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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38428 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Point two is the psyop potential we are giving the CCP. I'm not sure they have the competency to actually do anything meaningful to us, but it is a fair concern for the future. But what can they do to us that we haven't done to ourselves in the past 8 years, exactly?

This is a brush-off, not an answer.

  1. Even if I bit the bullet that TikTok is only as bad as the worst US social media site, there's still an argument for US citizens preferring to not have it, because US sites are at least forced to be more responsive to US concerns.

  2. Socially negligent and corrosive messages spread for profit are bad. It may be worse to have a peer rival doing the same thing to you for strategic reasons - presumably at moments pivotal to strategic competition.

Fair, I should have expanded on that point some more. The psyop potential isn't ideal, but you might have to pick your poison here. Under the proposed law, the loss in Chinese narrative control would just be replaced by unprecedented expansion of federal power to do the exact same thing. The Twitter Files made it clear that the feds found it in their interest to coerce social media platforms to enforce a narrative via implied threat of regulation. I'd rather not give them the power to ruin any tech company on their shitlist by having an unelected committee declare it to be a foreign asset.

I understand if you disagree on the value judgement here. I'm no CCP fan, but since I don't live there I'm less concerned about them than I am domestic government overreach. If your response is we should still ban TikTok, just not this way — how should we do that without massive increase in government power or curtailing our free speech?

All fair points. My personal take is that all these sites need more guardrails (e.g. Haidt's suggestion of an "internet age" to keep out young kids) but I'm not convinced that any of this will go past TikTok. Most likely outcome is they nuke TikTok and then everyone else continues to do the same thing. If that's what's going to happen then your concerns give me more pause.

The Twitter Files made it clear that the feds found it in their interest to coerce social media platforms to enforce a narrative via implied threat of regulation.

I don't recall what specific incidents this is referring to - I guess I have to go back into the Twitter Files kerfuffle.

This is the main thrust of it from Matt Taibbi from his statement to congress this month. I don't know why they released the leaks as tweets; it's impossible to find specific receipts for these statements when they're broken up between 20 threads over several accounts...

We saw the first hints in communications between Twitter executives before the 2020 election, where we read things like:

Hi team, can we get your opinion on this? This was flagged by DHS:

Or:

Please see attached report from the FBI for potential misinformation.

This would be attached to excel spreadsheet with a long list of names, whose accounts were often suspended shortly after.

We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation “requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.

A focus of this fast-growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.” The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.”

Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for “deamplification” or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a distant, faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge.

Another troubling aspect is the role of the press, which should be the people’s last line of defense.

But instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not been taken.

By implied threat of regulation I mean the unsaid thing that would be on these companies' minds when they received a communication like this — what will they do to us if we refuse to comply? These requests weren't based off a legitimate court order, just the government saying "We'd really like it if you stopped this person from saying things we don't like." Right now they're doing the most they think they can get away with, ReportMaxxing and informal requests, so if given increased jurisdiction over content we have good reason to suspect what they'd immediately start doing with it.

I don't know why they released the leaks as tweets;

Wasn't it part of the agreement that got them access to the internal data in the first place? A quid pro quo that benefits the platform. Taibbi does have an index of the threads with executive summaries on his news website/substack.

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