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Twitter’s mass layoffs, days before US midterms, could be a misinformation disaster
Internal chaos at the company – and the decimation of its staff – has created ideal conditions for falsehoods and hateful content.
The mass layoffs at Twitter, that diminished several teams, including staff on the company’s safety and misinformation teams, could spell disaster during the US midterms elections next week, experts have warned.
What would the woke do without experts – for example Paul Barrett, described as “an expert in disinformation and fake news at New York University”. I’m sure he’s very committed to it, but as to being expert at it – well, judge for yourselves. The Guardian quotes Paul as saying Twitter’s “chaos”, and:
“lack of staff and resources dedicated to counteracting misinformation, has created ideal conditions for election misinformation to thrive … Twitter is in the midst of a category 5 hurricane, and that is not a good environment for fostering vigilance when dealing with inevitable attempts to spread falsehoods and hateful content.”
Man arrested on suspicion of tampering with voting machine
did not prepare me for reading that their concern about this Colorado man was not that he might have affected the June primary but that
it heightened concerns among election officials and security experts that conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election could inspire some voters to meddle with – or even to sabotage – election equipment
Oh, those wicked election deniers! If only they had not raised the idea that such things had already happened, that registered Democrat would never have thought of inserting a thumb drive into a voting machine.
Despite this ingenious framing, I suspect what these ‘experts’ find really hateful is that the ‘information’ they’ve been supplying for two years seems to be missing its target anyway. A recent poll says that 40% agree, and only 36% disagree, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen – and of the 36%, one in three find it “understandable” that others might believe it was, which was not at all the idea meant to be conveyed by always putting ‘baseless’ before ‘claims of election fraud’. (And when the Rasmussen poll a month ago had the don’t-knows choose which side they thought more likely, they did not at all split the way the experts thought they should.) So if that happened despite all those safety and misinformation staffers banning tweets and accounts here, there and everywhere, how safe will the narrative be (I can understand the experts worrying) if Twitter lets reports of vote fraud be seen and assessed by the community, not just the experts?
So much for their fears, now a word about mine. The worst thing about vote fraud is not that it is lied about but that it happens. How much vote fraud will there be in the mid-terms? (Given the conveniently long lead-in times, how much has there already been?) My expectation is: a lot. My hope is: not enough. Hope is not a strategy. This article on the election integrity movement (h/t instapundit) notes some successes but concedes other failures:
Even with the recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court victory, that state remains essentially lawless when it comes to election integrity.
– and IIUC, the counting of post-dated or undated ballots in Pennsylvania only got prevented because a judge recently died, leading to an even-numbers stand-off in a key case.
But I can see it will be inconvenient to the lawless if Twitter hasn’t the censors or the will to bring a halt to users showing poll-watching being prevented. No wonder the Guardian and the Independent are upset.
Remember, remember, the Fifth of November
Gunpowder treason and plot
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot
Interesting how the significance of those words changed over the years to be less about the Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605, and more about attitudes towards contemporary politics.
More about notions like “V” than the actual historical Guy Fawkes.
“Don’t talk to me about Partygate. Don’t talk to me about Suella Braverman’s emails. Talk to me about the fact that a 28-year-old man with devastating injuries was left in unimaginable pain and terror as fire engines drove in the other direction and ambulances stayed away. Talk to me about the fact that our emergency services step back from horrific incidents because of ‘safety fears’. Talk to me about this institutionalised cowardice, where the emergency services now make bureaucratic safety assessments rather than behaving with courage and bravery to assist people in dire need. Avoiding risk is a completely surreal principle for the emergency services to adopt. These people should take risks. They should be rushing into danger to help the men, women and children facing that danger.”
– Brendan O’Neill, writing about the descriptions of shocking slowness by emergency services around the time of the Manchester terrorist attack of 2017. (Here is a link to the second report into the brutal attacks, and how services did, or did not, respond.)
