Undersecretary Sarah Rogers on free speech, Europe’s tech crackdown, and the internet she misses

Sarah Rogers:
Elon Musk comes from South Africa where there are white people sort of huddled in little settlements who probably think that solidarity is the way to survive.

Ben Smith:
It just seems like a funny thing for an American diplomat to be sort of carrying water for.

Sarah Rogers:
I get that you want to be incendiary because you want your podcast to get engagement and I don’t say that in an accusatory way.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I was going to say, come on.

Max Tani:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semafor, where we are talking to all of the most interesting and important people shaping our new media age. I’m Max Tani. I’m the media editor here at Semafor, and with me as always, packing his bags for Davos, the World Economic Forum is Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semafor, the co-host of the show. Ben, how’s the suitcase looking? Are you packing some stuff for skiing? Are you going to get some time up on the slopes in between eating hors d’oeuvres and brushing shoulders with members of the global media elite?

Ben Smith:
You’re really turning me into a caricature here, but yes, it is true. I just found an air tag to throw in my suitcase and my goggles.

Max Tani:
Every year, this is the second year in a row that we’ve been on the digital air at the time of Davos. And every year around that time, we like to have on a guest that kind of has a more global flavor, somebody who is influencing the global media landscape. Last year, we had Ian Bremmer on the show. This year, we have somebody a little bit different and somebody who’s really shaping tech policy when it comes to, in particular, Europe and a lot of the rest of the Western world. That’s Sarah Rogers. She’s the undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department. Ben, you’ve known Sarah for a little while. Tell us why do we want to have her on the show now and why is she getting under the skin of so many diplomats abroad?

Ben Smith:
Sarah sort of popped onto the scene when she got this appointment, but has since gotten a lot of attention for a series of videos she posted to acts in particular criticizing European speech policies, basically demanding that they let X and other platforms be as sort of open and wild as they are in the US right now, which is contrary to the impulses of a lot of European governments, many of whom just see her as an agent of the far right. Don’t really think this is about speech at all. They think it’s about the Trump Administration trying to open the way for far right parties on the continent.

Max Tani:
Well, we’ll ask her about that. We’ll ask her about this kind of back and forth that she’s gotten into with senior UK officials over their threats to ban X over Grok generating sexualized images of women and children, and a lot more right after the break. Sarah, thank you so much for joining us. You are the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy. What does the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy do?

Sarah Rogers:
So Max, Ben, thank you so much for having me. It’s great joining you. So the Undersecretary of State, if you think about the State Department org chart, you have Secretary Rubio, then you have two deputy secretaries under him, and then there are five undersecretaries of which I’m one. Public diplomacy, I think the best way to describe it, nobody knows what that means. To uninitiated people, it sounds very generic, like all diplomacy is public, but really what it is is, traditional diplomacy concerns the relationship between the American government and foreign governments. So two ambassadors shake hands, assign a minerals deal, et cetera. Public diplomacy is different. This is the relationship between the American government and the foreign public.
So I oversee our Global Public Affairs Press Office. When the State Department tweets memes, I’m directly or indirectly associated with that. I oversee our educational and cultural affairs office, so things like the Fulbright Scholarship, all of those traditional soft power domains. And also, and critically, the public diplomacy under Secretariat has historically been the home of all of the information environment engagement. So when we were doing the quote unquote “disinformation censorship,” all of that internet ecosystem stuff falls under me. And you guys had Jamie Rubin on your podcast in the past. He was with something called the Global Engagement Center. That was built within and ultimately, dismantled and removed from the public diplomacy under Secretariat. So I oversee the domain that Jamie Rubin used to, plus more.

Max Tani:
Speaking of, you’ve made your top priority putting pressure on Europe to kind of open up speech on social media. That’s part of this domain that you’re talking about. Explain that. Why would the US Government need to be doing that?

Sarah Rogers:
Yeah, absolutely. So that’s certainly one of my most visible engagements. I took my first official trip overseas this fall, and it happened to be to Europe, and it happened to be at a time when this EU fine, this 140 million Euro-ish fine against X came out over various alleged infractions. So my background is a litigator in private practice before I went into the government. Unlike a lot of people who filled my role, I’ve never been a press person and I don’t come from the soft power sphere. I come from basically, scorched earth litigation, but some of that litigation was in the First Amendment domain.
So I took a case to the Supreme Court in 2024 called NRA versus Vullo that dealt with a viewpoint-based debanking. As you may have heard it called, we actually won that case 9-0, Sonia Sotomayor, wrote the opinion. It was a pretty big deal. And I also worked in my private practice with free speech plaintiffs and litigants like Doug Mackey, Ricky Vaughn, like Charlie Kirk and others. So I approached this job with that perspective. And when this administration got into office, one of Presidents Trump’s first executive orders dealt with dismantling the kind of, what we would call censorship activity that the Global Engagement Center and other organs of the government undertook.

Ben Smith:
I was sort of glancing at your resume before and you have a fairly conventional lawyer resume. You went to Columbia Law School, you were a partner at a firm. You had some right-wing clients and litigated some speech cases, but you are now a very, you are one of, I think, basically the most powerful regulators of the internet in a certain way, with what you’ve been doing. And I guess I wanted to ask you a little bit about how did you get into this stuff? You have not been a famous public internet person, but I do think that you have been on the internet for a while.

