National security is the sum total of the individual earned securities
of each citizen, including economic, political, social, health,
cultural, military and all sorts of security that pertain to the
identity we call a nation.
What these guys are talking about is something else. They are talking
about the security of the security services, their own self interests
and the status quo of enmeshed relations between three letter agencies
and a few captured tech giants.
On the contrary, the exact opposite is true. National security is best
served by a diverse, pluralistic, open, heterogeneous tech industry.
There is no reason intelligence needs cannot function properly with
such an ecosystem, but it would have to do so through the Rule of Law,
and systems of warrants that the incumbents have sought to bypass this
last 20 years.
Splitting Apple/Google/Facebook/Amazon into 40 smaller tech companies would result in larger tech companies from elsewhere - mostly China - eating American tech industry's lunch on the world stage.
Large companies have massive resources which are a competitive advantage. Having these titanic companies headquartered in the US, beholden to American laws, employing Americans, being a symbol of American prowess abroad and listed on American stock exchanges is in American interests on multiple tangible & intangible levels; including allowing American engineers to command ridiculous salaries and granting the government a lot of soft-power.
The recent sanctions on Russia (and previously Huawei/ZTE) shows howuch that soft-power is worth
There will be security implications when Americans are hypothetically mostly using Chinese tech (Weibo, Didi, Baidu), should it leapfrog a kneecapped US tech industry - unless the US also bans Chinese tech - which would isolate the US and make it less competitive while ceding tech leadership in the rest of the world.
Also, all the botnet-, APT-, ransomware and CSAM investigation & disruption ops would be hampered when the #1 desktop operating system, #1 & #2 phone OS authors, #1 network equipment manufacturer,#1 social network and top 3 cloud providers are no longer under your legal jurisdiction
In that case, perhaps it is best to merge the top 5-10 tech companies into a single tech behemoth, with no potential domestic competition, making it even more formidable on the world stage.
I have to ask - by "diverse", do you mean "different people from different backgrounds who have different viewpoints"? Or do you mean "people who all think the same way but have different skin colors"?
> I have to ask - by "diverse", do you mean "different people from
different backgrounds who have different viewpoints"?
Yes, people and institutions, and technologies.
What gives security is something like "hybrid vigour" obtained by the
whole system because it has evolutionary resilience (it's survivable,
at least in part, to the greatest range of possible threats)
Parts of a resilient system can even be in moderate tension as they
keep a check on each other.
For examples; it would be stronger to have both centralised and
distributed philosophies represented; it would be good to have a
mixture of public and private funding models in operation; small and
large entities capable of agile innovation, and reliable scale.
That makes it hard for a malevolent or erroneous force to infiltrate
and take out the whole barrel of apples.
Of course, diversity of gender, religion, race, age, political leaning
and wealth tend to make a more interesting and vibrant workplace, but
that's not primarily what I am saying.
The national security argument is a red herring. It is in the interest of monopolies to keep their monopolies going. And they have all the money and lobbyists in the world to make it happen.
So there are 3 ways the government could influence Big Tech:
1. Infiltration. An agent or asset could be in a position of power to enact desired policies and changes, provide a backdoor or whatever;
2. Jurisdiction. The platform falls under US jurisdiction so is subject to various forms of law enforcement, secret or otherwise. National Security Letters, FISA warrants, pen registers, that sort of thing; and
3. Propaganda. US companies reflect the cultural and political values of their founders, board and management as will as the will of stockholders. For some issues there is a political divide but for many issues there isn't, most notably when it comes to US foreign policy where Democrats and Republicans are basically indistinguishable.
The prevailing foreign policy view is that the US is good and a benign hegemony and a civilizing and democratizing force. The current foreign policy bent also favours interventionism and has since World War Two.
You see this at the huge backlash you get, even here among relatively educated and informed commenters, when you dare to suggest that the US bears some responsibility for Ukraine's predicament even though Russia is of course wholly responsible for an unjustifiable invasion.
It's a real lesson in the power of US propaganda and how ingrained the benign hegemony meme (and it is a meme) is.
My theory is the first 2 points I listed above don't matter. They're of almost no importance. What really matters is the ability of the US media (and I include social media companies in this umbrella) to project US propaganda and to normalize the US-centric view of the world.
To say that the US is in any way responsible for Ukraine is to deny ukraine agency. They are caught between a lion and a bear. They could reject the aid of the lion, but that would throw them into the hands of the bear. They choose to accept US help in their defense, but that makes them vulnerable to US invasion. This is a choice they made, and they bare the consequences. The US in offering that help might have sought to anger russia, but they left it to the ukrainians to decide whether to follow through.
Fundamentally, russia had no interest in allowing ukraine to be an independent country. US aid forestalled an invasion, and made the ultimate invasion a fairer fight, but it wasn't the cause of it.
> To say that the US is in any way responsible for Ukraine is to deny ukraine agency
No, it doesn't. This war has highlighted just how simplistic people are in that someone has to be the bad guy and someone has to be the good guy (hint: the US is always the good guy). Any suggestion that more than one party can bear responsibility or blame invites histrionics about victim-blaming.
The US friend zoned Ukraine, basically. The US knew it was never going to happen. Sure, Ukraine should figure that out (which they didn't seem to) but there's enough blame to go around.
>This war has highlighted just how simplistic people are in that someone has to be the bad guy and someone has to be the good guy
Everyone who has ever said this has gone on to say that the US is the bad guy. And you're always arguing against people who say "Yes, the US is a bully, but that's not important right now."
I don't say this flippantly. Look at the governments the US has overthrown, rebels supported, natural resources stolen, corrupt leaders supported and arms supplied to those committing genocide (eg Saudi Arabia in Yemen).
There was blame to go around, until Russia invaded Ukraine today and in 2014. Now it's all on them. Otherwise you're saying the woman with the short skirt asked or deserved to be raped and murdered. Which is never true.
Mistakes were made, but none of them justify the genocide in Ukraine. Nothing even justified an invasion at all.
If you can't see true evil and who the bad guy is, you're definitely part of the problem. I hope no women in your family are raped by men with logic similar to your own, because you'll be blaming them.
This is a misleading and, frankly, rather disgusting analogy.
The sovereignty of an individual, especially over one’s own body, and the sovereignty of a nation are not even near equivalents.
And yes, I know that at this time the sovereignty of individual Ukrainians, men and women, is being horribly violated. But this did not need to happen even if the sovereignty of the nation itself was violated. It’s a separate matter for which Russians, especially individual soldiers and their commanders, bear direct blame for. They could have chosen another, less disgusting, far less inhumane means to gain control of Ukraine.
As well, despite the clear propaganda behind it, Russia can at least claim that they felt threatened by Ukraine’s chummy relationship with the narcissistic and occasionally-aggressive Uncle Sam. This entirely breaks your analogy as rape is never a defensive maneuver no matter how one might twist it.
Sovereignty of a nation is built on the sovereign individuals. Only a free man can build a free nation. It bubbles up, rather than comes from top down.
