Episode 6: Diane Francis, Journalist, Force of Nature

Diane Francis is a journalist, author, and editor-at-large for the National Post. Her areas of expertise include—Canada-U.S. relations, Silicon Valley, future technology, geopolitics, the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and white-collar crime. Diane’s popular Twitter feed on tech and corruption has more than 240,000 followers.

Always provocative, Diane’s direct and dynamic point of view established her international reputation covering stories about corruption, politics, economics, and technology. On this week’s podcast, our conversation with Diane includes questions such as:

Will governments pass fair compensation legislation, or will they allow the truth to die?

How do we correct the COVID Infodemic?

Should Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the U.S. be repealed?

Join Diane Francis and the Decentralists crew as we delve deeper into issues that matter.

Transcript

Henry : Hey everyone, it's Henry, Mike, and Chris of The Decentralists, and are we ever excited to have a very special guest today; none other than Diane Francis, we call her the journalist provocateur but let me tell you a little bit about Diane. She is an expert on Canada, US relations, Silicon Valley, future technology, geopolitics, the Ukraine-Russia conflict, energy, business, and white-collar crime, always provocative her direct and forceful writing has established her international reputation in covering the personalities, trends, and financial back` stories that affect companies, individuals, governments and societies. 

Her popular Twitter feed on tech and corruption has more than 240,000 followers, an award-winning columnist, and bestselling author of 10 books, investigative journalist, speaker, and television commentator. She is the editor at large at Canada's National Post and columnist for American Interest, Atlantic Council's UkraineAlert, and Kyiv Post. Francis is faculty at Singularity University in Mountain View, California, a distinguished visiting professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, and sits on the boards of the Hudson Institute's Kleptocracy Initiative in DC and the Canada-US Law Institute in Cleveland. Wow Diane, welcome to The Decentralists.

Diane Francis: Glad to be here.

Mike : Wow, welcome, Diane, I have to ask you, I was reading the bio on your website and you describe yourself as an anti to stupidity pundit, and I'd like to join that club, so how do I get in?

Diane Francis: Yeah, it's kind of a cheeky thing, but yeah, that's how I describe myself on Twitter. I think that it's the anti-stupidity anti-corruption pro-tech activist.

Henry : Well, I wish that there were more like you. Diane, I grew up in Toronto and I remember your name from the Toronto Star and how over the years, you've become a very successful journalist, so any tips for bloggers and influencers that are out there today trying to make a difference on social media?

Diane Francis: Well, I think that there's one thing you have to write clearly, and you have to have something to say that people can't read elsewhere, have a unique take on things, if you want to be crazy and rant and rave and write Tweets, that's one audience. If you want a broader audience, you have to be more rational and a little calm down, it doesn't mean don't have anger and impassioned essays, but you have to have facts and you have to back it up, it can't just be off of the top of your head. 

So, that's sort of my style and that's what I would counsel anybody who's interested in doing it, you have to decide on what audience, do you want a big audience? Do you want a small audience, a specialized, a general audience, an American audience, a Canadian audience? It varies and as a writer, you learn how to do this and it will determine what length you write, what vocabulary you use, how much of the thesaurus you use, it just determines the whole thing.

Mike : So, Diane, let me ask you a little further on that because when I think about kind of the assault on journalism; we've been losing newspapers by the dozens every year, and local TV and all these other things, kind of the occupation of journalist seems to kind of be a bit in decline. But if you look at this idea of bloggers and influencers, as Henry was just talking about, you could also interpret that as almost being like a new breed of journalism. 

Now, so one of the things that I think that we've talked with previously or many different times is this idea that one of the challenges with social media where most bloggers and influencers exist as quote-unquote journalists, is that it's basically a no-holds-barred kind of goat rodeo of an environment. And so, do you think that kind of uncontrolled kind of medium of expression affects kind of the quality of what you would call journalism if we were to interpret that as a blogger or as an influencer on social media?

Diane Francis: Well, I interpret journalism as anyone who's paid to write, anybody who just blah blahs is doing it for their own interest and if you are a journalist, you are paid by somebody or that somebody could be the people that read you, somehow there has to be some kind of shall we say remuneration for you to be a valid journalist. That doesn't mean that people can't do journalistic kinds of things, well, they can write about things and so on, but everybody thinks that they're a writer now and an editor and a photographer and that has made the landscape very noisy and very crowded. 

