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I've had people telling me for the last 3 years that it's definitely election interference if a private Russian company pays some people to write tweets about U

by Meekro 7y ago

I've had people telling me for the last 3 years that it's definitely election interference if a private Russian company pays some people to write tweets about US politicians. But now, apparently it's not election interference if Twitter itself applies special restrictions to the accounts of foreign politicians it doesn't like?

atomi 7y ago
One is a private American company abiding the law and exercising it's legal right. The other is a rogue state sponsored disinformation/psyop campaign detrimental to our sovereignty. How is this that difficult?
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  It’s remarkable that the two can even be conflated! I fear sometimes that a considerable amount of Americans have no further loyalty to the ideals of this country.
  - weberc2 7y ago
    It’s not a conflation; the point is that if Twitter _as a communication channel_ holds so much away that Russians can upvote or retweet things to manipulate our democracy, the _how in the world_ are we okay with a private company having the ability to directly and unaccountably manipulate that channel?
    - abathur 7y ago
      I roughly agree that we should require vastly more transparency than we do for all large-platform decisions (traffic/ad/metadata/data-sharing agreements between any number of firms, developer accounts, payment/donation platform accounts, social media accounts, etc.) that can have a really big effect on normal people relative to the platforms implementing them. But this is still conflation. 1. Unless/until communication is excluded from what can legally be a business, Twitter has a legitimate commercial interest (and probably a legal obligation) to moderate the platform it built to ensure its the company isn't significantly harmed by the behavior of users who are not paying customers. I doubt anyone can do this with integrity over time when money and power are involved, but unless you're advocating for nationalizing social media platforms or creating some sort of Department of Public Speech to provide "neutral" voter-accountable moderators at no cost, I don't see how you can argue that the organization running a platform doesn't have a legitimate interest in shaping what it is for. No other separate entity--not the IRA nor Facebook nor HuffPo nor Exxon nor Fox news nor the DNC/RNC nor the IRA--have any legitimate right to shape the purpose of Twitter's platform. I guess the IRA can try to turn Twitter into whatever it wants--but Twitter is completely within its rights to shift policy to address how any entity that doesn't hold a controlling stake uses its platform at scale. Regardless of how Twitter does or does not exercise this right, there will be genuine and malign actors attempting to portray them as only doing X for illegitimate political reasons (to stir up support, circle the wagons, or bully them into doing more or less of X). 2. The mechanisms are very different. If the IRA manipulated democracies by banning people from a platform they built--or if Twitter ran a massive astroturfing operation intended to synthesize the appearance of social consensus on someone else's social media platform--we'd be talking apples-and-apples. ----- I want to be a little more cautious moving ahead since I'm assuming more here, but outside of and separate from this conflation issue, it seems you're building an argument like: 1. anyone who thinks unchecked state social-media influence operations merit action by a private company with the ability to directly and unaccountably manipulate the channel should instead want to nationalize or close social media to protect everyone from the owners of the platform 2. anyone who doesn't think unchecked state-sponsored social media influence campaigns are big enough of a deal to justify nationalizing or closing social media platforms is being disgenuine (either by over-weighting the influence campaigns, or under-rating the possibility that the platforms owners engage in similar behavior.) But the opinions aren't mutually exclusive. Someone can think prosecutors have too much power, and advocate for them to use the power they have more-justly. Someone can think platforms are too big to be opaquely-ruled fiefdoms and advocate for long-term solutions while advocating for harm-reduction in the short term.
      - wolco 7y ago
        So if the private Russian company pays Twitter all is okay?
      - weberc2 7y ago
        I think we’re mostly in agreement. Clearly today’s Twitter has a legal right to do what they want with their platform. I think it’s hypocritical to be concerned about Russians manipulating our Democracy indirectly, but not concerned at all about Twitter manipulating it much more directly. And my acknowledging that some people are hypocrites doesn’t imply that everyone who is concerned about Russian meddling is not also concerned about Twitter meddling or vice versa. I’m not persuaded that this all constitutes a conflation; it appears the only distinction is that Twitter is acting legally and Russia is presumably acting illegally (and I’m not sure they are acting illegally), but I’m not convinced that this distinction is a meaningful distinction because there is little consolation to be had in that Twitter can corrupt our Democracy legally. I fully agree that moderating Twitter while protecting our democracy is a sticky problem, although I think there are many milder options besides those you presented including regulating Twitter as a utility, breaking it up as a monopoly, or even shutting it down altogether (yes, it’s sad to think of the government shutting down a company, but that’s strictly better than a company controlling our government). None of these solutions are nationalizing social media, by the way—not meaningfully. I’m sure we can find all sorts of reasons why these solutions are imperfect, and I’m sure smarter people than myself can think of better solutions. The fact remains that these big social media companies have far too much power, and even a bad solution is almost certainly better than allowing this considerable attack vector to persist (the attack vector that is open to private companies and state actors alike). By the way, it’s not just our American democracy under threat, it’s every democracy where Twitter et al have strongholds.
        abathur 7y ago
