A new thought-piece from a powerful British government lobbyist (Vice President of Global Affairs, Facebook. Former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, leader of the Liberal Democrats, member of Parliament) was introduced to me by Bryan Lee rather blankly as…

Facebook VP explains it’s your fault you’re fat, if you didn’t dress like that they wouldn’t say those things, and if you want to quit smoking stop buying cigarettes.

Of course such a framing of the argument had me hooked and off I went to read the entire piece.

It was a cringe worthy work of total tone-deafness.

However, it was even worse than buying cigarettes. This was tobacco plantation language.

Someone has taken time to write what amounts to a justification of colonialism as a partnership, where the subjugated love oppression as a new form of freedom.

Facebook seems to steal management values from colonialism, so maybe I should have called this post “taking the pith”.

Unfortunately this is not a hyperbole. Such nonsense is not unheard of in Britain, and this feels like someone on track towards repeating some of the worst mistakes in history.

As I’ve written here before, I spent a bit as an academic in the British archives reading actual memos from Foreign Office and Colonial Office staff. These arguments and their tone are very familiar, so perhaps I’m keying into that history and glaringly obvious signs that others haven’t studied or seen before.

There are moments as a historian when you open a dusty folder and stare at the hand written memo from Churchill, taking in the flow of every pen stroke and thinking about the power in his words. I might call those some of the highlights.

Then there are moments when some unknown chap in a pith helmet has telegraphed a racist screed about his vision to treat humans like animals and deny them freedoms because that is what they think another human deserves… leaving a knot in your gut as you can’t peel your eyes away from the historic relevance of disgusting cognitive blindness. Those are NOT some of the highlights.

This “Facebook VP…member of Parliament” very strongly invokes the latter.

I’ve also written here before about this colonialism topic in tech and why it’s a quagmire to avoid; so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised Facebook has a VP gleefully crossing the bright line.

Who else sees themselves in such a privileged power position as to say awful things about humanity without any real sense of responsibility?

Let’s break down a few examples.

1) You can’t kick the British Empire out of its colonies

Even if Facebook ceased to exist, social media won’t be — can’t be — uninvented. The human impulse to use the internet for social connection is profound.

Classic colonialism says you can’t just have the oppressors leave. They’re baked into targeted society by cruel design so they very often say it would be impossible for their victims to ever reach true independence.

Note here also how an “impulse…for social connection” is made falsely equivalent to social media. We don’t need social medial for social connections. That’s a logical fallacy to fit right into such proto-colonialism.

2) You owe the British Empire your good lives under colonial oppression

Personalized digital advertising not only allows billions of people to use social media for free, it is also more useful to consumers than untargeted, low-relevance advertising.

This is just so obviously and patently false, I could write long blog posts on it alone. First, advertising doesn’t make things free it obfuscates taxation without representation. Second, repeated studies have shown that targeting is garbage economics and totally fails to achieve its claimed goals. Third, about the only thing targeting is actually able to do is inflame bias and conflict. Fourth, the privacy loss and freedom-destruction of targeting systms is a ridiculously high price to pay. And the list goes on, as explained succinctly the Atlantic…

The eBay study suggested that people who click most ads aren’t being influenced. The Facebook study suggested that people who are being influenced aren’t actually clicking ads. It makes you wonder whether clicks matter, at all.

Given how Facebook systems currently are being run by unaccountable and immoral leadership, we easily can prove that an un-targeted, low-relevance experience is essentially a safer happier world for everyone.

3) The British Empire is your friend who prevents you from being a primitive savage

Turning the clock back to some false sepia-tinted yesteryear — before personalized advertising, before algorithmic content ranking, before the grassroots freedoms of the internet challenged the powers that be — would forfeit so many benefits to society.

A world before personalized advertising isn’t false. That really existed and still does exist. But it’s especially toxic here to see “grassroots freedoms” invoked completely opposite to actual events.

Again massively unfair fallacy, as it uses false equivalence to list individual freedom brought about on the Internet as something just like the surveillance used by giant centralized powers to track you everywhere. Apples are not bananas.

Pure propagandist nonsense.

I’m reminded of British colonialists who argued that Africans turning back the clock to sovereignty would lose their freedoms. Imagine a sentence like “some false yesteryear before British rule, before ships landed and men with guns invaded your homes, before men challenged the powers that be — would forfeit the benefits of being in a colony.” It sounds totally contradictory because it is.

