Bias, Power, and Platforms: Thoughts on the Rogan–Twitter Interview
This interview is from 2019 — way before Musk:
Here’s what struck me:
The tech world is controlled by American left-wingers who have a warped ideology. For example, they believe that a man who wakes up one day believing he’s a woman gets to force everyone to call him “her”, and those who don’t comply are framed as “attacking” him. They’ve twisted the meanings of words to indoctrinate others, along with making up new crimes, like “misgendering”. Some of these American tech elites don’t realise they’re biased; others do, but want to reprogram society to fit their dogma. Since these people control the tech platforms, Twitter ended up banning people for calling a guy “him”.
Twitter isn’t the neutral platform it claims to be.
If a different group — not American Democrats — ran Twitter, the biases would be different, not absent. If Twitter was an Indian company, mocking religion might be frowned upon. If Twitter were Chinese, criticising the Party would be verboten.
You can’t run a centralised platform that makes everyone happy, because different people want fundamentally incompatible things. This is a social issue, not a tech one, so tech solve it. It would be like building an app to bring peace between Israel and Palestine.
It’s always easier to be a critic (like Tim Pool in the video above) than a builder. A critic has to think only about the scenario or two he personally cares about, while a builder has to consider everything. For example, Tim insisted on his right to shout in other people’s faces — something Vijaya pushed back on, and something I wouldn’t want to see on a platform I choose to participate in, either.
Interviewers like Tim should be careful not to make the interview about themselves and their own beliefs — assuming, of course, that they’re actually conducting an honest interview and not just using it as a pretext to push their own beliefs.