The New Propaganda War
theatlantic.comLow information, under-educated, soundbite-oriented mass media consumers are these easiest to manufacture consent of, shout nationalist opinions at, and convince them of the moral superiority of the tribe they supposedly belong to. What's changed over the past 30 years is that media consumption has exploded and diverged with the internet and smart phone, making it easier to bypass centralized broadcast-only mainstream media and any meaningful attempt at regulation of the firehose either by the platforms or by regulators. Cambridge Analytica and Russian interference with phony microprotests were just a few known examples, but it's clear that nefarious actors can and will exploit social media to cause chaos and manipulate people into actions in the real world. That's partially a technological problem but it's mostly a people problem of applying pause, reasonableness, and reasonable skepticism to avoid causing direct harm in the real world. Identifying mass and targeted manipulation of sentiment that doesn't directly affect elections or calls to action is a problem for journalists, tech companies, and regulators to identify and minimize through data analysis.
Also, ownership of TikTok is largely a symbolic, selective, ideological/political fight rather than meaningfully addressing industry regulation of content moderation, data privacy, algorithmic oversight, mental health/app addiction, or data (re)patriation.
I agree, the real problem with TikTok is social media's unregulated ability to manipulate and surveil people en masse. It's hypocritical to ignore all the other nation-states and corporations that are doing the same kind of thing. What's sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander.
What's also quite twisted is social media companies (and their more zealous users) framing critics as being against "free speech", when their algorithms are actually being used to control what people see, censor criticism, push narratives for powerful interests, promote enraging news, appropriate user-owned content, and sell lots of advertising by getting people addicted to doomscrolling. That's the opposite of freedom.
And there's no easy answer. "Just moderate better" isn't going to cut it. The people running social media companies simply have too much power; abuse is inevitable.
Freedom is not possible if everyone is given a mic connected to the same sound system.
It only works if there is a sharing and coordination mechanism that the majority agrees too. As is the case when it comes to Broadcasting on Radio Spectrum. You wont find anyone protesting or demanding the right to stick a radio dish on their roof and the ability to broadcast across all frequencies in the name of Free Speech.
Because this debate (about share finite broadcast spectrum) already happened and a coordination and sharing mechanism was agreed too. That agreement comes out of social and political debates. Not out of technical debates. Its not a technical problem.
Social media designed by people who had no idea what they were building, allowed everyone to freely Broadcast(1-to-all) simultaneously, because it became technically possible <insert Jurassic Park quote about Engineers building things cause they could not because they should>. Post facto, this bunch of self certified geniuses realized they need a sharing/coordination/filtering mechanism and you get more garbage like the view/like/click/upvote count, moderation/censorship systems which do a half baked job. So we get infinite evergrowing spam (as cost to spam on free to broadcast system is 0), randomness, chaos, squandering of finite collective attention, and no control at all over what emerges tomorrow morning out of Jurassic Park.
> Social media designed by people who had no idea what they were building
Let's not jump to conclusions. Zuckerberg knew and knows very well what he was and is still doing.
In the beginning, there would've been unintentional cognitive dissonance while caught up in the moment or willful ignorance about the scope and nuances of harm.
Now, there isn't much excuse. MZ has really tried to address aspects of potential harm. For example, Meta isn't like Twitter: random employees cannot access any user's data without a business reason and sign-off from a manager or an appropriate privacy person. However, the Myanmar genocide happened. The root issue is there isn't enough reliable human or algorithmic effort to ensure continuous, global, perfect safety... but they are trying. They will fail sometimes. The question becomes: what are legal, ethical, and moral duties, boundaries, and liabilities any nation should require and accept in this area?
I am pretty sure this is actually not true if you read the propaganda literature.
Counter-intuitively, the easiest to manipulate is the highly educated.
Do you have any citations or evidence for these claims?
Do you have any literature you recommend?
I was in China part of 2020 (I entered before their border was closed). It was definitely a low point watching the heavy handed way in which police handled protests. And today seeing police with sniper rifles aiming at students, it is pretty far from the respect for free expression I’d like to see. Point is, China and Russia might be dismissing the right to protest, but the police are doing a pretty good job of that as well.
The other factor is the media, which seems to only be interested in the spectacle of the protest rather than the substance of it. Very rarely do they actually ask about the specific reasons people are protesting. They care more about whether people are protesting in the “right way”. It’s the kind of sanitized distant coverage you get when all media is consolidated into multinational corporations. Of course they will talk about how destructive protests are as a means of affecting change but never about how the most common method, lobbying, is just legalized bribery.
This reads like propaganda in itself, I would have enjoyed something more balanced.
It’s a wall of text that tries to blame other countries for the decline in trust for American institutions. No doubt Russia and China do everything they can to undermine and cast doubt, but a huge amount of the reputational damage was caused from within.
no, its a detailed look at exactly how the propaganda networks from other nation states are developing and influencing global opinion in ways that are actively harmful to basic democratic principles. these things are not the same. One of the founding principles of fighting against fascism is that the only thing you cannot tolerate is intolerance. I suspect some as yet un-formulated principle is waiting to be discovered for the Internet.
China and Russia didn’t force the Supreme Court to corrupt the political system with Citizens United or force politicians to spend all day taking bribes. They didn’t cause the widening gap between wealthy and poor in America. They’re not the ones gaslighting Americans into thinking they don’t deserve healthcare. Xi Jinping isn’t the one allowing data brokers to buy and sell bulk geolocation data to anyone that wants it. Vladimir Putin isn’t the one allowing private equity to strangle businesses across America. Erdogan isn’t the one saddling young people with student debt and causing home prices to rise.
The people who have lost trust in the ability of the American economic/political system to care about them, maybe foreign autocrats lit the match but the kindling was already there.
None of these points address the realities in the parent or in the article.
What if the facts themselves aren't balanced? The truth needn't be comfortable.
"secret authoritarian “plot” to preserve the ability to spread antidemocratic conspiracy theories" - Applebaum is an American citizen so she should already know this but it's not an "ability", it's a right we all share. Say what you like, read what you want.
If she is right in her assessment despite the wording, and these rights are something like a security vulnerability for societies, limiting them is not the only option. You can as well decide to use compensating controls (education, minimum age for social media, more bot control, limiting foreign agents access - not endorsing any of this, just some examples I heard elsewhere. This would thwart the ability without changing the rights it seems, which shows they are something different), or accept the risk tied to them as lesser than the gains.