        > I’m not persuaded that this all constitutes a conflation; it appears the only distinction is that Twitter is acting legally and Russia is presumably acting illegally (and I’m not sure they are acting illegally), but I’m not convinced that this distinction is a meaningful distinction I don't think this is the right distinction. I think it might help to drill down on legal vs. legitimate, and what we mean by affecting/meddling/influencing/manipulating/corrupting/etc. 1. Let's say you install a little free library (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Free_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Free_Library) at the edge of your property and put a dozen of your favorite history books in it. The general understanding is that anyone who walks by is free to take/leave a book. Over time, many books come and go. Sci-fi. Poetry. How-to-draw. Self-help. Pop-sci. An occasional religious text. A few months later, you notice that of your neighbors, who belongs to a minority religious sect, has started visiting every day. Each time, they take a book and leave one promoting their religion. This doesn't bother you much at first, but you get annoyed when you notice they've replaced most of the library and grow increasingly convinced they don't even read the books they take. In turn, you throw out the books they've left so far, put in several more of your own history books, and toss any new books they leave once a week. They notice this in turn, and start telling people that you are discriminating against their religion. The question of whether it's "legal" for them to do this, or "legal" for you to throw out the books they left is in the weeds. I think better questions are whether they have any legitimate right to turn your little library into an advertisement for their religion, and whether you have a legitimate interest in curating your little library to keep them from doing so. No one else has a legitimate right to repurpose your library, even if every individual action they take otherwise follows the conventions of how free libraries work. It doesn't matter if they do it intentionally or accidentally, nor whether they have good or bad intentions. 2. Our democracy is a different sort of thing--more of a shared emergent process or relation than a thing. Almost everything has some impact on it, and everyone with a legitimate membership claim has a legitimate interest in influencing it. I have a legitimate right to influence it. You have a legitimate right to influence it. Other states and their citizens don't. Exactly which kinds of influence are fair/unfair has to get haggled out through ongoing social process. It gets even fuzzier when we're deciding what kinds of influence are fair for U.S.-based multinational companies. (e.g., are we only concerned about intentional "manipulation"? Is intentional manipulation with a small aggregate effect more or less important than a large inadvertent impact lying in the shadow of performance optimization heuristics that were necessary to keep the service up?) Every multiverse incarnation of Twitter affects our democracy in some way. Twitter and every platform like it is a snowball of decisions made about UI/X, functionality/features, staffing, business/funding, management, accessibility, moderation, many of which get baked in long before a platform is anywhere near the scale it takes to even produce the emergent ripples that eventually get it labeled as powerful enough to corrupt a democracy. As long as it's legal to make platforms like this, they have a legitimate interest in deciding what their apps/platforms/service do and are for. --- Neither Russia nor the IRA have a legitimate right to repurpose Twitter or influence our democracy. Stopping them is not cut-and-dry, but I think it's more useful to see it as a nest of logistical/implementation problems. Twitter and many of its employees, at least as the rules of fair play are for now, have a legitimate interest in both making platform decisions, in influencing our democracy. It's fundamentally different because the solutions mostly involve doing democracy to figure out what is and isn't fair. There are some profoundly difficult questions here.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  I still don't see the difference. Domestic companies have been influencing elections for over a decade using advertising along with influence and power in the conglomerated media space. Neither the foreign power nor the large media giants nor the big defense contractors nor big tech actually care at all about individual people. It's turtles all the way down.
  - rland 7y ago
    I think this is actually kind of a dangerous equivocation to make, and I see it frequently and increasingly. It's very easy to be cynical and say everyone is just out to screw everyone but I refuse to believe that. To that extent, Twitter controlling the discourse is actually very different than the Russian government controlling the discourse.
    - sattoshi 7y ago
      Can you explain the difference? Is it just because Russia is a foreign entity? What if Twitter had a major Russian investment? What if Twitter was fully operated by the Russian government? What if it was operated by the german government? What if it was operated by the american government? What if it was operated by a man named Jack who has clear political interests? What if Jack only cares about the bottom line? What if Russia supported Hillary instead of Trump? Does your answer vary between the questions? To me, they are all the same.
      - enneff 7y ago
        One major difference is that the Russian operation was covert while Twitter is just now announcing their intent to do something before they do it, and it will be clear when they have done it.
      - lowtolerance 7y ago
        One is literally an adversarial nation hellbent on weakening the West’s influence in the world, enacting a strategy straight out of the modern fascist playbook, renowned fascist and political theorist Aleksandr Dugin’s The Foundations of Geopolitics with horrifying efficacy. But yeah, it’s understandable that someone might equate that with a social media platform being transparent (however belatedly) in their efforts to enforce their own rules. The problem with centrist lines of thinking such as yours is that it’s all predicated on fallacious logic: the demonstrably false notion that a compromise between two opposing positions is inherently superior to either.
- weberc2 7y ago
