In light of this Politico article on the White House aiming an Executive Order at Big Tech, reupping a piece I wrote last summer about the creative fiction at the heart of most "regulate the tech monopolies" arguments.

medium.com/@davekarpf/the…
TL;DR: For those who have determined that the solution is 'the government should regulate Google and Facebook,' let me ask: which government? *This* government?

Which alumnus of the Trump golf and real estate empire ought to be in charge of regulating digital media platforms?
The creative fiction at the heart of 'regulate the tech monopolies' is that we pretend we are talking about a generic government.

What's missing today is not a failure of imagination or of regulatory courage. The U.S. government is facing a crisis of competence.
OF COURSE the Trump administration has decided that the problem with social media is that it doesn't amplify rightwing extremists enough.

OF COURSE the Trump administration is treating calls for regulation as an opportunity to demand concessions for their partisan team.
This was always going to be how the Trump administration approached regulation of Big Tech. This is the only way that they approach regulation of any sort.
That's not to say there aren't *real* regulatory problems that need solving. It's not to say that Google, Facebook, and Amazon aren't quasi-monopolies. All of that is obviously true.
But those of us who have spent the past few years arguing that it is finally time to talk about serious regulation have been dodging an uncomfortable but equally obvious reality.

In an ideal world, now is the right time to regulate Big Tech. But we're stuck living in this world.
I don't know what the Trump administration's EO will eventually look like. But I know the general thrust of it. We all do.

It will be an exercise in brute-force power, designed to force tech platforms to be more accommodating of the worst actors with the worst impulses.
And the policy research community will tut, "well this isn't the regulatory framework we had in mind, but we sure are glad to finally be having the policy conversation."

It will be tragedy and farce, all at the same time.

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More from @davekarpf

Dec 14, 2022
A stray thought about ChatGPT:

It’s a cliché generator. A truly impressive cliche generator.
(1/x)
I was reading @ibogost’s Atlantic piece yesterday.

A few paragraphs in, I thought to myself “man, he’s kinda phoning this in.”

Then there was the reveal. He used ChatGPT to write the intro. Once he started writing in his own voice, you could *tell*.

theatlantic.com/technology/arc…
And that makes total sense!

The machine doesn’t have original ideas.

It produces speech patterns that resemble typical speech patterns.

That’s what cliches are: typical speech patterns.
(3/x)
Read 14 tweets
Dec 10, 2022
The #TwitterFiles are just fan service for aggrieved conservatives who exist in the Fox News Extended Universe.
This entire installment from Taibbi is just “ZOMG senior Twitter leaders met with government agencies to identify threats?!? And they considered CONTEXT when evaluating high-profile strategic communications?”

…man, you know that’s just a description of competence, right?
Again, fan service.

It’s December 10th. Trump has lost the election and is loudly spewing The Big Lie that RESULTS IN AN INSURRECTION.

How brainwormed do you have to be to think “the scandal here is Twitter executives developing new tools to deal with Trump’s rhetoric”?
Read 5 tweets
Dec 9, 2022
Shadow-banning is good, actually.

There should be more of it.
You can basically divide content moderation into two buckets.

You can develop ratings for each individual utterance or you can rate the speakers.
Focusing on the speech means identifying keywords, then expanding for context.

That gives you dictionaries of hateful words, and specific misinformation efforts that require context or outright blocking.

It’s difficult, necessary work.
Read 10 tweets
Dec 8, 2022
November 1994: @wired covers the Hackers on Planet Earth conference.

The opening keynote speaker and serious-adult-in-the-room is Robert David Steele.

“Even though Steele seems sincere in his desire for ‘free’ information, others in Washington may be less benign.”
(1/2)
Wikipedia is a great resource for sussing out the trajectory of these figures.

Steele in 1994 told WIRED he had ambitions of becoming Director of National Intelligence. What happened next? Where is he now?

The answer? Hmm…

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Da…
Frequent Alex Jones guest… thought NASA had a secret slave colony on Mars… protocols of the elders of zion… QAnon… COVID conspiracy theorist who died of COVID in 2021.
Read 4 tweets
Dec 3, 2022
The thing to understand about the Hunter Biden laptop story was that it was SUPPOSED to be the Trump campaign’s “October Surprise.”

Mainstream media and social media were supposed to take the bait and focus on the appearance of scandal for the last weeks of the election.
(1/x)
They didn’t take the bait. The New York Post story was shunned. Social media platforms treated it as manufactured propaganda with questionable sourcing.

And conservative elites have been PISSED ever since.
(2/x)
They’re supposed to be these brilliant media manipulators.

Roger Stone and Steve Bannon and the rest of the Pepe Patrol pretend at being these incredibly sophisticated actors, injecting precision memes to bend the public will.

But they’re actual just blunt instruments. (3/x)
Read 8 tweets
Dec 3, 2022
An early thought on the ChatGPT hype:

I keep people hearing this will upend higher education — “No more take home essays ever,” etc.

I think that’s obviously wrong.

What this *will* upend is the underground market for cheating on tests.
ChatGPT is at or very close to the writing level of an average undergrad pulling an all-nighter to complete an essay on readings they only skimmed.

Plagiarism detection software isn’t going to catch this stuff. That’s a real problem.
To state the obvious: this is worse for the student than for the professor.

A generative AI engine could write all your short-response essays for you and earn you a B while you learn nothing from the class.

Why take that class if you didn’t intend to learn from it?
Read 8 tweets

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