What's happened to real journalism, let's call it real journalism, what's happened to real journalism is that journalism isn't in trouble, but the business model has imploded and the internet destroyed the business model by taking, Google, by taking our content and not paying us fees for it. If instead, the newspaper world had sued Google to prevent that and demand fees up front, it'd be a very different situation now, Steven Jobs at one point also, who loved newspapers and was concerned about the arts because he was in fact, an artist himself, not a technical person, proposed sort of an iTunes idea to the newspaper world, but they weren't willing to share one another's readers. 

So, they actually hoisted their own petard and divided they fell, and so what they mostly did was spend most of the, after the internet became really commercialized in the early nineties, they spent the next decade consolidating, buying each other out, consolidating, reducing the titles, cutting jobs, doing all of that but not replacing anything. The only journalistic enterprise or entrepreneur who saw it coming and tried to do something about it was Rupert Murdoch and he sued, but he said, I can't be the only one suing, so he saw the handwriting on the wall that other people did not see. 

In the early days, I tried to tell the proprietors of the newspaper chain in Canada that I worked for, which was Canada's largest and they didn't even understand it, they didn't, and they went bankrupt three years later. So basically, what a person who aspires to be a real journalist; that is a person who writes and is paid for it, has to do, is to find or create their own business model so that they can support themselves.

Now, if it's a trust fund, lucky them or use it as a sideline and blogs are one, websites are another, newsletters are another and of course, writing in freelancing, but newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, all of whom I've written for, they will not pay any freelance unless that person's an established writer. They won't even read anybody's stuff unless they're an established writer, not because they're nasty, but because they're sinking and they can't spend the time to edit, deal with or pay freelancers and, even on their digital sites, which you could say, well, they have unlimited space, they could take everybody's stuff. 

But they can't, they have to curate it, they have to edit it and they have to have professional people that are highly skilled and highly paid in charge of that, of laying it out and writing the headlines and putting copy art to it. It's a cost, so what you have is a shrinking place for real journalism to [Cross-Talking].

Mike : Yeah, like a legitimate channel.

Diane Francis: Yeah, and in three years, the TV network's model will implode, that is going in three years, YouTube was, of course, the start of it and what killed newspapers was that we lost our advertising base and we couldn't pay for our content, so we couldn't provide content and we'd lose more advertising, it became a vicious circle, a spiral downward. What's going to sink the TV, television networks is that all these sports franchises are going to have their own TV streaming.

Mike : Yes, they do, yep, that's right.

Diane Francis: So, they won't need them and 60 or 70% of the revenue for the major networks, except for the BBC, which is supported directly by users, are directly because of sports, and live things like the Academy Awards, all of this is going to be bypassed. They can't support news organizations, we've already seen the result, we have the worst TV journalism ever, you go to the big networks in the US that have audiences and all that they do is blah, blah, blah, blah politics. They have pundits, they have no foreign bureaus, they don't cover wars, they don't cover street crime, they don't cover business unless they're a business channel, and it’s just poorly serving society, which used to be more generally served better.

Mike : Right, okay, so I think that's all totally true, Diane and I feel sad because I like legitimate journalism and I think that we need that voice, I think that we need somebody who can pick something and go after the topic and try to educate us all.

Diane Francis: What the internet has done and the way it's constructed now and I understand that you're decentralists and there is a lot of architecture out there that could restore but what it's done is it has absolutely obliterated the creative classes. Writers, musicians, the photographers, illustrators’ designers, all have been replaced and they can't make a living, and so you've taken away a huge number of people that were safely in the middle class doing creative things that were a benefit to a lot of people and that's all gone.

Mike : Well, and that's interesting that you say that Diane because one of the things that you mentioned is that we're decentralist, and that is basically our kind of mantra, we've been chasing this idea; we started with this idea trying to fix social media. It started back in February of 2018, speaking of journalism; I read an article in The Economist that was talking about how social media could be used even legitimately to influence public opinion, and then a month later, the Cambridge Analytica thing breaks. 

