Speaker 1: What's going on?
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It
is heard live every day from noon to three on
WBT Radio in Charlotte.
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smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for
your support. Pete Calendar here, that's k A L I
N E r h E r E. It's not part
of my last name, though, but I feel like it
almost sounds like it is because I always say Pete
Calendar here because of course, like I'm here, But I
feel like that because my last name is it's unusual,
let's say, which actually cuts down on the stalking.
Speaker 1: So maybe I'll stop spelling.
Speaker 2: Well, no, I can't, because in order to email me,
you need to know my last name Pete at Vpete
calendarshow dot com. Although I did get the URL for
the Pete podh uh huh. Also the Pete cast, I
don't know. I go back it all routes to the
Pete Calendar Show but because the last name. I also
bought Pete Calendar, like c A L E N d
A R because so many people misspell the name. Anyway,
it all routes to the same site. But if you
want to email, it's Pete at the Pete Calendar show.
So Donald Trump actually addressed this. Let me see, do
I have the clip here?
Speaker 1: I do?
Speaker 2: So Donald Trump had a news conference it ran I
think over an hour or so down at mar a Lago.
Fielded a whole bunch of questions on all sorts of stuff,
and he was asked about Meta Facebook, right, Meta or
Facebook's parent company called themselves.
Speaker 1: Meta now and not now.
Speaker 2: It's that's been a while, a couple of years since
they've done that, which to me, I hate. I just
hate saying the word because I always feel like I
have to say, like Meta Metta.
Speaker 1: I don't know why. It just sounds weird. It's a
weird sounding name.
Speaker 2: Anyway, Meta announced and by Meta I mean the AI
guy Zuckerberg.
Speaker 1: Dude's totally AI.
Speaker 2: So he did a like a hostage video kind of
a thing where he's staring at a camera, you know,
in a weird like office or something, I think, and
he is saying that they are no longer going to
be using these third party fact checkers. I'm putting that
in air quotes, the third party fact checkers. They're now
going to copy Twitter with the community notes. Have you
ever seen these things? If you're not on Twitter and
you're well, I would say you should join Twitter just
to follow me.
Speaker 1: At Pete Callander. Okay, a l I any r, but
you should, so you should do that.
Speaker 2: But on Twitter they implemented this system called community notes.
And what it does is that it's open for I
don't know certain people, but you got to get approved.
I am approved as an official community note or notarian notary.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I get to help do fact checks basically, but it's
open to a lot of people.
Speaker 1: I think you can apply. It's free, it's whatever.
Speaker 2: And somebody posts something like, let's say Donald Trump is
an agent of the Russians, right, and then I, as
a community notre or notary, I could put a community
note onto that tweet. But nobody sees it unless they
are fellow notarians. Okay, And if enough of the notarians
rate it, they give it a thumbs up basically, and
you gotta they give you some reasons why you're you know,
you're agreeing or disagreeing or whatever like helpful or not
helpful kind of thing. And once it gets voted up
by a certain amount, then it gets it becomes visible
for everybody to see, and now your tweet is permanently
tagged with this community note that says you're lying basically,
and so it has helped for the user base to
correct miss and disinformation. That's how Twitter has gone about
doing their their fact checking quote unquote. They're relying on
the people with their use of free speech to fact
check rather than the what was it the Twitter Safety
Committee or whatever it was, Yeah, where their or their
Trust and Safety project whatever that they were using where
they would censor people.
Speaker 1: And this all came out remember in the Twitter file.
Speaker 2: All the okay, right, Like this all came out when
they got a hold of all of the internal emails
when Elon Musk bought Twitter, and then they started Matt Tayibi,
Michael Schellenberger, I think that was there may have been
a couple a couple other journalists that started combing through
all of this stuff and laying out the operation that
came from the Democrat Party, the White House, the administration.
