I don’t disagree, but I think that it is a too benign an explanation. Not least because TV took over from Cinema and that was very heavily controlled ( I saw a clip of Daisy Duke on Instagram the other day, and she was wearing awful tights under her shorts, because there were strict limits how much skin she was allowed to show ).
For those of us who can remember the Wild West of the early nineties, the Internet has become ( inevitably ) dominated by global corporations, who impose their will upon the content and behaviour of their customers. It is part and parcel of the bureaucratisation of capitalism and is an unstoppable process.
What grew in the 2010s was the imposing of the corporations’ ideological prejudices upon its customers and in turn their cosying up with government to ensure contracts, access and a benign space in which to make money.
So we have censorship, the attack on ‘misinformation’ and electoral interference.
The public mood changes, though. I think the COVID debacle and government overreach has much to do with this. We now see the ‘progresssives’ failing, only the VdL led EU and Australia cling onto this quixotic desire to control the Internet ( we can ignore Labour Britain, it is finished ).
Two other things linked to the self interest
Costs – Musk cut 4/5 ths of his workforce by sacking the censors. Zuck is looking at similar savings.
New government threat – Zuck especially is looking at a long time in prison if the new regime goes after him for First Amendment breaches or electoral interference.
John B
I recall a Catholic priest telling me in the 1960s that if he wanted to go to the theatre he had to get permission from his Bishop, but not if he went to the cinema. The rule about theatre going back centuries, but cinema was too new for Church law to have caught up.
In olden days The Bible was only available in Latin which few outside the Church could understand. This gave the Church the monopoly over what people knew and thought, so the Church could regulate people’s lives.
When “Protestants” (the Far Right of the times) started to rebel against the authority of the Church and started printing and distributing the Bible in the vernacular, the Church was alarmed they were losing that monopoly and control.
Church and secular authorities operated against those who printed, published, distributed these new Bible versions – mis/disinformation. Printing presses were smashed, unauthorised Bibles burnt, printers and publishers fined, imprisoned or executed.
Eventually, there were too many for the authorities to stop, and by now enough of the Church’s lies had been exposed, the Great Unwashed wanted more information from other sources. The secular authorities had been infiltrated with secret Protestants or sympathisers, and the battle was lost.
We are just seeing a replay of what has happened throughout history – a regime which controls the flow of information losing their monopoly, fights to keep it, eventually loses control and the monopoly and their control.
Van_Patten
Bloke on M4
Great post – and spot on the money. I have bookmarked your Substack as a result of it and sundry (too numerous to mention!) excellent contributions here
Grikath
Mostly what Otto says, but there’s another thing at play here.
Before Musk took over Twitter, you basically had effectively one Social Media “pool”, which was effectively controlled by US-centric ( or rather… specifically Big City Californian) Progressivism and Activism.
Started at Meta, got a good run-up at Twitter, oozed back into the Meta stable, and tried to proceed even further into Internet Life™.
People noticed, but really couldn’t get out because there was no real alternative. Anyone who tried either got Squashed, or bought out.
TikTok became a Thing, and is basically Untouchable because the Chinese DGAF about wqhat the US Progressives think, but the short-clip format has its limitations, and it’s actually censored , to chinese tastes… And turned out to be more “free” than anything Meta/Amazon/Twitter had to offer..
People Noticed…
Que Musk and his takeover of Twitter, turning it into X. And with it the Big Sacking of the “Fact Checkers”.
X dropped any “fact checking” controls to the absolute minimum to comply with US law, and against all expectations first survived, then actually thrived against all opposition from the Vested Interests.
Meanwhile almost all the “Fact Checkers” and Progressive Allies basically moved to BlueSky to create their Utopia there.
And turned it into one of the most toxic pits of despair the internet has witnessed up until this day.
Zuck and Bezos are not stupid, and now have data points: X works, Bluesky doesn’t.
Not for their purposes, which is Making Money.
“Go Woke, Go Broke” has been proven with sufficient confidence in their line of trade, so the “Fact Checkers” would have been phased out anyway, regardless of the US election result.
Might have taken longer if the Dems won, but the Bell had already tolled for the “Fact Checkers”. They were demonstrably Bad for Business, so they would face the Axe.
Trump’s victory and the very clear mandate he got simply accellerated matters in the US.
And in true corporate US style.. it’s not about Ideology, it’s about Making Money.
And like the famed Robber Baron v/s the Priest… I personally have more faith in the predictability of raw corporatism than in lofty Idealism.
Interested
I’m just reading it now.
But this: no, government statistics are not reliable – at least not reliably so.
Things where he can point to a reliable data source (like government statistics) and show that a writer got things wrong.
That is, there are probably some reliable stats – how many rifles the Army has bought in the last ten years, for instance. Anything with a more political element to it should be treated with caution, given that we clearly have a politicised civil service.
Interested
BoM4 writes: I think this is largely what is happening here. “Fact” checkers were not so much “fact” checkers as checks that whether the things on Meta, Twitter and so forth meets the approval of and therefore can’t be attacked by the old news media. The victories of Donald Trump show that the old news media are weak. Meta, X, Substack, YouTube, podcasts are now the Mainstream Media. They don’t have to play nice with the old guys any longer./
Just read it. I don’t think I fully agree. I think the church/cinema thing is a useful analogy, but it doesn’t really describe what happened in the last five or six years.
This is not about old media vs new media, this is about the State/Deep State/establishment/elites/’them’ – call it, or them, what you will – vs the people, with new media as the novel battlefield.
Old media, newspapers and TV, was simply the territory ‘they’ had already captured, via advertising, regulation, threats and promises, and quids pro quo.