4) The British Empire is the future because it controls the future. There is only one queen.

This is the magic of social media, the thing that differentiates it from older forms of media. There is no editor dictating the frontpage headline millions will read on Facebook. …it is of course the case that these systems are designed by people. It is Facebook’s decision makers who ultimately decide what content is acceptable…

Notice the doublespeak here? Magic and differentiation comes from having no editor, other than decision makers who ultimately are just… editors.

Older forms of media had decision makers who ultimately decided what content is acceptable. It is not hard to see there is no magic, no differentiation on that front.

The shame here is pretending an editor is not an editor to control the entire dialogue; evade laws and common decency in order to peddle basic oppression as some kind of exceptional “magic”.

5) You will find no better colony than under the British Empire. Floggings set to continue until morale improves.

And it is entirely reasonable to argue that private companies shouldn’t be making so many big decisions about what content is acceptable on their own. It would clearly be better if these decisions were made according to frameworks agreed by democratically accountable lawmakers. But in the absence of such laws, there are decisions that need to be made in real time. […] But of course, you don’t see the algorithm at work, and you have limited insight into why and how the content that appears was selected and what, if anything, you could do to alter it. And it is in this gap in understanding that assumptions, half-truths, and misrepresentations about how Facebook works can take root.

The logical fallacy here is no true Scotsman. He is pleading for “democratically accountable lawmakers” to deliver magical new frameworks (when plenty relevant ones already exist — Facebook has repeatedly violated basic safety and privacy).

Realize instead that lawmakers don’t have to lift a finger for everyone to already see that “you don’t see the algorithm” is a completely planned failure.

Nobody wrote a law telling Facebook they had to give users limited insights. There was no law that Facebook had to deliver gaps in understanding, Facebook wasn’t legally required to leave people with half-truths.

Facebook chose all that awful destiny for their users. They built a torture box and put people in it, then started selling tickets to see it and saying “we shouldn’t be doing this and it would be better if someone could tell us to stop, but in the meantime this person’s obvious lack of freedom for our profit is just their opinion”.

Consider the absolutely tone-deaf irony here. On a platform claiming to provide a fantastical modern world of intelligent algorithms to figure out the right fit of information to keep you informed, they also say if you’re uninformed from the giant gaps in their platform that’s entirely your fault.

The gaps they say are your fault are the exact things that Facebook has the most control over. They claim to be able to close all the gaps in knowledge about some random person’s day scooping ice cream, despite having nothing to do with it other than surveillance, but simultaneously claim they can’t close the gaps that would explain how their own work is done.

Shall I go on?

Let me instead turn to an Indian opinion piece from 2020 that clearly warned us about Clegg repeating the worst mistakes of history.

The attempt by Clegg, presently on the payrolls of the global leader in social media, to push for free flow of data is really a part of the larger concerted attempt by digital giants to protect their monopolistic business from potential competition from firms in emerging developing countries, including India. In a narrative reminiscent of the colonial times when the EIC was attempting to get a foothold in India, Clegg cleverly camouflaged the business interests of his principals and instead, projected free flow of data as being democratic and also in India’s interest.

The EIC is a reference to East India Company.

The company’s transition from trade to conquest has preoccupied historians ever since Edmund Burke famously attacked it as a “state in the disguise of a merchant”. […] This story needs to be told… because imperialism persists, yet “it is not obviously apparent how a nation state can adequately protect itself and its citizens from corporate excess”. And it needs to be read to beat back the willfully ignorant imperial nostalgia gaining ground in Britain…

Indeed. Clegg seems willfully ignorant as he lays out the colonialism thickly. Clearly he is at risk of using his position within a merchant to operate it as a state just so it may achieve ill-gotten corporate excess (of which he is a direct beneficiary).

If nothing else, this is all food for thought given Facebook has created a C-level role for blockchain yet keeps its ethics buried at the Director level (reporting through government relations).

There’s probably a very simple reason Facebook neither understands human rights and ethics at the C-suite, nor makes room at that level for someone who does.

Such a person surely would have blocked Clegg’s completely tone-deaf messaging that Facebook can justify its colonialist mindset.

Have you seen this comedy video about hidden meanings in country music?