  Why does it matter that it’s a state compromising our democracy vs a private company? Anyway, I maintain that Twitter and other major social networks represent such an overwhelming volume of our speech that they are not simply “private companies”. To the OP’s point, their sheer power over the political process is the entire alleged Russian attack vector.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - belltaco 7y ago
    I'd agree with you if Twitter Inc. isn't being fully transparent with its actions or manipulating things on the back end without visibility and favoring one side, like the intentions and effects of the Russian interference.
    - weberc2 7y ago
      Cool, so we agree? Twitter’s moderation is completely opaque. All sides of this debate acknowledge this much.
  - r00fus 7y ago
    Guns and wars that’s why. Twitter doesn’t have an army and can’t dictate laws without getting its chain yanked. Russia/China/USA etc is a whole different story.
    - weberc2 7y ago
      Then you misunderstand the debate. Russia’s attack model isn’t guns and wars, it’s subverting our democracy by influencing who sees what via Twitter et al. If the Russians can change our laws by using social media to covertly influence elections, then clearly Twitter can as well. And “Twitter getting its chain yanked” depends on our ability to audit Twitter’s traffic shaping, which is nonexistent—there is no transparency.
- Meekro 7y ago
  It's difficult because they are both private companies. The Internet Research Agency is a private Russian company that was indicted by Mueller for election interference activities, among them paying people to tweet in support of some US politicians. So what exactly are private companies allowed to do to support or undermine a foreign candidate? Apparently tweeting goes too far. But if you restrict a candidate's tweeting, is that okay?
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    They're supposed to exercise their free speech by donating to a super-PAC and not "coordinating" (wink) with them.
  - fzeroracer 7y ago
    There are legal and not-so legal ways of supporting candidates. The FEC explicitly lays out what you can and cannot do. And generally speaking, a candidate requesting aid from a foreign entity in order to undermine an election is illegal. You're going to have to better establish how Twitter is violating the FEC rules if you want to compare the two.
    - username90 7y ago
      Twitter interfering with foreign elections has nothing to do with FEC.
- Aperocky 7y ago
  rogue => arbitrary opinion and not defined legally. disinformation/psyop campaign => can adequately describe most political campaigns. detrimental to our sovereignty => does this sound like Chinese reaction to western people commenting on HK? Not very convincing, in an ideal world everyone would have freedom of expression and freedom to influence other people in all circumstances. Now that doesn't mean freedom from the consequence of it but legally it shouldn't be restricted unless its active hate speech. A Russian posting 'great god emperor Donald Trump' on facebook doesn't fall in that camp.
- burfog 7y ago
  Is it really abiding the law and exercising it's legal right? If a company donates services to a campaign, that is considered donation-in-kind under FEC rules. An FEC filing must be made. Suppression of an opponent sure looks like donating services.
  - inlined 7y ago
    If a network decides not to air a political ad, would they need to file any FEC paperwork because that has value to all other candidates?
- paganel 7y ago
  I’m pretty sure Twitter may be seen by some Russian politicians as “detrimental to Russia’s sovereignty” and I’m also pretty sure that the Russian social networks based and working from Russia do in fact respect Russian laws (the same discussion goes for China). I’m also pretty sure that a lot of the recent US foreign involvement can be seen as “rogue”, even by some of the US allies (the most recent and famous example being the Iraq war, with the more recent Syria involvement also being not very well thought out, hence the hasty and sudden pull-out).
  - ben_w 7y ago
    > I’m pretty sure Twitter may be seen by some Russian politicians as “detrimental to Russia’s sovereignty” For what it’s worth, so do I — and I’m not saying that to support them, I don’t like what I see of the behaviour of the Russian government. For about the last decade, I’ve been of the opinion that the free an open border that is the internet is incompatible with current attitudes towards sovereign control of what happens within a particular national border. Sovereignty includes the ability to limit things, including things other people (like me) don’t want limited. Copyright, “immoral” substances or sexual acts, defamation, revealing state secrets. I have a question: if a Spanish person living in Spain publishes a South African state secret, has an offence been committed?
cryptoz 7y ago
> I've had people telling me for the last 3 years that it's definitely election interference if a private Russian company pays some people to write tweets about US politicians. I think you've got the facts backwards. Russia pays people to impersonate US politicians, not simply "write tweets about" them (but that would obviously count as election interference too; if there is no trusted space for democratic communication and discussion, then there is no democracy). The @TEN_GOP[1] account (among others) that pretended to be the Tennessee GOP but was actually Russian disinformation is absolutely 100% election interference. Russia also hacked the direct voter rolls or the voting machines or other election infrastructure in all 50 states. This is election interference. > But now, apparently it's not election interference if Twitter itself applies special restrictions to the accounts of foreign politicians it doesn't like? You have made this up? These assertions are not listed anywhere. The restrictions have nothing to do with who Twitter "likes"; the restrictions are based on who breaks the rules (which are publicly listed, not subjective by twitter inc). Private citizens and private companies cannot be compelled to distribute messages that contain calls to violence, falsehoods, etc, at scale to entire populations. That's anti-freedom, anti-democratic and anti-American. [1] @TEN_GOP info: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/19/16504510/ten-gop-twitter-russia https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/19/16504510/...
thenewnewguy 7y ago
