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Five Questions Explain Why the H1-B Visa Needs Reformed
Five questions to explain why the H1-B visa needs to be reformed.
1) What is an H1-B visa?
Visas for foreigners to travel temporarily to the U.S. are designated by letters and numbers. B-1 is a business visa, B-2 is for tourists. H1-A allows foreign nurses to work in the U.S. while H1-B is for highly skilled workers — think AI scientists, programmers, and engineers — to work in the U.S. Unlike most nonimmigrant visas, H1-B is considered a visa with duel intent, meaning it is understood most holders will go on to apply for green cards, permanent residence in the U.S., and never return home to their foreign residence.
Created in 1990, the H-1B is an employer-sponsored visa that authorizes foreigners to work in the U.S. for up to six years. Tech companies and IT consultancies are the top recipients. Every year, a government lottery awards 65,000 slots to applicants with an undergraduate degree and another 20,000 to those with advanced degrees (universities and nonprofits are exempt from these caps.) The private-sector allocation is typically filled within days, hence a lottery to chose finalists for the visa. More on this in a moment.
2) Who are the H1-Bs in the U.S.?
The majority of H1-Bs work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, with computer-related occupations accounting for 65 percent. This was followed by about 10 percent distributed among architecture, engineering, and surveying. Amazon was the top employer of H-1Bs in 2024, hiring more than 13,000. Other top employers were Google (4th), Meta (6th), Microsoft (7th), Apple (8th), and IBM (10th.) Tesla ranked 22nd. The rest of the top employers are Indian staffing companies (see below.) All successful H1-Bs came through the lottery system.
3) Does the Lottery Assure the U.S. of Getting the Best and Brightest from Abroad?
Since 2004, the number of new H-1B visas issued has been capped at 85,000 per year, 20,000 of which are reserved for foreign students with master’s degrees or higher from American universities (the cap does not apply to universities, think tanks, and other non-profit groups, so more are issued.) These limited slots are chased by some 386,000 approved H-1B applications in fiscal year 2023, all thrown into that lottery.
So that winnows out the best candidates? Nope, sometimes just the opposite. Or maybe better to say any of the best and brightest are chosen by dumb luck and have just as much chance as the dull and dim. Because so many more people want an H1-B visa than there are visas available, a lottery is held. The lottery does not look at the quality or credentials of the applicant; he’s just thrown into the hopper to try his luck. All that is needed is the minimum qualification to enter, so many excellent candidates to fill jobs badly needed in the U.S. are never even considered.
Worse yet, the lottery is dominated by IT staffing firms which routinely flood it with entries, often for more visas than they need, crowding out companies that play by the rules and submit for specific, individual workers. Many of the world’s smartest engineers are shut out from the most lucrative, in-demand jobs, and shortages at the top end persist. It works like this: American Company A needs a programmer. Rather than try to recruit abroad and then navigate the cumbersome U.S. immigration system alone, they contract with an IT staffing firm, usually located in India (there are more than a million Indians in the U.S. on H-1 B visas, 72 percent of the whole; five of the top ten H1-B firms are Indian), for such a person, any person who fits the general bill. The IT staffing firm then recruits say 100 such programmers and dumps them all in the lottery hoping one will win. That’s your man!
The paperwork is sometimes tidied up to change the employer from the staffing firm to American Company A. In some cases even the lottery winner can be substituted for a preferred candidate. It makes it near-impossible for a specific individual to make it through the process. The lottery — by design — doesn’t reward top talent. It rewards luck and gaming the system. So it is not surprising 85 percent of H-1B petitions are awarded to employers paying well below the median wage, as determined by occupation and location. The floor for the H-1B visa salary is only $60,000, a number that has not be raised since, well, since when 60k was a decent salary in the IT industry. Even the the median compensation was only $118,000 fiscal year 2023.
4) Do H1-B Workers Compete with Americans for Jobs?
The law says H1-B workers are supposed to be paid the prevailing wage for their job, based on the Department of Labor statistics. In reality, the Economic Policy Institute found that 60 percent of H-1B positions were assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the occupation. A Government Accounting Office report found that between June 1, 2009, and July 30, 2010, 83 percent of H-1B jobs were certified at Level 1 (Entry-level.) This does not mean the workers themselves were entry-level, only that to save money some highly-skilled workers were down-labeled to make them cheaper to hire. Companies get low-cost employees, and the worker himself considers the eventual Green Card enough a part of his compensation that he tolerates the lower wage. The H1-B workers can’t complain too much; their visa is for a specific company and they are like indentured servants, unable to freely change jobs and thus made to take what they are given. Too bad about the displaced American workers priced out of the market.
5) What Can Be Done to Fix This?
Elon Musk and other tech barons argue the H-1B visa program is critical to ensuring American companies can find highly skilled labor that may not be easily available in the U.S. labor force. Trump himself has spoken highly of the program, ensuring its continued viability.
