by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:
My my…..
It seems that Twitter was knowingly used by the Pentagon in its influence operations — perhaps to propagandize Americans.
This would not be all that big of a deal except that the company has repeatedly claimed that it goes after “inauthentic” activity by governments, and does not specifically exclude ours. That is, such covert influencing operations are not only against the rules Twitter has testified before Congress that it proactively seeks and shuts down such attempts.
They lied.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Not only did they permit it they went further, it is alleged, and actively enabled the activity, including by “whitelisting” requested accounts so they would not be flagged by Twitter’s automated (and presumably, human) intervention and pattern-analysis activities which would could otherwise detect and shut down said accounts. These accounts were explicitly set up for propaganda purposes and were effectively given license by Twitter to do so.
(Incidentally detecting and blocking this on an automated basis is easy if you put the effort into it; said “bots” try to register over on this system in size and unless something gets flagged the entire process is automated and I never see a new user registration until and unless they pipe up and post something. My logs are full of the “haha, didn’t work robot” notices and in fact that’s pretty-much all of the exceptions that get logged. When was the last time you saw a bot account manage to spam one of my Tickers? It’s been a hell of a long time, hasn’t it?)
Further, while there was apparently some internal discussion about whether the firm was misled by the DOD high-level executives knew about it all the way through Trump’s time in office and did nothing about it.
Now historically-speaking there is nothing unusual about propaganda in the context of foreign engagements. We do it and so does everyone else. Everyone knows it too. The issue here is that Twitter knowingly lied before Congress that it was actively involved in seeking out and shutting down such operations when the exact opposite was true.
But think about this one for a second: If you ran a company that had a service available in other nations and got caught allowing your government (and in fact got paid by it!) to use said service as a propaganda tool in foreign lands aimed at interfering in said nation’s domestic affairs do you think those foreign governments would allow you to continue to operate there?
Or would you expect they might blackball your firm, seize anything they can get their hands on in their nation and charge your firm and its employees with sedition — or worse?
Another revelation is that the FBI was essentially given a back door into Twitter’s “content police” and repeatedly used it to “request” that the firm ban accounts or remove content, which it then did.
MCSNet used to get such “requests” once in a while but the simple answer only had to be given once: Come back with a subpoena and you get whatever you want and has been authorized through appropriate process. Until then I have work to do.
Twitter, on the other hand, effectively became an extra-judicial arm of the FBI, shutting down anything and anyone they didn’t like even though there was no evidence that a violation of law had occurred. We know this because there was no subpoena or indictment and thus the so-called “requests” were never vetted through any sort of due process. There were also a large number of former FBI and DOJ employees on Twitter’s staff in relatively-senior positions which I’m sure had led to nothing but good results in properly vetting and pushing back against inappropriate requests.
Oh wait, there was no pushback at all, was there? Well now…
Is this Twitter-specific? I doubt it. Indeed, I’m willing to bet that Facebook and Google are both imbued with exactly the same sort of nonsense, but we just haven’t proved it yet. That Schiff is threatening Facebook with a “don’t you dare drop your censorship!” line of bullshit is all the evidence I need to know that they’ve been doing it too.
Now about those foreign governments and what they might do to all the other tech firms and their executives (and, incidentally, they deserve what they get if it happens too.)
After all it took Musk buying Twitter and taking it private for that proof to show up. This raises another question because a firm’s executives and board of directors is not beholden to the FBI or Pentagon; it has fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to uphold the rule of law in the operation of the firm which includes demanding due process of law which that American has a right to expect whether explicitly called out in the terms of service or not, never mind the extreme level of business and reputational risk involved in being used as a proxy to tamper in other nations’ domestic affairs. Indeed to fail to not stop that crap could reasonably be considered a liability-generating event for the firm — one that, being an intentional act would likely render their commercial insurance void — including D&O insurance. No thank you, but obviously not of concern to a bunch of folks when history says nobody ever goes to jail or gets personally nailed at a large public company and post Arthur Anderson not going after them has become public policy at the DOJ.
Why not break the law when you know you won’t be prosecuted in advance?
Ok, given all we’ve learned let’s say for the sake of argument Musk asks me to run Twitter as the CEO.
The first thing I would do is step back a bit with the lens and then refocus on the broader picture: What is Twitter?
It was formed as an agnostic platform upon which millions of divergent views may be expressed, built upon and commented against.
That’s it.
Therefore expansion of the methods and means of such expression is part and parcel of the development process — one that Twitter has ignored since it was formed. That gets fixed immediately with a group dedicated to standing up said expansion.