Sarah Rogers:
Well, internet fame is a funny thing because I’m an old millennial, so I think I’m a little bit younger than you. I grew up on the internet at a time when the internet was a place you would go to be free. So no one knew that you were a dog. No one knew that you were a girl. Your identities could be disposable. They could be numerous. Your content could be frivolous, it could be outrageous, it could be insightful, and none of it went on your resume. And that chaotic aspect of the internet, I think, was the source of a lot of its generative power and part of its charm for the posters who grew up in that era of which I’m clearly one.

Ben Smith:
Where did you post?

Sarah Rogers:
Where did I post? Oh man, media aren’t allowed to ask Trump appointees that. So one place I posted was... So during law school, actually, I posted on this forum that was frequently described as a bathroom stall wall, sort of a 4chan for lawyers that had all kinds of raucous and disgusting content, funny content. And I wouldn’t say that literally everyone at law school read it, but I caught a professor reading it once. Everyone looked at it, but no one admitted to posting on it. And everyone on there was anonymous and I posted on there anonymously. And that forum became a test case later on for a crackdown, one mode of crackdown on anonymous internet speech. So it became a test case for unmasking anonymous posters via John Doe subpoenas. And I didn’t like that when that happened, even though one of the courses of conduct that sparked scrutiny of that forum was that people were taking pictures of women, I would say, including me, and posting them on the forum and rating them and comparing them. And I really didn’t like this. This was at the dawn of social media.
Even the practice of posting pictures of yourself on the internet, I didn’t really like, but what I disliked a lot more was the prospect of having my IP address subpoenaed and having my life destroyed. Even though I hadn’t made any actionable comments and most people on there were ultimately fine, it felt like something was closing in, like a space that had been free and chaotic was gentrifying. And the norms of anonymity and freedom were decaying a bit. And I use the gentrification metaphor because you get more families on the internet, you get more commerce on the internet, you want it to be more of a sanitized shopping mall. And I’ll say this is probably the only place where I agree with the Mamdani Tenant Commissioner on the desirability of gentrification, but I think a lot of people of my vintage probably felt that a bit. And I think a lot of them would offer the rejoinder of that, “Okay, but we want an internet that’s clean and safe and productive.” We live so much more lives on there now. We do so much more work on there now.
And I think that’s true. I think you can’t constantly be wedded to one benchmark in the past. But I come from courtrooms where the way that you find a truth is that you make sure that every side or every bundle of interests in a controversy has a forceful advocate. And I feel like I need to be the forceful advocate for that spirit of the internet that was, that a lot of us remember that made so many favorable contributions to our culture and our economy, the internet where you can go to be free. After law school, I was a prolific Gawker commenter, and I’m one of these people who... I really like talking to people like you guys who think and speak a lot about media and media culture and how it’s evolved because I’m one of the New York media adjacent people who has a lot of opinions about 2006 through 2012 Gawker and how it served as kind of a Petri dish for a lot of trends that would influence blogging, but also conventional journalism later on.
And when I started posting on that site, it had this thing they called Snark. It was this aestheticized, cruelty. The Gawker voice was this kid who had moved to New York to be Oscar Wilder, Dorothy Parker, but was a little insecure about it. And there was this creative underclass article that paints this brilliantly. And so, there was this very catty, very catty, cruel, nitpicky, almost surveillance culture where they would go through your wedding announcements and they would pick apart your registry or pick apart your dating profile. And I felt like when that was applied to the world of Manhattan media gossip, it didn’t feel wildly inappropriate to me in that era.
But then I think what happened was, young journalists, especially in the second Obama Administration during the era of Occupy Wall Street, they all became inspired ironically by people like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, who are now their enemies, to become more righteous advocates on issues like the economy or race relations. And I felt like what happened was, this short form polemical nonfiction that was ad driven, that was engineered to get clicks that prevailed at that time, became a very infectious model for media. And it merged with the new social justice obsession of young New York journalism and professional types and created... I would say that wokeness kind of germinated on Gawker. And another site then, no offense, Buzzfeed.

Ben Smith:
Did you ever get tossed off Gawker for being too right-wing?

Sarah Rogers:
So I had several Gawker... I was a prolific Gawker commenter, and the reason is that I got married in 2009, and I was worried that if I got married, that my wedding announcement and my husband and my family and myself were all going to be dissected by these malicious internet commenters. And I thought about this the way that perhaps a future public diplomacy under secretary would, which is I thought if I can just have four Gawker accounts and sock puppet the thread and say good things about myself, then I don’t have to be afraid to get married because people, even if they bash me in public, I’ll be able to speak back. So I developed, you had to audition to be a Gawker commenter back then, and I developed this algorithm to be an impressive poster. And it was like you had to make a pop anthropological or pop social science reference to something New York specific with a tone of disdain.
And you could do it in total Mad Libs format, like an LLM. It didn’t have to make sense. But if there was a Wall Street Journal article, you could post it, you could react to it and you could be like, “I can just imagine the striving Scarsdale Equities research analyst picking up this article and thinking it makes him cool.” Right? That comment would get a ton of clout on Gawker. The other thing you could do is say something, insinuate that someone had an eating disorder or used stimulants so like, “This person in this post reminds me of a bulimic Conde Nast intern that I did coke with once.” That would get a ton of upvotes. This was the culture at the time. And it was because the people operating that website, my inference was, they wanted to be the kind of loose, decadent, glamorous New Yorker who did coke with Conde Nast interns, but also felt a little contemptuous about it. And none of that is an official State Department position. Sorry about that. I just wanted to...