“Ultimately, if you’re going to have a skilled worker program for ‘skilled’ workers, you don’t award these visas via a lottery,” said Eric Ruark, the director of research at NumbersUSA, an organization that advocates for tighter immigration controls. “Obviously, that’s not how you find the best and the brightest.” To make the program better, dump the H1-B visa lottery in favor of a merit-based program for skilled workers that assigns points for various criteria, including education and work experience, similar to how Canada and other Western nations allocate their “Green Cards.” Another possible approach, considered during Trump 1.0, would be to prioritize allocation of visas by wages. One way or another replace luck with skill to the benefit of the United States.
It is also time to raise the salary floor for H1-B workers to make Americans more competitive for their jobs. The Department of Labor needs to update salary schedules more frequently, with an eye toward what real wages in the IT world are. And enforcement of H1-B regulations must eliminate more highly-skilled workers being used to fill entry-level jobs to get around wage caps. There should be no competition between American workers and H1-Bs.
Raise the overall number of H1-B visas available. Exempt “critical” industries such as defense oriented companies from the numerical cap. To get more of the world’s best, the U.S. needs to open more doors to them.
Continue to streamline the H1-B application process. The January 17 H-1B visa reforms are a good start but still not enough.
What should not be done is to eliminate the H1-B visa. The program as it stands today is necessary but not sufficient, and ripe for overhaul as part of the greater scrutiny Trump seeks to apply to all immigration to the United States.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump May Succeed Where Others Failed in Personnel Cutting
Disclaimer: Then-Vice President Al Gore awarded my State Department team in Seoul in the mid-90’s a Hammer Award for helping “reinvent government.” Gore was in charge of the Clinton-era plan to create a government that costs less and works better. The plan mostly depended on us run-of-the-mill employees to come up with cost saving hacks and strategies within our own offices.
The award, a mounted gold-painted hammer, was supposed to remind us of the expensive, wasteful procurements by the military, in this case an ashtray that would break into no more than three pieces when hit by a hammer. It’s true! So while as a Gore team award-winner I might seem a bit biased toward what Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing, the truth is actually the opposite. And that’s because one strategy failed while the other still has a decent chance of succeeding.
Trump is far from the first president to want to reform the Federal government. Ronald Reagan in 1982 launched a group led by 150 private sector CEOs to review federal agencies and make recommendations to reduce waste. “Be bold. We want your team to work like tireless bloodhounds. Don’t leave any stone unturned in your search to root out inefficiency,” the president told commission members. Officially called the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control in the Federal Government, it was better known as the Grace Commission after its chair, Peter Grace. Grace was well-known at the time for a speech where he said food stamps were basically a subsidy for Puerto Ricans.
In due time, the Grace Commission issued a report suggesting over 2,500 recommendations to increase government efficiency. Most of them required Congressional action and so in the end not much was done.
As mentioned, led by former Vice President Al Gore, the National Performance Review had similar aims as the Grace Commission, but went about achieving them in a different way. Rather than bringing on private sector outsiders like Reagan, the Clinton administration relied on federal employees. “It is career bureaucrats who know, better than anyone else, what works and what doesn’t,” said a Gore aide. “A successful reform effort cannot take place without their wisdom and without their participation.”
Part of that wisdom was my team out in Seoul. We were then the busiest visa issuing embassy in the world, and were literally struggling for air amid Korean visa applications for travelers to the United States. Our rewarded hammer wisdom was to couple a hiring blitz with a range of kinda-makes-sense administrative changes to our workflow. Because we were processing close to a million visas a year, even small adjustments could have a big impact (a small thing times one million is a big number.) It made it all seem dramatic, and we wrote it up nicely, hence the award from Gore. We hung it on the wall near the restrooms where everyone could see it daily.
Gore’s program got a little help, I mean, besides from my team. Between January 1993 and September 2000, the federal workforce shrunk by 426,200, making it the smallest one since the administration of Dwight Eisenhower. The reduction was brought about through a large-scale buyout program and about 25,000 layoffs. Still, overall only $136 billion was saved and the workforce grew back again under subsequent administrations. A 2013 Government Executive article criticized how the shrinkage was achieved. “The reduction didn’t happen in a way that matched workforce needs because they used a strategy for downsizing to hit a target. The effort got in the way of the ‘making government work better’ piece. Many with special skills left, and people who stayed might have been those we’d have wanted to leave.”
Here’s where with lessons learned Trump may have a chance to succeed where Reagan and Clinton did not.
— No commissions or blue ribbon panels. One of Reagan’s mistakes was to create a commission with the power to peer into all aspects of government without the power to do anything about the problems they uncovered. A report was produced (purposeful use of the passive tense there) and dumped onto Congress’ lap where it slowly faded from memory. Though the wire diagram is a bit fuzzy here in 2025, Elon Musk clearly has more power in his hands than simply to produce a report. His ability to act, whether by ordering in Trump’s name actual de facto closures of agencies like USAID, or by offering government-wide buyouts ahead of a RIF, is significant. That alone may make DOGE more successful than its predecessors.