> But now, apparently it's not election interference if Twitter itself applies special restrictions to the accounts of foreign politicians it doesn't like? They're not applying restrictions to the accounts of politicians they _don't like_, they're applying restrictions to politicians that _break Twitter's sitewide rules_. A politician doesn't want to get restricted? Follow the rules, like everyone else.
- zanny 7y ago
  Its trivial to devise rules of a discourse that selectively lock out certain ideologies from participating. You can easily use such a system to suppress speech you disagree with as much as you would by just banning them. Its totally in Twitters right to do it though. If politicians and/or society at large disagree about about not centralizing all your communications on the websites of international corporations.
  - thenewnewguy 7y ago
    It may be trivial to do so, but is Twitter doing it? Skimming their ToS I see no instances of such rules.
    - blfr 7y ago
      Twitter has considered "learn to code" harassment. Of course they are.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    If "certain ideologies" promote lies and violence, then it's a good thing that Twitter locks them out, don't you agree?
    - wolco 7y ago
      Until twitter decides to censor something important to you. Perhaps the Hong Kong protesters opinions should be fall under this new rule. Because of violence and everything.
Aperocky 7y ago
I find it funny that voicing an opinion, depending on the citizenship of the person voicing it, constitutes election interference.
JoBrad 7y ago
Except it wasn’t just “a private Russian company”. It was a coordinated, state-sponsored attack using multiple channels both online and offline, to cause disruption in the United States, including in the last Presidential election. That is very different from a company under the jurisdiction of the US limiting the influence of people who break their rules.
- Bendingo 7y ago
  > It was a coordinated, state-sponsored attack If this were so, why has no evidence been found after 2 years of desperate searching? Please stop repeating this entirely unsubstantiated claim.
  - belltaco 7y ago
    Wrong. https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/read-muellers-full-indictment-against-12-russian-officers-for-election-interference https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/read-muellers-full-indic...
  - skosch 7y ago
    Plenty of evidence has been found. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/18/us/politics/mueller-report-document.html#g-page-27 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/18/us/politics/m...
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    There was a ton of evidence found. The US Senate Intelligence Committee just issued a report last week. Please feel free to read the whole 85 page document, and stop repeating misinformation about the subject https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu... > The Committee found that the IRA's Information warfare campaign was broad in scope and entailed objectives beyond the result of the 2016 presidential election. Further, the Committee's analysis of the IRA's activities on social media supports the key judgments of the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections," that "Russia's, goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton,· and harm her electability and potential presidency."5 However, where the Intelligence Community assessed that the Russian government "aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him," the Committee found that IRA social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump, and to the detriment .of Secretary Clinton's campaign. > The Committee found that the Russian government tasked and supported the IRA' s interference in the 2016 U.S. election. This finding is consistent with the Committee's understanding of the relationship between IRA ownerYevgeniy Prigozhin and the Kremlin, the aim and scope of the interference by the IRA, and the correlation between the IRA's actions and electoral interference by the Russian government in other contexts and by other means.7 Despite Moscow's denials, the direction and financial involvement of Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, as well as his close ties to high-level Russian government officials including President Vladimir Putin, point to significant Kremlin support, authorization, and direction of the IRA' s operations and goals. > The Committee found that Russia's targeting of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society. Moreover, the IRA conducted a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood. The IR.A's actions in 2016 represent only the latest installment in an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States. Etc. If that document doesn‘t do it for you, you can read quite a bit more relevant detail in the (still partly redacted) Mueller report (though the counterintelligence work that the Special Counsel’s office did is not explicitly part of the mandate of that report, so it doesn’t cover the bulk of the evidence about election interference uncovered).
daveFNbuck 7y ago
Twitter isn't applying special restrictions. They're making special exceptions to keep up notable tweets that should otherwise be removed for policy violations.
everdev 7y ago
> foreign politicians it doesn't like I'd hope Twitter is smart enough to have a panel of judges with diverse backgrounds making these decisions (maybe requiring 2/3 majority) and not a single, biased person. That said, it's usually the little guys that get hit the hardest. You could argue Trump has broken Twitter's T&C multiple times, but if you have enough popular support and eyeballs (and run federal law enforcement), Twitter wouldn't dare pick a fight. But, if a small (enough) account or a politician with less power (in Twitter's business markets) uses similar language they'll get shut down way faster.
throw23132123 7y ago
Since America is the legitimate ruler of the world, nothing Americans do can ever be wrong. /s/ Honestly though, there is very little introspection within a country whose foreign policy oeuvre is filled with instances of foreign manipulations and wars of self-benefit, and in all those instances the American people have fallen, like clockwork, for the propaganda that has been put out by their "intellectuals"..... or maybe this is to be expected since they benefit from such hypocrisy.
guelo 7y ago
Russians also hacked into email and voting systems and directly assisted various campaings using stolen information.
tmaly 7y ago
I read the article as All world leaders, not specifically foreign ones.

