The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher · 5 Sep 2022 · 439pp · 131,081 words
technology? This book is about the mission to answer that question, told in part through the people who led it. The early conventional wisdom, that social media promotes sensationalism and outrage, while accurate, turned out to drastically understate things. An ever-growing pool of evidence, gathered by dozens of academics, reporters,
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species whose traits become more pronounced with each subsequent generation. As semiconductors developed into the circuit board, then the computer, then the internet, and then social media, each technology produced a handful of breakout stars, who in turn funded and guided the next handful. Throughout, their community remained a commercial-cultural
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engineered to activate and engender above all else. Expressing identity, sharpening identity, seeing and defining the world through its lens. This effect remade how social media works, as its overseers and automated systems drifted toward the all-consuming focus on identity that best served their agendas. To understand identity’s power
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, forever ending the separation between digital and nondigital spaces, between internet culture and culture. It also launched a new kind of politics, defined by social media’s foundational traits: a digital culture built around nihilistic young men, Silicon Valley dreams of destructive revolution, and platforms designed in ways that supercharge identity
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attention, were waging an invisible war against billions of consumers. Another Google employee, James Williams, who later wrote essays calling Gamergate a warning sign that social media would elevate Trump, had his reckoning while monitoring a dashboard that tracked users’ real-time interactions with ads. “I realized: this is literally a
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been projected to lose, and took the presidency. In the coming months, digital watchdogs, journalists, congressional committees, and the outgoing president would all accuse social media platforms of accelerating misinformation and partisan rage that paved the way for Trump’s victory. The companies, after a period of contrition for narrower sins
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reality-TV finale knocking a Trump scandal out of the news, overly credulous media coverage of Russian-hacked Democratic emails, or, sure, social media. The broader question was harder. Were social media platforms meaningfully responsible for the Trump phenomenon? Had they pushed Americans toward Trumpism, and, if so, with a nudge or a shove
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was incongruous with the worldview core to many conservatives’ political identity. Trump had called refugees criminals and terrorists, yet these were desperate, terrified families. Social media provided an out. One photo, shared 36,000 times, supposedly showed a bloodied Mexican policeman who had been attacked by thugs posing as refugees. Another
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investigations. It was like fitting together the pieces of a puzzle that, once assembled, revealed what may still be the most complete framework for understanding social media’s effect on society. The platforms, they concluded, were reshaping not just online behavior but underlying social impulses, and not just individually but collectively,
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forms of content—truth, appeals to the greater good, appeals to tolerance—become more and more outmatched. Like stars over Times Square. Stage two in social media’s distorting influence, according to the MAD model, is something called internalization. Users who chased the platforms’ incentives received immediate, high-volume social rewards:
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, even pride. But something roiled beneath the surface. An idealistic young doctor, now his neighborhood’s first elected lawmaker, told me that waves of social media misinformation and incitement kept his community constantly on the verge of race riots, or provoked them outright. Days earlier, his constituents, furious over Facebook rumors
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real media collective, a jittery reporter back from years in exile, said the country’s long-suppressed journalists, finally unfettered, faced a new antagonist. Social media platforms were doing what even the dictatorship’s trained propagandists couldn’t: producing fake news and nationalist fanfare so engaging, so flattering to readers’ biases
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tried to correct the misinformation flowing online, they became the target of it instead, accused of abetting foreign plots. Civic leaders told me that social media platforms were pumping the national bloodstream with conspiracies and ultranationalist rage. Citizens who’d marched for an open, inclusive democracy now spent hours posting in
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. In 2018, BBC reporters in northern Nigeria found the same pattern, the Fulani majority pitted against the Berom minority, all on Facebook. In America, social media had tapped into white backlash against immigration, Black Lives Matter, increased visibility of Muslims, cultural recalibration toward greater tolerance and diversity. The most-shared rumors
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dominance. It is mostly unconscious, almost animalistic, and therefore easily manipulated, whether by opportunistic leaders or profit-seeking algorithms. The problem isn’t just that social media learned to promote outrage, fear, and tribal conflict, all sentiments that align with status threat. Online, as we post updates visible to hundreds or
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pushy, and loud. Another: grandiose narcissism, defined by feelings of innate superiority and entitlement. Narcissists are consumed by cravings for admiration and belonging, which makes social media’s instant feedback and large audiences all but irresistible. That need is deepened by superposters’ unusually low self-esteem, which is exacerbated by the platforms
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drawn toward and feel rewarded by negative social potency, a clinical term for deriving pleasure from deliberately inflicting emotional distress on others. Further, by using social media more, and by being rewarded for this with greater reach, superposters pull the platforms toward these defining tendencies of dogmatism, narcissism, aggrandizement, and cruelty.
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benchmarks found that thousands of students became internally opposed to bullying, their moral compasses pulled toward compassion. Bullying-related disciplinary reports dropped by 30 percent. Social media platforms place us all in a version of Paluck’s school experiment. But, online, our social referents, the people artificially pushed into our moral
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solution becomes more violent,” Berger wrote, until destroying the out-group becomes the core of the in-group’s shared identity. “The current generation of social media platforms,” he added, “accelerates polarization and extremism for a significant minority,” enabling and encouraging exactly this cycle. The body count was already mounting. In
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which the democracy-endangering polarization crisis had occurred. Again, almost half. As evidence mounted throughout 2018, action began following. That year, Germany mandated that social media platforms remove any hate speech within twenty-four hours of its being flagged, or face fines. Australia announced an inquiry into “world first” regulations on
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gets airtime and who doesn’t, who is portrayed as acceptable and who isn’t. Businesses and interest groups disburse the funding that wins elections. Social media, among other factors, eroded those gatekeepers’ power. For zero cost, candidates could build their own public messaging, organizing, and fundraising empires, circumventing the gatekeepers.
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The spectacle attracted attention, which brought new recruits. From the beginning, the Yellow Vests, as they termed themselves, identified as a leaderless, radically horizontal movement. Social media had, unquestionably, enabled this. There had never been such a scalable, cost-free, universally open way to organize. But the platforms also applied an invisible
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effect in democracies was subtler but still powerful. Chenoweth cited, as a comparison, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights–era student group. Before social media, activists had to mobilize through community outreach and organization-building. They met almost daily to drill, strategize, and confer. It was agonizing, years-long
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its system, even its users. But the story, framed as it was, offered Republicans an opportunity to whip up grievances that transformed the politics around social media, and ultimately the platforms themselves. “Facebook has the power to greatly influence the presidential election,” the Republican National Committee said in a press release,
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’s relationship to Trump’s campaign, which was spending heavily on Facebook ads, remained cordial. After the election, as evidence mounted that the major social media platforms had boosted false and polarizing content favoring Trump, some of it Russia-backed, Republicans clearly sensed their victory growing tarnished—perhaps, amid hints of
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indirect coordination between Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives, even delegitimized. They sought to invert the narrative. Social media hadn’t boosted Republicans, they claimed, it had suppressed them. Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress, eager to distract from the investigation
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, Sr., also tweeted “#StopTheBias,” launching months of conservative messaging on the tyranny of big tech. Throughout his presidency, Trump and his party painted the social media platforms as anti-Republican agents. They repeatedly threatened to investigate, regulate, or even break up the companies, threats that had tremendous power to motivate the
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substantial chunk of the electorate—were everywhere, starting with politics. Bolsonaro urged citizens to watch YouTube rather than reputable news. He replaced government technocrats with social media personalities, who used their power to act on the oddball conspiracies—about education, public health, minorities—that had appeased the Silicon Valley algorithm that got
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, organized online, that would change the trajectory of American democracy, perhaps for good. All that spring, as the Covid lies and rumors spread, the social media giants insisted that they were taking every available measure. But internal documents suggest that Facebook executives, by April, realized that their algorithms were boosting dangerous
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responsibility for the insurrection on the companies. “The fundamental problem,” they wrote to the CEOs of Google and YouTube, “is that YouTube, like other social media platforms, sorts, presents, and recommends information to users by feeding them content most likely to reinforce their existing political biases, especially those rooted in anger
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end-all for news and information. With news content gone, rumor and misinformation filled the vacuum. Evelyn Douek, an Australian scholar studying the governance of social media platforms at Harvard Law School, called the blackout “calculated for impact and unconscionable.” Human Rights Watch described the intervention as “alarming and dangerous.” An
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gave them the power to shape new regulations. She circulated European capitals, meeting with high-level officials whose governments had led the way on regulating social media. Throughout, Haugen consistently called back to Facebook’s failures in poorer countries. That record, she argued, highlighted the company’s callousness toward its customers’
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, a former Andreessen Horowitz venture capitalist, proposed “to remove whole layers of mechanics that enable abuse.” After all, algorithms are hardly the only feature behind social media’s chaos. Casino-style interfaces, share buttons, publicly displayed “like” counters, groups recommendations—all are intrinsic to the platforms and their harms. There are,
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The psychologist B. F. Skinner: For an approachable overview of Skinner’s findings, as well as elaboration on dual amplifiers of variable and intermittent rewards (social media provides both), try “Schedules of Reinforcement,” Annabelle G.Y. Lim, Simply Psychology, July 2, 2020. Greater detail, along with citations to supporting neurological research,
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Political False Polarization and Its Consequences,” Victoria Parker, master’s thesis, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2018. 38 false polarization is worsening: “On Trolls and Polls: How Social Media Extremists and Dissenters Exacerbate and Mitigate Political False Polarization,” presentation by Victoria Parker, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2019. 39 leads people to develop more extreme views
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February 28, 2018. 12 Denkhaus’s lawyer emphasized: “Brandstifterprozess Altena,” Akantifahagen.blogsport.eu, May 31, 2016. 13 “relatively unchangeable, unjustified certainty”: “Political Tolerance, Dogmatism, and Social Media Uses and Gratifications,” Chamil Rathnayake and Jenifer Sunrise Winter, Policy & Internet 9, no. 4, 2017. 14 Another: grandiose narcissism: “Why Narcissists Are at Risk for
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the Need to Belong,” Silvia Casale and Giulia Fioravanti, Addictive Behaviors 76, January 2018. 15 Unusually low self-esteem: “The Relationship Between Addictive Use of Social Media, Narcissism, and Self-Esteem: Findings from a Large National Survey,” Cecilie Schou Andreassen, Ståle Pallesen, and Mark D. Griffiths, Addictive Behaviors 64, January 2017.