And everybody now realizes that the legitimate 2016 election results could be questioned, the Brexit thing could be questioned and I think that they've identified something crazy, like 48 other elections that were tampered with. And so, one of the things that you start to realize is that with the power of messaging in so few hands, centralized in these big pools where everybody has to compete, it's a big ocean and we all have to compete, the fish that has bigger teeth wins over the smaller ones and all this other kind of stuff. 

And so, one of the things that we've been trying to do is this idea of changing the architecture of the internet fundamentally where people are the centre of the connections and the service providers are exactly that. Now, it's strange, it's peer-to-peer and that was what the internet was at the beginning of time but it's now become this thing where none of us have our own unique presence anymore. I remember back in the early days when you had to plug your modem into the wall and you had to dial a number and make a connection and you basically were physically connected to this virtual world whereas now, there's an avatar for me at Facebook and an avatar for me at Google and an avatar for me in all of these places.

Diane Francis: The business model, is espionage and propaganda, these are not tech companies, they use tech, they are advertising agencies, they sell ads to any disgusting entity without checking them, which has been the big problem and then they propagandize and spread disinformation to the great unwashed with fire hoses. And the other thing is that they spy on everybody who's on the system by selling their personal stuff, their journeys online, and so on. I would say that my Loadstar for all of this and one of the most incredible books I've ever read was, 'Who Owns the Future?' and 'Who Owns the Future?' has it all and the author has a solution that's Jaron gosh, what's his name? Lanier.

Mike : Lanier, that's the guy that was one of the very first ones that we actually saw, he's a brilliant storyteller.

Diane Francis: Jaron Lanier suggested and he's the chief scientist at Microsoft now, and he's a musician, he's a genius and Jaron suggested and he put down in "Who Owns the Future?" the book was written in 2011, I read it or 12 and he just set it out. He said that the business model is propaganda and espionage, it is immoral, it is going to ruin everything, and that it's going to put all the power in the hands of five or six Silicon Valley giants, all of which became true. Now, what he proposed was, which is what I would counsel you if you're going to come up with the tech and the architecture, he wrote it out in the book, he said that a web-based on Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu. 

And what it is, is a two-way linking system that points to the source of any piece of information, creating an economy of micropayments that compensates people for original material that they post to the web. So, in other words, the creative classes; the editors, the writers, the photographers the musicians, can get micropayments every time that somebody clicks on their stuff. And then you can restore that creative class and you would have an explosion in creativity again and you'd eliminate the fact that intermediaries who just want to spy on you and sell you crap, are making all of the money.

Chris : Diane, you are speaking our language, I just want to affirm that, something that we realized long ago is that it's as you said, the tech industry right now is not really about tech, right now, and it’s about owning you. Personal identity right now is worth 4.2 trillion dollars, we looked that up a while ago, it may have increased since the last time that we looked it up and what that basically means is that Google, Facebook, all of them, they're in the business of knowing as much about you as possible.

Diane Francis: Right, that's the espionage part of the business model, the other part is propaganda and the espionage they do for the people that want to spread, whether it's garbage about diets or books that they're selling or crazy ideologies or hate, that's what they're doing. And so, they facilitate that, so I wondered if to ask to reverse it, I saw something that you wrote that was interesting, I don't understand the tech, but what I do know is that Jaron had it very clearly stated about how this could work on a one-to-one base, a two-way linking system that was set out in project Xanadu and could be changed. 

But it's a technological engineering change at the very top, so the people that run the internet have to say, yes, this is what we're going to do; it wouldn't be up to politicians or companies to do, so that's a beta that I want to see.

Mike : Well, Diane, we'll have one for you in a couple of weeks, our approach is that you can't even take it to a corporate level; it has to come to the individual level. The idea is that who each of us connects to and what we see and what we view should be our choice as you mentioned the propaganda and espionage is because they own the channel of communication between any of us and anything else, whether it's a person or a service.

Diane Francis: Because we let them do it without knowing it.

Mike : Totally, and well, it just happened, I remember, and it wasn't that long ago, the web didn't look fundamentally different and you could surf websites and everything was fine, now every website that you go to has a gate where they're trying to push you towards making you create a username and a password. So, that they can take that piece of espionage that's theirs, and maybe it's food delivery, and they can sell the data as to how many people order pepperoni pizzas in Vancouver. 

