Warning label, the small print
This is not a political post, if you’re in a quest for a fellow traveller I am not that guy
This is also not a post about who is getting banned, why or why not
And this post is not a primal scream.
Everyone has biases, here’s mine.
The U.S. does need a social democratic party, but it must be anti-war, otherwise it commits a fraud on a social democracy. The United States ruling system must be deprived of its political ability to spend trillions on war, or they will always use the “necessity” of war to enforce austerity. The “left” domestic project will fail
I am against all of our endless wars. But, how can this be stopped if people cannot convene online. Social media has gone from a mobilizing agent to a demobilizing agent
Twitter big data and computational fusillade. It is asymmetrical warfare. They have a machine gun and ‘you’ have nothing, not even the awareness of all the battles you are losing.
There is no way to comprehensively decouple yourself from persistent data collection, the always-on trail of harvestable imprints. Your new identity exists in an onlife infosphere, a blend of your physical and virtual experiences.
This ‘you’ is then mapped into ‘their’ enhanced, network–based social engineering map.
The Twitter throughput is to own, or be a vital part of, your information infrastructure. People are fed in their Twitter timeline, or seek out, those that they trust, or ‘them’ that Twitter deems essential to embedding empathy. It is how you should feel about a fact, or whether you should reject that fact.
Then this happens
Twitter can make it easier or harder for political campaigns to acquire user information, or may decide to package and sell data to campaigns in ways that differentially empower the campaigns. And/or..
Twitter could decide to use its own store of big data to model voters and to target voters of a candidate favorable to the economic interests of Twitter itself
To keep your mind on fukdown, they have devious weapons:
Sockpuppet: False identities used to praise, support or defend a person or organizationAstroturfing: Masking the sponsors of a message or organization to make it appear grassroots
Those are tactics are force multipliers. They are used to:
Broadcast misinformation
Make a hashtag trend.Promote a story, have it detected by Google and promoted to the top of the results page for a query
Amplify messages, feign popular support, shape discussion and manipulate public debate
Jam the opposing campaigns twitter feed, bombard accounts in an attempt to get them suspended
There is no action on social media that does not have a target. Everything you are in is a campaign.
Q: How do you measure the success of a campaign?A: By the amount of diffusion and iterations that people create from the kernels that are planted
Q: Does the public have a right to know if your own government, its proxies and agents, deploys Twitter psyop’ed bots, sockpuppets and astroturfs?A: Twitter doesn’t think so
Lastly, this is a battle that many people want us to lose, them to win.
What is a country?
What is a flag? What is a logo?
What is a citizen? What is a consumer?
What is the Constitution? What is an End User License Agreement?
Which do you prefer, Free Speech which can be outrageous and/or offensive or the guidelines of Facebook and Twitter
Which has better governance, more transparency, accountability and protections?
What uses capital more efficiently, Google or the US Government?
What is a bank? What is an Amazon credit?
Which has better service, the government or the Apple store?
The end?
Ht/t to John Robb who writes at Global Guerillas – I swiped several of his ideas and the way he expressed them. I’m his fan