktok. So we have this conglomerate, this kind of true techno-oligarchic group that will now hold the United States government.
Bohumil Kartous: It seems to me a lot like entering into a form of dystopia, because we have a group of people like Mark Zuckerberg, who quietly, the moment he senses, sees that the political course is changing towards Trump, as it is, and immediately adapts and may do the same if the course reverses again, which we should hope for. But he will do it again. He’ll quietly support the other party again and he’ll adapt again. And he knows that there’s nothing we as companies can do about it because the technology is pretty much in our hands. They’ve got it in their grasp.
Josef Holý: A couple of things here on that. You’re saying that in four years the US government will change, that then the course will change and Zuckerberg will switch his allegiance. This clique is trying to make sure that the odds don’t change anymore. We need to accept the new reality. That course is not going to change, if the Democrats, or some other party that might emerge in the future, we don’t know in the United States, can succeed, then if the plan that this clique, together with Trump, has is successful, then basically there will be an autocratic takeover of the United States, and the United States will become basically an autocratic state, basically a fascist state, in the sense of that Mussolini-esque fascism, where you have the biggest, the biggest capital intertwined with the state. We mustn’t forget, too, of the techno-oligarchs, Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, who has supported the Democrats all along. And then, when it looked like before the election that Trump was really probably going to win, maybe he made that assessment, he refused to run a supportive op-ed in the Washington Post in support of Kamala Harris and now he’s talking openly about Trump and Musk, saying that he’s looking forward to working together and that it’s going to be great how they form the government. That’s one thing. The other thing. They’re going to try to exert that influence through the entire power apparatus of the United States. I’ll try to give an example. Zuckerberg said several things in that video. You mentioned in that introduction that they want to abolish fact-checking, that is, they want to abolish cooperation with those organizations that oversaw, that fact-checked, that is, verified information. He talks a lot about freedom of speech, he talks a lot about censorship. He even says that Facebook, under pressure from these organisations and also under pressure from the former Biden establishment, that it censored, that it was forced to censor and that it is still forced to censor in Europe, in the European Union, for example, he says that Europe is over-regulated. Which may be true in many respects.
On the other hand, it is in that digital world that the Digital Services Act makes an impact. This is the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Marketplaces Act or AOI as it is called in Czech, so these are the first regulations of this type and scope in the world. And I’ve been following the discourse in the regulatory community, listening and watching podcasts, statements from various people in the regulatory community from other countries, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and they all say, this is great, this is interesting. We take a lot of inspiration from that.
I mean, Europe has shown some direction here in this and in light of that, Zuckerberg at the same time in the video we’re talking about, he’s saying that he wants to work together, literally that ‘we’re going to work with Donald Trump to push back on other countries elsewhere in the world that are also pushing similar censorship policies.’
Bohumil Kartous: By the way, he makes no distinction at all in that video between Europe and Latin America and China. He lumps them all together as countries or as territories, regions that are trying to censor unnecessarily. That’s completely out of line, excuse me.
Josef Holý: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely, and this is an important sentence for me here that underscores that thesis about this techno-oligarchic fascism, this concept here where this industrialist of the new industry, the digital industry, one of the most powerful people in the world because his platforms serve and supply information to over 3 billion people on basically a daily basis, globally, so he’s saying that with Trump, that is, with a representative of political power, he’s going to use that political power to help his business, and at the same time, of course, there’s going to be an intertwining to help spread the ideology that Trump represents, which is, to put it in the finest terms, populism. And if we say it in a very realistic way, as Timothy Snyder, for example, the American historian, says, it is totalitarianism, dictatorship, fascism, basically.
Bohumil Kartous: I’ll maybe add one more important thing there, maybe not so perceptible to many people, which he announced that the team that has been doing the content management, let’s say, the control of that content, is moving from California to Texas, and he justified that by saying that those people were too biased in the way they judge that content, which is terribly, absolutely flagrant. So it’s obvious that simply when you move something from a Democratic state in the US to the most biased conservative state in the US, this is not about bias, this is again just about trying to please the new highly toxic leadership of the United States.
Joswef Holý: Absolutely, absolutely. Here too, of course, it was important in this and just what’s in it for Zuckerberg, they’ve had problems in the long run complying with these European regulations. They’re using the excuse that it slows down innovation and so on. On the other hand, really 80% of the regulations that are there are about ensuring democratic principles, they’re about defending democratic concepts in relation to those big platforms. These are not censorship regulations that the European Union has put in place. For example, one of the regulations that is in there is that when there are some major social events, whether it is natural disasters or democratic elections, for example, it is imposed on those platforms to increase surveillance and to communicate better with the relevant parts of the state if something happens. That is, when there are floods, so that they take information from security and other state forces and then publish it. Verified information from the state as to where people should report where, how, how to evacuate and so on. And when there’s an election, if there’s foreign influence, which we’ve seen by the way, in the last two months in Romania, where basically on the pro-China platform TikTok, an unknown extreme candidate managed to shoot up from 0 to 43 and a half percent or whatever.
