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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 © 2020. 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 © 2020. 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 © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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