Life!Line - Guest hosting: Robert Mahoney on The Infodemic
2023-01-02 · Guest: Robert Mahoney (Author of The Infodemic) · 45:27
Censorship First Amendment and Social Media
Bob Zadek guest hosts for Craig Roberts on LifeLine to interview Robert Mahoney, author of The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free. They discuss the evolution of censorship from simple suppression to “censorship through noise,” the legal implications of government agencies influencing private social media platforms (as revealed in the Twitter Files), and the collapse of public trust in institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Topics: Censorship, First Amendment, Twitter Files, COVID-19, Media Literacy, Social Media, FBI, News Deserts
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek – Guest Host
- Robert Mahoney – Author of The Infodemic
Defining Censorship and the First Amendment [00:25]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to LifeLine. I’m your guest host Bob Zadek, hosting in lieu of Craig Roberts, who is off this evening. I host the Bob Zadek Show every Sunday morning live at 8:60 AM, The Answer, KFAX’s sister station. I’m happy to join you this evening.
Today’s topic is censorship. My goodness, it used to be so easy to be an active voting member in political life in America. There were a few issues you had to understand, you voted for whoever would lower your taxes the most and perhaps give you the most freedom. It has gotten so much more complicated. Even a subject which we’re going to spend the whole hour on tonight, the subject of censorship, has now gotten so complex.
As you join me during this hour to discuss censorship, we need to set a few definitional guardrails so we at least are talking about the same thing. First, we’ll discuss censorship. What is censorship exactly? Well, censorship is nothing more complicated than the suppressing of political, social, religious ideas that one group may not be approve of. So it’s nothing other than the suppression of somebody else’s views so they don’t get to the attention of the public at large. Pretty simple stuff.
Next issue: Is censorship illegal? Well, it gets more complex than that. Censorship per se is not illegal. You are allowed to do what you can to prevent somebody else from being exposed to an idea. You can tell them, “Don’t read that book,” “Don’t watch that television program” (if anybody still watches television, that is). That’s the suppression of an idea by one person or by a group. Perfectly all right, at least perfectly all right legally. It may not be all right morally, but that’s for you to decide in the privacy of your own conscience. But it certainly is not illegal on the individual level.
What about a business? Can a business suppress an idea? Well, of course they can. In general, we have certain businesses that occasionally get into the public’s attention through news reporting and the like, and those are businesses that one way or another take one side of a social, moral, or political position and do the best they can to suppress the ideas of others because they don’t approve of them. Again, perfectly all right legally. That business, having associated itself with a certain idea or group of ideas, runs the risk of losing customers who may spend their dollars based upon the vendor who they agree with, but that’s a private decision for the individual and the business is allowed to take a position on controversial issues, indeed even to try to suppress other issues. They’re allowed to do that acting individually.
Well, so when does the law step in? The law steps in compliments of the First Amendment to the Constitution, the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights. We all know this as well as we know anything about life in America. The First Amendment provides and protects for very broad free speech rights. In fact, the United States has the strongest free speech rights of any country on Earth, at least those that I am aware of. And we have, as part of our ethos, proudly, we have very broad protection of free speech rights.
Well, the fact that it’s in the Constitution, what does that mean in terms of the law? The Constitution does not regulate behavior among individuals. The Constitution, as we all know, defines the relationship of government on the one hand and its citizens on the other. And the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights says that government—government, indeed the federal government, which has been extended to the states by the 14th Amendment, so state and local governments as well as the federal government—generally speaking, cannot interfere with very broad free speech rights. Of course, it’s not total freedom; there are limitations—inciting violence and the like—those are—that’s not protected speech. So the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits censorship by government.
Censorship in the Digital Age [06:08]
Bob Zadek: Okay, that seems simple enough. Businesses can generally do what they want vis-à-vis federal law and the Bill of Rights. Individuals can absolutely do what they want, consistent with other law. That’s censorship broadly. Everything was pretty gosh-darn simple until the internet came along, more specifically until social media came along. And now we have where we’re going to spend most of our time this evening discussing Twitter. Twitter in general, more broadly all of social media, because now it gets very, very complicated.