But the idea is that if you look at one of the things, we've had a bunch of different discussions with digital creatives, people like advertisers and journalists and musicians, and you have this promise of this great reach on something like Spotify. But if you get a million listens to your song on Spotify, you make a hundred dollars, that used to be a platinum record, and so the idea should be is, or at least the way that we want to do it is that each one of us should have a little container that has all of this stuff that we create. 

So, you're a journalist, Diane, you type all your articles up, it's in your container, and then when you choose to connect to somebody, it's basically digitally watermarked that it came from you and you're essentially allowing people to view that content from within your container, but you're not sending copies of it all over the place. So, that it can be taken and stolen and all of this and the idea is that these connections are all encrypted and they're all one-to-one.

Diane Francis: And you need a system of micropayments.

Mike : Basically, and it would be direct micropayments, it doesn't even have to involve some weird token or cryptocurrency or anything like this, we envision this future, Diane, where let's say the internet was essentially a big advertising board of QR codes and you'd have Nike or The Toronto Star. And they would say, you want to come and read our articles and do our things, click here, and you can have it for free or click here and it's a dollar. Or if Nike says, I want to advertise to you and you can say, okay, I'll come and join and watch your ads, but you're going to pay me to do that, this type of thing. 

And now, what you do is, it's just a simple little shift, you take the balance of power by instead of the funnel being each of us attaching ourselves to a fire hose every time that we join one of these sites like Facebook is what 2 billion people screaming. You have a little straw and you just decide I'm going to be on Facebook and then I'm going to disconnect from Facebook because the connection's yours, so you choose to connect, and then when you'd want to choose to disconnect, you disconnect, it breaks an encrypted connection and now there's no way back to you.

Henry : Oh, I don't want to follow Nike anymore, oh, I don't want their advertising anymore, boom, they're gone for good because you control everything.

Mike : So, if you take that to the logical level, and this relates back to the original comment on stupidity, let's look at what's happened this week in Washington. You have these groups that I would argue that there's no way that these groups naturally without kind of an algorithmically driven kind of social media feed, that's pushing people and radicalizing them into these groups, like Proud Boys and whoever else. You would not see thousands or hundreds of thousands of these people out there and yet they get pulled into this echo chamber, all of a sudden because everybody's trying to find friends online or to get influence. 

So, you go, Hey, if I join this community, all of a sudden I'll have 1500 friends, quote-unquote, and then you're driven down this radical path.

Diane Francis: And they can create flash mobs very quickly.

Mike : Totally.

Chris : Exactly, something that we often say Diane, is that if it's a social algorithm, in fact, it's an editorial whether it's made by a machine or not. So, every single time that somebody sees the Proud Boys in their newsfeed, that's an editorial right there.

Mike : So, what do you think it is Diane, one of the things that happen on social media is people read it and believe that it's true? How do you break that cycle?

Diane Francis: Well, that's nothing that tech can do, that has always been the case; people before the internet came, remember every newspaper in the world is an echo chamber itself, the Democrat, it's a Republican, it's socialist, it's whatever it is, they feedback beliefs and information that they think that their audience wants. So, it's audience feedback-driven and then the advertisers say, well, we want those Democrats in that demographic, so we'll advertise there, but we want a piece of the Republican paper so we'll also advertise there. 

So, that's how it works, that's how it's always worked, so people, people will gravitate toward those who they think share their same opinions and values and if they're aggregated commercially, then voila, you have yourself a feedback loop. You brought yourself a little closed shelter, people do not, I know it myself as a professional writer for 50 years, it is constantly disappointing to me how even educated people are lazy and do not look at both sides, do not analyze, do not care about facts if they see someone's shill and Trump was the best shill that I've ever noticed in my career as a politician. 

If someone is a good shill, they'll follow him and it's not just because they're stupid, many times they are, but it's not only that, so getting around the problem of human nature is not something tech can or should even aspire to do, that's scary.

Mike : So, then how do people determine what is truth or what is a fact, or is it always going to be an arbitrary kind of decision that people make?

Diane Francis: Well, facts are facts, truth is a philosophical concept and Aristotle wrote about it and the religious guys have written about it, what is truth? Truth is not a static thing, it's not a single thing, but a fact is a fact [Cross-Talking].

Mike : But there are people who would say that's not true.

Diane Francis: Well, they're morons, that's not it. No, there's no such thing as alternative facts, the fact is that there are 335 million people in the United States, that's a fact, it also happens to be true because it's a fact.

