MUSK Doc Director Reveals How Bad Media Censorship Really Is

Alex Gibney (0:00)

By censoring political content effectively, you're limiting the ability of the public to have a public square. And particularly when it comes to the rich and powerful, there's a critique of the rich and powerful, but they're also playing this game that tech platforms play, where they want to minimize controversy, or what they would call controversy, which usually means some kind of social issue content, right?

John Johnston (0:26)

Hi, everyone, JJ here. Welcome back to The Lounge. Today, I want to talk a little bit about media censorship. And I think a very good place to start is about this Musk documentary, which I've made lots of videos on now. The director, Alex Gibney, has been doing a lot of interviews, as he would with the movie coming out in theaters now limited, going wide on the 16th of October, apparently.

Now he's talked about the efforts to silence the film, to bury the film, and it does expose the media environment, the current US and really further media environment that he had to make this film in and that others have to exist in, including me.

And I'll be surprised if this video gets many views on YouTube, for instance, and elsewhere. I have noticed this whenever I talk about certain things, suddenly it doesn't do so well compared to other ones. I mean, it's the vagaries of the algorithm that I really don't know, but sometimes over time, and I've made more than 800 videos at this point, so I've kind of learned what to do and what not to do. In terms of that, sometimes I don't care, like this one, and the algorithm pushes people in certain directions, and it's different on different platforms. One of the things I've noticed on, say, on YouTube, when I do something that I know is probably not going to like, on Spotify, it does fine, no difference. And so you think, hold on a minute, what's going on there? But it's confusing, you don't know, it's opaque. And Alex Gibney talks about getting his film out there, about the media ownership in the US, and obviously we know who would be trying to bury this film, silence it, hinder how far it gets out there, right? And he talks about this and what happens. I think it's very instructive on the current environment. He says it's pretty bad.

SPEAKER_3 (2:19)

Now there's this effort to kind of soil the movie before the public even gets to see it.

Musk attacked you personally, called the documentary a hit piece, not surprising. And I think there's obviously with somebody like him, there comes the implied threat, whether it's explicit or not, the implied threat of an expensive defamation suit.

Alex Gibney (2:38)

Yes, that's right. And they've already threatened to sue.

SPEAKER_3 (2:40)

Okay, they've already threatened to sue. He won't talk to you. To me, the obvious hypocrisy here is Mr. Self-described free speech absolutist trying to prevent essentially free speech. And the film's distributor has run into this remarkable advertising problem. That's right. YouTube, TikTok, Meta and X initially rejected paid ads for the trailer of this movie to just let people know that it's out there. And they rejected it.

John Johnston (3:12)

Yeah, we've done videos about that when it happened. And you know, this kind of backfired because there was a article in The Hollywood Reporter, which I reported on. It also went out there to a lot of places. It got fed into social media and they reversed it because it was embarrassing. Too obvious about the censorship. Maybe they hoped that it would be quiet, but it was reversed except for X and on TikTok, who now the ownership involves one of Elon Musk, oligarch friends, the Alisons, right? So yes, isn't that interesting?

SPEAKER_3 (3:47)

Under these so-called political content rules, which to my mind, that's a really Orwellian set of rules. This idea that if content is quote unquote political, they can stop it from entering the public square. Now, Meta and YouTube later reverse themselves. But my question to you on that is, what do you make of that initial response? What I'm getting at here is, do you buy the idea that it was just purely like we have this blunt, no political content and the movie just got caught in that filter? Or do you think there was something specific going on here? If not that Elon Musk called his friends and told them to stop the movie from being like, what do you think was going on there?

Alex Gibney (4:28)

Well, I do think that initially the requests were caught in the AI algorithm devoted to expunging political ads. But think about that for a second. Already we know enough about AI algorithms to know that they're tweaked for particular purposes, right?