My latest book review for ERQ, Francesca Bolla Tripodi‘s The Propagandists’ Playbook.
Tag Archives: US
Workshopping trust and speech at EDMO
It was a great pleasure to convene a workshop at the European Digital Media Observatory today featuring Claire Wardle (Brown), Craig Matasick (OECD), Daniela Stockmann (Hertie), Kalypso Nicolaidis (Oxford), Lisa Ginsborg (EUI), Emma Briant (Bard) and (briefly) Alicia Wanless (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). The title was “Information flows and institutional reputation: leveraging social trust in times of crisis” and the far-ranging discussion touched on disinformation, trust vs. trustworthiness, different models of content moderation, institutional design, preemptive red-teaming of policies, algorithmic amplification, and the successes and limits of multi-stakeholder frameworks. A very productive meeting, with more to come in the near future on this front.
Independent technology research
This looks like a very worthwhile coalition, advocating for open access to aggregate social media data for research purposes (not necessarily only for academics and journalists), while emphasizing a duty of independence in research and upholding standards and oversight. The coalition is US-focused, but its efforts dovetail with draft legislation currently making its way through the European institutions that seeks to guarantee similar rights of access. Inasmuch as large platforms lay a claim to embodying the contemporary public sphere, such calls for openness will only persist and intensify.
Geopolitical splintering, decentralization, impartiality
Meta and Twitter have discovered and dismantled a network of coordinated inauthentic behavior spreading pro-US (and anti-China/Russia/Iran) narratives in Central Asia and the Middle East (Al Jazeera, Axios stories). Undoubtedly, this kind of intervention bolsters the platforms’ image as neutral purveyors of information and entertainment, determined to enforce the rules of the game no matter what the ideological flavor of the transgression may be. In a way, paradoxically, such impartiality may even play well in Washington, where the companies would certainly welcome the support, given the current unfavorable political climate.
The type of universalism on display in this instance harkens back to an earlier era of the internet, the techno-libertarian heyday of the 1990s. Arguably, however, that early globalist vision of the world-wide web has already been eviscerated at the infrastructural level, with the growth of distinctive national versions of online life, in a long-term process that has only been made more visible by the conflict in Ukraine. Hence, the impartiality and universality of Meta and Twitter can be seen ultimately as an internal claim by and for the West, since users in countries like Russia, China, or Iran are unable to access these platforms in the first place. Of course, geopolitical splintering was one of the ills the web3 movement set out to counter. How much decentralization can resist the prevailing ideological headwinds, however, is increasingly unclear. Imperfect universalisms will have to suffice for the foreseeable future.
Spyware as diplomatic agenda item
Commercial spyware has become a mainstream news item: Politico this week profiled a story about NSO Group in the context of President Biden’s official visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia. Both Middle Eastern countries have ties with this private company, the former as the seat of its headquarters, the second as a customer of its services. The general context of the trip is broadly defensive for the US Administration, as it seeks help to stem the runaway growth in oil prices triggered by the Ukraine war, while emerging from under the shadow of its predecessor’s regional policies, from Jerusalem to Iran to the Abraham Accords. Given Biden’s objectively weak hand, raising the issue of NSO Group and the misuse of their spyware with two strategic partners is particularly complicated. At the same time, many domestic forces, from major companies damaged by Pegasus breaches (Apple, Meta…) to liberals in Congress (such as Oregon Senator Ron Wyden), are clamoring for an assertive stance. Naturally, the agencies of the US National Security State are also in the business of developing functionally similar spyware capabilities. Hence, the couching of the international policy problem follows the pattern of nonproliferation, with all the attendant rhetorical risks of special pleading and hypocrisy. The issue, however, is unlikely to fade away as an agenda item in the near future, a clear illustration of the risks to conventional diplomatic strategy of a situation in which military-grade cryptanalysis is made available on the open market.