The trouble was that the people – voters, readers etc – or, at least, many younger people who might form opinions, and take an interest in their world, and have the vitality to agitate for change etc – had largely retreated from that old battlefield.
That came with the concomitant risk that a percentage of the populace – perhaps even a critical mass – might form up on the new battlefield, and then tell ‘them’ to fuck off and agitate for actual change rather than settle for managed decline, or whatever version of the status quo the future looked like.
But online media also offered ‘them’ amazing possibilities.
Powerful people have always, always wanted and needed to shape and even control what hoi polloi say, and ideally what they think.
Twitter and Facebook (etc) gave them a great way to do this, with surveillance and immediacy and measurement metrics and censorship opportunities that were better than anything they’d ever had in their wildest offline world dreams.
Obama realised this – that young people were now reachable mostly online – and it helped him win 2012.
Trump used social media in spades in 2016.
In America, the Dems – or the ‘they’ pulling the levers of the Dems – underestimated Trump, and as we know he won.
They couldn’t allow that to happen again, and so they set about undermining him in real time, via many of the actual people he appointed (see eg Mark Milley), but more importantly they set about recapturing and dominating the new battlefield as the place to control ideas and speech, and dominate the dissemination of the information they wanted their ‘voters’ to absorb.
Their main tool for this was the threat that the main ones (Twitter and Facebook) would lose their s230 exemption from defamation if they didn’t play ball.
Vox in 2020: You may have never heard of it, but Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the legal backbone of the internet. The law was created almost 30 years ago to protect internet platforms from liability for many of the things third parties say or do on them. (Link below.)
This would have destroyed these companies almost overnight.
Thus, when the Russiagate hoax was begun, to name but one of the many attempts to undermine Trump and his broader coalition or ethos, the social media companies saw which way the wind was blowing and promoted it, and censored those who said it was nonsense (which as we now know it was – and nonsense paid illegally for by the Clinton campaign, and facilitated illegally by the FBI and the FISA court and more).
For those who think this is all just a conspiracy theory, I suggest you read Matt ‘Twitter Files’ Taibbi or one of the other journalists and lawyers who were invited into Twitter and given free rein to look at their internal and external comms when Musk took over.
It exposed the vigorous and almost certainly unconstitutional censorship effort that had by then developed between the Biden administration and the social media companies. (Zuckerberg has since said the same thing happened at Facebook.)
The ne plus ultra example of this censorship involved the removing from Twitter of the New York Post when, a few days before the 2020 election, it tried to expose the Hunter Biden laptop story for what it was: a record not only of Hunter’s grotesque and probably illegal sexual perversion, and drug-taking, but, far more importantly, the deep corruption of the Biden family, right up to ‘the Big Guy’, and their receipt of tens of millions of dollars from Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian, and other interests.
Under Tim (BoM4) Almond’s theory, this would have been the old media (church) putting the arm on the new media (cinema) to protect the old media.
In fact, it was the Deep State putting the arm on the new media against the old media – or part of it, most of the old media was already onside – to protect the Deep State.
The Deep State couldn’t allow Trump to win again* – it was that simple.
(I’ll use ‘Deep State’ here – it came from the White House, but clearly not from Biden, who doesn’t know what day it is and hasn’t been running the country probably since the start of his term, leading one to ask: who is?)
There were, as the saying goes, many such cases.
The Alex Berenson court case is one such: you probably all know that Berenson (ex NYT) is suing the US government, but if not it’s for breaching his 1A rights by getting Twitter to boot him off for the crime of correctly pointing out that the covid vaccines didn’t work.
Disclosure will be interesting there. But what is clear is that this was another case of the Deep State using new media to target a citizen (or trying to remove that citizen from the new media battlefield as far as possible) in service of the Deep State and the hundreds of billions of dollars at stake for its Big Pharma partners.
More to come on all of this I hope – though of course they will all have been pardoned.
What has changed, as others say, is that Musk has bought Twitter and gone at least some way to exposing all of this, and Zuckerberg is worried: he spent $400m on election drop boxes which probably ‘won’ the 2020 election for ‘Biden’, and put an awful lot of time and effort and money into allowing the traducing of Trump and the boosting of Sleepy Joe in the run-up to that election.
Was that election interference? I think we know the answer.
*The hilarious thing is that they have fucked themselves: Trump now is wiser, older, surrounded by a far better group of allies, with a way better VP, than he would have been as a lame duck second term President being outwitted by his own staff and undermined by Pence.
Though I’m not all that relaxed about it all: ‘they’ won’t be beaten easily, even assuming Trump actually wants to beat them.
Interested: call it the Ruling Class. Marx got that right. The difference is that the Ruling Class used to be synonymous with an economic social class. No longer; it is now an intersectional identity class. It’s the usual group of rich and/or powerful (although the actual personnel have changed over time) now supported by plebeian cannon-fodder that thinks itself ‘progressive’.
As for Musk, my theory is that he simply wants to go to Mars and the Ruling Class had decided to prevent him from doing so. Read about all the bother SpaceX has with the FAA. I think, in his self-interested businessman’s way, he worked out that his best means of getting the FAA – a.k.a. Ruling Class – out of his way was to get wrecking-ball Trump back as President, and for that to happen Trump had to have his social media bullhorn back. That’s why he bought Twatter, immediately fired the censors and allowed MAGA accounts to operate again. The deal appeared to make no financial sense.
I think Musk is also not best pleased at how the Ruling Class decided he couldn’t have his contracted Tesla bonus for hitting those improbable targets. He wanted that money to fund his other ventures. I think he no longer cares much about Tesla; that was simply a vehicle to get him to where he is now.
Musk wants to take down the FAA/Ruling Class and go to Mars and there’s a good chance he’ll do it. The rest of what he’s doing is largely trolling. Same for Trump. Poker-playing dealmakers, they know how to make their opponents make the errors they want them to.
