Im-Politic: A Solution to the Big Tech Misinformation/Censorship Quandary

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algorithmic amplification, antitrust, Big Tech, censorship, competition, Constitution, Facebook, free expression, free speech, Im-Politic, internet, journalism, Mainstream Media, misinformation, monopoly, news media, Section 230, social media, tech, Twitter

Don’t look now (a heckuva way to begin a piece of writing!), but I may have come up with one solution to the incredibly complex and just as important national dilemma over regulating how gargantuan social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter handle Americans’ speech rights.

First, let me stipulate that I’m anything but an expert on the Constitution, law and regulation of any kind (except maybe in the international trade field), or technology of any kind. But maybe I know enough to have produced a plan that’s outside-the-box enough to break the various legal and political and philosophical logjams that have left the nation with a status quo that seems to satsify no one, but that’s anchored in reality.

In addition, the thoughts below were prompted by a very stimulating panel discussion involving genuine experts in all these fields that took place this past weekend at a wide-ranging policy conference held by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. (I spoke on a separate panel on China.) So my ideas aren’t coming from completely out of the blue.

The nub of the problem is that Americans across the political spectrum are furious with the platforms’ speech policies, but for radically different reasons. Those to the left of center blast them for posting what they view as misinformation. Their conservative counterparts claim that right-of-center views are too often censored – typically because they’re bogusly accused of spreading misinformation.

All sides seem to agree that the platforms’ practices matter greatly because, due largely to their algorithmic amplification powers, they have such power to turn material viral that they’ve achieved the massive scale needed to become a leading  – and often the leading – way in which Americans receive news, opinion, and other forms of information that affect politics and public policy. But towering obstacles stand in the way of pretty much every proposal for reform advanced so far.

For example, their status as private companies would appear to block any move to empower government to influence their speech practices. Antitrust specialists disagree strongly as to whether they’re now monopolistic or oligopolistic enough under current or even proposed legal standards to warrant breaking up. The companies themselves of course deny any such allegations, and contend that if they needed to downsize, they wouldn’t be able to compete effectively around the world with foreign counterparts – especially those from China. Some have proposed turning them into public utilities, but opponents call that a great way to stifle any further innovation.

So here’s my idea: Turn the platforms into a new type of entity that would be subject to a new body of regulation reflecting both the distinctive importance of free expression in American life and the distinctive (and indeed predominant) role that the platforms now play in enabling individuals and organizations both to disseminate material, and (stemming from an aspect of free expression rights that’s often overlooked, but that’s now unquestionably vulnerable due to the main platforms’ sheer scale and reach) to reach their potential audiences. One possible name: Electronic Speech Companies (ESCs).

As history demonstrates, there’s nothing unusual about the federal government organizing private business into different categories for tax purposes, and there’s nothing unusual about government at any level regulating such businesses with an unusually heavy hand because of their outsized role in providing vital goods and services. That should be clear from the long-established policy of creating utilities. So I don’t see any Constitutional problems with my idea.

I agree that government’s price-setting authority over utilities can stymie innovation. But ensuring that these entities don’t curb free expression any more than (legally) necessary (see below) wouldn’t require creating such authority. I’d permit these ESCs to charge whatever they want for their services and to make money however they like (including selling users’ personal information – which does raise problems of its own, but which are unrelated to the speech issue). As currently required by the controversial Section 230 provision of the Communication Decency Act of 1996, they wouldn’t be able to disseminate any content that’s already illegal under federal criminal law, intellectual property law, electronic communications privacy law, or (most recently) criminal and civil sex trafficking law.

I’d also make them subject to current libel law – which means that plaintiffs would need to prove that false and defamatory information had been spread maliciously and knowingly. Could this rule mean that now-incredibly clogged U.S. courts would become more incredibly clogged? Sure. So let’s also set up a separate court system to handle such cases. Since a dedicated tax court system already exists, why not?

Frivolous suits could be reduced with “loser pays” requirements for court costs. The Big Tech defendants would doubtless still hold a huge advantage by being able to hire the very best legal minds and driving those costs up by dragging out proceedings. But a number of legal non-profits have emerged over the years to help the little guys and gals in these situations, so maybe at least the potentially most important and promising suits wouldn’t be deterred by financial considerations.

What the ESCs wouldn’t be permitted to do is bar or delete or modify any content, or any users, on misinformation grounds. Advocates of continuing to permit and even further encourage or require such practices argue that the platforms’ vast scale requires greater discretionary and often required authority along these lines in the name of any number of good causes – election integrity, public safety, national security, etc. (See, e.g., here.)

But three counter-arguments are more persuasive to me. First, I can’t imagine developing any legal definition of misinformation (as opposed to libel or other well-established Constitutional speech curbs) that would be genuinely neutral substantively and that therefore wouldn’t be easy to abuse massively – and to the great detriment of our democracy’s health, due to the platforms’ scale.

Second, that’s no doubt why such regulations have absolutely no precedent in U.S. history, despite past periods and instances of intolerance dating from the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

Third, if the ESCs are going to be held liable for disseminating etc misinformation, what excuse will there be to maintain protection for the rest of the news media? I’ve spent much of my multi-decade career in policy analysis finding instances that would unmistakably qualify. Not that ongoing and arguably worsening conventional media irresponsibility is any cause for complacency. But would a government remedy for such an intrinsically nebulous offense really result in a net improvement?

Individual victims of ESC censorship would, however, need remedies for these forms of cancellation, and as with libel and slander, a special court system could handle accusations, using the aforementioned provisions aimed at leveling the legal costs playing field. The Justice Department could file its own suits, too, and some seem likely if only because its own inevitable political sympathies are bound to shift as power in Washington changes hands over time. This prospect, moreover, should help keep the ESCs on their best behavior.

The big danger of my proposal, of course, is that misinformation would keep appearing and metastasizing online, and spreading like wildfire offline due to the ESCs’ extraordinary reach. That can’t be a healthy development. But it’s surely an unavoidable development for anyone valuing any meaningful version of free expression and its crucial corollary – the marketplace of ideas. For empowering a handful of immense ESCs to restrict misinformation threatens to narrow greatly and even fatally the competitive essence of this marketplace.

Throughout U.S. history, Americans have relied on these dynamics, and the common sense of the public, to crown as winners the best ideas and the benefits they bring, and declare as losers those that have either caused or threatened serious dangers. Is anyone out there prepared to deny seriously that the results, though imperfect, have been historically excellent, that the potential for improvement remains just as impressive, or that any alternative yet proposed looks superior? If not, then I hope you’ll consider this ESC plan at least a promising framework for ensuring that these digital giants don’t become the ultimate arbiters.

Im-Politic: A Pandemic of Coverups?

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Anthony S. Fauci, CCP Virus, censorship, coronavirus, COVID 19, EcoHealth Alliance, Facebook, Fauci, Fauci emails, Google, Im-Politic, lab leak, Mark Zuckerberg, National Institutes of Health, NationalPulse.com, natural origin, NIH, Peter Daszak, social media, The New York Times, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wuhan lab, Wuhan University, Wuhan virus, Zeynep Tufekci

What a June it’s been so far for anyone who’s always been skeptical of claims that anyone linking the CCP Virus’ emergence to virology facilities in Wuhan was trafficking in fringe-y conspiracy theories. Many crucial pieces of the puzzle are still missing. But June’s developments should make it harder than ever to dismiss not only the possibility that a natural or engineered version of the virus escaped from the lab, but that U.S. public health authorities ignored official prohibitions on funding so-called gain-of-function work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that they and other powerful American institutions even acted to suppress news of their Wuhan connections.

After all, it’s already been a month in which no less than Anthony S. Fauci appeared to emphasize that the virus featured characteristics not normally found in the wild. The longtime head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Biden’s chief science advisor told a New York Times interviewer that

“This is an unusual virus because about a third to 40 percent of the people get no symptoms at all. Yet it’s capable of killing 600,000 Americans. We’ve never had a situation like that where a virus that would be benign or almost half the people or 40 percent of the people and yet kill so many people.”

And this after declaring that

“I’m not an evolutionary virologist, but those who are look at the virus, and they say it’s absolutely totally compatible with something that evolved from bat viruses because of the closeness to. But we don’t have that extra link that’s come in, but there’s nothing they see in there that makes you think it was something that came from a lab.”

Clear as mud, right?

It was also a week in which another New York Times contributor made an observation indicating that even if the the Wuhan Institute of Virology whose research Fauci and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) overall helped finance wasn’t engaged in federally prohibited gain-of-function experiments, it still might have created the pathogen in question where none existed before. According to Zeynep Tufekci,

“Just trying to culture bat viruses in the lab can create risks that the scientists may not even be aware of. While trying and failing to cultivate one strain, they might inadvertently culture another one they don’t even know about. It’s even possible, [Stanford University neurobiologist and bioengineer Michael Lin] told me, that viruses can coexist in a single sample and quietly recombine, giving rise to something novel but undetected.”

In other words, creating the specific SARS-CoV-2 virus that has swept over the world might not have been the goal of the Chinese scientists in question. But this virus might have resulted from their efforts to simulate natural processes. If you or loved ones have suffered from the virus medically, or from the economic and other public health damage it’s caused, this is likely to look like a distinction without a difference. It’s also likely to raise further questions about why U.S. public health agencies funded clearly risky research in a facility they’ve acknowledged they couldn’t monitor adequately.

It’s also been a month in which, thanks in part to that New York Times Fauci interview, more reasons emerged to wonder whether Fauci and social media giants Facebook and Google conspired (yes, the word would be justified in these instances) to suppress reporting on the lab leak theory – in Google’s case because it, too, had helped pay for the Wuhan lab’s work at various times recently.

In January, 2020 – when the CCP Virus was declared a public health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO) – Facebook began a campaign to “keep harmful misinformation about COVID-19 from spreading on our apps” and direct customers “to resources from the WHO and other health authorities through our COVID-19 Information Center and pop-ups on Facebook and Instagram with over 350 million people clicking through to learn more.” Throughout the pandemic period, WHO of course has been a major actor trying to debunk any version of the lab leak theory.

Given Fauci’s own clear interest in drawing public attention away from the possibility that his agency helped create the virus, it’s more than a little interesting that in March of that year, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent Fauci an email that the recipient told Times interviewer Kara Swisher, who covers Big Tech, “hey, is there anything that we can do to help out to get the messages out, the right public health messages? I have a very important medium here in Facebook. Can I help? And as a matter of fact, if you guys don’t have enough resources and money to do some of the things you want, just let us know.”

Fauci took Zuckerberg up on his offer but nothing is known about the details of this arrangement because although this email exchange has been made public (with redactions that are odd to say the least since it’s hard to imagine any national security secrets changed hands), the content of follow-up communications (which surely included not only emails but phone conversations) remain under wraps.

Can we all agree that all of this material should be released ASAP, so that we won’t have to accept Fauci’s word that “any thought” that his dealings with Zuckerberg had to do with censoring inconvenient virus-related truths “is total conspiracy theory and total flight of fantasy”? Especially since Facebook didn’t announce until May 26 of this year that “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.” (The company has said nothing about the possibility that the virus escaped a Chinese lab in natural form.)

