Perception 01: Twitter Files
If you are unaware of the scale, nature and importance of the Twitter Files, you could be forgiven. But should you be?
At its base level, social media is a perception management tool. Whether that is an individual user actively managing the perception of others through the curated expression of their own perception and self-perception, or whether it is the platform or certain actors managing the perception of users, it matters not.
This is clear and obvious to some, yet it is not openly acknowledged by users and commentators to the extent it should be. Even the perception of what social media is, how it is used and the effects it can have, is carefully curated by those who control or gain from social media platforms.
Over the last decade, it has been increasingly explicitly stated that social media is such a powerful technology that it can directly affect: a user’s mental health; education standard; knowledge base; attention span; ability to interact with other humans online and in meatspace; political attitudes; voting habits. It has been pointed out that these technologies have been developed with increasing focus on exploiting these effects for the benefit of the platforms and their controllers, and no regulation or oversight exists in the West that has any significant meaning. This is not new news. In many respects, the human race is being clubbed in the face while being told it’s being clubbed in the face and to step back if it doesn’t want to be beaten to death. It’s not stepping back. This engagement and behaviour is self-destructive. That’s the power of the dopamine pathway.
The Twitter Files are a new pinnacle of clarity in illustration of the above. We suspect readers of this newsletter are cognizant of TF, so the following recap will be extremely brief.
Since Elon Musk completed the purchase of Twitter, he has turned the company’s information resources inside out and provided select internal communications to a spectrum of journalists to examine. These journalists are of different flavours, which goes some way to dissipating accusations of political or ideological bias. The journalists have admitted to two key access conditions:
What they write must first be published on Twitter (in annoying tweet threads);
The internal comms are passed to them via legal counsel in response to the journalists’ specified queries e.g. “Russiagate”, “Trump”, “Devin Nunes” etc.
The journalists have stated that they are not being paid for their time or efforts, but they were selected and approached by Musk for the job.
Various outlets have openly resorted to ad hominem attacks against the journalists. Matt Taibbi’s credentials have, until now, been largely beyond reproach. The easy ad hominem wielded against him (and others) is that he is now a billionaire’s lackey and therefore nothing he writes is worthy of examination. You see this expressed by Twitter users as though this is their own thinking, such is the power of the ad hominem delivered into the brain via mass media. People who respond like this deliberately do not engage with the content of the TFs, because it does not suit their agenda or interests, or it undermines their worldview.
Were Musk to fully reverse the Twitterganda paradigm and do to the Democrats/Left what they have done to everyone via Twitter, the D/L would react in exactly the same way as the Reps/Right have just been doing i.e. object and cry foul, citing first amendment violations. Musk will not overtly do this, primarily for sensible business reasons (see below). However, on a net basis, VST predicts that Twitter and social media in general will remain what it now is. It will simply fall out of scrutiny, revert to a state tool again and the players will be more subtle about what they do and how. It is highly likely that state actors have full covert access to social media platforms anyway. Wikileaks Vault 7 went a long way to confirming that the CIA is in anywhere it wants to be by virtue of hardware backdoors and witting and unwitting co-operation from every level of tech “partner”. What the TFs show is that the FBI has a humint and agent layer directly in management. This means that it is likely to have the same in every tech platform and the CIA will have their own agents installed as well.
The only counter to this of any meaning is citizen-funded, decentralized and effectively publicly owned competing platforms which are run with total transparency. Mastodon is one such possibility. If 50m users paid just $1 a year, we suspect that a platform with equal functionality to Twitter could be rapidly built for that money. Twitter isn’t really complicated in its base functionality. It’s just a DB that shows a stream of messages that are filtered into a user’s view on a certain set of base rules that are then tweaked and refined by the user and the platform. If those users then paid $1 a month, there’d be literally zero need for advertising revenue. If ads existed on such a platform, the revenue could be evenly distributed back to every individually genuine user, who could choose to be publicly anonymous or not, but validated and known to the platform’s administrators. This model is a way for users to own their data and take the profits from advertiser’s access to it. Instead, the tech platforms get that data for free, exploit it and keep all the earnings. This is basically mad from a user perspective, but that’s humans for you.
What is the fundamental TF issue?
Government (US and others) has outsourced the bypass of (US 1st Amendment) rights to free speech and (non-US) freedoms of expression to private corporations who are unregulated, for the express purpose of aggressively, deliberately shaping, controlling and manufacturing perception and consent in a way that is different but supplementary to such abilities government and its partners wield through the mass media.