It came from government agencies, right the alphabet agencies, intelligence
community members and stuff, and it was sort of a
backdoor censorship model fascism. Basically, it was this facade of freedom,
a facade of free enterprise, a facade of free speech,
but behind the scenes not so much. That's how the
Hunter Biden laptop story got suppressed. It got censored, was
through this this mechanism. So Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook or
the Facebook, he comes out and he says, we are
going to get back to our roots and focus on
rating the attractiveness of co ed's in college.
Speaker 1: That's our roots for Facebook. No.
Speaker 2: No, he said, they're going to focus on reducing mistakes,
simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.
He posted this video this morning. He said, more specifically,
we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace
them with community notes similar to x or Twitter. Starting
in the US, Meta's chief Global affairs Officer, Joel Kaplan
was on Fox News channels Fox and Friends, and he
discussed the changes in an exclusive interview. Meta's third party
fact checking program was put in place after the twenty
sixteen election and was used to manage content and misinformation
on its platforms, largely due to quote political pressure, executives said,
but admitted that the system has quote gone too far. Really,
who could have ever expected that? Caplin told Fox News Digital.
Quote we went to independent, third party fact checkers. It
has become clear there is too much political bias in
what they choose to fact check, because basically they get
to fact check whatever they see on the platform. He said,
Meta is ending that completely. So what is what do
the fact checkers have to say about this? So one
of the fact checkers was PolitiFact. You've heard of them.
There isn't a what I dare say. Virtually every single
Republican at a national level has had some brush with
the dumb assary of PolitiFact. PolitiFact that finds every nuance
they could find in order to absolve any Democrat of
the four pinocchios or pants on fire ratings and that
sort of thing. Meanwhile divining the worst of intentions and
dissuming the worst motives of all Republicans and nitpicking. Well,
he said this, but it's actually this, plus this tiny
little other thing. They find all these ways to construct
their examination to drop the hammer on conservatives and give
a pass to the left, and Republicans know this. Conservatives
recognize this. This is why they don't trust these types
of ratings. So PolitiFact. This is from Aaron Sharonackmann. He
is the executive director of PolitiFact. Politifacts says the decision
to remove independent journalists from Facebook's content moderation program in
the US has nothing to do with free speech or censorship.
Mark Zuckerberg's decision could not be less subtle. PolitiFact is
one of the five original partners who worked with Facebook
to launch a fact checking program in the United States
after December or in December twenty sixteen, and our journalists
have worked on the project for more than eight years,
publishing thousands of fact checks in that time. Once again,
note what Facebook said. Facebook said that, or the yeah
this guy Kaplan said that there's too much political bias
in what they choose to fact check, and that is
exactly correct. I have been saying this for years. You're
never a prophet in your own land, you know. But anyway,
I've been saying this for years that the fact checkers
pick and choose. That's where the bias usually occurs. It
is where the people sit around and decide. This is
a lie that's worth checking. But I didn't even hear
about this other lie over there, told by a person
that I like, because they just don't consume media that
would ever put that lie onto their radar, right, And
so therein lies the bias. So they end up finding
all the lies that the right tails and none of
the lies that the left tells. And if you were
just going to do it even handedly, you would have, like,
for example, Joe Biden's mental acuity. Hmm, that might be
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and make memory Marise that'll last a lifetime. Donald Trump
was asked about this decision by Facebook to abandon this
third party fact checking program that Meta or or maybe
it will start calling it Fetah because it is the
or the the FETA. Anyway, they did a third party
fact checking program in the twenty right after the twenty
sixteen election, and they say it went too far, the
third party fact checkers. It became too became clear, there's
too much political bias in what they choose to fact
check because basically they get to fact check whatever they
see on the platform. Okay, so that's the that's what.
What's this guy's name, Caplan?
Speaker 1: Mark?
Speaker 2: No, not Mark now whatever? Something Kaplan? Oh, Joel Kaplan.
He has met his chief global affairs officer. So Donald
Trump at his press conference was asked about this, and
here's how that went.
Speaker 1: On the post on its website.
Speaker 2: Meta said today it was not putting fact checks on
which website.
Speaker 1: And it was a lot of community.
Speaker 2: I watched their news conference and I thought it was
a very good news conference. I think they've honestly, I
think they've come him a long way.