— Understanding people are the problem, unlike Gore. Gore made the mistake of handing over uncovering waste to the very people perpetuating it, trusting them to hack themselves into efficiency. Musk, instead of encouraging workers to flush out waste, assumes those employees are actually the drivers of it. The hammer this time is a pink slip. Gore did produce some nice optics and had a publicity-forward edge to it all, but resulted in little actual money-saving change or added efficiency. But contrast the media response to Gore’s approach versus Musk’s on-purpose bully-in-a-china shop tactics as an indicator to how long he’ll get away with what he is doing.
— But without some guidance as to who to cut, Musk risks the same problem Reagan and Gore had, throwing out the good, needed employees with the bad ones when the only criteria is headcount. You can bet that nearly every employee inside government is considering how to bail out right now. The problem is that given lucrative government retirement and pension plans, anyone close to “real” retirement is going to try and tough it out. These may not be the best employees, or maybe they are, but they’ll be the ones to cling to their jobs for another six months or a year or whatever. Statistically they are more likely to have a coronary at their desk then to leave without a fight.
The second group of government employees who will hang on like a dog with a turkey leg in its mouth are the worst of the worst, those employees who have no transferable skills into the private sector. They have nowhere to go and nothing to lose and unless identified and micro-targeted by RIFs may be who is left to turn out the lights in many government offices a year or two from now, the true Deep State, dug in even deeper.
Musk needs guidelines in his efforts beyond “move fast and break things” and creating some commission a la Reagan which will spend a year creating a report of little value. With that said, so far so good. Unlike Gore, who also just used crude headcount goals, Musk will need to engage departmental leadership for those agencies he hopes to redeem and make informed choices over which employees to RIF and/or which sub-departments to close. Of course none of that matters if your goal is to delete an entire agency, as with USAID or Education. The wood chipper has its uses, too.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Tough Times at Foggy Bottom
The DOGE tsunami is about to strike the U.S. Department of State, as well as other agencies. Let’s see what that means.
The day the music died was January 28, when nearly everyone at State, along with over two million other federal civilian employees, received an email referring to “A Fork in the Road.” The email offered qualifying diplomats and civil servants a choice ahead of planned Reductions in Force (RIFs, layoffs): resign now under a special program, don’t come to work for a few months while being paid, and then in September become eligible for whatever retirement benefits you would otherwise be eligible for, if any. State offers its diplomats a full retirement with pension after age 50 and 20 years of service, similar to the military, and after 30 years for civil servants, all with exceptions of course.
Despite the general sense the buyout was some sort of trick (workers questioned what legal authority allowed State and other federal agencies to pay people who technically resigned, then bring them back into the system to retire), across the government some 77,000 people signed up for the deal before it was brought to a pause by court action. For those with a long way toward formal retirement, it seemed like good enough; ahead of being RIFed, they’d pocket some seven months’ salary on top of whatever severance package might await them when actually let go. The Fork program, as it was commonly now called (alongside the new expression “to get forked”), acquired a formal name, “deferred resignation,” and the paid time off without working became “administrative leave.” An involuntary retirement is called the Orwellian “Discontinued Service Retirement.”
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and others sued to block the “deferred resignation” program, arguing that its chaotic rollout and shifting legal justifications constituted violations of the Administrative Procedure Act’s protections against “arbitrary and capricious” decision-making, and the promise to pay employees past the March 14 possible government shutdown deadline could constitute an Anti-Deficiency Act violation.
On February 12 the federal judge who had temporarily blocked the plan reversed course, ending the temporary restraining order upon concluding he lacked jurisdiction in the case. The deferred resignations would be allowed to go forward (though the sign up deadline has now passed) reducing head count at State and other federal agencies if everything went as planned. In his decision, U.S. District Judge George O’Toole wrote the unions’ challenges are of the type Congress “intended for review within the statutory scheme,” referring to the need to file administrative appeals before going to court. There were doubts the Trump administration would or legally could follow through as stated. Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, called the plan “an unfunded IOU from Elon Musk.”
Then things started to get really interesting at State.
Trump issued an Executive Order (EO) February 12, stating inter alia “The Secretary [of State] shall, consistent with applicable law, implement reforms in recruiting, performance, evaluation, and retention standards, and the programs of the Foreign Service Institute, to ensure a workforce that is committed to faithful implementation of the President’s foreign policy… In implementing the reforms identified in this section, the Secretary shall, consistent with applicable law, revise or replace the Foreign Affairs Manual and direct subordinate agencies to remove, amend, or replace any handbooks, procedures, or guidance… Failure to faithfully implement the President’s policy is grounds for professional discipline, including separation.”
Many at State read this as implementation of a “loyalty test” for continued employment. The full scope of the EO will depend on the actual steps taken after its signing, especially the admonition to revise or replace the Foreign Affairs Manual, the set of rules State functions under administratively and policy-wise. It could pave the way for a massive restructuring of State, consolidating power under political appointees and away from diplomatic staff.
Then things got really interesting.
