Andreessen: How Substack and Elon Musk Broke the Censors
January 27, 2025Andreessen: Substack And Elon Musk's Twitter Takeover Broke The Social Media Censorship Dynamic
Marc Andreessen just revealed exactly how Elon Musk delivered the hammer blow that ended the US Government's illegal internet censorship operation.
— Hans C Nelson 🗽 (@HansCNelson) January 27, 2025
Humanity is forever in your debt, @elonmusk.
And thank you for these revelations, @pmarca. pic.twitter.com/kydZ3Rv89K
LEX FRIDMAN: You are a good person to speak about the history of this because you were there on the ground floor. Take me through that if you can.
MARC ANDREESSEN: Basically, the government, over time, and then culminating in 2020 and 2021, in the last four years, decided that the First Amendment didn't apply to them. They decided that federal laws around free speech and around conspiracies to take away the rights of citizens just don't apply. They arbitrarily pressured companies, threatening, bullying, yelling, and screaming, and threaten repercussions and forcing them to censor.
There’s this idea that the First Amendment only applies to the government, not to companies. But there's actually a little nuance to that. First, it definitely applies to the government, like 100% the First Amendment applies to the government. And by the way, so does the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, including the right to due process, also apply to the government. There was no due process at all in the censorship regime that was put in place. There was no due process for debanking either. These are just as serious violations as the free speech violations. This was just flagrant, unconstitutional behavior.
There are specific federal statutes-- 18 U.S. Code §241 and §242. One applies to federal government employees, and the other applies to private actors, concerning what's called deprivation of rights and conspiracy to deprive rights.
It is not legal under the U.S. Criminal Code for government employees or private entities in a conspiracy to take away constitutional rights. The government employees have misbehaved for sure. As for the companies, there's an interesting question of whether they are victims or perpetrators -- or both. They will argue, and they have a good case, that they are victims, not perpetrators. They are the downstream subjects of pressure, not the cause of it.
However, there’s a swath of people in the middle, especially those funded by the government, who are possibly in pretty big trouble. These include third-party censorship bureaus like the so-called "Stanford Internet Observatory," which was funded by the federal government to operate as a third-party censorship operation. These are private-sector actors, but acting with funding from the government, which puts them in a very interesting spot. There’s a clear theory that they were essentially acting as agents of the government. They're also very exposed in this and they have behaved in flagrantly illegal ways.
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LEX FRIDMAN: Fundamentally, the government should not exert any kind of pressure, even soft pressure, on companies to censor.
MARC ANDREESSEN: They can't. It's not allowed.
LEX FRIDMAN: It really is disturbing. This kind of behavior probably started subtly and slowly and escalated, as the old will to power would instruct them to do. I mean, that's why there are protections, because you can't put a check on the power of government.
MARC ANDREESSEN: There are so many ways to come at you.
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The dynamic online played out like this. They had absolute conformity on the social networks, literally enforced through social networks by censorship, cancellation campaigns, mobbing, and shaming.
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Two things broke this dynamic. First, Substack was built from scratch and declared upfront it was going to be a free speech platform from the start and they came under intense pressure from the press and platform companies. And they stood up to it. Today, they host the widest spectrum of speech and conversation anywhere on Earth. They've done a great job and it worked.
The second was Elon Musk and X, the hammer blow. Elon stuck his hand up and essentially declared, "The emperor is wearing no clothes." One person stands up by themselves, and everyone in the audience watches to see what will happen. It may be that is a minority position and you're going to get yourself killed. Or it may be a majority position and you are now the leader of a revolution.
When one person stands up and doesn't get killed -- a lot of times he does get killed. But if he survives, others start to join. Two leads to four, four leads to eight. It's like the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989—when it goes, it can go fast.
If it turns out a large portion of the population believes differently, it turns out everyone has this giant epiphany where they realize they're actually part of the majority, and a tipping point occursy. At that point, you're on a freight train to revolution, and it is rolling.
They also discussed the moment when Jon Stewart took the Covid lab leak theory seriously during an interview on "The Late Show," and Nicholson Baker's piece in New York Magazine as two big turning points:
Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) just dropped a HUGE bombshell on @lexfridman's podcast today, exposing the true significance of this exact moment.
— Hans C Nelson 🗽 (@HansCNelson) January 27, 2025
The tide finally began to turn against censorship in the conversations that take place behind closed doors in ivory towers the very next… https://t.co/QBkzGEpGmz pic.twitter.com/729HsZ08NV
Full interview:
Timestamps:
10:32 - History of Western Civilization
19:51 - Trump in 2025
27:32 - TDS in tech
40:19 - Preference falsification
56:15 - Self-censorship
1:11:18 - Censorship
1:19:57 - Jon Stewart
1:22:43 - Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan
1:31:32 - Government pressure
1:42:19 - Nature of power
1:55:08 - Journalism
2:00:43 - Bill Ackman
2:05:40 - Trump administration
2:13:19 - DOGE
2:27:11 - H1B and immigration
3:05:05 - Little tech
3:17:25 - AI race
3:26:15 - X
3:29:47 - Yann LeCun
3:33:21 - Andrew Huberman
3:34:53 - Success
3:37:49 - God and humanity
Source: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/