As for Google, news of its own dodgy CCP Virus-related practices came out on June 9. Shortly thereafter, the company’s own virus and China connection was revealed. A website called TheNationalpulse.com produced proof that Google “funded research conducted by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance – a controversial group which has openly collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology” on that controversial bat virus research.

Google insists that “The one-off philanthropic grants referenced are years old and had nothing to do with COVID,” and that ‘We have engaged precisely zero times with this organization on any work related to COVID or the Wuhan lab.” But as the National Pulse post showed, one of the studies co-sponsored by Google – from 2018 – described itself “conducted in Guangdong Province, China, to characterize behaviors and perceptions associated with transmission of pathogens with pandemic potential in highly exposed human populations at the animal-human interface….” So it’s easy to conclude that Google also wanted to draw attention away from and discredit the idea that the Institute had anything to do with the pandemic’s outbreak.

Finally, June has been a month when the news came out that in June, 2020, a group of Wuhan University scientists asked the NIH to delete from a key medical genomics database data CCP Virus genome sequences they gathered from patients in that city in January and February.

The scientists claimed their reasons for the request were technical, and no evidence of deceitful intent has appeared. For its part, the NIH says that it receives such requests all the time, and typically complies. Fair enough. But given the importance of such very early pandemic stage information in determining the virus’ origins, and given China’s extensive efforts to keep data from this crucial early pandemic period secret, why on earth didn’t the NIH at least report the request and its response right away? Could it be because of its own funding of virus research in Wuhan?

As I said above, many major pieces of these puzzles remain missing.  But many are now in place also, and if ever there was a subject that screamed out for a comprehensive official investigation of the relevant actions and relationships at least of the U.S. players, with broad subpoena power, you’d think a pandemic that’s killed more than 600,000 Americans and sickened and disrupted or flat-out ruined the lives of tens of millions more amply fits the bill.  

 

Im-Politic: How Social Media Could Really Fight Misinformation

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censorship, Facebook, Fox News, Im-Politic, journalism, Mainstream Media, media bias, misinformation, NBC News, social media, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Twitter

During the last three weeks alone, major national news organizations have issued important corrections admitting that they’ve gotten two front-page stories completely wrong, and another has been caught red-handed in a comparably important misstep.

Contrary to two New York Times reports, the Biden administration has confirmed that there was never any credible intelligence indicating that Russia was paying Taliban-linked militants in Afghanistan bounties for killing American soldiers – and therefore no good reason for former President Trump to raise the issue with Russian officials. Contrary to claims in the Times, the Washington Post, and NBC News, the FBI never warned former New York City Mayor and Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani that he was being “targeted” (i.e., “used”) in a Russian misinformation campaign. And contrary to Fox News, the Biden administration has no plans to require Americans to reduce their consumption of red meat sharply.

And it’s not like these are the only badly dropped balls by such news organizations in recent years – or even close. Moreover, since there are no evident penalties for such incompetence or bias (or both), there’s no reason to suppose that the media’s performance will impove significantly. Indeed, it’s clear that the most troubling kinds of “Who guards the guardians?” questions are being raised by these incidents, since it’s the news organizations themselves who – sensibly – are supposed to serve as our democracy’s watchdogs over its other main instit utions. Unless you want any government agencies, at any level, stepping in to play this role?

But perhaps not all hope is lost – at least in principle. For there are powerful actors in America who have tried to stop the spread of misinformation: Facebook and Twitter. As widely known, they’ve taken it on themselves to identify cases of misinformation, label them for users, and on a regular basis punish the perps by limiting their access to their enormous and influential platforms. Why can’t they apply the same policies and practices to journalists and even entire news organizations that admit major mistakes, or whose mistakes have been admitted by politicians or others who have made or benefited from consequent allegations?

Any number of criticisms can be made about how these social media giants currently go about fighting misinformation, ranging from their questionable expertise on subjects they rule on, to the biases they bring to these exercises, to the broader matter of whether most of the transgressions they’ve spotlighted are misinformation at all – as opposed to expressions of opinion or interpretations or analyses of events or data that are completely legitimate.

But when it comes to journalistic retractions or corrections, none of these problems should arise – because the error has already been acknowledged. Similarly, it should be easy for such technologically advanced companies to track and tag repeat offenders, whether individuals or entire organizations, with contemporary versions of (truly deserved) Scarlet Letters.

Equally easy should be justifying suspending them or kicking them off for good if they don’t mend their ways. Indeed, it would be a valuable service to the reading, viewing, and listening public, and because the use of social media is so crucial to news organizations’ business models, would create powerful incentives for journalists to use anonymous sources in particular much more responsibly.

Ideally, in a free market system, quality news would eventually and consistently prevail over the alternative by customers rewarding the good performers with bigger audiences that fattened their bottom lines, and penalizing the bad performers by tuning them out. But for whatever reason or combination of reasons (like growing partisanship or more general political polarization, and the resulting tendency of news consumers to follow only ideologically congenial news outlets), it’s not happening. And when news organizations do report on their industry critically, they rarely shine the spotlight on themselves – and wind up in “Coke versus Pepsi”-like dogfights, or thinly disguised ideological vendettas.

Since in theory, anyway (yes, I keep using this kind of qualification), the social media companies aren’t competing directly with either legacy or on-line news organizations, their misinformation monitoring needn’t be so self-interested. And if they stuck to calling out admitted corrections and retractions or other unmistakably debunked scoops, they’d steer clear of any genuine controversy.

Maybe just as important: If Facebook and Twitter won’t reorient their content policing to focus on or even simply add this relatively simple task, everyone will be entitled to wonder whether their main concern all along has been fighting misinformation, or simply the kinds they don’t like.

