The Interregnum

Twitter Rejects ‘State Media,’ Except When It Doesn’t

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23 August 2019|By Any Means NECESSARY,Sputnik Radio|Mohamed Elmaazi

The Interregnum’s Editor-in-Chief Mohamed Elmaazi joined Eugene Pryer and Sean Blackmon on By Any Means Necessary to discuss his latest article regarding social media censorship, Twitter’s new policy rejecting ads from what it terms ‘state media’, how the the platform selectively uses that term to deprioritise platforms who go against status quo media narratives, the influence of pro-western media groups and the geopolitical implications of the move.

Featured image via Twitter – Twitter

EDITOR’S NOTE:

CORRECTION: at 08:45 Mohamed Elmaazi incorrectly referred to a June 2019 statement published by Google, the statement was actually published by YouTube, a subsidiary of Google

The Interregnum has added links to the article to connect readers to primary sources referenced to by speakers.

Rush transcript edited slightly for clarity:

Eugene Pryer: (00:02)
And we’re going to keep the movement moving on as they say. A happy to be joined by Mohammed Elmaazi, a writer and editor of The Interregnum. Mohamed thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Mohamed you recently published a piece, with The Canary talking about a recent announcement from Twitter saying that they will no longer be accepting advertising from “state controlled news media entities”. I’m moving forward though, these entities can still use Twitter. Certainly if they choose in their statement, the company says that they are making this move to “protect healthy discourse and open conversation”. Now on its face, it doesn’t necessarily seem like a huge deal, but I’m curious what you think about what some of the larger implications of this announcement may be.

Mohamed Elmaazi: (00:58)
Right. So when I first read that,  my first thoughts split. So as I write in the article, I say, there’s nothing in and of itself wrong with a saying. Okay. Let’s say, would they call state controlled? Let’s say we would say government, news media outlets from not being able to advertise the concern. The concern comes down to, okay, how do you define this? So they say,

“this is a global approach and it will be enforced across our entire business”.

Great. But then they say,

“this policy will not apply to taxpayer funded entities, including independent public broadcasters”.

So it’s like, okay, well what does that mean? Because surely all state controlled choose media outlets or funded by taxpayer funded entities. Unless you’re a modern monetary theorists, you say, okay, we have a Fiat currency so we don’t need taxes, but set that aside.

Independent public broadcasters. (01:52) So who decides what’s independent? So my main thing was, okay, within the context of what’s going on, this looks like it’s designed essentially to say that, the BBC, Channel 4, Voice of America, PBS, France, 24 and other such outlets are less likely to fall foul of these policies while they’re more likely to label RT, Sputnik, who they already now banned from advertising anyway, Telesur, Press, TV and Chinese state TV, as falling into this category. And so yeah, it’s within this wider context of, of trying to control, the flow of information that I found most disconcerting. Definitely.

Eugene Pryer: (02:32)
And, and that’s what I wanted to get at Mohamed was how of the way this is playing out with Twitter really seems like, you know, there’s something of a double standard for, you know, which state controlled platforms are deemed accessible on the platform to the point you just made. But that whole notion really seems to be based on a geopolitics more than any, you know, real desire to, you know, purifier filter content for the users of Twitter.

Mohamed Elmaazi: (03:00)
Absolutely. And in fact, another point I raise and I quote Alan MacLeod who wrote an excellent article on this but also gave, an interview with a Canary contributor [Slava Zilber] on this, which is, okay, what’s the difference?

Why is corporate controlled not an issue, but state controlled is. And how do you define states? Because I know lots of people use it along with the term government. But there’s also a long history of a left critique of the concept of the state, which is far more than the government. So they’re going back and easily to Vladimir Lenin who wrote on The State and Revolution, but they look at what is the state. It’s a whole sort of interconnected system will be on the government. But above and beyond that, I would point you to a, you know, the Council on Foreign Relations, which is a very powerful,  invite-only members organisation, that helps to craft U.S. foreign policy.

Mohamed Elmaazi: (03:52)
They put out a report in 2017 November saying that,

“social media companies should more aggressively policed their platforms for malicious state sponsored content and should work with news organisations to promote verified and fact check content on their platforms.”

They also say they have an interest in “cooperating with Western intelligence agencies” and that’s from the CFR. And a separate report called Containing Russia, which is incredibly hawkish, came out in 2018 and to that report, among its many recommendations say that they should

“work with major social media platforms to develop a voluntary code of conduct to more actively police their networks for disinformation.[…]

Facebook’s decision to create a portal to help identify ads from Russia’s Internet Research Agency. Twitter’s ban of RT and Sputnik from advertising and Google’s consideration of deranking. Rt and Sputnik are all steps in the right direction”.

I think that’s quite significant, especially when you look at the roster of the board of directors of who is at Twitter, Alphabet that owns Google and YouTube and Facebook. They all have members of the Council on Foreign Relations there [See end of transcript for further details of CFR members serving in Twitter, et al].

