I think what Twitter and X have done with community notes, I think is just a better program. Rather than having a small number of fact checkers, you get the whole community to weigh in. When people usually disagree on something, tend to agree on how they're voting on a note, that's a good sign to the community that this is, there's actually like a broad consensus on this and then you show it. And you are showing more information, not less. Right. So you're not using the fact check as a signal to show less, you're using the community note to provide real context, and show additional information. So I think that's better.
When you're talking about nation states, or people interfering, a lot of that stuff is best rooted out at the level of, kind of, accounts doing phony things. So you get like, whether it's China, or Russia, or Iran, or like one of these countries, they'll set up these networks of fake accounts and bots, and they coordinate and post on each other's stuff to make it seem like it's authentic. And kind of convince people like, wow, a bunch of people must think this or something, and the way that you identify that is you build AI systems that can basically detect that those accounts are not behaving that a human would.
A lot of what we've seen too, I mean there's the anonymous accounts, also I think over time a lot of the kind of more interesting conversations have shifted from the public sphere to more private ones. So WhatsApp groups, private groups on Facebook. I'm sure you've had this experience where like maybe 10 years ago you would have posted your kind of quick takes on whatever social media you're using. Now, you know the stuff I post on Facebook and Instagram, it's like I put time into making sure that's kind of good content that I want to be seen broadly. And then most of the jokes that I make are like with my friends in WhatsApp, right, in groups.
I was really worried from the beginning about basically becoming this sort of decider of what is true in the world. Right. That's like kind of a crazy position to be in for billions of people using your service.
[Podcasts] Well, it's a new medium. I mean, I'm sure you know the history on this. It's like when people transitioned from radio to TV, the initial TV anchors were the same radio people, but just like being filmed while speaking on the radio. But it turned out it was actually a completely different type of person that you need. Because on your radio is just like your voice and your cadence, and all that. It's like you know the whole phrase you've got a good radio voice. Right. Okay, on TV you need to be telegenic, right, you need to kind of have charisma. In that medium its like a completely different thing. I think that's going to be true for the internet too.
The Supreme Court has this clear precedent. It's like, all right, you can't yell fire in a crowded theater. There are times when if there's an emergency, your ability to speak can temporarily be curtailed in order to get an emergency under control. So I was sympathetic to that at the beginning of Covid.
I think at some level you start, you only start one of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice. Right, I mean. The whole point of social media is basically you know giving people the ability to share what they want.
In the beginning [of covid] it kind of seemed like, okay we should give a little bit of deference to the government and the health authorities on how we should play this. But when it went from you know, two weeks to flatten the curve, to you know like in the beginning it was like, okay there aren't enough masks. Masks aren't that important. To then it's like oh no you have to wear a mask, and you know like everything was shifting around. It just became very difficult to follow. And this really hit the most extreme, I'd say during the Biden administration when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program.
I'm generally like, pretty pro rolling out vaccines. I think on balance the vaccines are more positive than negative. But, I think that while they're trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who was basically arguing against it. And they pushed us super hard to take down things that were, honestly were true.
It's so complicated, this system, that I could spend every minute of all of my time doing this and not actually focused on building any of the things we are trying to do, AI, glasses, like the future of social media, all that stuff. So I get involved in this stuff, but in general we have a policy team. There are people I trust. They're the people kind of working on this on a day-to-day basis.
Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and like scream at them and curse. And it's like these documents are, it's all kind of out there. ... The emails are published. It's all kind of out there. And they're like, and basically it just got to this point where we were like, no we're not going to take down things that are true, that's ridiculous. ... We just said no. We're not going to take down humor and satire. We're not going to take down things that are true. And then at some point, I guess, I don't know, it flipped a bit. I mean Biden when he gave some statement at some point. I don't know if it was a press conference or to some journalist where he basically was like these guys are killing people. And, I don't know. Then like all these different agencies and branches of government basically just started investigating and coming after our company. It was brutal. It was brutal.
The internet is growing in importance around the world in people's lives and I think that it is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation.