Fact Checking or Free Speech?

 

I've written before about social media not being all it's cracked up to be, and definitely not the panacaea to all ills that its devoted fanboys and practitioners insist it is.  For a year or two I've been vacillating back and forth between staying put and dumping it from my life - and I still am.  But I think crunch time is almost upon me to make a final call.  It's all to do with how people, the ones that run this stuff and in so doing generate obscene profits for themselves (and presumably less obscene profits for the minions who work for them) are behaving.   I'm talking about you, Elon.  And you, Zuck.

I accept platforms like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter - sorry, I will not call it by its ridiculous single letter re-brand - and their various competitors serve a useful purpose to a lot of people, me included.  To re-iterate, I am an ex-pat, and increasingly rarely get the chance to go back to my homeland, so Facebook is a fast and effective way of keeping in touch with my old circle of Friends and Family back home, see the latest pics of my grandkids, and so on. But I'm finding my Feed is getting more and more clogged up with adverts and junk and frankly distressing posts from all kinds of Groups and (to a lesser extent) individuals that are not of the least interest to me.  I don't use Instagram (don't even understand its appeal, nor that of TikTok - but then I'm old, not a teenager, and have no need or desire to seek publicity) and never used Twitter or seen the point of it, even when Dorsey was running it rather than Musk.  And don't get me started on the totally misnamed Truth Social and its disgusting owner.....

So to me the waters have been muddy for a while now, and even the term "social media" is frankly completely misleading nowadays. Something "social", all my life, has meant somewhere, whether pub or club or internet platform, where you can get together and meet up with like-minded people of all shapes and sizes, both sexes and all ethnicities, and enjoy yourself.  Have a bit of food and drink, talk football or music, gossip about politics and personalities (another God-awful term: social media is littered with the bloody things!) and yes, take the piss out of each other.  Sure, you could have arguments and sometimes get angry, but that was simply human nature and nobody really minded.  Buy your adversary a beer and move on.  Simple.  All Facebook and co did was provide another, wider and more accessible, forum for doing precisely the same things but with a bigger and more widespread audience, some of whom you didn't know, had never met and were never likely to.  All a part of globalization (yet another recent and misrepresentative term from the internet age we're mired in).

Then it all got a bit nasty.  The internet has always been poorly regulated, if at all.  Its creators did so for purely altruistic reasons, to share knowledge and improve communications between like minded and essentially closed communities, with the expectation that in time it would grow but remain their ideal force for good.  But it didn't just grow, slowly and organically as the founders had expected.  It exploded - especially when expanding tech companies like Microsoft and Google and Apple got involved, creating and providing small and affordable computers and efficient tools to speed up the information transfer.  Like efficient and free browsers to find stuff on the internet and share it with others; easy to learn operating systems that enabled that; simple file systems to store increasing amounts of content; and easy to use and understand productivity packages to produce stuff and send it somewhere.  It was all good, and very soon became indispensable: writing letters and posting them (sadly in my view) was replaced by typing and sending emails because it was much easier and faster and safer to do so; writing a document of any kind easier to manage on a computer rather than using a typewriter because you could see what you were doing better on-screen and make immediate corrections as you went along without having to use bottles of white ink and brushes to messily cover up and re-type your typo's (or worse still throw away your document and start over).

Social media, once the network and technical infrastructure arrived to support it, was the logical progression, and it too exploded.  And again, its creators, like those at Microsoft and Google and Apple and all the others before them, did it on the basis of everything remaining all sweetness and light, fun to be around and making everyone's life easier and more productive.  And, once some bright spark came up with the idea of flogging advertising space, incredibly, obscenely profitable.  Which to me is crazy - highly intelligent men and women, visionaries and geniuses (genii?) completely misunderstanding human nature!  And governments, being more interested in using these wonderful tools to their own end and remaining in power, come hell or high water, with little or no interest in "the public good", went along with the internet's freewheeling unregulated nature - because it was much easier to do that and let someone else clear up the mess when (if?) it all went pear-shaped.

I think the Greek term for all this is hubris.....  Too many people in High Places, both in government and in the tech industry, thought the salad days would last for ever and put personal gain before the public good.  They fucked up.

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Bad Actors have probably infested cyber-space (terminology again, sorry) since Day One.  That too is human nature: we're not all good people.  But over the last perhaps 15 years or so, the Bad Actors seem to have got the upper hand.  Inexorably, the unpleasant, abusive, racist, xenophobic, nonsense has spread.  Keeping your Facebook account free from it nowadays is, it seems to me, totally impossible.  Perhaps keeping your postings Private is supposed to help, but it doesn't - there is not, as far as I know, any way of guaranteeing that only your Friends will see you stuff.  The only way to get close to that seems to be using some kind of private messaging system like Messenger (perhaps Meta would like to explain why it bought What'sApp, Messenger's competitor, but not kill it off or combine the two?  Makes no business or financial sense to me...) but doing that seems to defeat the entire objective - sharing every damn thing with everybody in the world -  of Facebook.

There has always been a need for moderation, some way of keeping the worst of the poison away - and God knows there's been a shitload of that flying around.  But the moderators have often been asleep at the wheel, or perhaps unsure what exactly they were supposed to be doing. Surely "moderation" means keeping the worst bits of garbage from appearing and spreading like the plague. And to do that it means making sure that anything questionable needs to be checked and double checked, or triple or quadruple checked if necessary, to identify any grain of truth that might justify allowing the post, and blocking it if there is no such grain.

Example: the rise of ISIS and radical Islamism was undoubtedly aided and abetted through Facebook accounts and Tweets, especially in recruiting and radicalizing large numbers of young dissatisfied Muslims to their cause.  How many innocent lives have been lost as a result is impossible to gauge.  Why were the accounts allowed to proliferate? Why were their lies allowed to spread?

Example: during the Brexit referendum, personal data was illegally harvested from tens of thousands of British Facebook accounts, sold to and used by the Leave campaign groups to create targeted adverts and sway the result in their favour.  No harm done to individuals, perhaps - but the country's economy and trade has been decimated as a result.  The propaganda spread by people like Farage and Gove and Patel in support of the Leave campaign was mostly errant nonsense and untrue, and easily verifiable - and yet there seemed to be no effort to do so.  Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people accepted them as gospel - enough to skew the debate (such as it was...) and win the vote.

Example: during the last three US Elections, huge numbers of fake accounts have been found, many of them operating from Chinese and, particularly, Russian troll farms, spreading reams of propaganda and misinformation (ok, let's give it it's true name: lies) that clearly affected voting patterns.  The activity is illegal, whether "their" guy won or lost is immaterial.  Not all of those identified were closed, and the denials from Moscow and Beijing accepted with little question.

Example: during the Covid Pandemic, social media was awash with conspiracy theories, more lies and more misinformation about the origins of the virus, its severity and effects, and the safety of the vaccines that were developed incredibly quickly to combat it, that were often endorsed by sitting Presidents (messrs Trump and Bolsonaro spring immediately to mind but there were others) and hence taken as gospel by their followers.  Again, uncountable numbers of people died as a result.  Quite how anyone could believe claims that the virus didn't exist and/or a complete hoax, or that injecting bleach into the bloodstream could kill it, or that the virus was created in a Beijing laboratory funded by the CIA  defies all logic and common sense.  And yet they spread, unchecked, across Facebook, Twitter and the rest.

There are many other "bad" examples, but those four are enough to be going on with.  Demonstrations, both violent and otherwise, for and against causes as distinct as climate change; support for the farming community; the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza; the NHS crisis; and anti-migrant have been organised and co-ordinated using social media in Britain, frequently and deliberately scheduled for the same day, time and location to cause maximum disruption and conflict - and usually succeeding in doing so.  Again, no checks and balances.