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: “Birds of a Feather Get Recommended Together: Algorithmic Homophily in YouTube’s Channel Recommendations in the United States and Germany,” Jonas Kaiser and Adrian Rauchfleisch, Social Media + Society 6, no. 4, October 2020. 39 published his findings: “How YouTube’s Channel Recommendations Push Users to the Fringe,” Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed News,
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on Progress against Hate Speech, Violence, Misinformation,” Scott Pelley, 60 Minutes, October 4, 2021. 21 Stanford and New York University economists: “The Welfare Effects of Social Media,” Hunt Allcott et al., American Economic Review 110, no. 3, March 2020. 22 calling it a “turning point”: “‘Turning point’: Mitch Fifield Flags Further
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Farr and Salvador Rodriguez, CNBC, February 14, 2020. 5 Facebook posts were already winning: “Coronavirus Cannot be Cured by Drinking Bleach or Snorting Cocaine, despite Social Media Rumors,” Christina Capatides, CBS News, March 9, 2020. 6 Instagram influencers explained: “Coronavirus Conspiracy Video Spreads on Instagram among Black Celebrities,” Brandy Zadrozny, NBC
American Marxism
by Mark R. Levin · 12 Jul 2021 · 314pp · 88,524 words
and self-descriptions, the essential characteristics of their beliefs, statements, and policies exhibit core Marxist dogma. Moreover, they occupy our colleges and universities, newsrooms and social media, boardrooms, and entertainment, and their ideas are prominent within the Democratic Party, the Oval Office, and the halls of Congress. Their influence is seen and
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, silencing contrary voices through repressive tactics, such as “the cancel culture,” which destroys reputations and careers, censoring and banning mostly patriotic and contrary viewpoints on social media, even including former president Donald Trump, and attacking academic freedom and intellectual interchange in higher education. Indeed, they take aim at all aspects of the
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. Seuss, Disney cartoons, ad infinitum. Pronouns are banned and replaced with nondescript words so as not to offend fifty-eight flavors of gender identification. Past social media posts are scrutinized for early indications of insufficient fealty to the present-day Marxist hegemony. Journalism and editorial pages are sanitized of nonbelievers. And yet
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, radio broadcasts, books, cartoons, toys, other products, product names and brands, and even words.65 Even President Trump was banned from Twitter, Facebook, and alternative social media communication platforms. The list is so long and growing so fast as to make an up-to-date compilation impossible. So egregiously threatening to our
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not show that during the last decade, a time of expansive growth of electronic communications, particularly on the Internet and mobile devices as well as social media, there has been a rise in hate crime incidents.” The NTIA’s report also issues a sharp warning: “We caution that efforts to control or
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being developed from approaches pioneered by the Chinese Communist Party to stifle political discussion and dissent. The report goes on: “Given that all the major social media platforms have rules against hate speech and, in fact, employ sophisticated algorithmic artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to enforce these often vague and contradictory rules in
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share the ideological bias, political partisanship, and censorship practices of these huge multibillion-dollar global companies. As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette put it: “The social media site Parler has been suspended from Google’s and Apple’s app stores, and Amazon has stopped providing the company with cloud services, effectively killing the service
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and prompting Parler to launch a federal lawsuit against the tech giant…. The killing of Parler amounts to a chilling assault on speech…. Social media, like much of the news media, has become a wedge between Americans who are decamping
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to profit from their experience: Those who elected him. Those who staffed his government. Those who funded him.”77 Indeed, there was much talk on social media and the media generally about blacklisting Trump administration officials and Trump supporters, and preventing them from finding work in the private sector. Former first lady
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actions, including threats, censorship, and character assassination, and the demand for more of it. Marx would approve. In fact, banning people, speech, words, broadcasts, and social media access; and redefining language, history, knowledge, and science—all of which are occurring or pursued in our current culture and environment—are the trademarks of
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of their fellow citizens through what is loosely called “the cancel culture.” It is they who demand conformity of thought by banning differing views from social media; it is they who use the false narrative of “oppressors and oppressed” to stigmatize those they claim as part of “the white-dominant culture” and
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to help create a one-party political machine.19 Their recent joint war on the Georgia Republican legislature is one of many examples.20 Furthermore, social media, including Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, Google/YouTube, which were once thought to be the antidote to corporate media’s oligopolist role as propagandists for the Democratic
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cleared.54 The lesson learned is that in addition to personally and collective boycotting companies, we must support pro-American companies as well. Furthermore, use social media to expose, pressure, and organize protests against politically and ideologically hostile corporations (more on Big Tech later); go to shareholder meetings in large numbers and
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de-platforming the Fox News Channel and banning its hosts), and, of course, Big Tech does the same against smaller social media businesses. Let us remember that when cable TV and, later, social media were developed, they were celebrated as providing more options and choices for news consumers. Instead, corporate acquisitions and consolidation have
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information throughout the country. This is simply intolerable. Respecting Big Tech, if you use social media, you should find alternatives to the corporate oligarchs. I am not tech savvy. But I know enough to suggest a few options: Parler, MeWe, and Discord’s community forums. Rumble, Vimeo, and Bitchute. And the DuckDuckGo search
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War on Free Speech,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 26, 2021, https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/editorials/2021/01/26/The-war-on-free-speech-Parler-Social-Media-technology/stories/202101140041 (April 11, 2021). 74 Krystal Hur, “Big tech employees rally behind Biden campaign,” Opensecrets.org, January 12, 2021, https://www.opensecrets.org
The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
by Ben Shapiro · 26 Jul 2021 · 309pp · 81,243 words
Introduction According to the institutional powers that be, America is under authoritarian threat. That authoritarian threat to America, according to the Democratic Party, establishment media, social media tech bros, Hollywood glitterati, corporate bosses, and university professors, is clear—and it comes directly from the political Right. And that authoritarian threat, according to
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s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, to the effect that free speech primarily benefited those who are white.20 Nikole Hannah-Jones, the serial social media prevaricator and Pulitzer Prize–winning purveyor of historical fiction about the inherent evils of America, quickly asked for a “reckoning” in the media.21 Max
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that would lead to the insurrection.”28 Other tech journalists mirrored that sentiment—a sentiment they had been pumping for years, hoping to shut down social media companies that distribute alternative sources of media. Meanwhile, governmental actors talked of revenge—and of using the Capitol riots to achieve long-sought political goals
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idea. Conservatives felt the left-wing authoritarianism. They understood it on a gut level. And they hated it. They felt the top-down censorship from social media, which deemed their speech “hate speech” and their worldview “harassment.” They felt the anti-conventionalism from Hollywood, which painted conservatives as the great threat
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in the grassroots conservative community. But as it turns out, elitist white Americans and woke “anti-racism” advocates who largely overpopulate the media, corporate America, social media halls of power, and Hollywood don’t have a read on broader minority viewpoints. When these elitists declare that standing with the police is a
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t stand in favor of top-down censorship. But increasingly, the Democratic Party leadership has shifted from liberal to leftist. This means threatening action against social media companies for allowing dissemination of nonliberal material, or seeking regulation targeting corporations who do not mirror the liberal agenda. Renormalization takes place by inches. Instead
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crime rates spiked. Afraid of alienating LGBT Americans, Democrats embraced the most radical elements of gender theory, including approval of children transitioning sex; they pressured social media companies to punish Americans for “misgendering”; they vowed to crack down on religious practice in the name of supposed LGBT rights. Afraid of alienating Latino
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the need for their children to go to “good schools”? That question was particularly pressing with regard to Laughlin’s daughter, Olivia Jade, already a social media celebrity with millions of followers. And after the scandal broke, Jade lost sponsorships with makeup companies like Sephora.5 So why, exactly, was it vital
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become full-scale activists. Instead of reporting on the news, they generate it by working with activist groups to motivate advertisers, neutral service providers, and social media platforms to downgrade or drop dissenting media. They claim that the very presence of conservative ideas in the public square ratchets up the possibility of
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violence—and then they seek to blame advertisers, neutral service providers, and social media platforms for subsidizing the unwoke or allowing them access to their services. When that fails, they call for outright government regulation of free speech. The
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more like the town squares in Puritan New England circa 1720: less free exchange of ideas, more mobs and stocks. The saga of the social media platforms begins with the implementation of the much-maligned and misunderstood Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in 1996. The section was designed to
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be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”18 At the beginning, our major social media companies understood full well the intent behind Section 230. In fact, they celebrated it. Facebook’s mission statement for its first decade was “to make
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share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”20 Google’s working motto was simple: “Don’t be evil.” For a while, it worked. The social media giants were essentially open platforms, with a light hand in terms of censorship. Then the 2016 election happened. The shock that greeted Trump’s victory
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in 2016 fundamentally altered the orientation of the social media platforms. That’s because, up until that moment, the personal political preferences of executives and staffers—overwhelmingly liberal—had meshed with their preferred political outcomes
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polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”22 In November 2017, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) openly threatened the social media companies, growling, “You created these platforms . . . and now they’re being misused. And you have to be the ones who do something about it
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than the original vision. And it called for new content standards to help reach this utopian goal, designed to “mitigat[e] areas where technology and social media can contribute to divisiveness and isolation.”25 Facebook would no longer stay on the sidelines. Facebook would get involved. In a congressional hearing in April
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’s easy for her to say, considering she’s paid to write repetitive, censorious garbage by an establishment media company given favorable treatment by the social media companies. This perspective, not coincidentally, mirrored the prevailing view in the Democratic Party: the tech companies should simply censor the views of political opponents.
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switch made over the course of the past several years from “fighting disinformation” to “fighting misinformation.” After 2016, the argument went, Russian “disinformation” had spammed social media, actively undermining truth in favor of a narrative detrimental to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. There was some evidence of this—although the amount of actual
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by allowing platforms to prune the hedges without killing the free speech tree, has been completely turned upside down: a government privilege granted to social media has now become a mandate from the government and its media allies to take an ax to the tree. The iron triangle of informational restriction
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doing its bidding; the Democratic Party, desperate to uphold its allied media as the sole informational source for Americans, uses threats to cudgel social media into doing its bidding; and social media companies, generally headed by leaders who align politically with members of the media and the Democratic Party, acquiesce. COVERING FOR CENSORSHIP So
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is uncontroversially bad, and should come down—material that explicitly calls for violence, or pornographic material, or, say, actual Russian disinformation. But more and more, social media companies have decided that their job is not merely to police the boundaries of free speech while leaving the core untouched—more and more, they
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“sometimes” or “often,” including a plurality of young people.36 Establishment media saw an opportunity. By targeting the means of distribution—by going after the social media companies and getting them to down-rank alternative media—they could reestablish the monopoly they had lost. And so the establishment media went to work
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ve already discussed, it’s rare to find a voice in the establishment media dedicated to the proposition that dissemination of information on social media ought to be more open. Social media companies have complied. So, for example, in 2019, in response to media reports blaming YouTube for violent acts supposedly inspired by viral
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mystical “authoritative sources” that ranked highly in terms of “news ecosystem quality”? Why, establishment media sources, of course—the same exact outlets attempting to browbeat social media platforms into censoring their competitors. As The New York Times reported, “The change was part of the ‘break glass’ plans Facebook had spent months developing
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the Times, if the pragmatists continued to win, “morale” within the company would continue to drop.40 In establishing which sources ought to be “trusted,” social media have outsourced their judgment to left-wing pseudo-fact-checkers. In December 2016, Facebook announced that it would partner with a slate of fact-checkers
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news—the truth as stated is often the subjective opinion of people with shared political views,” says Professor Stephen Ceci of Cornell University.43 And social media companies know that. They just happen to agree with the political leanings of the fact-checkers to whom they outsource their responsibilities. Algorithmic censorship doesn
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same media that declaim their hatred for misinformation and bullying engage in them regularly when it comes to mobbing random citizens with the help of social media. In December 2020, a recent high school graduate, Mimi Groves, found herself the subject of an interminable hit piece from The New York Times.
