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The contemporary equivalent of the Military Industrial Complex is the nexus of state and private platform power. We need a catchy phrase for that, and it needs sustained scrutiny. Things are getting ugly.
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The number of recent news stories about platform employees doing things to make governments happy, including disclosing user data and silencing (or declining to silence) online speech, is remarkable. And what gets reported is presumably just the tip of a very large iceberg. 2/
This @Wired piece about the Saudi royal family bribing Twitter employees to reveal logs data about dissidents and critics is mind-blowing. 3/ https://www.wired.com/story/mohammed-bin-salman-twitter-investigation/
First they got Twitter’s head of Middle East partnerships to find and hand over information about users. (Why did that guy even have access to data like that?) 4/
Then they got a Twitter engineer in SF to disclose user information to a Saudi handler, seemingly for quite a while. The engineer wound up fleeing the U.S. and now works for King Salman’s foundation. His job there, per DOJ, is to “monitor and manipulate social media.” 5/
Meanwhile over at Facebook, we have terrible stories about a senior employee with government ties helping to keep a ruling BJP party legislator’s hateful or incendiary posts *up* when they should have come down under the TOS. 6/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-facebook-ban-hate-speech-from-indias-ruling-party-11599174534#comments_sector
And then there are the stories about US executives, who also have strong government ties and deeply influence Facebook content policy. 7/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499
To be clear, having government ties is what makes these employees valuable to the platform. That’s their job. Equivalent roles exist in every major industry, and regardless of what party is in power. 8/
But the transparency rules, ethical wall rules, revolving door rules, etc. that a particular government or company adopts matter. 9/
What’s a problem inside platforms, as my colleague @alexstamos points out, is when people in the govt-relations business influence content policy for users. Those internal teams should be rigorously separate. But that may become impossible when issues are important enough. 10/
For completeness sake, here is a Google example – this odd thing with Jordan’s crown prince working at the company’s always problematic Jigsaw division. 11/ https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb98pb/google-jigsaw-became-toxic-mess
As a sidebar, I’ve worked with so many amazing and principled people from all of these parts of the world. It worries me greatly to think stories like this might bring suspicion upon them or make their lives harder within tech companies. 12/