Making News: New Article on Why I Voted for Trump

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Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, censorship, China, Conservative Populism, conservatives, Democrats, economic nationalism, election 2020, entertainment, environment, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, George Floyd, Hollywood, Hunter Biden, Immigration, industrial policy, Joe Biden, Josh Hawley, journalism, Mainstream Media, Making News, Marco Rubio, police killings, regulation, Republicans, Robert Reich, Russia-Gate, sanctions, Silicon Valley, social media, supply chains, tariffs, taxes, technology, The National Interest, Trade, trade war, Trump, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Ukraine, Wall Street, wokeness

I’m pleased to announce that The National Interest journal has just published a modified version of my recent RealityChek post explaining my support for President Trump’s reelection. Here’s the link.

The main differences? The new item is somewhat shorter, it abandons the first-person voice and, perhaps most important, adds some points to the conclusion.

Of course, keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Im-Politic: Why I Voted for Trump

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Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, censorship, China, Conservative Populism, conservatives, Democrats, economic nationalism, election 2020, entertainment, environment, free expression, freedom of speech, George Floyd, Hollywood, Hunter Biden, Immigration, impeachment, industrial policy, Joe Biden, Josh Hawley, journalism, Mainstream Media, Marco Rubio, police killings, Populism, progressives, regulations, Republicans, Robert Reich, Russia-Gate, sanctions, Silicon Valley, social media, supply chains, tariffs, taxes, technology, Trade, trade war, Trump, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Ukraine Scandal, Wall Street, wokeness

Given what 2020 has been like for most of the world (although I personally have little cause for complaint), and especially Washington Post coverage of endless early voting lines throughout the Maryland surburbs of the District of Columbia, I was expecting to wait for hours in bad weather to cast my ballot for President Trump. Still, I was certain that Election Day circumstances would be a complete mess, so hitting the polling place this week seemed the least bad option.

Hence my amazement that the worst case didn’t pan out – and that in fact, I was able to kill two birds with one stone. My plan was to check out the situation, including parking, at the University of Maryland site closest to my home on my way to the supermarket. But the scene was so quiet that I seized the day, masked up, and was able to feed my paper ballot into the recording machine within about ten minutes.

My Trump vote won’t be surprising to any RealityChek regulars or others who have been in touch with on or off social media in recent years. Still, it seems appropriate to explain why, especially since I haven’t yet spelled out some of the most important reasons.

Of course, the President’s positions on trade (including a China challenge that extends to technology and national security) and immigration have loomed large in my thinking, as has Mr. Trump’s America First-oriented (however unevenly) approach to foreign policy. (For newbies, see all the posts here under “[What’s Left of] Our Economy,” and “Our So-Called Foreign Policy,” and various freelance articles that are easily found on-line.). The Biden nomination has only strengthened my convictions on all these fronts, and not solely or mainly because of charges that the former Vice President has been on Beijing’s payroll, via his family, for years.

As I’ve reported, for decades he’s been a strong supporter of bipartisan policies that have greatly enriched and therefore strengthened this increasingly aggressive thug-ocracy. It’s true that he’s proposed to bring back stateside supply chains for critical products, like healthcare and defense-related goods, and has danced around the issue of lifting the Trump tariffs. But the Silicon Valley and Wall Street tycoons who have opened their wallets so wide for him are staunchly opposed to anything remotely resembling a decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies and especially technology bases

Therefore, I can easily imagine Biden soon starting to ease up on sanctions against Chinese tech companies – largely in response to tech industry executives who are happy to clamor for subsidies to bolster national competitiveness, but who fear losing markets and the huge sunk costs of their investments in China. I can just as easily imagine a Biden administration freeing up bilateral trade again for numerous reasons: in exchange for an empty promise by Beijing to get serious about fighting climate change; for a deal that would help keep progressive Democrats in line; or for an equally empty pledge to dial back its aggression in East Asia; or as an incentive to China to launch a new round of comprehensive negotiations aimed at reductions or elimination of Chinese trade barriers that can’t possibly be adequately verified. And a major reversion to dangerous pre-Trump China-coddling can by no means be ruled out.

Today, however, I’d like to focus on three subjects I haven’t dealt with as much that have reinforced my political choice.

First, and related to my views on trade and immigration, it’s occurred to me for several years now that between the Trump measures in these fields, and his tax and regulatory cuts, that the President has hit upon a combination of policies that could both ensure improved national economic and technological competitiveness, and build the bipartisan political support needed to achieve these goals.

No one has been more surprised than me about this possibility – which may be why I’ve-hesitated to write about it. For years before the Trump Era, I viewed more realistic trade policies in particular as the key to ensuring that U.S.-based businesses – and manufacturers in particular – could contribute the needed growth and jobs to the economy overall even under stringent (but necessary) regulatory regimes for the environment, workplace safety, and the like by removing the need for these companies to compete with imports from countries that ignored all these concerns (including imports coming from U.S.-owned factories in cheap labor pollution havens like China and Mexico).

I still think that this approach would work. Moreover, it contains lots for folks on the Left to like. But the Trump administration has chosen a different economic policy mix – high tariffs, tax and regulatory relief for business, and immigration restrictions that have tightened the labor market. And the strength of the pre-CCP Virus economy – including low unemployment and wage growth for lower-income workers and minorities – attests to its success.

A Trump victory, as I see it, would result in a continuation of this approach. Even better, the President’s renewed political strength, buoyed by support from more economically forward-looking Republicans and conservatives like Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Josh Hawley of Missouri, could bring needed additions to this approach – notably, more family-friendly tax and regulatory policies (including childcare expense breaks and more generous mandatory family leave), and more ambitious industrial policies that would work in tandem with tariffs and sanctions to beat back the China technology and national security threat.

