Yes, I agree. If Matt doesn't send the e-mail, I won't see the article. I'd rather get an e-mail for an article that I might not want to read (maybe the 10th entry in the sequence?) than not get an e-mail and miss an article that I do want to read.
Yes, was going to make this comment, but see it is already taken.
MT: Whatever you prefer -- don't mind checking substack regularly. But even if you were to send out a notification I didn't want every day (super unlikely), it would still be a small fraction of the actually unwanted stuff I get. Hard to imagine ever feeling overloaded by TK News.
Fmr. CIA Director John Brennan on WaPo's YouTube: "[The Hunter Biden laptop story] does bare all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation". (5:30, Oct. 2020) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gig1B8YWk14
YouTube's not taking that disinfo down either. Odd!
It really is. Sometimes just for the sake of doing it, IMO. Legacy of Ashes had a non-trivial amount of "what the frack is the point of this" misinformation campaigns.
Typo alert: Pretty sure the laptop story "does bear" the hallmarks of Russian disinfo. Not "bare," which means naked. On the other hand, in a perfect world, Brennan should be made to testify naked until he learned to stop lying about everything that issues from his lying pie hole.
But stories that support the narrative aren't really "disinformation" are they? It's just a way of looking at data and filling in the gaps, and then shaping and transforming it and eliminating irrelevancies that help get the reader (or watcher) to a deeper truth that happens to echo exactly the narrative that they want, and helps them preserve their power, which is an inarguable and primary good--so call it "disinformation" is really "disinformation" itself. Not because it's inaccurate, but because it gives people the wrong ideas and may lead them to make poor decisions.
I think it's time we get over our obsession with "accuracy" and "facts" and characterize "information" by how it benefits our elite expert class--which again is the highest good any "information" can aspire to. So any story or video that questions our elite expert class, or our leadership class, is "disinformation" by definition. Anything that supports and entrenches the power and supremacy of our elite expert and leadership classes is, by definition, "true".
Facts and data that are abused by bad actors to incorrectly influence the low-information public should not be considered "true".
Anyway, I think that's kind of where they are going with this.
I don't know much about law, but maybe look into digital gerrymandering - the selective presentation of information by an intermediary like Google/YouTube to meet its agenda rather than to serve its users. It's possible on any platform that personalizes, be it algorithmically or by manual curation, what it presents, particularly when there’s a digital choke point with an abundance of items offered up but only a few can be shown at a time.
By selectively arranging which stories/videos show up in searches, Google plays a much bigger role in influencing elections than most people realize. When the scale is big enough, tiny factors can have a profound impact.
Google also plays an enormous role in shaping the "research skills" taught to students, beginning at an early age. It's another monopoly, as is Google classroom, which of course uses Chrome.
Good thought. The challenge is that the law is far behind technology. There has to be the novel use of an existing theory to get something moving. Then the problem is dealing with the “it’s never been thought of this way before” argument.
Antitrust comes to mind, though I don’t know how the “marketplace for ideas” would necessarily be defined.
The midterms was supposedly a big disappointment for Republicans, but they still manage "win" every second or third election cycle despite almost all of traditional media and all of Big Tech allied to defeat them. One wonders...
I think this issue is less about who wins than what information is allowed out, what misinformation might be getting pushed by big tech, and what actual information might be getting censored.
Maybe something along the lines of honesty in advertising. They purport just to be a non- biased platform but clearly lean left. That is false labeling.
They also lean left in a specific way. To the benefit of Democrats generally (the DNC, specifically), and then sometimes certain Democrats (if the "wrong" Democrat is getting primaried, for example). The lean towards certain leftwing narratives but then may censor other leftwing narratives that are not consistent with the goals of neocons/neoliberals (such as anti-war commentary on a certain socialist website, deranked by Google because it was opposed to massive military spending for foreign wars when that became a position that was no longer acceptable for the "left" to hold). And so on. While it's primarily the right that gets nailed, harassed, and censored--there are also folks on the left who disagree with the current narrative in some way, in some area, that feel the hammer, too.
This subscriber echoes VFRMarine. YouTube must be held to account. Keep after 'em and share your efforts. I, too, would like to find a way to get this part of BigTech in a courtroom.
Thanks for the kind words. Thank you more for the explanation and information!
Law is an odd beast. Agreed that justice doesn’t like mistakes. The tools it has for remediation are few though. An AI probably can’t pay money damages. But, could the original programming company be vicariously liable for the damages?
The other tool that law has is some type of injunction - meaning to do or not do something. What would be the potential remedy?
The improper policing of thought by the AI is a tough legal argument. It’s more likely that such theories will gain weight as the injury lawyers make hay out of injuries caused by self-driving cars and robot surgeons. In both of those cases, it would be insurance companies paying anyway.
Here, it needs to be Alphabet for failure to supervise its “minor child”.
What they currently refer to as AI needs another descriptor that's more accurate--Like Learning Transformations. Or to Neural Network Programming or Adaptable Logic or something. It's doing some cool stuff but it's not intelligence, and has to be "taught" huge amounts to get even simple things right; there's very little rational extrapolation of patterns that humans do all the time, even animals. They are basically adaptable, modular software with very big databases to draw on. So when you have "AI" writing that writes stories, news, or novels better than human writers (and that's coming sooner rather than later), it still won't be intelligence in any true sense, it will be what fractal logic, minimal pattern processing, and a huge frackin' database of everything every written generates--with tons of education.
