Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself, associate editor Toby Young and

Canadian editor Jonathan Kay. You can support our podcast by visiting

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Welcome to the quillett podcast. I'm Jonathan Kay, Quillett's Canadian editor.

Readers of the Quillett website may be familiar with the name Brian Amridge.

He is the California-based engineer who, until recently, worked in a senior capacity at Facebook.

In 2018, he left the company following his authorship of a memo that called out Facebook for a lack of ideological

diversity among its staff.

In a recent article for Colette, Mr Ammerge set out his reasons for joining Facebook in the

first place and his reasons for leaving. He also gave readers an extraordinary behind the scenes

for leaving.

He also gave readers an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look

at how content moderation policies have evolved at that company,

often in ways that restrict free speech.

Following the publication of his article, Mr Ammerge spoke to me over the phone.

Here are excerpts from that interview.

Brian, could you tell listeners about the decision you made to join Facebook?

So it was around May 2012 and you know I had really come to this perspective about the importance of communication technologies.

You know at the time I was I was on my own I had sort of dropped out of college to focus on this startup

...