Tag: social media

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First Amendment rights social media

The Colluder-​in-​Chief

Joe Biden, censorship, social media

When government pressures private companies to censor people, the government is itself acting to censor people.

That the Biden administration is acting to censor unapproved discussion of COVID-​19 isn’t a guess. It has publicly urged social-​media companies to prohibit “misinformation.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki, for example, has said that Biden’s administration is “regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans are seeing. . . . You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others.”

The Liberty Justice Center is now suing the administration and firms like Facebook and Twitter for violating the First Amendment rights of people like Justin Hart, a plaintiff in the case.

Hart is a data analyst who questions the effectiveness of requiring children to wear masks in school. For his fielding and repeating those questions, he was booted from social media accounts.

Explaining its litigation, the Liberty Justice Center observes that “dominant social media platforms and the White House are openly collaborating to eliminate social media posts about COVID-​19 that the administration finds objectionable, and to cancel or suspend the Facebook and Twitter accounts of people who raise issues about COVID they don’t want the public to see.”

I tend to agree with Hart’s conclusion, but that is not the point.

More fundamentally, I am inclined to discover what we might learn from unfettered discussion of the facts. Which is one of the many reasons we need that First Amendment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people social media

Hidden Dissuader

Rumble, Dan Bongino

“It’s one thing to let people post UFO content about crop circles in Arkansas,” Ciaran O’Connor was quoted in a recent Washington Post article, talking about YouTube competitor Rumble. “It’s another to allow your platform to be used by someone claiming vaccines are actively harmful and that people should not take them based on conspiracies and misinformation.”

As a cited expert for the Post’s hit piece, O’Connor is the big gun, whom reporter Drew Harwell uses to conclude his vivisection of the upstart video platform: “There’s a duty of care and responsibility as your platform grows and scales up.”

After a year and a half of government lies and flip flops about the novel coronavirus and its treatments, coupled with Big Tech censorship, we must not allow O’Connor’s bald “vaccine” assertions to go unnoticed, but we have other fish to fry.

Sizzling on the platter? Ciaran The Expert.

Who is he?

Well, writes Harwell, O’Connor’s “an analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-​extremism think tank in London that has worked with Google on a European fund targeting online hate speech.”

Rumble, claims O’Connor, has “become one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-​right communities in the U.S. and around the world.”

But let us consult one of those right-​wingers, Rumble investor and online commentator Dan Bongino, to learn something more about this “Institute for Strategic Dialogue.”

Bongino points out that the institute gets its funding from various governments, including our own, as well as from Rumble’s competitors Facebook and YouTube. 

And several more subdivisions of YouTube’s parent company also support this critic of Rumble.

The Post, of course, disclosed none of that.

You know, cuz Journalism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs privacy too much government

Privacy with Chinese Characteristics

China, internet

Governments must appear, at least some of the time, to be riding a silver stallion to rescue The People. All government rests on a kind of consent: not legal; not democratic; instead, the accommodation of the many to the few — to accept being ruled. This has been known since David Hume.

So when governments pretend to be more democratic, more contractual, than they actually are, it’s to maintain and increase power.

Take China.

In a fascinating report by Liz Wolfe, we learn that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is establishing new rules regulating corporations’ use of their customers’ data: “the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), necessarily weakens big tech companies, forcing onerous regulations that they will now have to comply with.”

This may sound all very consumer- and citizen-​oriented. But Ms. Wolfe not only notes that the regulations are burdensome, she observes that while China’s corporations will soon be prevented from doing things big tech companies routinely do in the West, the Chinese will pointedly not be protected from data collection by the government. 

Which is vast. 

Intrusive.

Often malign.

“Protection of consumer data, while fine and good, means nothing,” she writes, “if there’s no true rule of law binding governments to privacy-​protecting standards as well.”

Almost certainly China is trying to prevent in China what happened in America: the creation of powerful countervailing organizations competing with the government in one of the oldest activities of government: suppression of opinion to leverage power and revolutionize the State, changing policy from outside formal power centers.

Our social media — and other major tech corporations — have plied their incredible access to information to mold popular opinion for political and ideological purposes.