Ben Smith:
I think what I just heard is that the American right knows so much more about the American left than the American left knows about the American right. People on the right were obsessively paying attention to these New York media outlets at a moment when I think a lot of the people in progressive media didn’t even know the right existed and certainly weren’t paying attention to what they were thinking. There’s kind of a funny asymmetry there. I don’t know any sort of Democratic officials who had sock puppet accounts on Free Republic in that era.

Max Tani:
I don’t think that’s entirely true. I think that there’s just a class of people who are just deeply online on both sides, so much so that they’re consuming the media of their ideological opposition, right? There’s a lot of people on the left who spend a lot of time watching Fox News and listening to Candace Owens and whatnot. I think there’s plenty of that, I think, to go around.

Ben Smith:
This is true. I’m not sure if it was as true then.

Max Tani:
Maybe not as true then, but now, for sure.

Sarah Rogers:
One important asterisk to that discussion is, at the time I was on Gawker, I wouldn’t have said that I was on the right. Ben asked if I was banned from Gawker for being racist or something. I mean-

Ben Smith:
I did not say that. I said for being too right-wing, but sure, project that.

Sarah Rogers:
When lamestream media types say that, they mean the other so... The answer is the website became woke. So I’m not racist in the sense that is morally pejorative. I worked very hard to treat people as individuals and would’ve done so online too, but the style became much more became the hegemonic style on Twitter monoculture by 2018. I think that germinated there. And so, my viewpoint became more right-wing as my young New York professional milieu became more intersectionally social justice-y, and I found that alienating.

Ben Smith:
So you didn’t leave Gawker, Gawker left you.

Sarah Rogers:
Gawker left me for sure, yes. And Gawker is a synecdoche for that whole scene.

Ben Smith:
It pains me to move on because obviously, I would happily talk about 2010’s internet media and for a long time and wrote a whole book about it. But I do want to get to, you have a very important federal role and also have really gotten a lot of attention, like more attention than I think under secretaries of state for public diplomacy sometimes get, particularly for a series of videos you made denouncing speech regulation, both digital regulation at the European level, speech regulation in Britain, speech regulation in Germany and other European countries. I sort of mentioned a couple European diplomats that I was going to be talking to you. And one question that came up was, why is the US targeting its allies in Europe and is totally silent on speech, particularly in the Gulf, I would say, where they have far tighter restrictions, where you’re going to go to jail if you criticize the government?

Sarah Rogers:
Well, the answer is that we’re not totally silent. I mean, we haven’t been silent on Venezuela or Iran or Russia. I talk about these things in my media engagements. I think-

Ben Smith:
What about the UAE and Saudi Arabia?

Sarah Rogers:
So UAE and Saudi Arabia are a great example. So the way that I’ve explained this is, when we’re engaging with a country, we consider our relationship with the country, what we’re giving the country, what the country’s giving us, and the history and trajectory of where that country is on free speech. So Saudi Arabia held a comedy festival this past year, and there were three censorship rules for this comedy festival. You couldn’t blast [inaudible 00:16:37] prophets, you couldn’t attack the prince of Saudi Arabia, and I think you couldn’t criticize the Saudi government. Now, obviously, that’s not coextensive with the First Amendment, and we wouldn’t want those rules here, and a free society wouldn’t have any of them in an ideal comedy festival. But notably, Western comics like Dave Chappelle were able to perform their Western sets totally uncensored. They didn’t have to modify their Western material because Dave Chappelle doesn’t naturally have jokes about Mohammed bin Salman, right? So he didn’t have to remove those from his material as far as I know.
And that would not have been thinkable 10 years ago. It would not have been thinkable 20 years ago. You couldn’t make jokes about drinking, you couldn’t make jokes about sex, and that represents a liberalization in Saudi Arabia that we want to encourage. Now, Dave Chappelle would’ve gotten in trouble if he blasphemed Mohammed, but if he did a comedy set in Britain or Germany and blasphemed Mohammed, he would also get in trouble. And that does not represent, that state of affairs does not represent liberalization in Germany. I think the trajectory that we see in Europe and the UK is worse. And one reason we care more and care differently about these countries is, we have mutual defense pacts with them and we have a lot of relationships with them premised on this idea that we together comprise a free world with shared values. Certainly our NATO allies invoke that a lot when they’re seeking cooperation and cash from us.
In addition, I think there’s more regulatory contagion from markets like the EU than from markets like Saudi Arabia, so we care about that. I was in Britain at its free speech event and I was drinking water out of a plastic water bottle. And if you’ve traveled to Europe, you know that there’s this EU regulation that when you uncap your water bottle, the cap can’t come all the way off. It has to hang by a thread because that’s better for recycling or something. And I was sitting on stage at this British event and one of the British speakers pointed out that Britain has no such regulation, yet all of our bottle caps were attached to our bottles. And the reason is that the EU has significant regulatory gravity and Britain is within its regulatory gravity. And so, you have to care about what these laws are because they affect literally the water you drink.
And when what’s happened is, some of these, not all of these European censorship incidents that I recited in my video, like the German woman got a harsher punishment than the rapist because the woman called the rapist a pig. That’s a notorious one that really no one can defend. I don’t think that happened under a digital specific law, but the problem is that statutes like the Digital Services Act in Europe and the Online Safety Act in Britain transpose these existing speech content regulations to a transnational internet often extraterritorially, and they impose a lot of first instance censorship obligations on risk averse corporations. And when you impose a vague chilling at speech regulatory obligation on a risk averse corporation, that’s how it becomes illegal to tell jokes at the water cooler. That’s how you get absurd results like literally speeches to the floor of British Parliament are being censored under the Online Safety Act because they contain content that facially triggers some gating obligation in the statute. And the company doesn’t want to be fined a huge percentage of its revenue if it allows that content to remain online.