I'm an "actions, not words" type of guy. Putin claims many things in this world, they're threatened etc. We all know it's a lie. You must watch Russia's actions, not their words. How many times have we learned this? Watch what they've done, not what they say.
You're right, rape is never defensive. Instead what happened here is that Russia has raped Ukraine, and claimed she was going to attack him. That's the reality of it, and it's the only twisted logic on display.
She was also supposedly a Nazi. I'd bet good coin there's more actual Neo-Nazis in Russia than Ukraine though, just based on sheer population alone.
Not that Nazism actually gives Putin any pause.[0]
Because, in this instance, the lion is not the one that launched an invasion. Particularly egregious, launching a pre-emptive war based on a flimsy premise of what Ukraine might do in the future.
> The prevailing foreign policy view is that the US is good and a benign hegemony and a civilizing and democratizing force.
No, that's just how it's sold to the public. E.g. I guarantee nobody had civilizing and democratizing in mind when the US occupying force in Iraq issued order 81:
the people in Iraq are now prohibited from saving newly designed seeds (not the traditional ones) and may only plant seeds for their food from licensed, authorized U.S. distributors. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Orders
> You see this at the huge backlash you get, even here among relatively educated and informed commenters, when you dare to suggest that the US bears some responsibility for Ukraine's predicament even though Russia is of course wholly responsible for an unjustifiable invasion.
Only 1 country is killing Ukrainians: Russia. There's no US troops massacring and raping Ukrainians... The only thing the US is responsible for is that they could have maybe threatened Russia enough to not invade.
Anyhow, I've been sceptical of US hegemony at times however one thing is clear: the world is far better with the US as the dominant power than it would be if Russia or China were dominant. At least the US allows its citizens and those of its 'protectorates' (or whatever you want to call US allies/countries it protects) a large degree of personal freedom.
The lines are clearer than ever for the 21st century. This century has been kicked off with the world struggle between democracy and totalitarianism.
People have a choice. Choose the US/Europe/Japan/South Korea/Taiwan, or, the mideast/Russia/China. Many people voted with their feet, migrating to the former nations. Those people have no room to speak as they already voted.
I'm missing some players of course, but generally speaking we in the Free World are definitely at a disadvantage and outnumbered by the hordes of people who desire strongmen and dictators. Most of the world actually does not want or trust themselves with self-determination through representative government. Russia is one of the few examples in Europe where the people want freedom, but don't really know what it is and are scared of the idea that they'll have to become active players in a non-farcical representative democracy.
The middle east similarly never asked for democracy. They largely see no use for it. Most of Asia is the same. The typical Chinese person prefers the greatness of China as a nationalistic power, rather than the greatness of their institutions progressing the freedom of mankind. Which is how most of us in Europe and North America view our true strengths as.
Of course, overt nationalism will lead to servitude, especially for Russia. They'll be losing Chechnya soon, and become a vassal state to China. Far lower than their previous state in the world. This is a nation that once slammed their foreheads on the ground in honor of their Turkish masters, now they are taking off their shoes for the Chinese. Their alternative choice was to ditch Putin, and join with the American, European and Asian democracies. Contrary to popular belief, we welcomed them. But Putin looks at old maps of the Russian Empire and honestly thought it was possible again. Being a farce democracy, there was no institutional resistance to stop him. He's only destroying Russia.
The Russian people are also ultimately responsible here. They chose to cower to Putin. I'm sympathetic to them to a degree, these are a people that haven't and don't dare to speak their views outside of their kitchen table. Yet inaction is an action. They can still stop this. But they have to storm the Kremlin and take him out ASAP. It won't happen. We have a newly confirmed genocidal state in the world to contend with.
> The Russian people are also ultimately responsible here.
I would be interested to learn about what steps you've taken to curb the abuses of your government. Surely your own government is not without fault, and through your logic you are responsible for all their transgressions.
That's a Soviet response right there. Everything must be examined objectively. It doesn't matter if someone else committed a crime or has a fault, that doesn't justify crimes of our own.
I'm happy to put myself on the defensive though. Self-examination is a path to enlightenment. I am guilty of many things in life. Some of which I have been punished and others which I never will be. In the portions of the Americas, Asia, and Europe that are healthy democracies, simple political engagement can suffice. Many things others would characterize as "abuses" were actually proxy wars against totalitarian regimes. If the entire world were healthy democracies, it would be a far more peaceful place due to having checks and balances on power. As opposed to dictators.
But that has no relevance here, when there's an active genocide occurring in Ukraine. I'm not part or parcel to that. Others are though.
The middle east similarly never asked for democracy. They largely see no use for it.
Full quote helps.. I realize the Iranian people are far more into neoliberalism than their leaders are, and that not everyone in that part of the world desires Sharia Law over neoliberalism. I certainly did not intend to insult those that do desire freedom / representative government in the region. But I do believe they're in the minority.
> I'm missing some players of course, but generally speaking we in the Free World are definitely at a disadvantage and outnumbered by the hordes of people who desire strongmen and dictators.
Dunno if I agree with this particular line (but I do agree with most of your post). India is a democracy, there's many quite populous democracies and many who live under dictatorships do desire personal freedom on several levels even if there's not necessarily democratic institutions in their countries at present.
There are those that desire their nation to be a part of the Free World, within nations that aren't currently. Of course. I didn't mean they're all doomed. Freedom fighters for democracy exist everywhere. There's many Russians like Navalny that desire this. He's an example of a Russian patriot, rather than just a nationalist.
Had the Russians stood with him in a real way all of these years, tens of thousands of Russian lives and Ukrainian lives would've been saved.
We can't help them. They're a nuclear power. External help with Russian liberation is not possible. It's on them, and I understand how difficult it is. Freedom fighting is not in most Russian's DNA. But they're human, and even after 70 years of Soviet repression, it's still there. I want to have faith.
India is worth keeping an eye on. They are a member of the Pacific equivalent of NATO, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, but it will be interesting to see how devoted they are to a transparent and healthy democracy as opposed to just looking to counter China as a rival.
They don’t cower to Putin. He’s quite popular. Russians have loved tsars for centuries. There was an infection point in the 80s and 90s where they could’ve stepped lately into a modern democratic form of government and did not. It does not seem to be the Russian way.
> This is basically the "she wore a short dress" defense...
I'm not sure why you characterize the assertion as a "defense". It's a reason.
People do things for reasons. Everyone makes choices based on how they perceive the world and predict the future from there. To flatly ignore circumstance is not constructive.
> You see this at the huge backlash you get, even here among relatively educated and informed commenters, when you dare to suggest that the US bears some responsibility for Ukraine's predicament even though Russia is of course wholly responsible for an unjustifiable invasion.
Here's the thing, the people who keep saying that US bears responsibility for Ukraine's predicament are wrong.
