BIG-TECH TYRANNY
Twitter Deletes QAnon to Protect US from Upheaval; Russia May Delete Twitter
for the Same Reason
With American social media companies increasingly controlled by the national
security state, Russia is considering bans on the likes of Twitter and
YouTube.
by Alan Macleod
March 17th, 2021
Mint Press
By Alan Macleod
SAN FRANCISCO - Twitter has taken action against the QAnon movement,
deleting more than 150,000 accounts that promoted the conspiracy theory.
This follows a similar crackdown by YouTube. The impetus for the decision
was the storming of the Capitol Building on January 6, led by many adherents
who believe Donald Trump was leading a fightback against a satanic cult of
cannibalistic pedophiles in the Democratic Party and the national security
state.
"That was a moment of reckoning where we realized that the approach that we
had put in place the previous fall, of attempting to reduce the influence of
this movement, wasn't sufficient," a Twitter spokesperson told CBS News.
At the same time, Vladimir Putin's administration is threatening to block
American social media giants like Twitter and YouTube completely, accusing
the two of illegally fomenting anti-government protests inside Russia.
Change Washington can believe in
These two developments are linked in many ways. Since its inception, social
media has been key in organizing and encouraging protest movements
worldwide. The Arab Spring - which dominated global headlines for months and
led to revolutions, wars, and regime change across the region - was said to
have been planned and boosted by Facebook and Twitter, which were keen for
their platforms to be seen as a revolutionary force.
The U.S. government has long understood the power of social networks to
bring about change. In 2009, it instructed Twitter to postpone a temporary
maintenance shutdown of its site in order to help leaders of ongoing
anti-government protests in Iran communicate and coordinate. That same year,
USAID, a front group for the CIA, secretly released a Twitter-like app for
Cuba that purported to be an independent platform. The plan was to provide a
free high-quality service aimed at the country's youth that would, once it
gained traction, slowly be turned into an anti-government propaganda network
used to incite an uprising.
Since then, the U.S. government appears to have decided on a more hands-on
approach to social media, working to convince Twitter to delete hundreds of
thousands of accounts it claims were linked to the governments of Iran,
China, Russia, Venezuela, or Cuba. While a new social media influencing
operation from a U.S. enemy is uncovered every few weeks, these platforms
never seem to be able to find the American government doing the same thing,
even though the existence of such U.S. networks has been known about for at
least 10 years.
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An info-control Gov-Tech complex
Washington seems to have found many willing partners in Silicon Valley.
"What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and
cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first," wrote Google
executives Eric Schmidt and Larry Cohen. Along with Amazon, Microsoft and
other tech giants, Google, YouTube's parent company, signed a massive
intelligence deal with the CIA in November, worth tens of billions of
dollars. One month earlier, Twitter announced publicly that it had been
working with the FBI in order to identify and delete Iranian accounts.
Fast forward to February, and the social media giant was removing
Russian-based accounts because they were "undermining faith in the NATO
alliance and its stability" - a decision that sparked consternation online
from users worried about its implications.
A report released earlier this month from the influential D.C.-based think
tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), called for
even more covert U.S. government control over social media, arguing that
Washington should work with platforms like YouTube and Twitter so as to
ensure that protest movements around the world result in an outcome more
conducive to American interests.
Russia YouTube Feature photo
Navalny, right, speaks to his video operations chief after a live YouTube
broadcast in Moscow. Pavel Golovkin | AP
The report singled out protests in Russia over the treatment of anti-Putin
activist Alexey Navalny and the long running Hong Kong demonstrations as two
prime examples where the power of "authoritarian states" could be weakened
or undermined if the U.S. worked with social media companies to boost the
anti-government message to billions of internet users. As the CSIS wrote:
The U.S. government should think creatively about public-private
partnerships that can expand its toolkit to defend the legitimate rights of
political protestors globally, including preserving the digital rights of
peaceful democratic activists while muting harmful mis- and dis-information
from violent state and nonstate actors seeking to tip the balance in various
countries."
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Twitter announced it has deleted 373 accounts it claims were linked to
Russia, Iran, and Armenia for "undermining faith in the NATO."
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Platform fencing
This plan might already be in action, if Russia's suspicions are correct.
Moscow is considering an all-out ban on Twitter after the company repeatedly
failed to respond to its requests to remove thousands of messages
encouraging citizens, including children, to attend illegal pro-Navalny
demonstrations across the country. It also accused Twitter of failing to act
to delete content relating to drug use, encouraging self-harm, and sexual
abuse of children. As a punitive measure, it has already significantly
slowed down the speed of the app across all mobile devices.
Moscow is also mulling over a ban of YouTube in a row over the platform's
censoring of Russian state media content. The government has accused the
Silicon Valley video sharing platform of suppressing content sympathetic to
it and promoting anti-Putin messages. Many pro-Russian content creators have
noticed their viewership rapidly nose diving while, at the same time,
pro-West, anti-Putin content is constantly promoted. RT filmmaker Anton
Krasovsky, for example, claims he has been effectively shadowbanned, while
Alexey Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation is suggested to Russians - even
alongside content, such as children's cartoons, that bears no relation to
his messaging.
"Our videos started showing up less and less in search results and
recommendations, until finally they stopped appearing at all," Krasovsky
wrote in an open letter addressed to Andrey Lipov, head of Russian media
regulator Roskomnadzor; "For a year now, they've been trying to silence us,
and there's nothing more we can do. We can't fight back, and we can't
retaliate - we can't even go underground."
It seems hard to argue that this is not at least partially true. In the
early to mid-2010s, when there was a more level playing field online, RT was
perhaps the most popular news network on the internet. The Director of
National Intelligence Report into Russian influence in the 2016 elections
showed RT easily defeating its competition on YouTube, generating around
eight times as many views as CNN. However, after extensive algorithm changes
in the wake of the report's publication, RT was demoted and establishment
American outlets elevated. All RT content on YouTube and Twitter now comes
with a warning label cautioning consumers that this is Russian-affiliated
content. Independent, alternative news outlets have also been hit hard by
the algorithm changes.
Meanwhile, Navalny has enormous influence online. His Russian-only YouTube
channel has more than 6.5 million subscribers (50% more than
English-language RT), while his Russian-language documentary (with English
subtitles), exposing what he claims is Putin's secret palace on the Black
Sea, has amassed an extraordinary 115 million views. It is estimated that
there are only around 258 million Russian speakers worldwide.
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With social media companies increasingly intertwined with and controlled by
the U.S. national security state, it might be that Russia decides the only
way to level the playing field is to cut itself off from the West online, as
China has done with its so-called Great Firewall. If the roles were
reversed, there appears little doubt that the U.S. would consider doing the
same. Last year, there was something close to pandemonium in the U.S.
government as Chinese-owned TikTok became a viral social media app, with
then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warning that the video-sharing platform
was essentially a front for the Chinese Communist Party. The U.S. attempted
to force through a sale to Microsoft or another American company. Chinese
company Huawei installing a modern 5G network across the world and Xiaomi's
dominance in the global smartphone and semiconductor market have sparked
similar concerns in the West.
Big-tech platforms like YouTube and Twitter tolerated the proliferation of
the QAnon conspiracy theory. That was until the movement directly threatened
the integrity of the U.S. state. After adherents began to question the
validity of the elections and even organize what many commentators called a
botched coup attempt, action was swift and extensive. It is perhaps
unsurprising, therefore, that Russia is considering retaliating against the
networks that are threatening its legitimacy.
