#1864 - Alex Berenson

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Smell that?

That's vindication. You are the sweet smell of vindication.

Alex Berenson (0:22)

Not yet, my friend, not yet.

Joe Rogan (0:24)

Not yet, but it's definitely in the air. Has there ever been a person that has gone to court and got back on Twitter besides you?

Alex Berenson (0:32)

There has not.

Joe Rogan (0:33)

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

Alex Berenson (0:38)

There's more coming.

Joe Rogan (0:39)

There's more?

Alex Berenson (0:40)

Oh yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:41)

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

Alex Berenson (0:50)

Are we live?

Joe Rogan (0:51)

Yeah, we're live.

Alex Berenson (0:52)

Oh good, good, okay. All right. So it was almost exactly this time last year, Joe. It was August 28th, 2021 I wrote a tweet that began, it doesn't stop infection or transmission. And they banned me.

I went on to say, 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 want to mandate it, insanity.

I would say that that's been pretty well vindicated by events.

Joe Rogan (1:30)

That's vindication.

Alex Berenson (1:34)

So they banned me. 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. The 300,000 people, too bad.

So I sued them in December.

And here it gets interesting and tricky.

So other people have sued Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Wikipedia, actually all these companies, and said, you've banned us.

I just wanna be able to use your platform. I haven't done anything wrong. And the company say, we can do whatever we want. We can ban you. We can attach labels to your tweets, this, that, and the other.

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, 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. Whatever it is that I'm saying, I'm saying something that's harassing or hateful or illegal. We can't expect a bulletin board or Facebook 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 have these people policing everything that's uploaded or downloaded. 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 I'm posting it to a Christian website that is advertising itself as a family-friendly place. The idea was the 230 is gonna allow me to take action against that user in good faith for harassing or objectionable content. So I'm gonna be allowed to ban stuff or to age-restrict. And that was really intended when you look back at the statute for pornography especially. Okay, so what happened was the companies with the help of the Ninth Circuit, which is the federal judges in California, which is where most of these companies are based, California and the West Coast, managed to get bigger protection. And this was happening for a while, and then it really happened in 2015 There was this case where a group of Sikhs, 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 group website. And Facebook said, okay, and pulled them. They sued Facebook. They said, this is not right. And by the way, this was a classic example of a government telling, not wanting dissent.

They didn't Facebook, 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 Alex Berenson says, here's naked pictures of my ex-girlfriend, that also allows you to ban whoever you want, whenever you want.