Is the Internet Advertising a Moderating Force?

On last week’s Dead Cat episode with ex-Facebook security chief Alex Stamos, we spent a lot of time trying to steel man the free speech moderation crowd’s argument — even though none of us seemed to hold it ourselves. The other week, we had Jason Calacanis on the show but he didn’t want to talk about Elon Musk.

This week, finally we have someone on the podcast who is a defender of the so-called free speech regime and is also willing to talk to skeptical journalists about it on air. Antonio García Martínez, the author of Chaos Monkeys and startup CEO, came on the show. On his Substack The Pull Request, he defended the free speech argument in April — before Musk acquired Twitter. (I’ve written that no one, Musk included, was plausibly going to govern social media under a free speech standard so invoking free speech is a pure marketing ploy. I think that position has been vindicated by Musk’s recent actions.)

More broadly, García Martínez, or AGM as he is widely known, is someone who has pushed back against the tech media and leftwing employees. With Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan, we set out to make sense of the culture war between tech “builders” and reporters.

Give it a listen

Read the automated transcript