Lordre: social

Showing posts with label social_media. Show all posts

Reasons social media should end

Social media is central to many people's lives. It is increasingly a focal place for political expression, too, with many having no means of doing so other than social media. However, there are reasons to think humanity is better off without it.

Stop (most) fake news

It is likely true that lies spread faster than truth on social media. Social media users are able to lean on one another as sources of information rather than going to official sources that at least have some (albeit not always) reputation to maintain for accuracy. Random people you meet on the internet are under no pressure to be accurate or reliable. In addition, mainstream news sources are able to get away with more fakes with the help of social media, since it allows to creation of media that can be quickly deleted and swept under the rug when it is not convenient, or followed up with haphazard apologies.

Improve mental health

There is adequate reason to think getting rid of social media would decrease mental illness and especially suicide among young people. Such a move would be a problem for some though, and result in them being more isolated. However, those isolated people would just be fringe minority communities who naturally are isolated anyway. If the majority at risk, their welfare has to always be addressed before that of any minority.

Reduce political interference

Dismantling social networks would remove a threat to governments by unpredictable and profit-driven actors. It would remove the ability for foreign governments where the social media companies are located, mainly the United States, to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. Likewise, it would allay Western fears of election interference by Russia and China, which are continuously voiced by politicians and journalists.

Improve political discourse

Social media may be ruining political discourse simply due to the way it works. Whether you are a conspiracy theorist or someone who just relies on mainstream media, you are similarly being duped by an industry that focuses on the endless, mindless consumption of news under a model intended for entertainment, rather than stopping to analyse or understand the world.

Of course, it is highly unlikely that social media will be eliminated for the reasons above, because it is too lucrative to the companies involved and the politicians they influence. Nevertheless, governments should certainly create options to get rid of it in the least disruptive way, in the interests of preparation against foreign interference. How to effectively do this will eventually be the subject of another post.

Bill Gates seems to have developed an obsession with the conspiracy theories about him, while doing nothing to address them. His own obsession now goes far enough that everyone can be forgiven for taking an interest in those theories, too.

Back at the start of this month, Gates objected to Elon Musk’s desire to ease the moderation policies on Twitter. He seemed to be specifically pleading for his own protection from conspiracy theorists who propagate claims regarding his bizarre continuous attempts to involve himself in health policy, with which this billionaire software designer has no expertise.

Bill Gates' conspiracy theory obsession

Bill Gates asked of Musk, “How does he feel about something that says ‘vaccines kill people’ or that ‘Bill Gates is tracking people?’”, which is telling. This reveals that Gates’ main concern about medical disinformation and malpractice is all about himself. For him, it is not about whether members of the public have access to the accurate and diverse sources of information they deserve or their understanding of science is boosted. He has shown no interest in that issue.

On Saturday, a very unfavourable hashtag was trending on Twitter about Bill Gates.

As an entrepreneur, Bill Gates should take note. Now, as always, he is at the mercy of consumers. Demanding harsh control over what opinions those consumers can express among themselves, when the entire capitalist model depends on them making choices, is folly for one whose career success was based on the consumer's whims.

Bill Gates' scientism

To be on the wrong side of millions of people is dangerous. To cultishly repeat that being on the side of science is best, in the face of millions of worried people, is a disservice to science. It creates the impression that the natural sciences have carved in stone unchanging answers fundamental questions, and have now developed some social role to compel society into obedience, which is hardly a service to scientific inquiry or the public perception of science. Scientists are not parental figures and nannies, and no credible scientist ever assigned himself such a role. They do not compel the public to do anything, as society only ever consented to give them the role of investigators and sources of counsel. Right now, scientists are aware of many things that compromise people's health, and they do nothing about them, because that is not their purpose, which is only to inform.

Bill Gates’ condescending attitude puts him at risk of the millions of unscientific people he feels it is safe to mock, and who may eventually take worse action than yelling at him. Conspiracy theorists may seem like a laughing matter to those who know better than them, but the ones doing the mocking should take a look at what conspiracy theorists have actually done throughout history. It is not a pretty thing, to be in their sights.

Conspiracy theories are no laughing matter

Conspiracy theories are not new, or an internet phenomenon. Before the internet, they were conveyed in pamphlets. Historically, they are linked to eventual justifications for massacres and the rise of extreme ideologies, as most genocides and civil wars feature them as a key part in the formation of the prerequisite extreme views. They are possibly the single most radicalising phenomenon, not just in modern extremism but in history's most extreme revolutionary violence and massacres. As such, the current approach of denigrating conspiracy theorists and dismissing them as incompetent, even as they come to encompass half the population in places like the United States, presents a grave danger.

Most people would be very worried for their safety if they were accused of the diabolical things that Bill Gates is being accused of. However, this man seems to expect so little initiative from the people who accuse him of murder, that he is completely unconcerned.

Gates' persistent mockery of the fears of a growing number of people across the world, and continued involvement in health policy despite unnerving so many people, actually suggests he has a personality that is bizarre and maybe sociopathic (unable to empathise with or understand the fear he creates). This is a factor that likely only increases many people’s discomfort with him. Many people likely sense stench about him, and it is why they buy into paranoid claims about him.

If conspiracy theorists are mistaken, Bill Gates' best way of correcting the problem is still to withdraw from all his involvement or interest in health policy, as a way to reassure people, and apologise for the fears he created. This would actually do more to encourage vaccines than all his previous involvement in promoting them to date.