Speaker 1: Meta Facebook. I think they've come a long way. I
watched it. The man was very impressive. I watched it,
actually I watched it on Fox.
Speaker 2: I'm not allowed to say that. Do you think he
would directly responding to the threats that you've made to
him in the past? Probably?
Speaker 1: Probably, do you?
Speaker 2: He said, do you think that he means Zuckerberg? Do
you think he's responding to threats that you have made
against him in the past? And Trump says it probably
because the Trump you know is like, that's right, I
made the threat and he caved. Hmm, Alpha Mal, you
know like that's but this is the language these guys speak,
these business guys. And look, Zuckerberg is not a fool,
He's not. He's a smart guy, right, so he knows
what which way the wind is blowing here. And with
the Trump administration coming in, you're gonna have to play nice.
Speaker 1: Now here's the problem.
Speaker 2: Nobody has been held accountable for the egregiousness of the
behavior over at the Facebook. There's no price to be
paid except by the users, except by the conservatives that
were you know, uh uh. Their their reach was throttled.
Their Facebook accounts were banned, shut down, whatever, or suspended.
So that's who has paid the price here. So I'm
not I'm not in a particularly forgiving mood for for
Meta or Facebook on this cap and told Fox News
Digital that Meta is changing some of its own content
moderation rules, especially those they feel are too restrictive and
not allowing enough discourse around sensitive topics like immigration, transgender issues,
and gender I just saw a poll and it said
a new low for support of men playing in women's sports.
It's now at like eleven percent support, which means the
rest of it is against or neutral, but like mostly against.
That's a new low. Well, I should say it's probably
not a new low. It probably was much lower than
that before we actually started asking the question, because prior
to us asking the question, nobody thought to ever ask
the question because we weren't morons. All right, I hope
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Speaker 1: Going over the story. This is from Fox News.
Speaker 2: It is a Fox News exclusive written up by Brooke
Singman over at their website met Ends fact checking program.
As Zuckerberg vows to restore free expression on Facebook and
I think, probably more importantly Instagram, Instagram. I think that's
the bigger deal. Instagram. I mean, I don't even really
I barely even use Facebook anymore. I never really liked
it to begin with. And let me tell let me
tell you something a little bit of background on the
Facebook and the way Facebook destroyed news and media operations.
Speaker 1: This was.
Speaker 2: I don't know, probably now about well, let's see fifteen, No, yeah,
about ten years ago. Facebook went into the They went
to news organizations and such and they were like, hey,
we know you guys are doing like newsletters and the like.
We will do all of this audience reach for you,
and you create the content, and then you use our
platform to distribute. So you end up with companies that
have well, I'll just make up an example here, Like
let's say there's a radio company for example. I'm just
making this up, but let's just say that there's a
radio company that owns like eight hundred plus stations. Okay, no,
I'm just saying it's complete, but it doesn't matter, all right,
So you got this this behemoth of a radio company
and they got eight hundred stations all over the country,
and so they say, awesome, say fire a bunch of people.
It's unrelated, but they just like to fire a bunch
of people anyway, So they fire people. But then they
use Facebook and they just use the bejeebis out of it.
I mean, they they use Facebook to spam you with
everything non stop, post after post after post after post,
across eight hundred stations, and they all look the same,
by the way, because it's just a template, and so
they just push it all out and I mean hypothetically,
and so they push all this content out and then
of course the users are complaining because they're just getting inundated.
Now imagine that, you know, in addition to all of
the other media outlets and newsrooms. Now in actual news stations, newsrooms,
newspapers and such, they're creating content because that's what these
platforms need, right, they need content. And so when the
Facebook made its big push to get more people to
use videos in order to compete with other video centric platforms,
they started doing deals with these large corporate content creation machines.
But that required the content creation to occur, and then
it would push out, push out, push out, and that
drove up engagement numbers, and Facebook could say, look all
the people that are looking at Facebook ads and posts
and all this, But then people were like, I don't
want to see it, so they start blocking.