It’s pretty funny but also sad how true this is.

For example while I was relaxing on an airplane trying to sleep with the country channel on, a song called “The Big Revival” woke me straight up. It almost immediately reminded me of the kind of racial trigger words I used to hear in rural Kansas.

A quick check of its history revealed its author was a reclusive Dennis Linde, originally from Texas.

He was the quintessential mystery man of Nashville because he didn’t go to all the functions,” Scott Siman, an artist manager who had known Linde since the 1970s, told The Tennessean newspaper. “If you ever saw Dennis Linde it was amazing, because you didn’t get that opportunity very often.

A mystery man. Interesting. You may have read some of my earlier posts on encoding messages in songs (e.g. Kumbaya and Atilla).

Also see “Ten Factors that Encourage Extremism”

…extremist tendencies are able to develop codes of communication that are difficult for outsiders to understand…

This song seems like another case of encoding, but it’s very vague and I don’t know if I can achieve the comedy genius of Key & Peele in explaining what I hear.

Get ready for the big revival
Get ready for the big revival

Get ready for the big revival
Everybody get in the van
There’s a little church on Eagle Mountain
It’s called The Blood of the Blessed Land
If your faith ain’t strong enough, child, you might wind up dead
Praise the Lord and pass me a Copperhead

Now Reverend Jones, he struts and dances
While the guitar plays Amazing Grace
He testifies in tongues of fire
With tears of joy running down his face
He ain’t sure and we ain’t sure exactly what he said
But praise the Lord and pass me a Copperhead

You won’t find many hypocrites that’ll take the chance on getting bit
But a true believer can survive rattlesnakes and cyanide

Now when you hold that deadly viper
Keep the holy spirit in your mind
Do not lose your concentration
That serpent’s surely bound to strike
Either way you won’t forget the first time that you said
Praise the Lord and pass me a Copperhead
Praise the Lord and pass me a Copperhead

Here are the clues I started picking at, which as I said reminded me of triggers I heard in rural Kansas:

• little church on Eagle Mountain
• It’s called The Blood of the Blessed Land
• faith ain’t strong enough, child, you might wind up dead
• pass me a Copperhead
• testifies in tongues of fire
• ain’t sure exactly what he said
• hypocrites that’ll take the chance on getting bit
• But a true believer can survive rattlesnakes and cyanide
• hold that deadly viper

“little church on Eagle Mountain”

There’s really no reference or context for an eagle in this song perhaps other than to evoke patriotism and pride. Unfortunately mountain, as the modifier, doesn’t seem like it would come from some innocent place like a bald eagle on purple mountain (far better phrasing if you ask me). The next line talking about blood really cements it for me as German and therefore classic encoding. Kehlsteinhaus (Eagle’s Nest) is the house on top of a mountain in Bavaria where Hitler entertained guests.

“It’s called The Blood of the Blessed Land”

Blut and boden (blood and soil) is how white supremacists make claim to be more connected to the land than any other races. So an eagle mountain church called blood of the blessed land is quite literally the very common symbolism invoked by white supremacists based on Nazi history.

“faith ain’t strong enough, child, you might wind up dead”

The penalty for being unfaithful to the cause is execution. Capitol punishment has and continues to be very clearly racist.

“pass me a Copperhead”

My first thought here was the old copperhead balls that we used to shoot in the empty spaces around Fort Riley, yet that seemed too obscure while also maybe from the same deeper reference.

Rummaging through history I quickly realized pro-slavery Democrats in the 1860s who opposed American Civil War and wanted immediate truce with a Confederate South, were called a Copperhead.

Copperhead, also called Peace Democrat, during the American Civil War, pejoratively, any citizen in the North who opposed the war policy and advocated restoration of the Union through a negotiated settlement with the South. The word Copperhead was first so used by the New York Tribune on July 20, 1861, in reference to the snake that sneaks and strikes without warning.

That sounds a lot like Americans who sided with Nazi Germany in WWII and demanded peace be negotiated as quickly as possible with Hitler (calling themselves “America First“), or a lot like the Americans who sided with Germany in WWI and demanded non-intervention (calling themselves “America First”). In case that isn’t obvious, “America First” meant KKK before 1929 and Nazism/KKK after — Copperhead predates them all.