The CCP will not put up with that. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency media and media people social media

Conspirators versus Conspiracists

conspiracy, tin foil

“Conspiracy theories circulated online over social media contribute to a shift in public discourse away from facts and analysis,” proclaims a new study by the Rand Corporation think tank, “and can contribute to direct public harm.”

Titled “Detecting Conspiracy Theories on Social Media,” the study, paid for by Google’s Jigsaw unit, proposes to “improve machine-​learning technology for detecting conspiracy theory language by using linguistic and rhetorical theory to boost performance.”

All very fascinating, but … do conspiracy theories shift public discourse away from “facts and analysis”?

They do challenge accepted facts, and are themselves examples of extended analyses. 

Often off track? Sure. 

But their problematic nature is not as stated.

The assumption throughout is that conspiracy theories are always in error. But when the report goes on to say that “conspiracists also distrust authority and believe that those who produce the news are lying to them,” there’s no fact check — why do the Rand authors believe we are not being routinely lied to? 

This becomes almost funny with the COVID origination debate. The Wuhan Lab Leak Theory is one of four current popular conspiracy notions the report looks at. And when the report was being written, the lab leak theory was marginalized on social media and pooh-​poohed amongst most public health experts. Now we know that there was an actual conspiracy to bury evidence for it.

Truth is: conspiracies happen. Most bandied-​about theories may be cuckoo, but a few turn out rock solid.

The honest way to deal with suspicions of a conspiratorial nature is pointed inquiry into relevant facts … with careful analysis.

The Rand Corporation and Google are more interested in defending the authorities.

Who often lie.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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social media

Reddit Redacts the Internet

Social Media, censorship, Odin

The watchdog group Judicial Watch has obtained evidence that the government of California and the Biden camp violated the First Amendment rights of Americans during the 2020 presidential campaign. 

In at least a couple dozen cases, social media companies complied with governmental requests to delete posts containing “misinformation,” the new code word for “stuff that I don’t want people to see or discuss.” 

But hey: were all materials containing “misinformation” deleted from the annals of humankind, historians would be left with maybe ten or twelve pages and scrolls of primary documents. Into the trash? Herodotus, Josephus, Gibbon!

On the other hand, the social-​media giants often curtail online discourse without any apparent urging by government censors.

Example? The popular discussion group Reddit has taken upon itself to block users from viewing the videos hosted by certain popular alternatives to YouTube like Rumble and BitChute. Reddit has China-​walled links to the videos regardless of content. The problem, it seems, is that Rumble and BitChute are too much in favor of free speech.

Now, it may be that Reddit does its redactions in eager pursuit of its own ideological agenda rather than in obedience to some politician(s), but questions remain. When it comes to suppressing voices that socialist social media moguls find politically uncongenial, how much is reluctant submission to government pressure and how much is spontaneous voluntary initiative?

I’d like to know. 

Barring any likelihood of a certain answer, we citizens must vigilantly watch governments — along with the tech firms receiving lucrative government contracts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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social media

The Cats’ Pajamas

facebook, search, brain, database

In all the talk of “social media” — their psychological effects on us; their political power; their abusive treatment of our privacy and our loyalty — one thing does not get talked about enough: that social media’s chief utility for many of us is not social at all.

Facebook, YouTube, SoundCloud, Twitter, Gab, Instagram, Quora — these are personal databases. 

Databases on the Cloud, sure; databases open to the public and open to paying advertisers, surely (that’s how the media giants make money while providing us with a free service). 

But they remain databases. And, as such, they allow us to log our interactions with both online and physical worlds, storing our photos, videos, audios, links, thoughts, questions & answers, and more, so we may retrieve them later for whatever projects we may be engaged in.

This is no small thing if you are in a “business” like ThisIsCommonSense​.org, where mining what I read two weeks ago can turn into something I need tomorrow. 

Trouble is, the search features of most social media services … well … don’t find much. It is often devilishly hard to find that article one linked to last April, or November, or … was it December? The search features to one’s own entries (as well as others’) should be much more robust. Inventive. Useful. 

It would be nice if the social media companies that mine our data for their pecuniary advantage would also allow us to mine our data … for our more humble purposes.

So, take this as advice to alternative social media developers, like the Flote app: if you are literally providing a database for clients (and not true P2P functionality), then give search features more serious attention.

So that we can quickly find and re-​share our most sublime cat photos.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Image from _​DJ_​

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