Category: Digital Culture

Yes, Let’s Cancel Some “Culture”

In January 2017, after far-right extremist Richard Spencer was attacked on Inauguration Day, a semi-rhetorical question began trending on social media. Is it okay to punch the Nazi? While I would tend to say that it is rarely ethical to throw the first punch at anyone, can we at least agree that it is not only fair, but morally imperative, to tell the Nazi to fuck off?

It strikes me that there are two conversations occurring on the subject of “cancel culture,” though it should really be one declaration and one conversation. The declaration should be directed at those Americans, whether they are ordinary citizens or Members of Congress, who have decided that “conservative” is now synonymous with religious or ethnic nationalism, or just plain crazy-ass nonsense like QAnon. And the declaration is simple enough: No, you are not owed a conversation, a seat at the table, a platform, or even basic courtesy because your views are well-known predicates to fascism. Take it from Serbian immigrant and author Aleksander Hemon, writing in 2018 about why he laments the deference he once showed to his best friend, as he watched that friend become consumed by nationalism until he ultimately rationalized genocide:

My relationship with the war has always been marked by an intense sense that I failed to see what was coming, even though everything I needed to know was there, before my very eyes. While Zoka took active part in enacting the ideas I’d argued against, my agency did not go beyond putting light pressure on his fascist views by way of screaming. I have felt guilty, in other words, for doing little, for extending my dialogue with him (and a few other Serb nationalist friends) for far too long, even while his positions—all of them easy to trace back to base Serbian propaganda—were being actualized in a criminal and bloody operation. 

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The lessons of history are clear. It is not only permissible to shut down fascist propaganda, it is essential. Trumpism and its overt appeals to white nationalism and rank thuggery is an existential threat to the nation, no matter what happens next to Donald Trump himself. And the immediacy of that threat has helped write the latest chapter in the conversation about the internet and its capacity to radicalize people to the point of engaging in domestic terrorism. Because now that the immediate danger has passed, and the Facebook Oversight Board gathers to decide whether Trump gets back on that platform, the “digital rights” organizations appear to be rehashing false dichotomies when addressing the challenge at hand.

For instance, the EFF, similar organizations, and Facebook’s Oversight Board all seem to acknowledge that deplatforming Donald Trump was a critically necessary response to the insurrection of January 6. But since Biden’s peaceful inauguration, they have reprised the broad, frankly rhetorical, question that asks, Do we want Facebook and Twitter to wield so much power and to be the arbiters of truth? No, we do not want that. But it doesn’t matter because that’s the wrong question. Facebook Twitter, Google et al are not the arbiters of truth—especially not with regard to countless examples in which truth is anything but arbitrary.

There were not two sides when the former president advocated the medical advice of a witch doctor. There are not two sides to the allegations of consequential fraud in the 2020 election. And there are not two sides to the belief that a conspiracy of pedophile cannibals is running the world. The list of examples, sadly, goes on for miles; but the point is that in many instances of consequence, the social sites do not need to be arbiters of truth. Site managers can use the same resources—experts, professional journalists, courts, and common sense—that the rest of us use to know what is true, and which lies (e.g. all of the above) can be very dangerous.

Why Can’t AI Assist Ordinary Reasoning?

What we should want the major social sites to do is not judge truth, but rather to employ their considerable computing power to identify when momentum is building around narratives that have the capacity to foster acts of tremendous harm. And, by the way, making that determination is not necessarily the job of a bunch of computer programmers or sage academics, and perhaps we should simply get comfortable with Facebook et al notifying the FBI. That said, what does the tipping point look like to site managers? What clues would alert them to the possibility that a page may be transitioning from a forum for political opinions (even rancorous opinions) into a petri dish growing new domestic terrorists? The answer is not uncharted territory: it begins with that word narrative.

When this blog launched, I did a podcast interview with Christopher Dickey, who passed away in July 2020 after a long career as an international journalist, author, and expert on terrorism and extremism. In a subsequent post, I cited Dickey’s observation that there are the three ingredients found in most acts of terrorism—Testosterone, Narrative, and Theater—TNT. Narrative, he defined broadly as a “belief that one is righting some great wrong.” And I would argue that the animating word in that definition is belief. Righting wrongs can be a virtue, though not usually by violence, and never in cases when the alleged wrong does not exist—like an election that was not stolen or pedophile cannibals who are not running the government.

So, can social media managers, with the help of their all-knowing AI, determine when a false narrative (e.g. on a group page) is metastasizing into a movement, and then assess whether that movement is approaching a threshold toward dangerous action? Conversely, if the answer to that question is yes, can the social media managers also determine when chatter is relatively benign, even if it may be generally divorced from reality? Probably. Because metrics exist.

