Thread by @caitoz

The Idiotic Claim That Other Nations Are ‘Disrupting The Public Conversation’ On US Politics

"The idea that any of this could have any effect worth mentioning on the gibbering vortex of irrational vitriol that is US political discourse makes no sense"
medium.com/@caityjohnston…

Twitter claims that it has suspended 130 Iranian accounts for “attempting to disrupt the public conversation” during the US presidential debate.

This evidence-free claim aligns with the narrative popularized by Russiagate that foreign governments seek to “sow discord” in the United States by amplifying controversial political opinions from both sides of mainstream US discourse, and it is idiotic for a number of reasons.

Firstly, anyone who watched America’s trainwreck of a first presidential debate knows that saying a few Twitter accounts could make US political discourse more polarized and hostile is like saying adding a drop of water to the sea can exacerbate a tsunami.

The much-touted Russian social media election interference in 2016 was shown to be a joke, consisting of a few thousand dollars going toward silly memes and posts amplifying both sides of the political conversation, much of it after the election itself.
thenation.com/article/archiv…

The few sample tweets provided by Twitter in this latest so-called attempt to disrupt the public conversation from Iran are vastly less significant than even that, saying nothing particularly noteworthy and bizarrely appearing to side with Trump.

The idea that any of this could have any effect worth mentioning on the gibbering vortex of irrational vitriol that is American political discourse makes no sense whatsoever, and again Twitter itself admits that it “did not make an impact on the public conversation”.

Secondly, the entire premise is bogus because other nations have every right to influence US political discourse.

This is especially true of nations like Iran, because it is no exaggeration to say that US politics affect Iranians more than they affect Americans.

Thirdly, it is not legitimate for monopolistic tech corporations to align themselves with the US government and then censor speech in a way which always benefits that government.

When you’ve got monopolistic tech giants aligning with government agencies like the FBI to implement censorship which aligns with the US government, what you have is government censorship. There is nothing else you could reasonably call it.

We learned back in August that Twitter, Facebook, Google and other massively influential platforms are collaborating with the US government to prevent foreign influence in the lead-up to the US election, and there’s no reason to believe this relationship will get any less cozy.

In a corporatist system of government, where corporate power is inseparably intertwined with state power, corporate censorship is state censorship. Every horrible thing the US government accuses other nations of doing is something it itself does as a matter of routine.