Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers on dismantling the "Censorship Industrial Complex"

0:00David and I are staying in a 300 year old house and we both smashed our head on the beams twice already but this is our first Davos, David. Yes. First Davos. We've been here for 24 hours and any first impressions here? It's interesting. You know, we're staying very far away. Yeah. Apparently they didn't want you to be part of this. They didn't want me too close. Yeah. But we finally got you an invitation. Your invitation did not get lost in the mail. My invitation didn't get lost in the mail this time. For those of you who watch the pod, you know what I'm talking about. Inside joke. Yes. But it's great to be here and great to be here at USA House.

0:39Thanks to all the sponsors and really delighted for our first guest for the pod. Sarah Rogers is the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy at the State Department. For members here who don't know this position or what you've been charged with or what you've decided to work on, I'm curious about that. Do they tell you what to do or do you come up with your own mandate? But yeah, tell us everything about what you're doing. Long-time listener, first-time guest and thank you to both of us. Thank you from all of us at America House for joining us here. So I am the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and when I got this nomination, my friends and family all congratulated me and then kind of furtively said, what is that?

1:20Yeah. So diplomacy traditionally concerns the relationship between the American government and foreign governments. To ambassadors, shake hands, make a deal, solve a war. But public diplomacy is different. public diplomacy addresses the relationship between the American government and foreign publics. And this has become a very important undersecretariat with the rise of the internet and then during the Biden administration especially, these mushrooming concerns about so-called disinformation and what do we do when there are allegedly malign influences on the public view of America, the public's intersection with American interests, how do we interact with the internet and the information ecosystem.

2:04That is part of my portfolio. I also oversee other soft power activities, including our educational and cultural and sports diplomacy. So I am privileged to play a role in the World Cup this summer and the LA Olympics coming up, and the Fulbright program and others like it. So it's a great job. You seem particularly focused on freedom of speech and a little bit of tension between our standards and the companies in America, which have made the move to being strongly freedom of speech, something that kind of got lost in our industry for a couple of years in technology, but has now made, I think, some significant progress on.

2:43It does seem like some folks in Europe don't share our love of freedom of speech. Maybe you could explain to us what the tension is today and what some of the regulations are that have been put in place in Europe? Sure, absolutely. So the two main regulations that I've interfaced with since taking office, and part of this is just a product of my first official trip was to Europe, and while I was in Europe, a large fine came down on an American platform, X, under the Digital Services Act, which I'll get into in a moment. So Europe, especially since the Second World War, but I think really since the American founding and our codification of the First Amendment, you know, America has taken a much stronger approach on free speech than even most of the West.

3:28And with the rise of the internet and all communication or a lot of communication becoming transnational, we see these new technocratic regulatory frameworks in Europe bumping up against the commitments to free speech in the United States. And Jason makes an important observation that for a while some of these large American technology platforms were more inclined to moderate or to censor, kind of in conformity with some prevailing norms and concerns in the United States. But I think in the United States, we've shifted back toward a less censorious approach, and so have these platforms. And at the same time, you have regulatory efforts in Europe and the UK, and I'll name a couple that I think have been particularly relevant.

4:12So the UK has something called the Online Safety Act. The Online Safety Act imposes age-gating obligations on a broad swath of content, almost any content that's upsetting, and then requires platforms to run risk assessments for and in some cases remove content that the UK would say is illegal. And in the UK, you know, major categories of content are banned, are rendered illegal, that would not be illegal in the United States, which is where these platforms are located, which is where their original user base is, which is where their executives live. and which is their primary regulator. So under the Online Safety Act, we now have active litigation by the relevant regulator Ofcom against several American websites.

4:55These are websites that don't reach into the UK. These aren't websites dedicated to discussing the Queen. They're not websites that sell goods in the United Kingdom. These are websites that exist on American soil, host large quantities of American users, and oftentimes discuss American political topics. But because users are permitted to discuss them in a way that offends UK law, there's the imposition of a UK fine. The Digital Services Act in the EU is similar. So DSA contains but doesn't just contain content-based regulations, hate speech regulations. So DSA requires all of the EU member states to adopt at minimum kind of a floor for hate speech prohibition, and those prohibitions in the statute I think are much vaguer than American lawyers are accustomed to.

