Racket News

I'm surprised that someone as interested in this as you has not followed up to try and see whether Taibbi's worrying thesis has any merit.

He, and Shellenberger and the other writers at "Public" are slowly revealing the outlines of something disturbing. Namely that social media companies take the direction of state surveillance and espionage actors -- including those of foreign (Israeli and Ukrainian secret services) governments, currently considered allies. This is being revealed to be effected through a sinister network of supposed "civil society" NGOs and 501c3s. That's a worrying idea to anyone that considers themself a democrat or a republican (in the non-partisan sense).

If you had followed up on this you would have noticed that although Taibbi rapidly admitted conflating CISA and CIS a further look suggests that the CIS is deeply inter-twined with the DHS and that Taibbi was correct about the CISA's involvement with the EIP. Taibbi is good at admitting his errors and correcting them publicly and rapidly: https://www.racket.news/p/lee-fang-vs-mehdi-hasan-round-2

With regard to the 22 million versus 3000 , Taibbi's co-author Michael Shellenberger notes that:

https://public.substack.com/p/attack-of-the-censorship-karens

“Stamos & EIP worked to get entire NARRATIVES banned outright,” explained Mike Benz, the State Department official-turned-whistleblower. “Those narratives, by EIP’s own math, had millions of associated posts.”

Taibbi pointed out that the 3,000…

That article does not seem to have been updated given the recent massive trove of information provided by the Twitter files. [1] A group, "Hamilton 68", was a central source on all of the "Russian trolls" narrative. They were widely cited, frequently as an exclusive source, by media and congressmen alike. They had a secret list of 644 "Russian trolls" whom they surveilled and used to populate their dashboard on the latest trends in Russian disinformation.

The problem is that those were mostly just 644 seemingly random, primarily conservative, "real" Western individuals. For instance David Horowitz [2] was a "Russian troll." Others included individuals who had written books on the US constitution, a conservative news editor, and so on. So basically whatever conservative individuals were discussing was labeled as "Russian disinformation" which the media (and congress) then simply took at face value and repeated.

Incidentally Twitter also knew that the "Russian disinformation" stuff was, itself, largely disinformation. They were able to determine Hamilton's entire list by simply looking at their API calls. While there was lively internal debate about whether they should go public with this information or not, and they did push back in private, they ultimately chose to remain publicly silent - just as the mainstream media is now also doing, leaving me to link to rando sites in lieu of where these stories ought be.

The one thing I'm certain about is that reading the book, 20…

>State level policy depends on public support or opposition.

Arguable - I'd say even unlikely in most real world situations. The US has recently had a wildly unpopular president who showed remarkable indifference to said public opposition. And relying on the media to gauge public support, or inform the populace in objective terms about the actions of their representatives, is inadvisable. It is not difficult to find instances of the same media organizations arguing both in favor and against public policies depending on the elected official enacting them[0][1]. In that regard, mainstream media seems more akin to a tool of propaganda, shaping opinion and manufacturing consent after the fact, than a useful organ of democratic governance.

The issue is that the control the population realistically has over their representatives in a democratic republic like every (?) modern democracy is by necessity of the size of said governments extremely limited. You can't have a referendum on every issue, so for the most part all the public gets to decide is if someone did a good job over the last X years. I recommend reading Democracy for Realists for a more in-depth look, but suffice to say that that level of interaction is far too coarse to guide public policy on immediate, subtle, and complex issues like Ukraine, COVID, or Chinese foreign policy. If something is not a core issue (i.e. something that the parties have split and staked their identities on, like women's rights, access to…

Quite marginal?

Here is a video compilation of just cases where MSNBC promoted just the Hamilton 68 dashboard, which supposedly tracked "Russian linked" bot and troll activity. It's 11 minutes of clips:

https://www.racket.news/p/eleven-minutes-of-media-falsehoods

These people couldn't stop talking about Russian bots. Listen for yourself and you'll see the claim is made regularly. Later it was discovered that these hundreds of accounts were all ordinary westerners, and the Hamilton 68 people admitted that they'd never really had a reason to think they were Russian. That's just one TV channel, referring to one source of misinformation! There are far far more such clips available.

This sort of thing was totally normal outside the media too. Look at how many papers have come from academics writing about this supposed widespread problem:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22social+bots%22+OR+%22twitter+bots%22&btnG=&oq=%22social+bots%22

Over 14,000 papers on bots that don't really exist!

And that's just a tiny fraction of the misinformation pumped into society regularly. Again, if Hinton actually cared about misinformation, he'd have cared about that. He doesn't. Like everyone else claiming to care, he's simply a bitter partisan, hence his comment about Biden at the end of the interview.

My point is that these claims all revolved around the idea that the internet was being flooded with bots that spoke and thought just like Americans, so similarly…

"Fake news" eh?

You obviously haven't watched any of the US senate hearings, nor read any of Matt Taibbi's investigative work - where Elon gave Matt and other journalists access to Twitter's data like email interactions between Twitter employees, the FBI and other government agencies.

I won't bother describing the understanding I've come to on God since you don't seem like a deep person to even investigate thoroughly enough, whatever propaganda bubbles you get your news from - makes you thinks it's "fake news" tells me you're lost.

Here's Matt's Substack, to make it super easy for you to start reading/learning yourself: https://www.racket.news/

And here's his specific work on the Twitter Files: https://twitterfiles.substack.com/

Maybe if you start developing your self-awareness, and your self-regulation skills, you'll develop the patience to read more, critically think better - and then that would be a good starting point to contemplate the universe and extrapolate from first principles as to how much of a chance that a God exists.

Maybe don't be so confident in your arrogance either; or "lay off it", as you'd say - you're not the super aware person you think you are.

90-minute Bikram hot yoga classes are a good place to start to kick your ass and get your body and mind healthier.

I don't know that former government officials are the same level of problem that demands from (then) current government officials are.

For example:

> We released a list of 354 names Maine Senate Angus King wanted taken down for reasons like “Rand Paul visit excitement,” “followed by [former Republican opponent Eric] Brakey,” and my personal favorite, “mentions immigration.” For balance we also released a letter from a Republican official at the State Department, Mark Lenzi, who tells Twitter about 14 real Americans “you may want to look into and delete.”

https://www.racket.news/p/capsule-summaries-of-all-twitter

This behavior clearly violates the First Amendment.