Hunter Biden And His Laptop…

One of the most interesting aspects of America’s current political environment has been the defection from the GOP of formerly high-ranking Republicans. These strategists and elected officials have recognized that today’s GOP is a very different animal than the party that once existed, and have been intellectually honest enough to say so.

One of those “refugees” from MAGA land is David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Frum is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic and an MSNBC contributor. (He was also the author of Bush’s “axis of evil” description–a framing I personnally found unfortunate, but hey…)

Frum has an article in the most recent Atlantic in which he predicts the behavior of the slim GOP House majority over the next two years. He began by comparing the actions of Democrats under Nancy Pelosi with the behavior of  the chamber under Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay. Pelosi focused the Democrats on legislation–notably, the Affordable Care Act.

By contrast, the Republican majority elected in 1994 and 2010 lunged immediately into total war. In 1994, the leaders, Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, wanted and led the total war. In 2010, Speaker John Boehner opposed the lunge and tried, largely in vain, to control it. In both cases, the result was the same: a government shutdown in 1995, a near default on U.S. debt obligations in 2011, and a conspiratorial extremism that frightened mainstream voters back to the party of the president.

Frum says the signs all point to the likelihood that the just-elected Republican House majority “will follow the pattern of its predecessors.” It isn’t difficult to pinpoint one of those “signs”–intemperate MAGA warrior Jim Jordan will evidently head up the Judiciary Committee. Jordan has all but licked his chops when announcing the GOP’s highest priority: investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop and tying whatever is found to Joe Biden.

As he says,

Why Republicans would want to believe this holds little mystery. From 2017 to 2021, Republicans supported and defended a strikingly corrupt president whose children disregarded nepotism rules to enrich themselves and their businesses. The administration opened with a special favor from the government of Japan to Donald Trump’s daughter and closed with a $2 billion investment by the government of Saudi Arabia for the president’s son-in-law—despite written warnings from the Saudi government’s outside advisers about excessive fees, inexperienced management, and operations that were “unsatisfactory in all aspects.”

How do partisans try to neutralize four years of nonstop genuine scandals? By ginning up an equal and opposite scandal against the other team. The Trump family may have been the most crooked ever to occupy the White House, and on a scale impossible to deny or ignore. During Trump’s administration, his hotel business exacted payments on Pennsylvania Avenue from corporations, individuals, and foreign governments as a condition of presidential favor and charged the Secret Service fees simply so that it could do its job of protecting the president. Trump himself elevated his son-in-law to de facto positions as a chief of staff and a national security adviser. Meanwhile, the president’s other children headed family businesses that profited from the presidency.

If that record cannot be denied, then maybe it can be diminished or rendered somehow acceptable by alleging that Trump’s successor is doing the same thing.

Frum proceeds to explain why the GOP’s “whataboutism” is unlikely to work, harking back to comparisons with Bill Clinton’s impeachment. But here’s the thing: if indeed Hunter Biden turns out to have been guilty of legal misconduct, most Democrats I know would agree that he should be appropriately sanctioned for that misconduct. No one’s above the law.

My own guess is that the worst thing an investigation will be able to pin on President Biden is that he has been a loving and forgiving father to a disturbed son. As Frum writes the upcoming script:

Republicans: Do you know that Hunter Biden is a financial and emotional mess?

Voters: Now we do.

Republicans: Don’t you care?

Voters: No.

Republicans: Do you know that Joe Biden wrote notes telling his son he loved him despite his troubles, and also let his son stay in his house when his son was down on his luck?

Voters: That sounds like a good thing.

Republicans: What if we told you that Joe and Hunter Biden ran a massive international-crime syndicate and that they are implicated in sex trafficking and cover-ups?

You can foresee where this dialogue is heading.

The GOP is gearing up for a re-run of “Pizzagate.” Deep in their conspiratorial bubbles, many of them actually believe the QAnon-inspired stories. As Frum writes, they are so deeply embedded in those fantasies, they forget that they were the ones who first concocted them.