The key here is that the Copperhead platform opposed Republican president Lincoln because of what they termed “an unconstitutional war against slavery”. Moreover, Lincoln called Copperheads a grave threat.

In January 1863, Abraham Lincoln made a remarkable confession. He was, he told a senator, more worried about “the fire in the rear” than he was about the Confederates to his front.

Remember tongues of fire (it’s coming next)?! Fire in the rear were Copperheads.

It turns out a Democratic Congressman of Ohio named Clement L. Vallandigham became known for his anti-federal Copperhead speeches of 1863 where he falsely alleged Republicans had gone to war to enslave the whites. Sounds crazy, right?

Commander of the Ohio military, General Ambrose Burnside, arrested Vallandigham on fairly obvious grounds of treasonous behavior (“declaring sympathies for the enemy”).

This might be a good moment to also point out Vallandigham accidentally shot himself while trying to prove that someone could not accidentally shoot themselves. He was… an idiot.

If that vignette doesn’t explain how crazy a Copperhead was with their tongues of fire, and how it ended up so connected in this song with wackos who obsess about the eagle mountain blood and soil, I’m not sure what does.

Moreover white supremacists today refer to themselves as “Constitutionalists” or similar to Copperheads, so this period in history could come to mind. The Copperheads argued the South could never be conquered and ran slogans like “The Union as it was, Constitution as it is”.

Here are the exact words from a 1863 Copperhead speech by the Hon. C.L. Vallandigham where you can see him tell the absurd lie that America would enslave whites if they didn’t enslave blacks.

“Pass me a Copperhead” is surely the flag of white insecurity.

“testifies in tongues of fire”

As I said above, this seems to be validation it’s about Valladigham attacking President Lincoln. Just before the fire comes Amazing Grace, an historic “revival” song used for background and a setup to the fire. These combinations of phrases and words have powerful association to tragedy in the 1800s.

‘Amazing Grace’ would have spoken to [slave] desire for an experience of freedom, of one day seeing God face-to-face, of one day being with him for all of eternity, and no longer subjected to the type of cruel treatment they experienced during slavery.

“ain’t sure exactly what he said”

Oath of silence and vagueness to the fiery events. No one can testify to what happened. This even gets to the point of “Know Nothings” (before 1855 calling themselves the Native American Party, American Party after) — an extremist “nativism” political party by white immigrants that used secret society (e.g. KKK “hidden empire”) to oppose immigration of other races.

“hypocrites that’ll take the chance on getting bit”

Again emphasizing you’re either in the group, a follower, or you are dead.

“But a true believer can survive rattlesnakes and cyanide”

This line really cements the Nazism. While an eagle mountain of blood and soil may seem the most obvious call-outs to Nazism, cyanide is completely over the top. Why cyanide? No way it is random. Of all the things to put into a song about revival… in the 1920s cyanide was used to kill Americans using gas chamber.

Washington, Arizona, and Oregon in 1919-20 reinstated the death penalty. In 1924, the first execution by cyanide gas took place in Nevada… a special “gas chamber” was hastily built.

Those three states in 1919 saw a HUGE rise in KKK activity. It was not a coincidence, as I said above about the racism of capitol punishment, that KKK were taking control of a state and using cyanide gas chambers to kill non-whites.

Zyklon B had become available in the U.S.A. in the early 1920s when fears of alien infection had been inflamed by the alarums of the eugenicists. […] The use of Zyklon B on the U.S.-Mexican border was a matter of keen interest to the firm of DEGESCH. In 1938, Dr. Gerhard Peters called for its use in German Desinfektionskammern. […] Peters went on to become the managing director of DEGESCH, which handled the supply of Zyklon B for the Nazi death camps.

The Nazis in 1940s used Zyklon B cyanide to murder 1 million people.

Again, we have a song here saying eagle mountain, blood and soil, and believers survive cyanide. It’s a trifecta of Nazism on top of the odious Copperhead background. How is this song not titled “Get Ready for the Fourth Reich”?

“hold that deadly viper”

This reinforces for me that the danger of a copperhead is being used in the context of a particular purpose, leveraged even, as a necessary evil to test true faith. As hard as I tried to flip the whole story and see some kind of positive story of surviving against threats of generic danger, the words just don’t add up that way for me and instead sound like a celebration of Nazism (which, let’s be honest, was ideologically similar to Copperheads).