Nearly concurrent with the February 12 EO, Foggy Bottom HQ sent out a message to all embassies and consulates warning outposts around the world to start planning for staff reductions, according to ABC News. Senior embassy officials were asked to provide comprehensive lists of all employees and their employment status as part of the process, sources said, explaining the request includes tenured, untenured, and temporary duty assignments. Embassies will be required to cut both American staff and employees hired locally, sources added. The edicts followed a decision by Secretary of State Rubio to not extend contracts for civilian personal services contractors (PSC) who provide housekeeping and maintenance at embassies. But PSCs also supplement diplomatic security; roughly half of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security’s contractors fall under the new directive. Contracts in the process of being signed are to be halted and any job postings made after the inauguration of Donald Trump are to be rescinded. Only State’s domestic passport PSC operations staff are exempted (a smart move in that it limits direct public impact from an otherwise nearly totally foreign-facing organization.)
Trump wasn’t finished. In another EO, he declared “Agency Heads shall promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force (RIFs), consistent with applicable law, and to separate from Federal service temporary employees and reemployed annuitants working in areas that will likely be subject to the RIFs. All offices that perform functions not mandated by statute or other law shall be prioritized in the RIFs, including all agency diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; all agency initiatives, components, or operations that my Administration suspends or closes; and all components and employees performing functions not mandated by statute or other law who are not typically designated as essential during a lapse in appropriations as provided in the Agency Contingency Plans on the Office of Management and Budget website. This subsection shall not apply to functions related to public safety, immigration enforcement, or law enforcement.” The uniformed military and postal service employees are also exempt.
That means State, along with other agencies, is going to have to soon start firing people.
The EO led directly to State’s diplomatic union issuing an urgent message to its members explaining “Agencies have 30 days to submit reorganization plans to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The implementation of these plans will include RIFs. The executive order does not specify when RIFs will begin… Section 611 of the Foreign Service Act allows for RIFs. This section also requires the creation of rules for letting go of career and career candidate members under Chapter 3 of the Act. The regulations note that the retention hierarchy in the event of a RIF should be based on the following: organizational changes; employee knowledge, skills, or competencies; tenure of employment; employee performance, and military preference.”
Regulations allow for 120 days notice to the RIFed employee though note under some special circumstances the notice need be only 30 days. They go on to say while an employee may file a grievance against the RIF, the grievance will not delay separation and is limited only to cases of reprisal, interference in the conduct of the member’s official duties or similarly inappropriate use of RIF authority. The current understanding is that RIFed employees, if otherwise eligible, can receive their retirement pensions. Ineligible RIFed employees will likely lose their healthcare and life insurance as best as things are understood. But this is far from over and no one knows how it will end.
“We do need to delete entire agencies, as opposed to leave part of them behind. Just leave part of them behind. It’s easy. It’s kind of like leaving a weed,” Elon Musk said. “If you don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.”
Everything is in flux at present and no one should make any decisions based on this or any other article. But what is clear is that this time Trump means business. Unlike the small-scale RIF which took place at State during the Clinton administration, this time it’s for real, a seemingly determined effort to downsize the State Department both at home and abroad while at the same time likely increasing the authority of political appointees. It is both a paradigm shift and a power shift away from a more-or-less independent State Department (and other agencies) toward a concentration of power deeper inside the Executive Branch.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Showdown in DOGE City
The leaders of President-elect Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have been meeting with Republican lawmakers recently. None of those involved shared details from their meetings, which was by design to allow for brainstorming. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) did say “Government is too big. It does too many things, and it does almost nothing well,” adding Musk and Ramaswamy would help usher in change. But how will Elon and Vivek actually seek change? What are their tools to bring to bear?
In an op-ed laying out their strategy, the duo said they would link administrative reductions, regulatory rescissions, and cost savings.
Cutting back on the sheer numbers of government employees is a fine starting point for Elon and Vivek. Using the controversial Schedule F, they hope to do away with the unofficial lifetime employment most Civil Servants enjoy. Civil service rules make firing for cause extremely difficult, and grind broader layoffs to a crawl if not a full stop. If Schedule F could be implemented early in Trump 2.0 (the plan was started in Trump 1.0 but failed to get any traction) it would be a decisive tool in clearing out civil service deadwood. They will not go easily, and the terms are tough; Vivek has vowed to cut 75 percent of the federal workforce. “This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people,” Elon added.
Another strategy for lowering government headcount is attrition. Trump could impose a government-wide hiring freeze, as he did when he took office in 2017, though many feel this may be too blunt an instrument. Musk and Ramaswamy suggest the Trump administration lean instead on separation incentives to get federal workers to retire early or accept buyouts. Elon and Vivek also plan to relocate some agencies out of D.C. and to offer generous severance packages to drive workers into retiring instead of moving.
An attrition move which has widespread Republican support in Congress is to end or curtail telework, back to at least pre-Covid levels. Ramaswamy predicted requiring more federal workers to go into their offices more frequently would cause many of them to quit. “If you require most of those federal bureaucrats to just say, like normal working Americans, you come to work five days a week, a lot of them won’t want to do that,” Ramaswamy said. “If you have many voluntary reductions in force of the workforce in the federal government along the way, great. That’s a good side effect of those policies as well.” How many Feds telework is itself the subject of much discussion; Speaker Johnson puts the figure at 99 percent of regular office workers, while the Office of Management and Budget claims 80 percent of the federal work hours are currently spent in-person and more than half of federal employees do not telework at all.
