Tag: social media

Jan. 6 Committee Experiment Found TikTok Went From Zero To Nazi in 75 Minutes

WHEN THE JAN. 6 committee wanted to test how easy it was for TikTok users to wander down a far-right rabbit hole, they tried an experiment. They created Alice, a fictional 41-year-old from Acton, Massachusetts, gave her a TikTok account, and tracked what the social media app showed her.

To their surprise, it only took 75 minutes of scrolling — with no interaction or cues about her interests — for the platform to serve Alice videos featuring Nazi content, following a detour through clips on the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp defamation suit, Donald Trump, and other right-wing culture war flashpoints. 

Staff described the exercise as “just one of the Committee’s experiments that further evidenced the power of TikTok’s recommendation algorithm in creating rabbit holes toward potentially harmful content.”

The experiment is detailed in a draft summary of investigative findings prepared by the committee’s social media team and obtained by Rolling Stone. The company mostly escaped notice in the public battles over the role of social media and moderation in combating extremism, including the kind that led to the Capitol attack. But the unpublished summary sheds new light on how the TikTok has grappled with the challenge of “how to moderate misleading content without attracting accusations of censorship,” in particular when “the mis- and disinformation benefitted the political right,” according to staffers.  

TikTok did not respond to a request for comment from Rolling Stone.

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New Twitter Files Reveal How Company Allowed Intelligence Agencies to Influence It

A series of tweets by investigative reporter Matt Taibbi has revealed how Twitter came under the influence of American intelligence agencies after concerns about foreign influence put the company under the spotlight.

Until August 2017, Twitter was not on many people’s radars with regard to the Trump–Russia foreign influence scandal. In September that year, Twitter informed the Senate that its cursory review led to the suspension of 22 possible Russian accounts as well as 179 accounts possibly linked to the initial set of accounts. Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.), who was the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee at the time, called Twitter’s report “frankly inadequate on every level.”

Facing growing anxiety over its public relations problems, Twitter started a “Russia Task Force” to investigate the issue.

“First round of RU investigation … 15 high-risk accounts, 3 of which have connections with Russia, although 2 are RT,” said an October 2017 Twitter memo shared by Taibbi. RT refers to the television network Russia Today, which is controlled by the state.

“Finished with investigation … 2,500 full manual account reviews, we think this is exhaustive … 32 suspicious accounts and only 17 of those are connected with Russia, only 2 of those have significant spend one of which is Russia Today … remaining <$10k in spend,” said a message from the same month.

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10 Scandals To Keep Your Eye On In 2023

The new year is upon us and with it a fresh start for more corruption. But 2023 also offers the opportunity to bring closure to some long-running scandals. Here are 10 to track in the upcoming year.

1. Government’s Puppeteering of Big Tech and Media

The ongoing release of the “Twitter Files” closed 2022 with a new scandal, as the internal communications of the tech giant exposed extensive coordination between the government and Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other big players controlling the flow of information. While conservatives have known — and complained — for years of Big Tech’s censorship and shadowbanning, by purchasing Twitter and giving independent journalists access to corporate emails, Elon Musk provided indisputable confirmation that Twitter both censored and blacklisted conservatives.

The censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the silencing of scientific criticism of the government’s heavy-handed Covid regime, both at the prompting of federal agents, proved the most appalling. 

As Musk continues to provide access to internal communications, a watchful eye is warranted in 2023.

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Twitter Files Reveal Politicians, Officials Evading the Constitution’s Restrictions

In recent years, social media firms, financial institutions, and hosting platforms have denied services to disfavored customers, sometimes for political reasons. The response from many quarters (myself included) has been that people have free association rights and can generally do business as they please.

But what if these outfits are private-ish, enacting policy on behalf of politicians to spare them pushback or allow for end-runs around constitutional protections? They do so out of ideological agreement, fear of government retaliation, or a mix of both. That messy scenario is what the Twitter Files reveal of the relationship between the social media giant and federal officials. It’s a glimpse of a bigger problem.

“The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about COVID-19 and the pandemic,” wrote David Zweig of The Free Press, who joined Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Free Press founder Bari Weiss in revealing Twitter’s collaboration with the state at the request of new owner Elon Musk. “Internal emails that I viewed at Twitter showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s content according to their wishes.”

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security also leaned on the platform to suppress what officials considered election-related “misinformation.” The files revealed internal disputes over what crossed the line, with decisions based on judgment calls. The employment of former feds and what The Dispatch‘s David French terms “an ideological monoculture” ensured that such decisions generally deferred to authority, especially after the Biden administration took office.