And America is being run (until the week after next) by Three-Term Barry. That’s always been obvious.
dearieme
A good piece I thought, and some good tussles with it in this comments thread.
Just a small quibble: I can’t see how Zuck can be charged over the First Amendment. It’s not a guarantee of free speech. It simply forbids Congress to legislate to abridge “the freedom of speech, or of the press …”
For much of my life American claims to free speech were farcical – it was perfectly obvious that the British and Australians, for instance, had a much more robust tradition of free speech. By contrast Americans were hopelessly conformist, forever looking over their shoulders lest employers, or churches, or whoever disapproved of their expressed opinions.
But things have changed greatly: now the threat to free speech comes not just from employers, and those humourless citizens who cultivate grievances, but from government itself. Then that American amendment seems much more important. But still, it remains simply a prohibition on legislation. no more.
rhoda klapp
Grikath is right, it’s all aspects of us vs them, where them is not only the deep state but also the shallow state stopping or restricting the flow of information. So, the pro-state?
Interested
@dearieme
Just a small quibble: I can’t see how Zuck can be charged over the First Amendment. It’s not a guarantee of free speech. It simply forbids Congress to legislate to abridge “the freedom of speech, or of the press …”
Is it criminal to conspire to deprive a person of his 1A rights? Not sure. But if so the initial step would be to prove that those 1A rights were indeed infringed, and while there is no right to be heard on a private platform such as Facebook it is (I read) unconstitutional for the government to cause eg Facebook to censor a person.
I think the greater risk to Zuckerberg is charges relating to election interference in the run up to 2020, not that I’d bother with that if I were Trump or his DOJ.
dearieme
“Is it criminal to conspire to deprive a person of his 1A rights?”
But an American’s 1A rights consist simply of not being subjected to Congressional legislation to abridge his free speech.
Unless, that is, SCOTUS has at some point invented some other free speech doctrine without constitutional justification. I’ll grant that SCOTUS has a history of legislating while passing off its decisions as merely judicial so maybe there’s been a bit of that going on.
Grikath
Norman:
As for Musk, my theory is that he simply wants to go to Mars and the Ruling Class had decided to prevent him from doing so. Read about all the bother SpaceX has with the FAA.
Not a theory, but simple fact.
The problem there is Musk actually being able to reach Mars, or most certainly the Moon.
A private enterprise able to do what up until now fell under the umbrella of Government and Military. Wordwide…
This genuinely scares the people in power. It completely invalidates anything they’ve cooked up to keep space “theirs”. They’ve lost control.
Musk did not fail, and came up with alternatives that are still experimental, but already more effective, efficient, and economical than anything the state-sponsored Space Agencies and subsidiaries have been able to cook up.
Mars or Moon, especially habitating it, may be an extremely difficult, if not potentially suicidal effort at this stage. So was colonising the Americas. So was, rather inevitably, US Independence.
And if Musk actually succeeds in having SpaceX set foot on Moon or Mars, all bets are off, and we’re in for Interesting Times..
Because Foot-on-the-Ground counts. Especially if you can maintain it. And that gives you a Claim….
One no nation on Earth has at the moment. And ohboi…. If Musks succeeds, he has it..
May be shyte real estate, but claim a piece of it he can. If he pulls it off… Give it 5 more years and he probably will have a go at it.
And someone who is not part of the Formal Arrangement and Old Boys circuit, nationally or internationally, being able to do that… scares the bajeezus out of them.
So they try and block or derail Musk in any way possible. And are failing at it rather hard.
And while doing so, may well be twisting the Tiger’s Tail…. Musk is not bound to the US for his operations… Twist too hard, and a “subsidiary” launch site and factory will appear.
Next 5 years will be Prime Popcorn Time… 🙂
Interested
But an American’s 1A rights consist simply of not being subjected to Congressional legislation to abridge his free speech.
Unless, that is, SCOTUS has at some point invented some other free speech doctrine without constitutional justification. I’ll grant that SCOTUS has a history of legislating while passing off its decisions as merely judicial so maybe there’s been a bit of that going on.
The key question which will eventually have to be decided by the Supreme Court is whether the undoubted pressure applied by the US government to Facebook/Twitter to censor speech and deplatform speakers amounts to a breach of those 1A rights. You don’t have an inherent right to speak or be heard on any platform; you do have the right not to have the government strongarm the platform owners into stopping you doing so.
Ottokring
Just to clarify.
My 1A ( I must use that in future ) point with Zuck was that he colluded with the govt to censor people during Covid. He admitted as much in Congress.
I think the electoral interference charge is almost indefensible.
Musk did a podcast with My Favourite Lesbian, Alice Weidel, yesterday. He stated that the next window for Mars probes is in two years and hopes to have a more substantial cargo ship if not even people on the way in the window after that ( ie 4 years ).
dearieme
@Interested: your link contains “the First Amendment gives everyone residing in the United States the right to hear all sides of every issue and to make their own judgments about those issues without government interference or limitations”.
What cobblers! I repeat, it gives them the right not to have their free speech abridged by legislation – originally just federal legislation but now (because of a subsequent amendment) State legislation too. That’s all. It’s a jolly good thing but it’s severely restricted.
That’s one of the beauties of the Constitution; apart from laying out all the stuff about relations between the arms of government, and between the people and the government, it doesn’t lay down lots of verbose laws. And, best of all, the laws it did include are largely negative i.e. in the style of Thou Shalt Not …
All the popular stuff about “it gives us free speech, it gives us separation of powers, …” is twaddle. It gives them just what it says which is usually achieved by denying powers to one of the arms of government.
