Imran Ahmed Researches Online Hate. Trump Wants to Deport Him

20:30The actual fine by the European Commission was because ETS breached its rules on data access. And I think that that's the fundamental, most important thing. We need transparency of these platforms. We actually have a right as a public to know how we're being misled, how they are distorting the information that we receive.

20:50Kara Swisher:Like what's in the food. Exactly. It's like a label, right? Because we're not eating nutritious food anymore. We're eating ultra-processed food. Slopped. Yeah, right. And I think just a few days ago, the Secretary for Health and Human Services said, we want to reduce the amount of ultra-processed food. I agree. I also agree we should try to reduce the amount of ultra-processed information we're receiving. That's a very good point. Now, X broke those rules, and they were fined$140 million US dollars, 120 million euros. And apparently, that censorship, breaching rules and transparency, that is now censorship, which is odd.

21:25Kara Swisher:Well, everything's censored at Elon Musk. Yeah. He owns X, as you said. He celebrated the news of the visa sanctions. The two of you, as you know, had a pass. In 2023, Musk sued your organization over a report documenting a spike in hate speech on X after he took over. A federal judge dismissed it. Do you see this? He's a very litigious person. He'll do it, even if he doesn't have a good case, but he'll continue to do it and harass people. Do you see this as the federal government retaliating against you on behalf of Musk? And why now, rather than when he was sort of at his strength? Although he's back, I guess.

21:59I mean, why now? It's been going on for years, is the truth, Cara. So the story of his lawsuit was extraordinary. It started off with him calling me a rat and calling my organization evil online. We did the study that was on the New York Times that showed that when he took over, there was a tripling in the global usage of the N-word on his platform. There was a massive spike in anti-women, anti-LGBTQ +, anti-Hispanic, anti-Semitic hate on his platform. And that led to him losing a lot of advertisers. His trust and safety council resigned because of the content of our research. And he sued us. And initially, he just was like, you guys are rats.

22:33You guys are evil.

22:34Kara Swisher:You're to blame for my fall off in business, not himself. Yeah. So, I mean, and he kept asking, like, who's funding you? Who's behind you? Because he's a conspiracy theorist. And so he's asking who's behind you. And I took a picture of his screenshot of his tweet. And I said, I'll tell you who funds us, the public, donate here. And I asked a few friends to retweet me. And, you know, a few celebrities retweeted. And it got a lot of views. We actually brought in a lot of money off the back of it. And that really annoyed him. And so the next day, he called up the chair of my board and said, I want to speak to you about Imran.

23:08And the chair of my board said, nope, I'm not his dad. You speak to him. And then the next day, we got a letter from Alex Spiro, his lawyer, saying, we want to...

23:20Kara Swisher:From Quinn Emanuel, just for people who don't know. Go ahead. Yeah, we're going to sue you under the Lanham Act. So he said, you are secretly funded by Mark Zuckerberg and by Google and by foreign governments and therefore we're going to sue you. And we thought, well, we're not funded by any government or any tech company. So that's nonsense. And that's the first time I met Robbie Kaplan. And I called her up and said, I hear that you're very good at suing billionaires. And she said, I am. And I said, I've got another one for you. And she said, I'll do it. Yeah. So that was the peak over this. Why now?

23:57Kara Swisher:So he lost the case. So he lost the case. But as soon as he sued us, we immediately got subpoenas from the House Weaponization of the Federal Government Subcommittee, so Jim Jordan's committee. And he asked specifically... As night follows day. As night follows day, he asked us under, and of course they have the subpoena power, he asked us for all correspondence and contracts between us and any social media company and any branch of government. Which is a lot. And we wrote back going, here's all of it. So we did. We gave him every single bit. Right. But it's expensive for a small organization like you to do this kind of stuff.

24:32It costs us hundreds of thousands of dollars. In total, millions of dollars, this whole thing. But of course, that evidence would have been very pertinent to Musk's initial claims and belief that we're secretly funded by Mark Zuckerberg. But there was nothing there, so he didn't really go any further with it. Then we were targeted by Stephen Miller, who said that we're in breach of the Foreign Agents Registration Act through his America First legal nonprofit. and referred us to DOJ, which is not true as well. We're not in breach of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Then we had the FTC start investigating us for being part of a criminal, this is in the last year, being part of a criminal enterprise in which we sit.