And we are discussing amongst ourselves—the media is discussing among itself, columnists are discussing among themselves, indeed often it seems people are talking about nothing else but—but they are talking about the Hunter Biden laptop, they are talking about suppression of speech by Twitter, they are talking about Donald Trump on Twitter, Donald Trump building his own social media network just so he has a platform (I presume, maybe he’s doing it to make money, I don’t really know that). But we talk about social media and censorship all of the time.
And it is my hope this evening to provide a little clarity where there is so much smoke and so much misinformation, not about the ultimate conclusion, but just about what the rules are, what the big picture should—should be. Because if you understand the framework of the discussion, you can actively participate, take your position, stake it out, and defend it.
So how does all of this come together and how has Twitter, a private company, triggered so much discussion about the First Amendment and free speech? After all, Bob, you said that the First Amendment does not regulate Twitter. Therefore, how can I have a show, talk about Twitter and censorship, and bring in the First Amendment? Well, frankly, I thought you’d never ask. The rest of the show will help you understand how Twitter, a private company, has triggered so much discussion about the First Amendment when, as I said earlier, it would appear the First Amendment has nothing to do about Twitter.
Introducing Robert Mahoney and The Infodemic [08:38]
Bob Zadek: As we get into this subject, I—coming attractions—I hope to have a guest with me join me on the show. I hope to have Robert Mahoney join us. Robert Mahoney has just published an entire book on censorship. He is a font of knowledge, and if we are lucky tonight, he may join us, probably sometime after the first break, and share with us all that he has learned about the subject of censorship and Twitter and the federal government at large.
And for no additional charge this evening, as a special added bonus tonight only, you’re invited to call. If you have a point of view you wish to share with us, please keep it relevant to the subject matter. Or if you have a question about censorship that is troubling you, I and my guest will do the very best we can to answer your question. The call-in number—drumroll please—888-367-5329. 888-367-5329. Your calls are welcome so long as they are on point and something which you believe the audience would be interested in hearing about.
My name is Bob Zadek. I am your host sitting in for Craig Roberts this evening. My own show, the Bob Zadek Show, is broadcast every Sunday morning from 8:00 to 9:00 AM at the KFAX sister station, 8:60 AM, The Answer. I’d love to have you listen to my show on Sunday mornings. If you happen to miss it, of course, you can always catch up on the podcast, the Bob Zadek Show podcast, wherever fine podcasts are broadcast. Thank you so much for joining me. I’ll be right back. We have a very short intermission. Perhaps we will have a guest a little bit later on. The subject this evening is censorship, Twitter, the First Amendment. Wow, what a big show we have tonight. I’ll be back in a few short minutes. Please stay tuned.
Welcome back to LifeLine, everyone. I’m Bob Zadek sitting in for your regular host, Craig Roberts. I’m host of the Bob Zadek Show. We broadcast live on KFAX’s sister station or brother station, 8:60 AM, The Answer. We broadcast live on Sunday mornings, 8:00 AM Pacific Time. We’re also live-streamed nationally at that time. And if you happen to miss the show—you overslept or whatever—just check it out on the podcast where my shows reside forever. It’s the Bob Zadek Show podcast. Today your calls are welcome: 888-367-5329.
Tonight we’re discussing censorship, Twitter, the government, and what is going on when we have a conversation discussing the First Amendment, which regulates government, in the same paragraph as we discuss Twitter, a private company. It’s a brave new world out there for censorship. To help me in this very interesting topic, you are all quite lucky. Robert Mahoney has agreed to join us and share the conversation on censorship. Robert is the author of the new book, just published, The Infodemic. Infodemic—a word Robert has, I think, invented because it is perfectly descriptive of his book. The book is entitled The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free. Robert, welcome to the show this evening.
Robert Mahoney: Very pleased to be with you.
Bob Zadek: Now Robert, tell us, just tell us so we can get into the book and the show, tell us the premise of your book and then we’ll drill down and get into our discussion in detail on censorship.
Robert Mahoney: Well, the premise of the book is that the COVID-19 pandemic was not just a health crisis, but it was a crisis of personal freedom and censorship. Because governments around the world, as the pandemic broke out, were terrified. They didn’t know what it was. They had no capacity to deal with it. So instead of engaging with us, the citizens, in a meaningful way and having a dialogue, they doubled down on censorship to cover their own incompetence and their own inability to deal with a once-in-a-century pandemic.