And really– sex trafficking is so much more interesting than governing…

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Trust, Safety And Twitter

The New York Times recently published a guest essay by the former head of Trust and Safety for Twitter, who has now resigned.

 In some ways, Yoel Roth’s essay was “more of the same,” for readers who’ve been following the chaos at Twitter since Musk acquired it. But what struck me was Roth’s recitation of all manner of complicated issues that Musk had obviously never considered: as he says, “even Elon Musk’s brand of radical transformation has unavoidable limits.”

The influence of advertisers has perhaps been the most obvious limitation, since it has been highlighted in a number of news reports. You’d think it is one aspect Musk would have understood, since –according to Roth–ninety percent of Twitter’s revenue comes (came??) from advertising. When Musk’s acquisition was immediately followed by a wave of racist and antisemitic trolling, wary marketers took a pause. They’re still paused.

But  even if Mr. Musk is able to free Twitter from the influence of powerful advertisers, his path to unfettered speech is still not clear. Twitter remains bound by the laws and regulations of the countries in which it operates. Amid the spike in racial slurs on Twitter in the days after the acquisition, the European Union’s chief platform regulator posted on the site to remind Mr. Musk that in Europe, an unmoderated free-for-all won’t fly. In the United States, members of Congress and the Federal Trade Commission have raised concerns about the company’s recent actions. And outside the United States and the European Union, the situation becomes even more complex: Mr. Musk’s principle of keying Twitter’s policies on local laws could push the company to censor speech it was loath to restrict in the past, including political dissent.

You would think someone able to pay 44 billion dollars for a social media platform would have good lawyers–and would have consulted them about the legal landscape he was about to enter, but evidently not. (The first clue that he’d failed to do so was his immediate, wholesale firing of half of Twitter’s employees–a move that neglected legal niceties like required notice.)

Regulators have significant tools at their disposal to enforce their will on Twitter and on Mr. Musk. Penalties for noncompliance with Europe’s Digital Services Act could total as much as 6 percent of the company’s annual revenue. In the United States, the F.T.C. has shown an increasing willingness to exact significant fines for noncompliance with its orders (like a blockbuster $5 billion fine imposed on Facebook in 2019). In other key markets for Twitter, such as India, in-country staff members work with the looming threat of personal intimidation and arrest if their employers fail to comply with local directives. Even a Musk-led Twitter will struggle to shrug off these constraints.

As daunting as the legal landscape, however, is a constraint of which I’d been totally unaware–and something tells me it hasn’t been at the forefront of Musk’s mind, either: the app stores operated by Google and Apple. The author says that  “failure to adhere to Apple’s and Google’s guidelines would be catastrophic, risking Twitter’s expulsion from their app stores and making it more difficult for billions of potential users to get Twitter’s services.”

Apple’s guidelines emphasize creating “a safe experience for users” and stress the importance of protecting children.

The guidelines quote Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” quip, saying the company will ban apps that are “over the line.”

In practice, the enforcement of these rules is fraught.

In my time at Twitter, representatives of the app stores regularly raised concerns about content available on our platform. On one occasion, a member of an app review team contacted Twitter, saying with consternation that he had searched for “#boobs” in the Twitter app and was presented with … exactly what you’d expect. Another time, on the eve of a major feature release, a reviewer sent screenshots of several days-old tweets containing an English-language racial slur, asking Twitter representatives whether they should be permitted to appear on the service.

Reviewers hint that app approval could be delayed or perhaps even withheld entirely if issues are not resolved to their satisfaction — although the standards for resolution are often implied. Even as they appear to be driven largely by manual checks and anecdotes, these review procedures have the power to derail company plans and trigger all-hands-on-deck crises for weeks or months at a time.

As the author points out, Musk has criticized the capriciousness of platform policies. (I believe this is an illustration of a pot calling a kettle black).