I fully accept that people have a democratic right to express their views on any subject - I'm doing so in this essay, and it's probable that every post I make does the same thing, but we'll get to that shortly - and social media is, these days, the Go To method of expresiing those views.  But if the platform of choice openly incites one side against the other, undoubtedly increasing the likelihood or civil disobedience (or if you prefer violent clashes between the two competing demonstrations and/or the police monitoring the marches and/or innocent bystanders including kids) then is there not a clear case for the platform - whether Facebook or Twitter or whoever, to say hang on a mo, we shouldn't allow this post.....and block and remove it?

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You're never going to get rid of conspiracy theories. They've always been there and always will be, and to be honest some of them can be innocent and quite amusing.  The Flat Earth Society has been around since I was a kid, sixty odd years ago, and despite all evidence to the contrary - i.e. documentary proof, photos and eye-witness testimony that the Earth is not flat like a plate but actually a ball with a circumference in excess of 40,000 km - there are still people around who insist that it's all a lie, a conspiracy by the Deep State and/or Illuminati with who knows what aim (certainly the Flat Earth Society are not specific about that).  But it seems to me the members of the Flat Earth Society are not malevolent, merely misguided.

There are others who firmly believe that Paul McCartney actually died in 1966 and was replaced by a jobbing guitarist called Billy Shears (hence the lyric on Sgt.Pepper) who had plastic surgery to look exactly like Macca and has done everything in his life since then as Macca ....recording albums, touring, writing songs and operas and, presumably, breeding.  But again, it's a harmless enough conspiracy and as far as I know nobody has ever been threatened for failing to believe it.

Essentially people will believe anything you throw at them, if it tickles their fancy.  And that's ok - until it isn't.  Prime example: Trump insisting that he actually won the 2020 Presidential Election, the result was a hoax, his victory was stolen and his loyal supporters should "fight like hell" to overturn it.  And?  Well, several thousand complete morons attacked the Capitol Building, stormed past police, trashed the place and tried to find VP Mike Pence to "string him up".  There were many casualtiies and even deaths in the riot that ensued.  But that's ok, said the morons, the President told us to do it and he knows what he's doing.  Which is of course bullshit.  This is a text-book conspiracy with a purely malignant aim, that was allowed to run unchecked - and continues to do so four years later.  It has divided a nation, transformed a once great Party - the Republicans, the GOP - into the tool of a would-be dictator hellbent on overturning the Constitution and replacing it with God knows what, and facilitated the Second Coming of The Donald.  God help us all!

Social media played its part in that shambles, and as a result Facebook and Twitter (then still the property of Dorsey) tightened up their moderations and clamped down on anything that seemed a little excessive.  Not to be outdone, the Orange Oaf started his own social media platform, using nearly identical formats and colour schemes to Twitter, hilariously branded it Truth Social (the meaning of both words clearly beyond the man's comprehension) and touted it as the new platform that guarantees Freedom of Speech (as long as you only agree with his version of it) with no moderation as it only publishes the Truth (that is to say, his own version of truth). He's been using it constantly since then to stir up his own World Vision, based on a whole raft of bollocks, conspiracies and lies, all tailored to suit his particular demographic.  That used to be easily recognisable: basically the Great American Unwashed, poorly educated, unemployed, often with psychological issues, drink and drug addictions, and taken in by the man's promise to Make America Great Again, tear down the System and destroy the (mythical) Deep State.  But the lines have since blurred.  For the life of me, I can't grasp why this has happened - his speeches are often incoherent rants, still replaying 2020's perceived injustice, or complaining about the various criminal investigations launched after the January 6th Capitol Riots, or railing against the fake media (whatever the hell that is...) - but all of it appeals to an increasingly big chunk of the population who have their own axes to grind against the government (for which read Deep State or Radical Left Extremists a.k.a. The Democrat party).