So this is what these regulations impose and they also impose, for example, privacy protections. Which then requires increased costs from those companies because they have all the data inside, simply put, in one pile. And suddenly the European Union, a major world market, wants them to treat that data, to treat it differently in some way, for example, to store the data of European users on the European continent, to subject it to different protection regimes and so on.
This is not censorship, this in light of the fact that, if we go back to the fact that fascism is on the rise in America, which yes, it is not just Holý and Kartous here who are saying this, but established intellectual leaders across the spectrum. Yeah for example Liz Cheney, who can hardly be described as a left wing liberal, she’s a Republican, daughter of Dick Cheney, who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq he was the architect of these wars basically.
So she’s saying the same thing, that is, at the moment when it’s about to happen here, it’s in our vital interest to resist that pressure from the techno-oligarchs. That is, to insist on compliance with the regulations that we have agreed to, and please do so in a pretty democratic way. Ursula von der Leyen didn’t make these regulations up. They went through several years of wrangling by the European Parliament, that is really European democracy, that is the result of a European democratic process that all states have agreed to in principle.
Bohumil Kartous: And of course, it is based on the necessary need to protect the public interest. What is really happening is the identification of the public interest with the interest of this new technological plutocracy represented by Zuckerberg. Musk, Bezos and other people who are completely unelected by anyone, but who, by supporting Trump, will buy his favour and then subsequently buy the fact that when the MAGA legion, that bunch of Trump-loyal idiots, negotiate with the European Union, they will either be there directly. I’m convinced that Musk will be sitting there and they will be pushing the European Commission and the European Union to the effect of –
Josef Holý: Absolutely.
Bohumil Kartous: – you’re not going to regulate us, otherwise we’re going to raise tariffs or we’re just going to destroy your prices for critical supplies, it’s a very uncomfortable situation. On the other hand, we don’t really have a choice, if we let ourselves be broken in Europe, we become vassals of this strange form of digital feudalism. Slash Slash as autocracy. So, of course, that feudalism inherently owns it. Just to put the whole thing in context, here we’re talking about a new government that, through the mouth of its president, who is very much a puppet, in his own way, a completely narcissistic idiot who stands at the top of the heap here, is threatening to take over Greenland, to take over Panama, to threaten Canada. That he’s going to turn them into another US state. That’s nothing that isn’t obvious.
Josef Holý: Exactly. Exactly. It’s such a new reality that we still refuse to admit it. What you just said in that last sentence. The American – let’s just repeat that, the American president, even before he took office, threatened Denmark that he would take Greenland away from them, and when asked directly by journalists, he didn’t rule out the use of military force. And this Denmark and the United States are in NATO. He wants to get control of the Panama Canal and basically wants or says Canada should become the 51th state of the Union of the United States. I mean this is the reality, it’s exactly the same as Slovakian Prime Minister Fico going to Russia, nobody knows what he’s doing there, he’s just making weird propaganda pro-Russian videos and then suddenly he’s discovered in a €6,000 room in a hotel somewhere in Hanoi. This is the same level or a very similar level, the level of the new reality, which is completely different from what we had. Exactly.
And you really have to look at it that way, that this is not normal. This is not normal and we as Europe have to push back very strongly against this because if we care about our system and now of course it’s about what cards we play and the problem is that Musk is openly supporting, at least populist, but moreover often pro-Russian, downright pro-Russian parties that have a record of being paid by the Russians, for example the German AfD, then he wants to help the Farage Reform Party, with or without Farage in the UK and so on and so forth.
That is, we are really looking at a frontal assault on our democratic systems here, and what Sasha Alvarova, my podcast colleague, also wrote about in Feeding the Demons. That Steve Bannon, Trump’s propagandist, ten years ago invented the populist international, which failed in that first period and they wanted to install Salvini and just all the AfD and so on, the only one that succeeded was Orbán in some respects, and today we’re looking at that version 2.0, which will be with the heavy use of these modern data-driven artificial intelligence-based information platforms..
Bohumil Kartous: How do you see the problem? I perceive the problem a bit like those people who, before the real rise of Nazism in Germany, didn’t believe that it could really happen. A lot of those people who said no, kept pushing back –
Josef Holý: “That’s just his rhetoric.”
Bohumil Kartous: It’s still just his rhetoric it’s just him just blabbing. It’s just a lot of people think that Trump, like, he’s just going to say something and then the next day he’s not going to do it, but this Trump 2.0 as a lot of critics of people who are involved and follow the political world, global events have pointed out. Trump 2.0 is something different than Trump between 2017-2020 and yet this clearly proves that it is, after all, he has everything on his plate. And just what you said, that is, the misuse of the tools of digital influence and social discourse, social discourse will undoubtedly lead to this.