Ben Smith:
The political speech you talk about is really almost entirely far right and from right-wing parties. And I think a reasonable observer might think this is a bunch of hand waving and those were a bunch of fancy legal terms, but basically, these are gestures of support for the AFD, for Nigel Farage’s party, for your political allies. And I really have not seen you out there on the barricades, I guess, in particular for what is obviously the most widely censored form of political speech in Europe right now, which is pro Palestinian speech. You had hundreds of protesters arrested in, I think it was Trafalgar Square for supporting a prescribed pro Palestinian organization. I mean, it just seems like your silence on that kind of speaks for itself.

Sarah Rogers:
Well, Ben, I haven’t been silent on that. I’ve spoken on that issue a couple of times. I was interviewed by a London radio program and I think they tried to trap me. They were like, “Ah, but what about globalize the intifada?” British regulators have proposed banning the phrase, “Globalize the intifada. Don’t you agree? You’re in the Trump Administration. Don’t you agree that that should be unacceptable and illegal?” And I said, “I don’t find it acceptable.” I’m from New York City where thousands of people were murdered by jihadists. I don’t want an intifada in New York City, and I think anyone who does is disgusting, but should it be legal to say in most contexts? Yes. You and I have uttered that phrase on this program and hopefully, even the British Government doesn’t want us arrested and I explained the Brandenburg incitement standard and all of that.

Ben Smith:
Okay. But I guess, are there instances where you’ve proactively gone out there? Because I just haven’t seen it and it does seem like you’re almost entirely focused on right-wing speech.

Sarah Rogers:
Well, it is hard to see all of my tweets because there’s a copious volume. There was a map of Jewish-owned businesses posted by a pro Palestine activist in Spain with the inference that the Jews are Zionists or maybe these Jews are Zionists. And it was a bit menacing and caused obviously, a lot of discontent. And I think even people like me who take a hard line on free speech would say that kind of speech is unpleasant and we would condemn it. And what I said about that map was that under American law, under our preferred free speech standard, whether this kind of thing is legal, depends upon the context, and it’s a context-specific inquiry. It shouldn’t necessarily be banned. But then I also said, “Under these European censorship laws, this thing, in fact, remained online.” Whereas I think if you posted a map of ISIS sympathetic mosques, it would’ve been taken down and you would’ve been jailed.

Ben Smith:
But on more straightforward issue, like these people the Britain is arresting for protesting, for supporting this prescribed organization, your view is they should be allowed to protest?

Sarah Rogers:
I would have to look at each individual person and each prescribed organization. I think if you support an organization like Hamas, then depending upon whether you’re coordinating, there are all these standards that get applied. This Palestine Action group, I’ve seen it written about. I don’t know what it did. I think if you just merely stand up and say, “I support Palestine Action,” then unless you are really coordinating with some violent foreign terrorist, I think that censoring that speech does more harm than good. Then I also just want to push back, Ben, on the idea that I’m some partisan agent of Nigel Farage or AFD or anyone else. That’s not true. We don’t intervene in other countries’ politics on behalf of specific candidates. And in American law, there’s this distinction between candidate advocacy and issue advocacy, which might feel arcane to some of your listeners, but it guides me because I’m a lawyer. I really try to speak on the issues and free speech should be a nonpartisan issue.

Ben Smith:
A final question, I think, in terms of how this campaign is seen in Europe, which is, I think the more maybe cynical view is that this is basically the same impulse that sent a bunch of special forces guys to Caracas, which is, you are a tool of the big American tech companies, X and Meta, probably particularly. They are facing fines. They don’t like European regulation and you’re just yet another in a long history of American diplomats, carrying water for big American corporations.

Sarah Rogers:
It’s very funny. I mean, I’ve heard that accusation and it’s humorous to me because I started my free speech activist career as a foe of big tech. So I represented the playwright, David Mamet, as an amicus before the Fifth Circuit in a case called NetChoice versus Texas that dealt with Texas’s effort to essentially require viewpoint neutrality on large platforms that operated in Texas. I supported that idea. I still think that conditioning the CDA 230 safe harbor subsidy on viewpoint neutrality is probably a good idea. Elon Musk, I don’t know if he hates that idea. I haven’t mentioned it to him, but it would be against his commercial interest. It’d be against Meta’s commercial interest. I think that the people who want to deflect this and just say, “You’re a big tech [inaudible 00:24:19].” It’s because they’re uncomfortable. And you can see this too when they try to be pedantic about the term censorship like, “Well, this wasn’t state censorship.”

Ben Smith:
A lot of the digital services action, a lot of what these companies don’t like about it actually isn’t so much about speech, right? It’s about reporting, it’s about transparency. And you’re opposed to that too, I think, right?