That said, there will be a point (soon, if it isn't true in some lab already) where entire YA book series could be written by "AI", using similar series as reference and perhaps one or a few initial novels. And I doubt it would take as much processing power or training as the AI art generators.
Propaganda writing will of course get lots of Learning Transformations applications. Why it's important to start figuring out how to weed out the bots in social media now. When you can get millions of applications that could pass the Turing test (but, again, aren't actually intelligent in any real sense) it will be good to be able to keep them out of comments sections and social spaces.
To believe these conspiracy theories, one must simultaneously believe that "Russia" has powers of persuasion bordering on psychic mind control, not to mention better insight into American elections and messaging than the best statisticians and campaign consultants that money can buy, and at the same time, one must also believe that Russia apparently has no clue how to use any of these superpowers.
Fortunately for Muh Freedom, the conspiracy theorists themselves are totally immune to Russian Mind Control antics. Just ask them.
Of course, if anyone actually believed that "Russia" could do even half of what is routinely attributed to her, every advertiser in the land would be begging Russia to run their next ad campaign, every MBA student with a marketing concentration would be studying in Moscow or St.P.. Anything else would be like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
So true. For all the talk about "fake news," nobody seemed to question whether or not it was influential. That, and the scale of "Russian interference" is rarely talked about because it was comically small.
Per Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Research Project, the Russians spent an infinitesimal amount of money on social media memes and ads: $73,711 between 2015 and 2017, with about $46,000 spent on Facebook ads before the 2016 election. For context, that amounts to about 0.05% of the $81 million spent on Facebook ads by the Clinton and Trump campaigns combined.
If you actually *read* the much-hyped Mueller indictment, it actually states that the Internet Research Agency was, in fact, a "commercial operation", that is, it was a clickbait troll farm. Very scary, when a clickbait troll farm threatens Our Democracy As We Know It.
As it was Mueller had to withdraw his indictment, under threat of court sanctions, for being unable to provide any evidence that the Internet Research Agency had any connection with the Russian government.
In other words, Mueller ran his yap, the IRA called his bluff, and he had to fold.
Oddly, none of this was widely reported at the the time, or subsequently.
Also, am I the only one who remembers when The Guardian tried to organize a campaign for British people to call swing state voters in 2004 to encourage them to vote for Kerry? So why wasn't that a case of Interfering In Muh Precious Democracy?
I remember that. And folks like John LeCarre (whose books i love, can't remember who the others were) writing snide little missives telling us how to vote. The problem is all they see of us is foreign policy. Non-American folks don't seem to see the day to day stuff that we vote on, and mostly particular to the state and region that we live in.
The Press (anywhere) can't interfere in elections, BTW, because they are the 4th estate, 100% honest, called to their vocation by God Herself, and only exist to do good. And also are the most important people in the world, in all ways, and must always believed, and are always correct about everything.
So that was just The Guardian doing the Lord's work. Praise be to our priestly journalist class!
Funny how I so often hear that Julian Assange cannot be a "journalist" and therefore protected by Freedom of Speech because he is allegedly biased.
Of course, the First Amendment say nothing about "journalism", nor are freedom of speech and the press reserved to that priestly caste. And of course, our Famously Free And Independent MSM never ever would resort to bias, heaven forfend.
Assange didn't go to j-school. So he was never blessed by the bishops.
Everyone has a bias. Ever journalist and media organization selects what to include and what to exclude, flavoring the story, even if they are trying their best to be 100% objective. The argument that Assange is not protected by the 1st amendment in the US is nuts.
I think there are laws that can apply in terms of the acquisition of sensitive data that isn't protected by the 1st amendment, and those might apply to Assange, but the distribution of information would 100% be protected in any rational reading of the 1st amendment.
Of course. The arguments advanced for the silencing and judicial murder of Assange are rationalizations, delivered in bad faith by persons whose behavior is indistinguishable from that of sociopaths.
On a wholly similar page - why isn't it illegal for New Yorkers to knock on doors for the Pennsylvania Senate and Gubernatorial elections? Isn't this "interfering" in another state's "democracy"?
This was clear to anybody remotely aware of how the Internet operates before the 2016 election. Intent was not election interference but finding which memes produced the most clicks, getting and trying to keep people on those pages long enough for enough ads to load that the click generated a few cents for them.
To anyone with any level of expertise in online marketing and most casual web browsers, this should have been obvious. There is no way that the people in media, in tech, and at the intelligence agencies that were advancing the narrative did not know this.
It was all a huge misinformation op. Apparently Mueller wasn't read in.
As I recall some of the click-baity stuff was coming from click farms in the Ukraine. I don't have a source to cite but my mind (not always reliable) seems to recall that, with the implication that the Russian government had psyops operations running out of Ukraine. Which I suppose is possible. But everything pointed to it also being an independently run clickbait operation.
Mueller surely knew all this as well, or at least he was clued-in. He did not care, since his goal was to "prove" evil nefarious Russian conspiracy, so he did.
Just that his case collapsed when the IRA called his bluff.
Thank you for pointing this out. The media (or our government, currently struggling to separate the two) NEVER provides the actual numbers. Hmmm, just like the actual number of unarmed black men killed by the police in the US annually. The media is all about narratives now, not facts or numbers because those are boring and need to be validated. I think Daniel Pink predicted this in a way with his book A Whole New Mind, which claimed that the future belonged to the people who could actually craft a compelling narrative. I don't think he imagined it would be misused in this manner!
