Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/27/tech-giants-met-with-intel-chi.html
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So we’re in the hands of the “Don’t be evil” crowd.
Great
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One attendee of the meeting said the encounter led the tech companies to believe they would be on their own to counter election interference.
With Twitter and Facebook as the biggest social media platforms and vectors for Russian disinfo attacks I’m sure nothing will go wrong.
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Is that worse than no hands at all?
If the Trump administration isn’t worried about it – since so far any Russian meddling has been to the GOPs favor* – at least someone is taking it seriously and trying to reign it in.
This seems telling:
“… only to be told — repeatedly — that no specific intelligence would be shared.”
*Have they convinced themselves that Russia just wants to help make America great again? I just don’t get how they are unconcerned about Russia’s end game. I guess as long as the GOP are “winning” there’s no harm, no foul.
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I thought that was a feature of those platforms.
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In Putin’s Amerika, app feature uses you!
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This! So much this!
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Now they know how we feel.
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One attendee of the meeting said the encounter led the tech companies to believe they would be on their own to counter election interference.
The pressure of being “on their own to counter election interference” will lessen once Putin gets those boudoir videos of tech CEOs together.
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Let’s see a show of hands by all who are surprised by this.
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While it’s, um, not encouraging that the elected government can’t even pretend to care, this might actually be the best outcome you could hope for from this meeting. I think Facebook, Twitter and Google are legitimately worried about being seen as giant election-rigging tools (for PR reasons, and because you never know, they might one day have to reckon with a government Russia didn’t help elect).
On a practical level, these companies are better placed than anyone to actually do something about it. It’s not like they need the NSA to tell them which bots and micro-targeted propaganda are dodgy (more like the other way round), and they don’t need the CIA to block accounts. I imagine their first choice was to have intelligence agencies take ownership so that they’d have plausible cover for not really trying, but since that’s not an option, they will have to make a genuine effort. Fingers crossed.
(though I don’t read too much into the CIA not wanting to share secret information with Facebook. That sounds like something that wouldn’t and shouldn’t happen in any scenario)
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Wouldn’t a smart Republican wring his hands worrying about the fate of Democracy, and then do nothing? Where are the smart Republicans? They can’t all have brain tumors?
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On a related note, I just saw this:
I take back my suggestion that Twitter or Facebook could ever serve humanity as anything but a septic wound. They should be fired wholesale into space.
(tl;dr: Jack Dorsey is Very Worried that doing anything at all to block organised disinformation campaigns would constitute “political bias”, and as a private company they’re required by the first amendment to act as a state propaganda organ just like Fox News)
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What the hell? No as a private company they can squash some, any, all political shit as they wish at their whim. They are not common carriers.
I mean… /s…
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It is so so hard to tell these days.
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