How Bill Gates can help

Bill Gates’ story is one of success with consumers. He should take note of his benefactors, and be aware that upsetting them and provoking them can have consequences just as as significant for his life as creating products for them.

Eventually, the crowds must be placated rather than dismissed, even if it means diminishing the authority of capable meritocrats and their role in society. Otherwise, uncontrollable and murderous crowds are inevitable.

Part of the role of leaders is to actually have the trust of society. If half the population really begins to believe Bill Gates is a murderer and a monster, this means that his most stabilising role in society is actually to keep his mouth shut and fade from public view, as would suit public safety and his own safety.

With the creation of the so-called Disinformation Governance Board in the United States, let us recall how social networks betrayed their purpose.

They tried to pry open your eyes and set them back to looking at the old faces that formerly monopolised your television screen, rather than letting you select your own information sources. Those other information sources are to be buried, suppressed, cancelled.

The very appeal of social media from day one was that it contained user-generated content, not approved by the establishment. That very feature, the central appeal of social media, is now berated as some sort of bug. It is "disinformation", now sidelined by the platforms, in deference to the content produced for television networks, as if all of Twitter is meant to be a substitute for the television screen.

The spread of “disinformation”, first and foremost conspiracy theories, was presented as an extraordinary evil that descended upon us like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky, in 2016 and then during the pandemic when it arguably had the potential to do harm.

In reality, nonsense conspiracy theories were abundant on the internet ever since it began, and possibly even worse prior to 2016, when it only began to upset the wrong people, because it might have slightly affected the results of a US presidential election. They had no care for people believing false realities until it affected their power in some way.

Journalists and politicians have spectacularly managed to fool many users into believing that the very things they were looking for on the internet - those alternative views and products that grew after people became hostile to the mainstream - are actually some new inconvenience to the users. According to them, we must now suppose, the internet was actually just meant to be television 2.0, with the same ugly talking heads of authority speaking via it, telling us what opinions are acceptable. Why ever did we need to listen to normal or random people on the internet, when we could focus solely on the special people with crumpled foreheads and lucrative sponsors to tell us what to think?

Of course, in reality, people fled those rich journalists and talking heads to the internet because they were sick of them, and wanted rid of the mainstream media. They wandered the desert, searching for an oasis where people spoke their mind rather than a paid agenda.

Unfortunately, the journalists followed the audiences that had fled them, until they finally appeared on social networks and began to receive blue tick marks and favourable treatment. They pursued their desire to recapture their captive audience, to firmly strap the television sets back onto the audience’s heads and prevent them from escaping again like runaway beasts.

In short, once upon a time, realising what a parasite and a villain the modern “journalist” was, people fled to the internet. The mocking forms of “alternative media” and lackadaisical memes were born. People created their own news and conspiracy theories, and derided the establishment. However, like monsters, the mainstream media followed, transforming social media into but another television screen, and now they have you back in their clutches again.

Elon Musk seeks to own Twitter and make it a platform for free speech around the world. This certainly is not its reputation at the moment, although it seemed like it in the past.

Many of us (especially if we are at least 30 or older) remember a time when the internet was an experiment in anarchy, rather than a prison of control. It easily seems natural to us that the current extent of control and filtering of content on social networks is just an unwelcome anomaly in what should be the course of human progress to greater liberty and exposure.

Contrary to my wishes, as well as Elon Musk's, Noughties-style online freedom probably isn't really our destiny but just a historical blip. History indicates that any technologically-endowed freedom is likely to only ever be a fleeting thing before some authorities reassert the primacy of the law, but that pattern is a topic for another day.

Restoring Trump?

The political right has rallied around Musk's attempts to take over Twitter. They seem to see a way to get their beloved Donald Trump’s account restored, after so-called "Big Tech" exercised its power in favour of the Democratic Party by suspending his Twitter account towards the end of the 2020 US presidential election.

Whatever happens to Twitter is likely to serve interest groups in the United States, first and foremost the government itself. Although it likely remains the world's most politically influential website or application, Twitter has become little more than a channel for amplifying and rewarding views approved by or entirely constructed by United States government bodies. With time, it has increasingly aligned with the US government on every issue and teamed up against regimes the US is targeting.

It has reached a point now that, if any other country is as vigilant as the United States about guarding against foreign political interference, such a country will ban Twitter without hesitation.

A dead end

Although Musk's ownership of Twitter may be beneficial to independent media and dissident voices, Twitter is dead. Despite retaining its influence as nothing more than inertia from a prior model under which it succeeded, almost all media stories that succeed there now are artificially boosted by the platform, and are from nauseatingly familiar sources.

Twitter is now little more than an aggregator for common American cable news channels, showcasing the content of such channels as its main attraction, as a way of recapturing the audiences that fled them and suppressing or banning other content wherever possible. Twitter may have, actually, been infiltrated by and bent to the will of journalists hellbent on restoring Iraq War-era levels of manipulation of the public.

The best Elon Musk ought to do is sabotage what Twitter has become, if he can, but the tech companies will never tolerate the return to the wilderness the internet once was. Immediately after Musk unblocks and unbans any content, there will be pressure on the app stores to remove Twitter. Following this, the platform will be effectively destroyed and fade into obscurity.

To set in motion the destruction of Twitter would wipe a stain from the internet, and be a huge favour from Elon Musk if it is achieved. Twitter, like most social networks, is no longer of any benefit to society or human relationships, being a false afterimage of former creativity.