The corollary is that state level and corporate actors have engaged in election rigging and behavioural manipulation on a gigantic scale. In extremis, Presidential elections have been affected by deliberate suppression of public interest stories. Also, social media has been used to pervert and undermine individual medical informed consent when it comes to Covid gene therapies by falsely suppressing information and evidence that has been available even before Covid and that continues to come to light.
Why has this been done?
The Twitter Files presently show at least the following reasons why Governments have done this.
To directly influence political outcomes at all levels of society, including the election (or defeat) of the US President.
To actively suppress voices that dissent against and promote voices that reinforce the state and corporate narratives du jour.
To directly drive agendas through what could be described as highly sophisticated, targeted, propaganda that demonstrably does not serve the interests of citizens at large.
What has been revealed so far?
Readers can recap from other sources (we suggest going directly to the journalists’ Twitter feeds and avoiding second-hand reporting).
https://twitter.com/bariweiss
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson
https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD
https://twitter.com/lhfang
https://twitter.com/davidzweig
Longstanding suspicions have been confirmed and the previously unknown has been revealed. Apparently there is still more to come, including information about COVID debate manipulation (just released) and Julian Assange.
Topics, timings, internal and external actors, some detailed communications and aspects of Twitter’s inner workings have been partly laid out. It has been repeated that internally, Twitter is an amateurishly configured IT company that did not have a development and testing environment, only a live production environment, to which changes were directly deployed. Given that the code base (as represented by functionality) is largely stable, Twitter had a huge number of employees and external contractors, who obviously weren’t all coders.
Twitter was working directly with US government agencies to control access, content and flow/visibility across the platform, using multiple methods. However, it was largely dependent upon human judgement and bias to make decisions, requiring large amounts of moderators interpreting rules subject to degrees of managerial whimsy. It was also wilfully colluding with government in the peddling of totally false narratives, which those inside Twitter knew to be false, while suppressing true information that staff either knew to be true, could determine to be true or might have been true to the point that it couldn’t be labelled definitely false. The two most egregious examples of the latter being the Hunter Biden Laptop story and COVID and gene therapy-related scientific information. Twitter staff also determined amongst themselves on a seemingly minority, uneven and uncontrolled basis, what and who was allowed on the platform with the most prominent example being the banning of then US President Trump. Twitter upper management is staffed with (former) FBI Agents, at least 15 of whom have been named, and Twitter was doing the direct bidding of the FBI and other government and political masters. It is not clear whether this activity is still going on and how many more employees are government agents of some kind. The Twitter Files in no way guarantees this has ceased, despite the lay off of nearly half of its permanent workforce, many of whom might have been non-technical or low-technical content moderators, ahead of value-add coders and business people.
Twitter literally took down and out individual users on its own terms or on behalf of the US state and connected interests, even when it couldn’t always find valid reasons to do so. Until now, Twitter was totally unaccountable for any of its actions or decisions. As the TFs have rolled out, public statements made by Yoel Roth and other senior personnel about Twitter’s approach, mission etc have been shown to be anything from disingenuous or deluded, to laughable and even outright lies that fly in the face of the US constitution. To some, Roth himself appears to be a woke-freak, biased and minority-interested person with a strong personal political agenda that has permeated Twitter’s corporate policies and actions. To others, he is some form of safe space champion and protector of the marginalised, and a fully paid up member of the wokeing class.
The public knows what it needs to know but…
Facebook admitted in court that its “factchecking” was nothing more than opinion.
Twitter has been directly proven to be a branch of the US government through which other corporate and political interests also act to manipulate user perception.
That is the direct, unassailable proof that justifies this newsletter’s description of SocMed as a perception management tool. Despite this evidence, a form of false reality persists.
This is the same mental trap as exists in Covid. To have used Twitter and believed that there were no issues, or to only be concerned about issues when they negatively impact you personally, is to be duped. Who wants to admit that they were too dumb to understand how they were being actively manipulated on a number of fronts, by likely every form of comms platform that they use? One defence is to simply go “so what, boring, move on”, which is a common response seen from users on Twitter, despite the obvious and clear legal implications for free speech, irrespective of who’s saying what.
Fake Reality: “Twitter is a Public Square”
This claim is peddled across the mainstream media and actors on all sides of the various debates. It is a perception management label that is provably false.