Censorship Through Noise [13:33]
Bob Zadek: Since one would imagine that governments would always default to censorship, at least insofar as information presents their behavior in a bad light, what is the relationship between the natural instincts of most governments to censor as much as they can—that’s a natural instinct, that’s almost a survival instinct, except perhaps in America, but it is in America as well—so we have governments with a natural instinct to censor bad news and bad information about them. How is that related to something that would appear to our listeners to be unrelated, which is COVID? What does one subject have to do with the other?
Robert Mahoney: Well, the idea in a democracy is that we take part and that we have a discussion about how we are governed. And we were being asked to lock ourselves down, to not go to work, to not send our kids to school—all kinds of infringement on our ability to lead our lives. And this was done in a way in which we were kept in the dark. We did not know why. And so governments masked their actions by controlling information in one of two ways.
They either used the old-fashioned form of censorship, which you’ve just been alluding to, which is to restrict the flow of news—think of the Soviet Union, think of China back in the day or modern Russia today. And then there’s the other form of censorship that we call here, which is “censorship through noise,” which is what we saw in the US and a couple of other liberal democracies, where you just confuse people by throwing all kinds of misinformation, lies, propaganda at them. So in the end, we don’t know what to believe.
Take, for example, the case of preventative measures like social distancing and wearing masks. Who in the United States had a clear idea of what the purpose of that was because the information landscape that we’re all living in was so damn confusing that in the end we didn’t know who to believe or what to believe.
Bob Zadek: I’m so glad, Robert, you presented it that way because that gives us a perfect opportunity to bring together several apparently disparate, different concepts because they all tie together beautifully. You explained to us how government suppresses news by drowning out news. Remember, there were physicians and healthcare professionals and epidemiologists who disagreed with the government party line, if you will, that lockdowns were the way to go, close the schools. There was an equally loud—wanted to be loud—other point of view. And we were all learning on the fly.
So when you are trying to learn what the right answer is, the best way to learn is to be exposed to as many points of view as possible and sort it all out. But it’s hard to learn if you aren’t exposed to various points of view. And Robert, as you have pointed out so well in your book, if the government had so much noise all about their view, the government view, they would simply by dint of volume, plus the use of social media which we’ll get into very shortly, by merely the result of the volume and the quantity of the government’s noise, all other views were drowned out. And that was as effective for censorship as it would have been locking up those people with a different point of view.
Robert Mahoney: Absolutely. And this phenomenon took on different aspects in different countries. But in the book, we analyze what happened here in the United States. We look at what happened in Brazil because the then-president of Brazil, Bolsonaro, was very friendly with Trump and those two had the same kind of approach. But all this confusion in the US in particular reflected the confusion that was going on in the White House itself. And we talked to people who were there in some of the conversations. And there was a desire to cover up bad news, to suppress bad news, to downplay the severity of the disease.
And don’t forget, the disease itself helped in the beginning because some of the symptoms were just like having flu, and we didn’t know what we were dealing with. We were in terrible ignorance. And it’s only as people started dying and ICU beds became scarce that the government realized it couldn’t cope. And that’s when it started embracing theories like you could take anti-malarials to treat this. And so all of this was just a big morass of confusion and lies. And it was done deliberately. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former aide, said that what you need to do is flood the zone with garbage (only he used a less polite word than that) in order to create this confusion. And that’s exactly what’s happened in this country. It’s what happened in Brazil as well. It left people confused, and people didn’t know how to protect themselves. Hence, the US has over a million COVID deaths out of six million globally, yet we don’t represent a sixth of the world’s population. That ought to tell us something right there.
The Twitter Files and Private Companies as Government Actors [20:01]
Bob Zadek: It sure would. And what’s quite interesting is, and your book’s sales have to become greater than they would have become naturally, despite the fact that it’s a quality bit of research, but despite that, what Elon Musk is doing now daily in the Twitter Files—what book will be written about the Twitter Files?—he is disclosing the role that Twitter played, which introduces a wonderful, wonderful hard legal, constitutional question, which is: When does the Constitution start to have something to say about the behavior of a private company?