As for regulatory rescissions, the federal bureaucracy generates thousands of regulations and rules each year, another target for Elon and Vivek. Rep. Aaron Bean (R-FL) who will co-chair the House DOGE Caucus, quoted Musk as suggesting the United States is “no longer a democracy, it’s a bureaucracy” and his commission would work to ensure Congress, not “unelected bureaucrats,” dictate regulation. Changing things will not be easy. Agencies generally must go through notice-and-comment rulemaking to amend or revoke rules, though Musk and Ramaswamy suggest Trump may be able to revoke some rules unilaterally via executive order. Musk and Ramaswamy also believe Trump could direct agencies not to enforce some cumbersome regulations or those he believes are unlawful in light of recent Supreme Court precedent. The duo says “we will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.” “He might get away with it,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Congress’ power of the purse will turn into an advisory opinion.”
One obstacle the duo cannot overcome is the math of the federal budget. Roughly 60 percent of the budget is mandatory spending — things like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Trump promised to protect those programs. Another 10 percent of the budget is spent on paying interest on the national debt. That leaves around 30 percent of the budget “discretionary,” though roughly half of that goes to defense spending, which Trump also vowed not to cut. That remaining 15 percent of the budget, non-defense discretionary spending, is already at its lowest level ever as a percentage of GDP.
That said, Musk and Ramaswamy identified a number of potential reductions. These include several specific appropriations or federal grants they consider to be wasteful, such as for NGOs, DEI training, PBS, NPR, Planned Parenthood, and $1.5 billion in grants to international organizations. Musk previously advocated removing subsidies from all industries. Ramaswamy said DOGE will closely review CHIPS Act contracts, especially those the Biden administration accelerated.
More generally, law firm Gibson Dunn notes Musk and Ramaswamy have said Trump may decline to spend appropriations for which Congress’s authorizations have expired (called impoundment, confounded by the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.) The Congressional Budget Office has identified $516 billion in appropriations for 2024 associated with 491 expired authorizations of appropriations across a range of agencies, including a number of appropriations administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs, State Department, Department of Education, National Institutes of Health, Federal Aviation Administration, and NASA. Withholding such funds is subject to legal challenge. It would be politically unpopular to cut a number of these programs, such as veterans’ healthcare benefits and Pell Grants.
Musk and Ramaswamy will also scrutinize federal contracts that have “gone unexamined for years,” and conduct “large-scale audits during a temporary suspension of payments.” Ramaswamy said to expect “massive cuts among federal contractors… who are overbilling the government.” Everyone has a list. Sources of potential cuts could also be the Government Accountability Office High Risk List, which identifies programs particularly subject to waste, fraud, and abuse, and a list of thousands of proposed cuts Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) sent to Musk and Ramaswamy.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Ministry of Twitter
I was shadow banned by Twitter, even after my suspended account was restored. What is it with these people? What are they so afraid of?
Things are changing fast under new owner Elon Musk, but using available free tools a few days ago I found my new account @PeterMVanBuren has been electronically censored. Specifically, using a tool called Shadow Bird, I learned my tweets have been subjected to Reply Deboosting. This means my replies on tweets will be hidden behind a “Show More” button for accounts that don’t follow me. This is particularly frustrating because it essentially silences me except among people who already know and usually agree with me. It makes it nearly impossible to build followers; they have to stumble on to my tweets or come looking for me based on something they have seen online. It is a very effective way of shutting someone up without leaving more than a paranoid’s slime trail behind, until now.
After years of denying such manipulation (“Paranoid much, dude?”) Elon Musk has made public information showing Twitter has been subjecting mostly conservative voices to search suggestion bans, search bans, ghost bans ( blocking content from an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user) and reply deboosting. Though directed at a variety of users, the bans have disfavored voices from the right and in all cases were implemented without notice to the user and without a chance for any form of process or arguing back. Yes, yes, Twitter is a private company and not subject to the 1A, but the moment they became a private company with the ability and now the demonstrated willingness to influence presidential elections their business became everyone’s business. Extensive Twitter threads posted by Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss revealed that the company was essentially part of a coordinated Democratic suppression operation and actively colluded with the FBI to destroy Donald Trump and assure Joe Biden’s election. Which is why, as Elon Musk observed, “Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene.”
In his novel 1984, George Orwell suggested a diabolical solution to the problem of censorship. He conjured up a technological device for the world of Big Brother that he called “the memory hole.” In his dark future, armies of bureaucrats, working in what he dubbed the Ministry of Truth, spent their lives erasing or altering documents, newspapers, books, and the like in order to create an acceptable version of history. When a person fell out of favor, the Ministry of Truth sent him and all the documentation relating to him down the memory hole. Every story or report in which his life was in any way noted or recorded would be edited to eradicate all traces of him. Same for ideas. A purity of thought, a world in which negative news such as about Hunter Biden’s laptop simply did not exist, was created.