Moreover, a big obstacle to this type of right-of-center (or centrist) conservative populism and economic nationalism would be removed – the President’s need throughout the last four years to support the stances of the conventional conservatives that are still numerous in Congress in order to ensure their support against impeachment efforts.

My second generally undisclosed (here) reason for voting Trump has to do with Democrats and other Trump opponents (although I’ve made this point repeatedly on Facebook to Never Trumper friends and others). Since Mr. Trump first announced his candidacy for the White House back in 2015, I’ve argued that Americans seeking to defeat him for whatever reason needed to come up with viable responses to the economic and social grievances that gave him a platform and a huge political base. Once he won the presidency, it became even more important for his adversaries to learn the right lessons.

Nothing could be clearer, however, than their refusal to get with a fundamentally new substantive program with nationally unifying appeal. As just indicated, conventional Republicans and conservatives capitalized on their role in impeachment politics to push their longstanding but ever more obsolete (given the President’s overwhelming popularity among Republican voters) quasi-libertarian agenda, at least on domestic policy.

As for Democrats and liberals, in conjunction with the outgoing Obama administration, the countless haters in the intelligence community and elsewhere in the permanent bureaucracy, and the establishment conservatives Mr. Trump needed to staff much of his administration, they concentrated on ousting an elected President they considered illegitimate, and wasted more than three precious years of the nation’s time. And when they weren’t pushing a series of charges that deserve the titles “Russia Hoax” and “Ukraine Hoax,” the Democrats and liberals were embracing ever more extreme Left stances as scornful of working class priorities as their defeated 2016 candidate’s description of many Trump voters as “deplorables.”

I see no reason to expect any of these factions to change if they defeat the President this time around. And this forecast leads me to my third and perhaps most important reason for voting Trump. As has been painfully obvious especially since George Floyd’s unacceptable death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, the type of arrogance, sanctimony and – more crucially – intolerance that has come to permeate Democratic, liberal, and progressive ranks has now spread widely into Wall Street and the Big Business Sector.

To all Americans genuinely devoted to representative and accountable government, and to the individual liberties and vigorous competition of ideas and that’s their fundamental foundation, the results have been (or should be) nothing less than terrifying. Along with higher education, the Mainstream Media, Big Tech, and the entertainment and sports industries, the nation’s corporate establishment now lines up squarely behind the idea that pushing particular political, economic, social, and cultural ideas and suppressing others has become so paramount that schooling should turn into propaganda, that news reporting should abandon even the goal of objectivity, that companies should enforce party lines in the workplace and agitate for them in advertising and sponsorship practices, and that free expression itself needed a major rethink.

And oh yes: Bring on a government-run “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to investigate – and maybe prosecute – crimes and other instances of “wrongdoing” by the President, by (any?) officials in his administration. For good measure, add every “politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled” the Trump “catastrophe,” as former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich has demanded. Along with a Scarlet Letter, or worse, for everyone who’s expressed any contrary opinion in the conventional or new media? Or in conversation with vigilant friends or family?

That Truth Commission idea is still pretty fringe-y. So far. But not too long ago, many of the developments described above were, too. And my chief worry is that if Mr. Trump loses, there will be no major national institution with any inclination or power to resist this authoritarian tide.

It’s reasonable to suppose that more traditional beliefs about free expression are so deeply ingrained in the national character that eventually they’ll reassert themselves. Pure self-interest will probably help, too. In this vein, it was interesting to note that Walmart, which has not only proclaimed its belief that “Black Lives Matter,” but promised to spend $100 million on a “center for racial equality” just saw one of its Philadelphia stores ransacked by looters during the unrest that has followed a controversial police shooting.

But at best, tremendous damage can be done between now and “eventually.” At worst, the active backing of or acquiescence in this Woke agenda by America’s wealthiest, most influential forces for any significant timespan could produce lasting harm to the nation’s life.

As I’ve often said, if you asked me in 2015, “Of all the 300-plus million Americans, who would you like to become President?” my first answer wouldn’t have been “Donald J. Trump.” But no other national politician at that point displayed the gut-level awareness that nothing less than policy disruption was needed on many fronts, combined with the willingness to enter the arena and the ability to inspire mass support.

Nowadays, and possibly more important, he’s the only national leader willing and able to generate the kind of countervailing force needed not only to push back against Woke-ism, but to provide some semblance of the political pluralism – indeed, diversity – required by representative, accountable government. And so although much about the President’s personality led me to mentally held my nose at the polling place, I darkened the little circle next to his name on the ballot with no hesitation. And the case for Mr. Trump I just made of course means that I hope many of you either have done or will do the same.

Im-Politic: The Globalist Never Trump Blob Shows its True Colors

Tags

America First, Biden, Blob, Byron York, democracy, election interference, globalism, globalists, Im-Politic, Michael McFaul, Never Trumper, Russia, Senate Intelligence Committee, social media, The American Conservative, The Atlantic, Trump, Twitter, Washington Examiner

If you believed that you’d been wronged on social media because someone had erroneously described your tweet on purpose, wouldn’t you stand by that tweet or post? Apparently not if you’re Michael McFaul. At least not for a while.

And his activity on Twitter in the last few days is worth highlighting because even though you haven’t heard of him, McFaul is a card-carrying member of the bipartisan globalist U.S. foreign policy Blob. A recent tweet of his, moreover, epitomized the views of this group of current bureaucrats, former officials, Mainstream Media journalists, and think tankers that even President Trump’s partial implementation of a fundamentally different foreign policy strategy he calls “America First” poses such a mortal danger to both national and international security that any means justify the end of defeating it.