But Twitter isn’t a special case. In 2021, President Joe Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” by allowing discussion of government-disfavored ideas about COVID-19 response. “White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki singled out a dozen specific anti-vaccine Facebook accounts and called on the platform to ban them,” Reason‘s Robby Soave noted at the time.

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Western Governments Keep Assigning Themselves The Authority To Regulate Online Speech

Depending on what political echo chamber you’ve been viewing it from, the ongoing release of information about the inner workings of pre-Musk Twitter known as “the Twitter Files” might look like the bombshell news story of the century, or it might look like a complete nothingburger whose importance is being wildly exaggerated by the far right.

From where I’m sitting, the Twitter Files look like entirely newsworthy revelations which add new detail to information that had already been spilling out about the way government agencies have been inserting themselves into Silicon Valley’s processes of regulating online speech. Right wing punditry has of course been exaggerating the significance of the releases and spinning them in all kinds of disingenuous ways, and Musk himself plainly has a partisan agenda in releasing the information in the way that he has been, but it’s not actually difficult to separate that from the value of the information being released.

Many liberals and leftists have struggled to grasp this (in my view simple and obvious) distinction, but we’re now seeing articles coming out in publications like The Guardian and Jacobin explaining to their respective audiences that it should actually concern anyone who opposes government tyranny to see secretive agencies taking it upon themselves to control the way people talk to each other on the internet.

“Make no mistake: while some criticisms of the project coming from left of center certainly have merit, that doesn’t mean the disclosures aren’t important, or that the accuracy of the information contained in the files is somehow undermined by the political slant of some of those reporting on it,” writes Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic. “The Twitter Files give us an unprecedented peek behind the curtain at the workings of Twitter’s opaque censorship regime, and expose in greater detail the secret and ongoing merger of social media companies and the US national security state.”

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‘Mind Dominance’: The CCP’s Disinformation War on US Social Media

Clusters of new social media profiles emerge and interact with long-dormant accounts, seemingly exchanging viewpoints from across the American political spectrum.

Some sport American flags for profile pictures; others have images of beautiful women. Almost all are anonymous, though some impersonate real people.

In tweets and posts and messages they spread their views. Some stridently defend a woman’s right to have an abortion, others the right to life. Some defend the second amendment, others vehemently champion Black Lives Matter. Some claim that the United States is descending into a leftist tyranny. Still more say it’s headed toward fascism.

Above all, they post memes disparaging the United States’ political parties and governmental institutions. Here one finds a meme of President Joe Biden with a caption excoriating the Build Back Better slogan. Here one finds a meme of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) insinuating that the lawmaker has financial ties with Putin’s Russia.

It would be easy to conclude that these clusters of accounts are a perfect representation of the political polarization that has seized the United States in recent years. But it would be wrong.

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Courts Won’t Stop The Feds From Deputizing Big Tech—The People Must

The release of internal communications in the ongoing series of “Twitter Files” reveals a government bent on propaganda and censorship—and a Big Tech industry willing to play along. With each new thread detailing the internal workings and cozy relationship between the Twitter team and our government, the political right screams louder of First Amendment violations.

The First Amendment cannot be the whole answer to the problem, however, and, in fact, may not have even been transgressed. Americans are right to be outraged, but the solution doesn’t rest in constitutional claims. The deepest solution is in a resurgence in the values of free speech and a free press.

“Twitter, The FBI Subsidiary” was the spot-on title independent journalist Matt Taibbi crafted for the thread he published two weeks ago detailing the hand-in-glove relationship between the FBI and Twitter. But as Taibbi’s Christmas Eve sequel, “Twitter And ‘Other Government Agencies,’” revealed, it wasn’t just the FBI using Twitter as a corporate underling, nor is it just Twitter the government appropriates for this purpose.

Rather, as Taibbi reported, the “Twitter Files” “show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.” Beyond Twitter, “Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others,” as well as “industry players also held regular meetings” with the government, Taibbi revealed.

The internal documents released by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, also exposed the U.S. government’s use of Twitter, and by extension other social media giants, “to carry out a covert online propaganda and influence campaign” with the goal of shaping “public opinion in countries including Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Kuwait.”

