Undersecretary Sarah Rogers on free speech, Europe’s tech crackdown, and the internet she misses

24:54It would be against Meta's commercial interest. I think that the people who want to deflect this and just say you're a big tech shill, it's because they're uncomfortable. And you can see this too when they try to be pedantic about the term censorship. Like, well, this wasn't state censorship. A lot of the Digital Services Act and a lot of what these companies don't like about it actually isn't so much about speech, right? It's about reporting. It's about transparency. And you're opposed to that too, I think, right? Well, so there are different facets that we oppose at different levels of intensity, but I think even a content neutral, and this was what my Supreme Court case was about, even a content neutral regulation, if it's enforced in a viewpoint disparate kind of selective way, can be censorious.

25:34So one of the regulations that led to the X-fine was they're supposed to allow designated researchers, researchers that basically work for leftist NGOs, to scrape user data from Twitter in a way that the ordinary user wouldn't be allowed to so they can do transparency. But this guy, Travis Brown, who doxxed lives of TikTok, who basically built a career doxxing exclusively people who supported President Trump and has this kind of nasty Antifa blue sky account. Like, this is one of the people that the German government is funding to do this. This sounds like viewpoint discrimination, Sarah. Shouldn't anybody be allowed to do this, including leftists?

26:11Well, the problem is if the government's picking leftists to do it, then it is. an asymmetric viewpoint skewed regulation that basically says you have to give communists access to all your user data. If that's the upshot of the regulation, then I mean, this would, most of the DSA would be struck down under the First Amendment. Just it would. And a lot of Europeans, I think, see the First Amendment roughly the way they see the Second Amendment, which is this is a crazy commitment the Americans have. And we're not wild west frontiersmen and we choose to be more genteel in our vein and we're not going to adhere to it.

26:44And the problem is you have this cross-border regulatory context where we're all drinking out of water bottles with attached caps. Well, we have a lot more that we want to get to with Sarah, but we have to take a short break. So we'll be right back after this.

27:07In this week's branded segment from Think with Google, I spoke with Google's VP of Marketing, Josh Spanier, about what he saw at CES. So Josh, you were at CES at the beginning of this year. Why does that event matter for CMOs? So CES gives us a real view into how people are going to be living their lives and spending their money in two, five, even 10 years time. I know from the outside, it looks like a giant toy show. There's smart rings and foldable laundry robots and flying cars. But I was chatting with Shelley Palmer, who I interviewed for my new podcast. He's an AI visionary and tech leader.

27:46And he swears by, and I agree with him, that the ability to see patterns amongst all the gadgets is actually really, really compelling for near term and into the future. So what did you learn from that conversation? Well, the gadgets aren't really the thing. stuff gets announced, some of it launches, some of it doesn't launch. What you're really looking for are business model changes, the new paradigms that are emerging. So two that I saw and we spoke about, one is around agentic commerce. Google announced during CES and just after CES, a whole bunch of partnerships with Shopify, with Walmart, with Target, around agentic commerce.

28:25Super interesting building the new protocols for machines doing the shopping for you where appropriate. And then separately, I also saw a lot of expansion of what you might call intelligent ecosystems. These are technologies from different companies coming together, meshing together to enable you to do more interesting and engaging things. And again, with Google and Gemini leading the way. They're really fascinating forerunners of where we're all going to be in the near and medium term. And where can people listen to the whole thing? You can listen to my conversation with Shelley Palmer in my new podcast, Frontier CMO, on YouTube or wherever you download podcasts, or you can sign up for my weekly newsletter over on LinkedIn.

29:07Great. Thanks, Josh.

29:19Sarah, a few minutes ago, you mentioned X. It seems like the UK's Deputy Prime Minister, David Lammy, has been trying to put a little bit of distance between you and Vice President J.D. Vance, obviously both members of the administration. I want to read you a quote from something he said. This was, I believe, earlier this week. He was speaking about Grok and these sexualized images, and Ofcom has basically been threatening X, saying that these sexualized images that Grok is generating are really bad and, you know, threatening X with consequences here. But I'm going to read you a quote from David Lammy here.

