Latest news with #wokeCulture
Daily Mail
04-07-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Joe Rogan surprised by revelation of who ended America's 'woke period'
Joe Rogan was left in awe after the CEO of a billionaire-dollar tech company revealed who he thinks has ended America's 'woke' culture. Amjad Masad, the co-founder of Replit, a cloud-based coding platform, confidently declared that Elon Musk erased an alleged oppressive ideology that took over society, particularly within the tech industry. During the latest episode of the Joe Rogan Experience on July 2, Masad (pictured) claimed that many companies recently went through a 'woke period where you couldn't talk about certain things,' like the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. 'Has that gone away?' Rogan asked, leading Masad to smile and reply, 'Yeah, yeah, totally gone away.' When Rogan followed up by asking what changed the culture so quickly, Masad simply said 'Elon.' The Replit CEO then added that Musk's purchase of Twitter (now called X) completely removed the stigma of voicing opposing viewpoints in public and online. 'Buying Twitter is the single most impactful thing for free speech. Especially on these issues of being able to talk freely about a lot of subjects that are more sensitive,' Masad explained. Masad, a Jordanian-American whose family is from Palestine, noted that he had faced fierce criticism from colleagues for talking publicly about the situation in Gaza. Despite calling himself a 'moderate Palestinian,' Masad said he has been called anti-Semitic for supporting a two-state solution, which includes protections for Israelis, in the region. While speaking about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Rogan claimed that society was devolving into groups of people being convinced by their leaders that another group of people were their enemies. 'It's [expletive] insane. And the fact that it's still going on in 2025, with all we know about corruption and the theft of resources and power and influence, it's crazy that this is still happening,' Rogan said during the podcast. Masad then said he hoped the internet was starting to reach its potential as a platform for opening minds and removing the 'veil of propaganda and ignorance.' 'It was starting to happen in like 2010, 2011. And then you saw YouTube start to close down. You saw Facebook start to close down, Twitter. And suddenly, we had like this period of darkness,' the tech entrepreneur said. Although Rogan said that this censorship initially had good intentions of trying to weed out hate speech, it quickly went too far when tech companies began silencing 'malinformation.' Malinformation is a term used to describe truthful information that is still censored because social media companies and governments claim these facts are harmful to the overall public good. 'That's crazy. You're turning adults into infants, and you're turning the state into God. This is the secular religion. This is the religion of people that are atheists,' Rogan warned. 'The west was never about that. The west was about individual liberty,' Masad replied. The two men then shifted back to Musk's takeover of X, with Rogan arguing that the changes the CEO instituted 'opened up discussion.' While Rogan said that the changes meant to promote more freedom, such as reduced content moderation and restoring suspended accounts, allowed more hate speech to sneak back into X, he argued that more people are now able to tell the difference between news and propaganda. 'You have a lot of people that are recognizing actual true facts that are very inconvenient to the narrative that's displayed on mainstream media,' Rogan said. After Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, he noted that his goal was to 'maximize free speech.' Musk has also repeatedly called out what he referred to as the 'woke mind virus' that was threatening society. During an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience in November, Musk blamed woke culture for attempting to censor humor and satire, with polarizing topics like social justice essentially becoming off-limits to criticism. 'The woke ideology makes humor illegal. There are so many humor no-fly zones. You can't make fun of anything,' Musk told Rogan in 2024. 'At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue,' Musk added during a 2021 interview with satire website the Babylon Bee. In the wake of Musk's acquisition of X, other major tech and social media platforms have caved to mounting pressure to roll back censorship online. In March, lawmakers in Washington subpoenaed officials at Google, demanding they turn over company records tied to the censorship of Americans during the Biden presidency. Republicans have long accused the Biden Administration of pressuring major companies into censoring free speech during and after the coronavirus pandemic, which Rogan and Masan also criticized during the July 2 podcast. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also publicly confessed that both Meta and Facebook censored conservative opinions on an 'industrial scale' during this time.