25:12Essentially, we control Disney is the argument from the FTC.

25:15Kara Swisher:Yeah, that's well known. And then we had the State Department take this action. So you say, like, this is an odd time for it to happen. The truth is it's never stopped happening for three years now. They kept trying. They were probably in a room going, now we'll do this. Like, I can see that. And it's death by a million cuts, right? If you are an organization with revenues of a few million dollars a year, I have 36 staff, data scientists, people who are studying things, advocates, communicators. I mean, all of this means I can't hire people. We can't do things. And so we've had to endure a lot.

25:45The truth is, though, that you will know that when you get attention, a lot of people hear our message and go, actually, I quite like the cut of that kid's jib. And so when Elon sued us, our revenues were about one and a half million globally. Last year, they're about seven million globally. And that's all because that's all the Elon effect. That's the Musk bump.

26:03Kara Swisher:Thank you, Elon. But why now did they do this? Because they've got a lot of other shitty stuff on their plate, right? Like, was there a resurgence of his power? He didn't do it in the middle of Doge, right? He didn't, like, when he had more power than ever. I mean, I'm not going to speculate as to, you know, I don't know what his current relationship is with anyone in Washington. I do know that they are escalating and escalating and escalating because, of course, they're feeling the cage coming around them, Cara. Like, whether it is the UK passing the Online Safety Act, the European Union, the Digital Services Act, Canada, Mark Carney came to power saying he was going to pass an Online Harms Act.

26:38Kara Swisher:Australia. Australia, but also domestically. Florida has passed bans. You know, Texas has got stuff in the mix. California. You've got AI legislation all over the country. Because actually, there is a fever pitch. And change organizations like mine, organizations trying to change a system, especially one that's relatively new. This is decades-long work. NADA, it wasn't immediate. It takes years to build up awareness. Mothers against drunk driving, et cetera, and cigarette. Exactly. So on the AI front, right now, speaking of the cresting of the situation, I have been focused a lot on kids in chatbots, for example, like since 2023.

27:15Kara Swisher:And I kept saying, this is going to be a problem. One of the big stories right now is how people have been using the chatbot Grok from Musk's AI company, XAI, to generate sexual images of women and minors. Musk said anyone making illegal content will suffer the same consequences if they upload illegal content. But as it's recording, X does not seem to have done anything with these posts. There's now one of the woman who was killed in Minnesota in a bikini, apparently. We've seen governments pass laws to criminalize deep fakes and non-consensual images like this. in the U.S. we have the Take It Down Act, right?

27:49Kara Swisher:This is, and which was a very Republican act. What is the effect of what's happening right now? Because these CSAM images are disturbing and most companies react, but so far Musk has not removed them as people are following it. And neither of the platforms that are in the center of the app universe, Apple or Google have moved in any way. And though Musk is at the center of it, they're certainly complicit in that. I just think it shows how weak we've been at passing legislation to do common sense things like, you know, not allowing AI platforms to produce CSAM. You would have thought that'd be the first thing that we'd think we want to fix.

28:27We want to make sure it doesn't happen. And of course, somehow we've got to the situation where Elon was at one point boasting about the fact that his platform will put a bikini on anyone. And our argument has always been that if you have ungoverned spaces, so I mean, in my past, I worked on foreign policy for the United Kingdom. So, you know, we know about ungoverned spaces, like spaces that are ungoverned. When I worked on countering terrorism and Islamic State, for example, places like Syria, Somalia, they become breeding grounds for Al-Qaeda, for, you know, Al-Shabaab, for ISIS. X became the breeding ground for anti-Semitism when Musk took over, and now Grok has become the breeding ground for pedophiles because essentially it's an ungoverned space where you can do whatever you want.

29:12And without rules, bad shit happens. So the question is, who's going to put the rules there?