29:48He said, of Vance, he said, he agreed with me that it was entirely unacceptable. I think he recognized the very seriousness with which images of women and children could be manipulated in this way. And he recognized how despicable, unacceptable that is. And I found him sympathetic to that position. You have seemingly taken a slightly opposite position here saying that all options are on the table if the UK bans X over this stuff. What's the administration's position here? So look, I'm not going to speak for Vice President advance, but I'm happy to revisit my comments and how they should be construed.

30:22We're talking about two different things. I think, and this is David Lammy saying what the vice president said in some conversation none of us were party to, so like, let's get it from the horse's mouth. But I think what Lammy is saying is that Vance said that the non-consensual explicit images of children and perhaps of women were totally unacceptable. That's a different question from whether you ban X. You know, when he says all options are on the table to ban X, that can be interpreted pretty broadly. And so I think a commensurate all options are on the table for me is fair game. But there's certainly ways to regulate this, like the First Lady's proposed regulating it.

30:58There's existing torts that regulate it without doing a China-style, Russia-style, Iran-style ban of an entire social media platform, which I think the UK may be backing away from. I think now they're saying, we just want to criminalize non-consensual deepfake revenge porn type stuff, which I think is closer to a sane approach. If we're speaking about images of children, then I wouldn't disagree with Vice President Vance or with anyone else who says that creating, you know, non-consensual images of children in a way that could be interpreted as sexually explicit is pretty unacceptable, disgusting behavior.

31:33I think with adults, it's a bit more complicated because you have this whole tradition of political cartooning, And a lot of the stuff that Grok is creating is distasteful, but wouldn't necessarily be violative of the First Amendment. I think that already, like, I could be wrong on my number of hours, but I think it was within like 12 hours Elon had banned everyone who made these images of children. This is not whether there should be sexually explicit images of children is not a conflict between the United States and the EU. But there are many differences of opinion, rightly so, on how you enforce that obligation and whose responsibility it is.

32:11Speaking of Elon, because you've mentioned him a few times, I'm curious, because so much of your job revolves around, in some cases, advocating for free speech interests that may have you aligned with the platforms. I mean, how often are you talking to Mark Zuckerberg or to Elon? Not often. I mean, there are people in my office, like, I oversee thousands of people and there are engagements with all kinds of companies with whom we have touch points. We are not, I think European bureaucrats want to style and depict us as like lawyers for X or Net or whatever, and we're not. But we do, you know, it's our job just as if there were some international oil regulation or some international, you know, space regulation that affected our businesses.

32:55It would be part of our job in the American government to hear what those businesses have to say. But we also hear from other groups, too, like I'll meet with free speech activist groups and the like. So I'm not I don't have a morning call with Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk where they tell me what my talking points are. I, you know, my office leases with those companies occasionally. So turning back to the U.S., obviously, one of the biggest stories last year was over ABC's suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, which came after FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, you know, basically said we can do this the easy way or the hard way, following some comments that Kimmel made that some people found to be distasteful.

33:33I have two questions here. One, isn't that essentially, you know, threatening free speech and unaligned with some of the policies that you're advocating for? And does an incident like that hurt, you know, the U.S. free speech policies that you're advocating for when you go to other places? Like, for example, when you're advocating for free speech abroad, are people bringing up comments such as these and incidents such as these? You know, interestingly, that one has not come up and it happened before I was in office. So I wasn't in the position of addressing it in real time. We have this very narrow and kind of old broadcast public interest doctrine that hasn't been before the Supreme Court in a while.

34:09I think also with the Jimmy Kimmel incident, there's this whole underlying mechanic of this Tegna merger. I don't know if you guys have covered that. I know you're kind of a media insider show. But basically, all of these network affiliates like Sinclair, like Nexstar had, and had under Biden, by the way, when they were trying to complete a similar merger that kept getting blocked by the FCC, had this very strong incentive to impress the regulator. And I think that if Brendan Carr really wanted to censor Jimmy Kimmel, truthfully, he could have just politely, secretly, or through an intermediary, called up the head of Nextar and said, you know, I really would hate to see a Tegna merger with a broadcaster that would allow this wealth online.