Sean Blackmon: (05:02)
Yeah. And I also think what’s really interesting to all of this is that it’s presented as if Sputnik and RT had been this nefarious actor for decades trying to game the system of social media and they, Twitter’s finally been able to finally realise all these bad things they’ve been doing, but it’s actually Twitter that has been aggressively reaching out to Sputnik and to RT specifically when we saw this release in documents of Twitter, talking about how much information they had on all the different candidates and how they could target messages for our t that it’s actually Twitter that has been a maybe an improper actor to these state interests and now they’re finally being reigned in by different people that have been able to gain access to their board and gain access to the Jack Dorsey’s of the world to start controlling them away from their bottom dollar. But it’s actually been Twitter that has been the aggressor in these situations, but not spun nick or rt or some of these other media outlets.

Mohamed Elmaazi: (05:50)
Exactly, and there’s nothing wrong with Twitter within the framework of a capitalist system of Twitter. Going to various, like news organisations saying, Hey, you know, the, the election is coming up, how would you like to expand your reach for, it was like more than $3 million. I think overall that what you talked about, because RT ended up publishing an article saying, Hey, look, here’s a slide show for a bids that they came to us and gave us and said, hey, you know, for a few million dollars you can expand the scope and the American market during elections. And then of course that gets flipped around of our t is part of a government up to interfere. And, and the u s elections, it was like, well, all news interferes in the sense that it is there to inform and shape opinion. But the idea that RT was, I’m going, I wouldn’t even use the term aggressor or just say, you know, it was a voluntary act from a social media,which incidentally RT declined the offer. Not that it helped them any in the end.

Mohamed Elmaazi: (06:52)
I don’t even think that there is as much capture, I just think that the fact that you have all these organisations that see it as in their interest not to upset the beast as it were, which is the US state, they are American based corporations. That is the largest market in the world. They are themselves mostly American citizens. And so yeah, if you want to be on the right side of, you know, for lack of a better word or the right side of the empire when it starts growling, that you should be more actively collaborating with the national security state and more actively censoring information coming from Venezuela or Iran or Russia, then yeah, why would you push back against that?

Eugene Pryer: (07:30)
and on this notion of what informs and influences different pieces? Mohamed, what was interesting to me was how Twitter was saying that, uh, the policy here that we’re talking about was informed by groups like Freedom House Reporters Without Borders press, freedom index, the European journalism centres, media landscapes report, you know, these, uh, you know, groups that I would consider a basically a pro western really a in terms of, you know, uh, their influence here really seemed to kind of have your fingerprints on this. I mean, by Twitter’s own admission, I mean, am I being a little paranoid or do you think there’s some significance to the orientation of this piece sort of being in guided by these sorts of groups?

Mohamed Elmaazi: (08:12)
No, they’ve definitely chosen organisations that are western facing the Committee to Protect Journalists I think is also there. And if you look at the board of directors, I mean, that’s, uh, I’m on poor and all the rest of it. It’s like, you know, establishment journalists are all there on the board of the a CPJ so no, you’re spot on. And Freedom House. I mean, Freedom House has very strong links to a sort of neo-con, uh, not just but neo-con organisations in the U S State Department. I mean these are basically, it’s western states, good adversary states or states labelled, uh, as adversaries or targets of the U S Bat. So, you know, Google, I know we don’t have much time left Google in June came out with this statement, uh, this year, June this year. They say that their work has focused four pillars, removing, violating content, raising up authoritative content, reducing the spread of borderline content, whatever that means. They don’t say, and rewarding trusted creators. So this is part of a, basically an avalanche of changes, whether it’s a algorithm changes to d rank, alternative media and upgrades, uh, preferred content, maybe New York Times, Washington Post, Fox, CNN is within that context that we should see that this decision being made and it’s not the decision as much as it is the terminology that, how they classify what is state controlled.

Sean Blackmon: (09:30)
And I’m kind of curious, going back to what you had said about the growl of them Pyre, what is that growl telling them be patriotic. This is for the con like the country or we’re going to simply crush you. If you don’t do this and it’s going to be economic hell for you in the future. You’re not going to have any type of movement or freedom. I mean what is the threat to these social media platforms that get them to act this way?

Mohamed Elmaazi: (09:50)
So behind the scenes, I don’t know what they would say. I know that a, in many of these cases, I mean one of the things we hear about right as possible regulation and anti trust. So you hear these sort of noises about you know, you have select committee meetings and what are you doing? You’re not doing enough to counter Russian dish information and you’ll, a few articles will appear and, and, and sort of a legacy outlets like, uh, is it time to, or former Facebook a co-founder says it’s time to break apart Facebook. And then they come up with a report saying, look, we’ve kicked off loads of users who are linked to the Venezuelan government and then you don’t hear anything about to antitrust, possible antitrust enforcement anymore. So it’s the same way that human rights, uh, used to get used, I think still does as a club, when I was growing up, you’d hear a human rights being referred to by the State Department.

