The Butcher, The Baker, The Censorship Maker
Examining the Mozilla CEO's response to the January 6th election fraud protests
As I was working on my earlier post, "Mostly Peaceful Tech," I reread Mitchell Baker's response to the election fraud protests on 6 January called, "We need more than deplatforming." She is the Chairwoman and CEO of Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox web browser. In her post she lambasts President Trump and blames social media for the protest, and she proposes four points above and beyond deplatforming which she believes will help prevent similar demonstrations in the future. It’s a short and easy read.
I typically try to avoid response posts like this because it drops my content down to "Group 2" in the creative world's Bullshit Industrial Complex, and that's a little close to the "line of bullshit demarcation" for me. Nevertheless, in this post I want to analyze her points for clues to future changes the technology cartel may attempt to make in order to further silence us or identify us for social, professional, or financial cancellation.
She begins, "There is no question that social media played a role in the siege and take-over of the US Capitol on January 6." I suppose she's right about social media, and I'll give her a pass on the hyperbolic use of "siege" and "take-over." This was written only two days after the protest, and to watch the corporate media during that time was to feel like you were tuning into a tragedy worse than 9/11. But I also suppose that social media played a role in organizing and promoting the violent race riots the previous summer. It'll be interesting to see how her upcoming points deal with this contradiction.
She goes on, "Since then there has been significant focus on the deplatforming of President Donald Trump. By all means the question of when to deplatform a head of state is a critical one, among many that must be addressed. When should platforms make these decisions? Is that decision-making power theirs alone?" Good hypothetical questions. Spoiler alert: In the case of President Trump, she wholeheartedly supports his deplatforming, as we'll read later.
I quoted paragraph #3 last week, "But as reprehensible as the actions of Donald Trump are, the rampant use of the internet to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy is about more than any one personality. Donald Trump is certainly not the first politician to exploit the architecture of the internet in this way, and he won't be the last. We need solutions that don't start after untold damage has been done."
Its just exhausting to hear these mischaracterizations over and over again, so I'll interpret them this way. She doesn't like us, plain and simple. She believes the narrative of the establishment media that we are domestic terrorists lashing out because of our resentment and fragility. But now she is facing the problem of the Paradox of Tolerance I mentioned last week, but in technology form. If you build a secure product for dissidents and journalists fighting authoritarian regimes around the world, what do you do when the wrong kind of dissidents and journalists start using it too?
Her phrase "exploit the architecture of the internet" is one I've been thinking about because I find it unclear. Literally speaking, the architecture of the internet is first three layers of the OSI model: the fiber optic cables, switches, and routers owned by various ISPs all over the world upon which the web is built. President Trump didn't exploit them. Perhaps she meant the resiliency of the internet which allows data to route around problems on its way to its destination. That doesn't make much sense, either. Or maybe she meant the amplification properties of social media platforms in which someone's hot take can go viral in minutes thanks to the cartel's algorithms, which are tuned for engagement. I'll assume that's what she means.
"Changing these dangerous dynamics requires more than just the temporary silencing or permanent removal of bad actors from social media platforms. Additional precise and specific actions must also be taken."
If it wasn't clear form the title of her post, she tells us again. She supports censorship in the form of deplatforming. President Trump, and by extension his 74 million supporters, are "bad actors" who must be removed from the public dialogue. Now for the meat. Here are the four actions that she believes will allow the good activists to flourish but keep the bad ones away from her progressive society.
Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.
Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.
Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.
Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms' impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
I find #1 amusing, because it hearkens back to the "Russia stole the 2016 election by buying some Facebook ads" conspiracy theory that helped leftists sleep at night from 2016 to 2020. Unless she wants to know who's buying ads so she can help generate a mob against the platform should the buyer have a low social credit score, I can't take this one seriously.