The Ukraine war perfectly illustrates how outrage regarding foreign conflict zones is generated selectively and handed to passive consumers, who drink stories like cans of Coke. Countless conflicts and even the names of countries are unheard of until someone decides to sell them.

With Ukraine, we are presented (through the international media and through social media) with a supposed reality in which a country (Russia) launched an unprovoked attack on its neighbour. This caused citizens all across the world to spontaneously denounce this apparent act of evil.

Ukraine seemed to come into existence in February 2022. People were given primers explaining what Ukraine is and where it is, so they can know better than everybody in Russia and in Ukraine itself.

Likewise, many conflicts and supposedly valiant struggles, such as in Syria, ceased to exist when the stories stopped, because the enemy (in that case the "Assad regime") was not being defeated as planned. As the manipulators lost interest, so too did the manipulated.

Bought outrage

Ukraine came to nobody's attention by their own will.

In reality, no citizen of any country denounced anything or rose up against anything that happened in Ukraine. The government and the international media simply decided to coax and convince the population of countries like Great Britain into thinking it was "the done thing" to condemn Russia. We used just the same approaches we use when marketing soft drinks to people, to get them to buy a ticket on the outrage bandwagon that the government thinks they should buy.

Setting aside the question of whether or not it is morally righteous for us all to fly Ukrainian flags from our windows, we should also be interested in knowing if we have strings, and if somebody is pulling them.

Consider whether the decision to care so much about Ukraine, as opposed to conflict-ridden Yemen or Ethiopia, was really your idea. Was it not in fact caused by your awareness of Ukraine, and complete unawareness of Yemen and Ethiopia? If so, is the one pulling the strings of your outrage in fact the one responsible for providing your daily news digest or delivering your evening news broadcast?

Where are all your other flags?

Which side are you on, between Morocco and the Sahrawis in Western Sahara, or between rebel Tigray and the forces of Addis Ababa? Between the Ansar Allah-led administration in Sanaa and the exiled government of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi? Between Kashmir and the Indian occupation? Oh, of course, these places and combatants don't exist, because the media has not given you a primer on them and told you who the bad guy is.

Whose side were you on between Kiev and Donbass, during the eight-year-long phase of the Ukraine conflict before the Russian invasion? But of course, that never happened, because the media ignored that.

One could argue that some of those conflicts aren't worth choosing a side in, because they aren't severe enough and the casualties are too low, but why should that influence anything? Is the "bad" side really just the side that was reported to have caused casualties or escalated the situation at a particular moment of news coverage, and no history or context is needed? What kind of moral system would that be?

For many, only the things appearing on television screens or socially encouraged social media feeds exist or deserve any comment. Occasionally, someone might make a social media post trying to showcase horrors in their country, but if it wasn't on the news, most of us will just ignore it and move on, dismissing the poster as some liar or lunatic. The news media may later assert something with no evidence at all, and people will accept it.

Build your own news service

People have committed themselves to the silliest causes due to some minute of tear-jerking manipulation, while being blissfully unaware of other causes in the world, because someone else they can't even name is manipulating their news feed. People even ultimately end up giving their lives for that reason, too, misled like cattle by personages they know nothing of.

It is also really easy to break someone's control of your information. You can simply build your own news digest, using tools like paper.li or any number of news aggregator services, according to which you can select the sources you feel provide balanced coverage of world events. There is no reason to only be aware of a conflict or controversy that some talking heads think it is important to talk about, for their own reasons.

The person deciding if a country needs your support can easily be you, rather than someone else. It is in fact possible to know about every country in our world, to be aware of the strife or injustice taking place in all of them at all times. Is this not better than receiving the painfully abridged account that someone else wants to give you, covering a particular locale and a particular time favourable to them?

People have many buttons that can be pressed by others, wanting to control them like robots. It makes sense to at least try to guard some of them, especially the button of emotional appeal, so you are more independent of manipulation and able to come to independent opinions.

Noam Chomsky asserted in his book, Media Control, that the corporate media had an ability to trigger totalitarian behaviour in people, stating "the educated masses goose-step on command and repeat the slogans they’re supposed to repeat".

America's history of making excuses for fascist types in Latin America and Eastern Europe, coupled with the veneration of police state figures at home and panic among elites at their collapsing economic and military power, could lay a path for our nations into actual fascism.

Sanitising fascism

As evidence accumulates that we in the West are supporting Nazis in Ukraine, such that even NATO itself is unable to avoid sharing evidence of these Nazis and then hurriedly deleting it, we may see excuses made for radical nationalism and fascism. It is accompanied by our own anti-Russian propaganda, sometimes rivalling the work of the Nazis, as we become enamoured with the monsters we support.

Nazism in Ukraine, however explicit, is uniquely weaponised and directed against the local ethnic Russians, such that Jews in Ukraine are seemingly able to avoid being hurt by it. But, as anyone who was properly educated at school knows, the selected scapegoat makes no difference to whether fascism is fascism. Portraying the West's declared enemies such as Russians, Muslims or the Chinese as subhuman is as wrong as anti-Semitism.

Unfortunately, as Chomsky points out, educated people in the West seem able to forget their entire moral code and education when the media simply claims that things are different this time, and that fascistic sentiment is now necessary. They are then okay with calling for the death or silencing of those who oppose us. Making special exceptions where it is okay to censor or even murder people when we are told is a masterclass in turning a peaceful person into a monster.

