Gossip and Bots

If You Aren't Reading the Twitter Files Release, You Should

“There never was a time when the inherent virtue of human beings required more strong and confident expression in daily life; there never was a time when the hope of immortality and the disdain of earthly power and achievement were more necessary for the safety of the children of men.”  - Winston Churchill

I have been reading each of the Twitter Files releases on Twitter. It’s not just interesting, it is shocking. I remember when the government wasn’t some sinister organization. We were always taught the government was there to prevent tyranny, and ensure that as Americans we had our rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

Somehow, Americans were different. It was the other people that had to worry about their governments taking away individual liberty.

Of course, these days using the pejorative term “American” can bring all kinds of trouble. I am old enough to remember that when the “Americans” showed up in some besotten nation it meant good things and that freedom was not far behind.

Reading the Twitter Files shows that is absolutely not the case, and in fact, the American government does all it can to usurp your individual rights. These are evil people, but they are Americans. They are of us. They are our people.

I want to remind the reader of this blog that when a government engages in taxation and when a government spends money it does not have, it is taking freedom away from you. There are reasons to acquiesce to some spending and taxation in the name of the common good but the government will always abuse the privilege and take it too far. It’s why we have a constitution that guarantees the rights of individuals and protects them from the government.

However, that is changing rapidly today because of how the judiciary is interpreting that constitution.

The Twitter Files drop today on the Covid vaccine is a perfect case and point which illustrates how the government is working actively with private industry to usurp your individual rights as a citizen of a free society. If you haven’t read it you should. I don't know what will make your blood boil if this doesn’t. This is Fascism in action pure and simple.

We toss that “Fascism” word around a lot these days but it doesn’t have heft and meaning when we do it. It’s designed to impugn and use gossip to curry opinion and favor to your side. I find that most of the people that use the word have no real idea of what it really means nor do they understand how to recognize it in action.

There will be those that try to equivocate the actions of the Trump Administration with the actions of the Biden Administration when it comes to Twitter. Don’t believe them. The only commonality between the two is I don’t think either administration ought to have met with Twitter and other tech companies to shape public opinion.

The intent was very different. When you delve into the underbelly of the Biden administration’s intentions, it is galling.

Do you know how when you chat with people you know, they gossip about stuff? It happens at work, in your neighborhood, with family, and with friends. Not just chatter with intent to destroy, but the idle gossip that passes information along?

That happens on Twitter a lot. With Covid, actual experts tried to pass along information that was real, valuable, and based on actual scientific data, but was actively suppressed by the Biden Administration.

Not only that, but because the internet is huge, people alone can’t do the suppression. They employed artificial intelligence and robots.

David Zweig @davidzweig

15. There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process: First, much of the content moderation was conducted by bots, trained on machine learning and AI – impressive in their engineering, yet still too crude for such nuanced work.

The thing is, with AI and machine learning and all this high-tech stuff, it’s only as good as the data sets it is trained on. There can be bugs in the code or algorithms. As information changes, the AI might not keep up and it needs to be rejiggered to do what it’s supposed to do. This happens in trading algos all the time and when I’d listen to entrepreneurs pitch AI Fin Tech companies I always asked them how they trained their AI and what data sets they used to train it.

Garbage in means garbage out.

David Zweig @davidzweig

17 Third, most importantly, the buck stopped with higher level employees at Twitter who chose the inputs for the bots and decision trees, and subjectively decided escalated cases and suspensions. As it is with all people and institutions, there was individual and collective bias

We know from previous Twitter Files releases that many people who worked at Twitter came from places like the CIA and FBI. Not only that, but those people had a far left-wing view of the world, and would work to mute, cancel, and destroy conservatives.

No surprise that when they were given the freedom to be aggressive during Covid that they did all they could to suppress free speech and science that was coming out of mostly conservative-leaning accounts. It didn’t fit the narrative, and more importantly, if that opinion became mainstream, the Biden Administration would have trouble pursuing other goals.

Twitter and other social media companies worked with Biden to shape opinion and they actively suppressed any speech or opinion that was contrary to what they wanted. Because Bots were involved, it was easier for them to control the gossip. China has made that practice a mainstay of its authoritarian state.

Kenny @graceand_truth

@davidzweig “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” - George Orwell, 1984

In polite human circles, if you brought up alternative opinions the artificial gossip on social media and megaphoned by the mainstream media gave other humans the agency to shut you down.

People tend to respect authority. We often crave organization and authority because it makes our lives easier to lead. We have to think less about some things and can intensely focus on other things that advantage us. If I have to think objectively and critically about every single piece of data I run across, I won’t get anything done.

Twitter and other social media sites used that to their advantage by labeling things as misinformation and backstopping their authority with the full faith and credit of the US government.

Twitter ruined friendships. It ruined family relationships. It coarsened public discourse and it encouraged people to put a hard shell around themselves. Twitter tribalized people so that certain groups could be objectified and seen as “not human”. When you were “not human”, then you could be shunned and persecuted. You could be ignored. You could be boxed up and put on the shelf.

Machines are not humanistic. They are machines.

I am reminded of some research done by Professor Nick Epley that showed how even close friends and family members would misinterpret text messages and emails from each other. Neither side could discern the body language or humanism in the communication that comes from physical interaction.

I am also reminded of Winston Churchill’s warning to us all in 1931 about science, communism, and the power, or actually, the lack of power, of parliamentary representative governments to act as a strong force to preserve individual human liberty. His essay, “Fifty Years Hence” is amazing reading in the wake of the Twitter Files release combined with Covid.

Churchill was fascinated by science and all the discovery taking place in his day. At the same time, Churchill witnessed how that science destroyed humans on the battlefield. He watched a military battle as one army using the technology of the 19th century took on an army using the technology of the 20th. The 19th didn’t win.

Science changes. Trends change. But, the humanity of man doesn’t. Nor does man’s underlying weaknesses and incentives. In high school English classes you should have been taught to look for themes in books. One theme was “Man’s inhumanity to Man”. We have seen that theme played out in real-time often over the course of human history. For our generation, the Nazi Holocaust is the penultimate touchstone exemplifying that theme but ask someone from the era of Tiberius Caesar and they will tell you a similar story. Are we seeing anything different in China or North Korea today? If you were a Russian citizen, would you believe the stuff that Putin is selling as a rationale to attack and destroy Ukraine?

Ha, those are other countries you might say. I’d never believe that bullcrap and I’d be able to see right through it. However, I’d present as evidence the latest release of the Twitter files and tell you that you cannot.

Government regulation will not quash the underlying desires of man that have been with us since the Garden of Eden. Only our personal humanity, our objective recognition, can startle us enough to see the actual reality. It is only then that we prick the bubble so we can see clearly.