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old video to Snapchat, TikTok, and Twitter. Groves was booted from the University of Tennessee cheer team, then withdrew from UT altogether thanks to the social media frenzy. An admissions officer said that the university had received “hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public.” The Times
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as a hero, standing up to the threat of endemic white supremacy.50 This story should raise two questions, one about social media, and one about the media. First, why has social media become such a flaming dumpster fire of visceral hatred? Second, why have the media degraded themselves to the point where
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nonstories about individual high school students are worthy of national coverage? For social media, the answer lies in virality. Social media companies encourage such activities, treating them as a source of traffic and news. Twitter’s trending topics are a perfect example of
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with frightening momentum. THE NEW INFORMATIONAL OLIGOPOLY Our social media oligopoly—cudgeled, wheedled, and massaged into compliance by a rabid media and a censorious Democratic Party—threatens true social authoritarianism at this point. In a free market system, the solution would be to create alternatives. Parler attempted to do just that. Angered at
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the January 6 riot used Facebook or Instagram, twenty-eight used YouTube, and only eight used Parler.54 The informational monopoly is being reestablished in real time. And alternatives are being actively foreclosed by social media companies determined to invoke their standard as the singular standard, a media that knows it can co
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and Signal, encrypted messaging services. All streams of dissent—or uncontrolled informational streams—must be crushed.55 Perhaps the only good news is that most Americans know they’re being manipulated by the gatekeepers in social media. Fully 82
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an excuse for cancellation, not a real justification. One might think that Disney was merely setting a standard that overwrought Holocaust comparisons were forbidden on social media. Not so. Pedro Pascal, star of The Mandalorian, tweeted in 2018 comparing the Trump border policy with regard to children to Nazi concentration camps.
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York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 169. 18. “#BrandsGetReal: What consumers want from brands in a divided society,” SproutSocial.com, November 2018, https://sproutsocial.com/insights/data/social-media-connection/. 19. James R. Bailey and Hillary Phillips, “How Do Consumers Feel When Companies Get Political?,” HBR.org, February 17, 2020, https://hbr.org/2020
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/28/obama-reckons-with-a-trump-presidency. 23. Scott Shackford, “Senator Feinstein’s Threat to ‘Do Something’ to Social Media Companies Is a Bigger Danger to Democracy Than Russia,” Reason.com, November 3, 2017, https://reason.com/2017/11/03/sen-feinsteins-threat-to-do
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33. “Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 Election, Volume 2: Russia’s Use of Social Media with Additional Views,” Intelligence.senate.gov, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf. 34. Nicholas Thompson and Issie Lapowsky, “How
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www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html. 52. Ari Levy, “Trump fans are flocking to the social media app Parler—its CEO is begging liberals to join them,” CNBC.com, June 27, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/27
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, 6–9, 54 freedom of speech and the press conservative media and cancel culture, 180–85 Left sees as protection for special groups, 170–71 social media and “hate speech,” 26, 204–5 Freeman, Morgan, 160 Frenkel-Brunswik, Else, 7 Friedersdorf, Conor, 42 Fromm, Erich, 54 “frozen prejudices,” minority coalitions and,
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toward liberalism, 143–47 depiction of conservatives, 145–47 renormalization of, 145–47, 150–54 Hollywood Reporter, 212 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 49 Holocaust, Carano’s social media post about, 212 Hopkins, Harry, 51 Horkheimer, Max, 54 Hudlický, Tomáš, 116–17 Hudson, Dawn, 139–40 Huffman, Felicity, 73–74 identity politics Obama
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” BLM riots, 163–66 political leanings of, 168–69, 186–87 rise and fall of “objectivity,” 169–73 techniques of “objective” journalists, 171 see also social media Media Matters, 181, 224 merit, ScienceTM and diversity encouraged over, 114–17 Microsoft, 121 Mill, J. S., 35 Miller, Matt, 152–53 Moonlight (film),
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Skipper, John, 158–59 Smith, Ben, 172–73 Snead, O. Carter, 88 Snopes.com, 203 social justice, language and religious nature of, 79–87, 94 social media algorithms for censorship and “fact checking,” 200–206 Hunter Biden and Burisma information and, 189–92 Left’s attempt to discourage conservative media and, 181
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Section 230 of Communications Decency Act and early intentions of platforms, 193–96 shift to new role as information gatekeepers, 194–200 see also specific social media sites Sokal, Alan, 85 Sosis, Richard, 83 SoulCycle, 133 Southern Poverty Law Center, 136 Spanberger, Abigail, 70–71 “speech is violence,” 36 need to
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responses to, 2, 11–14 democratic institutions and, 9–11, 14 media’s coverage of compared to BLM coverage, 166–68 Parler’s deplatforming and, 12–13, 136, 209–10 social media and banning of Trump, 205 U.S. Constitution checks and balances to restrain government and, 5–6 Revolutionary Impulse and, 53
The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
by Victor Davis Hanson · 15 Nov 2021 · 458pp · 132,912 words
their dormitories, a policy predicated on selecting boarders on the basis of race? Or as one student at the Claremont Colleges put it in her social media posting, “I don’t want to live with any white folks.”40 Racially segregated “safe spaces” are now fixtures on many college campuses. Civil rights
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’s Russian kleptocracy. Both Moscow and Beijing seek to subvert US elections, buy influence with American political and corporate elites, and undermine particular candidates through social media skullduggery. Yet the nation since 2016 has been obsessed with “Russian collusion” rather than “Chinese collusion.” That schizophrenia is explicable at least in part because
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. Unable to trust their time-honored sources of daily information, citizens could and did turn to talk radio, podcasts, the internet, blogs and websites, and social media for different versions of the news. In any case, what was stated rhetorically was soon born out in the concrete, as the following random examples
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forfeited their First Amendment rights. These current curbs can include efforts to silence faculty in the classroom, to punish students in their private conversations and social media postings, to prevent certain types of electronic communications, and to ban controversial speakers from campus. The restrictions are fought constantly in the courts. These suits
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can leave for other jobs in or out of the industry. But do employees and customers always have such alternatives? When Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets in ideological and often haphazard fashion censor particular expression and suspend or ban citizens from their platforms, they increasingly begin to revisit constitutional questions
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, one customer—such as the president of the United States with over seventy million followers—it need not show that it does not allow other social media users to express thoughts far more obscene, libelous, insurrectionary, or fallacious—such as the organizers of Antifa, for example, who used Twitter to coordinate their
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often violent street protests between 2016 and 2019. After all, a cancelled Trump can then simply use another social media provider. But what if there are no other Twitter, Facebook, or Google competitors with comparable reach in an industry where the leading companies enjoy near
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, and Latin American autocracy never imagined. Globalization spread so quickly because Western-spawned, mass-produced, and inexpensive technology—mobile phones, satellite television, the internet, email, social media—made instant communications easy, cheap, profitable, and fun. Such transparency allowed most of the world in real time to enjoy at least the semblance of
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Americans with the aid of shared radio or, after 1950, continuous television news coverage. Yet, even now, in the age of more intrusive and ubiquitous social media, email, Zoom, and Skype, it is hard to imagine transnational or transcontinental democracies comprising hundreds of millions of people with different cultures and traditions normally
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from millions of illegal aliens had begun to resonate with even doctrinaire Republicans, independents, and swing voters. Despite his often off-putting behavior and his social media talk deemed “unprecedented” and “unpresidential,” business groups and CEOs believed his economic plan was working and appealing to a majority of Americans. In sum, by
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controversial end of the Trump administration would mean a free license to ban, deplatform, and censor both use of social media and the users themselves. Soon after, thousands of Trump followers had their social media accounts censored or frozen. Those who had posted evidence of attending a rally to support challenges to the acceptance
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to the November election vote count, he finally conceded defeat. No matter. Trump himself was banned for life from Twitter and Facebook for allegedly using social media to encourage protesters to assemble on January 6 in Washington, DC.20 Amazon, Google, and Apple—three of the top-five market-capitalized corporations in
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same early hours of the same day, without warning and in a coordinated effort, blocked servers and apps used to access their upstart, conservative social media rival Parler. The latter had recently been flooded with millions of new users eager to follow Trump to an alternative platform after he was cancelled by Twitter
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legislation. Twitter’s new rival, Parler—summarily shut down for days and nearly ruined—filed antitrust suits against those who had sought to destroy it. No one could explain why the radical Iranian ayatollah Ali Khamenei could freely tweet about destroying Israel or Antifa could use social media to coordinate its often violent
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demonstrations, but the president of the United States and some of his supporters were banned from Facebook, Twitter, and a host of other social media platforms. And no one could quite figure out whether Silicon Valley had monopolistically coordinated its anti-Trump efforts after the surety of the Biden victory
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, 2017, www.cato.org/blog/poll-71-americans-say-political-correctness-has-silenced-discussions-society-needs-have-58-have. 28. On the defense of exercising social media censorship (before the banning of Trump), see A. Sewer, “Trump’s Warped Definition of Free Speech,” The Atlantic, May 29, 2020, www.theatlantic.com/ideas
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-035633142.html. 20. Trump banned: S. Fischer, “All the Platforms That Have Banned orRestricted Trump So Far,” Axios, January 11, 2021, www.axios.com/platforms-social-media-ban-restrict-trump-d9e44f3c-8366-4ba9-a8a1-7f3114f920f1.html; supporters banned: A. Martin, “Banned from Twitter and Facebook, Which Sites Are the Pro-Trump Movement
Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
by Vivek Ramaswamy · 16 Aug 2021 · 344pp · 104,522 words
days, Silicon Valley closed ranks to cancel the accounts of not only the people who participated in that riot but everyday conservatives across the country. Social media companies, payment processing companies, home rental companies, and many more acted in unison. It was a Soviet-style ideological purge, happening in plain sight, right
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The trick? Making you forget about the media firestorm just a few months earlier when Amazon fired several workers who dared to speak up on social media about working conditions at Amazon’s warehouses. Many of them were black. Behind closed doors, Amazon executives planned to brand one of its fired black
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Social Capital, a new woke venture capital fund whose mission is to “advance humanity.” He’s built a sterling reputation for himself by publicly criticizing social media companies for “ripping apart society” while becoming a part owner of the Golden State Warriors and a Silicon Valley celebrity on the back of his
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every group in Google searches, conservatives were shown slightly greater liberal bias in their search results.13 Having already censored users and websites with impunity, social media giants then took the next major leap—censoring articles published by major newspapers. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, the New
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newspaper. Facebook quickly followed suit and also decided to limit the distribution of the Hunter Biden article. Together, Facebook and Twitter comprise the two biggest social media platforms—and both of them effectively decided what information was made available for the American electorate in advance of an election. That’s particularly arresting
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of the United States is relegated to appealing not to the US Supreme Court but to Facebook’s Supreme Court in order to communicate via social media.21 So what did this “Oversight Board” decide? In May 2021, it upheld Trump’s ban from Facebook and Instagram (which Facebook owns), but it
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. Sure, sometimes that means they get it wrong. So conveniently, whenever they’re caught red-handed or the uproar risks being too costly, today’s social media giants now have a new refrain: oops, we just made a “mistake.” In March 2021, Dorsey testified at another congressional hearing, this time on misinformation
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and social media. Dorsey admitted that Twitter’s ban of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story was a “total mistake” while denying that Twitter has a
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market provide a solution? It did, at least for a hot second, in the form of Parler, a Twitter alternative popular with conservatives. Unlike Big Tech social media incumbents, Parler didn’t harvest user data and didn’t regulate political content. Instead, Parler set out to value, of all things, free speech and open dialogue
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, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”32 In a nutshell, it’s this second part that gives social media companies the power to censor material on their sites. It’s a shield that Silicon Valley’s titans use today to regulate content on their