As Madeleine Grant in the Daily Telegraph (£) notes today, it is a bit rich for people who dislike the fiscal austerity measures of the UK government to focus on the “mini-budget” tax cuts (now mostly reversed) of the recent Liz Truss administration, or Russia’s attempted conquest of Ukraine. To ignore the costs of lockdowns and mass furlough schemes seems particularly convenient for those, like the Labour opposition as well as many in government, that seemed to be positively enthusiastic not just about lockdowns, but about the idea of shuttering society. (And of course the current Net Zero insanity sort of plays to this authortarian mindset that seems to have arisen lately.)
Thus:
During lockdown, the electorate was led to believe that we could borrow endlessly without consequence; that money-printing was nothing to worry about and someone else would foot the bill if necessary. The whole period didn’t just cross a Rubicon in what the state believed it would get away with, it irrevocably transformed how people viewed the state. There remains an odd amnesia about the the whole period; a reluctance to deal with the lockdown hangover. It’s as if nobody wants to hear that their lengthy furlough now has to be paid for, or that you can’t repeatedly switch a sophisticated 21st-century society on and off like a computer without disastrous, unpredictable consequences.”
And…”I can’t help noticing that many of those now railing against spending cuts are precisely the same people who shouted down anyone who warned of the economic consequences of lockdowns or questioned the severity of the measures at the time. Similarly, many MPs and pundits, having vociferously opposed “irresponsible” un-costed tax cuts, now condemn planned
spending cuts with equal vigour.”
It is absolutely vital that this point is hammered home. Classical liberals simply cannot let the narrative of “Ukraine/Truss caused our pain” BS to flourish, in the same way that “capitalism caused the 2008 financial crash” nonsense. Narratives matter. They must be countered, vigorously, and mocked at every opportunity. And it is also important to remind people that we have had 20 years of central bank money printing (remember, this stuff was going on way before the 2008 crash) to have created part of the condition for our plight today.
Update: Here is a link to Rudyard Kipling’s work of the title used on this posting.
“The globalisation of Hallowe’en, however, is a bit of a problem. Unanchored from any cultural connection, it has now become a gigantic exercise in mass scariness. I wonder if this contributed to the tragic crush in South Korea on Saturday night which killed more than 150 people. Those Christians who say that Hallowe’en is satanic are being too literal-minded. It is, in principle, harmless. But it would help if more people knew its context. Hallowe’en is short for All Hallows’ Eve, ie the eve of the day which commemorates all holiday people ie, the eve of today, All Saints’ Day. Tomorrow is All Souls’ Day. Take the three days together and you get the balance right.”
– Charles Moore. Of course, expecting people to grasp these points is a bit of a stretch. How can one make All Souls’ Day work on TikTok?
There is no doubt that Paul Pelosi, husband of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, has been the victim of a vicious assault. There is no doubt that the person who carried out this attack was David DePape. There is widespread doubt about many other aspects of the story. The most common theory is that far from breaking into to the Pelosi residence as an assassin, DePape was invited in as a male prostitute, only for the two men to quarrel over payment or drugs. I will not rehash the arguments put forward in support of this theory, which are available to be read all over the internet. I do wish to stress that if all or any of this is true, it in no way excuses the crime. It would, however, make it a different type of crime from the one the media say it is.
The media would have you believe that these doubts come only from mad conspiracy theorists. They are not helping their case by silently changing details of their own reporting.
Look at these screenshots of two Politico accounts of this story, presented side by side by Stephen L. Miller under the apt caption “Seriously WTF”.