Speaker 1: They start complaining and all this other stuff.
Speaker 2: But in the meantime, you have the news organizations that
dismantle their newsrooms because they got all these other financial pressures,
so they start getting rid of people that are actually
creating the content, and instead they're just pushing out clickbait. Essentially,
they give up their newsletters, their email distribution newsletters, they
just let those go away because it's.
Speaker 1: Harder, it's more intensive.
Speaker 2: Creating content takes time, and so they don't want to
pay for that, so they just start posting lots of
more videos, and Facebook is giving them preference for more
of the videos because Facebook.
Speaker 1: Wants more of the videos.
Speaker 2: And then what happens the backlash and then Facebook turns
around and says, you know what, if you're posting this
kind of stuff, we're going to throttle you. And that's
what they did. So they started throttling the posts that
were coming from these mega content creators, news organizations, newsrooms.
And where did that leave these news operations in a
worse position than before Facebook ever darkened their door? And
then Facebook steps in to fill the void. Right, that's
the idea that Facebook would then take over all of
this area of content creation, but mainly relying on people
to create it for free. That's why, I mean, that's
why they want more users. More users equals more content.
More content means they can sull more ads.
Speaker 1: That's it.
Speaker 2: So no love lost here on my part for Facebook
for it's business practice, but also its platform.
Speaker 1: It's kind of janky. I don't really like it anyway.
Speaker 2: They've angered the PolitiFact people and maybe they should fact
check Zuckerberg on this, but they say this is the
head of PolitiFact says, let me be clear. The decision
to remove or penalize a post or an account is
made by Meta and Facebook, not the fact checkers. They
created the rules, not us. The role of PolitiFact and
other US based journalists has always been to provide additional
speech and context to posts that journalists found to contain misinformation.
So this is where they pretend that it's like.
Speaker 1: Oh, we're just observers over.
Speaker 2: Here, We're not actual participants in the fight. This is
always it's sort of like the you've probably heard this,
the clown knows on, clown knows off that John Stewart
was always accused of doing where he presents himself as this,
I'm just a comedian kind of a guy. But then
he like rails against stuff, makes these policy pronouncements, casts
moral aspersions on people and such, and then when challenged
when he gets stuff wrong, then he puts the clown
nose back on.
Speaker 1: I'm just a comedy I'm just a comic. You shouldn't
be relying on me.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, we find out member all of the studies that
found that the younger people were getting their news from
the Daily Show from John Stewart, that was their quote newscast,
and so he did more damage to the political discourse,
which is highly ironic because he was the guy who
went on Crossfire and browbeat Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson
because Crossfire he said, you know, there wasn't doing enough
to help with the civil discourse and informing people and
all this other stuff. Crossfire which actually brought a conservative
and a liberal together to debate issues, and John Stewart
savaged them and then corroded the discourse by basically doing
well what I do nowadays.
Speaker 1: Like that's the basically say clown knows on there you go.
Speaker 2: I am anything if not self aware, but man, the
the lefties and the reporters, and I hit myself there,
but they are they are really mad at this. They
all went over onto Blue Sky, which is supposedly a
competitor to Twitter, but it's like a it's just like
a censorious mob, right, So just a bunch of leftists
and they just you know, shout down people, report them,
get them banned and suspended. It's just it's this constant
witch hunt that goes on. It's it's Blue Sky witch
hunt site. And so they all went over there and
they're like lamenting. Mark Elias is over there crying about it.
Which I love it when Mark Elias cries about stuff,
and that's the Democrat super lawyer that sues only Republican
legislatures and such, even though Democrats do the exact same
legislation in other states. He never challenges that he only
sues the Republican states.
Speaker 1: He was also.
