Open-Source Algorithms: The War of Information

I have never been on Twitter as I didn’t really ever see it as truly the “Town Square” everyone says it is. But Trump sure seized upon it. In so doing, he seized upon an echo chamber that many of his adversaries had come to perceive as somehow their “turf” simply because it was Big Tech (and generally Big Tech has become synonymous with Left). People who were already losing their minds from Trump Derangement Syndrome went crazy over the audacity of the Orange Man to avail himself of a free platform. Was it becoming or dignified of a Commander in Chief to constantly tweet his stream of consciousness all day and every day? Hard to say. I suppose the more you’re on the feed yourself the less you can really judge, right? But something very strange began to happen soon after. Two terms of art crept into the modern lexicon: disinformation and misinformation.

Suddenly it became some kind of “profession” to fact-check, to build up a litany of offenses and then weaponize those alleged offenses as some sort of justification for de-platforming speech in a forum we thought wasn’t supposed to be allowed to screen content save those traditionally accepted “fire in a theater” types of clear and present danger. Censorship stopped being a dirty word and, while its advocates generally steered clear of the pejorative whenever possible, the ideology crept into the mainstream from the fringes to the point where, for some, it became a badge of honor to go to “Facebook Jail” for a week for posting a snarky meme that made light of COVID and Tony Science.

In an oligarchy you have a very limited choice of options between billionaires. Occasionally one member of the club strays from the pack and does something that seems altruistic. There was a time not long ago that many believed Bill Gates was just such a billionaire. And nobody seemed to light their hair on fire when Bezos bought the Washington Post. But it appears a whole lot of folks are having a meltdown over the Elon Musk deal.

Currently, Musk is saying all the right things and his nuance, like his stated desire to make the algorithms open source, is promising indeed. This alone is pretty huge as most folks are now clued into the tricks Big Tech plays behind the scenes with how different posts get prioritized. Musk says he wants to make the algorithm that promotes or demotes a tweet available for public view in order to help prevent manipulation from behind the scenes. These algorithms, however, process billions of items and datapoints so this may be far easier said than done. But, for all those who have found themselves having to “like” something several times because those likes keep disappearing (for some reason) this is a laudable endeavor on the part of Musk.

But as one Twitter user, Caitlin Johnstone@caitoz, aptly pointed out:

“You don’t get to be a billionaire, much less a billionaire media owner, if you don’t collaborate with existing power structures. Musk will only be permitted to buy Twitter if the oligarchic empire doesn’t feel he poses a meaningful threat to imperial narrative control. I’ll start paying attention to Musk’s talk about free speech as soon a Russian media stops being censored here and accounts suspended for criticizing empire establishment narratives like @RealScottRitter get restored.”

So, I am with this lady one hundred percent. When RT, Scott Ritter, Libs of Tic Toc and Vladimir Putin can post on Twitter I’ll be convinced that for the time being this revolution is for real.

Yes, you didn’t misread that one, I said Vladimir Putin. If he is the culmination of Attila the Hun meets Charles Manson, then I can think of no time more necessary to get a handle on this fellow’s thinking than in the middle of a war that could go nuclear. I would like to see the Twitter drama really push the envelope hard and dramatically to get folks really having a hard discussion about the limiting of any speech, and that means “dangerous” or even “violent” speech.

When I was a cop, I often got asked about a private citizen owning a gun. I have to admit there are lots of folks I met out there that I don’t believe should ever own a gun, but I wouldn’t trust them with a bandsaw or a welding torch either.

That’s the persnickety thing about the Second Amendment. The right to keep and bear arms is not something that suffers a screening process if it is a right that “shall not be infringed.” That means you get to buy the gun and the rest of us have to trust you’ll learn how to use it properly. That’s a notion that frightens a lot of people. I mean it really triggers them.

But the First Amendment is just as clear: Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech. That is pretty blunt. Nothing ambiguous there. Taking for granted the application of the 1st Amendment to the states via the 14th, it would seem clear that no governmental extension of a lawmaking body could take any enforcement action on someone for any speech at all. In fact, it might pose a serious hurdle to a federal charge of sedition, or treason, or insurrection.

Congress passes statutes whereas the Constitution is cognizant of the Common Law, Admiralty, and International Law. So that is not to say if a person yells fire in a theater one would fail to state a claim for damages for injury in the panic of everyone running as in any other civil claim. That would not violate the First Amendment because Congress didn’t make the Common Law of Tort.

But, if the Constitution is really the Supreme Law of the Land, it is hard to envision a form of speech cognizable under the Court’s jurisdiction if the claim is predicated on a statute or municipal code under the state or federal authority.

Over ten years ago, Anwar al-Awlaki was public enemy number one to such degree he was on Obama’s highly extra-judicial “kill list” for his speech. We killed this man, and his son, for things this man said. And, to date, no one has revealed anything that came from this guy’s mouth that would be any more acute or chilling than from someone like Malcom X, Karl Marx, or Patrick Henry. But even if Awlaki could have successfully dodged Obama’s drones and lived today, they would have added another label to the man’s dangerous speech,

…disinformation.

The thing about the term, disinformation (and its close relative misinformation), is that it is being tossed around these last few years as the pejorative label by the media organizations seeking your fealty as a synonym for attacking anything that conflicts with their narrative. It is truly fascinating theater to watch, in real time, a war for people’s very conceptions of what is reality. Not a competition nor a campaign. No, this is a war. We are literally experiencing the War of Information and the most employed dirty bomb is a simple but effectively affixed label.

Curiously, it seems the origins of the word could actually be from the language of the Democrat’s favorite bogeyman of the last six years, Russian. It derives from the word dezinformatsiya, which means "misinformation," a term the KGB used in the 1950s to name a department created to dispense propaganda. But Putin’s alma mater was far more adept at this game than the folks in Silicon Valley and Seattle because if the KGB Propaganda Division couldn’t make the disinformation work on you their executioners just made house calls.

We marvel at our free society whose life span alone is a marked achievement. We are so certain of our freedom and self determination until someone else exercising the same exposes the reality that we could lose in a fair horse race. Then you want to feel safe and, BAM! It’s over right there. Next thing you know, you’re in a prison and you have no idea how you got there. In the War of Information, the shackles also come in the form of concepts and constructs to which we all have become woefully addicted.

It is simply that we are not, as a society, evolved enough to govern ourselves in a playing field as open as this media truly is. It is nothing to be ashamed of, but it incumbent on us all to slow down a bit, take it down a couple notches and pause to remind ourselves we don’t know everything just because we can ask Siri.

We’re simply not grown up enough for this kind of media yet.

But as for the polarization? That is totally orchestrated. See, here is how this is going to go down. Twitter becomes a thriving hive of exchange and discourse. We will praise Musk. But what if Twitter descends into a gladiators’ arena where the only question is “are you not entertained?” Then we will blame Musk.

But we will never, ever, admit that we were played.

Democracy may not be dead, but it has been on life support since the 1800s. And the only reason it has a heartbeat is because the oligarchy still needs you to believe in it. They need you to believe you have a say, that you have a voice. That is until you decide to say something that serves to frustrate the programming.

There is one ingredient that guarantees a free society and that is free speech. And the best thing to promote free speech is more speech. When more speech is labeled as “disinformation” you should be very circumspect about just who is the party throwing the pejorative label at the information on the platform.