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Samaritan provision of the statute. According to former US Congressman Chris Cox, Section 230’s co-sponsor, the intent of the law was to empower social media companies to do things like prevent children from accessing pornography on the internet.33 Yet companies like Facebook and Twitter have used that same protection
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has become increasingly bipartisan, with even President Joe Biden suggesting a repeal of the statute.35 Silicon Valley’s defenders of Section 230 claim that social media companies like Facebook and Twitter could have never gotten off the ground in a big way if they were also responsible for fighting lawsuits from
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been a good thing for society. We ought to prefer a society in which no individual social media company is any larger or more powerful than an ordinary publisher. In that world, there would be multiple social media companies each with different offerings that each reach a smaller base of users—akin to a
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near term, our most promising solution rests in the judicial system, the one institution that nearly all Americans still trust. In response to the widespread social media bans in January 2021, I argued in The Wall Street Journal—along with my former law professor—that when Big Tech companies engage in selective
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engaged in the conduct Congress was promoting. If Section 230 is the carrot, here is the stick: congressional Democrats have repeatedly made explicit threats to social media giants if they failed to censor speech those lawmakers disfavored. In April 2019, Louisiana Congressman Cedric Richmond warned Facebook and Google that they had “better
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act against abortion clinics. If those companies did as Congress demanded and then got a pat on the back from lawmakers like Blumenthal gave the social media companies, progressives would instantly see the constitutional problem. Or try a different example. Say Congress wants to look through the email of every corporate executive
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that sounds ridiculous, think again: that’s exactly what Congress did with Section 230 of the Telecommunications Decency Act, combined with its severe threats to social media companies to censor speech on their sites. The left wing of Congress, unwittingly aided by some right-wing populists, effectively dispatched
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social media companies to do speech-censoring work that the First Amendment prohibits Congress from doing directly. These social media companies are effectively privately hired censoring agents for the government. This ought to be an affront to
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keep the private information of German citizens for its own purposes. It’s strikingly similar to what’s happening now in the real world with social media companies: substitute the US government for the German intelligence agencies, Twitter and Facebook for the CIA, and the analogy becomes clear. These corporate behemoths are
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is it hyperbole—in fact, it may soon have a name. New York University researchers published a report titled “False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim That Social Media Companies Censor Conservatives,” which calls for the Biden administration to form a new “Digital Regulatory Agency” to fight dangerous ideas such as the assertion that
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social media companies have anti-conservative bias.46 Remind you of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth? Well, it gets worse. According to the New York Times, we
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companies at hearings in 2020, saying that if they fail to remove “hate speech” from white nationalists, they would be punished. Third, liberal lawmakers congratulate social media companies after they go on to censor content that Democrats don’t like. Fourth, tech titans manage to take their most aggressive actions of all
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buy those things from now signal which side we’re on. We don’t just segregate ourselves geographically—the Big Sort has gone online too. Social media companies promised to bring people together, but instead they provide echo chambers where like-minded people reinforce each other’s biases. Technology has made it
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been sorting ourselves in physical space, and in the time since, we’ve done the same thing in cyberspace. In 2020, when I joined Parler, the alternative social media site that became popular for its commitment to free speech in the wake of Silicon Valley’s coordinated censorship crusade, I posted something that
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the annual Harvard–Yale football game and calling for both endowments to divest from fossil fuels and cancel Puerto Rican debt holdings—snapping selfies for social media along the way.2 Woke culture today is like a supercharged version of the faux performative service that I first saw as a high school
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Wall Street Journal, 12 Nov. 2020, www.wsj.com/articles/china-president-xi-jinping-halted-jack-ma-ant-ipo-11605203556. 8. Qiuyan, Qu. “Chinese Derogatory Social Media Term for ‘White Left’ Western Elites Spreads.” Global Times, 21 May 2017, www.globaltimes.cn/content/1047989.shtml. 9. “An Update on Our Work to
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Boing, 11 Nov. 2019, boingboing.net/2019/11/11/uber-ceo-on-saudi-murder-of-jo.html. CHAPTER 9 1. “Ex-Facebook Executive Chamath Palihapitiya: Social Media Is ‘Ripping Apart’ Society | CNBC.” YouTube, CNBC, 12 Dec. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=MakEIlvlyfE. 2. “Coronavirus: YouTube Bans ‘Medically Unsubstantiated’ Content.” BBC News
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=hoover%20%22cannot%20be%20thought%22%20%22single%20person%20or%20group%22&f=false. 18. Needleman, Sarah E. “Facebook Suspends Trump Indefinitely amid Pressure on Social Media to Clamp Down.” The Wall Street Journal, 8 Jan. 2021, www.wsj.com/articles/president-trump-to-regain-ability-to-tweet-from-his-personal-twitter
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/. 21. “Facebook Bans ‘Voice of Trump’ from Platform.” BBC News, BBC, 1 Apr. 2021, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56598862. 22. Thorbecke, Catherine. “Social Media Companies Restricting Trump Accounts Cite Risk for Violence.” ABC News, ABC News Network, 13 Jan. 2021, abcnews.go.com/Technology
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/social-media-companies-restricting-trump-accounts-cite-risk/story?id=75176327. 23. Manskar, Noah. “Jack Dorsey Says Blocking Post’s Hunter Biden Story Was ‘Total Mistake’—but
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. 1987). casetext.com/case/carlin-comm-v-mountain-st-tel-tel. 46. Barrett, Paul M., and J. Grant Sims. False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim That Social Media Companies Censor Conservatives. NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, Feb. 2021, static1.squarespace.com/static/5b6df958f8370af3217d4178/t/60187b5f45762e708708c8e9/1612217185240/NYU%20False%20Accusation_2
System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein · 6 Sep 2021
screen, while gathering ever more data of our online behavior. And as borne out at the Capitol, a tidal wave of misinformation and disinformation on social media platforms has served to undermine our trust in science, exacerbate political polarization, and threaten democracy itself—all of this powered by a small number of
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of the economy to proceed apace. People flocked in record numbers to Netflix as a substitute for movie theaters. The use of Facebook and other social media networks skyrocketed as people sought connections to friends and family. Videoconferencing enabled children to keep attending school and people to retain a connection to their
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of Zoom, the acceleration of automation in an age of smart machines without regard for job displacement, and the toxic misinformation and disinformation flowing through social media platforms. But that just underscores the essential work of our new post-pandemic era. We must strive now to find ways to harness the power
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the big tech companies. We no longer hear so much gushing about the internet as a tool for putting a library into everyone’s hands, social media as a means of empowering people to challenge their governments, or tech innovators who make our lives better by disrupting old industries. The conversation
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content posted by users. Whereas newspapers and television programs are content creators and therefore responsible for what they print or broadcast, internet service providers and social media companies can distribute user-generated content without incurring legal responsibility, even when that content is hateful, libelous, false, or vulgar. Those making policy in
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amount of digital data that was available grew by leaps and bounds. As more and more people shopped online, clicked on ads, liked their friends’ social media posts, uploaded family photos, accessed their medical test results online, and went about their merry way on the internet, they were leaving behind a data
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But the potential privacy harms to you are difficult to understand and thus rarely weigh heavily on the minds of those who post freely on social media. Even if you could perfectly forecast the consequences of your privacy decisions, the evidence suggests that people still struggle to formulate stable preferences and act
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action to stop a fountain of dangerous misinformation and heated cries by others of censorship and left-wing bias stands the central issue of how social media platforms actually deal with the millions of daily posts containing hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation. Twitter’s choice to suspend Trump’s account was
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what is permissible speech, then it can play the role of censor and block the transmission of ideas to wider audiences. But the internet and social media are changing everything. Fast-forward to 2020, and say you would like to communicate the patently false view that Bill Gates’s philanthropic support
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. No wonder resistance to vaccination is rising. When Gates was asked how he explains the proliferation of such views, he did not hesitate to blame social media, which he described as a “poison chalice,” and called for policy makers to act. “I personally believe government should not allow those types of
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billion people, you will see all the beauty and ugliness of humanity.” The best way to describe the new situation is that the internet and social media have created a superabundance of speech: texts, posts, audio, images, and videos. Billions of pieces of new content are posted every day on Facebook,
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of access for anyone with an internet connection is the capacity to direct harmful speech to a potentially global audience through a blog or viral social media post. Open exchange democratizes self-expression, yet the absence of gatekeepers allows speech that corrodes the informational health of democracy or violates the dignity
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was not born in Kenya? Did it lead to a factual refutation of the Gates vaccine conspiracy? To the contrary, the current infrastructure of social media has amplified the reach of these messages and increased the numbers of people who were exposed to and then perhaps believed such falsehoods. It also
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them in print, they were permitted under free speech protections. Should the situation be different if the same words were posted online? The internet and social media not only provide a megaphone for hate, they provide the infrastructure to spew hate anonymously through bots and fake accounts. The result is an online
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and dignity of all. What Are the Offline Harms of Online Speech? Back in 2001, Harvard professor Cass Sunstein warned of the harmful effects of social media on democracy and human dignity. His main concern was that online spaces tend to favor “enclave” deliberation—conversations among like-minded people who encounter information
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is not inherently dangerous, it tends to exacerbate group polarization in practice, breeding extremism and putting “social stability at risk.” Given the ways in which social media has been used by extremist groups to spread disinformation, Sunstein was onto something. But two decades after he issued his warning, what does the evidence
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the consequences for democracy would be devastating. However, the evidence points in another direction. As one recent analysis concluded, “Even if most political exchanges on social media take place among people with similar ideas, cross-cutting interactions are more frequent than commonly believed, exposure to diverse news is higher than through other
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types of media, and ranking algorithms do not have a large impact on the ideological balance of news consumption.” This is because social media seems to expand people’s interactions with individuals outside their closest social circles—coworkers, relatives living in other places, acquaintances—who often share different, and
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more ideologically diverse, information. This evidence sits uncomfortably with the popular perception that social media produces nothing but echo chambers that polarize the population. To reconcile these facts, it is important to recognize that a lot of what happens on
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provides an all-too-welcoming home for extremism and hateful rhetoric. And though polarization in our society might be affected by lots of factors beyond social media, the consequences of misinformation and harmful speech can be significant. One major source of pollution in the information ecosystem is misinformation, “claims that contradict
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to undermine the ability of people to make a choice or judgment with clarity about the verifiable facts. Concerns about the spread of disinformation on social media burst into public view with Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Teenagers in the Macedonian town of Veles were paid up to $8,000
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produced actually register with the sites’ users? One team tracked more than 2,500 adults during the five weeks before the 2016 election. Examining their social media consumption and mapping stories to existing lists of “fake news,” they estimated that more than a quarter of Americans had been exposed to at least
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is surely not ideal, a misinformed citizenry can be quite dangerous. As with misinformation and disinformation, hate speech has found a welcoming environment on mainstream social media platforms. Yet hate speech makes up only a tiny fraction of the content that is posted online. In one study, a research team analyzed more
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Moving Beyond Self-Regulation It’s easy to understand why Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey don’t want to be the arbiters of speech on social media. The challenge they faced in 2020 as Twitter and Facebook grappled with regulating content about COVID-19 and the presidential election revealed the difficulty of