Maybe you’ll have more luck and can decode it further or more accurately. To me, we have a popular song in America basically trying to invoke white nationalism.

To test my theory I listened to many versions of this song. Here’s a 2008 release:

On the airline radio I first heard it played by Kenny Chesney:

That’s an awfully strange looking bus in the image for a white nationalist tune.

Suddenly I felt like maybe I had the song wrong. Peace symbols? This guy looks like he’s into love and happiness (to be fair that’s exactly the disinformation Nazis broadcast on radio telling their targets to drop their arms… right before invasion).

So I went and found the video featuring that bus. It’s in a song called American Kids… that talks about America coast to coast etc as if representing all the kids while having only whites in the video.

Only whites.

You can’t make this stuff up. The cast is so white, so painfully not like America, I had to watch it twice just to be sure there was absolutely no other race but whites represented in a video claiming to be for all the “American Kids”.

It’s actually creepy how the video also seems to suggest American Kids worship that singer.

And just by way of comparison, I have to throw out a positive example of a “snake” video that shows what something purporting to represent “American Kids” could have done; a bus can be so much more with crowds dancing and singing around each other in a distributed manner (note this internationally diverse video is the 20th most watched on YouTube with over 3 billion views).

As I said at the start Key & Peele do a far better job at laying out the obvious racism in country music than I have done here.

But I can tell you as someone who has spent a lot of time studying triggers and encoding, as well as KKK history, when I was half-asleep listening to the radio these rather peculiar song lyrics woke me straight up.

“The Big Revival” had me immediately wondering who would write out such known white supremacist imagery under a title invoking things like rise of the KKK and rebellion against the United States. And on that note, the most curious part might be that it was written by a guy who wrote what other people wanted, remaining hidden and reclusive.

It all reminds me of the encoded racism of Ronald Reagan, as I’ve written about here before, and more specifically how Lee Atwater (Advisor to Reagan, campaign Manager to GHW Bush, Chairman National Republican Committee) described Reagan’s strategy to attack Americans:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites … “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Now be honest, how many of you realized “cut taxes” was Reagan’s way of getting away with saying “nigger” by not saying it?

Keith Gunderson, a pioneering philosopher of robotics, in his 1964 paper called “Descartes, La Mettrie, Language and Machines” captured this Robert Stoothoff translation of the 1637 Discourse:

If there were machines which bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated our actions as closely as possible for all practical purposes, we should still have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not real men. The first is that they could never use words, or put together signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others. For we can certainly conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words, and even utters words that correspond to bodily actions causing a change in its organs… but it is not conceivable that such a machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as the dullest of men can do. Secondly, even though some machines might do some things as well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would inevitably fail in others, which would reveal that they are acting not from understanding, but only from the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a universal instrument, which can be used in all kinds of situations, these organs need some particular action; hence it is for all practical purposes impossible for a machine to have enough different organs to make it act in all the contingencies of life in the way in which our reason makes us act.

Here is another translation:

…if there were machines which had the organs and the external shape of a monkey or of some other animal without reason, we would have no way of recognizing that they were not exactly the same nature as the animals… The first of these is that they would never be able to use words or other signs to make words as we do to declare our thoughts to others. For one can easily imagine a machine made in such a way that it expresses words, even that it expresses some words relevant to some physical actions which bring about some change in its organs … but one cannot imagine a machine that arranges words in various ways to reply to the sense of everything said in its presence, as the most stupid human beings are capable of doing. The second test is that, although these machines might do several things as well or perhaps better than we do, they are inevitably lacking in some other, through which we discover that they act, not by knowledge, but only by the arrangement of their organs. For, whereas reason is a universal instrument which can serve in all sorts of encounters, these organs need some particular arrangement for each particular action. As a result of that, it is morally impossible that there is in a machine’s organs sufficient variety to act in all the events of our lives in the same way that our reason empowers us to act.

And another one:

My head hurt when I read a new “insider” article on detecting and preventing hate on big data platforms. It’s awful on many, many levels.

It’s like seeing a story on airplane safety in hostile territory where former staff reveal they couldn’t agree politically on how to measure gravity in a way that appeased a government telling them that up is down. Or hearing that a crash in 2018 made safety staff aware of flying risks — as if nothing ever crashed before a year or two ago.