If Facebook, Google et al can influence a market decision, it seems highly likely that they can identify extremist tipping points because certain criteria (like Dickey’s TNT) will likely be present every time. For instance, I would propose the metrics virality, latent toxicity, and kinetic toxicity as three starting metrics. The first, virality, is something these companies measure all day long, and assessing relative significance is not a difficult logical leap. For example, if fifty people opine in a handful of threads that vaccines cause autism, that is not nearly so significant a measure of virality as five-million people repeating this nonsense across multiple pages.

The second metric assesses the latent toxicity of a viral narrative, which is not simply a matter of volume. Five-million adults who believe that vaccines cause autism has high toxicity, whereas thirty-million adults who believe in ghosts has low toxicity. But this assessment is also influenced by the third metric which assesses kinetic toxicity. If the action taken by the five-million antivaxxers is to shun vaccines and, thereby, force society to risk the return of polio, that action has very high toxicity. On the other hand, if half of the thirty-million ghost believers want to go specter hunting on their next vacations, that action has very low toxicity.

But, as we see happen all the time, if a splinter group of say 5,000 ghost enthusiasts coalesces around a new narrative, perhaps originating on 8Chan, that evil poltergeists are running America’s public transportation systems, this subgroup has just increased its latent toxicity based on the original narrative. At this point, the social media managers have reason to comb the splinter group’s page for kinetic toxicity, assessing whether the group is beginning to advocate, for instance, an assault on city busses and subways in order to purge the evil spirits from the system.

Nothing I just hypothesized is one bit loonier than the multiple narratives that collided at the Capitol on January 6. And none of the metrics I propose (name them or amend them however you like) is beyond the capacity of Facebook, Twitter, et al to measure and assess. The question is not whether taking such an approach is a civil liberties issue; these companies use these kinds of data all day long for their own pecuniary interests. The question is whether these companies have the moral integrity to risk losing market share by removing (or reporting) extremism, even when that extremism emanates from the highest levels of government.

Of course, it is beyond even the hubris of Zuckerberg to tackle America’s existential crisis of the moment, when it is clear that tens of millions of our citizens either do not know or do not care that the former president and members of their party committed sedition. Facebook and friends cannot solve that, but they can help mitigate galloping disinformation and nascent fascism. And they should look to their analog forebears for guidance. Returning to that same article by Aleksander Hemon, he responds to a moment when The New Yorker‘s editors first invited Steve Bannon to a discussion and then rescinded the invite, which was then called censorship by various parties. Hemon’s insight is relevant to the social platforms, if they choose to listen:

The error in Bannon’s headlining The New Yorker Festival would not have been in giving him a platform to spew his hateful rhetoric, for he was as likely to convert anyone as he himself was to be shown the light in conversation with Remnick. The catastrophic error would’ve been in allowing him to divorce his ideas from the fascist practices in which they’re actualized with brutality. If he is at all relevant, it is not as a thinker, but as a (former) executive who has worked to build the Trumpist edifice of power that cages children and is dismantling mechanisms of democracy.

Divorcing ideas from practice may be one of the most accurate expressions ever written to describe the fallacy underlying nearly all platform governance, or lack of governance, to date. And the folly needs to end now that we have seen some of the worst evidence imaginable that online madness, like QAnon, is not merely inert speech. The United States is a very delicate idea. And we have no reason to equivocate when rejecting ideas—least of all wild conspiracy theories or old ideas grounded in doctrines of cruelty—that are fatally incompatible with the nation’s existence. Fascism is the consequence of all forms of fundamentalism, and genocide is the aim of all forms of fascism.  So, yes, we must cancel that before it cancels us all. To that end, certain voices do not deserve a platform. And no apology is owed for telling them to fuck off.

Photo by: mikdam

To Parler or Not to Parler: It’s About the Money, Stupid

When I first learned about Parler, my immediate, half-joking, comment was that it would make the FBI’s job easier. To the extent that could be true, some might say this is one rationale to keep the site online. But separate from the efficiency of having putative domestic terrorists gather in a single chat space, many parties have asked whether AWS rescinding its deal to host the far-right social platform—followed by Apple and Google dropping the app—is an example of cancel culture. Personally, I think it’s just cancel cult, and the so-called broader implications are mostly handwringing bullshit for one simple reason:  this is all about money.