29:17Kara Swisher:Do you see this being the crest of it? Because people have certainly, the Europeans have certainly reacted, the U.S. less quickly. The Europeans have kind of reacted. The British have moved slightly faster. The European, look, I've got an office in Brussels. We have people there. I have an office in London. We have people there who are talking to lawmakers and everyone else. All right. The U.S. is glacial. This is turtle. The problem in Brussels is no one's back until next week because they're Europeans. And so therefore, they have their six-week Christmas vacation. And the Brits have said something, but they have no powers.

29:47So actually, the prime minister came out of the United Kingdom and said, it's unacceptable. This cannot happen. And you're like, so what are you going to do about it, bro?

29:55Kara Swisher:What are you going to do about it? And there are very few powers available. What is going to happen here? Do you think this is one of these moments, along with chatbots and everything else? Yeah. Sexualized children? Because we do have this act. Well, the Take It Down Act, the FTC has the power to fine them$52 ,000 per instance. And this is Melania's act. And President Trump signed it into law. It's a good act. You know, it's weak, but it's the first substantive piece of liability reform since Foster Sester. and that was the first piece since Section 230 30 years ago in 1996. And I think that it may push some people to call for action.

30:37You may see some tightly written bills which deal specifically with this problem, but we have a more general problem as well. We just did a research report, Fate Friend, where we did it in two modes. First of all, users simulating being a 13-year-old with mental health problems, so suicidal ideation, eating disorder, and drinking drugs problems. And we wanted to see how quickly could we get it to tell us how to safely kill ourselves. Chat GPT-40, two minutes. How quickly could we get it to list what drugs we could take at home to kill ourselves? 40 minutes. How quickly could we get it to write a suicide note for us?

31:1565 minutes. And then we bombarded the back end with prompts asking, try to work out quantifying how many times in the probabilistic model. So, chat GPT doesn't always give the same answer. So, how many times does it give a bad answer? Over half the time, it was giving a dangerous answer. A few weeks later, they launched chat GPT-5. And Sam Altman came out specifically and said, because Adam Rain's case came out two weeks after our fake friends report.

31:40Kara Swisher:This is a chat. I interviewed their parents. I interviewed their parents. Yeah, and I meet too many parents who've lost their kids. I'm sure both of us are parents. It never leaves your soul. It never leaves your soul. And it chips away, and it's chipped away at mine a lot over the last seven years. I had one type of person saying, when are you going to stop interviewing these parents? I said, when you stop. Stop killing them. Stop killing their fucking kids. That's what I said. That's what I said. And so... I didn't kill them. I'm like, eh, that's a debatable situation. You created, you handed them the gun is my feeling.

32:16I was like, you can't hand the gun. You handed the gun and you said, and often you said, please shoot.

32:20Kara Swisher:Yeah. What will it take to enforce it? What do you imagine? You know, Sam Altman actually got it right a couple of years ago when he was still pretending to care about safety. And he went to Congress and he said, we need, I remember him saying, he said, we need accountability and we need, you know, legal responsibility. And that's literally the staff framework that we'd written five years earlier. And I was going - And Character A just settled with Google. Right. What do you make of that? That was Megan Garcia's son. Yeah, I mean, they all claim that they want to fix this, but the truth is that they aren't actually doing it.

32:54And now we know that in the last year, they have spent a ton of money, a ton of money on lobbying against the precise laws that they once claimed to want. Again, I don't know why this has become political. Having chatbots that don't persuade your kids to kill themselves or generate CSAM should not be a partisan issue. And somehow in America, we've managed to make it partisan.

33:18Kara Swisher:Well, look who was standing next to Trump in the inauguration. That's, I'll take that. I always show that picture whenever that. If you want to ask the question of why I'm currently being targeted by the State Department, why they want to force me to move and take my American family with me, leave the country, or to fight it, and I'm stuck in this country now, I cannot leave this country because I wouldn't be allowed to be readmitted. So if my parents get ill and die, I can't go to their funerals in the UK. And I can come back to the point, I feel I have to fight this. But the reason why they did that is that one image, that image of them standing there at the inauguration because they are desperate to protect their franchises from the inevitable and the growing, the crescendo of clamor, begging for change.