Really? You just figured out domestic terrorism is a huge problem? That says a lot, a LOT. A Civil War was fought after decades of terrorism and it continued again after the war ended, and there’s a long rich history of multi-faceted orgs conspiring and collaborating to undermine democracy. And that’s just in America, with its documented history of violent transfer of power.

I’m not going to give away any insider secrets when I say this new article provides some shockingly awful admissions of guilt from tech companies that facilitated mass harms from hate groups and allowed the problem to get far worse (while claiming success in making it better).

Here’s a quick sample:

…companies defined hate in limited ways. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have all introduced hate speech policies that generally prohibit direct attacks on the basis of specific categories like race or sexual orientation. But what to do with a new conspiracy theory like QAnon that hinges on some imagined belief in a cabal of Satan-worshipping Democratic pedophiles? Or a group of self-proclaimed “Western chauvinists” like the Proud Boys cloaking themselves in the illusion that white pride doesn’t necessarily require racial animus? Or the #StoptheSteal groups, which were based on a lie, propagated by the former president of the United States, that the election had been stolen? These movements were shot through with hate and violence, but initially, they didn’t fit neatly into any of the companies’ definitions. And those companies, operating in a fraught political environment, were in turn slow to admit, at least publicly, that their definitions needed to change.

“Proud Boys cloaking themselves” is about as sensible a phrase as loud boys silencing themselves. Everyone knows “proud boys”, like other hate groups, very purposefully use signaling to identify themselves, right? (Hint: “men who refuse to apologize” with frequent use of prominent Proud Boy logos and the colors black and yellow)

Both the ADL and SPLC have databases easily referenced for the latest on signal decoding, not to mention the many posts I’ve written here…

Limited ways used to define hate (reduced monitoring) were meant to benefit who, exactly, and why was that the starting point anyway? Did any utility ever start with “defined pollutants in limited ways” for the benefit of people drinking water? Here’s a hint from Michigan and a very good way to look at the benefit from an appropriately wide definition of harms:

This case has nothing whatsoever to do with partisanship. It has to do with human decency, resurrecting the complete abandonment of the people of Flint and finally, finally holding people accountable for their alleged unspeakable atrocities…

It should not be seen as a political act to stop extremist groups (despite them falsely claiming to be political actors — in reality they aim to destroy politics).

Who really advocated starting with the most limited definition of hate, a definition ostensibly ignorant of basic science and history of harm prevention (ounce of prevention, pound of cure, etc)?

In other words “movements were shot through with hate and violence” yet companies say they were stuck in a worry mode about “what to do” with rising hate and violence on their watch — as if shutting it down wasn’t an obvious answer. They saw advantages to themselves of not doing anything about harms done to others… as proof of what moral principles, exactly?

Should be obvious without a history degree why it’s a dangerous disconnect to say you observe imminent, immediate, potential for harms yet stand idly by asking yourself whether it would be bad to help the people you “serve” avoid being harmed. Is a bully harmed if they can’t bully? No.

The article indeed brings up an inversion of care, where shutting down hate groups risked tech workers facing threats of attack. It seems to suggest it made them want to give into the bully tactics and preserve their own safety at the cost of others being hurt; instead it should have confirmed that they were on the right path and in a better position to be shutting bullies down so that others wouldn’t suffer the same threats (service to others instead of just self).

Indeed, what good is it to say hate speech policies prohibit direct attacks if movements full of hate and violence haven’t “direct attacked” someone yet? You’re not really prohibiting, are you? It’s like saying you prohibit plane crashes but the plane hasn’t crashed yet so you can’t stop a plane from crashing. A report from Mozilla Foundation confirms this problem:

While we may never know if this disinformation campaign would have been successful if Facebook and other platforms had acted earlier, there were clearly measures the platforms could have taken sooner to limit the reach and growth of election disinformation. Platforms were generally reactive rather than proactive.

Seriously. That’s not prohibiting attacks, that barely rises to even detecting them.

Kind of like asking what if you hear a pilot in the air say “gravity is a lie, a Democratic conspiracy…” instead of hearing the pilot say “I hate the people in America so this plane is going to crash into a building and kill people”.

Is it really a big puzzle whether to intervene in both scenarios as early as possible?

