Domestic companies have been influencing elections for over a decade using advertising along with influence and power in the conglomerated media space. Neither the foreign power nor the large media giants nor the big defense contractors nor big tech actually care at all about individual people. It's turtles all the way down.
To that extent, Twitter controlling the discourse is actually very different than the Russian government controlling the discourse.
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/video/does-voting-make-a-...
What if Twitter had a major Russian investment? What if Twitter was fully operated by the Russian government? What if it was operated by the german government? What if it was operated by the american government? What if it was operated by a man named Jack who has clear political interests? What if Jack only cares about the bottom line? What if Russia supported Hillary instead of Trump?
Does your answer vary between the questions? To me, they are all the same.
But yeah, it’s understandable that someone might equate that with a social media platform being transparent (however belatedly) in their efforts to enforce their own rules.
The problem with centrist lines of thinking such as yours is that it’s all predicated on fallacious logic: the demonstrably false notion that a compromise between two opposing positions is inherently superior to either.
This perspective that American interference in democratic political processes around the globe is "righteous and justified" must be coming from some book, somewhere.
Which one?
I’m an American, but I’m not America. I can love my country without condoning war crimes. The one does not contradict the other.
You can't have all the rewards and none of the responsibilities - either yours is a representative government of and for the people, or it isn't.
Clearly, its not a representative government any more, if you feel you have zero responsibility for its machinations. So, the real delusion is that Americans consider America to be the home of the free and the brave, but really are a nation of slaves and cowards.
I’m “protected by the state”? How do you figure? Less than six months ago, there was a mass shooting a few miles from my house, in which twelve people were killed in a government facility, by an employee of the government.
I spend more than a quarter of my income on healthcare coverage for myself and my family, and that’s before I incur any actual medical costs. Americans die every day because they simply can’t afford to be well.
As American citizens, we do have some mechanisms for self-correcting the course our elected leaders have set us on, but most are purely symbolic. The only real means of pressure we have to influence government is our democratic election process, which we now know has been compromised. We have a President who lost the popular vote by millions of votes, due at least in part to a massive flaw in our implementation of a representative democracy is being actively exploited by a foreign power.
What’s worse, the domestic beneficiaries of Russia’s massive influence campaign — Republicans — refuse to pass any bill that will grant more funding toward securing our elections. That’s on top of rampant gerrymandering and straight-up election fraud happening all over the country.
Democracy is under attack by domestic and foreign entities. How are the people — the majority of whom did not vote for our current leadership — to be held accountable?
Do you feel confident you can call 911 and get a police response if you need it? Then you are protected by the state, which provides those services.
> How are the people — the majority of whom did not vote for our current leadership — to be held accountable?
Civics 101. All governments are composed of the people they govern.
True, your state has been corrupted. But, you are just as responsible for that as any other citizen. And I think your position is how your state got corrupted in the first place - "I'm not responsible for the crimes of my government!"
Alas, you are. And failing to take responsibility for them is how they get committed so rampantly in the first place ..
Selective outrage over political machinations that don't originate from within your own political in-group is also a common tactic - when you've run out of good faith, arguments or otherwise ..
Twitter is just one in a long line of goose-stepping corporations doing the bidding of the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex which stands to profit greatly from its efforts ..
Pay attention. The war is coming your way whether you like it or not.
So what exactly are private companies allowed to do to support or undermine a foreign candidate? Apparently tweeting goes too far. But if you restrict a candidate's tweeting, is that okay?
The FEC explicitly lays out what you can and cannot do. And generally speaking, a candidate requesting aid from a foreign entity in order to undermine an election is illegal. You're going to have to better establish how Twitter is violating the FEC rules if you want to compare the two.
For what it’s worth, so do I — and I’m not saying that to support them, I don’t like what I see of the behaviour of the Russian government.
For about the last decade, I’ve been of the opinion that the free an open border that is the internet is incompatible with current attitudes towards sovereign control of what happens within a particular national border. Sovereignty includes the ability to limit things, including things other people (like me) don’t want limited. Copyright, “immoral” substances or sexual acts, defamation, revealing state secrets.
I have a question: if a Spanish person living in Spain publishes a South African state secret, has an offence been committed?
If a company donates services to a campaign, that is considered donation-in-kind under FEC rules. An FEC filing must be made.
Suppression of an opponent sure looks like donating services.
I fear sometimes that a considerable amount of Americans have no further loyalty to the ideals of this country.
But this is still conflation.
1. Unless/until communication is excluded from what can legally be a business, Twitter has a legitimate commercial interest (and probably a legal obligation) to moderate the platform it built to ensure its the company isn't significantly harmed by the behavior of users who are not paying customers.
I doubt anyone can do this with integrity over time when money and power are involved, but unless you're advocating for nationalizing social media platforms or creating some sort of Department of Public Speech to provide "neutral" voter-accountable moderators at no cost, I don't see how you can argue that the organization running a platform doesn't have a legitimate interest in shaping what it is for. No other separate entity--not the IRA nor Facebook nor HuffPo nor Exxon nor Fox news nor the DNC/RNC nor the IRA--have any legitimate right to shape the purpose of Twitter's platform.
I guess the IRA can try to turn Twitter into whatever it wants--but Twitter is completely within its rights to shift policy to address how any entity that doesn't hold a controlling stake uses its platform at scale. Regardless of how Twitter does or does not exercise this right, there will be genuine and malign actors attempting to portray them as only doing X for illegitimate political reasons (to stir up support, circle the wagons, or bully them into doing more or less of X).