The subconscious drift to fascism

Part of the reason for fascism is the feeling that one's country was meant to be the most successful, the best of them all, but that traitors and fifth columnists are hampering it. In the past, that was the essence of anti-communism. Today, the communists are simply "Russians", the word used for essentially anyone on the internet who contradicts the narrative, despite no evidence of any link to Moscow.

There has been a tragic history of the United States relying on fascists to secure its goals in South and Central America, and the US is typically aligned with the most reactionary forces around the world. This is no different in Ukraine, where, from the beginning, the US took as its allies the most violent nationalists and fascists it could find, and portrayed them as liberals to gullible audiences at first. Now, though, the audience is actually becoming illiberal, drawn more and more into pure hatred and flag-waving.

As the West declines in the face of a rising China, and is confronted by the unprecedented failure of its sanctions policy, statements from Western journalists and politicians can only be expected to become more deranged. As economic and financial punishments fail against rival countries for the first time, a new ideology that justifies the magnification of military force, terroristic violence, and the creation of vast armies may be demanded. As refugees flee Ukraine, many still with sympathies to fascism, and are lionised, it is possible that the Western media will engage in revisionism and justifications for a for at least a few variants of fascism.

Ukraine to be the model for the declining West?

Russia has been afraid for some time that World War Two could be rewritten by the West, in a way that puts all the blame on the Soviet Union. It could get worse. As Russia is increasingly vilified, Ukrainian Nazi collaborators are redeemed in Western eyes, and the usefulness of fascist thugs becomes increasingly attractive to Western elites, not just abroad but potentially at home.

Because the US is okay with bans on media in Ukraine, it is okay with bans on media at home. Because the US is okay with a war on terror abroad, it is okay with a war on terror at home. Does the US's support for fascist thugs on the streets in Ukraine mean that fascist thugs will be accepted on the streets at home?

Now, some will want to stop me here and attempt to make the case that groups like Black Lives Matter (BLM) or Antifa are the local variants of fascism. They are similarly lionised to the Ukrainian nationalists, and excuses are made for their violence in the US. Others will say this is different, because these are the anti-fascists. But are they? Anti-fascists may be expected to use reason, and explain exactly why fascism is wrong. The BLM and Antifa movements are not rationalist movements. Their followers are just addicted to the dopamine rush they get from being supported in the media and in the currents of social media. The ideology matters not.

Swastikas of freedom

It is not unrealistic to estimate that if the media began to fly the swastika, at first pitching it as a maligned anti-Russian "freedom" symbol, a fair majority of the self-styled advocates of BLM, Antifa and other social justice causes would steadily convert not just to fascism but to Nazism. Moreover, the amount of effort needed to convert a majority of Western society to Nazi ideology would require one week to one month of television broadcasts, social media hashtags, and some entertainment and education-related boycotts and products being cancelled by certain key companies. In total, it would only require the staff at the top of several organisations such as CNN, Facebook and Twitter to collaborate on achieving it.

What if Western policy elites responsible for backing extremists abroad should now decide that establishing full fascism at home is the way to mobilise the United States and the West to defend their hegemony? They are disturbingly well-equipped to do it. They have so far been able to pressure the previously mentioned types of organisation into adhering to their strategy. The informal hierarchy placing the US foreign policy elites and spooks over the media lackeys is obvious in the shocking speed at which propaganda is disseminated everywhere, and, as Chomsky said, we can be made to goose-step on command.

Through practices like corrections, retractions and social media follow-up posts, it may be that mainstream news organisations are able to preserve the appearance of journalistic integrity even while they get away with spreading disinformation to a majority of their audiences.

When retracting false claims, apparently to preserve their journalistic integrity (or, rather, just the false image of it), publishers may be only reaching a tiny number of people with their corrections. There is also the issue of false coverage or false "fact-checking" at a decisive moment, such as an election, followed by retraction or correction after the decisive moment has subsided, as can be seen with the story of Hunter Biden's laptop.

Always deception at a critical moment

Many media sources will assert certitude at times when decisions are being made by people on an issue, to purposefully press them into taking a position when it matters, like with the allegations of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq nearly twenty years ago, or chemical attacks in Syria more than five years ago. They don't mind later casting doubt on allegations, as long as the moment when decisions are being made has passed and they got their result.

Another example is the triumphant US strike against ISIS-K in Afghanistan, which followed a lethal suicide bombing against US Marines at Kabul Airport. The revenge strike was presented in the press as some sort of victory, only for it to later be quietly revealed that the US strike hit no terrorists but managed to kill an entire family, seven children included. What the American journalists did during that series of retaliatory drone strikes was about as good as drinking the blood of those Afghan children when they died, lapping up the US government's triumphant statement, and they had no shame later. Apologies and corrections are worthless, as their act of vile propaganda at the cost of real lives and the deceiving of their audience about an American revenge operation had already been done. To this date, there is no indication that US revenge strikes in response to the deaths of their Marines killed anyone other than innocent people.

When it comes to outrage-generating headlines relating to decisive elections or world conflicts, what we see is every dirty tactic being used by the press to convince people to support a narrow agenda or side. A lot of it is later passed of as mistakes, like showing pro-regime rallies in a country and miscaptioning it as opposition rallies, although they will only do the same again and again in similar conflicts. But, in every case, they make sure the damage is done and the public is thoroughly misled at a decisive moment before making any correction.