34:01Kara Swisher:Let me just finish up with your case. The federal judge blocked your removal from the US for now. The Supreme Court, though, is largely deferential to Trump with issues of immigration, although this is also a free speech case. It's a First Amendment case. That's right. But I'm saying they all make it an immigration case. How confident are you of where this goes? And what are the broader stakes then? What message will it send if the government is able to revoke your green card over your work? I think this is the core of where we are right now. I have faith in the courts. I've actually, as I said before, I've gone up against Elon and a court found that he was trying to, he said, look at this censor, blah, blah, blah, I'm going to sue him for$10 million.

34:44And the court said, no, no, you're trying to censor him. You're trying to use lawfare to silence a non-profit. And they gave us a slap ruling, a strategic litigation against public participation ruling. We got costs awarded, dismissed completely. So I have faith in the courts. but in this case they're going to position it as we have the right to throw out whoever i want and i'm going to say well no you don't you don't have the right to throw someone out we have the

35:08Kara Swisher:right to throw out trummels and immigrants that's basically i'm a legal permanent resident i abide by the law i pay my taxes i create wealth here as well through the work that we do and so what i actually want is for my this is about what they what they're pissed off about is my speech and that's why I don't want to fight this. I don't want to have a fight with the government. I have to, though, because governments acting this way are one thing. And governments do act this way. Governments are often quite naughty. But if we accept or we lose the will to fight, that's when all is lost. It's not when governments behave badly.

35:42It's when we just don't care anymore or we lose the will to fight. So that's why these cases matter. Because if we win, It doesn't matter if you're Democrat or Republican. All Americans will have strongest free speech protections from big companies who seek to silence them or the government seeking to punish them.

35:58Kara Swisher:This isn't specifically related to tech platforms, but it kind of is because it moves to it. But what we're seeing happen in Minnesota right now after the ICE officer shot and killed, and I would call it murder, given the videos, even when we have videos, it shows what happened. And most media companies are now, this is, she was veering away from him. But the Trump administration is actively lying from the get-go about it, even though video shows what's happening. This is a situation where the government itself is lying in their ability to have free speech. And then it's jumping online with all these, of course, once again, let's take apart the videotape all along.

36:39Kara Swisher:So talk about what it says about information ecosystems right now. They're not even doing the conspiracy theory thing. they've jumped right to, we're going to lie until people are too confused in some fashion. And then it gets iterated around the internet ecosystem or the digital ecosystem. And I think it's one of the things that makes high profile law enforcement cases so difficult. I mean, I've worked with people in law enforcement. I've sat on the Commission for Countering Extremism. I've worked with, you know, I've talked to and understood the perspectives of people from FBI and DHS and other agencies in the United States.

37:13We've never worked with them, but we understand where they come from. And one of the things that makes it really difficult is that instead of the investigative process, which is slow, meticulous, careful, that they're trying to understand exactly what happened and where liability may lie and criminal liability may lie, we instead get a screaming match on social media. And look, I think in a moment like what happened in Minnesota, my heart absolutely, of course, goes out to the family of a young woman, again, as a young dad. As a dad, I'm not a young dad, I'm in my 40s. As a dad, it upsets me enormously to see a six-year-old who won't have their mum come home.

37:52That's the worst thing that can happen. But you've got both sides screaming based on a single video on social media about how one side's a criminal, abolish this, abolish that, blah, blah. And actually what we need is, in a moment when we need sober politicians, our information ecosystem is designed in a way that actually advantages the dumbest politicians possible. The liars, the histrionic overreactors, the ones who spin and mislead as much as possible. And I think that's one of the broader problems of social media, is that it's encouraged democratic and political discourse that's increasingly...

38:31Lies. Toxic. Toxic. And then it destroys the values that underpin democracy. And that's my real fear, Cara, is that we have a window to try and get to some sort of renegotiation with tech about the way that their engagement-based algorithms work, or the values that underpin democracy. And the hard-earned trust that we've built in our society collapses. And my family's from Afghanistan. When shit goes bad, it happens fast. In the 70s, we had women in miniskirts in Kabul, as my grandfather keeps reminding me because he likes miniskirts. And, you know, and we had women in government. And it happens real fast.

