Uganda Forever! The Social Media State and Is Parler Fake?
The threats posed by a social media run state
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Former Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie is a master of framing.
I have long found Beattie one of the brightest minds in America and I am proud to call him friend, notwithstanding the dishonest attacks against both he and I have suffered from a dishonest Washington press corps.
If you haven’t listened to his masterly speeches or heard him explain his childhood living in the furthest corner of the American empire — Palau — you’ve really missed out on one of America’s great minds.
Beattie writes that whilst China has state run media, America has a media run state.
Alas, wish that it were so! I’d argue we have something far worse: the social media run state.
The events of the past week have shown that a social media state is neither particularly social, nor particularly well-mediated. The social media state is centralized. It colludes with its members, none of whom are elected and all of whom are in lock step. It moves quickly and without remorse or recourse.
The Pottinger Paradox: Why Our Elites Love China More Than America
“We had a hell of a time getting the app stores to ban CCP-affiliated social-media from the App Stores,” Matt Pottinger texted me. “The move is still being challenged on First Amendment grounds. But it didn’t take more than an afternoon for Apple/Google/Amazon to ban [first speech platform] Parler?”
“CCP/Russia will have a field day over the ban of Parler (and suspension of POTUS),” he continued, rightly arguing that in banning Parler and suspending the president, America was losing its moral authority.
Pottinger, who was Trump’s Deputy National Security Advisor until this past week, knows of what he speaks. He has made a lifetime of studying the Chinese and is among the few white Americans I know who speak fluent Chinese. He was a journalist for the Wall Street Journal and a Marine before serving all but the final week of the Trump presidency. Matt and I are both alums of Milton Academy, whose motto, “dare to be true,” he exemplifies. Many talk of an America first agenda but Pottinger has lived it for decades. He is not a MAGA conservative, to be sure, but he was right on the thing that mattered most: America’s response to the coronavirus.
Pottinger fought with the Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Jared Kusher who wanted to keep America’s borders open with China in the midst of a pandemic. Pottinger prevailed, ultimately, but we should have been a lot faster at shutting out the Chinese. Notwithstanding a change in regime Pottinger’s China strategy is here to stay, notes the Washington Post.
What then should we make of his observation of Big Tech’s hypocrisy of coddling China while punishing companies that are #AmericaFirst?
You can tell who is powerful by who is hypocritical. This’ll be a common refrain you’ll read on this website and it’s a useful construct for how you ought to see the world. You can tell who is powerful by who is hypocritical. Things are so often their opposites.
In essence Big Tech saw the Chinese built Tik Tok as one of their allies while Parler, founded by Americans with American money, was not. This “Pottinger Paradox” remains a defining feature of our politics.
Why is a Chinese company in the in crowd? And why is an American company on the outs?
Why is this? And what does this reveal about power and technology?
The “Pottinger Paradox” reveals nothing less than that our venture capitalist community has chosen China over America.
This love of China explains why Jim Breyer, an early investor in Facebook, is allowed to invest in SenseTime, a Chinese company since blacklisted from doing business by the United States government, while Clearview — one of the fastest growing startups in America — struggles to get an audience with Silicon Valley investors because it is disfavored by Google. Power and interests are all about proximity.
Clearview is more accurate than SenseTime but SenseTime has the right friends in Silicon Valley even though it is banned in the U.S. for human rights violations.
The Pottinger Paradox also helps to explain why Umbra, a synthetic aperture radar company backed with American capital, doesn’t get any money out of Silicon Valley while its competitor Capella Space, headed by its Iranian-born CEO (who is himself something of a security risk) is flooded with cash from DCVC, itself backed by money from the Chinese.
What you plant you harvest. And our venture community thinks rarely of America and Americans first. That's because they’ve given too little thought to how to make the lives of America’s better.
While it’s nice to have them notice the Silicon Valley monopolies conspiring to murder Parler it’s a little late.
Embarrassing Elite Arguments Return Years Later
Paypal mafiosos-turned tech investors-turned concerned Twitteratti David Sacks and Keith Rabois have admirably commented on
Let’s take a gander.