5:47And one of our jurisprudential principles under the American First Amendment is if you're going to enact any regulation that comes close to touching speech, it needs to be very clear what you are prohibiting because you have this chilling effect concept. A vague prohibition will chill speech, especially when that prohibition is imposed on a large risk-averse corporation. So you impose vague prohibitions on large risk-averse corporations, and that's how it becomes illegal to make jokes around the water cooler, for example. You see the same effect here. Digital Services Act also regulates other aspects of digital commerce and social media, so it regulates things like transparency and competition.

6:28And I think, you know, we have a lot of Europeans in the audience today and I hope none of them will find it contentious if I suggest that in Europe there is more of a focus on technocratic regulation as an arbiter of what's acceptable than there might be in America where we have this tradition that really emphasizes like rugged individualism and individual conscience. And to be clear, no one is saying, certainly not the State Department or America, hey, you can't have your own platforms in Europe. Right. Build your own. Build your own Facebook. Build your own Instagram. Build your own Twitter slash X, TikTok, whatever you'd like to build, and you can have whatever standards you like on your platforms.

7:07We're saying, hey, these are our platforms, this is our standard, and we don't want our users or our platforms to be receiving fines. That's our position. I think that's basically it. And look, when American companies operate abroad, they abide by the laws where they operate. But at a certain point, so we recently issued some sanctions, which we'll get into. And one of the individuals we sanctioned was a former EU official who threatened Elon Musk with enforcement action because X within the United States had said that it was going to host on a live Twitter space an interview with Donald Trump, our president.

7:46So it wasn't that Donald Trump had said anything violative. It wasn't there was a specific piece of content that the EU wanted to ban. It was just that the act of an American business hosting an interview with an American president might offend EU preferences about speech, generated a regulatory threat. And when you reach across borders and make a threat like that, that offends American interests and American values. And so you can expect America to respond. And I think, so I, my history is as an American lawyer in American courts, and we have, you know, we're a nation of 50 states, and each state has its own regulations.

8:23And we've had to think about, you know, when there's a website in California that operates in Texas, how do you decide to what extent Texas gets to regulate? And we have all these jurisdictional concepts like, does the website purposefully avail itself of the forum? Are you posting defamatory statements about a person in Texas? But the mere existence of a website in California that Texas doesn't like is hardly ever, basically never, a basis for regulation. And so when we talk about things like extraterritoriality, You know, what we're really talking about is it's undisputed that Europeans get to have their own laws in Europe.

8:59But we also get to have our own laws in the United States. And we're celebrating 250 years of American independence. And so we want, you know, we want our markets to be able to interoperate online. But we're not willing to give up American freedom of speech in the bargain. David, when we look at, and I'm asking you this one so I can give you a pass on it. but what do you think people are so scared of in the UK when it comes to freedom of speech? And maybe the most freedom, the most raucous platform, X specifically. Well, I don't think the people are afraid. I think the government is afraid of the people criticizing it, and therefore they're engaged in what censors always do, which is protect the people in power.

9:46There's something, Sarah, you should, explain this to us, but as I understand, there have been over 12 ,000 people. Is it prosecuted or arrested under the Online Safety Act? Was that just in one year, or is that since it... That was in 2023 alone, but that isn't just under the Online Safety Act. So I think what's particularly insidious and particularly relevant about statutes like the OSA and the DSA is that these are portals through which existing censorship laws get applied to the internet. So a lot of these Brits are arrested under existing statutes, like there's a Communications Act, there's a law against inciting, quote-unquote, racial or religious hatred, and we, I think, have differences of opinion about, you know, what amounts to incitement in America versus the UK.

10:34But so, for example, you had a comedian called Graham Linehan who tweeted that if a woman sees a penis in a lady's room, you know, she should feel free to kick that guy in the balls. And that's something a lot of comedians say, and I think it channels an impulse that a lot of Americans and Europeans would frankly consider common sense. But he was dragged out of the airport like a terrorist, had his devices confiscated, was thrown in jail overnight, and lost access, my understanding is, to his heart medication, if I recall correctly. And because this was an incitement to violence? Because this offended some existing law against provocative speech in the UK.

