Is this a reliable source? Are there many nefarious people out there wanting power and influence? If there was a time for this to happen COVID would have been an ideal cover, but instead the illuminati will be switching on the 5G control system any day now.
Taibbi is in the byline. He’s a well-known award-winning investigative reporter. He certainly has biases, puts his spin on things, and this is one of his hobby horses lately, but he is a reliable source.
This particular article goes deeper into the same subject and among other things, details government employees working for government agencies actively participating a way people attacking the Twitter files reporting claimed did not happen. What would make government censorship a story in your opinion?
> What would make government censorship a story in your opinion?
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.
What constitutes damning? I guess that’s in the eye in the beholder; as far as I can tell, the Overton window on this subject shifted hugely in the past 20 years. There’s certainly been much bigger outrage in the past over smaller instances.
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.
I think all the story was is that people from both political parties and the FBI were trying to take down disinformation. Sometimes Twitter agreed to these requests other times they did not. What I am surprised about is the attempt to turn this nonsense into a story, it’s unbelievably weak stuff to most people that just doesn’t hold up… Do you think government should be able to ask social networks to take things down?
Only Twitter could do this. The security services could ask Twitter for anything they like it doesn’t mean they are getting it. Or that the requests from politicians are bad either. Each case would need to be reviewed on its individual merits and both Trump and Biden campaigns asked for things. My suggestion is that bureaucrats dealing with these requests probably tried their best to treat them in a reasonable way - have a look at them and apply the Twitter policy if applicable. There’s no evidence they were doing anything more than that but it was manufactured into a story, arguably the fact you believe it is a bigger piece of manipulation than reasonable attempts to reduce disinformation on Twitter during a political campaign.
That post is not very damning for Taibbi nor Mate/Blumenthal, at least not in the eyes of critically thinking readers — “these guys have a show that is broadcast on RT” is not any more of a gotcha than saying the same about Al Jazeera, or the Washington Post for that matter.
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.
I do not know anything about this source, but it may be true. Information warfare for influencing public opinion through online media has been developed since early 2000s by both USA and Russia through private firms. I know at least one incident where US DoD censored publications about the war in Afghanistan by denying access to battlefield to opposition media and counter-messaging. Here‘s a breadcrumb if you are interested: https://www.stripes.com/news/military-terminates-rendon-cont...
More likely the plan was created by corrupt politicians while Military who is the last resort when it comes to protecting citizens from this kind of thing, sit on their hands.
Billions have been stolen during Covid by corrupt governments and their mates and nobody is in prison. Oh well.
Considering within 2 years the sitting president of the united states was banned from the majority of online platforms, along with various other figures from his political party, I'd say it was highly successful. I don't necessarily believe the source as it sounds a bit "outrageous", but if true they were highly successful.
> “Misinformation, they realized, could be treated the same way: as a cybersecurity problem.”
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.
I personally believe misinformation is a symptom rather than a cause of radicalization, but granting the premise, I don’t see how SV and USGOV can be trusted to fairly censor and run their own propaganda campaigns without transparency. We already have examples of them abusing this power.
There's a complex web of how disinformation and misinformation interact.
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.
Call it what you will: I mean people in a free and fair healthy society cannot be radicalized by information. It can only happen when bad government and other organic social forces (which government could regulate with better policy) cause a material decline in people’s living circumstances.
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.
> I mean people in a free and fair healthy society cannot be radicalized by information. It can only happen when bad government and other organic social forces (which government could regulate with better policy) cause a material decline in people’s living circumstances.
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.
The problem is that there's only one ultimate system that the public uses to measure trusted speech: individual human judgement of trust. Many have tried to create other trusted systems, but they all have a weakness in that they, themselves, are subordinate to that.
This problem can't be fixed with technology because it is not a technology problem, it's a human problem.
> It is, when spread over the internet in a systematic and intentional way. It literally is social engineering.
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.
I think I'll be creating a news service which filters for flagged HN posts with more than 20 votes and less than (votes / 2) comments. A good mix of really interesting mixed with click-baity news.
Western Civilization is in the midst of Fascism (in the Mussolini sense of corporation and state), and yet most people are in a Mass Formation and welcome demonizing and killing their fellow man all because of minor disagreements, ideological or religious differences, or tribalism.
I don't know how much longer Western Civilization will survive without world war or collapse. The inmates are running the asylum.
My guess is that people flagged it because they don’t like the authors. That seems to happen a lot around here. I consume HN via a feed reader, I see everything that flows through the RSS feed. Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger stories/posts always seem to get flagged. Even when the topics are HN appropriate.
Ultimately it is about trust. Time and time again history reveals that it is impossible to maintain trust by controlling information about trust. The only way is to build trust is to be proven trustworthy. But it is a slow and burdensome process, perhaps that is why governments return to the futile effort.
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[ 6.8 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] thread(this is severely sarcastic)
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.
Billions have been stolen during Covid by corrupt governments and their mates and nobody is in prison. Oh well.
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.
Looking for a co-founder :)
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
https://soundcloud.com/pushbackshow/matt-taibbi-on-the-twitt...
Western Civilization is in the midst of Fascism (in the Mussolini sense of corporation and state), and yet most people are in a Mass Formation and welcome demonizing and killing their fellow man all because of minor disagreements, ideological or religious differences, or tribalism.
I don't know how much longer Western Civilization will survive without world war or collapse. The inmates are running the asylum.