Militarists in the digital garden – how the world’s most powerful people captured a grassroots movement
A #TwitterFile and new piece for Racket detailing the work of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab
Today the DFRLab hosts the latest iteration of its 360/OS series at RightsCon, the biggest civil society event focused on human rights in the digital age organised by Access Now. Whilst EngageMedia Executive Director I co-organised RightsCon in 2015 in Manila. That turned out to be a serious error.
In partnering with DFRLabs RightsCon has driven forward collaboration with the militarists in the Atlantic Council, a NATO-aligned think tank funded by weapons manufacturers, Big Oil, Big Tech and riddled with former intelligence heads and corporate profiteers.
Today Racket has published my lengthy piece detailing the work of DFRLabs, including its participation in dubious “anti-disinformation” initiatives such as the Election Integrity Partnership, and the Virtality Project that worked with Big Tech to censor “true stories of vaccine side effects”.
Twitter Thread: https://twitter.com/NAffects/status/1666151678184243200?s=20
DFRLab is one of the most important nodes in the Censorship-Industrial Complex and illustrates just how much “anti-disinformation” has become a top down means of narrative control – a means to police the street level “thought crime” or everyday people, and deflect attention from the industrial level disinformation coming from the government and corporate world.
It is with no relish that I point this problem out to current and former peers in the digital rights field. Friends and employment opportunities are sure to be lost. I take heart however from the growing numbers of people who also see this problem and have reach out as a result.
The seeds of a new, independent, and more heterodox digital rights movement are taking root, and spring is coming.
Thank you for your work. You did the right thing. The public has no disinformation burden. This is a fabrication of obligation by a predatory class of undersecretaries. Please continue to care for this beat.
You’re not serious.
Taibbi’s political binary is the range between a Trumper and a self-described “Eisenhower Republican”. And now he’s a China hawk.
Recently, June 9th, you tweeted “Even Zuckerberg has caught up with reality”.
The reality is that Facebook controls what people read, and censor at request if it serves their interest, which like yours is financial.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/751449002072082/%20%20
Zuckerberg: A Blueprint for Content Governance and Enforcement
“One of the biggest issues social networks face is that, when left unchecked, people will engage disproportionately with more sensationalist and provocative content. This is not a new phenomenon. It is widespread on cable news today and has been a staple of tabloids for more than a century. At scale it can undermine the quality of public discourse and lead to polarization. In our case, it can also degrade the quality of our services.
Our research suggests that no matter where we draw the lines for what is allowed, as a piece of content gets close to that line, people will engage with it more on average -- even when they tell us afterwards they don't like the content.
This is a basic incentive problem that we can address by penalizing borderline content so it gets less distribution and engagement. By making the distribution curve look like the graph below where distribution declines as content gets more sensational, people are disincentivized from creating provocative content that is as close to the line as possible.
This process for adjusting this curve is similar to what I described above for proactively identifying harmful content, but is now focused on identifying borderline content instead. We train AI systems to detect borderline content so we can distribute that content less.”