Daily Mail
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Joe Rogan stunned by who really ended America's 'woke period': 'It's insane'
Joe Rogan was left in awe after the CEO of a billionaire-dollar tech company revealed who he thinks has ended America's 'woke' culture. Amjad Masad, the co-founder of Replit, a cloud-based coding platform, confidently declared that Elon Musk erased an alleged oppressive ideology that took over society, particularly within the tech industry. During the latest episode of the Joe Rogan Experience on July 2, Masad claimed that many companies recently went through a 'woke period where you couldn't talk about certain things,' like the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. 'Has that gone away?' Rogan asked, leading Masad to smile and reply, 'Yeah, yeah, totally gone away.' When Rogan followed up by asking what changed the culture so quickly, Masad simply said 'Elon.' The Replit CEO then added that Musk's purchase of Twitter (now called X) completely removed the stigma of voicing opposing viewpoints in public and online. 'Buying Twitter is the single most impactful thing for free speech. Especially on these issues of being able to talk freely about a lot of subjects that are more sensitive,' Masad explained. Masad, a Jordanian-American whose family is from Palestine, noted that he had faced fierce criticism from colleagues for talking publicly about the situation in Gaza. Despite calling himself a 'moderate Palestinian,' Masad said he has been called anti-Semitic for supporting a two-state solution, which includes protections for Israelis, in the region. While speaking about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Rogan claimed that society was devolving into groups of people being convinced by their leaders that another group of people were their enemies. 'It's f****** insane. And the fact that it's still going on in 2025, with all we know about corruption and the theft of resources and power and influence, it's crazy that this is still happening,' Rogan said during the podcast. Masad then said he hoped the internet was starting to reach its potential as a platform for opening minds and removing the 'veil of propaganda and ignorance.' 'It was starting to happen in like 2010, 2011. And then you saw YouTube start to close down. You saw Facebook start to close down, Twitter. And suddenly, we had like this period of darkness,' the tech entrepreneur said. Although Rogan said that this censorship initially had good intentions of trying to weed out hate speech, it quickly went too far when tech companies began silencing 'malinformation.' Malinformation is a term used to describe truthful information that is still censored because social media companies and governments claim these facts are harmful to the overall public good. 'That's crazy. You're turning adults into infants, and you're turning the state into God. This is the secular religion. This is the religion of people that are atheists,' Rogan warned. 'The west was never about that. The west was about individual liberty,' Masad replied. The two men then shifted back to Musk's takeover of X, with Rogan arguing that the changes the CEO instituted 'opened up discussion.' While Rogan said that the changes meant to promote more freedom , such as reduced content moderation and restoring suspended accounts, allowed more hate speech to sneak back into X, he argued that more people are now able to tell the difference between news and propaganda. 'You have a lot of people that are recognizing actual true facts that are very inconvenient to the narrative that's displayed on mainstream media,' Rogan said. After Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, he noted that his goal was to 'maximize free speech.' Musk has also repeatedly called out what he referred to as the 'woke mind virus' that was threatening society. During an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience in November, Musk blamed woke culture for attempting to censor humor and satire, with polarizing topics like social justice essentially becoming off-limits to criticism. 'The woke ideology makes humor illegal. There are so many humor no-fly zones. You can't make fun of anything,' Musk told Rogan in 2024. 'At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue,' Musk added during a 2021 interview with satire website the Babylon Bee. In the wake of Musk's acquisition of X, other major tech and social media platforms have caved to mounting pressure to roll back censorship online. In March, lawmakers in Washington subpoenaed officials at Google, demanding they turn over company records tied to the censorship of Americans during the Biden presidency. Republicans have long accused the Biden Administration of pressuring major companies into censoring free speech during and after the coronavirus pandemic, which Rogan and Masan also criticized during the July 2 podcast. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also publicly confessed that both Meta and Facebook censored conservative opinions on an 'industrial scale' during this time. Zuckerberg said the Biden Administration 'repeatedly pressured' the company to remove posts government officials claimed were 'COVID misinformation,' even if the posts were just humor or satire. To Masan's point that the 'woke period' has ended, Facebook has since shut down its third-party fact-checking program, replacing it with Community Notes, a crowdsourced content moderation feature that allows users to add context, corrections, or clarifications to posts online, just like X does.
Daily Mail
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Dazzling debut novels from new talent; SHIBBOLETH by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert, CAT FIGHT by Kit Conway, HAPPINESS FOREVER by Adelaide Faith
Shibboleth is available now from the Mail Bookshop SHIBBOLETH by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert (Europa £14.99, 384pp) EDWARD plans to spend his second year studying English literature at Oxford working hard and preparing for life in the real world. His peers, however, appear mostly interested in linking themselves to various woke trends while being noisily triggered and experiencing public anxiety. Edward does not come from wealth and is genuinely grateful to have made it to this palace of learning. It's only when he lets slip that his long-dead grandfather was a Muslim from Zanzibar that his upper-echelon peers show any interest in him. But his new-found celebrity status is not all plain sailing. I was engrossed in this funny, intelligent campus novel populated with fascinating characters. CAT FIGHT by Kit Conway (Transworld £16.99, 384pp) EMMA, Coralie and Twig have children the same age and are neighbours on the exclusive Briar Heart Estate in Kent. Tensions simmer mostly beneath the surface until Coralie's husband Adam thinks he sees a panther outside during one of their regular dinner parties. Coralie is a stiff upper-lip type so hasn't told anyone that her marriage feels like a sham and she's waiting for Adam to leave her. Twig and her wife Blake used to live in Bali. Everything was perfect until their daughter was diagnosed with cancer and they moved in with Twig's dad to fund her treatment. Emma is always uncomfortable that her husband Matt's first love was Twig. Panther-gate soon turns the small cracks into giant fault lines. Twisty and sharp. HAPPINESS FOREVER by Adelaide Faith (4th Estate £16.99, 272pp) VETERINARY nurse Sylvie is in her 30s, lives alone with her brain-damaged dog and imagines that if she can make her therapist fall in love with her, all her problems would be over. Sylvie went to therapy in the first place because she's been in some toxic relationships where she lost her sense of self. She wanted to work out who she is, but the more her obsession grows, the more in danger she is of losing herself completely. A book full of wisdom about desire and how difficult but life-changing vulnerability can be. Clever and funny.