The screenshot on the right takes you to a Politico story about the attack on Paul Pelosi written by Jeremy B. White and Nicholas Wu. I was familiar with this version because I had read it myself a few hours earlier. The title is “Police offer new details in Paul Pelosi assault” and the dateline (in American format) is given as 10/28/2022 09:46 PM EDT. The URL is https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/28/police-pelosi-attack-intentional-00064098. Do I labour the point? That’s because I think this version of the story will disappear soon. Read it while you can. It says:
“The irony of Xi’s Ahab Quest is that Taiwan has never been a part of China. ‘China’ today is a recapitulation of the old Qing Empire (which, to add irony to irony, was not Chinese but Manchurian). Tibet, East Turkestan, Mongolia, and Manchuria are in no historical sense remotely ‘Chinese’. Ditto for Taiwan, in which Qing officialdom evinced only desultory interest until 1854, when American Commodore Matthew C. Perry, fresh from his gunboat-treaty journey to Japan, showed interest of his own.”
– Jason Morgan, Spectator. Morgan says a Chinese attempted conquest of Taiwan, and war with neighbours, such as Japan, and the US, is inevitable.
Much has been written about what underpins the current war in Ukraine; how Russian revanchism is driven by Russkiy Mir ideology, the concept of the ‘Russian World’. This means all parts of what was the Russian Empire must once again be ruled from Moscow (the ‘New Rome’) for Russia to be spiritually and politically whole. It is very much like Nazi notions of “Germany is anywhere there are Germans” with a bit of lebensraum theory thrown in as well.
What makes the Russkiy Mir concept a bit more ‘inclusive’ than the Nazi version of Herrenvolk versus Untermensch, is the insistence that Russia also includes people who are said to be Russified, such as Chechens, Georgians, Moldavians, Buryats, Yakuts etc. etc…and of course all Ukrainians. If you read RIA Novosti (aimed at Russians) rather than Russia Today (aimed at foreign useful idiots), these are the official state narratives proffered day after day.
And the notion that is driving or at least justifying Russian aggression is true.
But there is another way to see this, not so much an alternative but rather a very complimentary perspective. Even if “Russkiy Mir” as both context and meta-context internally justifies Russian actions to Russians, is this the real driver pushing Putin and his supporters at the highest levels of Russia’s establishment? The push certainly isn’t “Ukraine trying to join NATO” (which Germany made clear it would always veto), the “Nazi government in Kyiv” hilarity or assorted biolab absurdities, but rather the ‘Tony Soprano’ theory of Russian geopolitics (Tony Soprano being a fictional mafia boss from the American TV show The Sopranos).
I have seen many people suggest forms of this but Matt Steinglass provides one version that is useful and succinct even if I think it is not entirely right:
In the Sopranos analogy, a business, let’s say a chain of groceries, at the edge of his territory decided they were going to stop paying protection and start trusting the police.
Tony Soprano obviously cannot tolerate this. It’s not just the loss of revenue: it’s that letting it go unpunished tells everybody else who’s paying him protection money that they can leave, too. So Tony decides to hit the groceries, take out the owner and ensure a more pliable one is installed, to send a message to anybody else who might get ideas.
Unfortunately it turns out the grocery clerks are packing shotguns and Tony’s soldiers, who were overconfident, get shot up and retreat. Now Tony has worse problems: he’s lost the grocery chain and he looks weak. Yet he may have inflicted enough damage that his other businesses hesitate to leave; who needs the trouble? Similarly, Ukraine’s economy has shrunk by a third.
Anyway, the point is that if you think about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an old-fashioned attempt at territorial conquest, it makes no sense. States don’t gain power by conquering territory anymore, this isn’t the 18th or 19th century. But if you think of it as a mob hit to intimidate states from exiting the protection racket that delivers corrupt rent streams to Russia’s ruling kleptocrats, then it at least made sense–until Ukraine fought back.
It is demonstrably untrue that aspirations for territorial conquest are a thing of the past (see China often stated threats towards Taiwan), but Steinglass’ analogy stands nevertheless. Certainly Ukrainians who understand Russia far better than most Russians understand Ukraine have been making this kind of ‘gangster’ analogy for quite some time. However, too many people in the West have been mesmerised by Russia Today narratives and ingrained Americocentric delusions to look at this from a more local perspective.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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