I guess some people think you have to wait for the crash and then react by saying your policy was to prohibit the crash. Those people shouldn’t be in charge of other people’s safety. Nobody should sit comfortably if they say “hey, we could and should have stopped all that harm, but oops let’s react now!”

How does the old saying go…”never again, unless a definition is hard”? Sounds about right for these tech companies.

What they really seem to be revealing is an attitude of “please don’t hold me responsible for wanting to be liked by everyone, or for wanting an easier job” and then leaving the harms to grow.

You can’t make this stuff up.

And we know what happens when tech staff are so cozy and lazy that they refuse to stop harms, obsessing about keeping themselves liked and avoiding hard work of finding flaws early and working to fix them.

The problem grows dramatically, getting significantly harder. It’s the most basic history lesson of all in security.

FBI director says domestic terrorism ‘metastasizing’ throughout U.S. as cases soar

Perhaps most telling of all is that people comforted themselves with fallacies as a reason for inaction. If they did something, they reasoned falsely, it could turn into anything. Therefore they chose to do nothing for a long while, which facilitated atrocities, until they couldn’t ignore it any longer.

Here’s another excerpt from the article:

Inside YouTube, one former employee who has worked on policy issues for a number of tech giants said people were beginning to discuss doing just that. But questions about the slippery slope slowed them down. “You start doing it for this, then everybody’s going to ask you to do it for everything else. Where do you draw the line there? What is OK and what’s not?” the former employee said, recalling those discussions.

Slippery slope is a fallacy. You’re supposed to say “hey, that’s a fallacy, and illogical so we can quickly move on” as opposed to sitting on your hands. It would be like someone saying “here’s a strawman” and then YouTube staff disclose how their highly-paid long-term discussions stayed centered on how they must defeat a strawman and ignored an actual issue.

That is not how fallacies are to be handled. Dare I say, “where do you draw the line” is evidence the people meant to deal with an issue are completely off-base if they can’t handle a simple fallacy straight away and say “HERE, RIGHT HERE. THIS IS WHERE WE DRAW THE LINE” because slippery slope is a fallacy!

After all, if the slippery slope were a real thing instead of a fallacy we should turn off YouTube entirely right now, SHUT IT DOWN, because if you watch one video on fluffy kittens next thing you know you’re eyeballs deep into KKK training videos. See what I mean? The fallacy is not even worth another minute to consider, yet somehow “tech giant” policy person is stuck charging high rates to think about it for a long while.

If slippery slope were an actual logical concern, YouTube would have to cease to exist immediately. It couldn’t show any video ever.

And the following excerpt from the same article pretty much sums up how Facebook is full of intentional hot air — they’re asking for money as ad targeting geniuses yet somehow go completely blind (irresponsible) when the targeting topic includes hate and violence:

“Why are they so good at targeting you with content that’s consistent with your prior engagement, but somehow when it comes to harm, they become bumbling idiots?” asked Farid, who remains dubious of Big Tech’s efforts to control violent extremists. “You can’t have it both ways.” Facebook, for one, recently said it would stop recommending political and civic groups to its users, after reportedly finding that the vast majority of them included hate, misinformation or calls to violence leading up to the 2020 election.

Vast majority of Facebook “civic groups” included hate, misinformation or calls to violence. That was no accident. The Mozilla Foundation report, while pointing out deepfakes were a non-threat, frames willful inaction of Facebook staff like this:

Despite Facebook’s awareness of the fact that its group recommendations feature was a significant factor in growing extremist groups on its platform, it did little to address the problem.

Maybe I can go out on a limb here and give a simple explanation, borrowed from psychologists who research how people respond to uncomfortable truths:

In seeking resolution, our primary goal is to preserve our sense of self-value. …dissonance-primed subjects looked surprised, even incredulous [and] discounted what they could see right in front of them, in order to remain in conformity with the group…

Facebook staff may just be such white American elitists, that they’re in full self-value preservation mode and discount the hate they see right in front of them to remain in conformity with… hate groups.

So let me end on a rather chillingly accurate essay from a philosopher in 1963, Hannah Arendt, explaining why it is the banality of evil that makes it so dangerous to humanity.

[Evil] possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet–and this is its horror–it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.