Red-handed journalists

When the media engages in false or misleading coverage, and later discretely apologises or tidies up its mistakes once it knows nobody is looking, it does the equivalent of what many nations keep doing on the foreign policy front when they enter conflicts. That is, despite repeatedly making everything worse and getting everything wrong, they keep giving themselves another chance to get it right, like a doctor who kills a hundred percent of patients he operates on. Although every attempt at intervention in other nations by Western military forces has been an unmitigated disaster for the last thirty years or so, and much of the Western media coverage of such conflicts has consisted of endless lies, still they try. And, they will try to convince us, it is all just innocent mistakes. They will go back later, offer a half-apology here and there, delete this or that offensive lie that killed so many people, and then move on after washing their bloodied hands in blood.

Yes, bloodthirsty interference and attempts to change the regime abroad are innocent mistakes by the well-meaning and sweet people of the United States, just as misleading the people about the change of regime at home is also an innocent mistake by sweet journalists. That is what you believe, if you are the kind of dupe they are looking for.

It would be good if some laws governing journalism forced news sources to thoroughly publicise their own errors in subsequent articles or segments. They should be forced to provide self-denigrating coverage that must reach as many people as their false information did, in order to compensate.

Donald Trump's echo chamber app, Truth Social, which can be expected to be banned at some point in app stores, bans criticism of itself and probably of Donald Trump as well.

Not a good plan

My own view, expressed in an earlier post, was that this app might benefit Trump if it was introduced sometime around the next US presidential election as a means of creating publicity and controversy. However, it has instead started up just about now.

The companies that provide app stores don't allow people to download the other conservative alt-social media apps, such as Gab (which is a complete and utter nightmare of an app because of the lunatics using it, as I also explained in my earlier post). Sooner or later, Truth Social will just be banned too, making it no better.

More censorship

What is worse is the platform's apparent hypocrisy. Banning criticism of itself is about the most extreme a social media platform can go. It seems as if all this is just intended as personal revenge over Trump's Twitter account being removed.

Censorship should not be in the hands of companies and people who control them, such as Zuckerberg or Trump. Censorship is essentially a form of law enforcement action and should only be practiced based on the decisions of courts or orders handed down by government authorities, local or national.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has long held the internet to be CIA, and has not made a secret of this belief. He doesn't use social media, which gives some insight into his attitude towards it.

In many ways, Putin is a man of the Cold War, almost perfectly built to handle Russia's affairs in what is considered a new cold war. He thinks in terms of missile numbers, move and countermove.

And there is some truth to the internet being a weapon of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). When one looks at its origins, most of the work really was done by a US government agency. Those who work at US agencies often step between other bodies, including the CIA. That doesn't mean it couldn't backfire on the US, however, becoming yet another case of what the CIA calls blowback.

It is clear to Putin and his cohorts that a few things went wrong in the last global struggle against the United States, and they will be determined not to repeat their mistakes. During the first Cold War, the then-Soviet Union, to which the Russian Federation is the modern-day successor, had what is considered to be a stagnant society and economy.

Censorship as the loser's strategy

Censorship was arguably a factor in the failure of the Soviet system. People are driven to find the awful truth about things, or at least see the countervailing point of view. When you restrict access to alternative views, even successfully, the effort almost always backfires.

At present, the aforementioned fault seems to be more apparent in the Western countries than Russia. The least popular variety of boring establishment "journalists", are the loudest in calling for suppressing competing information and curtailing freedom of expression on the very internet the West created and which Putin loathes. An example of this is their backlash against Substack.

Western states and their most obvious and vapid shills hate current Russian media networks such as the award-winning "Putin's propaganda channel" RT and Sputnik with a passion, making exaggerated claims about their apparent influence over Western audiences. In the original Cold War, the Russians didn't even possess such media with which to tempt anybody in the West.

For many unthinking people, there is likely a guilty allure to subversive foreign media, which explains both the alleged fascination of Russians with Western entertainment during the original Cold War and the current popularity of something like RT in Western countries. Western companies and authorities labelling RT as dangerous, foreign, and state-sponsored does nothing to reduce people's fascination with it and may only increase it.

We could see an escalation of attempts to stamp out Russian-backed media, going further than simply placing labels on it and moving more and more towards prosecuting journalists and banning points of view entirely. The West can be expected to be more heavy-handed than Russia, because it is backed up by an arrogant moral certitude implicit even in all news reporting on foreign policy, whereas the Russians merely speak of their national security.

A West no longer for freedom?

The sad reality is that in this Cold War, the establishment in the West is treading a boring path of ideological orthodoxy and restriction, and the foreign adversary is not. This is not just an immaterial difference of ideals in a contest of might, either. The attitude of automatically rejecting "enemy" points of view and denying people the right to even see them is potentially a threat to democratic models, dulling the intellect and pacifying political opposition.

Examples of Western ideological inflexibility are the commitment to imposing frameworks of LGBT rights, minority rights, and the freedom to offend religious sensibilities, even when such things divide their own alliances and cause discomfort especially among culturally diverse states. The West presents such things as universal and set to be accepted everywhere, which is far from certain even in Europe.

Western leaders want Russians to be portrayed as the ones afraid of information, afraid of human expression and liberty, as in the previous Cold War. However, with Western press arbitrarily branding all kinds of media stories as attacks or disinformation that need to be suppressed for the sake of democracy (like the blocked and then unblocked New York Post story in the US 2020 election), it is clear that Western states are at least as intolerant places for online dissent as Russia. The minutiae of how information and people are disappeared in the West and Russia may be different, but that is no basis to argue that the West is morally superior or better justified to make anything disappear.