I'm Russian so I follow various sources (both Russian and Ukrainian) in the original languages. Putin has had his eyes on Ukraine at least since he came into power 20 years ago. In 2014 Igor Girkin (among others) was sent clandestinely to take over Crimea and start the war in the Donbas. Girkin is a monarchist and believes in "the Greater Russia". He believes that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people (an opinion Putin shares and has publicly proclaimed before the war).
The FSB has a whole department (the 5th service) devoted to subversion of Ukraine, including payment/bribes of billions of dollars to various gov't and media officials (one of whom, Viktor Medvedchuk, was captured by the SBU recently while attempting to flee house arrest).
Blaming this conflict on NATO and the US is part of Kremlin propaganda, including their "de-nazification" claims. If anything, this conflict has shown just how important NATO is in keeping people like Putin in check, as he would've gladly continued to the Baltic states and maybe others if his Ukrainian campaign succeeded (in fact, some Russian politicians have publicly stated this on national Russian TV recently).
We can agree the whole "denazification" argument is complete BS. That's propaganda for domestic consumption.
As for Putin having eyes on Ukraine, let me argue it this way: NATO was never going to allow Ukraine to join. Germany, in particular, was always going to veto it. So even if you think that Putin had his eyes on Ukraine, NATO was never going to be a solution.
So what do you do? You get Ukraine to adopt a policy of neutrality similar to Finland, Sweden or Switzerland. You build your entire military around being a defensive army to make the cost of invasion so high as to dissuade anyone from trying. To be fair, Ukraine's military has exceeded all expectations here but the invasion was (IMHO) always doomed (at least for the entire country). It's simply too big and too populated. Russia simply can't maintain control of it.
Russia may well have invaded anyway but then we're in exactly the same situation we are now so what have we lost?
Putin wants Ukraine either to be part of Russia, or as a vassal/subservient state. You don't even realize how compromised Ukraine was by the FSB. Politicians, media figures, etc... all on the bankroll of the FSB to the tune of billions of dollars. In a way, this war has allowed these rats to be exposed and has unified the Ukrainians even more so as a people. Neutrality would've just prolonged the suffering and allowed Putin to destabilize Ukraine even further.
> However, the motives behind Russia’s actions toward Ukraine could extend far beyond traditional security interests. Unlike Ukraine, neither Austria nor Finland was viewed by Moscow as part of “the same historical and spiritual place” as Russia, as part of “a single whole.” Hence, it was easier for the Kremlin to accept their statehood, including their right to integrate with Europe politically and economically. It is unlikely that Moscow would ever acquiesce to the same latitude in Ukraine’s foreign policy. As Russian President Vladimir Putin has stressed, “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.” Without a common understanding of what neutrality means, Russia would then be even more likely to interfere in Ukraine as long as it interprets any of its foreign policy actions as hostile. Furthermore, in the absence of outside security guarantees or military cooperation with the West, Ukraine could be perceived as sufficiently weak to be coerced to Russia’s liking.
4. Coercion and Corruption. The government tells Big Tech "You're going to do $GOVERNMENT_THING, as well as fund our next campaigns. Cooperate and we'll make you even more wealthy and powerful; refuse and we'll bury you." This is a nefarious combination of all 3 of your points, and I suspect the most common.
Its much more interesting i think because in the end, its a game of who remains in power, the public domain (government, theoretically) or the private domain (large Corp). The Chinese CP decived to crack down on to-big-to-fail, where as we in the west ...
Thanks, vouched even though I'm not sure your claim about "every major player" being out is correct (https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...). Still, easier to have that conversation elsewhere now that there's a general public conversation about it, so it's harder to hand-wave it away as conspiratorial.
>Thanks, vouched even though I'm not sure your claim about "every major player" being out is correct (https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...). Still, easier to have that conversation elsewhere now that there's a general public conversation about it, so it's harder to hand-wave it away as conspiratorial.
Institutions like Blackrock or Vanguard don't get to vote, they may at most provide a proxy vote at cost.
The typical 'conspiracy' around those 2 is that their management can threaten entities like twitter with delisting. Twitter is then removed from their holdings at tremendous cost. So they have kind of a little threat and they get some say to do stuff like climate change and diversity stuff. Ultimately the orgs still take this upon themselves. It's an easy thing to bluff against.
Yes maybe some of these institutions have some players involved but I dont see it.
Former intelligence people churn out all sorts of goofy takes in an attempt to build their brand. They’re also all over the spectrum depending on what audience they’re chasing. Not that much difference than any other media influencer or substack author.
It's ultimately a free speech issue. You can't demand people to self-censor because their previous employment places unjustified credibility their nonsensical views. The way to combat this is through better civic and media literacy.
> Former intelligence people churn out all sorts of goofy takes in an attempt to build their brand.
Former intelligence people churn out all sorts of goofy takes because they're paid to, and after those goofy takes have been blasted by every corporate media outlet 24 hours a day for a month or two, they transform from goofy takes into orthodoxies that you could be fired for denying.
>Former intelligence people churn out all sorts of goofy takes in an attempt to build their brand. They’re also all over the spectrum depending on what audience they’re chasing.
You're right but is this one a goofy take? Or is there a real something here?
I don't think so, but to indulge my own cranky theories: Perhaps Elon Musk's takeover attempt was done at the behest of the US government to take control of the platform under the cover of "censorship". Musk himself indicated he wanted to make the platform more miserable for the "extremes" on both the left and right (both perceived as being anti-government) - leaving you with the establishment consensus unharmed in the middle.
That's a cool idea. Largely speaking you can see Elon's point of view.
He was on Babylon Bee's show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvGnw1sHh9M 2.4 million views in last 3 months. In this video they in detail discuss the problem with political banning.
2 months later, Babylon Bee got banned off twitter for a joke. Clear political banning and violation of section 230.
> Clear political banning and violation of section 230.
This has been posted a bunch of times, and it's wrong. Section 230 doesn't prohibit political bannings. It doesn't actually prohibit any banning at all.
> (2) Civil liability
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
> (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or
> availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene,
> lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise
> objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected;
Even banning for constitutionally protected speech is explicitly allowed.
Whether that's a good thing or not is a separate conversation, but nothing presently in section 230 would prevent Twitter/Facebook/etc from banning an entire political party.
Babylon Bee doesn't threaten the national security establishment. The "Far left" and "Far right" - yes.
The idea is you won't get banned for making jokes about trans stuff, but you'll instead get banned for saying something bad about US global hegemony. It's not a culture war issue so nobody is going to care that you got censored.
For the record Babylon Bee is not banned, they can unlock their account any time by deleting a Tweet that jokingly gives a "man of the year award" to a real individual transwoman by name.
What’s real is Greenwald poetically desires a world organized by his principles but has neither the skills or imagination to offer more than paranoid Big Brother scenario.
Technology based mesh networks are not going anywhere. Unless the public itself revolts against the state it will always stick its fingers in them.
One planet, one reality on the ground. If people don’t want big government they need to replace it.