Sarah Rogers:
Well, so there are different facets that we oppose at different levels of intensity, but I think even a content neutral, and this was what my Supreme Court case was about, even a content neutral regulation, if it’s enforced in a viewpoint disparate kind of selective way, can be censorious. So one of the regulations that led to the X fine was they’re supposed to allow designated researchers, researchers that basically work for leftist NGOs to scrape user data from Twitter in a way that the ordinary user wouldn’t be allowed to so they can do transparency. But this guy, Travis Brown, who dox, lives off TikTok, who basically built a career doxing exclusively people who supported President Trump and has this kind of nasty Antifa blue sky account, this is one of the people that the German government is funding to do this. So if the [inaudible 00:25:24]-

Ben Smith:
This sounds like viewpoint discrimination, Sarah. Shouldn’t anybody be allowed to do this, including leftists?

Sarah Rogers:
Well, the problem is, if the government’s picking leftists to do it, then it is. It is an asymmetric viewpoint skewed regulation that basically says you have to give communists access to all your user data. If that’s the upshot of the regulation, then most of the DSA would be struck down into the First Amendment, just it would. And a lot of Europeans, I think, see the First Amendment roughly the way they see the Second Amendment, which is, this is a crazy commitment the Americans have. And we are not Wild West frontiersmen and we choose to be more genteel in our being and we’re not going to adhere to it. And the problem is, you have this cross-border regulatory context where we’re all drinking out of water bottles with attached caps.

Max Tani:
Well, we have a lot more that we want to get to with Sarah, but we have to take a short break, so we’ll be right back after this. Sarah, a few minutes ago you mentioned X. It seems like the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy has been trying to put a little bit of distance between you and Vice President JD Vance, obviously both members of the administration. I want to read you a quote from something he said. This was, I believe, earlier this week. He was speaking about Grok and these sexualized images and Ofcom has basically been threatening X saying that these sexualized images that Grok is generating are really bad and threatening X with consequences here.
But I’m going to read you a quote from David Lammy here. He said of Vance. He said, “He agreed with me that it was entirely unacceptable. I think he recognized the very seriousness with which images of women and children could be manipulated in this way, and he recognized how despicable, unacceptable that is, and I found him sympathetic to that position.” You have seemingly taken a slightly opposite position here saying that all options are on the table if the UK bans X over this stuff. What’s the administration’s position here?

Sarah Rogers:
So look, I’m not going to speak for Vice President Vance, but I’m happy to revisit my comments and how they should be construed. We’re talking about two different things. I think, and this is David Lammy saying what the vice president said in some conversation, none of us were party to, so let’s get it from the horse’s mouth. But I think what Lammy is saying is that Vance said that the non-consensual explicit images of children and perhaps of women were totally unacceptable. That’s a different question from whether you ban X. When he says all options are on the table to ban X, that can be interpreted pretty broadly. And so, I think a commensurate all options are on the table for me is fair game, but there’s certainly ways to regulate this. The First Ladies proposed regulating it. There’s existing torts that regulate it without doing a China style, a Russia style, Iran style ban of an entire social media platform, which I think the UK may be backing away from.
I think now, they’re saying, “We just want to criminalize non-consensual deepfake revenge porn type stuff,” which I think is closer to a sane approach. If we’re speaking about images of children, then I wouldn’t disagree with Vice President Vance or with anyone else who says that creating non-consensual images of children in a way that could be interpreted as sexually explicit is pretty unacceptable, disgusting behavior. I think with adults, it’s a bit more complicated because you have this whole tradition of political cartooning and a lot of the stuff that Grok is creating is distasteful, but wouldn’t necessarily be violative of the First Amendment. I think that already, I could be wrong on my number of hours, but I think it was within 12 hours, Elon had banned everyone who made these images of children. Whether there should be sexually explicit images of children is not a conflict between the United States and the EU, but there are many differences of opinion, rightly so, on how you enforce that obligation and whose responsibility it is.

Max Tani:
Speaking of Elon, because you’ve mentioned him a few times, I’m curious, because so much of your job revolves around, in some cases, advocating for free speech interests that may have you aligned with the platforms, I mean, how often are you talking to Mark Zuckerberg or to Elon?

Sarah Rogers:
Not often. I mean, there are people in my office, I oversee thousands of people and there are engagements with all kinds of companies with whom we have touchpoints. I think European bureaucrats want to style and depict us as lawyers for X or Meta or whatever, and we are not. But we do, it’s our job just as if there were some international oil regulation or some international space regulation that affected our businesses, it would be part of our job in the American government to hear what those businesses have to say. But we also hear from other groups too, I’ll meet with free speech activist groups and the like. So I don’t have a morning call with Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk where they tell me what my talking points are. My office liaises with those companies occasionally.

Max Tani:
So turning back to the US, obviously, one of the biggest stories last year was over ABC suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, which came after FCC Chairman Brendan Carr basically said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” following some comments that Kimmel made that some people found to be distasteful. I have two questions here. One, isn’t that essentially threatening free speech and unaligned with some of the policies that you’re advocating for? And does an incident like that hurt the US free speech policies that you’re advocating for when you go to other places? Like for example, when you’re advocating for free speech abroad, are people bringing up comments such as these and incidents such as these?