Twitter is a privately owned software tool with has been subject to provably zero meaningful accountability to date. Congressional testimony given by then CEO Jack Dorsey, who claimed that “we don’t shadow ban”, when in fact Twitter did just that (“visibility filtering” being the term that provides him a semantic defence against the crime of lying to Congress) is arguably totally false. Only people whom Twitter allows can use the tool, under an opaque rule set that is entirely at the whim of the corporation. Arguably, Twitter is not in direct receipt of public funds so it is not financially beholden to government, whereas a public square might notionally be common land or public property. The public cannot determine what Twitter gets used for, though they may have some say in what goes on in a public square.
This fake reality is a double-edged sword that is employed misleadingly and whimsically by those on both sides of the free speech argument. If someone you don’t like is banned and cries foul, the “it’s a private company, suck it up” argument is rolled out. If someone you like is banned, the “but it’s a public square” argument is rolled out. There is a definitive position: in the absence of specific, binding regulation or laws governing the conduct of Twitter’s business, it’s a private sandpit that definitely contains shit and nothing that happens in the sandpit is Twitter’s fault, so suck it up and dig at your own risk. This remains the case, despite Musk’s arrival (see Musk’s whimsical bannings for starters).
Fake Reality: The Twitter Files don’t matter
How do you know something is something?
When everyone who should be talking about it isn’t. It’s that ancient game called Censorship, that is fundamental to the bigger game of Propaganda.
Pick your favourite rag and search for “Twitter”, “Twitter Files” and “Elon Musk”.
At time of writing, a check of the UK’s Guardian, Times, Telegraph, BBC News and Mail returns only a small number of articles which underplay the breadth or detail of the Twitter Files and are infrequent compared to the publication rate of the now 14 threads. The Mail seems to have more coverage, as one would expect.
One opinion piece by Kenan Malik in The Observer (Guardian’s Sunday Edition) contains valid observations but could be considered to both downplay and skim over what was being published in the Twitter Files (our bold).
Equally unhealthy is the response of many liberals who have become sanguine about the work of the security apparatus. There has been a remarkable partisan shift in American attitudes towards the FBI, with a huge swing in Democratic support for the organisation. Many now view the FBI as an essential weapon against populism. Many seem to have forgotten the sordid history of the FBI in undermining radical movements from unions to civil rights organisations. The insouciance of liberals and many on the left to such state interference in public life is disquieting.
Twitter, we are constantly told, is not real life. That’s true. But, like all social media, it plays an inordinately large role in real life, a private company that has become an intimate part of the global public square. We need to keep that public square as open as possible. That is why the revelations of the Twitter Files matter. And that is why we need to understand their significance beyond the clamour of the culture wars.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/01/the-twitter-files-should-disturb-liberal-critics-of-elon-musk-and-heres-why
Two of VST’s key observations of the article’s closing paragraphs are as follows.
First, the so called swing of support in favor of the FBI is attributed to the Democrats with a capital D. What exactly does that mean and how can it be interpreted at first glance? In other words, Malik is acknowledging the collusion, partisan behaviour and provable allegiance of the FBI to the Democratic National Party, at the superficial level. However, it’s possible that someone could scan read that sentence and interpret it as the embracing of the FBI by people of Democratic (even democratic) sympathies to support the FBI as an “essential tool” against populism.
Consider two definitions of populism:
Populism refers to a range of political stances that emphasize the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against "the elite". It is frequently associated with anti-establishment and anti-political sentiment… A common framework for interpreting populism is known as the ideational approach: this defines populism as an ideology which presents "the people" as a morally good force and contrasts them against "the elite", who are portrayed as corrupt and self-serving. Populists differ in how "the people" are defined, but it can be based along class, ethnic, or national lines. Populists typically present "the elite" as comprising the political, economic, cultural, and media establishment, depicted as a homogeneous entity and accused of placing their own interests, and often the interests of other groups—such as large corporations, foreign countries, or immigrants—above the interests of "the people".
In short, Malik is saying that “the elites of the DNC and connected interests are actively using the FBI as an overt weapon and/or means of control over and protection from the general populace. Woe betide those who ignore lessons from the past.”
Second, Malik refers to the false reality of the public square, despite recognising that Twitter is not public by earlier referring to both the private platform’s Terms of Service and the whim’s of the old and current owners. Why perpetuate a myth? If anything, the TFs hammer home that social media platforms, like other media outlets, are:
privately owned, walled gardens of information;
carefully, deliberately curated and managed in accordance with a largely black box set of internal rules that no regulators effectively know about, understand or regulate;
wielding disproportionate power over their users and readers in ways that almost none of them fully understand.