In Orwell’s pre-digital world, the memory hole was a vacuum tube into which old documents were physically disappeared forever. Alterations to existing documents and the deep-sixing of others ensured that even the sudden switching of global enemies and alliances would never prove a problem for the guardians of Big Brother. In the world he imagined, thanks to those armies of bureaucrats, the present was what had always been — and there were those altered documents to prove it and nothing but faltering memories to say otherwise. Anyone who expressed doubts about the truth of the present would, under the rubric of “thoughtcrime,” be marginalized (shadow banned) or eliminated (search banned.) What is scary is not how Orwell differs from Twitter, but how much the same they are. 1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
Through my Foreign Service career I served in and visited countries that practiced overt government censorship. Critics of the regime would be punished, the least physical of which method was usually the most effective, simply finding ways to stop them from publishing. No newspaper or broadcasting station would take their work, to the point where they found themselves unable to hand out photocopied pamphlets on street corners. What astounded me was not the censorship per se, that was easy to understand no matter how abhorrent, but the degree of detail. As with Iran’s “appearance” morality people who look for any wisp of hair peaking out from beneath a hijab, no subversive thought is too small, no objectionable material too minor to stomp on. It is the pervasiveness of evil, its level of detail, that makes it so wrong. A dictator need not disappear a troublesome person anymore, just his ideas. The need to murder Jamal Khashoggi was a failure of Internet technology.
I hate using Twitter but am expected to post my articles there and try to build a following of readers. Even after restoring me to Twitter after my original account with several thousand followers was shut down, somewhere deep within the Ministry of Twitter someone still thought I must be a threat of some kind, and electronically made sure I would never amass as large a following again, all via reply deboosting. I was a thought threat as far as Twitter was concerned and I had to be dealt with. I had made about 50 Tweets and a few RTs; is there some sort of naughty not nice list?
Of course what Twitter (and no doubt other social media sites) has been doing is small stuff. For the future, look to Google and negative search strategy. Here’s how a negative search strategy works, even if today its focus — largely on pedophiles — is easy enough to accept. Google uses software which makes it harder for users to locate child abuse material. Google Search has been “fine-tuned” to clean up results for more than 100,000 insider terms, many supplied by law enforcement, used by pedophiles to look for child pornography. Now, for instance, when users type in queries that may be related to child sexual abuse, they will find no results that link to illegal content. Instead, Google will redirect them to counseling sites. “We will roll out these changes in more than 150 languages, so the impact will be truly global,” Google claims.
While Google is redirecting searches for kiddie porn to counseling sites, the NSA has developed a similar ability. The agency already controls a set of servers codenamed Quantum that sit on the Internet’s backbone. Their job is to redirect “targets” away from their intended destinations to websites of the NSA’s choice. The idea is you type in the website you want and end up somewhere less disturbing to the agency. While at present this technology may be aimed at sending would-be online jihadis to more moderate Islamic material, in the future it could, for instance, be repurposed to redirect people seeking news to an Al-Jazeera lookalike site with altered content that fits the government’s version of events. Or making sure no one saw an article about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Or hiding the latest revelations from social media.
Back on Twitter, welcome to @MoonmanCartoons, an account featuring the conservative editorial cartoons of Robert Mooney. Mooney has all of 88 followers yet is subject to Twitter’s reply blocking and search suggestion ban, making it impossible for him to build followers. He posts a cartoon and less than 100 people see it; why bother, Twitter?
“Why would they censor us ‘small fish?’ Mooney asked TAC in an interview. “I think there are a couple of reasons, the first of which is simply because they can. If the technology exits, why wouldn’t they use it to achieve their objectives? Also, I think they may see some people at our level as potentially influential if they don’t nip us in the bud. Despite the censorship, I’ve occasionally slipped one by the goalie. For example, when Dinesh D’Souza retweeted one of my cartoons about 2020 election fraud, I got almost 1400 likes and 439 retweets. That sort of thing is rare, but it’s happened a few times, showing that I have a potential receptive audience out there.”
“As for whether this is similar to other nations that censor, I’ve felt for months that where we are in the U.S. right now with regard to censorship and the criminalization of political opposition is the American equivalent of Germany 1933. Obviously it’s not an exact duplication of the dawn of the Third Reich, but if we keep going down this road, we will end up with a country very different from what we’ve known for over two centuries and from what the Founders intended — and not different in a good way.”
As they say, it starts with the small stuff. Like Twitter.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Elon, Time to Kill Twitter
Nothing would be better than for Elon Musk to buy Twitter and then kill it. Take it off line. Delete it. Make it go away.
What is the point anymore? Like some aged European monarchy, the service has become too inbred to say anything useful. It consists now as a giant push survey, claiming the appearance of action equals action. Even the poltergeist of Twitter, cancelation of people, is like a magic spell that you have to believe in for it to work. Live outside the Twitter demographic and it does not matter. Listening to people talk, you’d think Twitter had the power to raise the dead, or more often, the opposite. Twitter is the physical embodiment of what Glenn Greenwald describes as Democrats criminalizing opposition to their party and ideology. Dissenting ideas are “disinformation” and must be censored. Trump voters are inherently criminal (“insurrectionists”) and should be imprisoned or at least banished for thought crimes.