39:10And so those tipping points of the breakdown in trust, the breakdown in truth.

39:16Kara Swisher:And look at Afghanistan now. We'll be back in a minute.

39:30Kara Swisher:There's basically been one guy in Republican politics who's argued for regime change in Iran for years and for America to take a proactive military role in making it happen. Ambassador John Bolton, President Trump's former national security advisor. But now, even Bolton says Donald Trump is messing it up. As far as we can tell, he did no preparation of the opposition actually inside Iran. No coordination, no effort to see what they would do, no effort to support them to provide resources, money, arms, if that's what they wanted, telecommunications. Just no coordination at all. And they don't seem prepared for it.

40:12Kara Swisher:How Trump lost the Republican Party's biggest Iran war hawk. Today Explained, every weekday and on Saturdays too. This week on Net Worth and Chill, it's my birthday and I'm turning 32, so I'm sharing 32 life lessons I've learned that have actually changed my perspective. These aren't the picture-perfect Instagram infographic versions. These are the real, hard, uncomfortable truths about money, career, relationships, and everything in between. I'll explain why choosing a rest day is non-negotiable, or your body will choose it for you, why you should never take advice from anyone you don't want to be, and why nobody is actually looking at you, so you should just go for it.

40:50Kara Swisher:Plus, I'm breaking down why you should always negotiate your salary, why individualism is making you broke, and yes, why you should try eating a popsicle in the shower after a bad day. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff. What's it like to talk to a digital twin of a relative who died before you were born? This week on Solutions with Henry Blodgett, I talked to writer and artist Amy Kurzweil about just that. She helped her father, famed inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, build a chatbot based on her grandfather. We discuss how increasingly lifelike digital representations of people will change human relationships, especially how we grieve, and how AI is forcing us to reckon with what consciousness even means.

41:39Kara Swisher:Follow Solutions with Henry Blodgett to hear our conversation. So every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours. Hi, everyone. My name is Nicole Wong. As Karen knows, the topic of online speech means a lot to me. So I appreciate your work and being included in this conversation. Over the last 30 years, I've worked with a lot of tech companies and a lot of governments about how to effectively manage online speech platforms. It's always been difficult, like playing five-dimensional chess. There has always been harmful, malicious speech. But the difficulty is in the speech that falls in that category that's offensive to some but meaningful to others, that gray zone.

42:24Kara Swisher:And for that category of speech, someone always has to be the decider. So I have a multi-part question for you. First, in your ideal regulatory framework, who makes that difficult decision about what contested speech is permissible and what's not? And how do we assess success or failure? And second, what is the role of the government in enforcing such speech? And does it change when we're dealing with weak democracies or authoritarian governments who don't like what critics have to say? Thanks and Happy New Year. So that's Nicole Wong, who worked for Google. I've known her for years. One of the smartest thinkers on this, back when they were smart at these tech companies where they had decent people working on these very difficult and thorny questions.

43:13Kara Swisher:She also worked at Twitter. So let's start with the first one. Who gets to decide what contested speeches are okay and what's that? And how do you gauge success? So I think the First Amendment decides what speech is. And if you remove Section 230, if you could sue a platform, and if you were trying to sue them for protected speech, the courts would say, sorry, that's protected speech. You cannot sue them for it. They've won every time. They've won because of 230. And I think that what we have to do is start looking at where that speech may actually become negligence or knowing indifference and where they might be held liable.

43:46Kara Swisher:Which might be an AI, by the way, which isn't clearly protected by Section 230, but go ahead. So platforms have always said, like, we're being defended by 230 and the First Amendment. Take 230 away. because 230 is like, it's just a blanket ban on being held liable. The problem with not being held liable is, as you will have witnessed yourself, it starts to become a shibboleth. It starts to become an idea that they should never be held liable, neither legally nor morally. That's correct. It creates a culture of indifference to the harm that they cause. Very well said. It's what's driven the sociopathic indifference and greed that these platforms have towards the harm that they cause.