Speaker 2: The the cutout for the Stile dossier stuff, so that
Mark wise, Yeah, he's very upset about this decision to
not have you know, third party independent journalists that happened
to always agree with him on stuff that they're not
going to be riding heard on what is and isn't
capital t the truth. You know, I think this is
a better model. But once again, I'm not in a
forgiving mood for Facebook for many reasons that I have articulated,
but also for the fact that the damage that they
did has already been done and now they're just trying
to ingratiate themselves with the incoming administration. So I see
that for what it is. All right, if you're listening
to this show, you know, I try to keep up
with all sorts of current events, and I know you
do too, and you've probably heard me say get your
news from multiple sources. Why well, because it's how you
detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed
with ground News. It's an app, and it's a website
and it combines news from around the world in one
place so you can compare coverage and verify information. You
can check it out at check dot ground, dot news
slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too.
I started using ground News a few months ago and
more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate
because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered
and by whom.
Speaker 1: The blind spot.
Speaker 2: Feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left
and the right. See for yourself check dot ground, dot
news slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get
fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan
to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then
not only helps my podcast, but it also supports ground
News as they make the media landscape more transparent. One
more thing on the Meta Chris Rufo, responding to the
announcement from Meta's founder there Mark Zuckerberg, saying they're going
to go with a community notes system to fact check
rather than the Journalismer's to start you know fact checking
people's posts on Facebook and Instagram. Rufo said this is
good and welcome, but Facebook has not been leading the
discourse for many years. It's turned into a recycled slop factory,
useful perhaps for engineering mass consumer habits, but not useful
for cutting edge politics. X is the platform that.
Speaker 1: Matters, and I agree with that.
Speaker 2: There isn't a lot I learned. I mean, okay, if
I want to watch one of the short reels I
think is what they call them on somebody who converts
their backyard into a you know, garden, I will watch Facebook.
That's about the extent of what I do on Facebook,
it really is. And I know, like I've got a
page over there, and I should do more. I know,
like there were always but like I'm only one man,
you know, I don't have a whole operation here to
manage all of my socials, as they say, so I
just devote my focus and energy onto the one platform.
It is Twitter, and I know my way around Twitter
very very well. And also Twitter punches above its weight class.
Twitter has the people who lead the discussions. You've got media,
you've got politicians, right, You've got academics and stuff like
these are the people that are engaging in these debates
and stuff, and there are a lot of randoms like me,
I'm in there too, right, But you've got a lot
of those those types of people that are on Twitter.
And the reason, I mean, the whole purpose of Twitter
was to find somebody who had like a massive following,
you know, is really well known or whatever, and then
you just troll them. Like that's the whole point of Twitter.
I thought, I mean, that's what.
Speaker 1: I used it for.
Speaker 2: But he's just like, you're stupid.
Speaker 1: Anyway.
Speaker 2: Sam Altman, do you know this guy is? He is
the CEO of open ai open ai Artificial Intelligence. He
said in a blog post Sunday that his company has
discovered how to build artificial general intelligence or AGI artificial
general intelligence. They have discovered how to build it, and
that the product will start to impact the workforce roughly.
Speaker 1: This year.
Speaker 2: He says it's going to materially change the output of companies.
In a related story, a radio company just fired a
whole bunch of more people. No, I'm kidding that that's
evergreen anyway. AGI is a type of artificial intelligence that
can match or surpay as human cognitive abilities on a
range of tasks or subjects AGI. He said the company
believes creating AGI and putting it in the hands of
people leads to great, broadly distributed outcomes. I mean it can, right,
it can lead to that. But I'm thinking it's going
to lead to a lot more cat videos, That's what
I'm thinking, which some of them are adorable. Have you
seen some of the AI generated cat images and stuff.
They're just adorable. Anyway, we are beginning to turn our
aim beyond that, he says, to super intelligence in the
true sense of the word. We love our current products,
but we are here for the glorious future. That's his quote.
He said that glorious like you're sounding like a COMI dictator.
With super intelligence, we could do anything else. Super intelligent
to could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond
what we are capable of doing on our own, and
in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.
Speaker 1: Or destroy humanity. We'll see how it goes.
Speaker 2: All right, that'll do it for this episode.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 2: I could not do the show without your support and
the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast.
So if you'd like, please support them too and tell
them you heard it here. You can also become a
patron at my patreon page or go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again,
thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.