E10: Twitter & Facebook botch censorship (again), the publisher vs. distributor debate & more

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome. Besties are back. Besties are back. It's another All-In Podcast. Dropping it to you unexpectedly because there's just so much news. It's too much news.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:12)
A surprise bestie pod.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:14)
We're dropping a bestie. It's not a code 13 We're not dropping any Snickers bars today. Just dropping a bestie. Oh, no, he's got a megaphone.

**David Sacks** (0:34)
It's a special censorship edition. Warning, warning.

**David Friedberg** (0:43)
We hit a new low in terms of people needing to be heard.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:47)
By the way, Chamath, Sacks' agent and his chief of staff called me. He felt like he only got 62% of the minutes in the last two podcasts versus the rest of us. And so I'm dealing with his agent a little bit. It's like the debates where they count the number of minutes of interruption.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:04)
Who, Daniel? Is Daniel grinding you for more minutes?

**Jason Calacanis** (1:06)
Yeah, Daniel's grinding me for more minutes on the fact check.

**David Sacks** (1:08)
No, I go for quality over quantity.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:10)
Absolutely.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:11)
OK. Well, this week's going to be. I mean, what a complete disaster of a week.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:19)
Is there no other way to explain what is happening right now? Every day is a dumpster fire.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:24)
It's a huge dumpster fire.
So here we are. We're three weeks out from the election. And somebody's e-mails have a Democrats e-mails have been leaked again, potentially. But last time we had an investigation by the FBI. And then that might have impacted the election. This time we have a whole different brouhaha. Apparently, Hunter Biden, who loves to smoke crack and has a serious drug problem.
This is, you know, he's a seriously obviously troubled individual. But he brought three laptops to get them fixed and never picked them up, according to this story in the New York Post. So the New York Post runs a story with an author who is kind of unknown. And this these laptops were somehow the hard drives. He never picked them up. That's a little suspicious. The hard drives wind up with Rudy Giuliani and the FBI. Anyway, what they say is that Hunter Biden, which we kind of know, is a grifter who traded on his last name to get big consulting deals. I don't know what board anybody here has been on that pays 50,000 a month, but it's obviously gnarly stuff. But the fallout from it was the big story. I went to tweet the story and it wouldn't let me tweet the story. So, the literal New York Post was banned by Twitter. At the same time, Facebook put a warning on it. So, let's just put it out there. You know, Sacks, you're guys losing pretty badly in this election. And so, we'll go to our token GOP. What do you think? Let's take this in two parts. One, what do you think the chance is that this is fake news or real news or something in between? And then let's get into Twitter's insane decision to block the URL.

**David Sacks** (3:23)
Yeah, I mean, so first of all, I think this whole thing is a tragedy of errors on the part of sort of everyone involved. I think the New York Post story stinks. I don't think it meets sort of standards of journalistic integrity. We can talk about that. But then I think, you know, Twitter and Facebook overreacted. And I think that the story was well in the process of being debunked by the Internet. And it was like Twitter and Facebook didn't trust that process to happen. And so they intervened. And now I think there's going to be a third mistake, which is that conservatives are looking to repeal Section 230 We should talk about that. And so each one, there's been a cascade of disasters that have led to this this dumpster fire. But starting with the story, it is it is very suspicious. First of all, these disclosures about 100 Biden's personal life, they didn't have to go there was completely gratuitous to the article. It was sleazy. And then, of course, the story about how the hard drive ends up with the reporters makes no sense. Even today, Giuliani was was making up new explanations for how it got there. It's now being widely speculated that this was the that the content came from the result of a hack, maybe involving foreign actors, that this whole idea that it came from this sort of hard drive that he left at a repair shop and forgot to pick up. I mean, so that's now, I think that would have been the story today, if it weren't for Facebook and Twitter making censorship the story. And then the final thing is, this story wasn't a smoking gun to begin with. I mean, the worst thing it showed was that there was a single email between a Burisma exec and Joe Biden. And the Biden campaign has denied that Joe Biden never met with this guy. And so it wasn't ever this smoking gun.