Mohamed Elmaazi: (10:37)
The human rights situation in Egypt is not improving. And then the Egyptian government would concede on something to do with say with the, uh, selling a completely separate, say something to do with the state of Israel. And then you wouldn’t hear anything about human rights anymore. The point is you have legal means by which to go after massive capitalist institutions, whether it’s increased regulation or actually enforcing rules that you should be enforcing anyway, or breaking them apart, antitrust or even just, uh, you know, lots of these organisations, they have massive deals with the Pentagon, you know, with the, the CIA, you know, with database or to algorithm technology. So it’s just like, well, we just won’t, uh, you know, we won’t, uh, hire you next time. We won’t offer you the contract. We’ll cancel the contract. And that’s millions, tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions of dollars. So it’s financial, it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s what I’ve just described

Eugene Pryer: (11:28)
that makes me think about how in your article, Mohamed,you reference comments made by a UK Labour MP, Clive Lewis earlier this year saying that the purpose of the British media is to quote, fit the political economy we are in, which to me, like we’ve been saying before, basically says it’s to maintain the status quo, right? So when you have this massive platform like Twitter with millions and millions of users, I mean this sort of policy, you know, really has the potential to orient mass consciousness in a considerable way and taken with the algorithm piece. I mean it just seems like a sort of a, a really impactful element, uh, that we’re dealing with outside of, you know, a this policy itself.

Mohamed Elmaazi: (12:05)
Yeah. And in a painfully insulated way, right? Because the more this happens, the more you will be in an ever increasingly limited echo chamber of just seeing certain types of views and hearing – I mean  we already have that to anyway, that existed before  the Internet. That existed when people buy certain newspapers, right? People gravitate towards newspapers, this has been shown consistently. People gravitate towards newspapers that reflect more their worldview. But the difference is, is that you were aware that the other newspapers existed and you could pick them up here. When you’re on Google or Twitter, there is the illusion of neutrality that like, oh, I’ll just put in a search and information will come out. And that is the information that should come out. Uh, when in fact more and more those searches are being manipulated and trains based on on algorithm changes.

Mohamed Elmaazi (12:50)
And World Socialist Website. I should give them a shout out cause they have done excellent work on a what they refer to as Google censorship because of algorithm changes. And indeed last year put out an article saying,  What is FireEye? And FireEye is a, is a cyber-security uh, corporation linked to the Pentagon, former members of the u s military who who helped to found it and they produce reports that Twitter, YouTube, Facebook use to kick off individuals and they questioned actually the accuracy of their information. You know, this whole business about “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”, which is very creepy sounding, a justification for knocking off the suspending accounts, closing down pages, all the rest of it. Actually it’s all circumstantial evidence when you read the report, which is all the worse.

Eugene Pryer: (13:37)
Definitely. Thanks so much for talking with us today, Mohamed. We’re going to leave it there for today and a move to a break here on by any means necessary on Radio Sputnik in Washington, D.C. but we will be back. So please stay with us.

Key figures in social media giants who are also members of the Council on Foreign Relations

Twitter

Robert Zoellick, Board of Directors, formerly President of the World Bank, US State Department, Chairman of the Board of International Advisors at the Goldman Sachs Group, US Trade Rep, Board of Directors, CFR member

Alphabet, Google, YouTube

Eric E. Schmidt, Executive Chairman Alphabet, CFR member
Ram K. Shriram, Independent Director, CFR member

Facebook

Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity and former White House National Security Council Director of Cybersecurity Policy under Obama, CFR member

Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, formerly Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google, Chief of Staff for US Treasury Department under President Clinton, a  management consultant with McKinsey & Company, and an economist with the World Bank, CFR member

Audit and Risk Oversight

Kenneth I. Chenault, Director, BOD, former CEO American Express, CFR member

Jeffrey D. Zients, Director, BOD, Chair of the Audit & Risk Oversight Committee, Obama Administration from 2009 to 2017, as Director of the National Economic Council, Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget, CFR member

Twitter’s new policy on ‘state-controlled news media’ should concern us all

20 August 2019|The Canary|Mohamed Elmaazi

Twitter has announced an update to its advertisement policy which may reflect yet another assault on free speech by social media giants. On 19 August, Twitter declared that:

Going forward, we will not accept advertising from state-controlled news media entities.

While this may not seem like a big issue at first glance, a further reflection of the wider context reveals this latest policy to be especially troubling.

Promoting ‘western’ establishment narratives?

The issue is less with this particular policy about “state-controlled news media” advertising on Twitter than with how Twitter has crafted the policy.

While it says that:

This is a global approach and will be enforced across our entire business.

Twitter then explains that:

This policy will not apply to taxpayer-funded entities, including independent public broadcasters.

In other words, Twitter’s policy appears designed to make an exception for Western “state” media and those allied to Western governments. Presumably the BBCChannel 4Voice of AmericaPBSFrance 24, and Al Jazeera are less likely to fall foul of these policies. While Twitter is more likely to label RTSputnikTelesurPress TV and the Chinese CCTV as “state-controlled”.

Read the full article here: https://www.thecanary.co/opinion/2019/08/20/twitters-new-policy-on-state-controlled-news-media-should-concern-us-all/

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