Consider the second amendment “the right of the people to keep and arm bears, shall not be infringed.” It’s a simple prohibition of a particular government action.
Or the fifth: “nor shall any person … be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself – hence ‘taking the fifth’ – … nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
That first part I’ve quoted seems to be universally interpreted in the same way. The second part isn’t, turning largely on what precisely is meant by ‘public use’ and by ‘just compensation’. Tricky business, compulsory purchase. I don’t know whether their habits are any better than ours.
dearieme
@Interested: mind you, your link does put attention on what may be the most important flaw in the Constitution. There’s nothing in it to stop SCOTUS inventing as many quasi-amendments as it likes and no way for the citizens of the Republic to repeal any such SCOTUS decree they may happen to disapprove of, either directly – e.g. by referendum – or indirectly i.e. through their elected politicians.
Some of the authors of the Constitution were serious and able people: maybe they discussed the problem and could find no solution. Some day I ought to look at the Federalist Papers.
Joe Smith
@ dearieme
Whilst it might not happen in reality (Blue vs Red partisan voting), there is nothing stopping Congress from enacting a law that overrides the SCOTUS interpretations.
dcardno
To quote from Interested’s link:
The First Amendment only prevents government restrictions on speech. It does not prevent restrictions on speech imposed by private individuals or businesses. Facebook and other social media can regulate or restrict speech hosted on their platforms because they are private entities.
I agree that the Obama / Biden administration’s pressure on social media platforms was unconstitutional. I am much less sure that a business can be unconstitutional, or that a businessman who bows to illegal pressure (like the kind of lawfare that the Dem applied to their enemies) has acted illegally. Cowardly and immoral, sure – but I don’t know that gets to “illegal.” The election interference charges are much more likely to lead to a conviction, and that’s where Zuck is exposed.
Gamecock
The Constitution is not statutory. 1A bans Feds from blocking free speech, but I don’t know of any specific laws for enforcement. A negative right. It bans government action, but what if government does it, anyway?
Consider the 18th Amendment, giving the Feds the authority to ban alcohol.* It took the Volstead Act to actually make it statutory.
Arguments that 1A doesn’t apply to private platform companies are false, as they conspired with government. Musk found government employees had OFFICES at Twitter HQ, that’s how in bed they were with the government. As reported above, Taibbi found resident government employees at Facebook and elsewhere.
*They have not passed an amendment to give them authority to ban drugs. Hence, FDA and DEA are unconstitutional – the Feds have no such authority.
Gamecock
‘Their main tool for this was the threat that the main ones (Twitter and Facebook) would lose their s230 exemption from defamation if they didn’t play ball.
‘Vox in 2020: You may have never heard of it, but Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the legal backbone of the internet. The law was created almost 30 years ago to protect internet platforms from liability for many of the things third parties say or do on them’
The irony being this is completely bassackwards.
S230 does indeed protect platform owners from content liability. Just like the phone company has no responsibility for what people say on the phone. The absurd problem is government demands that to keep this privilege, they must CONTROL CONTENT. Government should be demanding they leave content alone, like the phone company. X, Facebook, etc should have NO ACTIVE MODERATION. Actual attempts to control content is a breech of the intent of S230.
Grikath
“Actual attempts to control content is a breech of the intent of S230.”
If you’re talking about “intent” ….Not really… From what I can understand of that bit of legalese, it was meant for phone companies and other forms of direct communication. 1 on 1.
On any “Social Media” you are broadcasting, which opens another can of worms, and a different set of Rules ( and even more painful Legalese..)
I do feel Social Media should be moderated. To the extent of the Law. No more, no less..
Given the international nature of the Internet, to what extent is a bit of a grey area, but there are most certainly things no-one wants to see.
Kiddie fiddlers and those “enabling” them. Outright calls for violence or worse against groups or individuals. In line with that calls for exclusion of individuals or groups, because “morality” or “politics”.
Relatively simple stuff, painted with a broad brush, in line with the average of human law. If it would get you in trouble on the average street, it should get you in trouble if you try to push it on Social Media.
Fun bit is that Musk, through X, has not put up a single hurdle against the worbal gloaming fearing, kiddie-mutilation pimping, rainbow-worshipping “Progressive” crowd, since he took over. At all….
He just applied the above, and ensured the countervoice could be heard again, and not be blocked.
And he’s hated for it with a passion that’s almost beyond this world. Simply because he put his money where his mouth was. Makes you think…
Gamecock
“I do feel Social Media should be moderated. To the extent of the Law. No more, no less..”
Agreed. If passive. I.e., response to complaint. Not computers and employees monitoring and analyzing content perpetually. Compare to soap box in a public square.
“From what I can understand of that bit of legalese, it was meant for phone companies and other forms of direct communication. 1 on 1.”
Platforms. Internet platforms. Social media.
“That’s thanks to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
That legal phrase shields companies that can host trillions of messages from being sued into oblivion by anyone who feels wronged by something someone else has posted — whether their complaint is legitimate or not.”
@Grikath
Max respect to you Sir for your mastery of a foreign language, even one major similarities to your own, so please take this as a mark of respect and wish to elevate you to even better english.
“Que Musk and his takeover”
that is “cue” as in the start of an actor’s speaking.
Here endeth the english lesson.
Jack C
@johnnybonk
“even one major similarities to your own”?
“english” x 2
Correct spelling of cue, but incorrect definition
See me after class
johnnybonk
@Jack C
Yes, I was a bit loose with the definition, so perhaps I should have said “the signal for somebody to start something ( from the mark on an actor’s copy signifying the beginning of their part)” – used to be “qu” – ultimately from Latin “quando” = when.