I had heard Russia spent nearly $200k on Facebook ads alone. And obviously, I and my entire family made all of our voting decisions on the fact we saw "Is Hillary linked to Murder??" memes 7 times during the election cycle.
The monopoly that Google and YouTube enjoys is much different than monopolies of old—think Andrew Carnegie’s Steel Company (now U.S. Steel) or John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. The product over which Google has a monopoly is us: Our attention, our personal information, our content—the three key ingredients for human manipulation in the 21st century.
A central responsibility of an information intermediary is, or ought to be, refraining from using data in ways designed to further the political goals of the intermediary. When Google’s employees or algorithms block our access to information about a news story, business, or politician, reputations can be ruined, businesses can crumble, and opinions and votes can shift. Moreover, since its inception and in contrast to other companies, the tech giant has maintained incestuous relationships with Democratic administrations.
When I was young "Ma Bell" was broken up, because that telephone company that was only like a verbal Post Office was thought to be too powerful. What Google and Facebook and Apple, etc. are doing is reworking society, culture. A very cold, machine friendly view of humans and the world.
Ma Bell should have been broken up. For kind of the same reasons. They had the power to make it illegal for other companies to make phones, or sell them. They made it illegal for consumers to buy non-AT&T phones. Made it illegal for consumers to mess with the phone wiring in their homes or wired the house up themselves. They were a commercial company acting as a de facto government agency.
Sort of like big tech is doing today. So your argument is sound.
Ultimately, I don't have any huge objection to the Google monopoly in an of itself, or the Twitter monopoly, or the Facebook monopoly. These are (mostly) natural monopolies, and superior versions could supplant them. There's lots of competition for YouTube (one of the reasons that YouTube's censorship regime is much lighter than it would otherwise be, IMO). While there is competition for Google and I don't think most of it will ever get near to supplanting Google, because products like Bing and DuckDuckGo are clearly modeled after Google. If I was designing a search engine, I'd do something more like HotBot (where users could vote on search results) but also provide more robust search tools, constantly expanding, to do the kinds of deep data dives some people want to do.
Of course, I'd also make searches that primarily generate news stories or opinion pieces interject countervailing sources, so a Daily Wire report would be followed by an MSNBC piece or vice versa. I'd have the search crawling archive all changes, forever, so that it was also an Internet Archive. I just feel like a bunch of smart people could sit down and design a search engine far more robust than Google . . . which begins to make me wonder how much of a natural monopoly it actually is.
Also the fact it is a monopoly suggests to me that they aren't that interested, anymore, in improving their product. Why would they be? 15, 20 years ago, all the cash they were burning seemed dedicated to new tools, new ways to search, new ways to display data, etc., etc. Now they spend more money and have far more employees but I can't remember the last time I saw a new data visualization or "wow that's cool" search function pop-up. I've seen them kill some of the things they did back in the day, though. Lots of them.
You Tube tries to curry favor with political power, as do all social media companies. I wonder, though, if neo-Marxist/woke/identitarianism wasn't the current paradigm, if by some fluke nationalist conservative classical Liberalism was the current regime's ethos, would these communications corporations be censoring the left?
Not if this hypothetical regime considered the First Amendment's free speech clause to be absolute, which they would if they were ideologically consistent.
Ultimately, the wanna-be censors at Google and Youtube and Facebook are attracted to power and control, so yes, that's what they would be doing. As long as they were the one's in charge, most of them would be fine with it (and would have likely grown up in an environment where they intuitively new that the power to control and censor was on the right).
It's why the ACLU is now pro-censorship. It's why the left generally is now so pro-censorship. They were all for free speech when they lacked full cultural and institutional power. Now that they do, it's the best thing since sliced bread.
Regardless of what one thinks about Orange Man Bad, if "THEY" can lie about this kind of stuff "THEY" can lie about anything or make stuff up about ANYBODY. This is despicable and dangerous. Kudos Matt and team for setting the record straight.
And they might take a hit or two, but if you zoom out a little you realize this is the perfect time for the story to 'break'. Just after midterms, so that by 2024 it can be 'old news' that 'nobody wants to rehash'.
They are not capable of learning any lessons. They don't think they have anything to learn, they already know and are right about everything, all the time, even if what the know is the opposite from what they knew yesterday. They are right, have always been right, will always be right. Nothing for them to learn.
It's the peasants that need to learn. And they will teach us!
As a subscriber, I would also prefer you continue to clog my email. I don't tend to check the site because I expect email notifications of new posts and would prefer to continue to do so.
I use the Duck but if - gasp! - you put in the news and look for Fox you can't find it unless you scroll way down. The Duck is not as ducky as they want us to think but better than nuttin.
I think that they were squeezed like every other so-called search engine to stick with the MSMs or else. My belief system has been taken over by Russia, Russia, Russia!
But Fox seems to show up near the top of most other search engines, including YT and Yahoo news? I tend to be Conservative and look for contracry perspectives instead of Fox, but they always seem to be around.
I don't think the algos are always necessarily as nefarious as many like to believe. Once they know who you are and what you like, you can see how things change and it's often quite convenient, until you want to be contrary to your habits.
Can also be their algorithms are being gamed, but the MSM but possibly 3rd parties creating widespread links to stories, bots repeatedly clicking on certain results, etc. Don't know how DuckDuckGo weights it's search results but the possibility of other tech companies or activist groups gaming their search algorithms also seems to be a possibility.
Indeed. I prefer Google for most of my searches, which are not political in nature.