In addition, McFaul’s reaction to criticism also adds to the thoroughly Orwellian spectacle that’s been staged this last week by these and Never Trumpers in politics in (a) charging (based entirely on anonymous sources) that Mr. Trump has privately expressed contempt for Americans servicemen and women who have risked their lives for their country; (b) claiming that this unsubstantiated report, published Thursday in The Atlantic, proves the President’s contemptible character; and (c) insisting that some or all of the Atlantic piece’s allegations have been confirmed because they’ve been repeated by other anonymous sources to other journalists. (BTW, for all anyone knows – and for all these other journalists know – the sources they’re using may be the same accusers.)

As indicated above, McFaul is not your every day, garden variety tweeter. He’s considered a leading academic authority on Russia who served in the Obama administration for five years, including two as ambassador to Moscow. He’s got nearly 517,000 followers. He also tweets a lot: 85,000 to date! (Almost as much as yours truly!) And if you spend more than thirty seconds on his feed, you’ll see that he really doesn’t like the President or his policies.

Which is his right. It’s also his right to have tweeted the day the Atlantic article came out that “Trump has lost the Intelligence Community. He has lost the State Department. He has lost the military. How can he continue to serve as our Commander in Chief?”

But Washington Examiner political correspondent Byron York was just as entitled to respond on Twitter the following morning (Friday) that “This tweet has disturbing undertones in our democratic system. Trump is commander-in-chief because he was elected president, and he will remain commander-in-chief as long as he is president, for a second term if re-elected.” 

McFaul, not surprisingly was outraged. He tweeted back to York that evening : “Byron, you know DAMN well that I was not advocating a coup! You know damn well that I support democracy 100%, at home and abroad. Of course Americans voters, including 2 million federal workers, determine who the CiC is. I tolerate such nonsense from trolls. But from you? Wow.”

But here’s an even bigger “Wow.” When you clicked on the York cite of the original tweet, Twitter told you it was no longer available. McFaul had deleted it.

The plot sickened yesterday afternoon when McFaul himself evidently recognized how feckless his actions looked. He sent out the following Tweet, which added a sentence to the original: “Trump has lost the Intelligence Community. He has lost the State Department. He has lost the military. How can he continue to serve as our Commander in Chief? Our soldiers, diplomats, and agents deserve better. We deserve better. #Vote.”

Which returns us – and him – to Legitimate Opinion-Land. But McFaul needed prompting, as several of his followers and others had previously asked him why he deleted the original if was so indignant over York’s comments. Moreover, McFaul is hardly inarticulate. Why didn’t he include this qualifier in the original?

Even stranger: In a follow up tweet, McFaul stated “I retweeted with a clarifying sentence. 50,000 + people understood exactly what I meant. But trying to be more precise to the handful who I confused or deliberately distorted my views. But I know @ByronYork personally. There’s NO WAY he could believe that I’d support a coup.” In other words, lots of furious backtracking for a confused or mendacious handful.

Or was it a handful? Shortly before that tweet, McFaul had told his followers “Im deleting this tweet below. It has been misunderstood –whether deliberately or unintentionally — too much. Here is what I meant to say: If you believe Trump has not served our country well as Commander in Chief, vote him out of the job in November. https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1302071499914842112”

At the same time, McFaul’s clear and ongoing belief in the fundamental illegitimacy of Mr. Trump’s presidency can’t legitimately be questioned. Just late last month, in an on-line op-ed , he wrote that a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report had shown that:

“Far from a hoax, as the president so often claimed, the report reveals how the Trump campaign willingly engaged with Russian operatives implementing the influence effort.”

Even worse, in his eyes,

“[S]ome of the most egregious practices from the 2016 presidential campaign documented by the Senate investigation are repeating themselves in the 2020 presidential campaign. Once again, Putin wants Trump to win and appears to be seeking to undermine the legitimacy of our election. Just like in 2016, Putin has deployed his conventional media, his social media operations and his intelligence assets to pursue these objectives.

“Most shockingly, Trump and his allies have decided to — again — play right along.”

To McFaul’s credit, he at least acknowledged that “China, Iran and Venezuela now in the disinformation game” as well. (For details on China’s massive efforts, see my recent American Conservative article.)

He added that “it will be up to American voters to decide when and how cooperation with foreign actors during a presidential election crosses the line,” but indicated that the main reason was “Because waiting for criminal investigations or more congressional hearings will be too late….”

Most ominously, McFaul continues to maintain that the President has remained loyal to Putin, not once criticizing him in public and often undermining policies from his own administration to contain and deter Putin’s belligerent behavior abroad.”

In contrast, Democratic nominee Joe Biden “has affirmed that his campaign will not use information or accept assistance provided by foreign actors….In addition, Biden has assured Americans that he would retaliate in response to any foreign interference.”

So when McFaul declares that “Trump and Biden’s contrasting positions on Russian interference in American elections are clear. Whether voters care about these differences, however, is not as obvious,” it sounds to me that if the President is reelected, the de-legitimization campaign by McFaul and the rest of the Blob will continue. You don’t have to call that a coup to recognize it’s not democratic politics-as-usual, either.

Im-Politic: Why China’s U.S. Election Interference is a Very Big Deal

Tags

battleground states, Center for Strategic and International Studies, China, Chinese Americans, collusion, Democrats, election 2020, elections, entertainment, Freedom House, Hollywood, Hoover Institution, Im-Politic, Mike Pence, multinational companies, Nancy Pelosi, National Basketball Association, NBA, Robert Draper, Robert O'Brien, social media, The New York Times Magazine, think tanks, Trump, Trump-Russia, Wall Street

It’s baaaaaaack! The Russia collusion thing, I mean. Only this time, with an important difference.