Here’s David Sacks.
And here’s Keith Rabois:
It’s nice to see that Keith Rabois and David Sacks have joined the conversation some three years after Charles C. Johnson v. Twitter (2018).
Here’s how the Hollywood Reporter covered it at the time:
A conservative reporter who has been criticized as a purveyor of fake news and conspiracy theories has sued Twitter for political discrimination, claiming the platform violated laws and its own rules by banning him for life.
Plaintiff Chuck Johnson's lawsuit, filed Monday by attorney Robert Barnes of Barnes Law in Los Angeles, says Twitter used vague and subjective criteria allowing it “to censor or restrict political speech at their whim based purely upon its subjective beliefs, political animus, and unfettered and unbridled discretion in violation of state law.”
The attorney argues that Twitter’s decision to permanently ban Johnson negatively impacted his ability to do business at his websites, GotNews.com and WeSearchr.com, and Johnson is seeking millions of dollars in relief.
Twitter banned Johnson, a former Breitbart News reporter, temporarily on occasions, then BuzzFeed “disclosed two-year conspiracy efforts of Twitter to forever ban the plaintiff,” according to the lawsuit. The suit quotes several emails from Twitter executives that were first published a year ago by BuzzFeed.
“We perma suspended Chuck Johnson even though it wasn’t direct violent threats. It was just a call that the policy team made,” reads one email from Twitter operations vp Tina Bhatnagar.
“He is finding loopholes in policy which is almost worse than the people who blatantly have violations,” reads a note from former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. “To be very clear, I don’t want to find out we unsuspended this Chuck Johnson troll later on.”
The attorney says that Twitter users “are induced to congregate daily,” making it a “quasi-public” space where liberty of speech and association is protected under California law.
I lost the court case but won the argument.
In a spirit of kindness and mercy and justice I even entered into dialogue with Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s part time CEO, about what could be done in a spirit of peaceful collaboration.
I even complimented him in the Wall Street Journal.
I ask very innocently: What precisely is David Sacks doing about the problem? Where is he putting his money or that of his LPs?
To paraphrase the don of the PayPal mafia: We wanted a safer America where we could have free speech…and we got Bird, an electric scooter company, backed by David Sacks.
Call me up when you want to do something interesting fellas. I’ve got ideas, man, and most of them work.
We can rightly ask the Paypal Mafia.
Where were you when your own people needed you?
Why Parler (and Gab) don’t work: Follow India, Poland and Uganda!
Is Parler interesting? Or was it sapping the political strength
I love politically incorrect investments and I have made quite a few. I’ve founded companies. Some worked, some didn’t, and onward we go. I find that I always come back for more and I have mostly just blown my own money. Everybody needs a hobby, I suppose.
Naturally Parler caught my eye and I, the first person banned from Twitter, tried to get an audience with its team. We had many friends in common and I reached out. No answer. I posted a few parleys on Parler and quickly amassed a large following. I found the interface clunky and the people weird so I left.
Parler was deeply politically incorrect, to be sure, but if I am being honest a tad obvious. Responding to the braying of DC libertarians — could there be a bigger oxymoron? — Parler set out to build its own competitor. Good enough.
To be sure most startups who seek to do really interesting things find themselves blacklisted by Silicon Valley, especially if they do something that Silicon Valley disapproves of. Turf wars are intense and if you don’t come from the right school, or have the right connections, or the right politics, you won’t get any audience at all.
In fairness to the Silicon Valley crowd Twitter was proving to be a terrible investment. Twitter’s highest stock price was in 2014 at $69 a share. It’s now $47. No one who works at Twitter cares about the stock price.
So Parler turned to other money: right-wing billionaire money.
Enter Rebekah Mercer. Ms. Mercer is a billion-heiress with a history of weird data collection projects, projects that didn’t quite work as advertised.
Mercer backed Cambridge Analytica, which was essentially a fake company. Yes, yes, I know that they were scapegoated for Donald Trump’s election but those of us who had a peak under the hood found that the company’s claims were little more than vaporware. Professor David Sumpter rightly notes that the biggest Cambridge Analytica scandal was that it didn’t work.