Claiming, as Malik does, that Twitter’s TOS statement of “we may… limit distribution or visibility of any Content” means it is essentially excused of both its practise and description of moderation - specifically shadow banning or visibility filtering - on the grounds that i) it admits it; ii) users knowingly signed up to it, is inadequate. By reverting to the terms “visibility filtering” and “de-amplification”, Malik ignores the whole control equation: Twitter was doing what it wanted with content, in both directions. It amplified, de-amplified and banned what it wanted. It also let user accounts exist that it could determine to be fake, agents/bots and the publishers of very questionable material. Twitter up to the time of the TF files is said to be hosting overt pornography that is accessible to minors and also child pornography that had been on the site for as long as possibly ten years, despite takedown requests. One case against the platform regarding child pornography and trafficking was filed in Jan 2021 (NY Post).
Reality: Social Media is now proven to be a corporatocratic perception management trap
This is not new news to anyone who took a moment to consider how social media works and why. But that isn’t the majority of Twitter’s supposed 330 million-ish users or Facebook’s 2.9 billion-ish users, least of all their young users who stand to suffer the most from the technology’s adverse effects.
Given the power of a technology that’s literally designed to plug straight into the human dopamine pathway, why are there no instructions, warnings or oversight of it?
If you were to try to explain what social media is, what happens when you use it, what forces are in play, who is who within a social media framework, and what are anyone’s true purposes and objectives, could you manage to keep a straight face while saying:
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages.
or
Facebook is a social networking website intended to connect friends, family, and business associates.
Reality: If Twitter users don’t know about the Twitter Files, Twitter is failing to amplify them and the media is successfully de-amplifying them
Elon Musk clearly knows the superficial and subsurface importance and meaning of the TFs, irrespective of his real agenda(s). If he has the power to amplify anything, all Twitter Users should be having this stuff rammed in their faces. Are they? If not, why not?
If it’s not important enough for every user of the “public square” to know, why tell anyone in the first place? Just quietly tweak the platform, say you’re forgiving previous transgressions and keep going without so much controversy.
Musk has publicly stated “every conspiracy theory about Twitter was true,” and yet this is grossly under reported in the mainstream press, much like the Covid narrative.
Beware false prophets (who need to make profits)
Superficially, Musk’s proponents often peddle and believe a narrative that is bottom-up i.e. Musk, as a champion of free speech, is doing right by the user base and citizenry because hero/white knight/white hat/good/first and foremost because he’s a free speech absolutist and advocate.
VST argues the total opposite. Musk, for whatever reason, got into a $44.5bn buyout and now he needs to make good on that to achieve a working short-term balance sheet and a longer term return on investment. The way this is done is fundamentally simple. You reduce costs as much as possible, increase overall efficiency, and increase revenue, to result in workable and growing margin. He reportedly funded only half of the purchase, so he isn’t free soloing.
It would have been cheaper to build a competing platform, obviously. This would have required a wholesale user recruitment exercise strong enough to draw existing Twitter users. But fundamentally, being cheap would never have given Musk ownership rights to Twitter’s internal information asset.
Twitter had, at the time of Musk’s takeover, two information assets: the userbase input data (account demographics and tweets/content); the internal company information about what Twitter is and how it was run. Musk has done something very simple. He has levered the internal information asset to drive much larger changes in existing and potential user perception around Twitter that will manifest in greater revenue in the medium term. In addition, he has aggressively and simply cut costs by sacking large amounts of contractors and employees who did not add value to a broadly stable code base.
Musk is simply performing a rebrand of Twitter. He is exposing the old Twitter’s disdainful internals and burning the old crew. Userbase anger at known wrongdoing is now pinned to Dorsey, Aggrawal, Roth, Gadde et al - a bunch of supposedly left-ist Karens that reputedly pervade Silicon Valley and who are grossly out of touch with the real world. None of this is Musk’s fault, so he can hang all of them and hope for free column inches in publicity good or bad. This is Musk exploiting the internal information asset in a way rarely seen in big corporations, akin to someone buying out Pfizer then admitting to it having knowingly poisoned and killed a lot of people by being negligent in drug and service development in collusion with the FDA, in order to peddle the myth that it’ll all be better from now on, despite the driving forces and incentives really remaining unchanged. The only difference is that there’s zero financial or criminal penalty of meaning for Twitter at the moment. Were Pfizer to “do a Twitter”, it would be facing masses of criminal and civil charges.