2. The mechanisms are very different. If the IRA manipulated democracies by banning people from a platform they built--or if Twitter ran a massive astroturfing operation intended to synthesize the appearance of social consensus on someone else's social media platform--we'd be talking apples-and-apples.
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I want to be a little more cautious moving ahead since I'm assuming more here, but outside of and separate from this conflation issue, it seems you're building an argument like:
1. anyone who thinks unchecked state social-media influence operations merit action by a private company with the ability to directly and unaccountably manipulate the channel should instead want to nationalize or close social media to protect everyone from the owners of the platform
2. anyone who doesn't think unchecked state-sponsored social media influence campaigns are big enough of a deal to justify nationalizing or closing social media platforms is being disgenuine (either by over-weighting the influence campaigns, or under-rating the possibility that the platforms owners engage in similar behavior.)
But the opinions aren't mutually exclusive. Someone can think prosecutors have too much power, and advocate for them to use the power they have more-justly. Someone can think platforms are too big to be opaquely-ruled fiefdoms and advocate for long-term solutions while advocating for harm-reduction in the short term.
I fully agree that moderating Twitter while protecting our democracy is a sticky problem, although I think there are many milder options besides those you presented including regulating Twitter as a utility, breaking it up as a monopoly, or even shutting it down altogether (yes, it’s sad to think of the government shutting down a company, but that’s strictly better than a company controlling our government). None of these solutions are nationalizing social media, by the way—not meaningfully.
I’m sure we can find all sorts of reasons why these solutions are imperfect, and I’m sure smarter people than myself can think of better solutions. The fact remains that these big social media companies have far too much power, and even a bad solution is almost certainly better than allowing this considerable attack vector to persist (the attack vector that is open to private companies and state actors alike). By the way, it’s not just our American democracy under threat, it’s every democracy where Twitter et al have strongholds.
I don't think this is the right distinction. I think it might help to drill down on legal vs. legitimate, and what we mean by affecting/meddling/influencing/manipulating/corrupting/etc.
1. Let's say you install a little free library (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Free_Library) at the edge of your property and put a dozen of your favorite history books in it. The general understanding is that anyone who walks by is free to take/leave a book. Over time, many books come and go. Sci-fi. Poetry. How-to-draw. Self-help. Pop-sci. An occasional religious text.
A few months later, you notice that of your neighbors, who belongs to a minority religious sect, has started visiting every day. Each time, they take a book and leave one promoting their religion. This doesn't bother you much at first, but you get annoyed when you notice they've replaced most of the library and grow increasingly convinced they don't even read the books they take.
In turn, you throw out the books they've left so far, put in several more of your own history books, and toss any new books they leave once a week. They notice this in turn, and start telling people that you are discriminating against their religion.
The question of whether it's "legal" for them to do this, or "legal" for you to throw out the books they left is in the weeds.
I think better questions are whether they have any legitimate right to turn your little library into an advertisement for their religion, and whether you have a legitimate interest in curating your little library to keep them from doing so. No one else has a legitimate right to repurpose your library, even if every individual action they take otherwise follows the conventions of how free libraries work. It doesn't matter if they do it intentionally or accidentally, nor whether they have good or bad intentions.
2. Our democracy is a different sort of thing--more of a shared emergent process or relation than a thing. Almost everything has some impact on it, and everyone with a legitimate membership claim has a legitimate interest in influencing it. I have a legitimate right to influence it. You have a legitimate right to influence it. Other states and their citizens don't. Exactly which kinds of influence are fair/unfair has to get haggled out through ongoing social process. It gets even fuzzier when we're deciding what kinds of influence are fair for U.S.-based multinational companies. (e.g., are we only concerned about intentional "manipulation"? Is intentional manipulation with a small aggregate effect more or less important than a large inadvertent impact lying in the shadow of performance optimization heuristics that were necessary to keep the service up?)
Every multiverse incarnation of Twitter affects our democracy in some way. Twitter and every platform like it is a snowball of decisions made about UI/X, functionality/features, staffing, business/funding, management, accessibility, moderation, many of which get baked in long before a platform is anywhere near the scale it takes to even produce the emergent ripples that eventually get it labeled as powerful enough to corrupt a democracy. As long as it's legal to make platforms like this, they have a legitimate interest in deciding what their apps/platforms/service do and are for.
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Neither Russia nor the IRA have a legitimate right to repurpose Twitter or influence our democracy. Stopping them is not cut-and-dry, but I think it's more useful to see it as a nest of logistical/implementation problems. Twitter and many of its employees, at least as the rules of fair play are for now, have a legitimate interest in both making platform decisions, in influencing our democracy. It's fundamentally different because the solutions mostly involve doing democracy to figure out what is and isn't fair. There are some profoundly difficult questions here.
Twitter and its many employees and shareholders can vote and lobby, but if they can turn a knob and unilaterally influence elections, clearly they are on the wrong side of that threshold.
The best steelman I can think of is that social media is really analogous to a cable company where each person you're interested in following is a channel. Of course, this falls down for lots of reasons, mostly because Twitter controls which channels you're exposed to and in which proportions--a feature for which there is no real cable analog.
Russia/China/USA etc is a whole different story.
disinformation/psyop campaign => can adequately describe most political campaigns.
detrimental to our sovereignty => does this sound like Chinese reaction to western people commenting on HK?
Not very convincing, in an ideal world everyone would have freedom of expression and freedom to influence other people in all circumstances. Now that doesn't mean freedom from the consequence of it but legally it shouldn't be restricted unless its active hate speech. A Russian posting 'great god emperor Donald Trump' on facebook doesn't fall in that camp.