Henry : Right, Diane, I've read a lot of your articles and then I had to prepare for this and I didn't realize that there is almost a thousand or whatever, but the fact is I'd like to ask a question regarding a specific article that you wrote in Singularity Hub back in June 2018. It was just June 28th feels like five years ago, but you wrote about the newly passed EU GDPR legislation, the US Cloud Act, and Apple refusing to unlock a Californian terrorist's iPhone, I remember that well, and the danger of AI-controlled facial recognition. Now, do you have any thoughts on the evolution and consequences of those events intended or unintended over the last one and a half years?

Diane Francis: Well, each one of those issues is enormous, books have been written about it and courses given on it but I think that if I had to boil down, the problem with tech is in three areas, first of all, there's the espionage area, which is related to privacy. So, on the one hand, I don't want anybody sharing my personal information, so I shouldn't give it to them, now if they promised not to bring it to anybody else, they better not and that's where Apple became unstuck. The police wanted them to open up someone's cell phone, but they didn't have permission to share that information with police, they could share it with advertisers.

Mike : That's funny.

Diane Francis: So, you have the issue of privacy and as the espionage slash privacy issue, by the way, this has always been a problem, not espionage, but advertising standards have been a constant problem in all kinds of societies; snake oil salesmen, and truth in advertising legislation and all of these things, none of which these tech companies have to ascribe to and none of which are held up as standards against their advertisers. So, one of the things that you have to do and isn't being done is on the issue of espionage and privacy, is that you have to enshrine and protect privacy, that no one can use your information, unless you agree to it and even if you agree to it, then you get to see who they shared it with and that's the European model. 

Secondly, on the advertising, you have to make the tech companies and this is where section 230 comes in, section 230 has to lift the immunity from content off these guys because that's the basis of their wealth. When you lift immunity from content, they'll have to curate the advertising to make sure that it's true and fair and not hateful and racist and they'll have to curate the stupid splurges that people put on their Facebook or their Google or their Twitter pages to eliminate racism and hate.

Henry : And they'll have to spend money to do that.

Diane Francis: And un-factual, yeah, Hey, welcome to newspapers, that's what we've always had to do. So, they haven't had to do that, so they just let anything go, so there's the privacy issue and the propaganda issue and espionage and privacy are all part of the same problem.

Henry : The US Cloud Act and the AI-controlled facial recognition.

Diane Francis: Oh, okay, The Cloud Act wouldn't fall into the privacy, espionage, propaganda baskets, we have to regulate the development, application, and research into artificial intelligence, this is not being done now, and we already have fake images, fake everything on the internet and people can't be expected to know. YouTube and Google are already flagging and vetting for outright fraudulent photographs and video and they probably do a pretty good job, but I still think that artificial intelligence is the biggest issue facing the world because, and I wrote a piece in American Interest last year, that this is as important as was a nuclear non-proliferation treaty in the second World War and that either happens or look out.

Mike : Right, well, I think that the other thing that I try to point out on this whole issue of artificial intelligence and things like machine learning and all of these, is that they're all generally based on things like algorithms and algorithms are basically mathematical, they're generally set up where you come up with the answer that you want. So, in the case of social media, the answer is every post maximizes the number of times that it gets reposted or forwarded or whatever, so that the traffic is maximized. 

And then you basically create an equation behind it that essentially says no matter what the input is the output has to be this, so if you and it's funny, I saw this, I don't know if you saw this, Diane, I remember that I was watching, I think that it was, David Letterman's back doing these interview shows, he's got a big beard and he looks like a hillbilly.

Diane Francis: Yeah.

Mike : And he was interviewing Barack Obama, did you see the part where he was talking about, I think that it was just when he came into his first term and they called him into the office to show him the results of three Google searches and they basically, he said that he came in and they had three people sitting at a computer. One of them was right-wing, one of them was left-wing, and one of them was a moderate and they had them each type in, I think that it was something like Egypt or something like this into their search fields or Tharir Square, that's what it was. 

And the left-wing person got protests against inequality in Egypt, the moderate got something about disturbances and things like this in Cairo and the right-wing people got vacation ads for Sharm el-Sheikh, it's just crazy and it's exactly the same time.

