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Josh Marshall Profile picture
Sep 17, 2020 12 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Facebook is again getting an eminently justified wave of bad publicity today. It deserves every bit. It is the prime incubator racist, quasi-fascist propaganda, state-run psyops operations and more. But to really understand the problem it is important to understand the ...
2/ structural roots of the problem, how much of this is baked into the core architecture and business model. Some of it is inherent to post-2000 tech. Facebook is an ingenious engine for information and ideational manipulation. It's a Pavlov engine for heightening ...
3/ sharpening and intensifying instinctive responses. That's the basis of the algorithms and why it is hugely lucrative. That also makes it ripe for misuse and bad acting. But the core of second wave Internet commerce operations is finding network models were costs grow ...
4/ arithmetically and revenues grow exponentially. With the possible exception of Apple that's the core of all the big tech goliaths. That's why there's no phone support for Google or Facebook or Twitter or any of the rest. It's why these companies employ so few people relative..
5/ to scale and profitability. Managing or distinguishing between legitimately and bad uses of this engine is one that would require huge, huge investment, lots of people to manage. That is a scale of investment and involvement that is wholly beyond the business model.
6/ It's why all these platforms routinely have comical stories about people reporting on white supremacy or pedophilia being banned for white supremacist or pedophile content. The core economic model requires doing it on the cheap. From an economic perspective it is a grand ...
7/ of socializing the externalities and keeping the revenues wholly for the owners. Nuclear power is actually incredibly cheap. The fuel is fairly plentiful and easy to pull out the ground and you set up a little engine and it makes limitless energy. What makes it ...
8/ ruinously expensive is managing the externalities, all the risks and dangers or radiation, accidents and radioactive waste. Facebook is best seen as a fantastically profitable nuclear energy producer whose profitability is based on dumping the waste on the side of the ...
9/ road and seeing frequently accidents and explosions as just an inherent part of the enterprise. Again, if nuclear power producers did that they would unquestionably be the most profitable companies in the world. On a longer time horizon it's what fossil fuel producers ...
10/ have been doing for decades. The point is that they've created a hugely powerful and potentially very dangerous machine. The core business model is based on getting all the revenue and having a few algothrms and a very, very limited investment in personal try to ...
11/ get a handle on the most outrageous and shocking abuses. It's not about Zuckerberg being a jerk - though he is one. It is built into the very foundation of the operation. To manage the potential negative externalities of what they've created would require money they ...
12/ are totally unwilling and in some ways unable to spend.

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More from @joshtpm

Mar 12
One thing to consider here is that if the RNC is being fused with the Trump campaign and a big chunk of the staff is being fired, what’s the point exactly? That sounds awesome but it just leaves you with a single entity. The president/nominee controls the party apparatus…
2/ you don’t need to do this stuff to have control. It’s also helpful to have an allied group to handle other responsibilities. Gotv operations, working with allied campaigns and a million other things. The only real point of doing this is that you get the money.
3/ People contribute lots of money to national parties. That money is now under the direct control of Trumps family and campaign which really must mean that it goes directly to Trump fees and judgments or possibly that it goes to running Trumps campaign because they campaign …
Read 5 tweets
Mar 7
Since this post is getting some attn I wanted to add some details abt WHY this collapse happened. The biggest driver is the evolution, consolidation and growing monopoly power of the big platforms, Google, Meta, et al. But there are some secondary parts of the story that ...
2/ are interesting and worth understanding. Back at the end of 2012 I hired @JRagazzo and one of his core responsibilities was to help me manage and plan our programmatic strategies. One of the ways I built TPM was by being really creative abt maximizing programmatic ...
3/ revenue, which traditional publishers tended to see as what you did with the rest of your ad inventory. In any case, as I was teaching him our systems one of the things I explained to him was that there was a separate VC-driven world of "adtech" and programmatic companies ...
Read 9 tweets
Feb 21
Don’t think most people get the magnitude of the Hunter Biden/Smirnov revelations. One big ongoing Russian operation from 2015 until today. Basically confirms what was always obvious, “Hunter Biden laptop” was part of the same operation. via @TPMtalkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-bigge…
2/ And in this case, certainly with the “laptop”, basically every reporter and editorialist and commentator fell for it. All of official Washington. Every last one of them. Hilarious. And after all these years we learn the same spies are still leading around official DC …
3/ almost all of political press. Hilarious and sad. In the Trump sense and the real sense.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 16
An example of how not to do journalism, more below >>>> Trump Privately Expresses Support for a 16-Week Abortion Ban nytimes.com/2024/02/16/us/…
2/ Does Trump really "privately favor" a 16 week abortion ban? Privately, we know, Trump doesn't give a flying fuck about abortion. What position he'll adopt in the 2024 election cycle has some relevance. But adopt means adopt, as in publicly. What we have hear is just ...
3/ an adopt to hold multiple positions, to put out through journalists what is apparently Trump's secret position while allowing him to deny it or not depending on his needs during the campaign. In other words, this isn't good journalism. This is just allowing yourself to ...
Read 5 tweets
Dec 22, 2023
@djrothkopf @AlonPinkas Alon's piece is spot on. There is one touchpoint he doesn't address. It's a significant driver of this fracture. For a generation of democrats under 40, certainly under 30 their main experience of Israel through the prism of a longserving Prime Minister who went out of his ...
@djrothkopf @AlonPinkas 2/ to humiliate and publicly disrespect the country's first black President, someone who was genuinely beloved by a lot of these people and symbolized a kind of America they wanted to see in the future. BN also increasingly made Israel (as most Americans would see it) as a ...
@djrothkopf @AlonPinkas 3/ essentially a foreign auxilliary of the GOP. Of course there are deep ideological and demographic and policy issues. But no one comes to inherently distant issues like the politics and policies of a foreign country purely on their own terms. We see them through formative ...
Read 4 tweets
Dec 6, 2023
Spinning off from the carnage in Israel and Gaza I see we’re now debating which regional foods are owned by what national group, what’s cultural appropriation and what’s not. This is an example of how the rhetoric of cultural appropriation can quickly jump the rails …
2/ into a clumsy and misguided essentialism, as though national groups are rigid and fixed, uninfluenced and primordial. The discourse of appropriation can go on some quite unexpected directions. What is the oldest and most foundational cultural appropriation in the …
3/ history of western Eurasia other than Christianity itself and after that Islam? Taking the Jews’ religious, mythic and national clothes, trying them on for size, deciding to make them their own and then accusing the Jews of being imposters when they had the temerity to …
Read 4 tweets

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