If Western politicians and journalists are right in their claims about the threat of Russian disinformation and social media accounts, it means Russia has effectively turned what Putin considers to be a CIA weapon - the internet - into a tool against the West. It means the US, particularly the CIA, is profoundly confused about its role in the world, having believed it stood for freedom and encouraged technologies to facilitate just that, only to realise this was a mistake and will threaten American statehood too.

In branding the internet as a tool of foreign subversion of their political systems, Putin's enemies in the West are making his own case for him. Impose greater control and restrictions on what information is allowed online? Exactly what he wanted from the beginning. Only allow information that fits with one's national security interests? The Kremlin will be the first to agree with that sentiment.

The internet might be broken up

If the West wants to subvert adversarial influence and narratives on the internet, it will help Balkanise the internet. If Putin's comments about the internet being CIA reflect his views, then he is looking for this anyway. As such, those who continuously serve up stories and articulate concerns about Russian influence are doing Putin's work to destroy the CIA's weapon. It could be argued, of course, that this weapon should be subverted or destroyed, but that is another conversation.

The spread of deep suspicion about all media and the motives of those who produce it, rather than the content itself, may be the real foreign trick, and a clever one. If foreign interference or sympathising with the enemy is perceived in even a minor act of dissent, or any vocal form of opposition, nobody will be willing to correct or reform anything, which will eventually have repercussions for government and economic performance.

Truth Social, the social media service being pursued by Donald Trump, is likely to meet with similar problems to other attempts to create conservative-friendly social media services.

What happens without moderation is horrific

I joined alternate social media site Gab for a couple of weeks, to try it out, before promptly closing my account after getting a thorough look at what kind of repulsive people use the site. The best analogy is that if Twitter is a park, Gab is a lunatic asylum where the inmates are able to leave their cells and do whatever they want. Judging by the small and ideologically restrictive user base, it is obvious that users have their own way of silencing people and keeping them off the site, in a way that is possibly worse and certainly more arbitrary than any algorithm on Twitter.

A site that allows the full range of human behaviours, including the very worst, might seem to encourage liberty. But when bullies have free reign, how much liberty can there be? It is arguable that when the next person is free to do whatever they want, including degrade you, you have less freedom. The low numbers of people signed up to Gab, despite being aware of it, speak volumes about its failed appeal as a social network and the fact the user experience is more coercive than on Twitter.

It has been reported that even doxing is allowed on Gab. Almost everyone on the site has some fringe far-right view, and the user base is so small that it is more like a membership database for the few deranged cultists and violent psychopaths in society rather than a social network.

Social media isn't meant for extremism

Gab isn't a social network in the proper sense. It doesn't connect people, as is the purpose of a social network. Accounts promoting bizarre ideologies, while receiving no engagement and responding to nothing, are common. It is like all the bad accounts and spam accounts on Twitter got removed and put somewhere where they can carry on talking in a cell with no audience.

We have to remember that social networks were really just created so people can carry on interacting in a virtual space. They aren't propaganda machines. Any website created to mimic Twitter but mobilise political armies is doomed to failure, since that was never the appeal or purpose of Twitter in the first place.

Despite its seemingly libertarian credentials, most of the user profiles I saw on Gab were neo-Nazis, and one was even calling for the restoration of slavery in America. So, in other words, those who most enjoy the supposed freedom offered by Gab are users who want to literally take other people's freedom away, and they are looking for a space where they can advocate such things?

Conservatives often doomed to get themselves silenced

This is a common problem with some conservatives in America. They seem to be always the first to make references to freedom of speech when theirs is curtailed in any way, and the first to call for someone else's to be taken off them if they don't like what they heard. Exactly as with many liberals, it doesn't take much to convince conservatives to express alarm at mere words and call for the words to be stopped.

Finally, let us turn to the topic at hand - Trump's social media app, called Truth Social. The only feature of this app, that will make people use it, will be Trump. The existence of a Trump account there will cause some significant influencers, journalists, et cetera, and their followers across the world, to sign up to it. There is potential there for some diversity of thought, certainly a lot more than Gab. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.

However, if there is insufficient moderation of the content, the site will become overwhelmingly filled again with neo-Nazis and others posting extremist content and personal threats. If there is sufficient moderation, many conservatives will cry foul and not only leave the platform but could denounce Donald Trump in the process. As such, there is pressure to moderate it properly, and not moderate it properly, at the same time.

Why would Trump bother, if it is doomed?

What is certain is that the launch of the Truth Social app will probably have a significant effect and see a large spike in use if and when Donald Trump runs for president once again. Given that it may only be growing for a short time during such a campaign, and do well throughout it, its future decline will be unknown to us and its explosive success at the time will assist with Trump's chances of becoming president again.

It can be estimated that Truth Social will probably be banned from most app stores, including Apple's app store. It will be too controversial for business. However, even still, the "censorship" scandal associated with this and the fact people will still be able to make their way to the website will still have a positive effect on a hypothetical Trump campaign's performance.

To sum up, Truth Social will probably be a failure, especially if it is solely for political benefit and not as an actual social network with unique selling points and adequate moderation. If it is going to actually try to compete with Twitter and accommodate hard line conservatives kicked from Twitter, it will fail, but it could still have a positive effect on a hypothetical future Trump campaign. Whether that boosting effect on Trump's attempt to get re-elected will be decisive enough to return him to the White House remains to be seen.