“even one major *with* similarities to your own” – yes, a typo on my part for which I can only confess to being a glass of wine and two cans of barley wine under. 🙂 I’ve slipped up like that in the past with the clever buggers who lurk here. Note to self “don’t drink and blog”
johnnybonk
oh fuck it!!
“even one major *with* similarities to your own”
“even one *with* major similarities to your own”
I don’t disagree, but I think that it is a too benign an explanation. Not least because TV took over from Cinema and that was very heavily controlled ( I saw a clip of Daisy Duke on Instagram the other day, and she was wearing awful tights under her shorts, because there were strict limits how much skin she was allowed to show ).
For those of us who can remember the Wild West of the early nineties, the Internet has become ( inevitably ) dominated by global corporations, who impose their will upon the content and behaviour of their customers. It is part and parcel of the bureaucratisation of capitalism and is an unstoppable process.
What grew in the 2010s was the imposing of the corporations’ ideological prejudices upon its customers and in turn their cosying up with government to ensure contracts, access and a benign space in which to make money.
So we have censorship, the attack on ‘misinformation’ and electoral interference.
The public mood changes, though. I think the COVID debacle and government overreach has much to do with this. We now see the ‘progresssives’ failing, only the VdL led EU and Australia cling onto this quixotic desire to control the Internet ( we can ignore Labour Britain, it is finished ).
Two other things linked to the self interest
Costs – Musk cut 4/5 ths of his workforce by sacking the censors. Zuck is looking at similar savings.
New government threat – Zuck especially is looking at a long time in prison if the new regime goes after him for First Amendment breaches or electoral interference.
I recall a Catholic priest telling me in the 1960s that if he wanted to go to the theatre he had to get permission from his Bishop, but not if he went to the cinema. The rule about theatre going back centuries, but cinema was too new for Church law to have caught up.
In olden days The Bible was only available in Latin which few outside the Church could understand. This gave the Church the monopoly over what people knew and thought, so the Church could regulate people’s lives.
When “Protestants” (the Far Right of the times) started to rebel against the authority of the Church and started printing and distributing the Bible in the vernacular, the Church was alarmed they were losing that monopoly and control.
Church and secular authorities operated against those who printed, published, distributed these new Bible versions – mis/disinformation. Printing presses were smashed, unauthorised Bibles burnt, printers and publishers fined, imprisoned or executed.
Eventually, there were too many for the authorities to stop, and by now enough of the Church’s lies had been exposed, the Great Unwashed wanted more information from other sources. The secular authorities had been infiltrated with secret Protestants or sympathisers, and the battle was lost.
We are just seeing a replay of what has happened throughout history – a regime which controls the flow of information losing their monopoly, fights to keep it, eventually loses control and the monopoly and their control.
Bloke on M4
Great post – and spot on the money. I have bookmarked your Substack as a result of it and sundry (too numerous to mention!) excellent contributions here
Mostly what Otto says, but there’s another thing at play here.
Before Musk took over Twitter, you basically had effectively one Social Media “pool”, which was effectively controlled by US-centric ( or rather… specifically Big City Californian) Progressivism and Activism.
Started at Meta, got a good run-up at Twitter, oozed back into the Meta stable, and tried to proceed even further into Internet Life™.
People noticed, but really couldn’t get out because there was no real alternative. Anyone who tried either got Squashed, or bought out.
TikTok became a Thing, and is basically Untouchable because the Chinese DGAF about wqhat the US Progressives think, but the short-clip format has its limitations, and it’s actually censored , to chinese tastes… And turned out to be more “free” than anything Meta/Amazon/Twitter had to offer..
People Noticed…
Que Musk and his takeover of Twitter, turning it into X. And with it the Big Sacking of the “Fact Checkers”.
X dropped any “fact checking” controls to the absolute minimum to comply with US law, and against all expectations first survived, then actually thrived against all opposition from the Vested Interests.
Meanwhile almost all the “Fact Checkers” and Progressive Allies basically moved to BlueSky to create their Utopia there.
And turned it into one of the most toxic pits of despair the internet has witnessed up until this day.
Zuck and Bezos are not stupid, and now have data points: X works, Bluesky doesn’t.
Not for their purposes, which is Making Money.
“Go Woke, Go Broke” has been proven with sufficient confidence in their line of trade, so the “Fact Checkers” would have been phased out anyway, regardless of the US election result.
Might have taken longer if the Dems won, but the Bell had already tolled for the “Fact Checkers”. They were demonstrably Bad for Business, so they would face the Axe.
Trump’s victory and the very clear mandate he got simply accellerated matters in the US.
And in true corporate US style.. it’s not about Ideology, it’s about Making Money.
And like the famed Robber Baron v/s the Priest… I personally have more faith in the predictability of raw corporatism than in lofty Idealism.
I’m just reading it now.
But this: no, government statistics are not reliable – at least not reliably so.
Things where he can point to a reliable data source (like government statistics) and show that a writer got things wrong.
That is, there are probably some reliable stats – how many rifles the Army has bought in the last ten years, for instance. Anything with a more political element to it should be treated with caution, given that we clearly have a politicised civil service.
BoM4 writes: I think this is largely what is happening here. “Fact” checkers were not so much “fact” checkers as checks that whether the things on Meta, Twitter and so forth meets the approval of and therefore can’t be attacked by the old news media. The victories of Donald Trump show that the old news media are weak. Meta, X, Substack, YouTube, podcasts are now the Mainstream Media. They don’t have to play nice with the old guys any longer./
Just read it. I don’t think I fully agree. I think the church/cinema thing is a useful analogy, but it doesn’t really describe what happened in the last five or six years.
This is not about old media vs new media, this is about the State/Deep State/establishment/elites/’them’ – call it, or them, what you will – vs the people, with new media as the novel battlefield.