Sarah Rogers:
Interestingly, that one has not come up and it happened before I was in office, so I wasn’t in the position of addressing it in real time. We have this very narrow and kind of old broadcast public interest doctrine that hasn’t been before the Supreme Court in a while. I think also with the Jimmy Kimmel incident, there’s this whole underlying mechanic of this TEGNA merger. I don’t know if you guys have covered that. I know you’re kind of a media insider show, but basically, all of these network affiliates like Sinclair, like Nexstar had and had under Biden, by the way, when they were trying to complete a similar merger that kept getting blocked by the FCC, had this very strong incentive to impress the regulator. And I think that if Brendan Carr really wanted to censor Jimmy Kimmel, truthfully, he could have just politely, secretly or through an intermediary called up the head of Nexstar and said, “You know, I really would hate to see a TEGNA merger with a broadcaster that would allow this filth online.” And that would be closer to the Murphy conduct, frankly.
It would be closer also to the kind of conduct I was litigating against in Vullo. Instead, you see a more brash public expression that was very controversial. Ted Cruz made comments about it and others. Obviously, when you’re advocating abroad, people will look for things to invoke to accuse you of hypocrisy. But I think what I would say to all those accusations of hypocrisy is that I would never contend that the United States never contains or experiences censorious impulses or temptations. We had the Red Scare, we had wokeness, both very bad episodes. But the reason you should have a bulwark like the First Amendment is to hold those instincts at bay. That’s the whole point, right? That’s why I’m grateful that we have the laws that we do, and that’s why vague regulatory cudgels in the hands of regulators who want to suppress particular viewpoints, that’s why I’m wary of them in Europe too.

Ben Smith:
To stay on the hypocrisy topic for a minute here, I mean, the call is kind of coming from inside the building on some of this. The State Department recently bragged about all the visas that it had pulled, record numbers of visas, some for various crimes, but some visas were pulled for people who basically wrote pro Palestinian stuff. And I realize this is all being litigated. There are questions about the rights of citizens versus non-citizens, the rights of the US to pull visas arbitrarily. But just, I mean, in your gut, doesn’t that basically conflict with the kind of values you’re trying to advocate?

Sarah Rogers:
It’s very funny because when Yoel Roth was curating the public square so that you weren’t allowed to say anything opposing trans ideology, we would hear-

Ben Smith:
This is a former Twitter executive just to...

Sarah Rogers:
Yeah. So we would hear that it’s wrong to invoke the spirit of free speech and you have to adhere doctrinally finally to the First Amendment and any other complaints are just nonsense. But here, if you adhere doctrinally to the First Amendment, the Supreme Court since 1971, and I think even earlier, has made clear that even to the extent that foreign nationals on American soil have some First Amendment rights, we could not, as Germany did, we could not throw a woman in jail for calling a rapist a pig, even if she were a foreign national because she has some of the same First Amendment rights as Americans. The privilege of coming here on a visa is not a right under the First Amendment or any other. And the Secretary of State has enormous discretion there.
So if we had a deposed dictator come here and he started voicing support for his former regime, we could kick him out in the interest of US foreign policy. I want to say that I really can’t speak granularly on anything that’s pending in court because my comments would be construed as those of one of the litigants, and I have to be professional and constrained about that, so I just can’t do it. But there is this longstanding, President Trump did not invent this barrier in First Amendment jurisprudence between what you can say under the First Amendment and what the State Department can consider when it revokes a visa. This is a very longstanding thing.

Ben Smith:
And I think this is probably eternally true, but certainly true now that a lot of current champions of free speech, and [inaudible 00:34:59], I think you have not particularly talked this way, only seem to be very interested in protecting the speech they agree with and are often kind of leery of disagreeing with people whose speech they defend. And I think when I look at X right now, obviously the most [inaudible 00:35:15], just as a platform, and if I’m maybe a European regulator thinking about how to deal with this platform, the owner of the platform, Elon Musk, has set it up so that his tweet, both because I’m sure he’s a very interesting poster, but also because he’s rigged the system.
His tweets are the most seen thing. The number one thing you’re going to see on Twitter is Elon Musk’s tweets. And the other day, I guess he reposted and endorsed the sentiment, “If white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered. Remember, non-whites openly hate white men. Well, white men hold a collective majority, which included white solidarity is the only way to survive.” I mean, wouldn’t you agree that’s just an unbelievably un-American sort of anti-American sentiment that should obviously be permitted to be posted, but does it concern you that this platform you’re defending is very committed to expressing these very anti-American views?

Sarah Rogers:
I mean, it doesn’t concern me that the country I’m defending with the Nazis march through Skokie. And I think Elon Musk [inaudible 00:36:10]-

Ben Smith:
Do you think this is like that though, that this is basically Nazi speech?

Sarah Rogers:
I actually wouldn’t, I mean, because that speech isn’t calling for the genocide of Jews or anyone else. And if you were to look back at the writings of some of the founding fathers and some similar stuff from that vintage and even the prevailing viewpoints of the same soldiers who stormed Normandy, I think you would find some of this sentiment in American history, which is actually an observation the left makes ad nauseam.

Ben Smith:
But this is just very overt racism and a very white solidarity is the only way to survive. That’s not like some codage, should we be allowed to say. I mean, it just is what it is, right? You can kind of see why European regulators are concerned about a platform whose primary, the primary kind of speech they broadcast is that.

Sarah Rogers:
People get really mad when I say this, but I just think it’s impossible to dispute it. There is less viewpoint-based censorship on Twitter under Elon Musk than there was under... Basically since 2014.

Ben Smith:
Oh, for sure. And I totally agree. Obviously, we’re not talking about censorship. We’re actually talking about expression, right?