And now the whole world is infected.

The United States' values, exported so confidently to the world, may be contradictory and confused when practised by such a powerful central state. They really are the values of a non-state militia, which the US government originated as.

The United States was founded by people who committed treason and riots. Since then, America emerged from a long isolation and into the fortunes of war and conquest, and then began presenting its anti-state values as a model for states. As such, not just modern liberal interventionism but even the values of 1776 are at fault for confusing and undermining other countries.

US allies like Britain, dependent on American military and economic power to look strong, pretend we share American values. We don't, and even promoting them verbally and repeating the rhetoric is incredibly foolish of British authorities, but that is a matter for another time.

America's presidents are encased in bullet-proof glass to protect themselves from their own ideology.

The right to overthrow tyrants

The American right to bear arms is, in the current view of Americans, meant to defend against an abusive government. In keeping with it, America stands ready to provide arms to people in other nations to help them overthrow their apparently oppressive rulers.

To teach someone that your country (the state) is for freedom (revolt against the state) produces such problems for a state as whistle-blowers who expose its war crimes and gunmen eager to shoot politicians. Although the former can be obviously beneficial to the community, neither are conducive to a super-state's effectiveness or power.

Even Julian Assange and other "anti-American" publishers, silenced by the US government, acted on values related to countering excessive government authority. Those are values that originated in the creation of the United States. They are eating one of their own children. Assange isn't motivated by the values of Russia, China, Germany or even Britain. In these countries, if you break the law, you are bad, and that is the end of it.

British authorities reacted more harshly to whistle-blowers and activists than even the Americans, just as they act more harshly towards any mockery of the government. The British authorities really are horrified simply at the idea that anyone might break the law under any circumstances, even if nobody gets hurt.

Only Americans, or those influenced by them, debate whether breaking their own laws is okay. Admittedly, though, America's influence is so vast that it now reaches all of us - even those who prefer not to admit it.

The "traitor" Edward Snowden was in fact a highly patriotic individual and, on a darker note, so were every American implicated in the treason of the January 6 Capitol Attack. They were firm believers in the US ideology, and it led them to become the biggest betrayers of the US government.

Domestic terrorist land

Unlike in other countries, American seditionists all think they are loyal to the nation, and they are doing as they were told. They were not indoctrinated by a foreign power or terrorists, but by their own constitution, their own government's rhetoric.

Even the wording of the pledge of allegiance allows for Americans to seemingly identify their own politicians as traitors. It does so by stating that you are not pledging allegiance to the state but to a written constitution that has enemies "foreign and domestic".

The US government makes a conscious attempt to avoid its values undermining itself, by shifting all the emphasis on freedom and liberty to an aggressive foreign policy against tyrants abroad while encouraging loyalty and obedience at home. The problem is that these are polar opposite values, and everyone at home is listening to the foreign policy rhetoric too.

If they want, Americans can just turn off the TV when the government appeals for loyalty and obedience, and watch the TV when their government celebrates the death of state officials and "tyrants". People are then left with a lust for the government's blood, thanks to its irresponsibility.

At least on social media, you are likely to find a significant overlap between those Americans who supported the Capitol Attack and those who voiced approval of uprisings in Iran, Venezuela and Cuba in keeping with US aims.

Every time the US government opens its mouth to talk about liberty and rising up against oppression, it is accidentally encouraging its own population to overthrow the government. Such messaging also pervades American culture. American movies extolling the virtues of overthrowing the state encourage them to overthrow the state.

While most states are accustomed to hypocrisy and breathe it to survive, normal citizens aren't. Most people try to stick to the values they hold in their hearts, and Americans are very much like that. They can't help trying to destroy the government if they have been taught an ideology that endorses destroying the government.

This explains the "domestic terrorism" problem. It isn't really new or alien to America, but is what made the country. From the moment those first domestic terrorists took up arms against Britain to gain independence, America was destined to be domestic terrorist land.

Loyalty or liberty?

The contradiction in how the US handles "freedom" is evident in the role the US played in creating the internet and encouraging it in other countries, and the extent to which it now fears foreign influence feeding back through the internet to America.

American engineers and entrepreneurs, who really believed in the values their state preached, actively created ways to encourage freedom and bypass censorship. The US state, however, turned out to be one of the biggest complainers about the internet and independent media, whining that Russians and others were using tiny social media accounts to undermine US democracy in 2016.

Social networks themselves showed signs of becoming state-like despite their anti-state origins too, and are provoking states to wrestle with them. Still, America and American companies demand other countries be "open" to their supposedly benign media influence, while America itself slams its doors to any other country's influence, labelling it as malign.

Militias are present in the US, and talk of opposing the government is commonplace. The groups see themselves as counterparts to fellow Reagan-style "freedom fighters", contras and protesters supported overseas by the machine of the American state.

Repeated US encouragement of overthrowing corrupt regimes and dismissing election results must have at least helped encourage the Capitol Attack on themselves, and the conflicted ideology encouraging disloyalty and loyalty makes it certain to happen again. Many Americans perceive their own government as a pretender, helped by their belief in values that always dismissed authority and celebrated mutiny.

Past isolationism and minimisation of the government's role allowed a country to exist despite its destabilising insurrectionist values. Thanks to their aggressive assertion across the world, such values are louder than ever but risk backfiring.

Social networking websites and apps aim to manage almost every aspect of your life, curtail your access to information and take responsibility for your safety. In this regard, they are replacing government authority with their own. But when it comes to a clash with states, can they win?

