On Twitter’s Infantilization of Its Users

Today was a great and horrible day for any of us following the US elections and disinformation campaigns surrounding them.

Today the New York Post decided to publish an incredibly questionable story detailing how Hunter Biden, son of US Presidential Candidate Joe Biden and continuous Person of Interest for right-wing conspiracy theorists up to and including the current President of the United States, dropped a water damaged laptop off at a PC repair place to recover data and never came to pick it back up. On the laptop were (allegedly) pictures of the then-Vice President’s son doing crack while engaged in an unnamed sex act with an unnamed woman, and, somehow more wildly than that, emails almost comically worded to implicate Hunter’s role in facilitating a relationship between Burisma executives and his father during Joe’s tenure as VP.

Now, this isn’t going to be yet another blog post about the quality of the journalism in the Post’s article. I’m not going to touch on the fact that this whole story reeks of a badly executed Russian disinformation ploy, as if Jacob Wohl were on the way to see his lawyer and decided to half-read Thomas Rid’s book on disinformation on the way there. Others have done a far better job at that, as well as touching at the complete lack of forensic data that should be readily available to confirm this story.

I’m going to nit-pick at the response by Twitter to take down mentions of the story itself.

I guarantee you I just lost a couple readers who rolled their eyes, said “here he goes again on this freedom of information nonsense” and that’s fine! Politically, this is probably the least important thing that could be discussed related to this story. I have some pretty specific issues with it, though, and I figure I can write on those here since I’m a moron with respect to forensics and disinformation. So to those of you who stayed, buckle up.

The Policy

Twitter issued a response after taking down several posts containing the Post article and censoring the link itself by issuing a warning related to the content the links send users to. The policy I take particular issue with can be found here. Essentially, Twitter has a policy against any links to materials containing information that is collected by hacking or illegal access. This is… incredibly broad, but I could see why the policy could be applied to the NY Post story. Obligatory “I am not a lawyer” but I can see a computer repairman illegally accessing and disseminating that information (in this case, laughably, allegedly after giving it to the FBI by giving it to Rudy Fuckin’ Giuliani) as a breach of that policy.

The same policy was used to censor any tweets (and many Twitter accounts) that contained links to the BlueLeaks material. BlueLeaks was an initiative by a transparency collective that goes by the name DDoSecrets containing information on hundreds of thousands of police officers and individuals associated with police officers and FBI fusion centers. After the leaks went viral, Twitter permanently suspended the DDoSecrets Twitter account and went further in removing and censoring any posts that linked to the leaks as well as issuing a warning to users that clicked links to the DDoSecrets site that the site “may be malicious,” a claim that… doesn’t seem to have any truth to it.

A Policy with Questionable Enforcement

One of the simplest issues I have with Twitter’s policy on hacked information is that it is applied unequally. Then-presidential candidate Trump infamously requested the Russians hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails during our first joyous go-around of the “BUT THEIR EMAILS” scandal, and videos, quotes and other material related to the request were all over Twitter. Notably, Wikileaks is still very much present and active on Twitter, and their profile features a direct link to the site. One can simply search “pastebin.com” “hack” in the Twitter search bar and they will find plenty of links to hacked data, hacking materials and more.

The typical whiners on Twitter, to include Ted Cruz, Bongino and Tami Lawren were quick to bring up the beaten dead horse of “conservative censorship,” crying that anti-Trump information is never treated this way and etcetera etcetera, ad nauseum. Without even remotely attempting to sound sympathetic to the Children of the Alt-Reich, Twitter has only supplied the National Racists Association with more ammunition in their constant battle of frequent oppression against the liberal elite of Silicone Valley.

God, that sentence hurt to type.

The problem with inadequate application of policy is that it gives actors the opportunity to argue in bad faith that they are being singled out. I don’t think Twitter is intentionally censoring information that is advantageous to conservatives. I think their censoring of Trump’s frequent and flagrant disinformation is justified, as well as hilarious, under their own policies. This policy, though, is so easily proved to be unequally applied that it lends credence to the obnoxious conservative rallying cry of silicone valley oppression, and as annoying as it is, Twitter isn’t helping their case all that much.

Infantilization of the World Public Square

Now, on to the meat and potatoes, the part where I rant on freedom of information and sticking it to the man!