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as well as the European Union, have restricted incitements to hatred and discrimination even if there is no evidence that violence might result. Though the social media platforms must already stay attuned to these differences in law, they are paying increasing attention in the wake of a new German law related to
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anyone entitled to have his or her posts retweeted, amplified, or recommended. This is what makes text messaging fundamentally different from posting content on a social media platform. We have strong expectations that free speech should permit us to communicate with others directly and without censorship via messaging services. But invoking free
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harass, and discourage targeted speakers; defamation campaigns that use fabricated stories and rumors to damage a speaker’s reputation; swarmlike attacks over email, telephone, or social media to punish particular speakers. Some of these tactics draw significant public attention, such as the accusation that Hillary Clinton was involved in a pedophile ring
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dominate online communication is staggering. Google is responsible for over 90 percent of online searches worldwide. Facebook generates nearly 70 percent of all visits to social media sites on a monthly basis, with Twitter accounting for an additional 10 percent. Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Instagram all boast more than 1 billion
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monthly active users; they are the world’s largest social media platforms. Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are all part of the same company. And YouTube is part of Google. The implication of this market dominance is
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develop a more coordinated approach with Europe. In the United States, at least, antitrust enforcers have been totally confused about how to handle the major social media platforms. With their mandate to ensure that consumers pay a fair price for products, the enforcers are out to sea when it comes to regulating
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the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook. Although few people saw the risk at the time, the merger allowed Facebook to lock in its dominance of social media by scooping up one of its most significant and fastest-growing competitors. Although the politics of regulation has an important role to play in creating
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healthy market competition in search and social media, the reforms we discussed in chapter 5 regarding privacy rights are also important. If users gain the right to transfer their data from one platform
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essays, leading to widespread and undetectable cheating. At the extreme, propagandists could use it to create automated fountains of disinformation, delivered through fake websites and social media accounts. But what seemed a sober precaution was considered by some in the AI world either as running afoul of research norms and rank hypocrisy
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the wake of the livestreamed Christchurch massacre, nongovernmental organizations around the world banded together with governments to create the Christchurch Principles, an effort to promote social media governance that better supports democracy and human rights. Universities in the United States have launched a public interest technology consortium, creating new pathways for young
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19, 2012, https://bostonreview.net/joshua-cohen-reflections-on-information-technology-and-democracy. this area of scholarly research: Nathaniel Persily and Joshua A. Tucker, eds., Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform, SSRC Anxieties of Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020). “cross-cutting interactions are
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more frequent”: Pablo Barberá, “Social Media, Echo Chambers, and Political Polarization,” in Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform, edited by Nathaniel Persily and Joshua A. Tucker, SSRC Anxieties of Democracy
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no. 6239 (June 5, 2015): 1130–32, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa1160. most people are exposed: Matthew Barnidge, “Exposure to Political Disagreement in Social Media Versus Face-to-Face and Anonymous Online Settings,” Political Communication 34, no. 2 (April 3, 2017): 302–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2016
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629–76, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20190658. “claims that contradict”: Andrew M. Guess and Benjamin A. Lyons, “Misinformation, Disinformation, and Online Propaganda,” in Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform, edited by Nathaniel Persily and Joshua A. Tucker, SSRC Anxieties of Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
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3 (August 1, 2000): 790–816, https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-3816.00033. hate speech has found: Alexandra A. Siegel, “Online Hate Speech,” in Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform, edited by Joshua A. Tucker and Nathaniel Persily, SSRC Anxieties of Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
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Machinery, 2016), 95–106, https://doi.org/10.1145/2908131.2908150. One study in Germany: Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz, “Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime,” Journal of the European Economic Association, October 30, 2020, doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvaa045. Likewise, in the United States: Karsten Müller
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.ssrn.com/abstract=3149103. the core function of a platform: Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). Mark Zuckerberg wrote: Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community.” Community Standards Enforcement Report: Rosen, “Community Standards Enforcement Report, Fourth Quarter
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-ptsd-lawsuit.html. See also the pioneering ethnographic work on this topic by Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). “Facebook had failed”: Casey Newton, “Facebook Will Pay $52 Million in Settlement with Moderators Who Developed PTSD on
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/joe-biden-nytimes-interview.html. Two additional things are different: Francis Fukuyama and Andrew Grotto, “Comparative Media Regulation in the United States and Europe,” in Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform, edited by Joshua A. Tucker and Nathaniel Persily, SSRC Anxieties of Democracy (Cambridge, UK:
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edu/news/sio-parler-contours. Google is responsible for over 90 percent: Daisuke Wakabayashi and Tiffany Hsu, “Why Google Backtracked on Its New Search Results Look,” New York Times, January 31, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/technology/google-search-results.html. Facebook generates nearly 70 percent: “Social Media Stats Worldwide
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, https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013068/algorithms-create-a-poverty-trap-lawyers-fight-back/. “ten arguments”: Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (New York: Henry Holt, 2018). “count me as skeptical”: Anand Giridharadas, “Deleting Facebook Won’t Fix the Problem,” New York Times,
Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter
by Zoë Schiffer · 13 Feb 2024 · 343pp · 92,693 words
, Biden’s tweet had three times the number of views. What the hell? Four months earlier, Musk had acquired Twitter, making him not just the social media platform’s most powerful figure, but also its most ubiquitous. He posted constantly—recycled memes, missives about free speech, promises about upcoming features. Day in
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find his footing. His early posts were mostly banal—things he was reading, recommendations of stuff he liked. Once he got going, he was hooked. Social media gave him a way to talk to his audience, circumventing traditional media outlets. Now, if Musk wanted to hype the accomplishments of his visionary rocket
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people engage with one another online. A few years later, Roth got his PhD in communication from the University of Pennsylvania, with a focus on social media platform governance. In 2015, Roth landed his dream job at Twitter. The platform was at the height of its influence and just beginning to grapple
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chose not to take effective actions to prevent him from using the platform in this way,” read a scathing draft of a congressional report about social media’s role in the leadup to the January 6 insurrection. “Moreover, this failure to act was consistent with Twitter’s longstanding deferential treatment of President
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, the “everything app” he’d tried to start at PayPal? What if he put it on the blockchain? “I have an idea for a blockchain social media system that does both payments and short text messages/links like Twitter,” he texted his brother, Kimbal Musk, on April 8, before laying out a
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, at least, it had worked. No one knew exactly what Musk meant when he talked about free speech. But anyone who understood the dynamics of social media knew that loosening the reins of what could be said would also make Twitter less predictable. For those who saw Twitter as a “global town
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reserved for prominent people. But nearly any member of the mainstream media could get verified within twenty-four hours with the help of a savvy social media manager. Musk was suspicious of the mainstream press; in his mind the blue check gave journalists a false air of credibility. “Twitter’s current lords
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responded. “I hit follow, I refresh, it says following.” “Same here,” piped in Irwin. Soon after, Trump announced that he remained committed to his own social media platform, Truth Social, and, despite Musk’s efforts to reinstate him, saw no reason to return to Twitter. Musk followed up with another interactive poll
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careful planning on their part, according to a thorough investigation by New York magazine. But as the report zipped its way through message boards and social media, a theory emerged among tech policy experts that threatened to overshadow its racy revelations: the leaks looked like the result of a Russian hacking campaign
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documents obtained by sources at Twitter. 3. The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the [sic] control of its designer. Over the next hour and a
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(Sophie is Asian). One said she was an “example of how leftists abused the system.” Another simply called her a communist. Sophie deactivated all her social media accounts except her Instagram, which was already set to private. At first, she didn’t think too much about it. It was unsettling, but she
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legitimize a well-worn conservative narrative that the suppression of Hunter Biden’s ‘laptop from hell’ proved collusion between the so-called deep state and social media companies,” as Joan Donovan, a research director at Harvard Kennedy School, wrote in Politico. Doherty’s views fell squarely in the second category. “It was
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from Trump, liberal pundits correctly predicted just how far the Twitter Files would go to fuel the right-wing narrative that conservatives were silenced on social media. “They’re gonna keep bitching about it for years. It’s going to be louder and emptier than the Benghazi hearings,” wrote Dave Karpf, an
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did just that. As journalists began digging into the story, Musk made a surprising move. He blocked links to the jet-tracking account on other social media platforms and banned the accounts of multiple high-profile reporters, including Matt Binder of Mashable, Donie O’Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of The Washington
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decade of his life to.” CHAPTER 46 “An Absolute Scam” As the Goons were busy slashing Twitter’s costs, Musk was eyeing contracts between the social media giant and mobile carriers in countries like Indonesia, Russia, and India. These contracts, which involved the carriers supporting two-factor authentication, a security feature that
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researchers free access to its API, allowing them to study trends in misinformation and hate speech. This research was critical to understanding the impact of social media. But it also resulted in bad headlines for Twitter. In 2021, an article in The Guardian read: “Twitter admits bias in algorithm for rightwing politicians
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after, I saw the alert show up on my own account. CHAPTER 67 “Sorry, You Are Rate Limited” While the finer points of running a social media business can be debated, one basic truth is that they all run on attention. Tech leaders are incentivized to grow their user bases so there
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take their posts and followers with them if they left the platform. Many tech leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, believed this was where social media was headed. “My view is that the more that there’s interoperability between different services and the more content can flow, the better all the
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not be the best person to run Twitter. “It all went south,” he said vaguely. This, after Musk blocked people from sharing links to other social media sites on Twitter (which he had to reverse) and throttled links to the newsletter platform Substack, after it announced a Twitter-like feature called Notes
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, just like Tesla engineers tweaking Musk’s car. But now, with a few months of distance from the mercurial leader, Lin wasn’t so sure. “Social media is zero sum,” he said. “You can make his Tesla faster and it won’t affect other people’s driving experience. But with Twitter, that
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/sites/democrats.january6th.house.gov/files/20220901_Anika%20Collier%20Navaroli.pdf. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Twitter saw President Trump’s potential violent incitement”: “Social Media & the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol,” draft, n.d., washingtonpost.com/documents/5bfed332-d350-47c0-8562-0137a4435c68.pdf?itid=lk_inline_manual_3
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. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Be there, will be wild!”: “Social Media & the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “lower the temperature on the platform
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”: “Social Media & the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT hundreds more were injured: Chris Cameron, “These Are the People Who
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, January 8, 2021, blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Twitter’s decision to ban Donald Trump: “Social Media & the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Twitter actually amplified conservative voices: Luca Belli, “Examining Algorithmic Amplification of
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Laptop.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Twitter erred in this case”: “Statement of Yoel Roth, PhD,” Hearing on “Protecting Speech from Government Interference and Social Media Bias, Part 1: Twitter’s Role in Suppressing the Biden Laptop Story,” House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, February 8, 2023, oversight.house.gov/wp