In appointing himself “chief twit,” Mr. Musk has made clear that at the end of the day, he’ll be the one calling the shots.

And  the “chief twit” is nothing if not arbitrary and capricious..

I hope I have enough popcorn…

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Is Design Censorship?

We live in a world where seemingly settled issues are being reframed. A recent, fascinating discussion on the Persuasion podcast focused on the role of social media in spreading both misinformation and what Renee DiResta, the expert being interviewed, labeled “rumors.”

As she explained, using the term “misinformation” (a use to which I plead guilty) isn’t a particularly useful way of framing  the problem we face, because so many of the things that raise people’s hackles aren’t statements of fact; they aren’t falsifiable. And even when they are, even when what was posted or asserted was demonstrably untrue, and is labeled untrue, a lot of people simply won’t believe it is false. As she says, “if you’re in Tribe A, you distrust the media of Tribe B and vice versa. And so even the attempt to correct the misinformation, when it is misinformation, is read with a particular kind of partisan valence. “Is this coming from somebody in my tribe, or is this more manipulation from the bad guys?”

If we aren’t dealing simply in factual inaccuracies or even outright lies, how should we describe the problem?

One of the more useful frameworks for what is happening today is rumors: people are spreading information that can maybe never be verified or falsified, within communities of people who really care about an issue. They spread it amongst themselves to inform their friends and neighbors. There is a kind of altruistic motivation. The platforms find their identity for them based on statistical similarity to other users. Once the network is assembled and people are put into these groups or these follower relationships, the way that information is curated is that when one person sees it, they hit that share button—it’s a rumor, they’re interested, and they want to spread it to the rest of their community. Facts are not really part of the process here. It’s like identity engagement: “this is a thing that I care about, that you should care about, too.” This is rewarmed media theory from the 1960s: the structure of the system perpetuates how the information is going to spread. Social media is just a different type of trajectory, where the audience has real power as participants. That’s something that is fundamentally different from all prior media environments. Not only can you share the rumor, but millions of people can see in aggregate the sharing of that rumor.

Her explanation of how social media algorithms work is worth quoting at length

When you pull up your Twitter feed, there’s “Trends” on the right hand side, and they’re personalized for you. And sometimes there’s a very, very small number of participants in the trend, maybe just a few hundred tweets. But it’s a nudge, it says you are going to be interested in this topic. It’s bait: go click this thing that you have engaged with before that you are probably going to be interested in, and then you will see all of the other people’s tweets about it. Then you engage. And in the act of engagement, you are perpetuating that trend.

Early on, I was paying attention to the anti-vaccine movement. I was a new mom, and I was really interested in what people were saying about this on Facebook. I was kind of horrified by it, to be totally candid. I started following some anti-vaccine groups, and then Facebook began to show me Pizzagate, and then QAnon. I had never typed in Pizzagate, and I had never typed in QAnon. But through the power of collaborative filtering, it understood that if you were an active participant in a conspiracy theory community that fundamentally distrusts the government, you are probably similar to these other people who maybe have a different flavor of the conspiracy. And the recommendation engine didn’t understand what it was doing. It was not a conscious effort. It just said: here’s an active community, you have some similarities, you should go join that active community. Let’s give you this nudge. And that is how a lot of these networks were assembled in the early and mid-2010s.

Then DiResta posed what we used to call the “sixty-four thousand dollar question:”  are changes to the design of an algorithm censorship?

Implicit in that question, of course, is another: what about the original design of an algorithm?  Those mechanisms have been designed  to respond to certain inputs in certain ways, to “nudge” the user to visit X rather than Y.  Is that censorship? And if the answer to either of those questions is “yes,” is the First Amendment implicated?

To say that we are in uncharted waters is an understatement.

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Happy Thanksgiving

No pontificating on turkey day–just a heartfelt “thank you” to everyone who reads this blog, and especially to those who comment here, send me articles, and/or otherwise provide valuable feedback.