34:49And that would be closer to the Murphy conduct, frankly. It would be closer also to the kind of conduct I was litigating against in Bulo. Instead, you see a more brash public expression that, you know, was very controversial. Ted Cruz made comments about it and others. Obviously, when you're advocating abroad, people will look for things to invoke to accuse you of hypocrisy. But I think what I would say to all those accusations of hypocrisy is that I would never contend that the United States never contains or experiences centurion's impulses or temptations. Like we had the Red Scare, we had Wokeness, you know, both very bad episodes.

35:29But the reason you should have a bulwark like the First Amendment is to hold those instincts at bay. That's the whole point, right? That's why I'm grateful that we have the laws that we do. And that's why vague kind of vague regulatory cudgels in the hands of regulators who want to suppress particular viewpoints, that's why I'm wary of them in Europe, too. To stay on the hypocrisy topic for a minute here, I mean, the call is kind of coming from inside the building on some of this. The State Department recently bragged about all the visas that it had pulled, record numbers of visas, some for various crimes, but some visas were pulled for people who basically wrote pro-Palestinian stuff.

36:06And I realize this is all being litigated. There are questions about, you know, the rights of citizens versus non-citizens, the rights of the U.S. to pull visas arbitrarily. But just, I mean, in your gut, doesn't that basically conflict with the kind of values you're trying to advocate? You know, it's very funny because when Yol Roth was like curating the public square so that she weren't allowed to say anything opposing trans ideology. This was a former Twitter executive just to. Yes, we would hear that it's wrong to invoke the spirit of free speech and you have to adhere Dr. Finale to the First Amendment and any other complaints are just nonsense.

36:39But here, if you would hear Dr. Finale to the First Amendment, the Supreme Court since 1971 and I think even earlier has made clear that even to the extent that foreign nationals on American soil have some First Amendment rights, like we couldn't, we could not, as Germany did, we could not throw a woman in jail for calling a rapist a pig, even if she were a foreign national. because she has some of the same First Amendment rights as Americans, the privilege of coming here on a visa is not a right under the First Amendment or any other. And the Secretary of State has enormous discretion there. So if we had a deposed dictator come here and he started, you know, like voicing support for his former regime, we could kick him out in the interest of U.S.

37:17foreign policy. I want to say that I really can't speak granularly on anything that's pending in court because my comments would be construed as those of one of the litigants, and I have to be professional and constrained about that. So I just can't do it. But there is this longstanding, like President Trump did not invent this barrier in First Amendment jurisprudence between what you can say under the First Amendment and what the State Department can consider when it revokes a visa. This is a very longstanding thing. And I think this is probably eternally true, but certainly true now, that a lot of current champions of free speech, and I think you have not particularly talked this way, like only seem to be very interested in protecting the speech they agree with and are often kind of leery of disagreeing with people whose speech they defend.

38:02And I think like when I look at X right now, like obviously the most – just as a platform and if I'm maybe a European regulator thinking about how to deal with this platform, the owner of the platform, Elon Musk, has set it up so that his tweet – he's – both because I'm sure he's a very interesting poster but also because he's rigged the system. Like his tweets are the most seen thing. The number one thing you're going to see on Twitter is Elon Musk's tweets. And the other day, I guess he reposted and endorsed the sentiment, if white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered. Remember, non-whites openly hate white men, while white men hold a collective majority, which included white solidarity is the only way to survive.

38:38I mean, wouldn't you agree that's just an unbelievably un-American, sort of anti-American sentiment? That should obviously be permitted to be posted. But does it concern you that this platform you're defending is, like, very committed to expressing these, you know, very anti-American views? I mean, it doesn't concern me that the country I'm defending with, the Nazis marched through Skokie. And I think, you know, Elon Musk— Do you think this is like that, though, that this is basically Nazi speech? I actually wouldn't. I mean, because that speech isn't calling for the genocide of Jews or anyone else.