44:24And now, when I come along and say, well, that's mad, they go censorship, which is nonsense. I mean, utter nonsense. So, I mean, that's how I'd answer that question is, let the courts decide. Do not change the speech laws. That'd be madness. Go to court. Go to court.

44:43Kara Swisher:Let the courts decide. That's what I said. The second part, what's the role of government enforcing speech? What does that change when you're dealing with a Donald Trump, where it's whatever he likes, like he's been saying this week, is whatever his moral compass is, is what the rest of us should do, which means that's a party. The government doesn't have a role in enforcing speech. It has a role in protecting speech. And that's what makes what they're doing to me so outrageous. The government's role is actually to protect the rights. To protect you. You and I are both, in one respect, minorities, right?

45:16I mean, no one that's ever listening to who ever knows that I'm brown, but I am actually brown. And, you know, you're gay, and there are... These voices were suppressed. Our voices were suppressed. Our ability to... My ability to be anywhere near the public sphere and your ability to be open about who you love and the type of family that you want to have was suppressed. We've benefited from the government actually protecting our right to speech. That's where the government's role... But what the government shouldn't do is give special protections to one kind of company because they're their friends.

45:54That's wrong. That's not the way that governments should work. That's, you know, that's communism. That's basically oligarchs who are friends of Putin being given special protections.

46:05Kara Swisher:So your organization published multiple showing the harms of various tech platforms. Your research showed how, as you noted, ChatGPT produced instructions on self-harm and disordered eating within minutes. how TikTok bombards users, young users with similar content, and how X and Meta enable the spread of anti-Semitism. This is a, I've had round after round with Zuckerberg about this, and one of the more famous encounters we've had. The last one we've had, actually. What are you hoping these platforms will do with that information? Because one of the things I was trying to show in that famous interview I did was he is fundamentally unable to make these decisions and shouldn't, right?

46:42Kara Swisher:So what should happen here with this information? Because that's who gets to decide, is Zuckerberg. I mean, one of the most interesting things Zuckerberg did was he put out a chart a few years ago, which he was trying to explain why they have rules on their platform and why they enforce their rules. Which they don't. And on the X axis, so like, you know, that it had how violative the content is. So how close it is to violating their rules. And on the Y axis, it had engagement levels. And what it showed is that engagement is really low, really low, really low until you get the point of being violative and then it just shoots up.

47:16And it keeps going up.

47:17Kara Swisher:You know, I always say enragement equals engagement, but go ahead. Right. And we know this from study after study after study that shows that emotionally effective content actually gets the most engagement. And so essentially what it means is hate gets more engagement, often people being pissed off at it, and actually tolerance gets less engagement. And if the fundamental way that your platform works is that it doesn't reward how smart you are or how hard you've thought about it, but just raw engagement numbers. He said we have to have rules and we need to enforce those rules because then once you go past a certain point of being violative, it drops to zero.

47:52Kara Swisher:What are the incentives, though, to reorder? Because one of the things Nicole and I, which I always appreciated back then, was she sort of said Google is fast, relevant, and gets you the answer you want. It wasn't viral and incented for engagement. And she said when that changed, you couldn't reorder it back to just being useful. You know, speed and virality and engagement really fucked everything up. This was 15 years ago she talked about this. How do you reorder the way we, because we seem to like it, right? Of course, humans seem to like this. So how does it get reordered? Is there a better way to regulate the platforms that isn't fundamentally about deciding which speech is good on a case-by-case basis?

48:36Kara Swisher:Because these companies understandably don't want to be the speech police, and they're not good at it. So what could happen here? So, I mean, at a fundamental level, and this is one of the things that I really believe in as an organization, we were designed to look at the spread of the stuff that hurts people in the real world. We were never a tech organization. We were always a consumer rights organization that was looking at tech platforms. I'm a great believer in the serenity prayer. Like, you know, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the wisdom, the courage to change the things I can, the wisdom to know the difference.