by Meekro 7y ago

atomi 7y ago

One is a private American company abiding the law and exercising it's legal right. The other is a rogue state sponsored disinformation/psyop campaign detrimental to our sovereignty. How is this that difficult?

akhilcacharya 7y ago
It’s remarkable that the two can even be conflated! I fear sometimes that a considerable amount of Americans have no further loyalty to the ideals of this country.
- weberc2 7y ago
  It’s not a conflation; the point is that if Twitter _as a communication channel_ holds so much away that Russians can upvote or retweet things to manipulate our democracy, the _how in the world_ are we okay with a private company having the ability to directly and unaccountably manipulate that channel?
  - abathur 7y ago
    I roughly agree that we should require vastly more transparency than we do for all large-platform decisions (traffic/ad/metadata/data-sharing agreements between any number of firms, developer accounts, payment/donation platform accounts, social media accounts, etc.) that can have a really big effect on normal people relative to the platforms implementing them. But this is still conflation. 1. Unless/until communication is excluded from what can legally be a business, Twitter has a legitimate commercial interest (and probably a legal obligation) to moderate the platform it built to ensure its the company isn't significantly harmed by the behavior of users who are not paying customers. I doubt anyone can do this with integrity over time when money and power are involved, but unless you're advocating for nationalizing social media platforms or creating some sort of Department of Public Speech to provide "neutral" voter-accountable moderators at no cost, I don't see how you can argue that the organization running a platform doesn't have a legitimate interest in shaping what it is for. No other separate entity--not the IRA nor Facebook nor HuffPo nor Exxon nor Fox news nor the DNC/RNC nor the IRA--have any legitimate right to shape the purpose of Twitter's platform. I guess the IRA can try to turn Twitter into whatever it wants--but Twitter is completely within its rights to shift policy to address how any entity that doesn't hold a controlling stake uses its platform at scale. Regardless of how Twitter does or does not exercise this right, there will be genuine and malign actors attempting to portray them as only doing X for illegitimate political reasons (to stir up support, circle the wagons, or bully them into doing more or less of X). 2. The mechanisms are very different. If the IRA manipulated democracies by banning people from a platform they built--or if Twitter ran a massive astroturfing operation intended to synthesize the appearance of social consensus on someone else's social media platform--we'd be talking apples-and-apples. ----- I want to be a little more cautious moving ahead since I'm assuming more here, but outside of and separate from this conflation issue, it seems you're building an argument like: 1. anyone who thinks unchecked state social-media influence operations merit action by a private company with the ability to directly and unaccountably manipulate the channel should instead want to nationalize or close social media to protect everyone from the owners of the platform 2. anyone who doesn't think unchecked state-sponsored social media influence campaigns are big enough of a deal to justify nationalizing or closing social media platforms is being disgenuine (either by over-weighting the influence campaigns, or under-rating the possibility that the platforms owners engage in similar behavior.) But the opinions aren't mutually exclusive. Someone can think prosecutors have too much power, and advocate for them to use the power they have more-justly. Someone can think platforms are too big to be opaquely-ruled fiefdoms and advocate for long-term solutions while advocating for harm-reduction in the short term.
    - wolco 7y ago
      So if the private Russian company pays Twitter all is okay?
    - weberc2 7y ago
      I think we’re mostly in agreement. Clearly today’s Twitter has a legal right to do what they want with their platform. I think it’s hypocritical to be concerned about Russians manipulating our Democracy indirectly, but not concerned at all about Twitter manipulating it much more directly. And my acknowledging that some people are hypocrites doesn’t imply that everyone who is concerned about Russian meddling is not also concerned about Twitter meddling or vice versa. I’m not persuaded that this all constitutes a conflation; it appears the only distinction is that Twitter is acting legally and Russia is presumably acting illegally (and I’m not sure they are acting illegally), but I’m not convinced that this distinction is a meaningful distinction because there is little consolation to be had in that Twitter can corrupt our Democracy legally. I fully agree that moderating Twitter while protecting our democracy is a sticky problem, although I think there are many milder options besides those you presented including regulating Twitter as a utility, breaking it up as a monopoly, or even shutting it down altogether (yes, it’s sad to think of the government shutting down a company, but that’s strictly better than a company controlling our government). None of these solutions are nationalizing social media, by the way—not meaningfully. I’m sure we can find all sorts of reasons why these solutions are imperfect, and I’m sure smarter people than myself can think of better solutions. The fact remains that these big social media companies have far too much power, and even a bad solution is almost certainly better than allowing this considerable attack vector to persist (the attack vector that is open to private companies and state actors alike). By the way, it’s not just our American democracy under threat, it’s every democracy where Twitter et al have strongholds.