Recently rewatching Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9, it is obvious the 2018 film is mainly a screed about all the bad things Trump was going to do as president. Time is a cold witch of a mistress: basically nothing Moore predicted four years ago about what was going to happen actually happened. Moore was wrong about Trump’s ties to Russia, Moore was wrong about Trump being the last elected president because he would seize total power, and Moore was wrong about the lasting impact of the progressive Twitter heroes of the year, the Parkland High School survivors.
You do remember the mass shooting in a Parkland, Florida high school, right? A handful of “survivors” were insta-made into social media sensations by presenting their views on gun control unopposed and uncommented on. In his film Moore portrayed the kids were examples of an anti-Trump force sent by the universe to Tweet as a balancing mechanism, and that the power of their online activism was America’s only chance to remain a democracy free of daily massacres. You can’t do justice to the hyperbole of Moore’s narration in print; you would think by listening these kids had the power to change something simply by amassing RTs on Twitter. A good chunk of the movie is just Moore staring at the kids changing everything fascistic in the world by being online, the filmmaker’s expression somewhere between pedophile on the playground fence and a proud dad.
One can imagine Moore’s reaction if he was still relevant enough to quote to Musk’s impending takeover of Twitter as a twist on the absurd: Musk will have too much power to make Twitter into anything he wants, even a full-on bastion of unfettered speech. Instead of relaying on the Terms of Service to ensure people like the Parkland Kids face no opposition online, Moore might worry just the opposite, that the opposition, left to its own point making, might overwhelm the dumbass ideas that tend to come from 16-year-olds handed a very big microphone with no supervision. For those new here, that is the point, to allow better ideas to overwhelm poor ideas.
Have a look at what Twitter had done in the name of “free speech” and ending “misinformation,” the rallying cries now of so-called progressives. Twitter took an entire subject of critical interest, Hunter Biden, off the media menu and thus out of public viewing just prior to the last presidential election. Twitter silenced the loudest voices of opposition to the Democrats, people like Donald Trump himself and others like Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Call them what you want to, the idea in a free country is you’d have the opportunity to hear what they had to say if you wished to or maybe encounter speech that made you rethink your own views by accident (protip: that’s a cornerstone of Jeffersonian democracy, oh wait, Jefferson is on the outs now, too, sorry.)
Twitter also found cause to black out the satire site Babylon Bee and Libs of TikTok. The Bee’s violation? Naming transperson Rachel Levine its “Man of the Year.” Libs of TikTok only reposted clips from left-wing users on social media, including from drag queens and gay and transgender activists but that too was too much. Things got so stupid that Trump Derangement Post Child Robert Reich in his role as the Rob Reiner of faux-intellectuals tweeted, “When multi-billionaires take control of our most vital platforms for communication, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for oligarchy.”
“We are calling for careful content moderation that balances the important ideals of democracy, free expression, and public health and safety,” said Jessica González, co-CEO of Free Press, a media advocacy organization. Imagine that, a group which says its supports a free press demanding censorship. But why pull punches — Politico wonders “If Musk sticks with his word and removes most of the content moderation rules in place, which could include those that ban hate speech, extremism and vaccine and election misinformation — it may turn into a platform that poses a threat to democracy.”
Irony aside, look what they are afraid of: unfettered free speech brought to you by one of the few men rich enough to pay for it for us.
And that’s why Musk should instead kill off Twitter, and any other social media he can acquire. His legacy would not be to be the oligarch who gave us a smatter of free speech but the oligarch that helped break the grip oligarchs, whether progressive or otherwise, now have on our speech. Burn Twitter to the ground to save it, er, us, from any attempts to adjudicate further what we can read and listen to. If a social media outlet can’t present a democratic platform in a democratic way (i.e., without a rich guy paying our way to freedom like an abolitionists buying slaves only to set them loose) then we should not want it. We’ve gone too far in turning “content moderation” into crude censorship and viewpoint discrimination.
Public forums need to just that, public. You do not achieve free speech via censorship no matter who wields the red pencil. Musk can’t change that we’ve reached a point in democracy’s evolution where some half of us fear free speech, but there it is. His contribution is to kill the beast that Twitter has become, and hope something more democratic rises in its place.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Dear Elon Musk:
Dear Elon:
Big fan. I cheered to finally see an African-American like yourself rising to the top, owning one of America’s largest media companies, Twitter. I’m also a big fan of free speech, which is why I am writing to you to ask that my lifetime ban on Twitter be rescinded.
See in August 2018, Twitter banned me for life for a tweet which “harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence someone else’s voice.” I was on Twitter telling some journalists they had allowed the government to lie to them about the Iraq war. I said I once worked for the U.S. State Department, and I was one of the ones who lied to them. It was actually part of my job to lie to them, to give them the false impression our reconstruction programs in Iraq were coming along just nicely. I could name several journalists I lied to directly but what’s the point in that? They all still have jobs and Twitter accounts and it’s not exactly a secret what they wrote about the reconstruction programs was false and wrong. I told the truth on Twitter and lost my account.