49:08I don't do search platforms. We look at social media and AI platforms specifically. you know, Corey Doctorow and others have written about in-sertification and how essentially once Google won the franchise for search, they then filled you up with ads. We do look at YouTube and YouTube has got a problem. We just did a study called Anorexia Algorithm looking at how YouTube was recommending anorexia content to children. And, you know, YouTube have promised again and again and again, they won't do it. YouTube have got this, and you will know this, that because they had the image of being really cool, they're very good at managing their image, that they got away with it.

49:45And people kind of figured that YouTube probably wouldn't be as bad. But YouTube is systemically mendacious when it comes to covering up the way that their algorithms work in practice and their inability to deal with the flood of dangerous content on there.

49:59Kara Swisher:I had a long argument with Susan about this because I was like, whether you mean it or not, It's happened. Like my son was looking at Ben Shapiro and suddenly got to anti-Semitism. I'm like, wow, that's a leap. Like this guy is the opposite. Why is he down in anti-Semitic content? That's a publishing decision by the platform. When you make a recommendation to someone, you are essentially making an editorial decision. You are suggesting to them that that's something that you think they should watch next. And that's what I find so pernicious about it. So what then, we are in this situation. How do we get out of it?

50:33Kara Swisher:Because tech companies, as you know, have long been opposed to government regulation of their programs. What's new is the Trump administration is using its power on their behalf. And I would argue that Obama was a friend of also. And Biden wasn't. He got his head handed to them by them. It's trying to suppress critics like you. It's weaponizing claims of censorship to undermine foreign attempts to regulate content like the EU's Digital Services Act. So what worries you most is the Trump administration goes after some of the few guardrails that exist. And again, let me just note other countries.

51:02Kara Swisher:Australia passed a law to ban social media for young people, and other countries are considering similar legislation. I don't think that will happen here in the U.S., largely because of the, I think they'll have teens suing the government. But go ahead. A ton of Republican states are currently, and some have already passed bans on. So yes, we may not get one at federal level, but actually we, I think you'd be surprised. I think sentiment is moving so fast that legislation always lags sentiment, and sentiment grows, you know, linear, but legislation's binary. So like at some point it flips from zero to one, right?

51:34So like the sentiment grows. And I think that you, we may see something and it will require talented advocates will require people who go out there and make the arguments who can actually overcome the millions being spent by big tech. I think that's what, I think that's why, you know, CCDH has been targeted. We're actually quite good at what we do. We've got, we understand how to create the precise fact patterns that drive action. We know we're quite clever in picking areas, in making these arguments in emotive and clever ways. And also speaking to legislators in a way that they understand on a bipartisan basis.

52:09On the board of CCDH, we've got conservatives. You know, we've got everyone from every side of the debate.

52:14Kara Swisher:But where is the meaning? Because right now it feels like a rid me of this bothersome priest kind of situation, right? But how can meaningful regulation of social media also happen without buy-in from the US. When does that occur, this flip? Well, this is what worries me about what's happening right now. You know, interestingly, there's been no sanctions on Australia for having a ban on social media. What they are resisting most, what both the... So Elon, when he sued us, the actual tort in the lawsuit was that you broke the rules of our platform, which ban people from taking data from the platform for research.

52:50There is a through line through all of this. We're now being punished apparently because the European Commission said you need to have transparency. CCDH is a research organization that uses research to hold up a mirror to these platforms. Again and again and again, the thing they're most scared of, Cara, is transparency.

53:10Kara Swisher:Yes, they are. And watchdogs who are able to get data and create understanding for people. Well, you know, you're manipulating that data, just so you know, according to them. Fine. Sue us. Sue us for defamation. Yeah. They never have. Not once. Not even Musk sued us for defamation. Because we are good at what we do. And we know that we might get sued for defamation. They're the world's biggest companies. Of course, we're triple checking everything. But look, speech itself, I've always said First Amendment, very important that you keep it to where the law is already. And some kinds of speech are dangerous and tortious, and you may end up being sued for them.

53:45And that creates a hard barrier on that. But the other stuff, let's tell us how we're being manipulated and then see if advertisers and the public still want to use your platform. Transparency is the key. If tomorrow there was universal data access for all those guys at Stanford and Harvard and at CCDH and everywhere else, so we could actually understand these platforms better, I think the game's over.

