Thread by @caitoz

Twitter Rolls Out New Wikipedia-Like Program To Narrative Manage Tweets

"Whoever controls the narrative controls the world."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/twitter-roll…

Twitter has announced that it will be employing "a new community-driven approach to help address misleading information" called Birdwatch which news media are comparing to the model of content moderation used by Wikipedia.

https://twitter.com/ForbesTech/status/1353862408348037121?s=20

"We know there are a number of challenges toward building a community-driven system like this — from making it resistant to manipulation attempts to ensuring it isn’t dominated by a simple majority or biased based on its distribution of contributors," Twitter's statement says.

.@BenjaminNorton reported last year on the way concerted, aggressive efforts by shady-looking Wikipedia editors has succeeded in dominating the site's articles which relate to western imperialist agendas and the reporters who support and oppose them.
thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wik…

https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1227722696684953600

Since 2018 alternative media voices have been reporting on the frenetic editing behavior of a Wikipedia account by the name of "Philip Cross" which works an inhuman number of hours without ever taking a day off, largely targeting anti-imperialists.
thecanary.co/discovery/anal…

Aggressive imperialist narrative management operations are why if you go to the Wikipedia article on the 2018 Douma incident right now you'll find no fewer than 20 mentions of "Bellingcat" and a heavy bias toward the narrative blaming Assad for the attack.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douma_che…

What you will not find on that Wikipedia article is information and well-sourced articles which call this narrative into question, like this one:
thenation.com/article/world/…

So it's already established that this sort of "community-driven approach" to information control can easily be exploited by well-funded groups which have a vested interest in doing so.

That "Birdwatch" will likely be used to determine the dominant narrative on disputed events means it's obnoxious that Twitter's post on it features an imaginary account saying "Whales are not real! They're robots funded by the government to watch us!!"

https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1353766523664531459

As though that sort of indisputable falsehood is the kind of post this program will actually be targeting rather than people expressing doubts about things like Russian hackers and the White Helmets.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. That's all you're seeing in efforts to manage information via censorship, algorithm changes, "fact" checking, Russian propaganda panic, etc. Humans are story-driven animals, so if you control the stories you control the humans.

The US-centralized oligarchic empire will be doing a lot of evil things in the near future, and it will be necessary to control the narrative about those things. That's all we're really looking at here.