Diane Francis: Yeah, I've written about it, another great book was written about 10 years ago by Eli Pariser and he coined the term filter bubble, and this is exactly what he warned about and nobody's done anything about it. So, that people are reading what the tech is set up to believe based on your internet journeys and your clicks, what you want to hear, and so nobody gets out of their bubbles. So, that's an old problem, that's been around for a long time, but on the other hand, if I buy a book on Amazon, they'll give me 10 book ideas of things that people that bought the book I bought also bought and I kind of like that [Cross-Talking].

Henry : Yeah, that's interesting.

Diane Francis: It's interesting but it's rooted in the same problem, and so yes, to me, that is a manipulation of information on the search platform and that is potentially very dangerous. And that's something the Europeans have taken onto, they're talking about website rankings, they're talking about how do you determine the order? What kind of ads do people see? That's part of the propaganda, espionage game.

Mike : Well, and I think that it's funny, I talk about it and I kind of use this analogy of Frankenstein's Monster, to me, there is two aspects of the data that is collected and used in this for the purposes of espionage and propaganda, there's the metadata. So, some entity at this IP address, which means that they know kind of roughly where it is, you're in Vancouver, you're in Toronto, went and bought a pair of running shoes, that type of information, the metadata that's transmitted, where you clicked all these things, that piece has been kind of in the tech company's backyard forever. 

And that's the piece that they started to use to target these advertising and stuff like this, so I kind of likened it to, each of them has their own little piece of this Frankenstein's Monster, but then it wasn't until social media kind of came and put the brain into the monster and gave all of this anonymous metadata, a face, a name, friends, family, birthdays, likes, all of that. So, you start to kind of, think about this idea where they talk about the precision that was used during the 2016 election, where they basically zeroed in and micro-targeted, 70,000 voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan with like a million dollars each worth of ads.

Diane Francis: They do that to sell newspapers and condoms, filter bubbles, e create ourselves because they capture what we do online and they just put us in our own bubble of our own creation and that is an issue and that is also another problem. And I think that the Europeans are kind of looking at that, but this is a huge problem and I really think that, have you seen the terrific documentary, Social Dilemma?

Mike : Absolutely.

Diane Francis: Brilliant, I think that it should be shown in schools every month, everybody should see this, people are in filtered bubbles of their own device and they are stuck there and they don't ever change and they're bombarded and they don't know what they don't know, and they learn more and more about less and less. And this is the problem with the electorate, the problem with advertising, the problem with policy, with politics, it really all goes back to that. 

So look, I think that the era before tech wasn't necessarily wonderful either but this has just been purposely more insidious and more secret than before and I think that has to stop and I thought that a lot of the things that Andrew Yang said during the presidential campaign were really smart because he's a techie, he knows this. He's the only guy I've ever seen in politics anywhere on the planet that says this is wrong and that's what we have to do, he really does get it, so I hope he plays more and more of a role in public life to mean more, I think that he will.

Mike : So, let me ask you on that one, if you think about it, in 2016, the left in the US blamed Facebook for Trump's election victory, and in 2020, the right is blaming Facebook for Trump's loss. And there's been a lot of discussion about the section 230 law that basically makes these social media platforms not responsible as publishers. Okay. And so, on the one the logical part of me thinks, well, then they have to repeal it, they have to get rid of it, they have to remove the protections, they have to make it just as expensive to do business for these guys as they can, or as they should be. 

But then, on the other hand, is there not a kind of a bit in the back of somebody's mind, who's thinking, okay, wait for a second, the one thing that these platforms give me with the way that they're set up right now, where they're centrally controlled, is at least I know that if I have more money or more smarts than the other person who I'm running against, I can game the system and win the election. And so, if you think of it that way, is there really any incentive for any political party, either left or right or wherever they are to actually stop social media from giving them that platform that they can just buy their way into an election?

Diane Francis: I don't know, but I think that this is on the basis of the rule of law, we're talking about the rule of law now, and we're not just talking about Donald Trump getting the Russians to do the stuff on Facebook that he did, we're not just talking about the Russian doing what they did in Brexit, that's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is the fact that anybody can advertise anything to anyone, anytime, anywhere, they can make it up, the ad can sound okay, but you click through to some creepy site that gets hold of you through cookies and your lives miserable. 