11:10And the Online Safety Act is a device through which all of those existing laws get applied to the internet. You had another case in the UK where Joey Breton, a footballer, called somebody a bike nonce, which nonce is not an American term, but I imagine you're insinuating someone as effeminate for riding a bike so much or in the manner that he rides the bike. And that resulted in a suspended prison sentence, but still a prison sentence. Because he called somebody zesty. Yeah, basically. That's what we call it in the United States now. And there were some other tweets too, but none that would meet the bar for American incitement.

11:43So, David, you're absolutely right. So that was in a single year of slightly over 12 ,000 Brits arrested for speech acts. And that is more than we're arrested that you're in Russia, more than in China, more than in Turkey. And when you talk to Brits about this, you know, you're absolutely right. Most of the British people that you talk to say this is totally unacceptable. And if you look at the polls in the UK, you see public sentiment against this kind of thing. But I've had, you know, both public and private engagements with regulators in these countries, and the defense you hear is, well, you know, we have a less chilling, less totalitarian environment than China, so maybe more people are willing to break the rules, more people are willing to offend.

12:23But if you arrest 12 ,000 people a year for speech and you're raising children in an ecosystem where you can be dragged out of the airport for offending the dogmas of transgender activism, then you might not have a different culture than China for long. And why should the United States be paying to defend your country and support it in fighting, say, a proxy war against Russia, if that's basically the values that are being enforced? Right, exactly. When we interact with our NATO allies in the NATO context, we hear a lot about our shared history and shared values. And it's time to ask, you know, what values do we still share.

13:04We, together with our allies, comprised the free world after World War II, and the free world that was assembled against communism. But the cornerstone of a free world, of any free society, has to be freedom of speech. And criticizing the uncomfortable speech is where this actual defense is necessary. Yes. And we have a very special, you know, bent in the United States to really go after our leaders. I do it every week with David, since he's now a public servant. I mean, we go at it. And they're knocking on people's doors strictly for saying like, hey, you know, I might have disagreements with the Catholic Church.

13:41I'm a Catholic. Well, a lot of it's about immigration, right? I mean, so I've seen a bunch of these examples, you know, on X. I saw one clip on X where a judge was handing down a two-year sentence against somebody. I don't know if this rings a bell, but supposedly for speech that I think was criticizing the UK's open immigration policies. That's where I sense a lot of the prosecutions are, right? Right. And this is another place where, you know, free speech and freedom of expression are American values and interests in and of themselves. But another priority for the administration is common sense on mass migration.

14:17And a lot of the speech that offends those in power has to do with migration policy. So there was a 31-month sentence handed down to a suburban mother named Lucy Connolly in the UK, because after a man called Axel Rudabanka stabbed, I think it was a seven-year-old girl, an eight-year-old girl, and a nine-year-old girl at a birthday party, there was ensuing unrest, and she tweeted something anti-migration, and it was pretty inflammatory, but it would have been unambiguously legal in the United States. She said, if this is what migration is going to do to our country, and I'm paraphrasing slightly, but I remember it pretty well, if this is what migration means, then burn down the migrant hotels for all I care.

14:59This was a bereaved mother who'd lost a child. She saw three little girls murdered for no reason. And she reacted, and then she felt bad, and she deleted the tweet. That was a 31-month sentence. 31-month. 31-month sentence in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, you have actual pedophiles, actual child sex offenders who get minimal prison or none in the United Kingdom. And that's led to this epithet that you hear among UK activists, this quote-unquote two-tier policing, this activist cause that they've assembled around because they sense that if you oppose mass migration, if you make that kind of critique, you are subject to a different justice system than the kind of person who merely agitates for Sharia law in Britain or merely downloads child pornography in Britain.

15:46Yeah. So, okay, so... I emphasized that. Yeah, so, I mean, so I think... That was the gong of righteousness. Yes. We appreciate it. And then just to add one more dimension to this. So U.S. companies have been getting fined like crazy, right, in the U.K. and then the EU. And I think it's related to this issue. But can you just describe that? Yeah. Because that's where this crosses over into, you know, an ally doing something that we think is mad into directly hurting American interests, I guess, right? Right. So I don't believe there have been any big fines under the UK Online Safety Act yet, but its provisions take effect over time, and some of those provisions are just coming online now, including the ones relating to AI.