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NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT prior campaigns out of Iran: Moderated Content, “MC Weekly Update 10/9: Social Media During War,” Stanford Law School Podcasts, October 10, 2023, law.stanford.edu/podcasts/mc-weekly-update-10-9-social-media-during-war/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT after it was viewed eleven million times: Joseph
The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg · 11 Oct 2021 · 521pp · 118,183 words
mark in free-loving San Francisco.4 Right now, the symbolism felt a little too close to home. In our rambunctious democratic system and freewheeling social media platforms, the Russians had hit the bull’s-eye. Across Silicon Valley, revelations such as these had set off alarm bells—and raised serious
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suspend TikTok in the context of a mere U.S.-China competition? Unlikely, and has not to this day—the concept of competition implies American social media platforms should simply compete for market share with TikTok in the United States. However, this misses the point: TikTok poses a gaping national cybersecurity risk
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National Basketball Association to apologize—after the team’s general manager tweeted in support of Hong Kong’s democratic protests.25 In 2018, a Marriott social media employee in Omaha was fired for “liking” a tweet from a Tibetan independence organization.26 For many foreign policy academics, the China cold war
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113 One activist tweeted, “We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.”114 Recognizing the central role social media was playing in the demonstrations, Mubarak’s regime attempted to choke off Internet access. The effort failed. On February 11, the modern pharaoh resigned. Mubarak
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graphic and grainy videos flooded the Internet, capturing the desperate last moments of the dictator’s life.118 It wasn’t the first time that social media had fueled social movements. When anti-government protests swept Iran in 2009, enthusiastic observers had prophesied that the unstoppable power of the Internet would unleash
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new generation of enforcers who understood the internet almost as well as the protesters,” write Singer and Brooking in their book, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. “In truth, democratic activists had no special claim to the internet. They’d simply gotten there first.”131 Gerasimov Meets Civil-Military Fusion In early
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s nationalists and pro-Russian separatists. Perhaps most importantly, in St. Petersburg, a troll factory known as the Internet Research Agency began experimenting with how social media could be used to distort the news and divide a population.138 Then, just before Christmas Eve 2015, the lights went out in western Ukraine
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saw false news headlines thought they were true.12 A series of Stanford studies revealed that the vast majority of American teenagers—despite their supposed social media fluency—struggle to identify legitimate information online. Three-quarters failed to distinguish between verified and unverified accounts on Facebook.13 When evaluating a website on
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summarized her students’ attitude. “My friends wouldn’t post something that’s not true.”15 The latter point hints at a particularly problematic element of social media: the consolidation of so-called filter bubbles. These cocoons are partly the product of human nature. As psychologists know, we have an “implicit bias”
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seek out and believe information that reinforces our existing views—and reject information that doesn’t. But filter bubbles can be exacerbated by technology. While social media companies are not responsible for creating cognitive biases, technology can inflame them. For instance, if you’re a liberal using Twitter to track House of
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many of the algorithms that govern our online lives—“may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”17 Thanks to social media, it has become easier than ever to connect with the people who share our views. This can yield powerfully positive results, such as allowing
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to be free.”20 Truth, they believed, would ultimately triumph over lies. Yet in the years since, the Internet has become a double-edged sword. Social media has given the student activists produced by the 2018 Parkland shooting the megaphone that comes with several million Twitter followers. Those same platforms also spread
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, Kim Kardashian.” Now with more than 215 million followers on Instagram and nearly 70 million followers on Twitter, Kardashian epitomized to Peskov the power of social media. “Let’s imagine that one day she says, ‘My supporters—do this,’ ” Peskov said. “This will be a signal that will be accepted by
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millions and millions of people. And she’s got no intelligence, no interior ministry, no defense ministry, no KGB.” Social media, Peskov boasted, “creates a perfect opportunity for mass disturbances.”30 Initially, the Kremlin mostly focused on creating these mass disturbances in Ukraine.31 Russian trolls
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was never conclusively established that Cambridge Analytica had links to Russia or other foreign actors interfering in elections.76 But malign actors had abused powerful social media tools for attempted electoral manipulation. This was a seismic shift for tech as a whole. Meanwhile, the headlines kept piling up on the foreign
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narratives. Next comes amplification, employing an army of shell accounts or sock puppets—much like money launderers create shell companies—to push misleading content across social media platforms. These accounts can sound like legitimate outlets, like the Denver Guardian (ostensibly a local publication)87 or Veterans Today (allegedly focused on military
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to credible sources like your friends and favorite news sources. Finally, information laundering culminates in the integration of disinformation into legitimate news sources and mainstream social media users. Perhaps the most infamous illustration of this phenomenon was @Jenn_Abrams, supposedly an American teenager whose feisty tweets on everything from National Punctuation Day
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In a Russian effort called “Ghostwriter,” hackers breached legitimate news sites, planted fake stories (often attempting to undermine NATO), and then blasted them out on social media.145 Or take Redfish, a Berlin-based media group that claims to offer “radical, in-depth grassroots features”—and just happens to have extensive ties
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to the pandemic and President Trump claiming that the vote would be rigged—presented further opportunities for interference and disinformation. Rumors and untruths zipped around social media, many of them pushed by Trump and his allies. As election night receded and each new day yielded additional ballots but no declared winner,
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indulged in unwarranted conspiracy theories claiming that Trump had in fact won. Mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook accelerated their crackdown on disinformation, but Parler—a social media platform that pitches itself as a freewheeling and unrestricted alternative to such sites—shot to the top of the Apple and Google app stores, as
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and Google suspended Parler from their app stores, and Amazon kicked them off their popular cloud hosting service. Deciding where to draw the line on disinformation is a difficult and unenviable task—especially for unelected engineers in Silicon Valley. We still haven’t fully defined how to view social media platforms—is Twitter
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China’s security apparatus kicks into high gear to “harmonize” the opposition. Within minutes, the Great Firewall blocks Chinese citizens from viewing websites, blogs, and social media comments focused on the standoff at the U.S. Embassy. Security officials leverage China’s individualized psychographic profiles—built from the data collected by commonly
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between a desire to condemn domestic Chinese repression and their dependence on Chinese trade. Even Americans begin to feel the influence of AI-generated disinformation. Social media is flooded with contradictory and misleading accounts of what is really happening in China. Swarms of Russian government bots spread still greater confusion. Maybe Fei
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that photo. Web browsers like Google Chrome even allow you to perform these reverse image searches with the simple right-click of a mouse. Astute social media users have outed trolls posing as Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli, for instance.38 But what happens when the trolls’ profile pictures are deepfakes, and
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huge scale at very little cost—by swarms of bots operating across different platforms. Those same bots could engage in front-end “swarm warfare,” bombarding social media users with messages to create skewed impressions of reality. Take Lyrebird, a Montreal-based company that uses AI to generate what it boasts are “
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speech rather than the conduct of individual actors will ultimately further politicize the platforms and weaken the public’s trust in their neutrality. While our social media companies scramble to fight nefarious activity, the rest of us will also find ourselves subject to policies that increasingly penalize anonymity. If you have a
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evidence that our government has stolen billions of dollars’ worth of trade secrets from foreign companies or is currently engaging in massive influence campaigns on social media in an attempt to interfere in foreign elections. Behind China’s Great Firewall, however, we can glimpse a future that looks decidedly different. Never
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authorities when its cameras detect Uyghur faces.56 Algorithms monitor for atypical electricity use, a potential sign of an unregistered inhabitant. Social media behavior is tracked; so is staying off of social media. Companies like ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, have allegedly helped Chinese authorities track down Uyghur women of childbearing age and forcibly
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they wonder, that all this tech brainpower can create algorithms that have dramatically reduced child pornography online but can’t crack down on disinformation? Do social media companies really want to eliminate trolls and bots from their platforms, or would they rather rake in the ad revenue from a larger user base
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advertising and hiring, and for allowing ugly, allegedly racist comments to proliferate. By 2020, Facebook found itself confronting the largest-ever corporate boycott of a social media company, with brands ranging from Adidas to Verizon registering their disapproval of the platform’s role in spreading disinformation.33 Some lawmakers called for breaking
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Nunes, then the chairman of the House intelligence committee, sued Twitter for defamation.35 Several Republican senators demanded that the Federal Trade Commission look into social media companies’ content decisions.36 In mid-2020, after Twitter had the temerity—for the first time—to affix a gentle fact-check to a
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tweet from Donald Trump, the president issued a legally questionable executive order threatening to revoke legal protections for social media companies.37 By the summer of that year, amid the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide protests for racial justice, a poll found that more than
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half of Americans had “very little” confidence in social media platforms. Positive opinions of these companies even ranked below Congress, typically one of the least admired bodies in America.38 Ahead of those antitrust hearings
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sanctioning malign foreign actors based not on content but on patterns of nefarious conduct. Modernizing the Foreign Agents Registration Act and expanding it to cover social media actors, as cybersecurity scholar Joshua Fattal has suggested, could also help shift the responsibility for determining foreign influence to the U.S. government and make
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of a U.S. Trust and Safety Agency would be an Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or ISAC, building on the provision for a Social Media Data and Threat Analysis Center that was authorized in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. Much like the Centers for Disease Control gathers information on
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as platforms have made some encouraging strides since 2016, much more must be done to limit the spread of disinformation campaigns by foreign actors. While social media platforms can’t stop people from believing disinformation, they can offer as much truthful context as possible. That means combating “bad” speech not by
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need more sophisticated natural language processing to detect if accounts are posting in unnatural increments or using suspicious syntax. To combat manipulated images and video, social media platforms should likewise invest in deepfake detection. Qualcomm has begun incorporating sophisticated photo and video verification tools into its smartphone chips, making it easier to
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the Federal Trade Commission and nearly every state attorney general sued Facebook for anti-competitive practices.84 There are kernels of truth to these arguments. Social media companies have at times been irresponsible with the mind-boggling amount of personal data they possess. They have the potential to wield immense influence when
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19, 2015, https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2015/06/revenge-porn-and-search.html. 9 P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (New York: First Mariner Books, 2019), 27. 10 Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New
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30, 2017, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/os-trid-033017.pdf. 63 Clint Watts, Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), e-book, 141. 64 David Sanger, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and
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Francis Online, May 29, 2012, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21520844.2012.675545. 108 Aleya-Sghaier, “The Tunisian Revolution.” 109 Jennifer Metz, “Social Media Plays Role in Toppling Tunisian President,” ABC News, January 14, 2011, https://abcnews.go.com/International/tunisian-president-pushed-power-country-rocked-riots/story?id
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2020, https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/9991401?hl=en&ref_topic=29265. 85 Kirill Meleshevich and Bret Schafer, “Online Information Laundering: The Role of Social Media,” Alliance for Securing Democracy, January 2018, https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/InfoLaundering_final-edited.pdf. 86 Anton Troianovski, “A former Russian