Putting that question another way: Is there a point in time when a private company—we’ll use Twitter because it is such a living example—when does a private company become enough like government that it is government? Because if it does cross that line and behave more like government or doing the government’s bidding, is acting like they’re under the control day-to-day of a government, then it’s not a big jump to say it is government. Therefore, the First Amendment applies and Twitter has as little right to censor as does the government. Wow, is this interesting stuff. We’re going to cover a lot more of that after our very short break. We are talking with Robert Mahoney. Robert has just published The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free. This is Bob Zadek sitting in for Craig Roberts. I’ll be right back. Lots more to follow.
Welcome back to LifeLine, everyone. I’m Bob Zadek, guest hosting for Craig Roberts this evening. And thank you, Craig, for giving me an opportunity to share your audience on this Tuesday evening. I’m host of the Bob Zadek Show, which broadcasts every Sunday on KFAX’s sister station or brother station, 8:60 AM, The Answer. We broadcast Sunday mornings at 8:00 AM Pacific Time. We’re also live-streamed nationally at that time. And if you happen to miss the show—you overslept or whatever—just check it out on the podcast where my shows reside forever. It’s the Bob Zadek Show podcast, Z-A-D-E-K, Bob Zadek Show, and my podcast is wherever fine podcasts are broadcast, you’ll find my show. Thank you so much for listening to LifeLine tonight.
My guest tonight is Robert Mahoney. Robert, in a perfectly timed publication of a book, has just started selling The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free. Robert examines in great detail the confluence of the pandemic, the COVID pandemic on the one hand, and the extraordinary use of the sophisticated tool of censorship used by governments in the US and around the world to take giant steps towards the suppressing of free speech.
Today we are discussing censorship. We are going to examine the relationship between Twitter and its behavior as exposed by Elon Musk in his release over time, drip, drip, drip, of what has come to be called the Twitter Files, where he, as now the sole owner of Twitter, is exposing heretofore private information in the Twitter files and in its servers about Twitter’s behavior over the recent past, specifically regarding matters of censorship.
And we are starting to learn—and this is so interesting for anybody who even has a passing curiosity about the Constitution in general and free speech in particular—we are learning that Twitter, albeit a private enterprise, had lots of very interesting, intense, intimate contacts with the federal government, perhaps state governments, but tonight we are talking about the federal government. And the federal government had a substantial degree of control over what Twitter allowed to be published, allowed to be circulated, allowed to be promoted, and what Twitter suppressed so that it wasn’t available to the public. And in doing so, Twitter got to do the bidding of the government.
So if Twitter is now censoring, which they clearly were, certain private speech and encouraging other private speech, and they were doing so under the guidance of the government, how is that different than if some federal agency was doing it? In other words, Twitter was behaving an awful lot like a federal agency. Uh-oh, if they are behaving like a federal agency, it wouldn’t be a giant step for a court to determine that insofar as the First Amendment is concerned, Twitter is a governmental agency, not for all purposes, but for First Amendment purposes. Then what Twitter did, not only is bad for business perhaps, but it is illegal and they cannot do it. And then what would that do to the rest of social media and what will that do to mainstream media? This is all “tune in later” because we don’t know how it’s going to turn out.
Now Robert, in your book, you’ve explored and explained how government used Twitter in specific and social media more broadly to censor, which means promote certain ideas and drown out others. So lest the audience believe I am simply making this stuff up, put a little meat on those bones, Robert. Tell us about the relationship of government on the one hand, social media on the other, as you have learned in studying their behavior during COVID.
Robert Mahoney: Right. Well, let me just say that, I mean, first of all, I and my fellow author, Joel Simon, when we did our research for this book, Twitter was a different company under the ownership of Jack Dorsey. It had nothing to do with Elon Musk and everything that you’ve just been saying about the revelations in the last week in the Twitter Files is new. That wasn’t part of what we were looking at back in 2020.
I think that in the book, we look at the role that social media played across not just platforms but also across countries. We didn’t single out Twitter in particular, but it’s part of the analysis that we do along with Facebook and other social media platforms. The big thing here is that everybody that had a message that they wanted to get out used these platforms to amplify that message. And the way that these companies are constructed, the algorithms, the instructions that are given to a piece of content, are that if it gets you to stay longer in front of your screen, it promotes that piece of content. In other words, enragement is engagement. In other words, you get angry, you stay in front of the screen. This is picked up, that piece of news, that piece of information is amplified and goes out.