The amount of fraud committed on the internet is breathtaking, the police don't even bother with it, so the whole point is that they have to be forced to police themselves, period, and that's not big brother, that's what we do in the, we can't print an ad by some scurrilous advertiser who wants to sell condoms, that don't exist. If it slips through the cracks, my newspaper will get sued out of business, they should have the same burden, they're publishers, they call themselves a platform, that's nonsense, they're publishing, they're republishing information and that requires responsibility. 

Now, as far as ADEM saying, oh, Facebook cost us the election and the Republicans saying the same thing, that's irrelevant because that's the old shoot the messenger nonsense, I don't care about that, that's shooting the messenger, that's irrelevant to this discussion, what is relevant is truth in advertising, that's what's relevant.

Henry : Absolutely, Diane, last fall, in the Financial Post, it was a great article, you paint a rather bleak, but realistic picture of what you call the other pandemic and I'll quote you here; there's no vaccine in development against the negative implications of social media such as fraud, conspiracy theories, and lies and the US election looks to become its biggest casualty ever. Now, of course, you were a hundred percent correct regarding social media and the behaviour of Donald Trump but my question is, does the American electoral system need to be replaced by one with more checks and balances to keep madmen from subverting it, or is only social media to blame or both?

Diane Francis: Well, now we're into a different issue than tech ethics, and tech, now we're talking about public policy and I think that the American electoral system is the worst that anybody could imagine designed.

Henry : I know, I do too.

Diane Francis: No, it's crazy, the elections last what, two years, they never stop, they're back to back and they can advertise right up to the minute that you vote. In parliament democracies, which most of the world, except the United States, has, we have six-week windows of election time, the last 24, 48 hours, and no polling can be published. We don't let third-party vested interests, whether they're unions on the left or big business on the right advertise; it's about ideas, it's about personalities, it's about policy, that's what an election should be, the American thing is just the worst of all.

Henry : It's great to hear that from you because I've always felt that.

Diane Francis: Oh God, let's take the Canadian, the German or these various systems, we've never had a Prime Minister in this country in 30 years who got more than 50% of the popular vote, never and we encourage a lot of different parties, well, you know what, that encourages consensus building or coalitions. So, I don't have any time for the moron we have as prime minister now and when you think about it, he's there because of daddy's name and mommy's looks.

Henry : Oh, but he's cute though.

Diane Francis: Mommy's looks, daddy's name, and mommy's looks, he has no qualification to be there and he's done some really damaging things I think and he goes off on the tangents, him and Greta. Anyway, so the point is that if he had majority control of the country just because he got more votes than anybody else, that's a disaster but he doesn't. So, he has, the Tory's are there, The Bloc, five parties, he has to maneuver his way, navigate between the wishes of a lot of different Blocs of voters, which is messy, but it works.

Mike : But it's a bit more honest.

Diane Francis: In the US, it's really quite crazy sometimes, now they have, there are Democrats, blue Democrats, red Democrats, and then Trump is a fascist, he's not even a Republican, so what you have is a real hodgepodge mess there, but I think that that's not the fault, of tech that's the fault of their policy architecture.

Mike : So, let me ask you, okay, so Diane, I want to address the other elephant on the planet and that's COVID. Back at the beginning, when this thing in kind of the March, April timeframe, the WHO called it an infodemic because you have basically the majority of people are getting their daily news now from some kind of social media or internet-based platform. And the amount of information that's out there is just burying people, so how do we get out from underneath it?

Diane Francis: You hope that the people that are elected can form a consensus and not go off half-cocked doing something stupid. So, that's the only thing that you can do, people don't do their homework, and listen, I write for the Financial Post in the Post media newspaper chain, and I'm regarded as a conservative in Canada, but I'm left of the Democrats in the US.

Mike : Exactly.

Diane Francis: I know because there's no such thing as Republican in Canada, and so it's very different, but I get a lot of schtick from Canadian readers when I say things, and I really believe this and I think that the United States is going to be an example of why this is true, is that they don't have a public health system worth spit. They have 10 times more casualties than we do and then layer on that, the cynical usage of the mask as a speak hole and it's insane. So, what I like about Canada, same as Germany and the other countries where we have a 10th of their problem and our societies are just as free as theirs are but we have public health requirements and people say, yeah, okay, good. 