On top of charges that Moscow is monkeying around with November’s U.S. elections to ensure a Trump victory, and that the President and his aides are doing nothing to fend of this threat to the integrity of the nation’s politics, Democrats and their supporters are now dismissing claims administration about Chinese meddling as alarmism at best and diversionary at worst.

In the words of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, commenting on recent testimony from U.S. intelligence officials spotlighting both countries’ efforts, to “give some equivalence” of China and Russia on interference efforts “doesn’t really tell the story. 

She continued, “The Chinese, they said, prefer [presumptive Democratic nominee Joe] Biden — we don’t know that, but that’s what they’re saying, but they’re not really getting involved in the presidential election.” ,

The Mainstream Media, as is so often the case, echoed this Democratic talking point. According to The New York Times‘ Robert Draper (author most recently of a long piece in the paper’s magazine section on Mr. Trump’s supposed refusal to approve anti-Russia interference measures or take seriously such findings by the intelligence community ), China “is really not able to affect the integrity of our electoral system the way Russia can….”

And I use the term “Democratic talking point” for two main reasons. First, the Chinese unquestionably have recently gotten into the explicit election meddling game – though with some distinctive Chinese characteristics. Second, and much more important, China for decades has been massively influencing American politics more broadly in ways Russia can’t even dream about – mainly because so many major national American institutions have become so beholden to the Chinese government for so long thanks to the decades-long pre-Trump policy of promoting closer bilateral ties.

As for the narrower, more direct kind of election corrupting, you don’t need to take the word of President Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien that “China, like Russia and Iran, have engaged in cyberattacks and fishing and that sort of thing with respect to our election infrastructure and with respect to websites.”

Nor do you have to take the word of Vice President Mike Pence, who in 2018 cited a national intelligence assessment that found that China “ is targeting U.S. state and local governments and officials to exploit any divisions between federal and local levels on policy. It’s using wedge issues, like trade tariffs, to advance Beijing’s political influence.”

You can ignore Pence’s contention that that same year, a document circulated by Beijing stated that China must [quoting directly] “strike accurately and carefully, splitting apart different domestic groups” in the United States.

You can even write off China’s decision at the height of that fall’s Congressional election campaigns to take out a “four-page supplement in the Sunday Des Moines [Iowa] Register” that clearly was “intended to undermine farm-country support for President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war….”

Much harder to ignore, though: the claim made last year by a major Hoover Institution study that

“In American federal and state politics, China seeks to identify and cultivate rising politicians. Like many other countries, Chinese entities employ prominent lobbying and public relations firms and cooperate with influential civil society groups. These activities complement China’s long-standing support of visits to China by members of Congress and their staffs. In some rare instances Beijing has used private citizens and companies to exploit loopholes in US regulations that prohibit direct foreign contributions to elections.”

Don’t forget, moreover, findings that Chinese trolls are increasingly active on major social media platforms. According to a report from the research institute Freedom House:

“[C]hinese state-affiliated trolls are…apparently operating on [Twitter] in large numbers. In the hours and days after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted in support of Hong Kong protesters in October 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported, nearly 170,000 tweets were directed at Morey by users who seemed to be based in China as part of a coordinated intimidation campaign. Meanwhile, there have been multiple suspected efforts by pro-Beijing trolls to manipulate the ranking of content on popular sources of information outside China, including Google’s search engine Reddit,and YouTube.”

The Hoover report also came up with especially disturbing findings about Beijing’s efforts to influence the views (and therefore the votes) of Chinese Americans, including exploiting the potential hostage status of their relatives in China. According to the Hoover researchers:

“Among the Chinese American community, China has long sought to influence—even silence—voices critical of the PRC or supportive of Taiwan by dispatching personnel to the United States to pressure these individuals and while also pressuring their relatives in China. Beijing also views Chinese Americans as members of a worldwide Chinese diaspora that presumes them to retain not only an interest in the welfare of China but also a loosely defined cultural, and even political, allegiance to the so-called Motherland.

In addition:

“In the American media, China has all but eliminated the plethora of independent Chinese-language media outlets that once served Chinese American communities. It has co-opted existing Chineselanguage outlets and established its own new outlets.”

Operations aimed at Chinese Americans are anything but trivial politically. As of 2018, they represented nearly 2.6 million eligible U.S. voters, and they belonged to an Asian-American super-category thats been the fastest growing racial and ethnic population of eligible voters in the country.

Most live in heavily Democratic states, like California, New York, and Massachusetts, but significant concentrations are also found in the battleground states where the many of the 2016 presidential election margins were razor thin, of which look up for grabs this year, like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

As for the second, broader and indirect, Chinese meddling in American politics, recall these developments, many of which have been documented on RealityChek:

>U.S.-owned multinational companies, which have long profited at the expense of the domestic economy by offshoring production and jobs to China, have just as long carried Beijing’s water in American politics through their massive contributions to U.S. political campaigns. The same goes for Wall Street, which hasn’t sent many U.S. operations overseas, but which has long hungered for permission to do more business in the Chinese market.

>These same big businesses continually and surreptitiously inject their views into American political debates by heavily financing leading think tanks – which garb their special interest agendas in the raiment of objective scholarship. By the way, at least one of these think tanks, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has taken Chinese government money, too.

