What the Internet can do to stop censoring of Big Tech: JD Vance, the Future Investment Initiative, and the US in January 2018
Mittelsteadt notes that Trump’s VP pick, JD Vance, has also talked of reining in Big Tech companies and gone as far as to call Google “one of the most dangerous companies in the world.”
The first Trump administration also targeted perceived bias at Big Tech companies with an executive order that sought to hold platforms such as Twitter, Google, and Facebook accountable for censoring information for political reasons. The pressure had a tangible impact, with Meta ultimately abandoning plans for a dedicated news section on Facebook.
Musk supported a proposed bill in California that would have required companies to make their AI models available for vetting, even though he dislikes government regulation.
The research fellow at George Mason University says that any comment Musk makes will have a big influence on the election. “At a maximum he could have some sort of seat in a potential Trump administration, and his views could actually be enacted into some sort of policy.”
“A lot of the AIs that are being trained in the San Francisco Bay Area, they take on the philosophy of people around them,” Musk said at the Future Investment Initiative, a Saudi Arabia government–backed event held in Riyadh this week. You have a nihilistic, wokephilosophy that is being built into these Artificial Intelligences.
Musk warned against the current artificial intelligence models being too politically Correct, and dragged it into the Trump crosshairs.
In the days following January 6, Meta, Twitter, YouTube, and Twitch suspended former president Donald Trump over posts the companies said glorified the violence at the Capitol. It was the most extreme moderation that these companies had ever made. Thousands of accounts belonging to militias, conspiracy theorists and the content they shared led to the US to that moment.
It’s not a regular politics newsletter. How the internet is shaping the political reality is explained by the WIRED Politics team, with help from Makena Kelly.
After the 2022 midterms, the balance of power shifted in Congress. Republicans had a small majority in the House and they went after the researchers and safety workers who did the work of debunking election myths. Jim Jordan was elevated to chair of the powerful House Judiciary Committee and immediately launched investigations stifling the work of academics at best and launching harassment campaigns against entire moderation teams at worst. As a result of these attacks, the Stanford Internet Observatory, one of the top disinformation research groups, shut down for good over the summer.
The collapse of the social media infrastructure built to safeguard our democratic systems is due to either inattention or force. There are only five days left until Election Day and a chasm has formed in what little foundation remains.
We are all aware that the man who took over the social network turned it into a conspiratorial wasteland where lies are made. Alex Jones and Andrew Tate had their accounts restored by Musk, who banned them before the 2020 election began. And, to bring us to the present day, Musk has spent the last few weeks campaigning for Trump and spreading election lies.
There were fissures in the platforms across the board. A new fact-checking tool built for Meta was abandoned last year after the company reduced the size of their trust and safety teams. Meta has blind eyed the militias who are currently organizing on its platforms.