A lot of the government used that, so did other private individuals, so too did news organizations. I don’t think, from what I’ve seen of the revelations of the last week that Elon Musk has been putting out, that the federal government was telling Twitter what to do. But Twitter was acting under public pressure to edit certain content, particularly around tweets that we saw come from some political leaders, including Donald Trump, around cures or treatments rather for COVID, such as anti-malarials, hydroxychloroquine, and others. Those things were at first promoted and then Twitter started to de-amplify them, in other words, not to promote them. That was part of the way that social media was used by everybody to get their message out.
Mainstream Media vs. Social Media Censorship [30:13]
Bob Zadek: Now social media, as I said in my introduction, social media—the starting point of this discussion is that social media, a private business, is allowed, is allowed to censor. We have had—the media has censored in America and in the world for as long as there has been media. After all, everybody knows and does not mind that a newspaper which publishes letters to the editor (if there are such things as letters anymore, don’t even know anymore, but if there are letters to the editor), the newspaper will decide which ones to publish. It is their right. There is a limited amount of space, obviously, and to publish uninteresting letters doesn’t promote readership. Nobody minds if mainstream media—and I’m selecting newspapers, but it could be any media—selects who gets to have their letter published and who does not. And we don’t mind that.
Well, what’s different? Well, what’s different is it’s the question of degree, profound difference in degree. Social media today has the ability to broadcast over a wide, wide swath of its users certain tweets or certain published material that one of its users, whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or the like, and it has the ability to suppress others. And because of the magnitude, the number of users, and because the effect is so profound, when Twitter simply does on steroids what media has always done since there has been media, the effect is more profound.
And what the Twitter Files have been showing us is, almost on a daily basis, the FBI was in close contact with Twitter, expressing great suspicion—at least the FBI seems to have been concerned or suggesting to Twitter that the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was first released by the New York Post, a tabloid in New York City, when it was first released, the FBI and other governmental officials were suggesting to Twitter (and when I say suggest, there are air quotes around it) were suggesting to Twitter that this may have been hacked material. And with a wink and a nod, in other words, the FBI was indicating they would look with great displeasure if Twitter were to publish the story.
Well, it gets to be, yes, Twitter had a choice, something like “dark alley, gun at your head, your money and your life.” Your response is not going to be, “Well, let me see, I’ll get back to you later on that.” No, that’s a choice which is not a choice. And the claim is that the government was giving social media more broadly and Twitter in general that kind of a Hobson’s choice. And if so, Twitter was acting voluntarily (air quotes) at the request of the government. And was the government behaving badly? Was Twitter behaving badly? And what are the constitutional implications? We’ll examine that and more when we come back from our very short break. We are talking with Robert Mahoney, who has just published The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free. Lots more to follow, don’t go away.
The Collapse of Trust and News Deserts [34:40]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to LifeLine, everyone. I’m your guest host Bob Zadek, sitting in for Craig Roberts this evening. And thank you, Craig, for giving me an opportunity to share your audience on this Tuesday evening. I’m host of the Bob Zadek Show, which broadcasts every Sunday on KFAX’s sister station, 8:60 AM, The Answer. We broadcast Sunday mornings at 8:00 AM Pacific Time. And if you happen to miss the show, don’t fret, just listen to the podcast. All of my shows are stored forever, if not longer, at the Bob Zadek Show podcast, available wherever podcasts are located.
Tonight we are having a conversation with Robert Mahoney. Robert has just published The Infodemic. Infodemic—what a wonderful word, Robert. How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free. Questions for Robert or questions for myself: 888-367-5329. 888-367-5329. Now Robert, listeners—sorry, readers of your book will learn there was a lot of information that I don’t think I’ve seen available anywhere else. Help our listeners out there understand what is the type of information, what is the content that, relevant to today’s show (probably all of it is), which the listeners could learn in detail from your book? How would they—what information would they have to help them understand more fully what has happened in the past to be alert to it so we don’t—we do not let it happen again in the future?
Robert Mahoney: Well, the biggest thing that I think people should take away from the pandemic is the collapse of trust between the public and institutions. Whether that institution is our government, our health institutions, the media, there was a rupture in trust between the public and these institutions that are supposed to make sense of the world for us and to help us when we are facing something as unknown and potentially deadly as this pandemic.