If I'm looking for something on a hot news story or related to politics or opinion (or the news, or something covered by Project Veritas, etc), I go to DuckDuckGo. I agree with Barbara below--it's far from ideal. And that may be because it's being gamed by the big news sources. But it's better than nothing.
I disagree. Keep posting until they ban Orfalea totally, then sue them for violating their own terms of service. Simply leaving is EXACTLY what YouTube wants him to do, don't you think?
Currently, YouTube may prefer that Matt leave the platform rather than deal with this moderation issue. If, however, enough people leave for alternative platforms over moderation/censorship then that paradigm quickly shifts and either YouTube changes or dies.
Some content producers have to be the early departures and be willing to take the personal loss of reach/distribution for the greater good (on principal).
The answer is for content providers to maximize their reach and have their content on YouTube, Rumble, etc. They need to keep themselves in the position of not being silenced just because YouTube pulls the plug.
"...major news media...actively embraced disinformation, in the form of a group letter...saying the laptop story (they referred to a “laptop op”) had the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
"the classic earmarks" LOL! Paging Maxwell Smart!
"All the aforementioned news agencies fell for this..."
No one "fell for this" unless you also think that if you commit a crime and I agree to provide an alibi, you are "falling for" it. They didn't "fall for it" so much as create and embrace it.
"Russian disinformation" is the new "I see the hand of Satan!" for our corporate Pravda class, who really just needed a plausible fig leaf to cover their strategy of making sure they did whatever was necessary to help Biden beat Trump.
Since we're bringing back old chestnuts of political hysteria, how bout we resurrect George W's "Axis of Evil" and apply it to the Big Tech/Big Media/Democratic Party axis, who hate America and Americans as much as an ayatollah ever did, and who are engaged in a desperate drive to gain and maintain full control over American discourse (aka "save democracy" LOL), our rights or freedoms be damned.
I fully support calling out Google/YouTube/FB/the MSM's lies and bullshit propaganda, for as long as it takes. Fuck the oligarchs, fuck the deep state ghouls, and fuck their bootlicking media handmaidens - may they all rot in Hell.
Are there any ways for us viewers at home to boost the signal on these articles? Anywhere we could be sharing?
Why not read a book, or take a walk, or go canoeing? I'd say "Google/YouTube/FB/the MSM's lies and bullshit propaganda," have presently got your number, will continue to have your number--- "for as long as it takes."
Being as how the article isn’t about me and my reading and/or canoeing habits, but *is* about the disgusting censorship and lies being distributed by (chiefly, in this case) YouTube, I’d be curious to know if you have anything to add to the discussion?
Second, I’d say you know precisely nothing about me, and that you may wish to jog on instead of making asinine ad hominems.
Passivity is not the best or even always the natural response. Although I support taking walks and reading books, but I suspect the poster can do all those things and also read Matt's articles on the MSM.
You’ve seen the average YouTube comments section, right? If our goal was to convince the spam/scam bots to join us it might be a good place to start, but otherwise not what I’d call a signal boost to change hearts and minds.
It really depends on what you’re watching on YT. Lex Fridman’s interviews for example have very smart comments. Jordan Peterson’s recent interview of Stella Assange was also void of idiotic comments.
I think it’s more that those who listen to/watch those sorts of podcasts/interviews aren’t assholes for the most part. It takes a fair amount of maturity to be interested in such in depth media. But you may be correct.
Keep clogging my inbox with the good fight here Matt!
Yes, I agree. If Matt doesn't send the e-mail, I won't see the article. I'd rather get an e-mail for an article that I might not want to read (maybe the 10th entry in the sequence?) than not get an e-mail and miss an article that I do want to read.
Yes, we are Happy Warriors yearning to slake our thirst with Truth! Fight on!
This ^^
This^^
Download the app
same
Yes, was going to make this comment, but see it is already taken.
MT: Whatever you prefer -- don't mind checking substack regularly. But even if you were to send out a notification I didn't want every day (super unlikely), it would still be a small fraction of the actually unwanted stuff I get. Hard to imagine ever feeling overloaded by TK News.
Mine too!!
Agree!
Agreed.
Yep.
Fmr. CIA Director John Brennan on WaPo's YouTube: "[The Hunter Biden laptop story] does bare all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation". (5:30, Oct. 2020) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gig1B8YWk14
YouTube's not taking that disinfo down either. Odd!
Keep fighting, Orf, and we will keep backing you!
What's the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth?
These days it's about 3 months.
About a day...
CIAs main purpose is to spread lies.
It really is. Sometimes just for the sake of doing it, IMO. Legacy of Ashes had a non-trivial amount of "what the frack is the point of this" misinformation campaigns.
Typo alert: Pretty sure the laptop story "does bear" the hallmarks of Russian disinfo. Not "bare," which means naked. On the other hand, in a perfect world, Brennan should be made to testify naked until he learned to stop lying about everything that issues from his lying pie hole.
Matt (and Matt) -- isn't it libel when the publisher has "knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for truth" ? Why not sue YouTube for defamation?
Meanwhile, "I know a clogged mailbox. That clogged mailbox is a friend of mine. Mr. Taibbi, you are no clogged mailbox."
Do you think they'd temp a stay in the gulag?
But stories that support the narrative aren't really "disinformation" are they? It's just a way of looking at data and filling in the gaps, and then shaping and transforming it and eliminating irrelevancies that help get the reader (or watcher) to a deeper truth that happens to echo exactly the narrative that they want, and helps them preserve their power, which is an inarguable and primary good--so call it "disinformation" is really "disinformation" itself. Not because it's inaccurate, but because it gives people the wrong ideas and may lead them to make poor decisions.