Old media, newspapers and TV, was simply the territory ‘they’ had already captured, via advertising, regulation, threats and promises, and quids pro quo.
The trouble was that the people – voters, readers etc – or, at least, many younger people who might form opinions, and take an interest in their world, and have the vitality to agitate for change etc – had largely retreated from that old battlefield.
That came with the concomitant risk that a percentage of the populace – perhaps even a critical mass – might form up on the new battlefield, and then tell ‘them’ to fuck off and agitate for actual change rather than settle for managed decline, or whatever version of the status quo the future looked like.
But online media also offered ‘them’ amazing possibilities.
Powerful people have always, always wanted and needed to shape and even control what hoi polloi say, and ideally what they think.
Twitter and Facebook (etc) gave them a great way to do this, with surveillance and immediacy and measurement metrics and censorship opportunities that were better than anything they’d ever had in their wildest offline world dreams.
Obama realised this – that young people were now reachable mostly online – and it helped him win 2012.
Trump used social media in spades in 2016.
In America, the Dems – or the ‘they’ pulling the levers of the Dems – underestimated Trump, and as we know he won.
They couldn’t allow that to happen again, and so they set about undermining him in real time, via many of the actual people he appointed (see eg Mark Milley), but more importantly they set about recapturing and dominating the new battlefield as the place to control ideas and speech, and dominate the dissemination of the information they wanted their ‘voters’ to absorb.
Their main tool for this was the threat that the main ones (Twitter and Facebook) would lose their s230 exemption from defamation if they didn’t play ball.
Vox in 2020: You may have never heard of it, but Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the legal backbone of the internet. The law was created almost 30 years ago to protect internet platforms from liability for many of the things third parties say or do on them. (Link below.)
This would have destroyed these companies almost overnight.
Thus, when the Russiagate hoax was begun, to name but one of the many attempts to undermine Trump and his broader coalition or ethos, the social media companies saw which way the wind was blowing and promoted it, and censored those who said it was nonsense (which as we now know it was – and nonsense paid illegally for by the Clinton campaign, and facilitated illegally by the FBI and the FISA court and more).
For those who think this is all just a conspiracy theory, I suggest you read Matt ‘Twitter Files’ Taibbi or one of the other journalists and lawyers who were invited into Twitter and given free rein to look at their internal and external comms when Musk took over.
It exposed the vigorous and almost certainly unconstitutional censorship effort that had by then developed between the Biden administration and the social media companies. (Zuckerberg has since said the same thing happened at Facebook.)
The ne plus ultra example of this censorship involved the removing from Twitter of the New York Post when, a few days before the 2020 election, it tried to expose the Hunter Biden laptop story for what it was: a record not only of Hunter’s grotesque and probably illegal sexual perversion, and drug-taking, but, far more importantly, the deep corruption of the Biden family, right up to ‘the Big Guy’, and their receipt of tens of millions of dollars from Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian, and other interests.
Under Tim (BoM4) Almond’s theory, this would have been the old media (church) putting the arm on the new media (cinema) to protect the old media.
In fact, it was the Deep State putting the arm on the new media against the old media – or part of it, most of the old media was already onside – to protect the Deep State.
The Deep State couldn’t allow Trump to win again* – it was that simple.
(I’ll use ‘Deep State’ here – it came from the White House, but clearly not from Biden, who doesn’t know what day it is and hasn’t been running the country probably since the start of his term, leading one to ask: who is?)
There were, as the saying goes, many such cases.
The Alex Berenson court case is one such: you probably all know that Berenson (ex NYT) is suing the US government, but if not it’s for breaching his 1A rights by getting Twitter to boot him off for the crime of correctly pointing out that the covid vaccines didn’t work.
Disclosure will be interesting there. But what is clear is that this was another case of the Deep State using new media to target a citizen (or trying to remove that citizen from the new media battlefield as far as possible) in service of the Deep State and the hundreds of billions of dollars at stake for its Big Pharma partners.
More to come on all of this I hope – though of course they will all have been pardoned.
What has changed, as others say, is that Musk has bought Twitter and gone at least some way to exposing all of this, and Zuckerberg is worried: he spent $400m on election drop boxes which probably ‘won’ the 2020 election for ‘Biden’, and put an awful lot of time and effort and money into allowing the traducing of Trump and the boosting of Sleepy Joe in the run-up to that election.
Was that election interference? I think we know the answer.
*The hilarious thing is that they have fucked themselves: Trump now is wiser, older, surrounded by a far better group of allies, with a way better VP, than he would have been as a lame duck second term President being outwitted by his own staff and undermined by Pence.
Though I’m not all that relaxed about it all: ‘they’ won’t be beaten easily, even assuming Trump actually wants to beat them.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/5/28/21273241/section-230-explained-supreme-court-social-media
Interested: call it the Ruling Class. Marx got that right. The difference is that the Ruling Class used to be synonymous with an economic social class. No longer; it is now an intersectional identity class. It’s the usual group of rich and/or powerful (although the actual personnel have changed over time) now supported by plebeian cannon-fodder that thinks itself ‘progressive’.
As for Musk, my theory is that he simply wants to go to Mars and the Ruling Class had decided to prevent him from doing so. Read about all the bother SpaceX has with the FAA. I think, in his self-interested businessman’s way, he worked out that his best means of getting the FAA – a.k.a. Ruling Class – out of his way was to get wrecking-ball Trump back as President, and for that to happen Trump had to have his social media bullhorn back. That’s why he bought Twatter, immediately fired the censors and allowed MAGA accounts to operate again. The deal appeared to make no financial sense.
I think Musk is also not best pleased at how the Ruling Class decided he couldn’t have his contracted Tesla bonus for hitting those improbable targets. He wanted that money to fund his other ventures. I think he no longer cares much about Tesla; that was simply a vehicle to get him to where he is now.