39:07And if you were to look back at the writings of some of the founding fathers and some similar stuff from that vintage, and even the prevailing viewpoints of the same soldiers who stormed Normandy, I think you would find some of this sentiment in American history, which is actually an observation the left makes ad nauseum. But this is just very overt racism and a very like white solidarity is the only way to survive. That's not like some coded, should we be allowed to say, I mean, it just is what it is, right? You can kind of see why European regulators are concerned about a platform whose primary, the kind of the primary kind of speech they broadcast is that.

39:40People get really mad when I say this, but I just think it's incredibly, it's impossible to dispute it. there is less viewpoint-based censorship on Twitter under Elon Musk than there was under basically since 2014. Oh, for sure. And I totally agree. Like, obviously, we're not talking about censorship. We're actually talking about expression, right? Right. So if you wanted to post like the monoculture that has retreated to blue sky and become the founding population there, like if they wanted to come back to Twitter and post what they were posting as the prevailing form of speech on Twitter, which is things like, like the new tenant commissioner saying that our goal should be to impoverish the white middle class, or the whiteness is a virus and we should exterminate it, or what Charles Blow wrote in the New York Times, which is that white women use their bodies as instruments of terror, and there are too many noose to necks and charred bodies for white women to deny what they're doing, which is basically like inter-homeway radio rhetoric.

40:29I think, do we defend the legality of that kind of speech? Yes. I mean, now we know who Charles Blow is because he wrote that headline or whoever some editor did, right? And I don't know the context of that tweet, but Elon Musk comes from South Africa where there are white people sort of huddled in little settlements who probably think that solidarity is the way to survive. So... No, it seems like a very truly South African sentiment, yeah. It just seems like a funny thing for an American diplomat to be sort of carrying water for. Well, I think that's... I get that you want to be incendiary because you want your podcast to get engagement, and I don't say that.

41:04I don't say that in an accusatory way. Yeah, I was going to say. Come on. No, you should. I hope we get engagement. I appreciate that sentiment, Sarah. I'm not curing water for that specific sentiment. I think, though, that none of what you've quoted comes close to imminent incitement to lawless action. None of it comes close to true threat. And if the same regulators are allowing very similar speech by woke activists or by Islamists, then no, I don't think it is particularly deserving of censorship. I totally agree with you that it shouldn't be censored. I just think that it's possible that European regulators are also—I just wonder how they think about kind of the character of the expression on the platform.

41:39And not—I agree with you. It shouldn't be censored. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of them think adversely about it. But that's the point of having these diplomatic conversations. Not so that I can carry water for one specific tweet, but for the right of everyone on that platform and other platforms to tweet and say what they think is true. So that feels like a pretty good place for us to ask the last question because it's about that specific topic, which is— Sarah, do you think that social media is good now? Is this kind of the information ecosystem that you kind of want to see? Obviously, you've talked about the 2010s and kind of, you know, wokeness and this perceived and also, you know, actual kind of censoriousness by some of the platforms, most of which have been rolled back over the last few years.

42:22Are you pretty satisfied with what the social media landscape looks like these days? I wouldn't say that I'm complacent, but I'm hopeful. I think that we the structure of communication has changed and when you go through those kinds of shutters and shocks when you invent a new way of communicating or when communication is suddenly social mobile and local or when communication is suddenly AI abetted then the way that people think and the way they relate to each other changes that's why podcasts like yours are interesting because I think you think through how this affects the way people work how this affects the way people reason.

42:57And there's no moment in history when I would have surveyed the information landscape and thought, well, now this is perfect and we shouldn't try to innovate our way forward or improve everything. I think that it's very interesting the transition we've seen from long-form and even short-form text to very long-form streaming and very short-form video. That could have attentional consequences, as many pundits have posited. And I look forward to seeing society is kind of reasoned through that. No doubt there are improvements that could be made. I just don't think that content-based or viewpoint-based censorship at the behest of the government is one of those improvements.