The truth is one night on Twitter I was explaining about my lies, a kind of atonement, and several journalists ganged up on me to begin criticizing my writing and the work that I have done as a journalist since leaving the government. It was all kind of rude (one said I was a “garbage human being” and another claimed I was a Russian stooge) but within the schoolyard boundaries of the scrappier side of Twitter.
It never occurred to me to report them for harassment or bullying. I happened to have the television on with the Walking Dead playing in the background and I cranked off a tweet, as many of us do, that I’m not particularly proud of. I said to one of the pack “I hope a MAGA zombie eats your face.” You can read all my offending tweets here. Within about five minutes of posting I was given a lifetime ban on Twitter. It says on my Wikipedia page by someone who continually hacks it, that I was removed from Twitter for threatening someone or something along those lines.
Anyway I can’t help but thinking my real lifetime ban had something to do with the fact that I had previously promoted free-speech without boundaries on Twitter and other social media. Yes, yes, I’m aware the First Amendment does not cover social media, that these are private companies, but like you I believe they play such an enormous role in the tapestry of our speech that they deserve the protections of the 1A. I understand Jefferson and Madison wrote the Bill of Rights long before the Internet, and think they would be on board with expanding the 1A to companies that have grown to be more powerful censors than the government ever could be. BTW, that’s U now, LOL.
I hasten to add that there is no such thing as MAGA zombies and so my tweeted threat to have one of them eat someone’s face was actually a bit of a jest. You see since there are no zombies the threat was not real, sarcasm at worst, and so I’m hoping that you can forgive me where are your predecessor @jack was unable to do so. He never even answered my inquiries.
To be fully honest, what bothers me is not the scolding per se, or (most of the time) the inability to tweet. Yeah, I know, it can be a big time sink. I think the thing that bugs me is I feel I was rounded up and sent off because I wrote true things, albeit critical things, about the media on what they consider their turf, your new acquisition, Twitter. I obviously meant no one harm with the silly zombie remark, but it was used as a very thin excuse to send me down the Memory Hole (you remember, from Orwell’s 1984, a place where facts and ideas could be disappeared in service to the powers that be.)
My cancellation took place late on a Friday night, which leads me to wonder how the journalist I was engaging got through to Twitter’s censoring staff so quickly. I certainly don’t have that access. It felt kind of more like a set up than a gatekeeper protecting someone against whatever hate speech is (and you know there is no such crime as hate speech, and whatever people insist on calling “hate speech,” including things like the N-word, is fully protected by the First Amendment.) So what’s up with the lifetime ban for one tweet? It seems pretty heavy. That’s the kind of thing I have in mind when I say it did not feel fair.
I don’t think anyone needs protecting from my ideas, but I guess I can figure out why they’d be frightening to charlatans, pols, and grifters. That’s why I guess a journalist whose livelihood depends on the 1A wrote to you “for democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.” Robert Reich, veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations, argued you’re putting us on a fast track to fascism. He thinks an uncontrolled Internet is “the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron.” On of your other critics nearly exceeded Twitter’s character limit writing “Today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany.” While I am not fully comfortable with billionaires deciding the fate of free speech, they’re downright terrified of you, Elon. If you want to scare them more, reinstating me (and yeah, Trump, too) would be excellent for that purpose.
It’s funny/not funny because I have experienced their version of the Internet. When I was in Iran, the government there blocked Twitter and many other sites, effectively deciding for an entire nation what they cannot read. In America, Twitter decides for an entire nation what they cannot read. It matters little whose hand is on the switch: government or corporate, the end result is the same. This is the America I always feared I’d see, where Americans not just tolerate, but demand censorship.
Now if you really want to shake things up (you’re that kinda guy, right?) just flat-out acknowledge the interplay between the First Amendment and corporations like your Twitter is the most significant challenge to free speech in our lifetimes. Pretending a corporation with the reach to influence elections is just another place that sells stuff is to pretend the role of debate in a free society is outdated. The arrival of global technology controlled by mega-corporations brought first the ability the control speech and soon after the willingness. The rules are their, er, your rules, and so we see the permanent banning of a president for whom some 70 million Americans voted from tweeting to his 88 million followers (ironically the courts earlier claimed it was unconstitutional for the president to block those who wanted to follow him.) Then there was that game-changing ban on news about Hunter Biden just ahead of the election. Let someone take Twitter to the Supreme Court and see if they’ll extend the 1A in some form to the new public square. The ability of a handful of people nobody voted for to control the mass of public discourse has never been clearer. It represents a stunning centralization of power.
Speech in America is an inalienable right, and runs as deep into our free society as any idea can. Thomas Jefferson wrote it flowed directly from his idea of a Creator, which we understand today as less that free speech is heaven-sent so much as it is something that exists above government. And so the argument the First Amendment applies only to the government and not to private platforms like Twitter is both true and irrelevant—and the latter is more important.
So Elon, thank you very much for your consideration. I realize as a billionaire super villain you have many things on your mind but I hope you find time to at least delegate this to someone in hopes that they could reinstate me to Twitter to prove a point. The old Twitter sold censorship as a product, a dissent-free zone for libs. You can do something important freeing ideas, and I’d like to be a part of that.
Love, Peter
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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