Musk wants to take down the FAA/Ruling Class and go to Mars and there’s a good chance he’ll do it. The rest of what he’s doing is largely trolling. Same for Trump. Poker-playing dealmakers, they know how to make their opponents make the errors they want them to.
And America is being run (until the week after next) by Three-Term Barry. That’s always been obvious.
A good piece I thought, and some good tussles with it in this comments thread.
Just a small quibble: I can’t see how Zuck can be charged over the First Amendment. It’s not a guarantee of free speech. It simply forbids Congress to legislate to abridge “the freedom of speech, or of the press …”
For much of my life American claims to free speech were farcical – it was perfectly obvious that the British and Australians, for instance, had a much more robust tradition of free speech. By contrast Americans were hopelessly conformist, forever looking over their shoulders lest employers, or churches, or whoever disapproved of their expressed opinions.
But things have changed greatly: now the threat to free speech comes not just from employers, and those humourless citizens who cultivate grievances, but from government itself. Then that American amendment seems much more important. But still, it remains simply a prohibition on legislation. no more.
Grikath is right, it’s all aspects of us vs them, where them is not only the deep state but also the shallow state stopping or restricting the flow of information. So, the pro-state?
@dearieme
Just a small quibble: I can’t see how Zuck can be charged over the First Amendment. It’s not a guarantee of free speech. It simply forbids Congress to legislate to abridge “the freedom of speech, or of the press …”
Is it criminal to conspire to deprive a person of his 1A rights? Not sure. But if so the initial step would be to prove that those 1A rights were indeed infringed, and while there is no right to be heard on a private platform such as Facebook it is (I read) unconstitutional for the government to cause eg Facebook to censor a person.
I think the greater risk to Zuckerberg is charges relating to election interference in the run up to 2020, not that I’d bother with that if I were Trump or his DOJ.
“Is it criminal to conspire to deprive a person of his 1A rights?”
But an American’s 1A rights consist simply of not being subjected to Congressional legislation to abridge his free speech.
Unless, that is, SCOTUS has at some point invented some other free speech doctrine without constitutional justification. I’ll grant that SCOTUS has a history of legislating while passing off its decisions as merely judicial so maybe there’s been a bit of that going on.
Norman:
Not a theory, but simple fact.
The problem there is Musk actually being able to reach Mars, or most certainly the Moon.
A private enterprise able to do what up until now fell under the umbrella of Government and Military. Wordwide…
This genuinely scares the people in power. It completely invalidates anything they’ve cooked up to keep space “theirs”. They’ve lost control.
Musk did not fail, and came up with alternatives that are still experimental, but already more effective, efficient, and economical than anything the state-sponsored Space Agencies and subsidiaries have been able to cook up.
Mars or Moon, especially habitating it, may be an extremely difficult, if not potentially suicidal effort at this stage. So was colonising the Americas. So was, rather inevitably, US Independence.
And if Musk actually succeeds in having SpaceX set foot on Moon or Mars, all bets are off, and we’re in for Interesting Times..
Because Foot-on-the-Ground counts. Especially if you can maintain it. And that gives you a Claim….
One no nation on Earth has at the moment. And ohboi…. If Musks succeeds, he has it..
May be shyte real estate, but claim a piece of it he can. If he pulls it off… Give it 5 more years and he probably will have a go at it.
And someone who is not part of the Formal Arrangement and Old Boys circuit, nationally or internationally, being able to do that… scares the bajeezus out of them.
So they try and block or derail Musk in any way possible. And are failing at it rather hard.
And while doing so, may well be twisting the Tiger’s Tail…. Musk is not bound to the US for his operations… Twist too hard, and a “subsidiary” launch site and factory will appear.
Next 5 years will be Prime Popcorn Time… 🙂
But an American’s 1A rights consist simply of not being subjected to Congressional legislation to abridge his free speech.
Unless, that is, SCOTUS has at some point invented some other free speech doctrine without constitutional justification. I’ll grant that SCOTUS has a history of legislating while passing off its decisions as merely judicial so maybe there’s been a bit of that going on.
https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/censorship
The key question which will eventually have to be decided by the Supreme Court is whether the undoubted pressure applied by the US government to Facebook/Twitter to censor speech and deplatform speakers amounts to a breach of those 1A rights. You don’t have an inherent right to speak or be heard on any platform; you do have the right not to have the government strongarm the platform owners into stopping you doing so.
Just to clarify.
My 1A ( I must use that in future ) point with Zuck was that he colluded with the govt to censor people during Covid. He admitted as much in Congress.
I think the electoral interference charge is almost indefensible.
Musk did a podcast with My Favourite Lesbian, Alice Weidel, yesterday. He stated that the next window for Mars probes is in two years and hopes to have a more substantial cargo ship if not even people on the way in the window after that ( ie 4 years ).
@Interested: your link contains “the First Amendment gives everyone residing in the United States the right to hear all sides of every issue and to make their own judgments about those issues without government interference or limitations”.
What cobblers! I repeat, it gives them the right not to have their free speech abridged by legislation – originally just federal legislation but now (because of a subsequent amendment) State legislation too. That’s all. It’s a jolly good thing but it’s severely restricted.
That’s one of the beauties of the Constitution; apart from laying out all the stuff about relations between the arms of government, and between the people and the government, it doesn’t lay down lots of verbose laws. And, best of all, the laws it did include are largely negative i.e. in the style of Thou Shalt Not …
All the popular stuff about “it gives us free speech, it gives us separation of powers, …” is twaddle. It gives them just what it says which is usually achieved by denying powers to one of the arms of government.