Former Intel people are a necessary tool of the current Intel community. I forget which project veritas recording caught this- but a journalist was caught stating that they get their information from former Intel people that talk to current Intel officials to get around rules preventing current Intel officials from leaking information to journalists, we have a problem. And we've had a serious problem as this behavior is not just the activity of rogue officials that only leak true information. I would argue that it's also likely that Intel officials are doing this with the blessing of their organizations in order to shape public opinion. And they aren't always leaking the truth. Remember when 50 Intel officials signed a weasely letter stating that the laptop from hell was simply Russian Disinformation? Or in the case of the Durham investigation, we are seeing an increasingly obvious pattern that Intel agencies were involved in creating fake controversy over Russia and Trump in order to remove him from power?
You call it brand building, I call it destroying democracy.
We used to fund distributed disruptive technologies to subvert Soviet censorship. Chinese censorship was seen as proof of our superior freedom 20 years ago. Now it is viewed with envy by those in power. What moral high ground do we hold now?
>We used to fund distributed disruptive technologies to subvert Soviet censorship. Chinese censorship was seen as proof of our superior freedom 20 years ago. Now it is viewed with envy by those in power. What moral high ground do we hold now?
The bigger point to discuss. If twitter is under control of the US government. I have no idea if it is or not, it just seems to be the case.
You dont get to make the comment 'twitter is private, free speech only applies to government' because twitter == government.
The other consideration I had. What if the us government doesnt explicitly own twitter. They simply dont realize the us government has hacked access to moderate and censor things in a clandestine way? Now it's an even more complicated subject but wouldn't justify the stock market situation that brings me to the point.
>You dont get to make the comment 'twitter is private, free speech only applies to government' because twitter == government.
it's true, twitter == government but not twitter === government. Meaning that the conversion happens in the underlying JIT engine where government hacks twitter to do what it wants.
So the idea is that you could make a first amendment complaint against the government for hacking twitter if it infringed your free speech with that hack, but you could not say twitter cannot just turn off my account because while twitter == government it does not === government.
> it's true, twitter == government but not twitter === government.
Let's not start coding political documents in JavaScript now. (Insert additional joke about the interpreter engine running on 9 robed meat processors).
I don’t understand how “Twitter is controlled by the government” is the simplest explanation. Do you actually use Twitter?
I feel like Twitter had an outsized representation along social media giants. It’s one of the smallest by MAU; and has a history of management problems. Isn’t occans razor here that is just a poorly run company?
Occam's Razor has nothing to do with this, and its improper invocation is fallacious. Literally it means "do not multiply entities beyond necessity"; in practice it's also called the principle of parsimony, meaning that one should not assume a more complicated explanation when a simpler one will do. Positing a connection between Twitter and the US government, without supporting evidence but just because it "makes sense" - is anything but parsimonious. That remains true even if such a connection does eventually turn out to exist. "Do not attribute to malice that which is explained by incompetence" is likely to be the more applicable principle here.
Vast amounts of ground, fortunately. How about the fact that we can have these conversations fully uncensored? That little thing known as freedom of speech, which is still overwhelmingly alive and well. I enjoy its use, aggressively, on a daily basis without persecution and have for decades uninterrupted.
The article is about the benefits that the US intelligence agencies get from the censorship power of a centralized monopoly of tech companies.
For example, if your main form of communication online is through companies owned by Meta, it’s very easy to effectively censor a point of view or group of people through deplatforming, but if there are dozens of platforms that becomes more difficult.
While more authoritarian countries rely on direct censorship, the US instead promotes the viewpoints they want people to subscribe to: positive reinforcement. You can see this with the government’s involvement with the entertainment industry, or with the military paying sports leagues to promote patriotic displays.
Tech companies being private entities means that they can censor or at least stop the viral effects of social media on ideas that don’t fit the mold.
There’s a lot you can do to shape public opinion without violating the first amendment.
It’s kind of similar to the way local news stations will run “stories” that amount to advertisements for various products or local businesses. Or you might see a funny meme on Reddit where the joke mostly has to do with a company.
Not to say that there aren’t valid reasons to do stuff like this…there’s plenty of harmful speech out there that makes the world a worse place. Hateful, violent, or misleading speech is a legitimate problem. For example, there’s a report that claims most anti-vaccination online content comes from just 12 sources. [1]
It seems a little bit alarming that such a small group can amplify speech in a way that has cost perhaps thousands of lives.
Except that freedom of speech does not protect us from intolerance, as Karl Popper observed. For example, private entities are not required to uphold freedom of speech.
It's funny when Popper is brought up in this way because his conclusion was that the only reasonable censorship of intolerance was that which poses a threat of immediate physical harm. So basically how the US treats freedom of speech today.
He certainly wouldn't be supportive of censoring racist commentary that didn't incite immediate physical violence.
Funny enough, in Germany - which is definitely more restricted, and for good reason, on the US understanding of "free speech" - Facebook and Twitter are routinely seen as public discourse forums and have to unban users as long as what they post isn't against the law [1].
I don't think people think it's impossible but you need a source. The article in the headline does not prove this. Of course US security/war hawks want control over twitter but that doesn't make it true.
From your comment, you went unnecessarily political regarding the January 6, 2021 insurrection. In my view, this is why people downvoted your comment. The common narrative is that it was insurrection. It was certainly a dangerous mob driven by Trump and cronies intending to interfere with the US election proceedings without justifiable cause beyond pseudo-creedal feelings that somewhere, somehow, the election was stolen.
Correct. But interfering with election proceedings, never mind being encouraged to kill the people charged with finalizing those proceedings, could lend to chaos and give incumbents (who are stocking the chaos) opportunities to seize control -- an effective coup.
I hear you, but as soon as anyone "siezed control" they would be summarily thrown out in the mud and made a laughing stock by the entirety of the nation.
Don't let the tiny vocal minority of fools chanting election fraud trick you into thinking regular folks would go along with some half-baked coup attempt - they'd be met with laughter and scorn. I've discussed this at length with friends and family, some of whom have pretty strong political views.
But if they're in nominal control of the military, and have 40% of the country expressing a modicum of sympathy, then you let loose a pretty dangerous situation.
The event was an insurrection. Several have been charged with seditious conspiracy, as your earlier commenters have pointed out. Others have other charges.
>From your comment, you went unnecessarily political regarding the January 6, 2021 insurrection. In my view, this is why people downvoted your comment. The common narrative is that it was insurrection
Wiki used to call it insurrection but it's not that. I understand the criticism that perhaps it's because it's political, but that's the because the whole subject is political.
>It was certainly a dangerous mob driven by Trump and cronies intending to interfere with the US election proceedings without justifiable cause beyond pseudo-creedal feelings that somewhere, somehow, the election was stolen.
> Wiki used to call it insurrection but it's not that.
They don't call it insurrection only because "seditious conspiracy" is the more legally accurate term, and the charge on which convictions have already been obtained. But ask a layperson to describe the difference and you'll get nothing. Even the US house and senate voted on impeachment for "incitement of insurrection" despite the legal distinction. Saying that it's "not insurrection[legal]" might be true, but HN is not a court and saying "not insurrection[common]" here is false.