I appreciate you all!

See you tomorrow.

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Food For Thought…

Ezra Klein’s columns and podcasts are always thought-provoking, and a post-election essay he published in the New York Times was no exception.

He began with a disclaimer of sorts–noting that post-election narratives tend to be like that “flashy jacket that looks just right when you try it on at the store, only to prove all wrong once you wear it out on the town.” Nevertheless, he proceeded to present three reasons for America’s current, stubborn dysfunctions.: calcification, parity and cultural backlash.

The first and arguably most intractable obstacle to functioning governance is  political calcification. Klein cites findings from recent research:

Because politics is so calcified, virtually nothing matters, but because elections are so close, virtually everything matters.

The researchers looked into the effects of Covid, the economy, impeachment, and the George Floyd protests.(The study evidently preceded the effect of Dobbs; that would have been interesting…)

Convulsions that reshaped the country — that filled morgues and burned buildings — were barely visible in the vote. Counties with higher rates of Covid deaths didn’t turn on Trump. Counties where Black Lives Matter protests turned violent went, if anything, slightly toward Joe Biden. So much happened, and so few minds changed. They call this calcification, writing, “As it does in the body, calcification produces hardening and rigidity: people are more firmly in place and harder to move away from their predispositions.”

The cause of this calcification is no mystery. As the national parties diverge, voters cease switching between them. That the Republican and Democratic Parties have kept the same names for so long obscures how much they’ve changed. I find this statistic shocking, and perhaps you will, too: In 1952, only 50 percent of voters said they saw a big difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties. By 1984, it was 62 percent. In 2004, it was 76 percent. By 2020, it was 90 percent.

The yawning differences between the parties have made swing voters not just an endangered species, but a bizarre one. How muddled must your beliefs about politics be to shift regularly between Republican and Democratic Parties that agree on so little?

As Dan Mullindore commented here on an earlier post, calcification helps to explain the otherwise inexplicable election results in Indiana. Along with gerrymandering, it has led to a politics described by Klein as “effective one-party rule leading to a politics devoid of true accountability or competition.”

The second theory–persistent parity– explains why, nationally, political control has teetered, “election after election, on a knife’s edge.”

We live in an era of unusual political competitiveness. Presidential elections are decided by a few points, in a few states. The House and Senate are up for grabs in nearly every contest. In both 2016 and 2020, fewer than 100,000 votes could’ve flipped the presidential election. So even as calcification means fewer minds change in any given election, parity means those small, marginal changes can completely alter American politics.

The third explanatory theory is the one Americans can hardly avoid seeing: cultural backlash.

Starting around the 1970s, generations raised in relative affluence began to care less about traditional economic issues and more about questions of personal autonomy and social values. The core fights of politics turned away from the distribution of money to the preservation of the environment and women’s bodily autonomy and marriage equality.

These changes were generational, and they’ve moved steadily from the margins of politics to the center. That’s led to a backlash among those opposed to, or simply disoriented by, the speed at which social mores are shifting, and the rise, in countries all over the world, of a post-materialist right. That’s led to a slew of right-wing parties that care more about culture and identity than tax cuts and deregulation.

Klein quotes Ron Inglehart’s observation that today’s GOP is obsessed with critical race theory and whether Dr. Seuss is being canceled. It is not obsessed with economic growth or health care policy.

Klein offers considerable data in his discussion of these three narratives, and I encourage you to click through and read the full analysis, but it’s hard to debate the accuracy of his concluding paragraph:

The parties are so different that even seismic events don’t change many Americans’ minds. The parties are so closely matched that even minuscule shifts in the electoral winds can blow the country onto a wildly different course. And even in a time of profound economic dislocation, American politics has become less about which party is good for your wallet and more about whether the cultural changes of the past 50 years delight or dismay you.

I’m pinning my hopes on that “generational change”…

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