I think it's time we get over our obsession with "accuracy" and "facts" and characterize "information" by how it benefits our elite expert class--which again is the highest good any "information" can aspire to. So any story or video that questions our elite expert class, or our leadership class, is "disinformation" by definition. Anything that supports and entrenches the power and supremacy of our elite expert and leadership classes is, by definition, "true".
Facts and data that are abused by bad actors to incorrectly influence the low-information public should not be considered "true".
Anyway, I think that's kind of where they are going with this.
Give ‘‘em hell, Matt. I’m as invested in this crusade as you are at this point
Please keep me informed. I won’t speak for the rest of subscribers. There is a public interest in speaking truth to the algorithms of power.
Also, as an attorney, I keep following along looking for the way to haul the BigTech nonsense to the courthouse.
I don't know much about law, but maybe look into digital gerrymandering - the selective presentation of information by an intermediary like Google/YouTube to meet its agenda rather than to serve its users. It's possible on any platform that personalizes, be it algorithmically or by manual curation, what it presents, particularly when there’s a digital choke point with an abundance of items offered up but only a few can be shown at a time.
By selectively arranging which stories/videos show up in searches, Google plays a much bigger role in influencing elections than most people realize. When the scale is big enough, tiny factors can have a profound impact.
https://euphoricrecall.substack.com/p/googlegov-part-2
Google also plays an enormous role in shaping the "research skills" taught to students, beginning at an early age. It's another monopoly, as is Google classroom, which of course uses Chrome.
Yes! Control of the marketplace of ideas. Hmm???
Indeed....
Good thought. The challenge is that the law is far behind technology. There has to be the novel use of an existing theory to get something moving. Then the problem is dealing with the “it’s never been thought of this way before” argument.
Antitrust comes to mind, though I don’t know how the “marketplace for ideas” would necessarily be defined.
The midterms was supposedly a big disappointment for Republicans, but they still manage "win" every second or third election cycle despite almost all of traditional media and all of Big Tech allied to defeat them. One wonders...
I think this issue is less about who wins than what information is allowed out, what misinformation might be getting pushed by big tech, and what actual information might be getting censored.
Indeed, and they definitely wanted to fix that mistake. ;)
That said, would prefer an even playing field, and for the big tech players not to put their thumb on the scale so much.
Be careful, he may take that as a compliment.
Maybe something along the lines of honesty in advertising. They purport just to be a non- biased platform but clearly lean left. That is false labeling.
They also lean left in a specific way. To the benefit of Democrats generally (the DNC, specifically), and then sometimes certain Democrats (if the "wrong" Democrat is getting primaried, for example). The lean towards certain leftwing narratives but then may censor other leftwing narratives that are not consistent with the goals of neocons/neoliberals (such as anti-war commentary on a certain socialist website, deranked by Google because it was opposed to massive military spending for foreign wars when that became a position that was no longer acceptable for the "left" to hold). And so on. While it's primarily the right that gets nailed, harassed, and censored--there are also folks on the left who disagree with the current narrative in some way, in some area, that feel the hammer, too.
THIS! ^^
This subscriber echoes VFRMarine. YouTube must be held to account. Keep after 'em and share your efforts. I, too, would like to find a way to get this part of BigTech in a courtroom.
DOJ will fight you at every opportunity. Luckily, they are usually political dolts.
Problem with DOJ is that it has unlimited resources. Better to bring the case when there’s a more receptive administration.
The whistleblower compensation for something like this would be astronomical.
Thanks for the kind words. Thank you more for the explanation and information!
Law is an odd beast. Agreed that justice doesn’t like mistakes. The tools it has for remediation are few though. An AI probably can’t pay money damages. But, could the original programming company be vicariously liable for the damages?
The other tool that law has is some type of injunction - meaning to do or not do something. What would be the potential remedy?
The improper policing of thought by the AI is a tough legal argument. It’s more likely that such theories will gain weight as the injury lawyers make hay out of injuries caused by self-driving cars and robot surgeons. In both of those cases, it would be insurance companies paying anyway.
Here, it needs to be Alphabet for failure to supervise its “minor child”.
I can run with 'augmented interference' perhaps even more.
Augmented inference is a perfect way to describe it.
What they currently refer to as AI needs another descriptor that's more accurate--Like Learning Transformations. Or to Neural Network Programming or Adaptable Logic or something. It's doing some cool stuff but it's not intelligence, and has to be "taught" huge amounts to get even simple things right; there's very little rational extrapolation of patterns that humans do all the time, even animals. They are basically adaptable, modular software with very big databases to draw on. So when you have "AI" writing that writes stories, news, or novels better than human writers (and that's coming sooner rather than later), it still won't be intelligence in any true sense, it will be what fractal logic, minimal pattern processing, and a huge frackin' database of everything every written generates--with tons of education.
That said, there will be a point (soon, if it isn't true in some lab already) where entire YA book series could be written by "AI", using similar series as reference and perhaps one or a few initial novels. And I doubt it would take as much processing power or training as the AI art generators.
Propaganda writing will of course get lots of Learning Transformations applications. Why it's important to start figuring out how to weed out the bots in social media now. When you can get millions of applications that could pass the Turing test (but, again, aren't actually intelligent in any real sense) it will be good to be able to keep them out of comments sections and social spaces.