And what happened here in the US is that the information that should have been given to people in an objective way and in a timely way so that they could know what they were facing and what measures they needed to take to protect themselves became politicized. It became weaponized very quickly. And the information available to Americans was largely in two camps: on the right or on the left. Social media, as we’ve been talking about, amplified a lot of the misinformation and the lies in the middle, and it left people confused. So we had states where people were not taking the pandemic as seriously as others, where they did not wear masks, they did not observe social distancing and other health protocols, and other states that were locked down tight like a drum and where everybody was forced to wear a mask.
So what I see also amplifying this was the lack of good old-fashioned journalism. You see, the United States has gone through an upheaval in the last 15 years, losing thousands and thousands of newspapers, local newspapers, to the point where we now talk about there being “news deserts” in the US where there are no local newspapers, where there are no local reporters. So if you’re sitting in one of these news deserts, you’ve got scary stories amplified on Facebook or Twitter, you’ve got Fox News on the one side and MSNBC on the other side, but you’ve got no one that is telling you in your local community, someone that you can trust, what is going on and what you might be doing. Because local journalists are from the community, you might know them, they know you. That lack of local reporting amplified the mess that we already had, and we still have not got anywhere near restoring that trust in our institutions and in our government. That may be a longer-lasting effect of this pandemic.
Media Literacy and the “Sprouts” of New Media [39:26]
Bob Zadek: You know, Robert, you’re quite right in what you said in referring to a news desert. I always look for—I am just hardwired to be quite positive. And the positive—not spin, that would suggest it’s artificial—but to take the same observation and present it in a slightly different light, just very slightly, is I say we don’t have—I would use a different metaphor. I don’t see our country being a news desert. The metaphor I would use: it’s like a forest where the trees have all burned down, but not yesterday, they burned down two months ago. And what do we see if we were to walk through that former forest? We would see sprouts of little plants, an inch, three inches tall, starting to grow all over the place. We would see no trees, but we would see plenty of life.
What I see, carrying my metaphor one step further, is there is more media available than ever before on the planet. However, it’s in a different form. It’s not a tall sequoia; it is a sprout. There are bloggers and there are many more channels available, there are many more online publications. There’s all the news you possibly could want from every different point of view. The trouble is, it’s not as if you have one newspaper, one dominant newspaper, or three dominant newspapers, or three dominant stations. So no decision, just randomly pick a channel or pick a webpage and just read it. You have to do some work. But the result will be, like picking the right doctor, you will feel better and you will be better and your brain will be better as a result.
So I hope you can join me, Robert, or correct me if I’m being overly optimistic. The media is out there, the information is available, it is not being suppressed. There’s too much; it’s impossible to suppress it all. It just requires more work to find it, but the work pays off.
Robert Mahoney: Absolutely. They call that media literacy sometimes. We need to make sure that people are schooled in how to discern between good and bad information.
Bob Zadek: And if you, my listener friends out there, are concerned, “Woe is me, how do I pick the right media?” You have a brain. You will know. You will know. And the only advice I will give you as we regretfully run out of time with our guest this evening, Robert Mahoney. What you will discover is it takes a little bit of work, but when you have the media you select, the sources of information you select, when they are speaking to your brain at the right level, you will know about it. Just like you know when you feel good. Your brain will know when it’s being fed the proper diet of objective information. Your brain will know, don’t worry about how to figure it out.
So my parting for this evening suggestion is just be selective who you listen to and do not select media based upon how it makes you feel. It’s like living off candy. It tastes pretty gosh-darn good, but you’re going to die a short, unpleasant death if all you eat is candy. So don’t give your brain the candy of feeling good and listening to media just because it gives you confirmation bias and makes you feel good. So there’s more media than ever. You enjoy more media than anybody else on Earth has ever enjoyed. It’s available and take advantage of it.
Robert, Robert’s book is—Robert Mahoney, his book is The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free. It’s a must-read. Feed your brain, you’ll learn from it, you’ll become a better consumer of the media, and you’ll be more alert when somebody is trying to censor your views. Robert, thank you so much for your book and thank you for sharing some time with us this evening.
Robert Mahoney: Thank you, Bob. It’s been a great pleasure.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much. Goodnight, everyone.