      - abathur 7y ago
        > I’m not persuaded that this all constitutes a conflation; it appears the only distinction is that Twitter is acting legally and Russia is presumably acting illegally (and I’m not sure they are acting illegally), but I’m not convinced that this distinction is a meaningful distinction I don't think this is the right distinction. I think it might help to drill down on legal vs. legitimate, and what we mean by affecting/meddling/influencing/manipulating/corrupting/etc. 1. Let's say you install a little free library (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Free_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Free_Library) at the edge of your property and put a dozen of your favorite history books in it. The general understanding is that anyone who walks by is free to take/leave a book. Over time, many books come and go. Sci-fi. Poetry. How-to-draw. Self-help. Pop-sci. An occasional religious text. A few months later, you notice that of your neighbors, who belongs to a minority religious sect, has started visiting every day. Each time, they take a book and leave one promoting their religion. This doesn't bother you much at first, but you get annoyed when you notice they've replaced most of the library and grow increasingly convinced they don't even read the books they take. In turn, you throw out the books they've left so far, put in several more of your own history books, and toss any new books they leave once a week. They notice this in turn, and start telling people that you are discriminating against their religion. The question of whether it's "legal" for them to do this, or "legal" for you to throw out the books they left is in the weeds. I think better questions are whether they have any legitimate right to turn your little library into an advertisement for their religion, and whether you have a legitimate interest in curating your little library to keep them from doing so. No one else has a legitimate right to repurpose your library, even if every individual action they take otherwise follows the conventions of how free libraries work. It doesn't matter if they do it intentionally or accidentally, nor whether they have good or bad intentions. 2. Our democracy is a different sort of thing--more of a shared emergent process or relation than a thing. Almost everything has some impact on it, and everyone with a legitimate membership claim has a legitimate interest in influencing it. I have a legitimate right to influence it. You have a legitimate right to influence it. Other states and their citizens don't. Exactly which kinds of influence are fair/unfair has to get haggled out through ongoing social process. It gets even fuzzier when we're deciding what kinds of influence are fair for U.S.-based multinational companies. (e.g., are we only concerned about intentional "manipulation"? Is intentional manipulation with a small aggregate effect more or less important than a large inadvertent impact lying in the shadow of performance optimization heuristics that were necessary to keep the service up?) Every multiverse incarnation of Twitter affects our democracy in some way. Twitter and every platform like it is a snowball of decisions made about UI/X, functionality/features, staffing, business/funding, management, accessibility, moderation, many of which get baked in long before a platform is anywhere near the scale it takes to even produce the emergent ripples that eventually get it labeled as powerful enough to corrupt a democracy. As long as it's legal to make platforms like this, they have a legitimate interest in deciding what their apps/platforms/service do and are for. --- Neither Russia nor the IRA have a legitimate right to repurpose Twitter or influence our democracy. Stopping them is not cut-and-dry, but I think it's more useful to see it as a nest of logistical/implementation problems. Twitter and many of its employees, at least as the rules of fair play are for now, have a legitimate interest in both making platform decisions, in influencing our democracy. It's fundamentally different because the solutions mostly involve doing democracy to figure out what is and isn't fair. There are some profoundly difficult questions here.
djsumdog 7y ago
I still don't see the difference. Domestic companies have been influencing elections for over a decade using advertising along with influence and power in the conglomerated media space. Neither the foreign power nor the large media giants nor the big defense contractors nor big tech actually care at all about individual people. It's turtles all the way down.
- rland 7y ago
  I think this is actually kind of a dangerous equivocation to make, and I see it frequently and increasingly. It's very easy to be cynical and say everyone is just out to screw everyone but I refuse to believe that. To that extent, Twitter controlling the discourse is actually very different than the Russian government controlling the discourse.
  - sattoshi 7y ago
    Can you explain the difference? Is it just because Russia is a foreign entity? What if Twitter had a major Russian investment? What if Twitter was fully operated by the Russian government? What if it was operated by the german government? What if it was operated by the american government? What if it was operated by a man named Jack who has clear political interests? What if Jack only cares about the bottom line? What if Russia supported Hillary instead of Trump? Does your answer vary between the questions? To me, they are all the same.
    - enneff 7y ago