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Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok’s Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

Accusations of Chinese tyranny are often based on demands from Beijing that Google and Facebook comply with their censorship orders as a condition for remaining in China. Reports over the years suggested that these firms typically comply: Google was building a censored search engine suited to Chinese demands; The New York Times has claimed Facebook developed a censorship app as its entrance requirement to the Chinese market, and Vox accused Apple of succumbing to Chinese censorship demands by banning an app from its store that had been used by protesters in Hong Kong demanding liberation from control by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

But now the tables appeared to be turning when it comes to U.S. censorship demands and TikTok. Threats to ban or severely limit the Chinese-owned-and-controlled platform from the U.S. have been hovering over TikTok’s head through both the Trump and Biden years. The most common justification offered for the threat is that TikTok’s presence in the U.S. empowers China to propagandize Americans, a concern that escalated along with the platform’s massive explosion among Americans. Since early 2021, TikTok has been the most-downloaded app both worldwide and in the U.S. In August, Pew Research conducted a “survey of American teenagers ages 13 to 17” and found that “TikTok has rocketed in popularity since its North American debut several years ago and now is a top social media platform for teens among the platforms covered in this survey.”

Concerns over China’s ability to manipulate U.S. public opinion were based on claims that China was banning content on TikTok that was contrary to Beijing’s interests. Western media outlets were specifically alleging that the Chinese government itself was censoring TikTok to ban any content that the CCP regarded as threatening to its national security and internal order. “TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social network, instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong,” warned The Guardian in late 2019.

Rather than ban TikTok from the U.S., the U.S. Security State is now doing exactly that which China does to U.S. tech companies: namely, requiring that, as a condition to maintaining access to the American market, TikTok must now censor content that undermines what these agencies view as American national security interests. TikTok, desperate not to lose access to hundreds of millions of Americans, has been making a series of significant concessions to appease the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, the agencies most opposed to deals to allow TikTok to stay in the U.S.

Among those concessions is that TikTok is now outsourcing what the U.S. Government calls “content moderation” — a pleasant-sounding euphemism for political censorship — to groups controlled by the U.S. Government:

TikTok has already unveiled several measures aimed at appeasing the U.S. government, including an agreement for Oracle Corp to store the data of the app’s users in the United States and a United States Data Security (USDS) division to oversee data protection and content moderation decisions. It has spent $1.5 billion on hiring and reorganization costs to build up that unit, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Perhaps one might view as reasonable U.S. concerns that China can weaponize TikTok to propagandize Americans and destabilize the U.S. through its power to censor the platform. Note, however, that this is precisely the same concern that countries like China, Iran and Russia all invoke to justify censorship compliance as a condition for U.S. internet companies to remain active in their country. Those countries fear that American tech companies — whose close partnership with U.S. security agencies has long been well-documented — will be used to propagandize and destabilize their populations and countries exactly the way that the U.S. Security State is apparently concerned that China can do to the U.S. via TikTok.

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Mysterious Government Agencies Participated in Suppressing Twitter Content: Twitter Files

Mysterious government agencies were involved in censoring content along with Twitter Inc. on the social media platform, journalist Matt Taibbi said in newly-released Twitter Files.

The files—which mostly were internal communications among Twitter executives and employees—show that unspecified agencies worked with Twitter before Elon Musk bought the company.

The agencies were usually referred to as “Other Government Agencies,” or OGA, inside Twitter.

In one email from June 29, 2020, FBI San Francisco Field Office official Elvis Chan asked Twitter executives if he could invite an “OGA” to attend an upcoming event.

“I wanted to follow up to see if I could forward this invitation to an OGA?” he wrote.

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The Big List of former federal agents now working for Big Tech

For those who think Big Tech has been a little more Big Brotherish lately, there’s a reason.

The concern has been raised because Big Tech companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook have in recent years openly censored messaging that conflicts with Democrat ideology.

They even shut down the channel for the voice of a sitting president of the United States, Donald Trump, because his opinion about the 2020 election disagreed with theirs.

Of course, the corporations called the speech they censored “misinformation,” but the American public now understands that accusation itself was misinformation.

But the real reason Silicon Valley sometimes is sounding like the FBI headquarters is that Big Tech companies are literally “riddled” with former CIA agents, former FBI staffers, and more.

“So many ex-FBI work at Twitter they have Slack channel and Google is rife with ex-CIA,” a new report says.

The Daily Mail has assembled a list of those who left spy operations for the government and now are in Big Tech, and it runs on for pages. And pages.

The revelation about the large number of former FBI, CIA, NSC and State Department operatives now working for Big Tech “comes amid fears the FBI operated control over Twitter censorship and the Hunter Biden laptop story,” the report said.

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