The complaint brief in the lawsuit filed by Parler against AWS alleges breach of contract (which may be valid), and it alleges violation of anti-trust law on the grounds that, for instance, Twitter has also hosted divisive and incendiary content without losing its multi-year deal with same host provider. The brief highlights the fact that, especially after Twitter dropped Donald Trump’s account, AWS cut Parler off at the moment of its greatest growth opportunity as a competing social venue. The court may even grant Parler’s request for a temporary restraining order and instruct AWS to restore the site pending further proceedings. We’ll see what AWS presents in its response.*

But the premise of the anti-trust complaint, while it may prove legally tenable, most instructively emphasizes the fact that Parler was not designed as a “conservative” social site—a venture that many real conservatives would probably tell you is a losing proposition today. Parler was designed to capitalize on the seething, conspiracy theory insanity that boiled over on January 6th and is still boiling, and which may yet tear this nation and western civilization apart. It doesn’t even matter whether Parler’s founders are ideologues. The bottom line, as any terrorism expert will tell you, is that extremism is a money-maker.

Look at the scenes of all those dupes in Washington, and what do we see as a backdrop to the violence and vandalism? We see merchandise. It’s a goddamn football riot without the game. These idiots believe they’re “taking their country back” while profiteers, led by Trump himself, are simply using them as life-size action figures in the apotheosis of American capitalism gone astray:  Outrage Incorporated. “It’s 1776!” Ted Cruz tells them. Really? The patriots of ’76 didn’t even have uniforms, let alone flags, hats, tees, and sippy cups declaring their loyalty to a single man. Those patriots froze, starved, and bled barefoot to defeat the very idea of rule by a single man.

Amre Metwally, writing for Slate, says that we should all be “very concerned” about the implications of AWS et al dumping Parler. But why the hell should that be a concern? Parler is just more short-term opportunism profiting off the decline of democracy itself. What could possibly be the downside to its disappearance? It’s a business venture, and if violent extremism is finally a bad bet, that’s what conservatives traditionally call the “free market doing its job.” Major American corporations cut ties with Trump and certain members of the GOP—not out of altruism, but because existential threats to democracy are bad for business. It’s very hard to sell toasters in the middle of a civil war.

Metwally is correct to note the tech industry’s hypocrisy when he writes:

Last I checked, Google and Apple never chucked Facebook app downloads from their stores even though violence has most certainly been incited on Facebook time and time again. Tech platforms never rushed to block access to YouTube even after it was found that it helped radicalize the Christchurch shooter. Come to think of it—why wasn’t Twitter blocked from the Google Play Store or the App Store for allowing Trump to monopolize these radical sentiments for years until we reached this breaking point?

Fair enough, but also missing the point. It is true that for years the major internet players both practiced and advocated willful blindness to all manner of toxic content until we finally reached a breaking point. And they did this because it was profitable. Period. There was never anything principled about Google or Facebook or Twitter’s laissez-faire approach to site management. “Save the internet” was a bogus battle cry (like “Take our country back”) that was repeated across the political spectrum; and in that regard, we all have a little blood on our hands for believing it.

What we should be concerned about is the underlying fallacy (a mostly liberal one by the way) that suborns an enterprise like Parler due to a fundamentalist notion of the First Amendment—one as unconnected to constitutional principles as Ted Cruz invoking Bunker Hill to an angry, privileged, mob in 2021. Frank Pasquale writes in a must-read post:

There are at least two responses to the lies, racism, and violence at the core of the attack on the Capitol. One is to simply put faith in an unfettered marketplace of ideas, hoping that a critical mass of Trumpist Republicans will back away from the idea that elections are rigged for Democrats, that millions of false votes are cast, etc. But what the recent bans reflect is a dawning realization among technology firms that this marketplace of ideas is dysfunctional. It is not self-correcting—or at least it is not self-correcting enough to prevent a significant group of persons (with the guns and votes to cause real havoc) from acting on false beliefs that, say, the presidential election of 2020 was stolen, that COVID-19 is just a bad flu, that Democratic leaders are a cabal of child abusers, and so on.

A-freakin’-men, Mr. Pasquale. The difference between Parler and Facebook might be compared to the crisis in the Republican party right now. Parler, like Trumpism, intentionally aims to exploit civilization-destroying forces for profit (and power); while Facebook, like the meekest members of the GOP, naively allowed those forces into the tent assuming they would be modified by better angels. And this was also for profit.

Sure, we can have a discussion (if a forum for discussion exists in the near future) about the amount of market control held by Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google et al. But that should be a traditional, antitrust conversation that—unless we are truly suicidal—should reject the idea that somehow the speech right means that two plus two equals nine. Although it is no surprise that there is money to be made by launching twoplustwoisnine.com, there is absolutely nothing wrong with letting ignorance fail or with starving extremism of oxygen. We have seen the results of the opposite view, and it is the end of everything. Fuck Parler. Better they lose their shirts than we lose a whole nation.