      One major difference is that the Russian operation was covert while Twitter is just now announcing their intent to do something before they do it, and it will be clear when they have done it.
    - lowtolerance 7y ago
      One is literally an adversarial nation hellbent on weakening the West’s influence in the world, enacting a strategy straight out of the modern fascist playbook, renowned fascist and political theorist Aleksandr Dugin’s The Foundations of Geopolitics with horrifying efficacy. But yeah, it’s understandable that someone might equate that with a social media platform being transparent (however belatedly) in their efforts to enforce their own rules. The problem with centrist lines of thinking such as yours is that it’s all predicated on fallacious logic: the demonstrably false notion that a compromise between two opposing positions is inherently superior to either.
weberc2 7y ago
Why does it matter that it’s a state compromising our democracy vs a private company? Anyway, I maintain that Twitter and other major social networks represent such an overwhelming volume of our speech that they are not simply “private companies”. To the OP’s point, their sheer power over the political process is the entire alleged Russian attack vector.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- belltaco 7y ago
  I'd agree with you if Twitter Inc. isn't being fully transparent with its actions or manipulating things on the back end without visibility and favoring one side, like the intentions and effects of the Russian interference.
  - weberc2 7y ago
    Cool, so we agree? Twitter’s moderation is completely opaque. All sides of this debate acknowledge this much.
- r00fus 7y ago
  Guns and wars that’s why. Twitter doesn’t have an army and can’t dictate laws without getting its chain yanked. Russia/China/USA etc is a whole different story.
  - weberc2 7y ago
    Then you misunderstand the debate. Russia’s attack model isn’t guns and wars, it’s subverting our democracy by influencing who sees what via Twitter et al. If the Russians can change our laws by using social media to covertly influence elections, then clearly Twitter can as well. And “Twitter getting its chain yanked” depends on our ability to audit Twitter’s traffic shaping, which is nonexistent—there is no transparency.
Meekro 7y ago
It's difficult because they are both private companies. The Internet Research Agency is a private Russian company that was indicted by Mueller for election interference activities, among them paying people to tweet in support of some US politicians. So what exactly are private companies allowed to do to support or undermine a foreign candidate? Apparently tweeting goes too far. But if you restrict a candidate's tweeting, is that okay?
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  They're supposed to exercise their free speech by donating to a super-PAC and not "coordinating" (wink) with them.
- fzeroracer 7y ago
  There are legal and not-so legal ways of supporting candidates. The FEC explicitly lays out what you can and cannot do. And generally speaking, a candidate requesting aid from a foreign entity in order to undermine an election is illegal. You're going to have to better establish how Twitter is violating the FEC rules if you want to compare the two.
  - username90 7y ago
    Twitter interfering with foreign elections has nothing to do with FEC.
Aperocky 7y ago
rogue => arbitrary opinion and not defined legally. disinformation/psyop campaign => can adequately describe most political campaigns. detrimental to our sovereignty => does this sound like Chinese reaction to western people commenting on HK? Not very convincing, in an ideal world everyone would have freedom of expression and freedom to influence other people in all circumstances. Now that doesn't mean freedom from the consequence of it but legally it shouldn't be restricted unless its active hate speech. A Russian posting 'great god emperor Donald Trump' on facebook doesn't fall in that camp.
burfog 7y ago
Is it really abiding the law and exercising it's legal right? If a company donates services to a campaign, that is considered donation-in-kind under FEC rules. An FEC filing must be made. Suppression of an opponent sure looks like donating services.
- inlined 7y ago
  If a network decides not to air a political ad, would they need to file any FEC paperwork because that has value to all other candidates?
paganel 7y ago
I’m pretty sure Twitter may be seen by some Russian politicians as “detrimental to Russia’s sovereignty” and I’m also pretty sure that the Russian social networks based and working from Russia do in fact respect Russian laws (the same discussion goes for China). I’m also pretty sure that a lot of the recent US foreign involvement can be seen as “rogue”, even by some of the US allies (the most recent and famous example being the Iraq war, with the more recent Syria involvement also being not very well thought out, hence the hasty and sudden pull-out).
- ben_w 7y ago
  > I’m pretty sure Twitter may be seen by some Russian politicians as “detrimental to Russia’s sovereignty” For what it’s worth, so do I — and I’m not saying that to support them, I don’t like what I see of the behaviour of the Russian government. For about the last decade, I’ve been of the opinion that the free an open border that is the internet is incompatible with current attitudes towards sovereign control of what happens within a particular national border. Sovereignty includes the ability to limit things, including things other people (like me) don’t want limited. Copyright, “immoral” substances or sexual acts, defamation, revealing state secrets. I have a question: if a Spanish person living in Spain publishes a South African state secret, has an offence been committed?