Come the 2024 Election and unbelievably the man wins by a landslide, both Electoral College and popular vote - despite pretty much every opinion poll, right up to the day before voting, predicting a Democrat victory.  Again, social media played its role - of course it did.  Trump's team managed it far better than Biden's (in the same way that in the Brexit Referendum the Leave campaign made better use of it than the Remain campaign), especially with Truth Social now acting as Trump's personal mouthpiece in a way that Twitter (run by Dorsey in 2020, remember, and still perhaps reflecting his more liberal democratic views) hadn't last time out.  All done with little or no checks and balances to weed out the more fictitious and dangerous pronouncements.

And now there is the Musk factor.  Already a known conspiracy theorist, he acquired Twitter in 2022 and re-named it X (go figure....I can't!) and immediately turned it into a conspiracy theorist's dream home.  Post whatever shit you want, seemed to be the message, we'll publish it all, no matter how extreme - it's called Free Speech.....  And he's remained true to his word. And gone further.  His support for Trump, massive cash donations to the Re-elction fund, setting up a quasi-legal prize draw that paid a million dollars to any registered voter who entered by simply registering to vote regardless of voting preference (I assume the two winners, before the Election Committee stepped in, both being Republican voters was purely coincidental) all helped - and on his Election Trump rewarded him with a place on his incoming cabinet.

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Musk has always been crowing about his support for Free Speech, with no restrictions, and has changed Twitter to become a bastion of it.  Zuckerberg has vacillated between pro-Free Speech/anything goes and pro-Moderation, and strengthened Meta's moderation team after the Cambridge Analytica scandal (the Brexit data sale I referred to earlier). He hired Nick Clegg, who had been the leader of the Liberal Democrat party wiped out in the 2014 Election after being Deputy Leader of the 2010 Tory/LibDem coalition, because the party dropped a pledge to abolish university tuition fees. He had little option, Tory Leader Cameron refused to accept the policy and as the senior party in the coalition that ended LibDem hopes.  Clegg was appointed Meta Vice President responsible for Global Affairs and Communication - with moderation falling under his wing.  Now and again, appearing  before Congressional Hearings with other Big Tech luminaries,  Zuckerberg would apologise for something or other, but always with reservations and caveats, and always failing completely to sound either believable or sincere.

But now, that has changed.  Clegg has resigned from Meta and Zuckerberg has pledged to reduce moderation and promote Free Speech on his platforms, and made a significant donation to Trump's coffers.  The reason is fairly obvious, if unspoken - money.  With Musk now in charge of Twitter and responsible for reducing regulation in Trump's government, and with Trump himself (and all his cabinet and senior party officials in House and Congress) being equally pro-Free Speech  (as long as it mirrors Trump's own version of it) Zuckerberg has no option. He has to toe the line in this new extreme Right Wing MAGA Republican America, or else he could be forced out.  And of course, he's not the only one: pretty much all the Big Tech major players and those in other industries, are doing the same.

It is truly a sick state of affairs.

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Here is my problem.  

I am a supporter of Free Speech - to me it's a fundamental human right.  We are all entitled to form our own opinions, and should be able to state them or write about them without fear of reprisals.  I do it all the time on this Blogger platform, on my blog on the Vivaldi Community platform, in discussions on Facebook and the Supporter's Forum belonging to the football team I support.  Not everyone agrees with them, and I have many lively conversations and arguments (ok, discussions) with other community members - they sometimes get quite heated, too.  And that is perfectly ok as far as I'm concerned, because the people I interact with respect my right to hold different views to theirs (and vice versa).

In over ten years of doing this, I have only had three cases where my views have prompted a complaint and moderation.  Once I expressed criticism of the Netanyahu government's conduct in relation to the Gaza crisis (my view remains that it has gone way beyond the "proportional response" permissable under International Law).  The essay prompted a reader comment that I was an anti-Semite and terrorist supporter, and demanded withdrawal of the post; I refused, apologised to the guy for offending him and pointed out that in the same post I had condemned Hamas without reservation. He then lodged a complaint to the Vivaldi moderators who asked me to credit my information sources - which I did gladly, and heard no more.  The post is still there.  That is how moderation should work - two-way, fair and impartial.  