This house cleaning is Musk’s sleight of hand way of convincing users that he’s returning Rome to them. Off the back of this, he is now expanding the potential user base to attract greater diversity and gain back those who left or those who were shut out. The Covid backlash dollar is a big, growing dollar and now Twitter is a platform that is back open for their business. Conveniently, Musk has changed the “tick” to mean nothing, while making it sound like you get something. The price of a tick has increased by a whopping 60%, from $5 to $8 dollars a month. As of this moment, the only thing you get for that is for your blurted out noise to be seen before non-payers’ noise. If you look at the tick feature list, it’s either practically meaningless or is actually yet to be delivered (Tesla FSD anyone?). So, Musk has managed to convince people to actually pay for a form of visibility filtering privileges, thereby actually monetising an implementation of VF. All Twitter users are born equal (anyone can get a free account) but some are more equal than others (afford $96 a year and your noise is played more loudly in the private walled garden).
Even if you think that longer videos on your tweets is worth an extra $3 a month, how much is changing a DB value video_max_length in a user_account_properties table actually worth?
Twitter moderation is alive and well and as opaque as ever. Scott Ritter explains just one example of how this is exploited and mysteriously implemented here:
Time and effort is the test of what Twitter is. People will simply find what Musk bans and shadow bans people for. We’ve seen examples already. Musk has made some improvements, but that’s to be expected initially. He’s got to give his coders something to do. Freeing up the Covid information restrictions on the platform may satisfy his purported attitudes towards the pandemic and ultimately help to shift some of the public perception quicker. But it won’t convince everyone and it’s too little, too late, like everything corrective in Covid. Just look at the persistent user idiocy in the face of constant, growing research, institutional admissions and legal rulings. Covid is a multi-faceted scam and yet many will not heed any evidence that they were duped.
The political fall out of the TF contents means what to Musk? On the one hand, not much. He is an established incumbent space and telecoms contractor. Both arenas feed the war economy (Space Force and Starlink). Tesla is backed by Net 2030 agendas, irrespective of the economic unworkability of electrification of transport by that date. He doesn’t have to care about whether a government can meet its own climate targets, he just needs an environment friendly to his businesses. He is selling cars governments want to push. On the other hand, Musk could face forms of ire from weaponised state organs including the IRS, EPA and NTSB, which could impact his businesses. What he won’t be is personally destitute or poor, and he is globally mobile so could decamp all of his business interests from the US, accelerating its economic demise. If Space X and Tesla are legally independent of the US government and its endless tax rebates, Musk could port both businesses to any continent and offer instant step up competitive advantage in space, for prices today that are lower than they’ve ever been. Meanwhile, the US would be left with the legacy space development costs which Tesla has benefitted from, plus the costs NASA faces to do its present work, plus a need for a commercial space lift services (the Russians or eventually Blue Origin are really the only other options right now). That looks like leverage in favour of SpaceX to us. If he decamped, SpaceX would still be in the running for US business.
One must ask, how truly important is Twitter? In many ways, it’s not. Looking at walls of mostly zero value, short form user noise serves what purpose? What do you really learn from stranger’s outpourings? From the “pros” and worthwhiles you follow, what are you really getting for the amount of time you spend on the platform? If people are just sharing media and clips and links, those things exist at source. Twitter is just a middleman for this stuff. However, you are likely to justify your time on the platform in any and every way, all of which will be subjectively impossible to argue with. The truth is that Twitter isn’t important, because the human race did better than fine without it. Ask anyone who doesn’t use it what they lose in competitive advantage or happiness to those who do. Coping is a life skill, as is effective time management.
VST would argue that the social media experience is in significant part, like media, self-reflexive i.e. people talk about the superficiality of the presentation layer (the faces and the platform) as much as or more than the actual content’s value or meaning. Why waste time talking about the medium or the messenger, instead of the message? Further, the vast majority of social media content is drivel. There’s a reason the inner monologue is a personal experience. Social media has thrived in part because it has created a perception that everyone’s inner monologue and opinion has value and deserves to be heard. The reality is that this simply isn’t true but people are willing to burn time having this shown to them with interspersed adverts.
How will anyone know how a key Defence Space and Tech contractor will use the platform in the future unless hitherto unseen levels of transparency are self-imposed and maintained by a private corporation whose purpose is to manage perception for the reward of its masters?
Starlink’s major userbase is the Ukrainian and NATO Armed Forces who get the means to wage war at a cost of around $1000 for a terminal and $60/month subscription, paid for by the US citizenry. It isn’t for Ukrainian citizens who earn on average around $400/month in the best of times.
Perception. Management.