>Hollywood and the rest of the U.S. entertainment industry has become so determined to brown nose China in search of profits that it’s made nearly routine rewriting and censoring material deemed offensive to China. And in case you haven’t noticed, show biz figures haven’t exactly been reluctant to weigh in on U.S. political issues lately. And yes, that includes the stars of the National Basketball Association, who have taken a leading role in what’s become known as the Black Lives Matter movement, but who have remained conspicuously silent about the lives of inhabitants of the vast China market that’s one of their biggest and most promising cash cows.

However indirect this Chinese involvement in American politics is, its effects clearly dwarf total Russian efforts – and by orders of magnitude. Nor is there any reason to believe that Moscow is closing the gap. In fact, China’s advantage here is so great that it makes a case for a useful rule-of-thumb:  Whenever you find out about someone complaining about Russia’s election interference but brushing off China’s, you can be sure that they’re not really angry about interference as such. They’re just angry about interference they don’t like.`      

Following Up: Video of CNBC Interview on TikTok Ban and China Tech Wars Now On-Line!

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China, CNBC, Following Up, social media, tech, TikTok, Trump

Sorry for the delay here!  The streaming video of my appearance last Friday on CNBC is now on-line.  In fact, it’s been on-line since Friday afternoon.  The good news:  It’s still timely!

So click here to see the segment, which focuses on the broad implications of President Trump’s recent decision last week to ban popular Chinese social media app TikTok from U.S. markets unless a U.S.-owned buyer comes through toute de suite.  Also:  Be sure to watch till the very end!

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

 

 

 

 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why Microsoft Can’t Be Trusted to Run TikTok

Tags

censorship, China, Microsoft, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, privacy, social media, tech, TikTok

When I read that President Trump’s recent decision to ban TikTok from the U.S. market gave the popular Chinese social media app’s services one chance to survive intact – a purchase of its U.S. business by an American-owned company (most likely, it seems, Microsoft) – my “Uh oh” antennae started buzzing. I knew that there’s no reason for confidence that a U.S.-owned tech multinational would adequately safeguard American national security and individual privacy interests versus the kinds of threats that have already been posed by TikTok’s obligations to an increasingly hostile Chinese government, much less uphold values in the freedom of expression family.

I knew this because research for a 2013 article I published on Bloomberg.com revealed that Microsoft was one of the many big U.S. tech companies whose drive for access to China’s potentially huge customer base involved extensive activities aimed at strengthening the technological prowess that has helped make the People’s Republic such a danger to America as well as the world at large.

As I wrote – based on the companies’ own financial reports – these efforts have included the establishment of state-of-the-art factories and laboratories, along with training programs that have taught literally hundreds of thousands of Chinese students state-of-the-art tech skills not only at facilities run by these businesses, but through partnerships with Chinese universities.

Worse, as made clear by a Financial Times report last week Microsoft, whose operations in China “have included collaborations with researchers at China’s military-controlled National University of Defense Technology,” has done nothing important since this piece came out to scale back such cooperation with China’s dictatorial regime.

For example, in 2015, Chinese leader Xi Jinping “visited Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, where he praised the company for “driving forward the development of China’s ICT [information and communications technology] industry”. Moreover, last month, “Microsoft was the sole US company invited to a televised entrepreneurs’ summit with Mr Xi.”

Perhaps most troubling, the Financial Times reported that “The company’s management of its research staff is very light.” According to a former executive at Microsoft China, limiting research collaborations is “a really tough question — research is a very liberal environment in itself. People might question [research collaborations] but from the point of view of our researchers, they want to work with the best partners they can find in their field.”

And what did Microsoft get for itself and its shareholders for all this assistance? Almost nothing. Even though its Windows operating system enjoys an estimated 90 percent market share, piracy of its products is so widespread that China accounts for less than two percent of its global revenues, according to its president. So I’m glad I don’t have to make the case that Microsoft can be relied on vigilantly to resist Beijing’s pressures to remain privy to important U.S. data – by hook or by crook.

Indeed, another recent Financial Times article claimed that Microsoft is mulling a takeover agreement that would give it “one year to separate TikTok from its Chinese parent and address US government concerns over the security of the data generated by the app.” Yet even if Microsoft’s U.S.-based executives do their darnest to shut the Chinese government out, that could leave plenty of time for TikTok’s Chinese employees to work with the regime to create new or keep open existing backdoors to Beijing.  Alternatively, once the deal is done, Microsoft might simply manage ongoing cybersecurity issues as “lightly” as the U.S. parent has managed its research team-ups with China’s regime.

Moreover, requiring Microsoft to conclude the separation much sooner would still leave the company – which would still be anxious for more China business – free to  wind up emulating TikTok’s practice of taking down content deemed offensive by China. Such subjects include praise for the Tiananmen Square protests of 1990, or the Tibetan independence movement. And Microsoft certainly wouldn’t be the first U.S. tech company to regulate speech with political aims in mind.

For all I know, effective safeguards against all these contingencies might be developed. But at very best, preventing China from continuing to exploit TikTok – and other tech products and services it’s currently offering to U.S. customers or could offer – will be a never-ending struggle. Best to remove as many uncertainties as possible, and make defense as easy as possible, by simply kicking TikTok and other Chinese products like it out, and keeping them out.   

Making News: On CNBC Today on the U.S.-China Tech War

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China, CNBC, Making News, national security, privacy, social media, technology, TikTok, Trump, WeChat

I’m pleased to announce that I’m scheduled to appear on CNBC this afternoon EST to talk about the intensifying technology conflict between the United States and China.  The segment, slated to start at 2 PM EST, will key off President Trump’s announcement last night that the Chinese social media apps TikTok and WeChat will be banned from the American market.

You can watch the segment live on the network, and if you can’t catch it, I’ll post a link to the video recording as soon as it’s available.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.