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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15620 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Twitter Files 8

Lee Fang is joining the fight. Link

This one is very much disconnected from the rest of the TF releases, and consequently more interesting. Fang argues the following.

  1. Despite publicly declaring they combat state-backed information ops, Twitter has worked with the US military to help its ops for years.

  2. As early as 2017, CENTCOM (US Central Command) was sending Twitter lists of accounts they use to "push certain messages" and asking for them to be whitelisted (and verified in one case). The Pentagon also wanted help in doing better at these campaigns (like how to not accidentally reveal related accounts and what not).

  3. These accounts were typically writing in Russian and Arabic, promoting pro-US messaging like accusing Iran of organ harvesting against Afghanis, or flooding Iraq with crystal meth.

  4. Twitter was lauded for its efforts to combat these information ops, but had been actively complicit in helping them and knew what they were being used for.

  5. Twitter worked with journalists closely and was quite happy when reporting on these campaigns focused on the Pentagon instead of Twitter.

This release is much shorter, but damn, this is exciting! I feel like this is the kind of bombshell expected of all releases, but I've definitely noticed engagement going steadily down with each release (2 days and the first tweet in this chain doesn't even have 100k likes).

Anyways, this seems like a much more open-and-shut case. I don't know what you could say that wouldn't indict Twitter. Even if the messaging wasn't explicitly known to Twitter, they could not be so credulous as to imagine the Pentagon wasn't trying to push pro-US messaging via fake accounts and what not. That said, a few details seem weak. In particular, I'm not sure which reporting Fang is referring to when he says that Twitter was lauded for its efforts in removing those types of accounts.

I also read the emails posted as pictures, I don't see them "congratulating" each other, just acknowledging that the WaPo won't focus on them in its article. I think the article in question is this one. Anyone know of a case of the media lauding Twitter/Facebook for this?

There's also an interesting report from the Stanford Internet Observatory which digs into how these accounts were generated and what they were doing. Most of these apparently didn't get very much interaction

The vast majority of posts and tweets we reviewed received no more than a handful of likes or retweets, and only 19% of the covert assets we identified had more than 1,000 followers. The average tweet received 0.49 likes and 0.02 retweets. Tellingly, the two most-followed assets in the data provided by Twitter were overt accounts that publicly declared a connection to the U.S. military.

The only people who'd care about this, ignoring the lizardman constant, would be some members of the old left who think anything the US does overseas is bad and that the FBI is always bad anyway. Yes, it has Twitter cooperating with the FBI, but they're cooperating with the FBI to do the kinds of things that are actually the government's job to do. There's a big difference between the FBI doing this and the FBI using Twitter to interfere with domestic politics.

As a non-American, I certainly care about the US interfering in other countries by spreading disinformation. Even if it were my own government, I care about Twitter acting as a free propaganda arm of the government to give it more influence when I want it to have less influence in the world, because I don't think it is actually generally acting in my best interest when it does these things.

As a non-American, I certainly care about the US interfering in other countries by spreading disinformation.

Notice the languages: Russian and Arabic. The countries that speak those languages aren't shining models of democracy.

when I want it to have less influence in the world

The US also has influence in the world through normal ambassadors. This argument implies that the US must get rid of all of its ambassadors. It implies that the White House should never make any press releases. It implies that the US should never get involved in any treaties that are in its own interest. It implies that the US should never perform any military action anywhere, any time. "This is bad because it gives the US influence" is a ridiculously general argument which implies that the US should never do anything that has any political implications, at least not for its own benefit.

"This is bad because it gives the US influence" is a ridiculously general argument which implies that the US should never do anything that has any political implications, at least not for its own benefit.

It's a good thing I didn't say that then. I said the US has too much and therefore I care about it extending its influence in this specific way.

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