JMore than four years ago, an insurrectionist mob found each other online, stormed Washington, stormed the Capitol and threatened to execute the vice president. But those were the good old days. We live in a different reality now. A reality in which the shackles of billionaires have been loosened.
Because in the heyday of 2020, tech platforms, still reeling from public outrage, had to at least show they meant something. Twitter employed more than 4,000 people in “trust and safety” jobs tasked with removing dangerous content from its platform and sniffing out foreign influence operations. Facebook tried to ignore public pressure, but eventually banned political ads that “don’t believe the truth.”invalidate voting” And a number of academics and researchers in “election integrity” units worked to identify and flag dangerous misinformation.
But still, a large portion of the American population came to believe the vote had been stolen, and a violent mob nearly staged a coup. Fast forward four years, and we’re now in a very different — and significantly worse — place.
Because while Kamala Harris is enjoying her hot summer and liberal America breathing a sigh of reliefAmerica needs to look to Britain. Rioters in the streets And burning cars and contagious, unchecked racism are spreading like wildfire across multiple platforms. Lies are amplified by algorithms, whitewashed by politicians and professional media frauds long before the facts are revealed.
Because just as Brexit foreshadowed the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the signs are that we are the canaries in the coal mine again. The same transatlantic patterns, the same playbooks, the same statistics. But this time with a whole new set of dangerous, unpatched technological vulnerabilities that can be exploited.
The streets are – for the time being – quiet. Violence has been suppressed. But this is Britain, where extremist political violence involves someone picking up a brick and throwing a chair leg at someone. In the US, there are not only automatic weapons and the right to openly carry firearms, but there are actual militias. Regardless of how well Harris does in the polls, the US faces a very dangerous moment, no matter who wins the election.
Because as Trump has already shown us and as Jair Bolsonaro learned the lessonNow it is not necessary that there will be victory. Or even a day. The entire time between the result and the swearing-in is such in which anything can happen, not only for America but for the whole world.
In Britain, the canaries have sung. This summer we have seen something new and unprecedented. The billionaire owner of a tech platform publicly confronted an elected leader and used his platform to undermine her authority and incite violence. Britain’s 2024 summer riots Elon Musk’s trial balloon,
He got away with it. And if you’re not terrified by its extraordinary supranational power and potential consequences, you should be. What would it look like if Musk chose to “predict” a civil war in the US? If he decided to challenge the election results? If he decided democracy was overrated? This isn’t science-fiction. It’s literally three months away.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. For a brief moment after 2016, there was a moment to understand how these tech platforms were being used to spread lies and falsehoods — or mis and disinformation — as we know them, and to try to stop it. But that moment has passed. The effort by Republican activists over the years to politicize the whole topic of “misinformation” has won out. It barely even exists in American tech circles anymore. Anyone who suggests that it does — researchers, academics, “trust and safety” teams — is now all “on the radar.”Censorship Industrial Complex,
A US congressional committee headed by Republican Jim Jordan believed that big tech companies were suppressing conservative voices, so it went on the warpath. Email history subpoenaed Dozens of academics have lost their lives and entire fields of research have ground to a halt. Entire university departments have collapsed, including Stanford Internet Observatory Which the Election Integrity Unit provided rapid identification and analysis in 2020.
Even the FBI Officials have warned that they are barred from communicating with tech companies because of an onslaught of foreign disinformation and influence operations, after a lawsuit filed by two attorneys general reached the Supreme Court. new York Times It was reported that it has just been quietly restarted.
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All of this has provided these platforms with the perfect cover to retreat. Twitter, now X, At least dismissed It has half the trust and security team. But it’s still the same Every tech company we know aboutThousands of employees previously employed to spot misinformation have been fired By Meta, TikTok, Snap, and Discord,
Just last week, Facebook shut down one of its last remaining transparency tools. CrowdTangleA tool that was crucial to understanding what was happening online in the dark days leading up to and after the 2020 inauguration. It did so, despite the pleas of researchers and academics, simply because it could.
In 2020, these efforts seemed pathetic, trivial, and inadequate for the scale of the threat. Now they are gone, just as the tools are becoming even more dangerous. Last week, OpenAI boasted of having found a solution Iranian group that used ChatGPT Running a campaign to influence the US election that would have been far more effective had the last time its trust and safety team was spoken to was when It was dissolved The move came after its co-founders resigned in May.
But what Musk – the new self-appointed master of misrule – has done is throw off the mask. He has shown that you don’t even have to pretend to care. In Musk’s world, trust is distrust and security is censorship. His goal is chaos. And it’s coming.