Thread by @gauravsabnis

We need to stop and take a moment to recognize the #PegasusProject consortium as a historic thing in itself, separate from its chilling findings. It's an unprecedented alliance of media and watchdog entities spread across the globe. First coordinated pushback against fascists.

Fascists have come to power across the world in the past decade by using social media to demonize the "newsroom, editorial meetings, fact checking" type media entities. This is the first global alliance to push back.

Cos substack and podcasts are nice and all, but something like this.... This requires teams. Big teams. Resources. Standards. Coordination. Forensic analysis. Multiple confirmations and triangulations. This takes a village. Hundreds of people make investigative journalism happen.

We've all grown up in a world with investigative journalism defining our times. So we tend to forget what a relatively new thing it is. The concept of a neutral newspaper, one that aims to pursue truth objectively, is actually a very young precious creation of our species.

Until about WW2, newspapers and magazines didn't even pretend to be neutral, objective, truth-seeking, etc etc. It was a given that every publication has an agenda. Every party, every movement, had its own mouthpiece. There were no generally accepted neutral arbiters of truth.

The history of "muckrakers", which is actually a compliment and a positive adjective for journalists if you read history, is a lot shorter than we think. In terms of overall human existence, investigative journalism is not that much older than you and me.

I'm trying to dig up this excellent longform from a few months ago detailing how the relationship between "mainstream" media and "big tech" has deteriorated in this century. Until a decade or so ago, media and tech loved each other. It was a lovely symbiotic relationship.

When tech wasn't as big, so roughly until the smartphone became ubiquitous, media loved tech as spunky underdogs creating empires out of nothing, and tech basked in it. There were no conflicts cos tech was still in its teens when IBM was Sauron and Jobs, Gates were the fellowship

But as big tech went from millions to billions to hundreds of billions to now a trillion, it was inevitable that investigative journalism would start looking into tech as well. And out tumbled many many skeletons from the valley and elsewhere. Tech didn't like it.

The old alliance was media and tech on one side and governments on another side. The bigger tech grew, the more it made sense for them to side with governments instead. Especially govts who brought social media armies and engagement numbers.

The only thing making tech begrudgingly put in place whatever standards they have put in place is the residual clout mainstream media still carries in the US and Europe. But the average unicorn CEO would much rather get in bed with authoritarians than fact checkers.

As much as Twitter and Facebook have reshaped global politics, the biggest events in US politics tend to start with an investigative deep dive by a "mainstream" newspaper or a magazine. Even the eventually pointless Hillary emails story only took off when be NYT wrote.

Everything from Watergate to Pentagon papers to abu ghraib to Mueller investigation to even something as out there as UFOs became a thing in US Congress only after NYT/WaPo/New Yorker/etc turned their investigative spotlights on.

These #PegasusSnoopgate findings are so clear cut and objectively damning that the only thing fascists and those in tech who are fascist-adjacent can do is continue their campaign to malign media and suggest non-existent conspiracies. The fascist is too dumb to do otherwise.

For example, Indian politicians saying that this globally coordinated story was timed for release with India's.... *checks notes*.... Monsoon session of Parliament. It's so absurd that even the guy saying it knows it's absurd. But the fascist has no other card left to play.

It takes a special kind of WhatsApp University First Class First type of addled mind to think that there is some global conspiracy to malign India, when Modi has swiftly reduced India from an aspiring global socioeconomic powerhouse to pitiable irrelevance.