> But ask a layperson to describe the difference and you'll get nothing. Even the US house and senate voted on impeachment for "incitement of insurrection" despite the legal distinction.
\o layperson here. My observation of January 6 was the people being punished were part of a hapless, mindless mob who believed the lies of kakistocrats playing on their economic insecurities and political loyalties.
I withdraw my position about US government and twitter.
>They don't call it insurrection only because "seditious conspiracy" is the more legally accurate term, and the charge on which convictions have already been obtained.
I think I saw this on twitter. I'm not going to argue over this one. Even the wikipage extensively uses the word insurrection still.
This is a super non-issue. In fact, the differing reactions and hard line take on these contemporary political protests is all that matters.
Yeah, one group of "protestors" can take over a small section of a city, push the authorities out, loot and riot. But another "protest" gets a little out of hand and it's an attempt to overthrow the government.
Trump lost, can nobody see that continuing to talk about him is counterproductive? On both sides!
> Yeah, one group of "protestors" can take over a small section of a city, push the authorities out, loot and riot.
If you read my prior comment, you'll note a distinct lack of discussion regarding this unrelated topic.
> But another "protest" gets a little out of hand and it's an attempt to overthrow the government.
Correct. The mob that actually performed the violent protest may not have come to the Capitol that day to overthrow the government, but the people spurring them on had other designs. Calling for the murder of the government official performing their duty is a key tell for that; to my understanding there is further evidence beyond incendiary and violent rhetoric.
But please, let's stay on topic instead of deflecting to the ills of Antifa and her counter-agitators. That conversation just reinforces the backfire effect since the trivial triggering conversation challenges deeply held worldviews.[0]
I'm sure if it was on the table, intelligence and national security officials would issue a jointly signed letter that implementing a "Great Firewall" in America is necessary for national security.
Luckily, these people don't get a say in what congress does. I will continue to vote for legislators who advocate busting tech monopolies.
That makes one vote, unfortunately, it doesn't matter.
The set of people who vote on tech issues is dwarfed by the set of people who vote based on what "team" the candidate is on. That's simple reality, and it's not changing anytime soon.
If we want real change, we'll have to start paying the large "campaign contributions" that the organizations on the other side pay. It's a horrible thing to say, but that's how the system works.
I don't put much faith in things Turley writes. He went off the deep end a long time ago and went into crazy town. Marc Elias has, correctly IMO, labeled him as "the pillow guy, but with tenure."
Why would you place stock in anything Marc Elias has to say? He is, at the very least, a partisan ideologue. And he’s certainly not a journalist unlike “the pillow guy, but with tenure”.
Suppression of liberty and free speech is against the founding ethos of America. Should we abandon that ethos, we have abandoned the very idea of America.
--
"Better to die on your feet than live on your knees."
~ Emiliano Zapata
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"Live Free or Die"
~ U.S. state of New Hampshire
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"Give me liberty or give me death!"
~ Patrick Henry
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“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
~ Benjamin Franklin
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"True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else."
"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic..."
~ Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. writing for a unanimous Supreme Court about why antiwar pamphleteers should be jailed.
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"We think ... that [black people] are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time [of America's founding] considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them."
~ Chief justice Roger Taney, for the Supreme Court majority in Dred Scott vs. Sandford
> "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic..."
The decision for the first quote you used was overturned afterward, over 50 years ago now. It's misrepresentative of the current state of the law and you shouldn't use it as an example.
"The whiskey tax was repealed in the early 1800s during the Jefferson administration. Historian Carol Berkin argues that the episode, in the long run, strengthened US nationalism because the people appreciated how well Washington handled the rebels without resorting to tyranny."
Let's hope the government maintains it's historical position of not resorting to tyranny and the country grows stronger as a result.
The Bonus Army was a group of 43,000 demonstrators – made up of 17,000 veterans of the United States in World War I, together with their families and affiliated groups – who gathered in Washington, D.C. in mid-1932 to demand early cash redemption of their service bonus certificates.
On July 28, 1932, U.S. Attorney General William D. Mitchell ordered the veterans removed from all government property. Washington police met with resistance, shot at the protestors, and 2 veterans were wounded and later died. President Herbert Hoover then ordered the U.S. Army to clear the marchers' campsite. Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded a contingent of infantry and cavalry, supported by six tanks. The Bonus Army marchers with their wives and children were driven out, and their shelters and belongings burned.
Fighting for liberty and freedom is an idea so divorced from contemporary society that the age of the founding fathers might as well be mythology.
We already have a sizeable portion of the population that wants people that don't agree with them to be silenced. And as long as they can all still buy their cattle feed at Wal-Mart, nothing is going to change for the better.
Frances Haugen, the supposed Facebook whistleblower, slipped up in her 60 minutes interview and revealed that she works for US intelligence. The effort she was employed to advance is acceptance of more censorship of Meta and the like. Conspicuously absent from the publicly promoted discussion was any mention of the free alternatives such as the fediverse. 'The Social Dilemma' movie had similar objectives and narrative framing.
I anticipate that self-hosters, linux users, and people who are not Facebooked will be further castigated as radicals and worse in the future.
Also note the irony that Substack contains Google and Amazon trackers.
It was somewhere in the interview where she mentioned about how careful she was at copying FB files because of her previous experience working in intelligence. I am sorry I don't feel like listening to the whole thing again to give you the specific time marker. https://youtu.be/_Lx5VmAdZSI
And even still, the comment you reference is pretty innocuous if you have actual context. She has publicly stated that she worked alongside intelligence assets at a "threat intelligence unit" at Facebook[1].
Of course I cannot prove that she still works with intelligence. The funding and direction of such assets is understably obscured. My statement is merely logical conclusion that you can choose to agree with or not.
I see you would be open to my information about how the lizard people run the world. Of course I cannot prove it but my statement is merely a logical conclusion.
Hanlon's Razor is qiite rusty compared to Occam's, and it's self-evidentness is massively in question. It's more a crutch leaned on to lubricate interaction between executive decision makers than anything else.
Unfortunately, I've seen it cut the user more than the situation in my lifetime.
None of their arguments are that convincing to me but I do think there's something to the broader argument in a US/China lens. The Chinese govt is backing up the dumptruck investing into AI while good ole boys in DC are passing around billion dollar contracts on fighter jets. Google and Facebook are leading the west in AI innovation in my opinion. If AGI is possible, it would really suck for the world if China got there first.
Imagine how different the world would be if China beat us to the internet and the Great Firewall was the world standard, but with AGI it will probably be able to rapidly become more advanced and prevent others from coming close to it.
If the US were to get serious in AI investment I wouldn't care about breaking up big tech but that doesn't seem to be the case at all.
Harry Truman said in 1945 about the atomic bomb, "We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies". I feel the same way about FAANG and Silicon Valley as a whole (and Wall Street, and Hollywood, and SpaceX/Tesla, and the Ivy League), that they are in the United States.
That doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That doesn't mean I can't or won't decry their putting thumbs on scales toward a certain type of bien-pensant ideology. That does mean that, overall, I am very, very glad that they are American instead of Russian, Chinese, or even British, French, or German.
It's such a financially convenient line of thinking. It's absolute nonsense. Both at face value and once you dig into it. Mainstream media is feeding us constant lies which work against our interests, destroy our ability to trust institutions and the government. Big Tech is clearly the biggest threat to our democracy.
Before Big Tech, we did not have such problems. This new narrative is pure self-serving propaganda, a figment of the imagination of corporate-funded lobbyists.
Free-market capitalism with freedom of speech is the recipe for economic prosperity. Has been for hundreds of years.
Some people will point to China as an attempt to show a counter-example ("Look at China, they're totalitarian and their economy has been booming.") but they conveniently forget the fact that China's growth has been happening during a time of general loosening of policies. The past 20 years in China have overall been characterized by an increasing tolerance for free-market capitalism and more freedom of speech compared to what it was before.
China came out of an extreme form of communism. Of course, any loosening would yield huge improvements! Also, they have over 1 billion people, of course any small improvement to even a small fraction of their population would have an impact globally.
The problem with the US and the west is not freedom of speech or the free market, it's our debt-based monetary system which is now based on soft money. The decline started in 1971 when USD became detached from the gold standard. It's no longer backed by anything; also, the growth in the currency supply has become unconstrained and the distribution mechanisms for all newly issued currency have been partially hijacked to serve corporate interests. The effects of this were not felt immediately. It's only in recent years that the negative effects of our soft-money system have become difficult to ignore.
The important thing to note is that no fiat system has ever survived more than a few hundred years. A monetary system which is founded on the endless debasement of its own currency is doomed to fail sooner or later. There has been hundreds of such monetary systems over thousands of years; not one which remains to this day. It has never worked and will never work in the long run. They're just pyramid schemes.
This intense competition over eyeballs is driven by the monetary system. Money printing creates a supply side economy (demand-constrained, as opposed to supply-constrained).
All companies just produce as many goods and services as they can using all the financing which is available to them. The biggest challenge in a supply side economy is finding customers to buy the goods which the company produced or plans to produce. It increases competition on the customer-acquisition side and reduces competition on the production side (I.e. quality goes down). It makes it almost impossible for small companies to compete.
The money printing acts as a kind of subsidy for big corporations (and regular citizens end up paying via inflation). Companies which are not subsidized cannot compete no matter how good their products are or how efficient they are at producing them. They can never get the same profit margins as big corporations due to the lack of subsidies. Subsidies from the money printer can come in the form of government grants, overly generous government contracts or from banks in the form of very low interest loans. It's an asymmetric playing field.
Yes there was. That trend started long before big tech. In the aughts there was a lot of constrination around news rooms being gutted, with less and less investigative journalism — replaced with “soft news”.
Those criticizing this and were called snobs and elitists; the market - the people - wanted soft news stories!
Interestingly the same ideological coterie that cheered news room gutting (because of a perceived ideological slant) and welcomed the soft news trend is now complaining about click-bait internet journalism.
But these points completely undermine the original OP - how can you blame media companies for pushing things that are "against our interests" when market forces overwhelmingly demonstrate that it's what we want?
If the media is showing these "alarmist" or "biased" stories, it's because it's what people want. People don't want honest journalism, otherwise C-SPAN would be the most popular outlet in America.
If you don't want media showing you clickbait and garbage, don't click on it. Simple as that.
>The problem with the US and the west is not freedom of speech or the free market, it's our debt-based monetary system which is now based on soft money. The decline started in 1971 when USD became detached from the gold standard.
You have it backwards. We didn't end Bretton Woods because the government wanted to print money. The government was printing money, so they had to end Bretton Woods or else hyperinflation would occur. Right after WWII, Europe and Japan were desperate for capital to rebuild, so they were willing to exchange physical gold with made up paper, so it was free money while it lasted. If there were any real interest in maintaining a fiscal responsibility, they would have allowed investors to buy gold at the same price.
The Bretton Woods system never fully ended in reality.
Bretton Woods just ensured that all foreign fiat currencies would be pegged to the US dollar which at the time was pegged to gold. It was intended as a mechanism to allow all global currencies to be indirectly pegged to gold via the USD.
When Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1971, the fiat currencies of all countries around the world were still pegged to the USD. This aspect of the Bretton Woods agreement remained in place... The USD started losing value but this did not cause the USD to hyperinflate relative to other currencies because all countries were still trying to maintain a stable exchange rate relative to the USD. It became currency manipulation on a global scale. Economies became increasingly detached from real value.
You should watch 'Hidden Secrets of Money' - One of the episodes does a really good job at explaining how this occurred.
>The Bretton Woods system never fully ended in reality
Sure, we still have the IMF, but I'm specifically referring to part referring to the "gold standard". Again, it wasn't really a gold standard because the deal only extended to governments that happened to be desperate for capital. Regular people couldn't even own significant quantities of gold at the time.
>the fiat currencies of all countries around the world were still pegged to the USD.
This isn't true. Otherwise, exchange rates wouldn't be changing every second. Countries were allowed to choose how their currency was exchanged, and most of the major players allowed their currency to float freely.
>USD to hyperinflate relative to other currencies because all countries were still trying to maintain a stable exchange rate relative to the USD.
The USD never hyperinflated at all. I think the gist of what you're saying is true, like how Japan started to devalue its currency after the Yen started increasing in value. However, this precisely shows the problem with deflation. If your money grows just by sitting on it, there is little reason to invest in businesses, and it may be profitable to even downsize your business.
>You should watch 'Hidden Secrets of Money'
That was produced by the founder of goldsilver.com, so it's hardly an unbiased source. His business gains from sowing distrust in the financial system. I didn't watch this particular series, but I'm familiar with their arguments after I started investing in precious metals. I don't think their history is wrong, but IMO, they miss the entire point of money. Money isn't meant to be stored because it doesn't do any work. Money is something made up to facilitate trade as easily as possible. That's why it never makes any sense to artificially place constraints on it (e.g. pegging it to gold). This doesn't mean that we should abuse this freedom to print money on a whim either, but that's a completely separate problem.
> This isn't true. Otherwise, exchange rates wouldn't be changing every second.
Prices fluctuate because people trade currencies on forex markets but those traders are not a significant force in the long run... Government reserve banks are the ones which keep exchange rates relatively stable by printing money. Traders just respond to and anticipate changes in the money supply caused by central banks.
If US Fed prints a lot of money (which puts downward pressure on the value of USD), all other central banks in the world will also start printing money to also devalue their currencies so that the exchange rate for their currency remains stable relative to USD (and therefore relative to all other currencies).
There is no major country in the world right now which has a free floating currency. Reserve banks are manipulating the global currency supply and enslaving the working population due to Cantillon effects.