I don't think that a lockdown if initiated based on science and facts by public health authorities is a denial of my freedom, I think that it's my protection, so they don't know what freedom means down there. These people believe that freedom, they're libertarians and anarchists; they don't believe that they want any restrictions on anything they do and, to me, one of the best definitions that I heard in school was a civics teacher in high school and we were saying, well, what is Liberty? He said, Liberty is the right to swing your arm, but not hit anybody with it.

Mike : Oh, that's awesome.

Diane Francis: If I go out of my house without a mask on, I'm going to hit somebody, they've always had a strain, and I wrote about it in my column this week and got lots of schtick. What happened this week is a bird's eye view into the fact that the United States has tens and hundreds of thousands of maladjusted men who like guns, don't like government, don't like laws, don't like controls, don't like women, don't like blacks, don't like anything and this is a terrorist movement that is bigger than anybody can imagine. That is enabled through tech, into flash mobs and then I go through the horrendous things that they've done, showing up at legislative houses with long guns [Cross-Talking].

Mike : That is unbelievable.

Henry : Incredible.

Mike : Incredible.

Diane Francis: That's the problem and Trump didn't create that but boy, did he love it, he used it.

Mike : Especially if it was a democratic legislature that they were showing up at.

Diane Francis: Like Hitler used the brown shirt.

Henry : Oh, yeah.

Chris : Diane, today there was footage released of the entire Trump family partying while the insurrection was going on.

Diane Francis: Good, I hope that goes viral.

Henry : I'm sure that it will.

Mike : That's awesome.

Diane Francis: Send it to me and I'll tweet it out.

Mike : Giddy up, send it.

Diane Francis: That's how you counteract the craziness on the internet, is you get these marvelous things that come out of nowhere; people with cameras now, people with video now, these guys can't hide that long. Yep.

Mike : Well, and it's funny, it's kind of, what's the analogy, Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burns. It's that type of thing, you could see them partying while Capitol Hill, you could probably see it from The White House just being burnt to pieces.

Diane Francis: Well, it's a demented family, and no, they are, one of the things that I've learned from all of it, and one of the best books that I've ever read is Mary Trump's book.

Mike : Well, I heard that it's great.

Diane Francis: In the future, I think that columnists like me and historians should have good training and have involvement of psychiatric information for writing biographies and evaluating people because this is an issue. And I think that the more that we become sophisticated toward this, the more that we'll start to eliminate people out of hand for this kind of behaviour.

Mike : You should almost have to have like a Mary Trump-esque biography written of you before you could even run, you know what I mean? Can you imagine if that book had been out before Donald even ran?

Diane Francis: An examination by a team of independent psychiatrists.

Mike : IQ test would be a good start

Diane Francis: IQ test too, but that would be part of it and I think that you could have a complete physical workout and all of this has to go online.

Henry : Okay, now folks, we're almost at the end here and I am very much looking forward to Mike's final question for Diane.

Mike : Oh, yeah, here we go.

Henry : But no, because when you proposed it to me, I said, oh man, this is going to be good. So Mike, why don't you ask the question?

Mike : Okay, so Diane, I just waved my magic wand and you are now in charge of the internet. How do you fix it?

Diane Francis: Well, I think that it's along the lines, I think what Jaron put together is very important, I think that we have to make privacy sacrosanct, he had a good idea to weigh micropayments for the creatives, I think that California has a very interesting privacy legislation that's gone into effect now. And that's worth looking at, I wrote about that in the Post in the summer in my tech series, Europe is doing good work, many countries and soon Canada will start to demand payments until you can get micropayment payments for Google taking content. 

And I think that section 230 has to be completely rescinded and I think that anybody, digitally or any other way who publishes or republishes content has to be legally liable for the damages that content may cost someone. And just bring them into the rule of law, so apply the rule of law to the internet and protect privacy and also fairness in terms of payment and then over and above that, truth in advertising standards.

Henry : And you alluded to a lot of that earlier, but putting it all together succinctly as a final thought, it's absolutely fantastic.

Mike : And I totally still want to be an anti-stupidity pundit.

Henry : Well, okay, Diane, thank you so much for joining us today, we really, really appreciate it.

Mike : Yeah, thanks Diane, it was great.

Diane Francis: You're welcome.