*UPDATE: AWS filed its response on 1/12. Having read it, I would now say the TRO seems doubtful.

On the Post Hoc Deplatforming of Trump

I guess this is the digital-age equivalent of defenestration:  rather than an authoritarian getting thrown out a window, he gets thrown off Twitter. And now that the major platforms have closed the proverbial barn door while the cows run amok on Pennsylvania Avenue, calling the decision to deplatform Trump too little too late is itself saying far too little, and way too late.

On December 31, 2016, I published a post asking whether Americans might begin to doubt the extravagant premise that the internet as we know it is a gift to democracy. To an extent, the answer to that question was yes. Over the past four years, we did see at least a new willingness to criticize Silicon Valley; and at the same time, that industry’s ability to thwart every policy initiative with the over-broad message that “the internet would break” proved as futile as it is fallacious. 

That it took a violent, seditious* assault on the Capitol to slap at least some of Trump’s enablers into reality is dismaying to say the least, and many of those enablers should not—and very possibly will not—be forgiven. But we should also not be quick to absolve the corporate enablers at Twitter, Facebook, et al, or their well-financed network of shills who so earnestly promoted the notions that all content online is tantamount to protected speech, that the free exchange of all views is inherently a net positive, and that the good will outweigh the bad as long as we remove all barriers to informative and cultural material.

Long before Trump announced his candidacy, the political landscape had been well-softened by the illusion that social platforms provide better transparency, and Trump’s incipient cult was not unique in believing that “new media” were providing access to a truth that the gatekeepers of the “old media” were hiding. At the same time, social platforms are uniquely designed to feed that egotist in us that craves the dopamine hit generally referred to as confirmation bias.  

The tech-utopians truly believed (and apparently still do) that a more enlightened, more civilized world is the inexorable outcome of more access to more information. When some of us countered that internet platforms seem to be highly effective at spreading disinformation and other toxic content, we were called luddites who hate progress and technology. We were told that we wanted to stop a new enlightenment in which “the whole store of human knowledge would be at everyone’s fingertips.”

It should not have been so easy for a president, or any individual, to insinuate that the entire intel community is a corrupt “deep state” or that election officials are liars or that over 60 courts, including the Supreme Court, willfully ignored fraud in the 2020 election. Those conclusions insist that not one of the tens of thousands of oath-taking public servants implicated can be trusted over the word of one man or the conspiratorial ravings of some profiteering opportunists on the internet.

We must acknowledge that Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, Reddit et al have been the category killers in the business of that profiteering opportunism. If one feels suddenly inclined to straighten out a Trump defender on the First Amendment, remember that it was these corporations, with the assistance of the EFF, Techdirt, Public Knowledge, the ACLU and others, all asserting for many years that almost everything posted online should be treated with the deference of protected speech. Whether militance on this matter is ideological or simple greed, it is a premise that must be rejected as false for our own good. David Golumbia, associate professor of digital studies, wrote recently for the Boston Globe:

As a small group of scholars and activists are arguing with increasing force,…it is manifestly possible to protect free speech — and thus enhance the political and democratic values free speech is meant to promote — while suppressing, or at least not actively encouraging, the efforts of those who want to turn democracies against themselves.

And if we grasp that protections on speech really exist to enhance democratic participation, then it’s easier to see through the claims that digital products such as Bitcoin or Apple’s computer code count as speech. In other words, we’d see that a lot of cries for “freedom of speech” in the Internet era are really just demands for freedom from regulations that wouldn’t be challenged in the offline world.

So, by all means, Senators Hawley and Cruz, and any elected official who lent credence to the stolen election story, should be held accountable for feeding a fire that exploded on January 6,and is probably not done exploding. But Big Tech executives and the “digital rights” groups have much to answer for as well. To a very great extent, Donald Trump merely exploited the systemic and psychological vulnerabilities that the major platforms had been exacerbating and monetizing for years.

The leaders of the internet industry have consistently spoken to the public in the ebullient language of new horizons, where fresh ideas and opportunities converge. But that was only part of the picture. While raking in billions, these companies willfully ignored or scornfully dismissed the fact that their systems and business models made few distinctions among information, misinformation, and disinformation. Instead, they papered over those dichotomies by citing the First Amendment to which they owed no duty whatsoever. So, yes, Trump and his supporters are dead wrong to call the sudden deplatforming an infringement of the speech right, but it was the internet companies themselves who fed them that lie in the first place.

*CORRECTION: This was originally published as “treasonous,” which is the wrong word.