The leader of any country which has tried to move out of this global monetary scheme has been overthrown and murdered by US military action (under some false pretext). For example, the real reason for the war in Libya is said to be that Gaddafi was trying to push Africa towards a gold based currency. Research the 'Libyan Gold Dinar'.
I agree with some of your points but accusations like that without any room for nuance do not resonate with me.
> The problem with the US and the west is not freedom of speech or the free market, it's our debt-based monetary system which is now based on soft money.
And I've seen convincing arguments claiming the exact opposite: that debt has allowed large enterprises, investments that have gone on to create untold capital. I'm still on the fence.
Just some things that the mainstream media lied about:
- The NIH having funded gain of function research in Wuhan Labs.
- The mortality rate of COVID19 (they ignored obvious issues with data collection and flawed incentives which over-counted deaths and under-counted cases).
- The effectiveness of COVID19 vaccines (several outlets initially said that 1 dose would be enough to get 90% protection, now they're saying we need 4).
- Covering up the 2008 and 2020 bailouts of the stock market - These are considered crimes in the eyes of many people but mainstream media has been silent on the subject.
- The existence of Hunter Biden's laptop containing compromising data.
You can look up all of these things. It's only a tiny fraction of all the lies they told.
What sort of complete moron would consider the 2008 bank bailout (what I assume you're referring to) as a crime? How is TARP and the repurchasing of toxic bank assets for the stabilization of the US/global financial system, which was fully paid back to the taxpayer with interest, a crime? Unless you think we should've just let the financial system melt into oblivion?
It's this populist rhetoric of people being mad at shit they don't know anything about.
I don't consider the 2008 bailout a "crime" per se but it was definitely a govt handout and did not punish the bad actors who caused the issues in the first place.
It's interesting to me that you ignored the rest of the lies that were pointed out and focused only on one bullet to make your point. You seem to think people are mad when they shouldn't be? Is constantly being gaslit by cable news (just to give one example) acceptable to you?
People seem to think being "constantly gaslit by cable news" is something that news companies do of their own accord, rather than as market agents responding to market signals that we the people send off to them. Fundamentally, the blame lies with us. If you want to change what they show, change what you signal you want to consume. It's literally that simple. I'm not saying this interaction is one way, but people tend to focus on way too hard on only one half of the equation.
Yes, the financial system should have been left to melt into oblivion and then people could have rebuilt it properly instead of allowing the crooks to keep doing what they've been doing and making the problem even worse. The financial system is an overcomplicated mess which has been hacked to pieces and is doing the opposite of what it was supposed to do. It hasn't worked for decades for value creators; it mostly works for crooks. What kind of moron cannot see what's going on with their own eyes?
If you need more proof that the financial system is destroying the economy, don't worry, there will be plenty more coming! Some people simply won't get it until they see mass starvation, mass protests and nukes blowing everything up... Heck they still won't get it, they'll blame the Bitcoin people, they'll blame some new virus, they'll blame some foreign politician... They'll blame everything except the fiat monetary system; the root of all incentives.
> Free-market capitalism with freedom of speech is the recipe for economic prosperity. Has been for hundreds of years.
Economic prosperity for a handful of wealthy Brits you mean? Regulated capitalism created the middle class, free market capitalism is doing its damnedest to undo that outcome.
We have more regulation now than ever before. Regulations are to blame for destroying the middle class. Corporate lobbyists are the ones who craft regulations. They're not working for the middle class.
Why do corporations pay lobbyists? They wouldn't pay them if they weren't delivering returns for those corporations.
What is this talk about “the algorithm,” as in Musk saying “they should open source the algorithm.” Is this the traffic boosting and suppression mechanism?
It basically is at this point. Every time one of these companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter...etc get caught doing something dodgy they just say it was the algorithm's fault and call it a day. Like when Facebook was selling ads to anti-semites or Google just banning people from their services for undisclosed reasons.
Or they pay 0.0001% of revenue as a fine after a months or years long regulatory case comes down with a fine and no admission of wrongdoing or criminality.
And search suggestions, search results, follow/friend suggestions, push notifications, up next on YouTube or IG stories. See the work of Robert Epstein
>What is this talk about “the algorithm,” as in Musk saying “they should open source the algorithm.” Is this the traffic boosting and suppression mechanism?
If for example you make a post that says "Vaccines cause autism". They dont have enough humans to moderate this. They write an algorithm that generally sees that and you get shadowbanned or equivalent.
What are all the subjects in which you may not talk about on twitter? Its not public knowledge. Open sourcing it means people can see the true bias.
It's not biased to moderate something like "vaccines cause autism".
It's been legally and scientifically established as outright misinformation. The genesis of that theory was a disgraced researcher who pushed fraudulent claims with misrepresented data. The paper was retracted for "scientific misconduct".
And yet now moderating false claims that have a detrimental effect on public health outcomes is seen as a "leftist government conspiracy".
If social media were about private communication among circles of friends and family, this wouldn't be an issue. Instead it's also some kind of broadcast medium with an opaque curation/boosting system. That's the part that causes most of the trouble, and IMO the fix is to treat tech companies that operate that way as responsible for what they publish, when it's not private communication.
"But that will make them to stop that part of their business entirely, or make it way more expensive and force them to take an actual editorial stance! And their viral-ness will suffer a ton!"
Yes, exactly, that's the point.
They've created this medium, then they decide what to push with it. They should be responsible for that, or else back away from how they're currently operating.
Ok, but where is the line drawn and who decides where it is drawn? The point of Musk advocating to open source the algorithm is to provide transparency on this.
E.g. not all issues are as cut and dry as your example.
> It's not biased to moderate something like "vaccines cause autism".
It is biased. As is any and all moderation, inherently.
Biased toward science. A bias toward the rational is a positive, healthy bias.
Rather than cowering about bias, Twitter should very openly and very aggressively stake out a clear and biased position; ie, this is our ground: we're pro science, pro vaccines, and we're going to hold that ground, period (whether anyone else likes it or not, and our algorithms will bias this way accordingly).
I dont mind this position. Ultimately it needs to be open and free to discuss. By saying this is offlimits, the cat and mouse game begins and we invent new words that will generally be understood in their place.
>It's not biased to moderate something like "vaccines cause autism".
I surrender. I agree, we absolutely should be doing something. The point elon is planning with the open sourcing is to simply make it public. I figure most political folks wont really argue over the autism thing.
>It's been legally and scientifically established as outright misinformation. The genesis of that theory was a disgraced researcher who pushed fraudulent claims with misrepresented data. The paper was retracted for "scientific misconduct".
Here is the interesting thing. Do we fix the conversation by banning people from talking about it?
When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say. -George R. R. Martin
Or would it be better to allow people to talk about it and just post a warning that it's discredited and link?
>And yet now moderating false claims that have a detrimental effect on public health outcomes is seen as a "leftist government conspiracy".
I chose vaccines cause autism because it's a great example of something that is harmful to society. Something that might be worth censoring but when you block or even secretly shadowban this subject. It even makes me want to know more. Sure looks like conspiracy to me.