cryptoz 7y ago

> I've had people telling me for the last 3 years that it's definitely election interference if a private Russian company pays some people to write tweets about US politicians. I think you've got the facts backwards. Russia pays people to impersonate US politicians, not simply "write tweets about" them (but that would obviously count as election interference too; if there is no trusted space for democratic communication and discussion, then there is no democracy). The @TEN_GOP[1] account (among others) that pretended to be the Tennessee GOP but was actually Russian disinformation is absolutely 100% election interference. Russia also hacked the direct voter rolls or the voting machines or other election infrastructure in all 50 states. This is election interference. > But now, apparently it's not election interference if Twitter itself applies special restrictions to the accounts of foreign politicians it doesn't like? You have made this up? These assertions are not listed anywhere. The restrictions have nothing to do with who Twitter "likes"; the restrictions are based on who breaks the rules (which are publicly listed, not subjective by twitter inc). Private citizens and private companies cannot be compelled to distribute messages that contain calls to violence, falsehoods, etc, at scale to entire populations. That's anti-freedom, anti-democratic and anti-American. [1] @TEN_GOP info: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/19/16504510/ten-gop-twitter-russia https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/19/16504510/...

thenewnewguy 7y ago

> But now, apparently it's not election interference if Twitter itself applies special restrictions to the accounts of foreign politicians it doesn't like? They're not applying restrictions to the accounts of politicians they _don't like_, they're applying restrictions to politicians that _break Twitter's sitewide rules_. A politician doesn't want to get restricted? Follow the rules, like everyone else.

zanny 7y ago
Its trivial to devise rules of a discourse that selectively lock out certain ideologies from participating. You can easily use such a system to suppress speech you disagree with as much as you would by just banning them. Its totally in Twitters right to do it though. If politicians and/or society at large disagree about about not centralizing all your communications on the websites of international corporations.
- thenewnewguy 7y ago
  It may be trivial to do so, but is Twitter doing it? Skimming their ToS I see no instances of such rules.
  - blfr 7y ago
    Twitter has considered "learn to code" harassment. Of course they are.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  If "certain ideologies" promote lies and violence, then it's a good thing that Twitter locks them out, don't you agree?
  - wolco 7y ago
    Until twitter decides to censor something important to you. Perhaps the Hong Kong protesters opinions should be fall under this new rule. Because of violence and everything.

Aperocky 7y ago

I find it funny that voicing an opinion, depending on the citizenship of the person voicing it, constitutes election interference.

JoBrad 7y ago

Except it wasn’t just “a private Russian company”. It was a coordinated, state-sponsored attack using multiple channels both online and offline, to cause disruption in the United States, including in the last Presidential election. That is very different from a company under the jurisdiction of the US limiting the influence of people who break their rules.

Bendingo 7y ago
> It was a coordinated, state-sponsored attack If this were so, why has no evidence been found after 2 years of desperate searching? Please stop repeating this entirely unsubstantiated claim.
- belltaco 7y ago
  Wrong. https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/read-muellers-full-indictment-against-12-russian-officers-for-election-interference https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/read-muellers-full-indic...
- skosch 7y ago
  Plenty of evidence has been found. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/18/us/politics/mueller-report-document.html#g-page-27 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/18/us/politics/m...
- jacobolus 7y ago
  There was a ton of evidence found. The US Senate Intelligence Committee just issued a report last week. Please feel free to read the whole 85 page document, and stop repeating misinformation about the subject https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu... > The Committee found that the IRA's Information warfare campaign was broad in scope and entailed objectives beyond the result of the 2016 presidential election. Further, the Committee's analysis of the IRA's activities on social media supports the key judgments of the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections," that "Russia's, goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton,· and harm her electability and potential presidency."5 However, where the Intelligence Community assessed that the Russian government "aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him," the Committee found that IRA social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump, and to the detriment .of Secretary Clinton's campaign. > The Committee found that the Russian government tasked and supported the IRA' s interference in the 2016 U.S. election. This finding is consistent with the Committee's understanding of the relationship between IRA ownerYevgeniy Prigozhin and the Kremlin, the aim and scope of the interference by the IRA, and the correlation between the IRA's actions and electoral interference by the Russian government in other contexts and by other means.7 Despite Moscow's denials, the direction and financial involvement of Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, as well as his close ties to high-level Russian government officials including President Vladimir Putin, point to significant Kremlin support, authorization, and direction of the IRA' s operations and goals. > The Committee found that Russia's targeting of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society. Moreover, the IRA conducted a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood. The IR.A's actions in 2016 represent only the latest installment in an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States. Etc. If that document doesn‘t do it for you, you can read quite a bit more relevant detail in the (still partly redacted) Mueller report (though the counterintelligence work that the Special Counsel’s office did is not explicitly part of the mandate of that report, so it doesn’t cover the bulk of the evidence about election interference uncovered).

daveFNbuck 7y ago

Twitter isn't applying special restrictions. They're making special exceptions to keep up notable tweets that should otherwise be removed for policy violations.

everdev 7y ago

> foreign politicians it doesn't like I'd hope Twitter is smart enough to have a panel of judges with diverse backgrounds making these decisions (maybe requiring 2/3 majority) and not a single, biased person. That said, it's usually the little guys that get hit the hardest. You could argue Trump has broken Twitter's T&C multiple times, but if you have enough popular support and eyeballs (and run federal law enforcement), Twitter wouldn't dare pick a fight. But, if a small (enough) account or a politician with less power (in Twitter's business markets) uses similar language they'll get shut down way faster.

throw23132123 7y ago

Since America is the legitimate ruler of the world, nothing Americans do can ever be wrong. /s/ Honestly though, there is very little introspection within a country whose foreign policy oeuvre is filled with instances of foreign manipulations and wars of self-benefit, and in all those instances the American people have fallen, like clockwork, for the propaganda that has been put out by their "intellectuals"..... or maybe this is to be expected since they benefit from such hypocrisy.

guelo 7y ago

Russians also hacked into email and voting systems and directly assisted various campaings using stolen information.

tmaly 7y ago

I read the article as All world leaders, not specifically foreign ones.