54:13Kara Swisher:Yes, agreed. Because I think once we realize that they're not just putting red dye into our information ecosystem, they are pumping uranium into it. Let's just be able to sue them. Let's be able to sue the bastards. And if we lose, we lose. If we win, we win. That's just the way America is. Here's my thesis. If everyone in America knew about the existence of Section 230 tomorrow, the day after Section 230 would no longer exist. because overwhelmingly, when people realize that special protections are given to one industry, they say, that's not fair. And Americans believe in fair competition. It's why I love being in America.

54:48I'm competitive. I like competing. I like being surrounded by people who are hyper-competitive because it makes me better at what I do. But there have to be rules. There has to be fair competition. And social media platforms being given a special dispensation, screw that. That is fundamentally un-American.

55:06Kara Swisher:Yeah, but the internet without Section 230, it is a legal minefield to vet every single piece of content the user uploaded. That's a real problem just removing it. It's like removing your liver at this point. So there's different ways that you could do this. So I would argue that the status quo is so bad and moving in such a bad direction that actually radical action might be okay. And fundamentally, why are they given any protections at all? There are people like Marianne Frank and Daniel Citron, brilliant legal theorists who've talked about, instead of saying that you're liable immediately, that actually it should be where there's knowing indifference to harm.

55:44So when you're killing kids, you know about it, and you just kind of go, eh. And you know that those guys behave that way.

55:51Kara Swisher:I have been in those rooms. Then the liability kicks in. So let's bring it back to you. You've made, the last question, you made it clear you're not backing down from the fight with the administration or planning to change your work. What's next for this case and your organization then? Talk about where it goes from here. I mean, look, we're back in court in two months' time. The government didn't oppose extending the restraining order for a couple of months. And they gave us a fairly leisurely briefing schedule. So we're back in court in a couple of months. I look forward to being back in court.

56:24I have faith in the system. And in the meantime, you know, what they are trying to do is bleed us to death. what I'll be going out there and doing. What most of my... I used to have a fun job. I used to actually do research and do all this stuff myself. Nowadays, it's mainly fundraising and begging people. Right. So I'm going to be going out there and raising money and also spreading the message. Because as I said to you, if I can use this targeting to help people, more people to hear about Section 230, that gets me closer today to the day when everyone in America knows that it exists. And I think the day after everyone in America knows that it exists, it stops existing.

56:59Kara Swisher:Well, we need to rename it. like K-pop demon hunters or something. We got to give it a new name. So everyone just... I do. Section 230 just trips off. I'm quite weak at that because I'm fundamentally a dork and I'm not very good at... I named my organization the Center for Character and Digital Hate because I was like, I'm just... I can't be bothered explaining what it does. So I'm just going to put it in the name. Right. That's right. I'm just saying it's got... You're absolutely right. Anyway, so it goes to court and then you believe it could either be Taco, which is Trump always chickens out or they'll lose.

57:27Kara Swisher:But it could bleed you. I want to have this fight. I think it's an important fight to have. I think it is a fight about what the true censorship is. And I think it's time that we puncture this nonsensical debate that's been going on in America for the last five years about whether or not criticizing Elon Musk is de facto censorship. No, Elon. He said, this is great. When this was all announced, he was like, this is great. The great free speech absoluter said, this is great. No, this is censorship. When you're told that you're going to be split from your family because of the things that you say and advocate, that is censorship.

57:59And we've got to all, it doesn't matter if you're a Republican or Democrat, you can't let any president have that power. I've got to fight this and I've got to win it.

58:06Kara Swisher:All right. Thank you, Imran, for your time. And I appreciate it. Thank you.

58:16Kara Swisher:Today's show was produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Michelle Eloy, Megan Bernie, and Caitlin Lynch. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Rosemary Ho and Bradley Sylvester. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you are fighting the good fight. If not, you're a scared little boy. And that only matters if you are actually a little boy, which Elon Musk is not. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network and us.

58:55Kara Swisher:We'll be back on Thursday with more.