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U.S. stops helping Big Tech spot foreign meddling amid GOP legal threats

13 points by perihelions 3y ago

llamaimperative 3y ago
Very curious how the GOP can construe this as anything other than strengthening our adversaries’ information ops. I know it’s a common meme around here to eyeroll about “disinformation,” but the reality is you’d be a goofball to think our adversaries aren’t utilizing our (very open) information ecosystem to further their interests. Of course we do the same to them to whatever extent possible and they combat those efforts to the extent possible, this isn’t a good guy bad guy debate. The line between “notifying information services of foreign threats” and “coercing information services into specific moderation decisions” is, or can be, somewhat blurry. But this line has always been blurry, which is why there’s 200 years of case law establishing information services’ right to contest such coercion based, essentially, on their own feelings of coercion. The recent GOP legal threats didn’t stem from that feeling at all — no information services AFAIK have reported feeling coerced. So as it stands in reality today, the GOP is just making the US strictly more vulnerable to information ops because they didn’t like the moderation decisions that private companies made, so far according to those companies, of their own accord.
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
I love reading stuff like this because I hate the GOP. I don't think too much about any of this stuff, because I know that the GOP is bad. There's no real risk in demonizing one party and having a single party state, that's the goal - to defeat my enemies, the GOP
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
There is no mention in the article of the Hunter Biden Laptop https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532 The FBI warning led to Facebook and Twitter censoring a news story. You would think an article talking about why the GOP is against this program would at least mention that incident.

13 points by perihelions 3y ago

Very curious how the GOP can construe this as anything other than strengthening our adversaries’ information ops. I know it’s a common meme around here to eyeroll about “disinformation,” but the reality is you’d be a goofball to think our adversaries aren’t utilizing our (very open) information ecosystem to further their interests. Of course we do the same to them to whatever extent possible and they combat those efforts to the extent possible, this isn’t a good guy bad guy debate. The line between “notifying information services of foreign threats” and “coercing information services into specific moderation decisions” is, or can be, somewhat blurry. But this line has always been blurry, which is why there’s 200 years of case law establishing information services’ right to contest such coercion based, essentially, on their own feelings of coercion. The recent GOP legal threats didn’t stem from that feeling at all — no information services AFAIK have reported feeling coerced. So as it stands in reality today, the GOP is just making the US strictly more vulnerable to information ops because they didn’t like the moderation decisions that private companies made, so far according to those companies, of their own accord.

local_crmdgeon 3y ago

I love reading stuff like this because I hate the GOP. I don't think too much about any of this stuff, because I know that the GOP is bad. There's no real risk in demonizing one party and having a single party state, that's the goal - to defeat my enemies, the GOP

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

There is no mention in the article of the Hunter Biden Laptop https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532 The FBI warning led to Facebook and Twitter censoring a news story. You would think an article talking about why the GOP is against this program would at least mention that incident.