US and UK Military Contractors Created Plan for Global Censorship in 2018
public.substack.com
public.substack.com
A single damning report too ugly to cover up, corroborated by a major source (either journalistic or investigative). The Twitter files were not Snowden-level, and the drip-feed release schedule tired everyone out real fast. It was written with dramatic intent, and that exhausted his credibility in my eyes. I don't read news for the eye candy, I read it to get a fair and level-headed understanding of the situation at hand.
Even the FBI managed a reasonable response:
> The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.
This article verifies that CTIL: - got direction to do what it did from the White House - consisted of contractors and actual government employees - operates under the legal theory that “public-private partnerships” where the government directs and the companies execute doesn’t count as government censorship - actively crafted and pushed its own propaganda using the same techniques as bad actors - actively suppressed views that did not contain misinformation - pushed to cut off financial services to people they considered problems
I consider all of these pretty damning.
Do I like the format of the reporting? Nope. But that doesn’t make it irrelevant.
> Even the FBI managed a reasonable response:
There’s nothing reasonable about their response. They’re simply normalizing their behavior. There has never been a time when the FBI was not embroiled in multiple massive rights violation scandals, going back to its very beginning. J Edgar Hoover founded it and was in charge for 37 years and it still shows. They never cleaned house and Congressional oversight has been ineffectual.
Something new? Something we didn't know already, like the fact that intelligence agencies have workers stationed in every Fortune 500 company? Facebook, AOL and YouTube were all listed on the original PRISM leaks. If you didn't think Twitter was next, were you even paying attention?
> operates under the legal theory that “public-private partnerships” where the government directs and the companies execute doesn’t count as government censorship
lmao
The US isn't going to surrender warrantless surveillance, ever, so good luck rallying against this. You'll need all the luck you can get, because your hardware and software manufacturers certainly won't be working in your favor. We learned that from Snowden.
I got a cold, hard truth incoming to all the entrepreneurial spirits of the world; if you can be bought at a price, the US government can write an even bigger check.
From what I’ve seen from Mate and Taibbi, they present evidence to support their claims at a level that merits honest discussion, especially since they represent perspectives that deviate from the powerful who dominate messaging in mainstream media.
Looking for a co-founder :)
It is, when spread over the internet in a systematic and intentional way. It literally is social engineering.
There is a serious problem with misinformation causing radicalization and SV is doing only the bare minimum to give congress lip service, and it is getting measurably worse.
Malicious regimes around the world are fueling these efforts systematically and intentionally (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency) and know that this is a cheap way to cause domestic problems within the US at an arms length. From their perspective, this is a great weapon, and a trojan horse taking advantage of the US's cultural reluctance to censor.
Many here usually support a "no censorship in any circumstance" position, but I think that's a dangerous position to take in this situation, because it risks a future in which speech is free but automatically distrusted. Something needs to be done to cut these efforts off at the source before it (further) undermines our own trust in free speech.
Misinformation spread by ignorant people to other ignorant people is bad, but I don't think it's really the problem here, and I don't think it should necessarily be censored.
The real problem is the engineered disinformation which is introduced into the wild by malicious parties for the purpose of causing political unrest. The downstream people who latch on to these made up ideas then become unwitting amplifiers and/or people who decide to act in real life (e.g. David DePape). They're the victims of these social engineering attacks.
Really, it's not much different than how malware spreads. It's just malware for social engineering.
Weimar Germany had Nazis and Communists agitating and spreading disinformation for years. They did what they could to suppress and censor them both, instead of addressing the underlying causes that ultimately led to the complete social bankruptcy of the government and its takeover by the Nazis - but if it hadn’t been them it’d have been another extremist group. It wasn’t the ideology that created the extremism. It was the failed society.
Censorship only accelerates the decline by further reducing the legitimacy of the government.
That's just not true, and there are radical minds in every country on the planet. The young, uneducated, mentally ill, disabled, or other vulnerably impressionable minds are absolutely capable of being radicalized by falsehoods that target their insecurities or vulnerabilities.
> Censorship only accelerates the decline by further reducing the legitimacy of the government.
The government doesn't have to do the censoring. In the age of centralized media, media outlets "self-censored" (e.g. editing and fact checking), and were significantly more trusted by the public than any media outlets are today. The lost of trust in today's world is squarely to blame on social media platforms, who republish literal falsehoods and throw their hands up and say "section 230!" as they cash their ad checks. 100 years from now, this will be seen as the defining moral hazard of this century.
Censorship is a tool, but when all you have is one tool... well...
We need better tools, not more censorship!
This problem can't be fixed with technology because it is not a technology problem, it's a human problem.
But at the same time...
There's the idea of a giftschrank around 'dangerous / false' information...
That is a tool to combat the spread of information deemed dangerous, without censorship... So is the lesson then: just add meta-data to everything?
I tend to agree. Yet, the problem here, I think, is that like all people with a technical background, cyber security people are ill-suited to handle the issue; you really need those "damned" social scientists and humanists to understand the context and societal implications, such as:
> There is a serious problem with misinformation causing radicalization and SV is doing only the bare minimum to give congress lip service, and it is getting measurably worse.
Another big problem, as I've argued here before, is the securitization that comes with cyber security people and these "misinfosec" things or whatever you want to call them.
Billions have been stolen during Covid by corrupt governments and their mates and nobody is in prison. Oh well.
(this is severely sarcastic)