The other two issues were on LinkedIn: in one, I called someone an idiot for a particular comment he had made (it was spectacularly stupid and not made in response to something I had written), the person complained and my post removed because the term "idiot" broke house rules and was deemed offensive.  The second was in relation, again, to Gaza, where I once more suggested the Israeli government had gone too far - and again the cries of "anti Semite" and "terrorist sympathiser" were thrown at me, my apology to the poster not accepted and a complaint made.  The post was removed.  I tried to appeal it using the tools on the platform and pointed out that I would also like an apology for being slandered in that way after I had already apologised but the system rejected my input.   Essentially, despite following the process, I was not allowed to make a counter claim.

I am perfectly fine with all three cases, perhaps less so with the second LinkedIn one, but at least something had been challenged and dealt with fairly.  I still believe the people who had complained were being pretty petty and thin skinned: but it takes all sorts.  Personally, I don't mind if someone calls me out, as long as there is a dialogue where both parties accept we simply have differences of opinion.  Human nature.  If Twitter, or Meta or anyone else removed moderation for spats like that it's fine, I guess - but people need to understand that they need to develop a thicker skin.  As my mum used to say, if you can't stand the heat stay out of the kitchen.

But in my view, some things must still be subject to moderation and fact checking. Specifically, lies and misinformation, because they can (and do) lead to far worse consequences than calling someone an idiot, or a Leftie Remainer (I've been called that many times!).  There are plenty of examples of lies being spread on social media platforms that have not been challenged, moderated or removed that have led to serious consequences.  There were many during the Brexit campaign, as I wrote earlier here, and that possibly led to the murder of a Remain supporting MP just a few days before the vote by a Brexit supporting anti-Islam thug.  People died because lies were posted on Facebook to the effect that the Covid vaccines were a ruse by Bill Gates and the Deep State to inject "tracking devices" into everybody so that Deep State operatives knew where we were at any given time (I know, I know - it's stupid on so many levels but a neighbour of mine lectured me to that effect when I said I was going for my innoculation. Needless to say he caught Covid and was seriously ill, but thankfully recovered).  All of these could have been disproved, fairly easily, with a little fact checking, and removed.

More recently, in the last week or so, Elon himself has posted a whole string of inflammatory statements accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer and one of his ministers, who has spent her entire working life protecting and helping abused women and children, of being "complicit" in the mass rape of women and children and demanding their resignation, and calling for a General Election because Labour is "not fit to rule" and should be replaced by Nigel Farage and the Reform Party (and the next day rolling back, posting that Farage "doesn't have what it takes"...  All a complete pack of lies, demonstrably so, and none of Elon Musk's business - he should focus on kow-towing to his new Orange paymaster.  Oh, and he in turn has suggested the US will "take over" Greenland and the Panama Canal, rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and make Canada the 51st State.  It would be laughable if the fat fuck hadn't then refused to rule out using the US military to achieve all of this.... 

That little lot - and there is plenty more, as bad and worse - is not free speech.  It's lies, blatant untruths specifically couched to prompt a reaction that could turn violent very easily (security around certain government ministers because of a perceived danger as a result of Musk's nonsense has already been put in place).  And yet in this new Metaverse the fact checking of that shit will henceforth stop, in the pursuit of Free Speech.

It is not, I repeat, Free Speech.  It is lying, dangerous and unfettered.  And if Musk and Zuckerberg think otherwise, if they will not apply some common sense and responsibility then they are as certifiably insane as their new Orange Master whose ring they are busily slobbering over.  And they are certainly not fit to run companies the size of Meta, or Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX or the Trump Organization - never mind the United States and the Free World... 

These are scary times indeed.