Glad you’re not taking this lying down. Let us subscribers know if there’s anything we can do to amplify the embarrassment!
Spread the link further on social media and elsewhere... it will help MT’s fight against brazen censorship
To believe these conspiracy theories, one must simultaneously believe that "Russia" has powers of persuasion bordering on psychic mind control, not to mention better insight into American elections and messaging than the best statisticians and campaign consultants that money can buy, and at the same time, one must also believe that Russia apparently has no clue how to use any of these superpowers.
Fortunately for Muh Freedom, the conspiracy theorists themselves are totally immune to Russian Mind Control antics. Just ask them.
Of course, if anyone actually believed that "Russia" could do even half of what is routinely attributed to her, every advertiser in the land would be begging Russia to run their next ad campaign, every MBA student with a marketing concentration would be studying in Moscow or St.P.. Anything else would be like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
So true. For all the talk about "fake news," nobody seemed to question whether or not it was influential. That, and the scale of "Russian interference" is rarely talked about because it was comically small.
Per Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Research Project, the Russians spent an infinitesimal amount of money on social media memes and ads: $73,711 between 2015 and 2017, with about $46,000 spent on Facebook ads before the 2016 election. For context, that amounts to about 0.05% of the $81 million spent on Facebook ads by the Clinton and Trump campaigns combined.
If you actually *read* the much-hyped Mueller indictment, it actually states that the Internet Research Agency was, in fact, a "commercial operation", that is, it was a clickbait troll farm. Very scary, when a clickbait troll farm threatens Our Democracy As We Know It.
As it was Mueller had to withdraw his indictment, under threat of court sanctions, for being unable to provide any evidence that the Internet Research Agency had any connection with the Russian government.
In other words, Mueller ran his yap, the IRA called his bluff, and he had to fold.
Oddly, none of this was widely reported at the the time, or subsequently.
Also, am I the only one who remembers when The Guardian tried to organize a campaign for British people to call swing state voters in 2004 to encourage them to vote for Kerry? So why wasn't that a case of Interfering In Muh Precious Democracy?
I remember that. And folks like John LeCarre (whose books i love, can't remember who the others were) writing snide little missives telling us how to vote. The problem is all they see of us is foreign policy. Non-American folks don't seem to see the day to day stuff that we vote on, and mostly particular to the state and region that we live in.
The Press (anywhere) can't interfere in elections, BTW, because they are the 4th estate, 100% honest, called to their vocation by God Herself, and only exist to do good. And also are the most important people in the world, in all ways, and must always believed, and are always correct about everything.
So that was just The Guardian doing the Lord's work. Praise be to our priestly journalist class!
Funny how I so often hear that Julian Assange cannot be a "journalist" and therefore protected by Freedom of Speech because he is allegedly biased.
Of course, the First Amendment say nothing about "journalism", nor are freedom of speech and the press reserved to that priestly caste. And of course, our Famously Free And Independent MSM never ever would resort to bias, heaven forfend.
Assange didn't go to j-school. So he was never blessed by the bishops.
Everyone has a bias. Ever journalist and media organization selects what to include and what to exclude, flavoring the story, even if they are trying their best to be 100% objective. The argument that Assange is not protected by the 1st amendment in the US is nuts.
I think there are laws that can apply in terms of the acquisition of sensitive data that isn't protected by the 1st amendment, and those might apply to Assange, but the distribution of information would 100% be protected in any rational reading of the 1st amendment.
Of course. The arguments advanced for the silencing and judicial murder of Assange are rationalizations, delivered in bad faith by persons whose behavior is indistinguishable from that of sociopaths.
The Moral Guardian is neither.
Sieg heil to the little Reich.
On a wholly similar page - why isn't it illegal for New Yorkers to knock on doors for the Pennsylvania Senate and Gubernatorial elections? Isn't this "interfering" in another state's "democracy"?
Same with sending money to candidates in another state.
"that is, it was a clickbait troll farm"
This was clear to anybody remotely aware of how the Internet operates before the 2016 election. Intent was not election interference but finding which memes produced the most clicks, getting and trying to keep people on those pages long enough for enough ads to load that the click generated a few cents for them.
To anyone with any level of expertise in online marketing and most casual web browsers, this should have been obvious. There is no way that the people in media, in tech, and at the intelligence agencies that were advancing the narrative did not know this.
It was all a huge misinformation op. Apparently Mueller wasn't read in.
As I recall some of the click-baity stuff was coming from click farms in the Ukraine. I don't have a source to cite but my mind (not always reliable) seems to recall that, with the implication that the Russian government had psyops operations running out of Ukraine. Which I suppose is possible. But everything pointed to it also being an independently run clickbait operation.
Mueller surely knew all this as well, or at least he was clued-in. He did not care, since his goal was to "prove" evil nefarious Russian conspiracy, so he did.
Just that his case collapsed when the IRA called his bluff.
Thank you for pointing this out. The media (or our government, currently struggling to separate the two) NEVER provides the actual numbers. Hmmm, just like the actual number of unarmed black men killed by the police in the US annually. The media is all about narratives now, not facts or numbers because those are boring and need to be validated. I think Daniel Pink predicted this in a way with his book A Whole New Mind, which claimed that the future belonged to the people who could actually craft a compelling narrative. I don't think he imagined it would be misused in this manner!
Thanks for the book recommendation, I completely agree about the power of narratives!
The future has always belonged to whoever crafted the more compelling narrative tbh.