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://www.themoscowtimes.com/2017/10/27/former-russian-troll-describes-night-shift-as-bacchanalia-a59398. 93 Meleshevich and Schafer, “Online Information Laundering: The Role of Social Media.” 94 Ben Collins and Joseph Cox, “Jenna Abrams, Russia’s Clown Troll Princess, Duped the Mainstream Media and the World,” Daily Beast, November 3,
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Great Firewall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 6. 128 Ibid. 129 Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts, “How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument,” Harvard, April 9, 2017, https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf. 130 Marc Faddoul, Guillaume Chaslot
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India continues to ban China apps amid standoff.” 82 Joshua R. Fattal, “FARA on Facebook: Modernizing the Foreign Agents Registration Act to Address Propagandists on Social Media,” SSRN, July 10, 2019, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3416925. 83 Nakashima, “Cyber Command has sought to disrupt the world’s
Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre · 18 Jan 2023
criminal records, facial recognition, and other biometric data, but also addresses, religious affiliations, medical records, birth control records, travel bookings, online purchases, package deliveries, and social media comments. These databases are not merely repositories of information but are intended to automatically fuse and analyze data for police. They could be used to
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as diverse as Brazil, Burundi, Hungary, India, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and Venezuela. Part of this trend has been the rise of “digital dictators,” who use social media, censorship, surveillance, and other digital tools to control the media, repress the population, and spread regime propaganda. China is not foisting their model on an
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video can be used to create fake news for disinformation and propaganda. They can even be used to convincingly impersonate political leaders. Bots can flood social media with manufactured narratives, allowing authoritarian regimes to suppress dissent. Algorithms can promote or demote political content, subtly censoring the public square. The digital information ecosystem
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AI tools for disinformation, propaganda, and information warfare. The information environment is swiftly evolving, driven by the emergence of new channels of communication, such as social media, and new technologies, such as algorithms to sift and sort information and AI-generated content. The information environment has always been a geopolitical battleground among
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flashpoint in U.S. politics, with crudely manipulated videos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or White House press correspondent Jim Acosta making the rounds on social media. These “shallow fakes” were manipulated without AI, but AI-based synthetic media will enable more sophisticated fake audio and video, making it harder for
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Ukrainian civilians injured in Russian attacks were “crisis actors.” Ukrainian defenders, for their part, pumped a steady stream of heroic tales of brave resistance on social media, many of which were false. These included stories about the “Ghost of Kyiv,” a mythical Ukrainian air force pilot who reportedly had downed six Russian
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that was obviously fake; Zelensky’s high-profile media presence which meant viewers were familiar with how he actually sounds; the quick response from Zelensky, social media companies, and news outlets; and the fact that the Ukrainian government had been warning about deepfake disinformation for weeks. The Zelensky video was an early
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tank and connected to government officials. Experts concluded Jones’s persona was likely a state-run intelligence operation attempting to connect to Washington insiders online. Social media has increasingly been a tool of hostile foreign intelligence services to attempt to connect with and recruit people with U.S. government security clearances. One
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media. In the United States, federal lawmakers directed several government studies of deepfakes starting in 2019, while some states have begun issuing their own regulations. Social media companies are adapting to both rapidly evolving technology and societal expectations, but without regulation companies’ approaches are likely to be inconsistent, at best. Companies that
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in 2019 that governments or political parties in fifty countries around the world used bots to manipulate public opinion online, including in the United States. Social media manipulation in the United States is widespread, with Bradshaw and Howard concluding, “the adoption of techniques to influence political opinion online seems to have become
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general electoral and political practice.” U.S. government agencies, from the DoD to the EPA, have been accused of manipulative practices on social media to promote messages, ranging from countering ISIS propaganda to promoting clean water regulations. Members of both political parties, Democratic and Republican, have employed astroturfing, a
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manipulative social media practice intended to create the illusion of grassroots support. Bots can be used to create the illusion of public support for ideas by amassing fake
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to free books on Amazon.) Bots are in many ways a small part of online disinformation, and bot network takedowns are just one part of social media companies’ broader efforts to counter manipulative information campaigns. Twitter and Facebook have removed thousands of accounts linked to influence operations from both state and non
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Darnella Frazier filmed Minneapolis police murdering George Floyd, she posted the video to Facebook, sharing the truth of the event and sparking a nationwide movement. Social media has enabled the rise of both transformative decentralized social movements, like #BlackLivesMatter, and dangerous conspiracy theories like QAnon. Despite their democratizing ability to empower individuals
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, the largest social media platforms are controlled by a handful of companies. Meta (which owns Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram), Google (which owns YouTube), Tencent (which owns WeChat, QQ
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social app dominance is heightened by the powerful and often opaque role AI plays in affecting discourse online. Algorithms are at the heart of how social media functions. Social media platforms manage a staggering amount of content. Twitter processes 500 million tweets per day (6,000 tweets per second!). Facebook clocks four billion video
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changed their algorithm to demote borderline content. Facebook said their intent was disincentivizing “creating provocative content that is as close to the line as possible.” Social media platform policies generally prohibit manipulative behavior and certain categories of content, such as nudity, violence, or hate speech, but not whether or not the content
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geopolitical challenge to the free world. TikTok was owned by ByteDance, a major Chinese tech firm, and was the first Chinese-owned social media platform to go global. U.S. social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and others are banned in China, where the Chinese Communist Party heavily censors online discourse
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operations, using bots and other methods to artificially elevate or suppress certain messages. Authoritarian governments are attempting to control information internally and undermine democracies abroad. Social media platforms themselves have used algorithms that, perhaps unintentionally, appear to have promoted inflammatory or divisive political content. And TikTok represents a new front in this
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fight, as U.S. companies for the first time face competition from China for control of the global social media marketplace. The rules that social media companies use to filter, censor, promote, and demote information are enormously consequential. To date, companies have responded in an ad hoc fashion, often
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in their place. As Twitter and Facebook increased their content moderation to crack down on disinformation, far-right users flocked to alternatives like Parler and Gab. Fragmenting the social media ecosystem so that users fall into even more extreme bubbles is hardly an effective long-term solution. Regulation is needed to establish uniform
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companies continue to lead, the United States is hamstrung by its politics. Washington and Silicon Valley view one another with mutual suspicion, and politicians view social media through an increasingly polarized lens. Conservative politicians have claimed for years—without evidence—that U.S. tech firms have an anti-conservative bias. These unfounded
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safety, it is hardly a sane situation when big tech firms are (justifiably) censoring the president of the United States. The rules governing information on social media should be established by U.S. elected leaders, not unaccountable tech company executives. Yet American political leaders have, time and again, demonstrated not only an
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outrageous and dangerous lies. Artificial intelligence is enabling new and powerful tools that will shape how billions of people perceive reality, from synthetic media to social media algorithms. It will take a concerted effort by tech companies, civil society, the media, and democratic governments to build a revitalized ecosystem that protects
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lack a clear competing model for the use of AI. Whether it is for facial recognition systems, data privacy, synthetic media, or content moderation on social media platforms, governance rules are either fragmented or nonexistent across democratic nations. Democracies must out-compete authoritarian regimes to present models for AI governance that preserve
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of concern in Washington among both liberals and conservatives, but the United States would be unquestionably better off having Facebook or YouTube dominate the global social media landscape than companies like TikTok that are beholden to the Chinese Communist Party. Democracies must find ways to deepen cooperation between tech companies, the government
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china-style-surveillance-state. 109sweeping cybersecurity law: Gilbert, “Zimbabwe Is Trying to Build a China Style Surveillance State”; Tawanda Karombo, “Zimbabwe Is Clamping Down on Social Media Use with a Cyber Crime Bill Set to Become Law,” Quartz Africa, October 9, 2019, https://qz.com/africa/1724542/zimbabwe-bill-clamps-down-on
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Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate, on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference, in the 2016 U.S. Election: Volume 2: Russia’s Use of Social Media With Additional Views, S. Report 116-XX (2019), https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf. 122slew of influence operations across
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twitter.com/amaleshwar/status/1272413343328997380?s=11. 125China’s “50 cent army”: Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts, How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument (gking.harvard.edu, April 9, 2017), https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf?m=1463587807; Henry
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Connect with Targets,” Associated Press, June 13, 2019, https://apnews.com/article/bc2f19097a4c4fffaa00de6770b8a60d. 131tool of hostile foreign intelligence: “The China Threat: Foreign Intelligence Services Use Social Media Sites to Target People with Security Clearances,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, n.d., https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/the-china-threat/clearance-holders-targeted
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-on-social-media-nevernight-connection; National Counterintelligence and Security Center, “FBI and NCSC Release New Movie to Increase Awareness of Foreign Intelligence Threats on Professional Networking Sites and
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Other Social Media Platforms,” news release, September 29, 2020, https://www.dni.gov/index.php/ncsc-newsroom/item/2145-nevernight-press-release; Jeff Stone, “LinkedIn Is Becoming China
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—NOV 2019.docx, 123–126. 142“the adoption of techniques to influence political opinion online”: Case Studies—Collated—NOV 2019.docx, 123. 142astroturfing, a manipulative social media practice: Case Studies—Collated—NOV 2019.docx, 123–126. 142twenty-six authoritarian regimes: Bradshaw and Howard, “The Global Disinformation Order,” i, 2, 5. 142half
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foods . . .” Facebook (story), May 26, 2020, https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1425401580994277&id=100005733452916. 143#BlackLivesMatter: Aleem Maqbool, “Black Lives Matter: From Social Media Post to Global Movement,” BBC News, July 10, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53273381. 143dangerous conspiracy theories: Kevin Roose, “What Is
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Though Regulators Will Hold Off on Enforcing Divestiture,” Washington Post, December 4, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/04/tiktok-sale-deadline/. 143largest social media platforms are controlled by a handful of companies: Wikipedia, s.v. “List of social platforms with at least 100 million active users,” updated September 17
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Guidelines,” Youtube, n.d., https://www.youtube.com/howyoutubeworks/policies/community-guidelines/. 146the information seen by more than 4 billion people: Kemp, “Social Media Users Pass the 4 Billion Mark.” 146censored social media platforms: Lotus Ruan et al., “One App, Two Systems,” The Citizen Lab, University of Toronto, November 30, 2016, https://citizenlab.ca
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Continues,” South China Morning Post, July 17, 2018, https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2155580/tik-tok-hits-500-million-global-monthly-active-users-china-social-media-video; Sarah Perez, “TikTok Surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat & YouTube in Downloads Last Month,” TechCrunch, November 2, 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/02/tiktok-
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://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-bytedance/bytedances-chinese-version-of-tiktok-hits-600-million-daily-users-idUSKBN2660P4. 147national security risks of a Chinese-owned social media app: Tom Cotton, Senator for Arkansas, “Cotton, Schumer Request Assessment of National Security Risks Posed by China-Owned Video-Sharing Platform, TikTok, a Potential Counterintelligence
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January 7, 2021, https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10112681480907401. 150account suspensions were clearly necessary: Sheera Frenkel, “The Storming of Capitol Hill Was Organized on Social Media,” New York Times, January 6, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/protesters-storm-capitol-hill-building.html. 150Republican members of Congress