Now compare that to a quote in the article from someone “surprised” to find out the KKK are nice people. If anything, history tells us exactly this point over and over and over again, yet somehow it was news to the big tech expert on hate groups. Again from the article:

In late 2019, Green traveled to Tennessee and Alabama to meet with people who believe in a range of conspiracy theories, from flat earthers to Sandy Hook deniers. “I went into the field with a strong hypothesis that I know which conspiracy theories are violent and which aren’t,” Green said. But the research surprised her, as some conspiracy theorists she believed to be innocuous, like flat earthers, were far more militant followers than the ones she considered violent, like people who believed in white genocide. “We spoke to flat earthers who could tell you which NASA scientists are propagating a world view and what they would do to them if they could,” Green said. Even more challenging: Of the 77 conspiracy theorists Green’s team interviewed, there wasn’t a single person who believed in only one conspiracy. That makes mapping out the scope of the threat much more complex than fixating on a single group.

For me this is like reading Green discovered water is wet. No, really, water turned out to be wet but Green didn’t know it until went to Tennessee and Alabama and put a finger in the water there. Spent a lot of money on travel. Discovered water is wet, also that white genocide is a deeply embedded systemic silent killer in America rather than an unpolished and loud one… and people with a cognitive vulnerability and easily manipulated are… wait for it… very vulnerable and easily manipulated. What a 2019 revelation!

Please excuse the frustration. Those who study history are condemned to watch people repeat it. In military history terms, here’s what we know is happening today in information warfare just like it has many times before:

For Russia, a core tenet of successful information operations is to be at war with the United States, without Americans even knowing it (and the Kremlin can and does persistently deny it).

Seemingly good folks, even those lacking urgency, can quickly do horrible things by failing to take a stand against wrongs. We know this, right? It is the seemingly “nice” people who can be the most dangerous because they normalize hate and allow it to be integrated into daily routines, systemically delivering evil as though it is anything but that (requiring a science of ethics to detect and prevent it).

From the Women of the Ku Klux Klan, who reinvigorated white supremacy in the 1920s… Genocide is women’s business.

Can physics detect up versus down? Yes. Can ethics detect right versus wrong? Yes. Science.

White supremacy is a blatant lie, yet big tech allows it to spread as a silent killer in America.

When those of us building AI systems continue to allow the blatant lie of white supremacy to be embedded in everything from how we collect data to how we define data sets and how we choose to use them, it signifies a disturbing tolerance…. Data sets so specifically built in and for white spaces represent the constructed reality, not the natural one.

Putting Woodrow Wilson in the White House (an historic white space, literally named to keep black Americans out of it) was a far worse step than any amateur hate group flailing loudly about their immediate and angry plans. In fact the latter is often used by the former as a reason for them to be put in power yet they can just normalize the hate and violence (e.g. Woodrow Wilson claimed to be defending the country while he in fact was idly allowing domestic terrorism and “wholesale murder” of Americans under the “America First” platform).

Wilson’s 1915 launch of America First to restart the KKK always has been a very clear hate signal, an extremist group, and yet even today we see it flourish on big tech as if something is blinding their counter-terrorism experts from a simple take-down.

Interesting tangent from history: the January 1917 telegram intercepted and decoded by British warning the Americans of a German plot to invade via Mexico…was actually over American communication lines. The Americans claimed to not care what messages were on their lines, so the British delicately had to intercept and expose impending enemy threats to America that were transiting on American lines yet ignored by Americans. History repeats, amiright?

Thus if big tech can say the know how to ban the KKK when they see it, why aren’t they banning America First? The two are literally the same ffffffing thing and it always been that way! How many times do historians have to say this for someone in a tech policy job to get it?

Hello Twitter can you see the tweets on Twitter about this… from years ago?

Is this thing on?

Here’s a new chart of violent white nationalist content (America First) continuing to spread on Twitter as a perfect very recent example.

Big tech staff are very clearly exhibiting a failure to think (to put it in terms of Arendt’s clear 1963 warning).

Never mind all the self-congratulatory “we’re making progress” marketing. Flint Michigan didn’t get to say “hey, where’s our credit for other stuff we filtered out” when people reviewed fatalities from lead poisoning. Flint Michigan also doesn’t get to say “we were going to remove poison but then we got stuck on a slippery slope topic and decided to let the poison flow as we got paid the same to do nothing about harms.”

Big Tech shouldn’t get a pass here on very well documented harms and obviously bad response. Let’s be honest, criminal charges shouldn’t be out of the question.