Sarah Rogers:
Right. So if you wanted to post the monoculture that has retreated to Blue Sky and become the founding population there, if they wanted to come back to Twitter and post, what they were posting as the prevailing form of speech on Twitter, which is things like the New Tenant Commissioner saying that our goal should be and to impoverish the white middle class or the whiteness is a virus and we should exterminate it. What Charles Blow wrote in the New York Times, which is that white women use their bodies as instruments of terror.
And there are too many noose to necks and charred bodies for white women to deny what they’re doing, which is basically like Interahamwe radio rhetoric. I think do we defend the legality of that kind of speech? Yes. I mean, now we know who Charles Blow is because he wrote that headline or some editor did. Right? And I don’t know the context of that tweet, but Elon Musk comes from South Africa where there are white people sort of huddled in little settlements who probably think that solidarity is the way to survive.

Ben Smith:
No, it seems like a very truly South African sentiment. Yeah. It just seems like a funny thing for an American diplomat to be carrying water for.

Sarah Rogers:
Well, I get that you want to be incendiary because you want your podcast to get engagement. And I don’t say that. I don’t say that in an accusatory way.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I was going to say, come on.

Sarah Rogers:
No, you should. I hope we get engagement, but-

Ben Smith:
I appreciate that sentiment, Sarah.

Sarah Rogers:
I’m not carrying water for that specific sentiment. I think though that none of what you’ve quoted comes close to imminent incitement to lawless action, none of it comes close to true threat. And if the same regulators are allowing very similar speech by woke activists or by Islamists, then no, I don’t think it is particularly deserving of censorship.

Ben Smith:
I totally agree with you that it shouldn’t be censored. I just think that it’s possible that European regulators are also... I just wonder how they think about the character of the expression on the platform and not... I know, I agree with you, it shouldn’t be censored.

Sarah Rogers:
Right. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of them think adversely about it, but that’s the point of having these diplomatic conversations, not so that I can carry water for one specific tweet, but for the right of everyone on that platform and other platforms to tweet and say what they think is true.

Max Tani:
So that feels like a pretty good place for us to ask the last question because it’s about that specific topic, which is, Sarah, do you think that social media is good now? Is this kind of the information ecosystem that you want to see? Obviously, you’ve talked about the 2010s and wokeness and this perceived and also actual censoriousness by some of the platforms, most of which have been rolled back over the last few years. Are you pretty satisfied with what the social media landscape looks like these days?

Sarah Rogers:
I wouldn’t say that I’m complacent, but I’m hopeful. I think that the structure of communication has changed. And when you go through those kinds of shutters and shocks when you invent a new way of communicating or when communication is suddenly social, mobile, and local, or when communication is suddenly AI embedded, then the way that people think and the way they relate to each other changes. That’s why podcasts like yours are interesting because I think you think through how this affects the way people work, how this affects the way people reason.
And there’s no moment in history when I would’ve surveyed the information landscape and thought, “Well, now this is perfect and we shouldn’t try to innovate our way forward or improve everything.” I think that it’s very interesting the transition we’ve seen from long form and even short form text to very long form streaming and very short form video that could have attentional consequences as many pundits have posited. And I look forward to seeing societies kind of reason through that. No doubt there are improvements that could be made. I just don’t think that content-based or viewpoint-based censorship at the behest of the government is one of those improvements.

Max Tani:
Sarah, actually that brings up an interesting point, and I know that I was just trying to wrap this up, but it raised an interesting question for me which is, how are you thinking about how your job extends to the AI platforms and LLMs overseas and in other places? Are you focused on companies like X and in some cases like Meta? And I’m curious how you and your office are approaching AI and what you’re looking at overseas when it comes to AI and executing the free speech policies that you’re hoping to see.

Sarah Rogers:
So as you can glean from the president’s AI action plan, this administration is very forward to leaning on AI innovation. I think we want more of it, not less. We are suspicious of safety-ist regulatory models. And I think where AI intersects with free speech, there are a lot of really interesting legal and political questions that arise like, should you treat the AI as an agent of the company that coded it? And so its speech is attributable to that entity. Should the AI speech be attributable to the person that evoked it using a prompt? Those are interesting and nuance and in different contexts suggest different answers. I think that we don’t want to... When the first LLM models were coming out and everyone was playing with them, you saw a lot of these viral screenshots of like, “Look how woke and stupid Gemini is. It answers this hypothetical in a really rigid way.”
There’s a guy in Substack who asks all the LLMs to conduct actuarial calculations where they put a dollar value on a human life and then he adjusts the calculation by race. So he thinks that ChatGPT values white men’s lives at negative a hundred, the magnitude that it values a black women’s life or something. And there are all these... And I think some of those incongruities in AI aren’t even intended by the coders. They just arise through processes we don’t totally understand. What I would say is that lobotomizing and fettering models to the point where they never generate any kind of edgy or unacceptable response, makes them less creative and less useful.
I think that’s been discovered through the iterative process of AI development and that regulatory approaches which flag or discern AI from authentic human content are better than regulatory approaches, which just decree that the AI is never allowed to emit a discriminatory idea or something because you see when people try to code these models in this really corseted [inaudible 00:43:09] way that they become less useful. And China, which is our main competitor in what you might construct as the AI race, they’re going to impose some constraints on their LLMs, but probably not as many as a censorious safety-ist polity would oppose if every single person got their way. And at the end of the day, I think we would rather that free self-governing societies leave the world in AI innovation and decide what the AI is allowed and inclined to think and say, than have China make those decisions for us.