Here’s what Sumpter explained: Cambridge Analytics was fake.
It was over two years ago the issue of Cambridge Analytica caught my attention, as part of writing my book, Outnumbered. While researching the book, I was the first person to get an on-the-record interview with Alex Kogan, the researcher who downloaded Facebook data and sold it to Cambridge Analytica.
What I found out was a very different story than the one presented by whistleblower Chris Wylie and that had been given earlier by Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica. They claimed that using Facebook data they could target voters personalities and influence the election in Trump’s favour. But as Kogan told me, almost two years ago now, “that shit doesn’t work”.
Kogan’s view squared with my own investigations. I used a similar data set to the one acquired by Cambridge Analytica and showed that, exactly as Kogan told me, the effectiveness of political personality targeting is negligible. Two of the Cambridge researchers, Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell, who carried out the original personality studies suggested that they could target instead extreme personalities. So I tested that too. While there was some effect, it remained weak. Too weak to influence an election. [Emphasis mine].
Parler didn’t have a penny of venture capital and yet it still ended up the top app in the Apple store. The company was headquartered in Las Vegas — not exactly known as a hot bed of talented engineers.
Parler’s backers include Jeffrey Wernick. Wernick claims that he invested in Uber but none of the Uber executives or early investors have ever heard of him. I suspect the same is true of his “investment” in Airbnb.
I’ve found Wernick to be dishonest in the extreme and a time waster and yet here is he is being quoted in the New York Times.
In an interview, Jeffrey Wernick, Parler’s chief operating officer, blamed “a cancel culture” at the tech companies for his company’s dimming prospects. He said he would advise other platforms not to try to compete on Apple’s App Store. “Because if you raise money and get investors and end up like Parler, what’s the point?” he said.
Or maybe you could have listened to those of us warning you about building on Amazon?
Wernick regaled me with tales about how China was going to crush America and how that might be a good thing and how he kept all of his money outside the US.
Naturally I met him through Steve Bannon and I ultimately blocked him after he threatened me weirdly for telling him that he didn’t understand that the solution to social media censorship wasn’t to just build another tech company.
But putting aside the admittedly odd Mr. Wernick we should ask ourselves what deeper significance this revelation has.
Parler brought a technological knife to a political gun fight.
They tried to solve what is essentially a political problem with a technological one. In that key way they were bad engineering.
Could it be that Parler was itself something of gambit? Were the Mercers intending to take social media censorship all the way to the Supreme Court? Well they’ve financially backed David Bosie who took Citizens United court case all the way there. Why not establish a court case with Parler?
To win such a case, though, requires the courts to take it seriously.
Perhaps America could take its rights as seriously as say, the third world country of Uganda.
Or perhaps they could listen to the growing international consensus which rightly worries about a world in which unelected San Francisco woketopians can censor
Poland points the way, too, by fining social media for censorship. Why don’t we do that in America? Couldn’t we do it on a state-by-state basis?
India banned Tik Tok and a host of other Chinese apps from its country.
Prime Minister Modi didn’t want to subvert his citizens’ freedoms at the expense of placating China.
Modi’s move, according to one of my well-placed sources, was what forced Donald Trump to ultimately ban Tik Tok. Thank you, India.
Parler, censorship, #metoo businesses and me
Parler has since sued Amazon and Amazon has been nothing short of scathing in its response. For what it’s worth I happen to think Amazon will win if for no other than reason than Amazon is extremely powerful. It’s tough to beat the second richest man in the world, especially when he hosts the CIA.
I had warned those around Parler that they faced an imminent risk of deplatforming and offered to help one of its cofounders — Rebekah Mercer — find a hosting solution. She was less than enthused — she needed 5000 servers in less than twenty-four hours, no easy feat that — and not willing to listen. Or perhaps more charitably, simply exhausted.
The demand for hosting won’t go away and some friends and I have built a hosting company for precisely this reason. If you’re interested please let me know.
This insight raises an important question: what does it mean when you can’t trust a contract with an American company?