My main issue with censorship in this case, and censorship in general, is the infantilization of social media users. I’ll explain my point eventually, but first I will construct the argument against my own point, since I’m a glutton for punishment, before moving on to explain what I see as a net negative in public education and critical thinking.

This has, frankly, been a horrible year for disinformation. Disinformation has lead to campers, mistaken for those horrible radical antifa leftists that everyone’s been talking about, to be chased, harassed, cornered and menaced. It has lead to militias preparing for buses full of antifa radicals to take to the streets to defend against an enemy that was… never coming. In foreign countries, it has lead to death and rioting, with major companies including Twitter and Facebook changing and strengthening their policies to combat dis- and misinformation that is being spread on their platform. Frankly, it is my belief that disinformation has lead to a complete breakdown of an already fragile system of governance in America, with pitiful older generations taking to the streets, fueled by COVID-19 misinformation and child exploitation conspiracies to an almost frenzied hysteria. We’re not far removed from Pizza Gate, a story that could have had a far darker ending after a man entered a pizza parlor, heavily armed, to search for kidnapped and exploited children who were supposedly hidden there by Hillary Clinton and Podesta.

To begin my argument, I’ll state that I don’t necessarily disagree with the premise that social media companies have a duty to combat disinformation. They are the architects of the algorithms that drive us to stay on the platform, as well as the all-important algorithms that drive us to read certain content. Facebook has been rightfully criticized as a platform that welcomes and drives individuals to take part in disseminating or consuming extremist content, as has YouTube. I think platforms should take part in combating misinformation…

… but I don’t think the method should be censorship

We are fighting a constant war against disinformation. It is on our TV screens, our billboards, in our email inboxes and our DMs. It is everywhere, and it’s very tempting to take a heavy-handed approach to removing disinformation to combat its spread. However, in my opinion, this approach is inefficient and ineffective. The reason why disinformation is having such a profound effect on us, especially Americans, is that we are not being taught to think critically. We aren’t exercising our ability to consider sourcing, to construct conflicting hypotheses, to research and read conflicting information. Social media has such a profound effect in the spread of disinformation because of the way it is being used and abused in its very construction to create echo chambers. Conservatives are not often being faced with direct, contradicting evidence pertaining to their beliefs, nor are liberals, and further censorship of information will only worsen this issue.

To Twitter’s credit, they have recently taken part in perhaps my favorite approach to date by a social media company to combat disinformation. They have begun tagging viral posts containing COVID-19 disinformation with conflicting, well-sourced counterpoints. They aren’t taking the disinformation down, they are presenting it as-is with a notice that the Tweet may contain misinformation, with a link to official sources refuting that point. I like this approach, because it presents the issue and allows the consumer of the information to formulate their own thoughts armed with well-sourced research from an official source.

I do believe that Facebook and Twitter are, in part, worthy of blame in the rise of QAnon, anti-vaxx ideology and white supremacy. I think they didn’t take action quickly enough to combat these ideologies and that they have blood on their hands for the role they played in the rampant spread of disinformation. However, in my opinion, the politicians and pundits who have allowed the US to get away with abysmal public spending on proper public education, which would have taught American citizens how to think and read critically, are far more to blame. Notably illustrated by the Streishand Effect, the censorship of information is far more likely to make it more viral. You would be an idiot to think that Email-gate 2.0 isn’t going to be the central talking point for weeks to come, arguably especially now that Twitter has decided to censor the story. Censorship time and time again has proven to pour fuel on the fire instead of extinguishing it, and in my opinion it is because that is the easiest and least costly strategy for social media to take.

Instead of censoring information, a feat that is technically not that difficult, especially for the modern era’s social media giants, they could be helping to inform the public on critical thinking and reading. Social media companies could be constructing algorithms that present alternative research alongside trending topics. They could be focusing more effort on the deconstruction of harmful echo chambers on their platform. They could even focus more of their efforts on censoring legitimate bad actors that are taking part in disinformation campaigns on larger, automated scale, instead of censoring real-world people discussing current events. Censorship is the easy way out, and in my opinion it is one that will only lead to a less intelligent population who will, more and more, be unequipped to deal with the flood of information that holds our attention online.