As some background, Russian President Vladimir Putin allegedly said at this year's Valdai forum that social media companies had attempted to take on some form of state-like authority and displace the state itself in this regard, and that they had failed. The remarks are quoted by Russian broadcaster RT.

Unfortunately, the source linked by RT is a more than three hour-long video with an English translation in which Putin does not seem to make the alleged remarks, so it is hard to tell what exactly he meant.

If the RT quote was valid, Putin may have said large tech companies tried to assume some roles traditionally held by governments, and the attempts were "fleeting". He would have claimed, "in the US, the owners of these platforms were taken down a peg or two as it was in Europe as well," with some clarity added that this was due to "anti-monopolisation measures".

So, what did Putin mean?

Antitrust laws

The European Union currently has the Digital Markets Act (DMA) on the cards, which apparently will prevent a tech company from trapping users in an operating system or bundle of apps that solely favours its own services (and by extension news feeds) over any other firm's. It also apparently hopes to make sure users can uninstall pre-installed apps, which presumably means preventing US digital giants from forcing European users to use their apps and look at their news feeds.

Antitrust lawsuits have already targeted large tech companies in the US and Australia, with Amazon and Apple often being in focus. Facebook has also had a hard time in Australia, where the government sought for Facebook to pay news outlets for their content and Facebook attempted to push back against the government with help from Alphabet (who own Google), by carrying out a news blackout. Back at the start of the year, the push from Facebook failed to deter the Australian government and in fact other governments took Australia's side.

Subduing African governments?

Social media companies are uniquely confrontational towards governments, lately seeing themselves as authorities on par with some governments. Silicon Valley-based corporations like Twitter certainly see themselves as more reliable and legitimate authorities than African governments, as can be seen from their enforcement actions targeting government accounts in Uganda and Ethiopia.

Twitter's removal of government communications because they promoted violence is an attempt to de-recognise a state, because the monopoly on the legal use of violence is a defining aspect of a state. It is also an ineffective and failed usurpation of the state's responsibilities, since a state can still commit or allow violence whether Twitter deletes posts about it or not.

Victory over Trump?

Some might consider the banning of Trump to be a victory of social media over the US state, but in reality Trump was always an outsider to the US state and it was the US state that defeated Trump. The other branches of the US government certainly hated Trump, as did a majority of lawmakers. The spectre of these state figures cracking down after the evident electoral defeat of Trump was the factor most responsible for compelling organisations like Twitter and Facebook to kick Trump off social media.

The behaviour of social networks certainly suggests they have or had a willingness to compel governments to do their bidding, yet they have been ineffective. The actions of Twitter in Africa have simply resulted in bans targeting the website. Governments have shown they are willing and capable of pushing back against what are really just weak outfits. Social networks can be forcibly broken up due to laws, taken offline or bankrupted by fines at any moment the state truly loses patience with them.

States as continuous victors

Whether or not Putin was actually making comments like the above or sought to discuss the above developments, I do not know. However, the reported observation that social networks are losing their battle with states is valid. There have been plenty of times when new media, organisations and other actors created upheaval in the internal and international order, but they are ultimately crushed under the tank-treads of whoever wields the real power. At this moment, that still means nation-states.

YouTube's decision to hide dislike counts on all videos is absurd and seems more like the result of a child's tantrum than an informed team decision. I say this as one of the first users of YouTube in the days when few had heard of it, who uploaded content and withstood heavy dislikes. Those were barbaric times, when the scary dislike bar was red with blood.

Without being able to see the number of dislikes on videos, the dislike button itself becomes redundant. Pushing it will do nothing for viewers except indicate to the person who pressed it, that they pressed it. It will serve no purpose, and might as well be removed too.

What will the new system even look like?

Without being able to see the dislikes on videos, being able to see the likes on videos is also of no consequence. YouTube did not explain how it would display the now-meaningless likes on a video while they compete against nothing. Yes, we are used to the competing like and dislike bars, formerly coloured before they were reduced to thin lines to look less impactful, and eventually turned grey as if to reduce the crimson stain of being disliked too much. Will there now simply be a grey line representing likes, always the same on every video, that doesn't indicate anything?

This might be an example of inclusivity and inoffensiveness reaching an extreme at which it undermines inclusivity itself - a point where the desire to value every voice comes full circle and instead excludes every voice. Moreover, if people are excluded from expressing their dislike of something, they still won't like the thing and their resentment may only be more intense, perhaps moving to an ever more offensive comments section.

Failure to fight disinformation

As well as causing other problems, YouTube's decision to remove the public dislike count may undermine its own fight against disinformation on the platform. A significant amount of false information, such as bogus science, proliferates on YouTube and is combated by a sensible and balanced community who dislike, flag and debunk such content. Removing the dislike button on such videos will remove an obvious sign that might have prevented people from falling for scams and disinformation. In short, YouTube's decision to help bad videos look good, to safeguard the feelings of bad creators, will probably allow internet conmen to take their game further and claim more victims.

Who is vandalising YouTube?

At the end of the day, the site and all the changes it makes are up to Google, and YouTube will continue to remain a very popular service despite this change. However, such a change points to a lack of talent or creativity.

YouTube complains that mobs are exploiting their system. However, if YouTube's hands only deface and destroy services and features, they are vandalising their own website rather than improving it. They won't make people more feel safer or more respected.

Pages