But I also kind of point to NYTimes and incoming CNN ceo who are telling their journalists to break out of their twitter echo chambers.
twitter censors far more than this subject. The anticonservative bias that twitter creates also ends up forming echo chambers for the left. Who then dont see criticism of their work. The consequence that NYTimes for example sees is that they stop reporting properly, they report on their echo chamber. They then fundamentally break journalism ethics rules.
Not the same reach. Telephone calls are ostensibly private exchanges between two willing parties. Twitter is much more akin to a "crowded theater" than a telephone call.
> By contrast, by maintaining all power in the hands of the small coterie of tech monopolies which control the internet and which have long proven their loyalty to the U.S. security state, the ability of the U.S. national security state to maintain a closed propaganda system around questions of war and militarism is guaranteed.
> The cynical exploitation could hardly be more overt: if you hate Putin the way any loyal and patriotic American should, then you must devote yourself to full preservation of the power of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon.
Which golden goose has died or is going to? Tech profits are through the roof and have never been better, while growth continues unabated. The only thing big tech is facing are speeding fines and regional constraints on growth, which it can trivially afford (it has been a decade of the same talk while big tech has gotten massively bigger).
The US tech golden goose is going to get bigger and richer yet. It should only take you a few moments to estimate reasonably where eg Microsoft is going this decade (~$140+ billion in operating income, probably the size of all of Europe's tech companies op income combined in one company).
Seems like just another low-effort dig at greenwald? He's got haters for sure but they never seem to have substantive arguments... or at least none that I've seen.
I think Greenwald's characterization of the letter's contents is a bit disingenuous. The letter makes the claim that recently proposed legislation that would enforce non-discriminatory access would do so in a way that would include foreign adversaries.
Greenwald takes that and elevates the claim to, "Any attempts to restrict Big Tech's monopolistic power would therefore undermine the U.S. fight against Moscow."
The letter makes no such claim. This amounts to a straw man.
Greenwald goes on to rail at the signees for the letter claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop had the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, but while the NYT recently apparently confirmed the genuine nature of Biden's laptop, that letter was still well-founded at the time. A thing can be genuine and have the hallmarks of developed disinformation.
I think Greenwald is being intellectually dishonest.
It's been Greenwald's MO for a long time now. Take completely uncontroversial statement -> twist it using just the right amount of slippery slope or change/omit one key detail -> make it seem inflammatory and controversial. There's nothing wrong with criticizing the negatives of Big Tech, but Glenn's turned his "anti-establishment" beat into an obsession with being anti-{whatever the current thing is}.
Well, I prefer not to speculate, but let's assume for a moment that the intelligence community knows some things before the general population does.
I don't think it would be unreasonable to speculate that they knew then what a portion of the general population knows now, namely that a vast disinformation network was disseminating information on behalf of Steve Bannon. This has been analyzed and reported on by social media analysis firm Graphika.
So combine an outlandish story of an abandoned laptop making its way to Rudy Giuliani with the outlandish and serially repeated claims of child pornography and push it out with a known disinformation network, and it has all the hallmarks of a disinformation campaign.
But that's just what I see that leads me to conclude that it's reasonable. Don't expect me to actually explain the intelligence community's behavior.
I suppose I'll also speak to the fact that someone from among the intelligence community vs. Trump's ilk deserves more of the benefit of the doubt. Given Trump and his ilk's long and trivially verifiable history of being brazen liars, I find it exceedingly easy to give the benefit of the doubt to the intelligence community.
Without knowing what information they had at the time, I will say we now know that there was plenty of disinformation about it being manufactured and spread.
Perhaps the most concerning thing is that a group of such blatantly unscrupulous people has actual political support in the US.
I feel the need to draw a parallel to Trump's refusal of military aid to Ukraine contingent upon them manufacturing an investigation of Hunter Biden, over which he was impeached.
I'm not sure what your point is. Is it that you suspect that they are not accurately relating the contents of Guo's whatsapp message?
If I were a betting man, I'd happily bet that they're reporting accurately, and that Bannon and Wengui were, as usual, being unscrupulous. It's not hard to see that claims of serial bullshit-peddlers that contain all the same bullshit as they always contain is bullshit. How much pattern recognition do you need?
Not only that, but the laptop turns out to be verifiable, and it goes to the FBI, which investigates. As normal. I fail to see the outrageous part.
That article is a most impressive whitewash that changes nothing.
The laptop was authentic yet the intelligence community and mass media closed ranks and called it Russian disinformation without any proof. Just a suspicion (as your link claims) that “something was up”.
That is a pitiful excuse for journalism. Sure, call the content “alleged”, publish rebuttals from the Biden team, whatever.
But they didn’t do that. They said “its likely Russian disinformation so not worth discussing at all”. That not journalism that’s actively shaping the story.
The hilarious thing about this is that China is at the same time cracking down hard on its own tech sector for reasons of domestic competition and concentration of power.
So on the one hand you have the country of freedom that must preserve its monopolistic structures and accept the lesser evil to fight the enemies abroad but the communist security state is busy... reigning their giants in?
Probably a good time to quote Sheldon Wolin who thought of the American system as 'inverted totalitarian'
"Inverted totalitarianism reverses things. It is all politics all of the time but politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash"
I don't think China's doing it out of the good of their heart, or because they're less monopolistic. They strike me as being 1. smarter about it and 2. already having whatever control they want, through implicit means.
Somehow, I think that the CPC knows that the Chinese internet companies won't run without Alibaba, but I also think they know a lot of the Chinese engineers who work for Alibaba don't really have too many other places to go. So important players like Alibaba will probably stand regardless of the level of crackdowns they have taken. For the sake of competitiveness – and to keep Jack Ma erstwhiles in line – some random flogging may be in order. I think China is also concerned about the brain drain caused by having a tech sector that's too economically prosperous compared to the rest of the economy. (How they acted on that is another thing).
The U.S., meanwhile, evidently doesn't care very much about the long-term health of its tech economy.
I'm really uncomfortable about the situation that this presents. In the U.S., Apple has usually pushed against the establishment making it easier to crack their phones. And there are worse social networks than FB and Twitter. There are better ones too, but if I find myself wanting to defend Apple against the government (even though I'm sure they're taking their stance out of selfish reasons), then the overall situation seems like it is inherently balanced against U.S. competitiveness in tech.
This is only because the CCP wants full control over these entities and to shut out any Western/Non-CCP approve opinions and messages quickly and permanently.
What these guys are talking about is something else. They are talking about the security of the security services, their own self interests and the status quo of enmeshed relations between three letter agencies and a few captured tech giants.
On the contrary, the exact opposite is true. National security is best served by a diverse, pluralistic, open, heterogeneous tech industry. There is no reason intelligence needs cannot function properly with such an ecosystem, but it would have to do so through the Rule of Law, and systems of warrants that the incumbents have sought to bypass this last 20 years.