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.com/abacus/tech/article/3092992/microsofts-xiaoice-chatbot-become-its-own-company-china; Yizhou (Joe) Xu, “Programmatic Dreams: Technographic Inquiry into Censorship of Chinese Chatbots,” Social Media + Society 4, no. 4 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1177%2F2056305118808780. 159Xiaoice has since been programmed to sidestep questions: Xu, “Programmatic Dreams.” 160Bing search engine
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Can Claim Back Power in the Digital World,” MIT Technology Review, September 29, 2020, https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/29/1009088/democracies-power-digital-social-media-governance-tech-companies-opinion/; Joe Biden, “My Trip to Europe Is About America Rallying the World’s Democracies,” Washington Post, June 5, 2021, https://
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International Corporation), 178, 181, 184 Smith, Brad, 159, 163, 166, 167 social app dominance, 149–50 social credit system, 99–100 social governance, 97–104 social media, 126, 141–51 socio-technical problems, 65 soft power, 317 SOFWERX (Special Operations Forces Works), 214 SolarWinds, 246 South Africa, 107 South China Sea militarization
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein · 11 Sep 2023
-altitude simulations of volcanoes that were intended to partially dim the sun risked interfering with rainfall in the Southern Hemisphere. She was busily speculating on social media about chemical cloudseeding and covert mass poisonings. I based my writing on dozens of peer-reviewed papers and managed to get access to two closed
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the first few years of my doppelganger trouble: with the exception of the Manhattan bathroom incident, getting confused with Naomi Wolf appeared to be a social media thing. My friends and colleagues knew who I was, and when I interacted with people I didn’t know in the physical world, her name
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my doppelganger, this is it: Once and for all, stop eavesdropping on strangers talking about you in this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media. I might have heeded the message, too. If Covid hadn’t intervened. 2 ENTER COVID, THE THREAT MULTIPLIER “Can I just read you this one
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, and stretches across every platform and media tool. That said, within this global network, a few individuals—because of their high profile pre-Covid, their social media skills, and their relentless hustle—have played an outsize role. And while they started with Covid, they are rapidly moving to all kinds of other
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avalanche. And that’s how I justified, a few months into this mess, starting to fight back. I briefly added “Not that Naomi” to my social media bio and, in February 2021, when she was making a Fox News tour warning that governments imposing Covid measures were “autocratic tyrants,” I tweeted: “This
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me, telling Wolf, “I have relegated Naomi Klein to the position of being: ‘The Other Naomi’!” It’s a vertiginous thing to be harangued on social media about your alleged misunderstanding of your own ideas—while being told that another Naomi is a better version of you than you are. The dark
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of us during Covid, I was online much more than usual, because, well, where else was I going to be? Previously, I had kept my social media use under pretty tight control. But in the isolation of Covid, and my isolated life on the rock, that all fell away
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. Social media was one thing I didn’t have to give up in the name of that damn virus, so, I reasoned, why should I? The more
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are substantive differences, reflecting the different belief systems of two separate people. But I have come to accept that, for plenty of folks glancing at social media during the boring bits of Netflix shows, we’re just a blur of opinionated Naomis saying stuff about states of emergencies and Bill Gates. On
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us suspect that we, too, have become machine food. And, in a way, we have. As Richard Seymour writes in his blistering 2019 dissection of social media, The Twittering Machine, we think we are interacting—writing and singing and dancing and talking—with one another, “our friends, professional colleagues, celebrities, politicians, royals
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the data.” Zadie Smith saw all this coming more than a decade ago. Writing about the rise of Facebook, and by extension all the other social media platforms, she observed, “When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual
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of sincerity and world-weariness. We hone ironic, detached voices that aren’t too promotional but do the work of promoting nonetheless. We go on social media to juice our numbers, while complaining about how much we hate the “hell sites.” It’s a precarious line to walk, as I discovered early
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Amazon, which we were all sure would destroy the publishing industry but which I nonetheless checked obsessively, an early taste of the addictive power of social media’s credit systems of likes, views, and follows. It also became clear that a great many of us were dead wrong about the impossibility of
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certain extracurricular activities because it would “look good” to some amorphous audience down the road. Others recall stern parental lectures about the perils of incautious social media posts: everything you put online now, they were told, will be read by college admission officers and future employers, so be careful to curate and
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with a single bad take or post. All of this is on top of the omnipresent and very real possibility of having your email or social media accounts hacked, and discovering to your horror that someone who, for all intents and purposes, seems to be you is inundating your friends and colleagues
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so many doppelganger tales, doing a better job of being her than she ever did. This fantasy is fast becoming a reality. In late 2022, social media was inundated with iridescent, smoothed-out, slimmed-down versions of friends, family members, and online acquaintances who had succumbed to the “magic avatar” craze. They
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are troubled by where all of this doubling is leading. Nonetheless, almost all feel duty bound to participate in creating their own digital doubles on social media (as do I). One student shared that she had gotten off Instagram because the pressures to perform an idealized version of herself, and the inundations
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tear she went on about vaccine “shedding” and infertility. It must have been a miserable time. She was repeatedly suspended and locked out of her social media accounts for violating rules against medical misinformation. She was getting bombarded with abuse and mockery online (as I knew better than anyone but her). By
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, all of your medical history can be included. She claimed, in the “slavery forever” video, that “machine reading assesses what you’ve been saying on social media. So if you’ve been too conservative or too liberal … machine reading will let PayPal know, PayPal will switch off or dial up your interest
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on the many wrong facts she was sharing, as well as the true fact that her newfound celebrity on Fox was blowing up my own social media. What many of us who were cringe-following Wolf at the time missed was the extent to which her new messaging had struck a chord
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cell phones. They just don’t know what to do about cell phones (or smart speakers or search histories or shadow banning or email and social media metadata…). And neither, it seems, does anyone else, including those in power, who are patently unwilling to rein in what the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff
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.” She is tapping into these barely submerged fears, which are rooted not in fantasy, but reality. Vaccine passports aren’t a social credit system, but social media itself kind of is. Those QR codes on our phones aren’t putting our lives under constant surveillance, but as all those clever jokes suggest
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playing doctor. I could offer a kind of equation for leftists and liberals crossing over to the authoritarian right that goes something like: Narcissism(Grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public shaming = Right-wing meltdown. And there would be some truth to that bit of math. The more I learn about her
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to audiences,” Gore Vidal said back in 1981. Wolf took to audiences, in a way that would have been unimaginable to Vidal, whose heyday predated social media. Wolf grasped the magnitude of the shift to the attention economy earlier than most authors of her generation. She joined Facebook in 2008 and fully
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platforms. As Steven W. Thrasher writes in The Viral Underclass, Covid-19 marked “the first viral pandemic also to be experienced via viral stories on social media,” creating “a kind of squared virality.” This squared virality meant that if you put out the right kind of pandemic-themed content—flagged with the
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, more than on Twitter before she got booted.) Censored by YouTube? Get an account on Rumble. Shadow banned on Instagram? Try Parler. “Speak freely,” the company urges, on “the premier social media app guided by the First Amendment.” Did GoFundMe refuse to distribute the money you raised to support your favorite Freedom Convoy
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. He quickly folded the vaccine apps into a basket of issues he calls “Big Tech Warfare,” a category that includes not only familiar complaints about social media companies suspending the accounts of high-profile conservatives but also more obscure and even esoteric concerns. For instance, Bannon has a dedicated “transhumanism” correspondent whose
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describe how liberals treat his listeners. This is key, he says, to why he has been forced to build the Mirror World, with its mirror social media and mirror currency and mirror book publishing. Because his people were being “othered.” But no more. “Never again will they be able to other you
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in a world in which everyone was lying all the time. And from there we were all primed to dive headlong into the sea of social media non sequiturs, the scroll that scrambles the narrative structures of argument and story in favor of a never-ending thought confetti of “this” and “this
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deaths in just three years. The blame for the spike in misinformation falsely claiming that vaccines cause autism is usually linked with the rise of social media, and the fact that junk vaccine science circulated there unchecked for years. Telling parents that children are being permanently disabled by routine vaccinations is certainly
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a sensational message, one seemingly made for the attention economy. But as with misinformation related to Covid, social media only intensified tendencies that were already present. In my conversations with autism parents who have gone the vaccine-blaming route, I am always struck by
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enough to make it to the toilet. Or that content moderators in Manila must stare at beheadings and child rapes all day to keep our social media feeds “clean.” Or that all of our frenetic consumption and energy use fuels wildfires in the swanky suburbs of Los Angeles and Sonoma that are
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nothing. The police did not get involved, and it would seem that both the governor and the mayor were otherwise occupied. Undeterred, and with her social media feeds now on high alert, Wolf proceeded to Grand Central Station and pulled the exact same stunt in a waiting area with a vaccination requirement
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she proudly posted the videos on Gettr, the restaurant was, entirely predictably, inundated with racist abuse from her followers—by phone and email and over social media. Many took it upon themselves to make fake reservations (some under Donald Trump’s name) and deliberately drove down the restaurant’s ratings. “We’ve
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with far more heinous forms of ethnic and racial projection, forced to represent only their skin color to white eyes. They also log on to social media to find themselves blamed and credited for the words and actions of others. The Australian poet Omar Sakr regularly shares outrageous stories about TV bookers
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something we can do on our own, as individuals, with a charity donation or an equity and diversity training, or a performance of virtue on social media. Indeed, a central reason why so many of us cannot bear to look at the Shadow Lands is that we live in a culture that
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Left Melancholy,” boundary 2 26, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 26. “The (Safe for Work) Self”: Alice Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013), 163. “a wish defense”: Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
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), October 8, 2021; Andrew Guttman, “Dad Who Decried Antiracism Initiatives at Brearley Urges Parents to Join Fight,” New York Post, May 8, 2021; “Digital Hate: Social Media’s Role in Amplifying Dangerous Lies About LGBTQ+ People,” Center for Countering Digital Hate and Human Rights Campaign, August 10, 2022. “extinguish” behaviors: “Extinction in
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; as portal for change; profiteering from; race and class disparities and; relief programs during; religious people and; risk factors and; schools and; shock doctrine in; social media and; tech companies and; tests for the virus; Trump and; workers and Covid vaccines; adverse reactions to; Freedom Convoy and; mandates, passports, and apps; nanoparticles
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property Intercept, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Internal Family Systems International Criminal Court International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association International Monetary Fund internet; see also social media Internet for the People (Tarnoff) Internet Gaming Entertainment In the Presence of Absence (Darwish) Invasion of the Body Snatchers investigative journalism iPhone Iran Iraq Ireland
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Mau, Bruce Mazzei, Isa McCarthy, Jenny McGill University McKay, Adam McKibben, Bill meaning measles measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine Medem, Vladimir media; see also social media medical experimentation Medicare Meehan, Paul Meir, Golda Meloni, Giorgia Mengele, Josef Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare) meritocracy Merlan, Anna Metaverse Metzger, Deena Michigan Microsoft Miéville
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“slavery forever” video Slobodian, Quinn smallpox Smalls, Chris smart cities Smith, Adam Smith, Zadie Snowden, Edward social credit systems Social Democrats socialism; Jewish attraction to social media; avatars on; content moderators and; Covid and; digital doubles on; enclosure process and; Facebook; hacking of accounts on; influencers on; Instagram; Twitter, see Twitter; vaccine
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