43:36Sarah, actually, that brings up an interesting point, and I know that I was just trying to wrap this up, but it raised an interesting question for me, which is, how are you thinking about how your job extends to the AI platforms and, you know, you know, in some cases like meta. And I'm curious how you and your office are approaching AI and what you're looking at overseas when it comes to AI and kind of executing the free speech, you know, kind of policies that you're hoping to see. So as you can glean from the president's AI action plan, this administration is very forward leaning on AI innovation.

44:15I think we want more of it, not less. We are suspicious of safetyist regulatory models. And I think where AI intersects with free speech, there are a lot of really interesting legal and political questions that arise, like, should you treat the AI as an agent of the company that coded it, and so its speech is attributable to that entity? Should the AI's speech be attributable to the person that evoked it using a prompt? Those are interesting and nuanced and in different contexts, suggest different answers. I think that we don't want to, you know, when the first LLM models were coming out and everyone was playing with them, you saw a lot of these viral screenshots of, like, look how woke and stupid Gemini is.

44:53Like, get answers to this hypothetical in a really rigid way. There's a guy in Substack who asks all the LLMs to conduct actuarial calculations where they put a dollar value on a human life, and then he adjusts the calculation by race. So he thinks that ChatGPT values white men's lives at negative 100, the magnitude that it values a black woman's life or something. And there are all these, and I think some of those incongruities in AI aren't even intended by the coders. They just arise through processes we don't totally understand. What I would say is that lobotomizing and fettering models to the point where they never generate any kind of edgy or unacceptable response makes them less creative and less useful.

45:35I think that's been discovered through the iterative process of AI development and that regulatory approaches which flag or discern AI from authentic human content are better than regulatory approaches which just decree that the AI is never allowed to emit a discriminatory idea or something. Because you see when people try to code these models in this really corseted, cosseted way that they become less useful. And China, which is our main competitor in what you might construct as the AI race, they're going to impose some constraints on their LLMs, but probably not as many as a centurionist, safetyist polity would oppose if every single person got their way.

46:17And at the end of the day, I think we would rather that free self-governing societies lead the world in AI innovation and decide what the AI is allowed and inclined to think and say than have China make those decisions for us. Well, Sarah, we really appreciate you taking the time. This was super interesting. And also, of course, you know, fielding all of these questions. Sometimes we kind of let people skate a little bit and it's kind of a get to know you thing, but you jumped right in here with us and took some tough questions. So we really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Happy to do it. Thank you, Sarah.

46:47This was fun.

46:55We spent 2025 talking to people who channeled the excitement and belief in AI in media and marketing. A lot of that conversation in 2026 will be about the hard work of building with those tools. Think with Google is here to bridge the gap between inspiration and implementation. This isn't fluff. It's a rigorous look at the mechanics of growth to help CMOs solve the hard problems like navigating complex consumer journeys and proving value through better measurement. Make this the year you turn potential into performance. Visit thinkwithgoogle.com.

47:32So Ben, I thought that was a really interesting conversation. I went into it, you know, understanding that Sarah is very interesting and important in the news and that she has been, I think, bugging the hell out of some European diplomats. But I found that she was obviously very charismatic and was kind of ready to go back and forth with us a little bit. She was saying that we just needed to get our viral clips or whatever, which, you know, maybe, Josh, if there's any good viral stuff that you can pull out of that, that would be great. But, Ben, the European diplomats that you talked to beforehand are going to obviously listen to this episode.

48:07Do you think that they'll be satisfied with her answers? I mean, basically, no. You know, I think the view in Europe right now is these unhinged Americans are, you know, trying to open the floodgates to far-right speech. And that the Trump administration, that Trump – I mean, this is the European view. You really don't believe anything. Don't believe anything they say. This is just like invading – basically the moral equivalent of invading Venezuela for the oil. You know, and I think the reality and I think the thing you saw with Undersecretary Rogers was this – there's a lot of different impulses inside this administration.