16:39And we have active litigation in American courts right now. One of the leading lawsuits involves the website 4chan, which people who are very online in America may be familiar with. 4chan is kind of a no-holds-barred, primordial soup for memes and the like. The cat memes come out of there. A lot of activism, Occupy Wall Street came out of 4chan. But 4chan has essentially no censorship rules. It bans child pornography. That's pretty much it. And so the UK has decided that 4chan is not allowed to exist unless it pays a bunch of money to the United Kingdom for not policing its speech in accord with UK laws, the numerous UK speech statutes that led to prison sentences like the one I just discussed.

17:19But there was a large fine handed down during my recent European tour against X, and I believe it was 140 million euros, but that might be dollars. Are they targeting Elon because they disagree with his influence in the UK? Look, I can't speak for the UK regulators, but I can make inferences. Yeah, what's your inference? X has a particular political valence. We saw Joe Biden after Elon acquired Twitter saying, you know, we've got to find ways to go after him. And I think that sentiment might be shared. But as an undersecretary of state, I'm not an advocate for one American company or even one American viewpoint on the free speech issue.

17:57If any American company were fined, let's say,$140 million even by a foreign power for upholding the American First Amendment, if General Motors were treated that way. You know, the U.S. government would have something to say about it. I also think that X is not the first company to be fined under EU digital regulations. So there's an infographic that circulated recently comparing, you know, revenues raised within the EU through other metrics and then revenues raised just by fining American tech companies. And there's a suspicion that this is really kind of a de facto tax, and pretexts are contrived for fining large American tech companies in order to raise revenue.

18:39Yeah, so that was the thing I think I was referring to, is that, and I think actually the president may have truthed that out, that I think maybe this is more the EU, but the DSA has become almost like a digital speed trap to try and fine American companies. And it does massively disproportionately affect them to the point where you could argue that it's effectively like a tariff on American tech companies operating in Europe, and if that's the case, well, I mean, I guess Europe is allowed to have tariffs, but then that's going to change the tariffs that we set. So it's all part of a larger trade negotiation.

19:16Right, exactly. I've referred to the DSA before as a censorship tariff because the cost of maintaining the censorship apparatus under the DSA is intentionally levied on specific companies, mostly American ones, that are subject to higher and more intricate regulatory standards than other companies are. And EU regulators say, well, that's not because they're American, that's because they're large. But the fact that they're American and not European surely makes them easier as a political proposition to tax. And so a lot of Americans see this as a tax. Really bizarre, David. We're living in a time where we're seeing freedom of speech expression go down in Europe and go up in the Middle East.

19:54You know, they just had the Riyadh Comedy Festival. There were some rules. Hey, you can't criticize the kingdom. Let's leave religion off the table. But you can go after your own. but we might have some sensitivities there. And then there's everything in between. South Korea does require you have a social security number essentially to post online. But David, I'm wondering what you think about this overall trend in the world of what we're seeing with censorship. I mean, it's not a good trend. I think that the purpose of censorship, like I mentioned before, is always to protect the people in power.

20:36And specifically, it insulates them from criticism. But it'd be a lot better for them to hear that criticism and adjust their policies than it would be to try and switch off the feedback altogether. And it's very clear, I think, in Europe and the UK that these policies of open migration, mass migration, are very unpopular. Why not listen to the people and adjust their policies instead of trying to silence them? Say what you will about President Trump, and people have varying opinions, but South Park has been deranged this season. I mean, they have gone full bore in attacking him, like, to a level that I wouldn't feel comfortable explaining the details of it.

21:19Not in a family podcast. Not in a family podcast. But even President Trump has a fixed skin on these things. We did have one weird thing that occurred. I think it was before your time, the Jimmy Kimmel, Charlie Kerr-Kerr-Fluffle. But even that, it seemed, David, President Trump and the administration and Brendan Carr, friend of the pod, who's been on a couple times, kind of rethought that one, yeah? Well, Jimmy Kimmel was back in the air within, was it like two or three nights? So, yeah, I mean, there's no real censorship there. In that case, it was the network affiliates who were upset because Jimmy Kimmel said something untrue and malicious and outrageous.