"Narrative" = "fiction" = "lie"
I had heard Russia spent nearly $200k on Facebook ads alone. And obviously, I and my entire family made all of our voting decisions on the fact we saw "Is Hillary linked to Murder??" memes 7 times during the election cycle.
There are a few posters I’m as eager to see comment as I am to read the article from Mr. Taibbi, you are one of them, Feral.
The Finster aims to please.
The monopoly that Google and YouTube enjoys is much different than monopolies of old—think Andrew Carnegie’s Steel Company (now U.S. Steel) or John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. The product over which Google has a monopoly is us: Our attention, our personal information, our content—the three key ingredients for human manipulation in the 21st century.
https://euphoricrecall.substack.com/p/googlegov-part-1
A central responsibility of an information intermediary is, or ought to be, refraining from using data in ways designed to further the political goals of the intermediary. When Google’s employees or algorithms block our access to information about a news story, business, or politician, reputations can be ruined, businesses can crumble, and opinions and votes can shift. Moreover, since its inception and in contrast to other companies, the tech giant has maintained incestuous relationships with Democratic administrations.
When I was young "Ma Bell" was broken up, because that telephone company that was only like a verbal Post Office was thought to be too powerful. What Google and Facebook and Apple, etc. are doing is reworking society, culture. A very cold, machine friendly view of humans and the world.
Ma Bell should have been broken up. For kind of the same reasons. They had the power to make it illegal for other companies to make phones, or sell them. They made it illegal for consumers to buy non-AT&T phones. Made it illegal for consumers to mess with the phone wiring in their homes or wired the house up themselves. They were a commercial company acting as a de facto government agency.
Sort of like big tech is doing today. So your argument is sound.
Ultimately, I don't have any huge objection to the Google monopoly in an of itself, or the Twitter monopoly, or the Facebook monopoly. These are (mostly) natural monopolies, and superior versions could supplant them. There's lots of competition for YouTube (one of the reasons that YouTube's censorship regime is much lighter than it would otherwise be, IMO). While there is competition for Google and I don't think most of it will ever get near to supplanting Google, because products like Bing and DuckDuckGo are clearly modeled after Google. If I was designing a search engine, I'd do something more like HotBot (where users could vote on search results) but also provide more robust search tools, constantly expanding, to do the kinds of deep data dives some people want to do.
Of course, I'd also make searches that primarily generate news stories or opinion pieces interject countervailing sources, so a Daily Wire report would be followed by an MSNBC piece or vice versa. I'd have the search crawling archive all changes, forever, so that it was also an Internet Archive. I just feel like a bunch of smart people could sit down and design a search engine far more robust than Google . . . which begins to make me wonder how much of a natural monopoly it actually is.
Also the fact it is a monopoly suggests to me that they aren't that interested, anymore, in improving their product. Why would they be? 15, 20 years ago, all the cash they were burning seemed dedicated to new tools, new ways to search, new ways to display data, etc., etc. Now they spend more money and have far more employees but I can't remember the last time I saw a new data visualization or "wow that's cool" search function pop-up. I've seen them kill some of the things they did back in the day, though. Lots of them.
Maybe some complacency has set in after years of having their way in the marketplace and being wooed by government agencies.
I came across this, which seems like it might be useful for news junkies:
https://newscompare.com/
You Tube tries to curry favor with political power, as do all social media companies. I wonder, though, if neo-Marxist/woke/identitarianism wasn't the current paradigm, if by some fluke nationalist conservative classical Liberalism was the current regime's ethos, would these communications corporations be censoring the left?
Not if this hypothetical regime considered the First Amendment's free speech clause to be absolute, which they would if they were ideologically consistent.
Ultimately, the wanna-be censors at Google and Youtube and Facebook are attracted to power and control, so yes, that's what they would be doing. As long as they were the one's in charge, most of them would be fine with it (and would have likely grown up in an environment where they intuitively new that the power to control and censor was on the right).
It's why the ACLU is now pro-censorship. It's why the left generally is now so pro-censorship. They were all for free speech when they lacked full cultural and institutional power. Now that they do, it's the best thing since sliced bread.
Regardless of what one thinks about Orange Man Bad, if "THEY" can lie about this kind of stuff "THEY" can lie about anything or make stuff up about ANYBODY. This is despicable and dangerous. Kudos Matt and team for setting the record straight.
The NYT, et al, really ought to have their noses rubbed in this - just like a puppy being housebroken.
And they might take a hit or two, but if you zoom out a little you realize this is the perfect time for the story to 'break'. Just after midterms, so that by 2024 it can be 'old news' that 'nobody wants to rehash'.
Excellent point.
They are not capable of learning any lessons. They don't think they have anything to learn, they already know and are right about everything, all the time, even if what the know is the opposite from what they knew yesterday. They are right, have always been right, will always be right. Nothing for them to learn.
It's the peasants that need to learn. And they will teach us!
As a subscriber, I would also prefer you continue to clog my email. I don't tend to check the site because I expect email notifications of new posts and would prefer to continue to do so.
Keep fighting!
I'm using Duckduckgo now for my searches and am shocked how much easier it is to find content on unwoke topics. Much more FTX content.
Also, trying to use Rumble more, but Youtube owns so much more content, it'll be tough to cut the ties altogether.
I use the Duck but if - gasp! - you put in the news and look for Fox you can't find it unless you scroll way down. The Duck is not as ducky as they want us to think but better than nuttin.
Try the Brave browser. More private than Duck Duck Go.
try luxxle and qwant as alternatives. both are pretty good although if you need a map . . .