I admit #2 captures my interest. I've long sought more information about how the algorithms of the Big Tech cartel makes the decisions they do. But that information is a well-kept secret, kind of like the formula for Coke. The algorithms are where the intentions of the cartel are carried out. Cristos Goodrow, VP of Engineering At YouTube, recently wrote a post explaining in depth how YouTube's recommendation algorithm works. I read it with interest because that algorithm is the one I try the hardest to keep my young children away from. You'll see why in an upcoming post.
#3 links a New York Times article by Kevin Roose entitled, "Facebook reverses postelection algorithm changes that boosted news from authoritative sources." Roose writes, "The change involved boosting the weight that Facebook's news feed algorithm assigned to an internal publisher quality score known as "news ecosystem quality," or N.E.Q.. It was implemented several days after the election as part of Facebook's emergency "break glass" plan to combat misinformation during the critical postelection period, while votes were still being counted. The change resulted in an increase in Facebook traffic for mainstream news publishers including CNN, NPR and The New York Times, while partisan sites like Breitbart and Occupy Democrats saw their numbers fall."
Baker seems to be requesting that those changes be made permanent. But as we've seen since the COVID era began, what are called "mainstream" news publishers are more akin to mouthpieces for the establishment than seekers of the truth. Unquestioningly repeating the dictates of government agencies and deliberately suppressing or censoring their critics is the technique I believe will most likely find its way into more and more tech products in the future. For example, in its address bar Firefox could artificially elevate search suggestions from official agencies and demote or disappear everything else. Even worse, Firefox could place a warning on webpages that do not match the establishment narrative, but I digress because I don't want to give Baker any more ideas. Her use of the word "disinformation" instead of "misinformation" suggests that she strongly considers opposing opinions to be intentional acts of malice rather than innocent or unintentional mistakes.
Finally, #4 calls for studies to be done on the impact of social media on society. Since social media is inherently left-wing (proprietary, centralized, and surveilled), it forms a tempting platform for social control. It can be (and is) used to silence dissenting voices and amplify the establishment narrative. It can be used as a way to collect data for use in social credit scores, and as a platform for the amplification and suppression of certain political ideologies. I'm sure that no matter what the results of any studies are, the so-called solutions to improve things will be along these lines. Having won the culture war, the left no longer debates or argues its points. It simply enforces them and cancels you if you don't go along with it.
Concluding her post, Baker writes, "These are actions the [social media] platforms can and should commit to today. The answer is not to do away with the internet, but to build a better one that can withstand and gird against these types of challenges. This is how we can begin to do that."
Let's review the elements of right-leaning tech: free, decentralized, and private (properly encrypted). To her credit, she did not suggest dismantling the current decentralized internet and building a new centralized one. Her points do not touch on the underlying layers of the internet or the web. She did not call for fundamentally bypassing encryption or outlawing it all together. Instead, her points are relatively toothless and do not address the Paradox of Tolerance or the double-standard inherent in the toleration of left-wing protests vs. the rejection of right-wing ones. She did not reveal what a new internet friendly to the left and hostile to the right would look like or how it would be built (hint: because its impossible). Clearly, she supports censorship (deplatforming), but she does not appear to go beyond that.
Perhaps the ultimate purpose of her post was to vent her anger at the election fraud protests and to get Mozilla on the record as having the correct opinion on the matter. Her attendance at cocktail parties is assured (unlike her predecessor Brendan Eich, who was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla in 2014 over his support for traditional marriage).
Thankfully, Baker's post does not set off any alarm bells right now. #3 might have the most impact short term if Firefox decides to incorporate search suggestions or page warnings based on information from "authoritative" sources. But ultimately, she can't do much to stop us from using Firefox and taking advantage of the end-to-end encrypted accounts that keep our history, bookmarks, and passwords in sync over multiple devices without Mozilla snooping on them. I still recommend both Firefox and Brave for your desktop and mobile browsing, and I still support using a Firefox account to keep your browsing data in sync across devices. I haven't done a deep dive on Brave's account-less sync technology yet, but I'm interested in it, so look for that in a future post.
By Fil.Al from Comox, Canada - Rub a Dub Dub, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79095155
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