22:00So in any event, the system kind of worked itself out. There was no government censorship there. Brendan probably shouldn't have said what he said, in my estimation. Anyway, in any event, there was no government censorship. That's the bottom line. Yeah, I think it is disturbing that countries that we see as our closest allies that share similar values that are part of the same Western culture and history are moving in this direction of more and more censorship is disturbing. And I'm glad to see that under President Trump, the Department of State is pushing back on this. I think, Sarah, the work that you're doing and Secretary Rubio is extremely important.

22:39So I think you're making a huge difference. I think we have to use the tools that we have, whether they're tools on trade or the denial of visas, or expressing condemnation to push back on this as we will, as we can. Let's talk about some of the new issues. AI, it was pretty obvious, but 18 months ago, when you saw a deepfake. It just didn't pass the uncanny valley. Grok images, Nano Banana from our friends at Google, I mean, these things now, If you're flipping by very quickly, you could make a mistake. This also, in terms of censorship, we have significant protections in the United States for, say, cartoonists, as do the French, and they're mocking public figures.

23:33How is it different when you're mocking public figures, presidents, prime ministers, cabinet members, but the public can't tell? Because this is new. Right. I think this is a really interesting question, and it's our privilege to be at this new technological frontier where these new questions arise. I'm glad you mentioned cartoonists. So after Charlie Kirk was murdered and I knew him, I represented him on some First Amendment issues in the United States, I saw Americans walking around in an old T-shirt from 10 years ago, and that T-shirt said, Just Sweet Charlie, because that was a T-shirt we bought when free speech in France was under threat, and French people stood up for it, The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were bombed, they were murdered, for saying things that offended religious zealots.

24:20And I think, you know, it's a different kind of religious zealotry to not want to allow any dissent online. And thinking back on that episode and how European consensus on free speech might have shifted since then is really sobering, but I think America, we take pride in being the kind of civilization where Charlie Kirk and Charlie Hebdo can both speak. I think making fun of public officials, you know, pointing out when the emperor has no clothes is one of the most essential things you can do in a democracy. If you believe in self-governance, you have to believe in that. And what's interesting about a deepfake is that the point of parody is that you can tell that it's parody.

24:57But if you're depicting a public official falsely in a way that people can't tell as a satirical or non-authentic depiction, then the parody tension really isn't there. And what I would say, though, is whenever we reach a new technological frontier, there is a temptation to just enact a flurry of new regulations. And if we look back over history at other frontiers that have caused similar instability, like the invention of the printing press, people thought that was the end of the world. The invention of the telegraph, there were worries about disinformation and attention span. The invention of the film strip, people thought the train was coming at them through the screen, the impulse to restrain that deal to regulate and to allow people to adapt and to give freedom the benefit of the doubt, that impulse tends to be vindicated over time.

25:46When it comes to deep fakes, I think we have in America and in Europe strong legal remedies against defamation. So if someone creates an image of a public figure that is false and people are believing that image and a reasonable viewer would believe that that person engaged in that action, you can already sue for defamation. And that doesn't mean that... And we have child protection and underage laws. Those are very strong. Yes. And fraud. The thing is, just because you don't have AI-specific laws doesn't mean that you can do whatever you want with AI. You could still use AI as a tool to then break the law and be prosecuted.

26:21I mean, if you engage in cyber hacking, for example, and you use AI to do it, you're guilty of a cyber crime. Yeah. So there's a lot of things like that where there are plenty of existing laws that apply to AI, and we should just think about using all of those before you start then creating a bunch of AI-specific ones. Yeah, if those didn't cover it, then there would be, hey, maybe we need to have a thoughtful discussion because, you know, I'm trying to think of an edge case here, but for cybersecurity, it's even hard to do. Like, using voice clones, it's just fraud, you know. Yeah. Right. Wire fraud, you know.

26:59And it might be that you use the existing fraud statute, but there are little regulatory tweaks you can make the fraud easier to detect. So one approach, which I don't think is always correct, but it exemplifies one direction of thinking, is maybe there's watermarking or something on some AI images. That would mitigate tort liability for some of the providers. or when we invented capital markets on a mass scale, right? We had our old laws against fraud, but we kind of made some more fine-grained securities regulations. Like now you have to file a certain disclosure annually with your earnings and whatnot.