Consider the second amendment “the right of the people to keep and arm bears, shall not be infringed.” It’s a simple prohibition of a particular government action.
Or the fifth: “nor shall any person … be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself – hence ‘taking the fifth’ – … nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
That first part I’ve quoted seems to be universally interpreted in the same way. The second part isn’t, turning largely on what precisely is meant by ‘public use’ and by ‘just compensation’. Tricky business, compulsory purchase. I don’t know whether their habits are any better than ours.
@Interested: mind you, your link does put attention on what may be the most important flaw in the Constitution. There’s nothing in it to stop SCOTUS inventing as many quasi-amendments as it likes and no way for the citizens of the Republic to repeal any such SCOTUS decree they may happen to disapprove of, either directly – e.g. by referendum – or indirectly i.e. through their elected politicians.
Some of the authors of the Constitution were serious and able people: maybe they discussed the problem and could find no solution. Some day I ought to look at the Federalist Papers.
@ dearieme
Whilst it might not happen in reality (Blue vs Red partisan voting), there is nothing stopping Congress from enacting a law that overrides the SCOTUS interpretations.
To quote from Interested’s link:
I agree that the Obama / Biden administration’s pressure on social media platforms was unconstitutional. I am much less sure that a business can be unconstitutional, or that a businessman who bows to illegal pressure (like the kind of lawfare that the Dem applied to their enemies) has acted illegally. Cowardly and immoral, sure – but I don’t know that gets to “illegal.” The election interference charges are much more likely to lead to a conviction, and that’s where Zuck is exposed.
The Constitution is not statutory. 1A bans Feds from blocking free speech, but I don’t know of any specific laws for enforcement. A negative right. It bans government action, but what if government does it, anyway?
Consider the 18th Amendment, giving the Feds the authority to ban alcohol.* It took the Volstead Act to actually make it statutory.
Arguments that 1A doesn’t apply to private platform companies are false, as they conspired with government. Musk found government employees had OFFICES at Twitter HQ, that’s how in bed they were with the government. As reported above, Taibbi found resident government employees at Facebook and elsewhere.
*They have not passed an amendment to give them authority to ban drugs. Hence, FDA and DEA are unconstitutional – the Feds have no such authority.
‘Their main tool for this was the threat that the main ones (Twitter and Facebook) would lose their s230 exemption from defamation if they didn’t play ball.
‘Vox in 2020: You may have never heard of it, but Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the legal backbone of the internet. The law was created almost 30 years ago to protect internet platforms from liability for many of the things third parties say or do on them’
The irony being this is completely bassackwards.
S230 does indeed protect platform owners from content liability. Just like the phone company has no responsibility for what people say on the phone. The absurd problem is government demands that to keep this privilege, they must CONTROL CONTENT. Government should be demanding they leave content alone, like the phone company. X, Facebook, etc should have NO ACTIVE MODERATION. Actual attempts to control content is a breech of the intent of S230.
“Actual attempts to control content is a breech of the intent of S230.”
If you’re talking about “intent” ….Not really… From what I can understand of that bit of legalese, it was meant for phone companies and other forms of direct communication. 1 on 1.
On any “Social Media” you are broadcasting, which opens another can of worms, and a different set of Rules ( and even more painful Legalese..)
I do feel Social Media should be moderated. To the extent of the Law. No more, no less..
Given the international nature of the Internet, to what extent is a bit of a grey area, but there are most certainly things no-one wants to see.
Kiddie fiddlers and those “enabling” them. Outright calls for violence or worse against groups or individuals. In line with that calls for exclusion of individuals or groups, because “morality” or “politics”.
Relatively simple stuff, painted with a broad brush, in line with the average of human law. If it would get you in trouble on the average street, it should get you in trouble if you try to push it on Social Media.
Fun bit is that Musk, through X, has not put up a single hurdle against the worbal gloaming fearing, kiddie-mutilation pimping, rainbow-worshipping “Progressive” crowd, since he took over. At all….
He just applied the above, and ensured the countervoice could be heard again, and not be blocked.
And he’s hated for it with a passion that’s almost beyond this world. Simply because he put his money where his mouth was. Makes you think…
“I do feel Social Media should be moderated. To the extent of the Law. No more, no less..”
Agreed. If passive. I.e., response to complaint. Not computers and employees monitoring and analyzing content perpetually. Compare to soap box in a public square.
“From what I can understand of that bit of legalese, it was meant for phone companies and other forms of direct communication. 1 on 1.”
Platforms. Internet platforms. Social media.
“That’s thanks to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
That legal phrase shields companies that can host trillions of messages from being sued into oblivion by anyone who feels wronged by something someone else has posted — whether their complaint is legitimate or not.”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/01/mark-zuckerberg-admits-joe-rogan-that-biden-admin/
@Grikath
Max respect to you Sir for your mastery of a foreign language, even one major similarities to your own, so please take this as a mark of respect and wish to elevate you to even better english.
“Que Musk and his takeover”
that is “cue” as in the start of an actor’s speaking.
Here endeth the english lesson.
@johnnybonk
“even one major similarities to your own”?
“english” x 2
Correct spelling of cue, but incorrect definition
See me after class
@Jack C
Yes, I was a bit loose with the definition, so perhaps I should have said “the signal for somebody to start something ( from the mark on an actor’s copy signifying the beginning of their part)” – used to be “qu” – ultimately from Latin “quando” = when.
“even one major *with* similarities to your own” – yes, a typo on my part for which I can only confess to being a glass of wine and two cans of barley wine under. 🙂 I’ve slipped up like that in the past with the clever buggers who lurk here. Note to self “don’t drink and blog”
oh fuck it!!
“even one major *with* similarities to your own”
“even one *with* major similarities to your own”