Max Tani:
Well, Sarah, we really appreciate you taking the time. This was super interesting. And also, of course, fielding all of these questions. Sometimes we kind of let people skate a little bit and it’s kind of a get to know you thing, but you jumped right in here with us and took some tough questions, so we really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Sarah Rogers:
Happy to do it.

Ben Smith:
Thank you, Sarah. This was fun.

Max Tani:
So Ben, I thought that was a really interesting conversation. I went into it understanding that Sarah is very interesting and important in the news and that she has been, I think, bugging the hell out of some European diplomats. But I found that she was obviously very charismatic and was kind of ready to go back and forth with us a little bit. She was saying that we just needed to get our viral clips or whatever, which maybe Josh, if there’s any good viral stuff that you can pull out of that, that would be great. But Ben, the European diplomats that you talked to beforehand are going to obviously listen to this episode. Do you think that they’ll be satisfied with her answers?

Ben Smith:
I mean, basically, no. I think the view in Europe right now is, these unhinged Americans are trying to open the floodgates to far right speech and that the Trump Administration and that Trump... I mean, this is the European view. We really don’t believe anything, don’t believe anything they say. This is just like invading, they basically the moral equivalent of invading Venezuela for the oil. And I think the reality, and I think the thing you saw with Under Secretary Rogers was that there’s a lot of different impulses inside this administration. Stephen Miller recently just talked about the rule, international law is that we’re strong and we do whatever we want. And then there are different kind of more principled views.
And I do think she represents a very pure, and you sort of heard her story about it, kind of speech ideology about speech on the internet that in some ways, is a throwback to the kind of more utopian days of the internet, but that is... I think when you hear her talk about it, I think is more ideological, maybe a little more radical and more principled than I think the people who are dealing with her wing of the Trump Administration totally realize because I think you sort of have to remember, these are people who came of political age on Twitter, most of all, in the years like 2010 to 2020. And so for them, the notion that you could get your account banned for being too right wing, that is a huge deal.
That is, for some people in the Trump Administration, I think that is one of the top three issues in the world, free speech on the internet. And I think for the Europeans, it’s like, “What are you talking about? This is just some other regulatory thing. You’re carrying water as usual for these big American companies.” I mean, obviously, that’s also true and Meta and these guys are thrilled about it and they’re giving all sorts of money to Trump Administration accounts. But there is also a real ideological thread here about speech on the internet from people who feel like they are their political allies, whether it was around COVID or other issues, got pushed off these platforms. And it’s not fake. It is so intensely held.

Max Tani:
Right, but it’s only intensely held by some people. And obviously, there’s some other people in the administration who feel differently or who execute in a different way. I thought that the most interesting-

Ben Smith:
Oh, totally. And I’m not sure if Trump is a particularly like, and I’m not sure he has deep principles on the [inaudible 00:46:58] free speech.

Max Tani:
Not at all, not at all.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, of course.

Max Tani:
He obviously wants to say what he... He wants to be able to say what he wants to say, obviously.

Ben Smith:
And wants to make other people say the same thing. Yes, that [inaudible 00:47:10].

Max Tani:
Yes, exactly. He’s interested in other people speaking the same thing as him, which I get, I am as well. But I obviously thought that the most interesting part was her deflection on Brendan Carr and saying, “Well, I wasn’t here when all of that stuff was happening,” which I thought was really interesting. And she basically said, different people in the administration feel different things about various aspects of that.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. I think she represents the sort of principled speech wing of the administration. I suspect there are people in the administration who really disagree with her. I think on the Palestinian speech stuff too, I see why she’s not leading with it, but I was actually surprised how directly she said the British out to be letting people protest in favor of a banned Palestinian.

Max Tani:
And I mean, she really did seem to say, while she kind of defended Brendan Carr and said, “Well...” I mean, the point she was basically making was he didn’t actually use his regulatory authority to kind of go after Jimmy Kimmel, and he could have if he wanted to.

Ben Smith:
Right.

Max Tani:
And actually put some real pressure. She still said that she felt like people had different viewpoints and opinions on it. She did say that she hadn’t heard about that example from other European diplomats. So if there’s some diplomats who are looking for something, that does look like, feel like a point where they could maybe squeeze her on it a little bit because it seems like she probably thinks that is a bit censorious. But Ben, was there anything else that you thought was particularly interesting? Did you think that there is a straight line from Gawker, commenter to Under Secretary of the State Department? Should I be referring to her as the Under Secretary? I referred to her as Sarah. Was that rude?

Ben Smith:
I’ve known her for a little while and she didn’t seem to object to being called Sarah, but it occurred to me too, that we ought to be calling her Under Secretary Rogers.

Max Tani:
Well, you can apologize on my behalf and say-

Ben Smith:
I will.

Max Tani:
... that I didn’t know the proper etiquette.

Ben Smith:
My impression is that she’s not somebody who’s big on taking offense at minor slights.

Max Tani:
That’s true. That’s true. Well, that is it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Mixed Signals from us here at Semafor. Our show is produced by Manny Fidel and Josh Billenson with special thanks to Anna Bozzino, Jules Zern, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Tori Core, Garrett Wiley, and Daniel Haft. Our engineer is Rick Kwan and our theme music is by the great Steve Bone. Our public editor is Elon Musk. Elon, we’d love to have you on the show.

Ben Smith:
And if you’re enjoying this podcast, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or subscribe on YouTube.

Max Tani:
And if you want more, you can always sign up for Semafor’s media newsletter, which for now, is out every Sunday night.