48:38Stephen Miller recently talked about like the rule, you know, international law is that we're strong and we do whatever we want. And then there are different kind of more principled views. And I do think she represents like a very pure – and you've heard her kind of like story about it – kind of speech ideology about speech on the internet that in some ways, you know, is a throwback to the kind of more utopian days of the internet. But that is – I think, you know, when you hear her talk about it, I think is not – is more ideological, maybe a little more radical and more principled than I think the people who are dealing with her wing of the Trump administration totally realize.

49:17Because I think you sort of have to remember, like, these are people who came of political age on Twitter, most of all, in the years like 2010 to 2020. And so, like, for them, the notion that you could get your account banned for being too right wing, that is a huge deal. That is, for some people in the Trump administration, I think that is, you know, one of the top three issues in the world, free speech on the internet. And I think for the Europeans, it's like, what are you talking about? This is just some other regulatory thing. You're carrying water as usual. for these big American companies.

49:48I mean, obviously that's also true. And, you know, Meta and these guys are thrilled about it and they're giving all sorts of money to Trump administration accounts. But there is also a real ideological thread here about speech on the internet from people who feel like they are their political allies, you know, whether it was around COVID or other issues, got pushed off these platforms. And it's just, it's like, it's not fake. It is so intensely held. Right, but it's only intensely held by some people. And obviously there's some other people in the administration who feel differently or who execute in a different way.

50:18Oh, totally. And I'm not sure Trump is like a particularly like, I'm not sure he has deep principles on the question. Are you? Not at all. Not at all. Like, you know, he obviously wants to say what he, you know, he wants to be able to say what he wants to say, obviously. And wants to make other people say the same thing. Yes, that's basically. Yes, exactly. He's interested in other people speaking the same thing as him, which, you know, I get, I am as well. But, you know, I obviously thought that the most interesting part was her deflection on Brendan Carr and saying, well, it wasn't here when all of that stuff was happening, which I thought was really interesting.

50:50And she basically said, like, different people in the administration feel different things about, you know, various aspects of that. Yeah, I think she represents the sort of principled speech wing of the administration. I suspect there are people in the administration who really disagree with her. I think on the Palestinian speech stuff, too. I see why she's not leading with it, but I was actually surprised how directly she said the British ought to be letting people protest in favor of a banned Palestinian. And I mean she really did seem to say – well, she kind of defended Brendan Carr and said, well – I mean the point she was basically making was like he didn't actually use his regulatory authority to kind of go after Jimmy Kimmel and he could have if he wanted to and actually put some real pressure.

51:25She still said that she felt like people had different viewpoints and opinions on it. She did say that she hadn't heard about that example from other European diplomats. So if there are some diplomats who are looking for something, that does feel like a point where they could maybe squeeze her on it a little bit because it seems like she probably thinks that is a bit censorious. But Ben, was there anything else that you thought was particularly interesting? Did you think that there is a straight line from Gawker, commenter, to undersecretary of the State Department? Should I be referring to her as the undersecretary?

51:57I referred to her as Sarah. Was that rude? I've known her for a little while, and she didn't seem to object to being called Sarah. But it occurred to me, too, that we ought to be calling her Undersecretary Rogers. Well, if you can apologize on my behalf and say that I didn't know the proper etiquette. My impression is that she's not somebody who's big on taking offense at minor slights. That's true. That's true. Well, that is it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Mixed Signals from us here at Semaphore. Our show is produced by Manny Fidel and Josh Billinson, with special thanks to Anna Pizzino, Jules Zern, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Tori Kaur, Garrett Wiley, and Daniel Haift.

52:39Our engineer is Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by the great Steve Bone. Our public editor is Elon Musk. Elon, we'd love to have you on the show. And if you're enjoying this podcast, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or subscribe on YouTube. And if you want more, you can always sign up for Semaphore's media newsletter, which for now is out every Sunday night.