Thanks, I'll give them a try.
Any idea of why that is?
I noticed that the other day, but thought it was an exception.
I think that they were squeezed like every other so-called search engine to stick with the MSMs or else. My belief system has been taken over by Russia, Russia, Russia!
But Fox seems to show up near the top of most other search engines, including YT and Yahoo news? I tend to be Conservative and look for contracry perspectives instead of Fox, but they always seem to be around.
I don't think the algos are always necessarily as nefarious as many like to believe. Once they know who you are and what you like, you can see how things change and it's often quite convenient, until you want to be contrary to your habits.
That makes sense....thanks.
I'd always prefer to prospect myself and respond badly to any manipulation, but certainly see that most people are probably looking for confirmation.
Your question answers itself. Fox is the "controlled opposition".
Can also be their algorithms are being gamed, but the MSM but possibly 3rd parties creating widespread links to stories, bots repeatedly clicking on certain results, etc. Don't know how DuckDuckGo weights it's search results but the possibility of other tech companies or activist groups gaming their search algorithms also seems to be a possibility.
Hopefully twitter will add a web search because I’ve had it with google.
Indeed. I prefer Google for most of my searches, which are not political in nature.
If I'm looking for something on a hot news story or related to politics or opinion (or the news, or something covered by Project Veritas, etc), I go to DuckDuckGo. I agree with Barbara below--it's far from ideal. And that may be because it's being gamed by the big news sources. But it's better than nothing.
I love hearing all the rants (I wrote one myself today!) -- but when are you going to actually get off YouTube?
The most powerful thing you can do is withdraw your consent.
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/countering-the-control-crisis
I disagree. Keep posting until they ban Orfalea totally, then sue them for violating their own terms of service. Simply leaving is EXACTLY what YouTube wants him to do, don't you think?
Currently, YouTube may prefer that Matt leave the platform rather than deal with this moderation issue. If, however, enough people leave for alternative platforms over moderation/censorship then that paradigm quickly shifts and either YouTube changes or dies.
Some content producers have to be the early departures and be willing to take the personal loss of reach/distribution for the greater good (on principal).
The idea that any significant number of people will leave Google/YouTube is fantasy. If somebody leaves in protest, they're only hurting themselves.
I'm not saying this is how things should be. Just how they are.
The answer is for content providers to maximize their reach and have their content on YouTube, Rumble, etc. They need to keep themselves in the position of not being silenced just because YouTube pulls the plug.
My thoughts exactly
"...major news media...actively embraced disinformation, in the form of a group letter...saying the laptop story (they referred to a “laptop op”) had the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
"the classic earmarks" LOL! Paging Maxwell Smart!
"All the aforementioned news agencies fell for this..."
No one "fell for this" unless you also think that if you commit a crime and I agree to provide an alibi, you are "falling for" it. They didn't "fall for it" so much as create and embrace it.
"Russian disinformation" is the new "I see the hand of Satan!" for our corporate Pravda class, who really just needed a plausible fig leaf to cover their strategy of making sure they did whatever was necessary to help Biden beat Trump.
Since we're bringing back old chestnuts of political hysteria, how bout we resurrect George W's "Axis of Evil" and apply it to the Big Tech/Big Media/Democratic Party axis, who hate America and Americans as much as an ayatollah ever did, and who are engaged in a desperate drive to gain and maintain full control over American discourse (aka "save democracy" LOL), our rights or freedoms be damned.
Exactly. You read my mind.
I fully support calling out Google/YouTube/FB/the MSM's lies and bullshit propaganda, for as long as it takes. Fuck the oligarchs, fuck the deep state ghouls, and fuck their bootlicking media handmaidens - may they all rot in Hell.
Are there any ways for us viewers at home to boost the signal on these articles? Anywhere we could be sharing?
Why not read a book, or take a walk, or go canoeing? I'd say "Google/YouTube/FB/the MSM's lies and bullshit propaganda," have presently got your number, will continue to have your number--- "for as long as it takes."
Being as how the article isn’t about me and my reading and/or canoeing habits, but *is* about the disgusting censorship and lies being distributed by (chiefly, in this case) YouTube, I’d be curious to know if you have anything to add to the discussion?
Second, I’d say you know precisely nothing about me, and that you may wish to jog on instead of making asinine ad hominems.
I'm certain I know enough about you to confidently recommend that's it's time to go canoe shopping...
Oh my sweet trolling child - you may wish to consider taking your own advice, rather than bothering strangers on the internet. Best of luck to you.
Another stooge for Big Canoe here, I see.
#YesWeCanoe
Passivity is not the best or even always the natural response. Although I support taking walks and reading books, but I suspect the poster can do all those things and also read Matt's articles on the MSM.
Youtube has comments.
You’ve seen the average YouTube comments section, right? If our goal was to convince the spam/scam bots to join us it might be a good place to start, but otherwise not what I’d call a signal boost to change hearts and minds.
It really depends on what you’re watching on YT. Lex Fridman’s interviews for example have very smart comments. Jordan Peterson’s recent interview of Stella Assange was also void of idiotic comments.
In which case you've got to think they have someone curating their comments section. That's the only way on YouTube.
I think it’s more that those who listen to/watch those sorts of podcasts/interviews aren’t assholes for the most part. It takes a fair amount of maturity to be interested in such in depth media. But you may be correct.
Bravo. U nailed it again. We love you Matt!
Go get 'em. Also, coming from a periodically vocal critic, I think emails shouldn't really bother your subs.